Eight reasons you won't persuade PZ Myers to believe in a god

Eight reasons you won't persuade me to believe in a god

Abandoning religion

Peter Wall continues the conversation. Money quote: "Many atheists go wrong, I think, by construing most of the world in terms of belief: If your belief in God is defective, as I have shown, then your religion must be abandoned."

But really, who says this? Even a glance at the mainstream atheist literature reveals a more robust criticism of religion than Wall suggests here. Consider Christopher Hitchens' contribution to the New Atheist canon, God is Not Great. Hitchens most emphatically does not say that religion should be abandoned just because it rests on a false belief, regardless of the other characteristics of religion. Rather, the religious are doing so many egregiously bad things: the oppression of women and gays, abuse of children and protecting those abusers, undermining science, waging unnecessary and unnecessarily violent wars. Yes, we're all very pleased that most religious people do a lot of good things (although we're skeptical of many of the claims; see especially The Missionary Position, Hitchens' devastating condemnation of Mother Teresa), but that's not really the point: all the good works in the world do not excuse or permit even the smallest evil... and the evils attributed to religion are hardly small. We attribute these evils and especially their persistence directly to the supernaturalism of religion: we probably won't remove evil from the world, but we remove one of the most compelling and prevalent justifications for evil: that a supernatural god (or His priestly spokesmodels) demands we do evil.

The criticism of the religious "moderates" and "liberals" is likewise more nuanced than Wall would suggest. A lot of religious people are entirely good (more-or-less; it cannot be the case that the support for denying ordinary civil rights to homosexuals is limited entirely to Christian "fundamentalists"). The New Atheists might look askance at the supernatural justification of those beliefs, but beyond a few mutterings and quotations from Diderot, it is not the supernaturalism per se that earns our criticism. We criticize, rather, the accommodationist and religious "moderate" demand that we not criticize the supernatural justification of the fundamentalists precisely because that criticism equally undermines the moderates' own supernatural justification. We criticize the moderates because in defending the pillar of their own good, they must defend the pillar of the fundamentalists' evils: necessarily so, for it is, in our judgment, the same pillar.

Our criticism and condemnation might, of course, be mistaken. The New Atheists have no more than the religious any direct line to Cosmic Truths. But we are making the subtle and nuanced arguments in considerable depth and breadth. If you're going to criticize us, criticize us for the content we actually offer. It's just dishonest to ignore 90% of the content and then accuse us of being facile and thin.

Defending religious viewpoints

One has to read quite a ways through Peter Wall's wall of text to get to an actual point, but there really is one. (Trust me.) I was so thrilled to have found one that I stopped reading with a sigh of relief.

Basically, John Shook asserts that "Many kinds of theology have emerged, replacing a handful of traditional arguments for God with robust methods of defending religious viewpoints." Larry Moran responds, "Too bad he doesn’t mention even one of those supposedly robust new arguments for the existence of supernatural beings." Wall notes that Moran demands something different — "new arguments for the existence of supernatural beings" — from what Shook offers — "robust methods of defending religious viewpoints." To a certain extent, it's a fair cop: Larry Moran should have been a little more clear about why and how he went from "religious viewpoints" to "supernatural beings".

But the connection is not all that hard to make; I suspect Wall is guilty of some degree of obtusity (and certainly turgid prolixity in the first degree).

There are only four ways to interpret Shook's demand.

A "religious viewpoint" is a viewpoint that relies in some substantive sense on the existence of a supernatural being. At least this is the definition you have to use if you're going to talk specifically about atheists' stance towards religious viewpoints. If, for example, you want to label Einstein's viewpoint as "religious" — if you want to label the underlying order and simplicity of physical law as "the mind of God," — you're using "God" and "religious" as literary metaphors, a use that the vast majority of atheists have no (social) objection to. If Shook were as diligent about understanding atheism as he demands atheists be about understanding theology, he would see that we object to "religious viewpoints" only insofar as they rely on a supernatural being. Take the supernaturalism out of "religion", and you will find atheists* entirely uninterested in what's left.

*They would uninterested as atheists; they might be interested as scientists or literary critics.

So Shook might mean that the vast majority of theology really has taken the supernaturalism out of religion; theology is, by and large, indistinguishable from literary metaphor and/or naturalistic ethics. That might well be true, but if Shook really believes it, it seems perverse to censure atheists for ignoring theology exactly as billions of religious people would have to be ignoring it.

Shook might also be saying that one can legitimately "robustly defend" a religious viewpoint by saying that it doesn't matter whether if the supernatural being the viewpoint rests on does not actually exist: it's OK to have a viewpoint that rests on a false position, or it's OK not to care about truth at all. Shook expresses himself with all the precision and candor of, well, a theologian, so it's hard to get what he really does mean. But unless he were to take one of these positions explicitly, I think we must exclude both on the basis of simple charity.

Which leaves only one option: "Robust methods of defending religious viewpoints" really must rely on "new arguments for the existence of supernatural beings." Hence Larry Moran's demand.

Atheism, conviction and certainty

A theme that appears with some regularity is the charge that atheists are absolutely certain there is no god. I suppose there are a few atheists who really are absolutely certain there is no god, but I haven't met a single one... and I know a lot of atheists. The hardest, most "militant" atheists I know (and I'm one of them) explicitly and vociferously disclaim certainty. I'm not certain even about the conceptions of God that are logically impossible or obviously contradicted by experience: my deduction might be faulty; my experiences might be hallucinatory.

I am however convinced that there's no god, at least according to the usual notions of god, the "invisible man in the sky" sorts of conceptions that billions of people believe. I'm convinced in precisely the same sense that I'm convinced that humans and apes (and humans and bananas) evolved from a common ancestor. I'm convinced in precisely the same sense that I'm convinced the universe is about 15 billion years old, that things (near the surface of the Earth) fall when you drop them, that airplanes can indeed fly. I'm convinced: I'm persuaded by the evidence I have and the arguments I've heard that no god exists. Give me more evidence or different arguments, and I might change my mind. I don't really expect additional evidence or arguments to change my mind — I've been doing this whole atheism thing for a long time — but I've been surprised before and I'm sure I'll be surprised again.

Not just theists and agnostics but also other atheists have argued with me that we cannot and should not say we are convinced, that we know there is no god, because we cannot be absolutely certain there is no god. But I'm puzzled* by this position: in no other endeavor**, not even mathematics, is absolute certainty a prerequisite for a legitimate claim of knowledge. Am I convinced that Quantum Mechanics and General Relativity are true? Yes. Am I absolutely certain that no other theory will come along to supplant them as Relativity supplanted Newtonian Mechanics. Of course not. So what's so special about god that we need absolute certainty to claim the knowledge that no god exists?

*I'm not really puzzled, I'm just trying to be nice. Don't worry: it won't last.
**Well, maybe philosophy, but philosophers are just bullshit artists slightly more sophisticated than theologians.

(The flip side of this fallacy is the theists' claim that they cannot supply atheists' demands for absolute certainty about claims of a god's existence or properties. We do not demand absolute certainty. We'd like to see a case made beyond a reasonable doubt, but at this point I'd settle for probable cause or even reasonable suspicion.)

If you personally are not convinced that no god exists, then you're not convinced. I'm happy to discuss the issue with you in a friendly way. But what irks me is the argument (unless you're a big-ess Skeptic or epistemic nihilist who believes we can't know anything) that just because I am convinced that no god exists it is necessarily the case that I am being in some sense dogmatic or committing some grave epistemic error. It might happen to be the case that I am indeed dogmatic, but you have to look at the details of my actual position to discover that: you cannot tell that I am being dogmatic just because I'm an atheist.

Part of the problem is, of course, that theologians and apologists have been trying to obfuscate the issue, mostly arguing (when you cut through the bullshit) that the existence or nonexistence of god is not something that can be scientifically known. OK, ha ha, you got me: I admit that I don't know that a god whose existence or nonexistence cannot be scientifically known does not actually exist. But so what? If you have some other means of knowing whether or not such a god exists, please clue me in. And I do mean knowing; simply choosing to believe one way or another is not knowledge. If there's no way at all of actually knowing, then who cares? I just don't care that a god might be hiding behind my couch, or that invisible fairies are pushing everything towards the center of the Earth.

The problem is that every day I read this or that atrocity against human well-being and happiness — atrocities that shock my conscience to the core — being not just perpetrated but proudly perpetrated by people in name of their god. It's not just the "newsworthy" atrocities — acid in a young girl's face, the murder of an abortion doctor, the rape of a child — it's the systematic and persistent efforts of so many religious people to marginalize, oppress and exploit some large segment of the population: heretics, foreigners, homosexuals, and of course women.

All of this would be irrelevant if it were true that a god actually existed. The truth is the truth; nuclear physics is still true even if it means we can incinerate tens of thousands in a heartbeat; it's still true even if we annihilate the entire terrestrial biosphere in a nuclear holocaust.

But it's not true. There is no god. We're on our own, a microscopic speck of life in an indifferent universe that cares nothing for our happiness or our survival. Bullshit in the service of good is still bullshit; the defense of bullshit in the service of good equally defends that bullshit in the service of evil.

I'm an atheist: I'm not buying the bullshit. If you want to buy the bullshit, well, that's your problem, not mine. And fuck you! if you demand that I buy the bullshit just so you don't feel bad about your reliance on infantile fantasies.

Bullshit poisons everything

It's not really religion — it's certainly not just religion — that poisons everything: bullshit poisons everything.

Even if we could completely eliminate bullshit, we would not turn the world into a Utopia. Figuring out how the world works is an enormously difficult task. Even just figuring out physics at the most basic level, simplified level has taken the lifetime effort of tens (hundreds?) of thousands of people for centuries; throw in all the physical sciences and the cost is staggering. Of course, the benefits to humanity (even counting all the drawbacks, like oil spills and nuclear weapons) have exceeded the costs by orders of magnitude. And if science is hard, politics and economics — negotiating all the competing interests, preferences, talents and abilities of billions of self-interested people — is even harder.

Bullshit is not our only problem, and it's probably not even our worst problem. The elimination of bullshit is not a panacea: it's not a sufficient condition to solve any, much less all, of the world's problems. But bullshit makes everything harder. Bullshit and the toleration of bullshit actively blocks solutions to our political and economic problems. We know this because the most important advance of science has been the scientific method — experimental, empirical falsifiability — which detects and eliminates instances of bullshit.

I can't stress the point too strongly. Scientists today are no more clever or intelligent than people were a thousand years ago. We did not magically leave the stupid field in Francis Bacon's or Gallileo's day. The key to science is not naturalism: Thales was a naturalist a generation before Socrates; the key to science is not logic: Aristotle discovered the laws of logic; the key to science is not reliance on evidence and thorough investigation of the facts: Thucydides pioneered these methods. And yet modern science had to wait a hundred generations after these pioneers. Science had to wait on its true key: total and intentional commitment to the elimination of falsity and bullshit on the basis of evidence and experiment.

Science has not, of course, eliminated all bullshit. The point is that scientists have intentionally adopted the attitude — and built the social systems to fulfill that attitude — that bullshit is intolerable: when they do find an instance of bullshit (and they find it all the time), they ruthlessly extirpate it. Hence, despite their considerable scientific achievements, scientists and devotees of science such as myself look askance at scientists such as Ken Miller or Francis Collins. The essence of science is the intolerance of bullshit, and here are these guys tolerating egregious bullshit in their personal lives. (It's not their conclusion that God exists, it's rather their justification for that conclusion that reeks of bullshit.)

The total commitment to the detection and elimination of bullshit is not a sufficient condition to solving or ameliorating our problems. It is, however, a necessary condition. And the only way to develop this commitment is to socially select against* habits of thought and institutions that definitionally or actually tolerate bullshit.

*As I've often noted, social selection does not mean killing people; indeed killing people is almost always an ineffective and always a grossly inefficient way of selecting against ideas and social constructions.

It's not at all that confrontationalist, anti-religious atheists such as myself have any abhorrence to belief in gods per se. We object, rather, to the bullshit that necessarily supports these beliefs, and the toleration of bullshit necessary to maintain these beliefs and their associated institutions. And it's not that religion has any corner on bullshit; religion is, rather, a "paradigmatic" bullshit-tolerating social institution. Religion too might be the keystone in the edifice of bullshit we've been building for millennia. Undermine religion — and undermine it using a dedication to the detection and extirpation of bullshit — and all the other forms of bullshit — e.g. woo, counterfactual denialism and historical revisionism, epistemic nihilism, Libertarianism — are thereby weakened, perhaps fatally.

It is this abhorrence not of god but of bullshit that I think the accommodationists at best fail to see and at worst refuse to see.

If our goal were only to get people to somehow believe — or believe in, whatever that means — evolution, then it's crucial to make religious bullshit compatible with evolution. We can make bullshit say whatever we want it to say; bullshit can be just as easily compatible with evolution as with creationism. It might take some effort, but anyone who's studied even a little theology knows that theologians have explained away more troubling ideas than a measly four billion years of evolution. And people hold their bullshit near and dear to their hearts: to demand that people not just believe evolution but believe evolution because that's what you have to believe when you have eliminated bullshit, those intent on holding onto their bullshit will be more likely to reject evolution. The accommodationists are absolutely, 100% correct: the anti-religious confrontational stance is not just unnecessary but seriously counterproductive to the goal of persuading people to accept this or that scientific truth.

But that's not our goal. Of course we'd like people to accept evolution — even if you have some bullshit support for it, evolution is absolutely necessary to understand biology — but acceptance of evolution per se is not our goal. Our goal really is to establish the intolerance and abhorrence of bullshit itself into all of our larger social institutions, and we do so by condemning institutions — especially religion — that are built on the foundation of tolerating and promoting bullshit. And of course the accommodationist position is not just unnecessary but at least somewhat counterproductive to our goal.

There's an important asymmetry, though. Accommodationist tactics are not really fatal to the confrontationalist position, but confrontationalist tactics are probably fatal to accommodationism. Accommodationism is just one more form of bullshit, and the confrontationalist position is that bullshit will always be with us; we need to develop attitudes and institutions that continuously detect and eliminate bullshit. But confrontationalism actively and fatally undermines accommodationist tactics: how can the accommodationists say that there's no conflict between science and religious bullshit when people who believe the very same scientific truths are loudly asserting that those truths actively undermine religious bullshit? Confrontationalists don't need the accommodationists to shut up, we need only to openly observe and condemn their toleration for bullshit. But the accommodationists desperately need the confrontationalist to shut up and not make our case, because they cannot openly rebut our case without undermining the foundations of science itself. We cannot actually eliminate the intolerance of bullshit necessary to make scientific progress, but to make accommodationism work it has to remain a dirty little secret that we cannot reveal to the religious.

Theology in a nutshell

Assuming that:

1. God exists
2. God created the universe
3. God wants people to behave exactly as I would like them to behave
but
4. God is not quite as big of an asshole as I am

what can we then say about God?

That's it, folks: that's all there is to theology.

The Stupid! It Burns! (rottweiler edition, part 2)

Before I continue my criticism of Imagine, I want to lay out my own position.

I'm going to repeat a theme over and over because I want to really hammer it home: If you're going to make a value judgment, and you want to have even a chance at being persuasive, you have to at least tell your readers what it is you're judging; unless it's blindingly obvious, you have to also say why you're judging it that way. If you do not do so, you are at best simply whining, behaving exactly like the petulant child not just making vicious personal attacks, but making unsubstantiated vicious attacks.

In the most abstract sense, nocenslupus is free to write whatever she pleases. No matter how much I disagree with her position, on whatever level I disagree, I do not and would not demand that she not write. At a more concrete level, she's free to express her opinion as an opinion, without much commentary from me. Had she simply said, "I think Richard Dawkins acts like a petulant child," my response would be to shrug and say to myself, "Whatever; I think he's cool, but you're entitled to your opinion." She's free to argue that Dawkins or the New Atheist "confrontationalists" are mistaken, either as to matters of truth or matters of political tactics; I would address her argument without condemning her personally. Even if I were to disagree completely with her argument, it's no sin to be mistaken, however deeply mistaken one might happen to be.

There are two sides to the accommodationist position, and I have different opinions about them.

First, I do think the accommodationists are fundamentally mistaken: I believe it is impossible, or at least deeply impractical, to actually accommodate in any meaningful way religion with a scientific society. I do not believe it is possible to "build bridges" between the scientific and religious. However much one might want to accommodate the religious, however much one might want to gently persuade them to voluntarily relinquish their more egregiously harmful beliefs, I do not believe such a task is possible. But I could be mistaken. Maybe the accommodationists are correct. If they want to argue their position reasonably, I'm willing to consider the argument as an argument, and not condemn them for simply having a different opinion than my own. And hey, if they want to do their thing, I won't tell them they shouldn't do it just because I disagree with them: go for it, give it a whirl. I'd love to be surprised.

The second side of the accommodationist position, though, is a purely ethical position: One should not condemn religion for being false even when one knows it is false. One should not condemn the religious for ethical and moral failures even when one knows they have acted harmfully. It's one thing to argue that evolution doesn't actually affect religious belief; it's quite another to say that yes, we know evolution really does compromise religious belief, but we shouldn't actually say so for fear of scaring off the religious. It's one thing to argue that the Pope is not actually complicit in the cover-up of massive child abuse; it's quite another to say that even if we know he is complicit, we shouldn't actually say so for fear of scaring off the Catholics or hardening their opposition.

The problem is, of course, that we do know a lot of religious people believe that the truth of evolution — as well as other scientific theories and the empirical, rational foundations metaphysical naturalism; witness the religious outrage over Stephen Hawking's latest book — really does deeply undermine their religion. And their arguments — at least at the first level — seem sound: if you believe that human beings' relationship with God really is the ultimate purpose of the universe, I can't see how you could accept the accidental, ephemeral and cosmically trivial position of humanity that science unequivocally paints.

The problem is, of course, that we do know a lot of important religious people have done great evil. We have not yet had a trial, but were the Pope a subject of any Western nation with a rule of law, we know he would have long since been indicted for a criminal conspiracy. The only "arguments" one can make to exempt him from legal action are that he is the head of state of a sovereign nation or that he is a religious leader. The first argument, however, argues implicitly that he should be subject to the same sort of international condemnation we apply to the heads of state and government of any "rogue nation", and possibly that there is a case to declare war on the Vatican.

The position that the Pope should be exempt from legal action because he is religious is the very heart of the New Atheist "confrontationalist" position: it's one thing to have an imaginary friend, but that you do have an imaginary friend does not in any way, shape or form exempt you from legal, ethical, or truthful criticism.

It uncontroversial that if you abuse or molest a child you should go to jail; if you have definite knowledge of such abuse and you merely fail to notify the legal authorities — not to mention actively assisting the perpetrator to avoid justice — you should go to jail. It is uncontroversial that if you speak a falsehood, you should be corrected; if you knowingly speak a falsehood, you should be condemned as a liar; if you knowingly speak a harmful falsehood, you are liable for civil penalties for slander and libel.

When it becomes equally uncontroversial that the shape of your hat and your sincere convictions about your imaginary friend are no more relevant to such judgments than your height, your race or your nationality, we can talk about whether the anti-religious confrontationalist position is ethically justified. I cannot tell you how anti-religious confrontationalists will behave when that day comes. But until that day, I will condemn anyone who directly or indirectly excuses any immoral behavior, behavior that harms another person or harms the truth, because of anyone's religious beliefs, and I will condemn religion because people — even atheists — do in fact use religion to exempt people from criticism.

I may sound like a "petulant child", but I can live with that. I will at least offer justification for my "vicious personal attacks".

The Stupid! It Burns! (rottweiler edition, part 1)

Normally, I reserve The Stupid! It Burns! for stupidity so egregious and obvious that no commentary is necessary. Where I feel commentary is necessary to highlight the errors of some work, it's hard to support the notion that the stupidity is actually burning. But in this case, I'll make an exception. I feel that I have a duty to be more explicit in criticizing my fellow atheists.

In her elaborately titled post, Play A Perfect Circle’s Version of “Imagine” in the Background While You Read This… What? I Like It Better Than Lennon’s Original, nocenslupus sharply condemns the "New Atheists" and its notable intellectuals, especially Dawkins. Her condemnation is not only inaccurate, the author simply fails to justify her judgment. The only meaningful point is that she doesn't like the New Atheist approach to the criticism of religion. That's all well and good: she's under no obligation to identify with the New Atheists. But if she's going to do more than simply disagree with New Atheists and Dawkins, if she's going to condemn them, then a sound justification is necessary. She utterly fails to do so. She exhibits the worst feature of the religious: how dare anyone disagree with her!? It really is true, as I've noted time and again: sometimes an atheist is just someone with one fewer stupid idea than a theist.

She starts off not just comparing but equating Dawkins' speech condemning the Pope to the Pope's equation of atheism and Nazism.

Naturally, I was appalled at comments by Pope Benedict XVI and Cardinal Kasper effectively comparing atheism to Nazism, among other slanders. Of course I was.

However, I found Richard Dawkins’ response speech to be equally as frustrating:

Let me detour for a moment to something I find extremely frustrating in the modern mixed-media environment: posting videos as evidentiary support for one's assertions. This technique is not always bad; naturally I want some evidence that someone actually said what someone alleges he said, and I want the whole context of their remarks. On the other hand, to post an almost nine minute video as the only description of the statements one is criticizing is as intellectually indefensible as posting only the title of a book and saying some parts of it are bad. Which parts are bad? Which parts does the author think are bad?

Our author gives us no clue. Some unspecified parts of Dawkins speech are "snide comments and vicious attacks," some parts are factual. Well, which parts? What statements constitute snide comments? Which are vicious attacks? Which are factual? I've watched the speech and I found nothing objectionable, but maybe I'm missing something. All I know is that the author doesn't like Dawkins, but I have no idea specifically what she doesn't like; if I don't even know what she doesn't like, how can I figure out why she doesn't like them? If she is trying to persuade me — since I definitely do self-identify as a New Atheist, and I admire Richard Dawkins — she has to fail, since I have no idea what she would like me to actually change.

Even if her evaluations were accurate, why is Dawkins' speech equally as frustrating as the Pope's? Atheists condemn the Pope's comparison of atheists and Nazis not because it is a vicious attack — the Pope obviously thinks atheism is dangerous and evil; he therefore ought to viciously attack us — but because it's not just factually incorrect, it's so deeply and obviously incorrect that it goes beyond mere slander to a level of contempt and indifference to truth itself. Our author does not even allege that Dawkins is in any way factually inaccurate, much less as egregiously inaccurate as the Pope. In essence, our author is saying that a group's defense against outright aggression is "equally as frustrating" as the aggression itself. It is not always true that, "A soft answer turneth away wrath: but grievous words stir up anger." (Proverbs 15:1) Sometimes a soft answer signals nothing but weakness and encourages more wrath.

Remember: the Pope is the member of a conspiracy — a conspiracy that would be blatantly criminal had it been committed by subjects of an ordinary democracy — to cover up the despicable physical, emotional and sexual abuse of tens of thousands of children. To say so out loud is indeed a "vicious attack"; a vicious attack entirely justified by its actual truth. Indeed the Pope's only defense is not on the facts but on standing: the sovereignty of the Vatican* — established by Mussolini, since we're on the subject of 1930's and 40's era fascism — grants him immunity from prosecution unless it can be shown that his actions are not just illegal under national law but constitute a crime against humanity in international law.

*I am not a lawyer.

The author from there makes her own attack against the New Atheists, an attack that if it were true would constitute blatant hypocrisy. The author asserts that
"Darwin’s Rottweiler" has inspired the New Atheist "movement that demands that atheists take a less accommodating stance toward religion and instead call them out, criticize, and attack their beliefs whenever possible." The New Atheists do not demand that atheists take a less accommodating stance, we merely ourselves take this stance. Even were her assertion true, the author is entirely hypocritical since she is in effect demanding that atheists take a more accommodating stance. Indeed the New Atheist criticism of accommodationism is not that accommodationists want individually to take a more conciliatory stance towards the religious, it is precisely because accommodationists demand that the New Atheists exempt religion from accurate criticism. If you want to play good cop to my bad cop, more power to you. But I really am — intellectually speaking — a cop, and part of my job is to charge people with crimes against the truth, a vicious attack no matter how you slice it. You can condemn me for not doing my job, you can condemn me for doing it wrong, but if you condemn me for actually doing my job then you are saying that my job does not need to be done, that the truth needs no defense.

(Damn, I'm only up to the second paragraph of a rather long post, a post that actually gets stupider as it goes on. Further criticism will have to await another post.)

Atheism and the burden of proof

There's often a big controversy over whether atheists or theists have the burden of proof. I think the big mistake that both atheists and theists make lies in the article: it is a category error to think of THE burden of proof, as if there were only one burden that must be borne by one side or the other. In any argument, burdens of proof shift back and forth, which is why not only prosecutors but also defense attorneys introduce evidence into a trial. Theists can easily place various burdens of proof on atheists; happily we can just as easily meet those burdens.

One of the reasons atheists often state their position as "lack of a belief in any god" is not to escape THE burden of proof, but rather to correctly place the initial burden of proof on the theist.

Most of the basic theistic apologetic arguments — especially the first cause and design families of argument — do in fact place a burden of proof back on the atheist. The world — and especially the terrestrial biosphere — really is complex, that complexity really does calls for an explanation, and we know that prosaic intelligent activity (i.e. human endeavor) really does produce astonishing complexity. The design argument ultimately fails, but it successfully places a burden of proof on an atheist.

It is important to acknowledge that the design argument really does place a burden of proof on an atheist: it's a burden that an atheist can cheerfully bear, because it can and has been met. We must make a positive argument to respond to the argument from design, and we can make a positive argument.

There are three families of positive argument: Hume makes the first two with reasonably good rigor: First, the world (and especially the terrestrial biosphere) exhibits features radically and deeply inconsistent with intelligent design; we must posit an "intelligent" designer of either astonishing incompetence or mysterious abilities (a mystery is of course the very antithesis of an explanation). Second, the complexity of an intelligent designer calls out for just as much explanation as the complexity of the world, an argument that Richard Dawkins summarizes in The God Delusion. The third family is of course the scientific theory of evolution, which explains the complexity of the terrestrial biosphere; indeed it explains not only the appearance of "design" but also the appearance of "incompetent" design.

They may be very weak serves, but it's important to emphasize that the standard apologetic arguments really do serve a burden of proof to the atheist's court. The standard atheist philosophical training consists of learning to anticipate and return these serves. We do not escape our own burdens of proof, we meet them. It is the theist who is unable to meet his own burdens.

Reflections on reflections

Self-described campus minister chab123 posts his (?) Reflections-Advice on Atheist/Christian Discussions.

His first complaint, that atheists insist that "we can only use the empirical or scientific method to examine the existence of God," misses the mark. The implication is that there are all these other methods we can use; atheists are arbitrarily excluding these alternatives. He goes on at great length discussing the purported limitations and shortcomings of the scientific/empirical methods, and even throws in a swipe at the long-discredited logical positivism.

But what does he offer as an alternative? Nothing other than the scientific method itself!

I think that one of the best solutions to dealing with the issue of evidence and arguments for God’s existence is to utilize what is called inference to the best explanation. This type of explanation is commonly called “abduction” since it is a type of reasoning that is different from induction and deduction. Inference to the best explanation is commonly utilized by apologists that use the cumulative case method. In a cumulative case method, each argument has evidential value but will never lead to any kind of mathematical or logical certainty. The inference to the best explanation model takes into account the best available explanation in our whole range of experience and reflection. For example, since we can’t observe gravity directly, we only observe its effects. And since we can’t observe God directly, we can draw general conclusions from specific observations.

The problem, though, is that the cumulative inference to the best explanation — the best explanation for the empirical evidence of our senses, that is — is that there is no God, which is precisely the crux of the atheist argument. Apologists use the "scientific method" only by either arbitrarily excluding evidence (the "minimal evidence" paradigm) or by introducing evidentially undecidable components that complicate rather than simplify the theory.

The author claims that the theists believe it takes faith to believe in evolution (which he more-or-less accurately represents as the combination of the laws of physics, chance, and time). Theists are mistaken: evolution is the best explanation inferred from a mountain of evidence.

The author asserts that "Christian scholars have provided solid answers" to the question, "[i]s The God of the Old Testament is a God of genocide?" Have they now? I'd like to see these solid answers. The only answers that I've seen is are bullshit rationalizations that externally impose the interpretation that God is not genocidal, and assume on faith whatever ad hoc hypotheses are necessary not to explain the plain textual evidence but to explain it away. But why shouldn't the god of the Old Testament be genocidal? Maybe our own discomfort with genocide (not to mention slavery, rape, human sacrifice, wars of aggression, misogyny and sexism, and homophobia) is merely unjustified sentimentality. I don't mind too much imposing our own human moral beliefs on the Bible, but once we do so, it ceases to have any sort of moral authority.

The author sidesteps the question, "Does religion cause evil?" with a fallacy of the excluded middle. The issue is not whether religion causes more evil than non-theism, the questions are: what evils does religion — specifically the supernatural component of religion that distinguishes it from naturalism — cause? Why does it cause these evils? Can we ameliorate these evils without losing supernaturalism? Is a religion without supernaturalism really a religion, or at least an objectionable religion? (If you want to label as "religious" your desire that everyone be as happy as possible and suffer as little as possible, without assigning a supernatural justification for that belief, I have no quarrel with either your "religion" or your choice of label.)

The argument has never been that religion is wholly evil; it's never been that religion does more evil than good. The minor argument is that religion holds itself up as a moral paragon: their evils — whatever they happen to be — undermine this stance.

The major specifically moral atheist critique of religion is that a supernatural justification for a moral belief — regardless of the content of that belief — cannot be critically examined. Supernaturalism is just as easily employed to justify "evil" moral beliefs (beliefs one might disapprove of) as to justify "good" moral beliefs. No matter what your belief happens to be, once you have retreated into faith the criticism that your belief is inconsistent becomes irrelevant: God can distinguish on whatever basis He chooses; it's irrelevant that we ourselves might think the distinction is trivial or specious. God can cause whatever suffering He chooses: the argument from empathy — that the suffering of others caused by some moral belief shocks our conscience — becomes irrelevant: if our conscience is shocked, so much the worse for our conscience. If we can actually determine that religion even does the smallest evil, then we must presuppose that we can evaluate good and evil independently of religion: we can critically examine moral beliefs, and therefore supernaturalism is unjustified.

The author mentions that "I have been told that on the Ohio State campus where I am a campus minister that the Philosophy 101 class went over the God Delusion and demonstrated why Dawkins should probably stick to biology." Could we imagine a more egregious example of completely bullshit third- and fourth-hand hearsay and a pure argument from authority? And what kind of authority do we even grant to an introductory philosophy class?

The God Delusion is not book of philosophy. The philosophical arguments it contains are directed at a lay audience, not a technical or academic audience, and are rebuttals to one particular conception of God and a few particular arguments for the existence of a God. Even his one more-or-less positive argument for the non-existence of God is still addressed primarily to the conception of God implicit in the apologetic argument from design — an argument about which Dawkins has a legitimate claim to expertise.

The author is "saddened to say that one of the predominant reasons our culture rejects our faith is because of a lack of information." But is this really true? And if it's actually true, or he believed it to be true, why does he not offer any new information?

I'll tell you what we atheists want from believers: we want you to stop trying to flagrantly bullshit us. If you have faith — belief without or contrary to sufficient evidence or argument — then just say so. If you think you have an evidentiary or argumentative case, then just make it. Don't deprecate evidentialism, don't retreat to faith when your argumentative case fails. Don't try to make up new rules of evidence just to give you the conclusion you want; give us a positive reason to accept different rules. Remember: at the very heart of it, atheism is the conviction that everyone who says they speak for God is completely full of shit: if any god were to exist, it is a completely mysterious god, a god no one can speak for. And as Hume noted a mysterious god is no god at all.

Carnival of the Godless #147

The Carnival of the Godless #147 is up at Infallible Failure.

Amorality

Allow me to let you in on a little secret: I am 100% amoral. That's right: I do not have a shred of morality in my being. Not a jot, a tittle, a soupçon, or a wee dram. None, zero, zilch, nada.

Before you get alarmed you should ask me the very first question you should always ask a philosopher: what exactly do you mean by "morality"? And there's the rub. I do not do anything, ever, only because it is the right thing to do. I act only to maximize my own personal happiness and satisfaction.

As it happens, I have a brain: I can remember the past, predict the future, and imagine possibilities. I can rationally know that my own happiness and satisfaction is greater in a world where people tend to refrain from killing each other, beating each other up, or stealing their stuff. And since I live in a world where other people also have brains and imagination, and they know too they themselves will be happier if people don't go around killing each other. So we make promises to each other, and — more importantly — enforce those promises with police and prisons, judges and jails, soldiers and the occasional nuclear bomb. Because I know that if we all make and keep certain promises we will all be better off, I have a good reason for making and keeping these promises myself: I will be happier and more satisfied.

But that's not morality, at least not as some people construe morality. Morality means doing what's "right" without regard to your own or anyone else's benefit. In fact, we know that we are acting morally only if our actions benefit no one. It just doesn't matter, for example, that women are people, with their own wants and needs, and we would all be better off — women and men alike — if they had all the freedoms, responsibilities, and benefits afforded men. The right thing to do is for women to be submissive and subservient to men regardless of the cost to men and women alike.

This is the morality that people like Vox Dei correctly argue is unavailable to atheists. It is the morality of acid thrown in a woman's face, the morality of faggots tortured and strung up on fence to die, children left by their parents to die of appendicitis. It's the morality of genocide, slavery, tyranny and oppression. Yes, that's a morality that as an atheist I'm proud to say does not apply in the least to me: you can be damn sure that I'm completely amoral.

Something and nothing

Why is there something rather than nothing?

This is, supposedly, the "big question" of religion, metaphysics, and philosophy. But it's a stupid question: at some point everyone, theist and atheist alike, has to say, something just is. Whether it's God or the laws of physics and the initial conditions of the universe, something just is. The "big question" is not: why is there something rather than nothing? but: what are the characteristics and properties of the something that just is?

In the 18th century, when the philosophies of deism and atheism began to take hold (especially with David Hume (1711 - 1776)) one proposed something-that-just-is was the whole natural universe, which (barring a few anomalies) appeared to be more-or-less stable and eternal. The whole universe (comprising at the time the solar system and the nearby stars visible to simple telescopes), complex as it was, was considered by atheists to be simpler than the alternative theistic something-that-just-is of an interventionist creator deity. But the whole universe is still extremely complex, especially when we include human beings and all of Earth's varied life forms. There was some appeal to the compromise position of deism: a deity has to get the complex universe started; the operation of non-teleological natural law is sufficient to explain and understand everything that happens afterward. The creator endows human beings with reason (and perhaps a moral sense), but after that it's up to us to work out what we do with it.

As we investigated these natural laws with increasing sophistication, we discovered quite a lot of the apparent complexity of the universe emerged from a much simpler basis. With the nebular hypothesis, the something-that-just-is no longer includes each planet in its particular orbit, but just a diffuse nebula. With the theory of evolution, the something-that-just-is no longer includes hippopotamuses, giraffes, gorillas and human beings, just the simplest possible life form. And with modern physics, cosmology, chemistry, etc. we got the natural story of the something-that-just-is down to the Standard Model of the laws of physics and the initial conditions of the Big Bang (with some quantum randomness thrown in to mix things up a bit).

It bears repeating: even if the simplest natural something-that-just-is were the present-day physical universe in all the complexity modern observational methods have revealed, that model would still be better than the deistic model and incomparably better than the theistic magical creator deity who not only magically pops the whole thing into existence but magically (but undetectably) dabbles and adjusts affairs from time to time and who has an obsessive concern with what we do with our genitals and requires his spokesmodels to wear silly hats. But the natural something-that-just-is isn't so complex as the whole physical universe; it's eight skitty zillion times less complicated. A handful of laws, a couple of dozen parameters, some mass-energy, a few microscopic irregularities in the initial distribution and Bang! the whole physical universe follows. If the whole thing is better than theism, this dramatically reduced version relegates theism to the outskirts of the peanut gallery.

Supposedly, Stephen Hawking's new book — which I haven't read yet, as it hasn't been released — simplifies the natural something-that-just-is even more. Even the Standard Model (somehow) emerges from just gravity. Some people wanted to believe that we needed a creator deity to fiddle with a score of dials to get this universe; Hawking now claims — as I understand it — if we want a creator deity, His only job is to push one button, a job for which the nervous system of a fruit fly is vastly overqualified.

The theistic story of something-that-just-is was made absurd in Ancient Greece, when we first realized that the physical world operated according to mechanical, non-teleological laws. Once we don't need a god to make the wind blow, to make the Nile flood every year, and to sustain the process of life from moment to moment, we don't need a god, period. The entire debate since then has been the retreat of the parasitical priests and prophets from their positions of power and privilege (hooray for alliteration!), a retreat where these bastards have extracted blood, death and suffering for every inch of ground they've lost.

But they have indeed lost.

Poe's Law

Poe's Law? (Not to be confused with Cole's Law*)

Atheism

Here are just a few true statistics. None of the facts have been changed. Let these be a warning to you.

1. Atheists are the least likely people in America to pray to God.

2. Most atheist do not attend church.

Stephen Hawking’s Latest Book Converting Lot of Atheists Into Believers

The Grand Design, Stephen Hawking’s latest book co-authored with physicist Leonard Mlodinow, is turning a lot of atheists/agnostics into believers, finds KBNN. An Internet based survey conducted by Rbit Analytics, an affiliated body of KBNN, has found that the book has profoundly shaken the disbelief of atheists, and toppled a lot of atheists/agnostics into believing in the God hypothesis.

*sliced cabbage

Baseball and religion

I have a lot of the same feelings about professional baseball (and professional sports in general) as I do about religion.

I think both professional baseball and religion are a colossal waste of time. The labor and resources we dedicate to both would be far better spent doing something else. I have no sympathy in the literal sense for baseball fans and religious congregationalists: not only do I not enjoy them, I cannot imagine enjoying sitting in a baseball stadium or a church. I find the social prestige and economic privilege we afford baseball players, managers, owners, and commentators, as well as priests, bishops, popes, and theologians, to be completely unwarranted.

Fundamentally, I think both baseball and religion are just silly: it's ridiculous to pay good money to watch a bunch of grown men in silly clothes throwing a ball around or watch a grown man (or, more rarely, a woman) in a silly hat drone on about his imaginary friend and his fanboy crush on a bunch of iron-age goat herders.

On the other hand, I think it's silly, but so what? I can certainly sympathize at a more abstract level with doing what you enjoy, whatever that might happen to be. If you enjoy something I don't , well, it's your money, spend it as you please. And every individual in a democracy has as much of a right to the public purse as any other. I'll vote against a penny in sales tax to build a baseball stadium, but once the vote's taken and I've lost, I'll pay the penny with a good will: everyone has to pay for some things we don't want, that's just life in the big city. If you enjoy baseball, or if you enjoy religion, it doesn't matter whether or not I can sympathize with you: it's a free country, do what you like; you don't have to answer to me.

Of course, along with these real and relevant similarities, there are some enormous differences. Baseball fans don't care that not everyone is a baseball fan, and they don't get all butthurt when I say out loud that I think baseball is silly. And when I say that I think baseball is silly, they don't demand that I learn the infield fly rule or the complex strategy of relief pitching. They don't get apoplectic because I don't just as vociferously indicate my dislike of football, cricket or professional bowling.

When baseball players happen to molest children, the baseball community doesn't close ranks to protect them. They don't say that only those who love baseball are good and moral people, and those who dislike baseball are unfit to be citizens. They don't organize political campaigns to take civil rights away from a class of citizens. A baseball player can't use his skill in baseball to justify violence against his wife or girlfriend. While prominent people in baseball do have social prestige, nobody says that being able to hit a tiny little ball moving at 100 MPH gives one a special insight into ethics, sexuality or law.

And they don't blow up or assassinate football fans.

The critical difference is that baseball doesn't make any special truth claims, so they don't have any special truth claims to defend against scientific or rational inquiry. They don't have to lie, they don't have to bullshit, They don't have to erect an edifice of doublethink. They just say "We like watching grown men throw a ball around; what's it to you?"

And that, of course, is why I spend a lot of time talking about religion, and no time at all talking about baseball. If the position of the religious were just that they enjoy getting together on Sunday morning and talking about their invisible friend, I'd give religion no more attention than I do baseball: it's not my cup of tea, but to each his own.

But of course that's not the case.

The major themes of this blog are atheism and religion, communism and economics, the philosophy of science, and meta-ethical philosophy. They're all related: everything about this blog is about what is a matter of truth and what is a matter of opinion, and how we determine — about matters of truth — what is actually true.

Anyone who has read even a little philosophy knows that philosophers no less than theologians have been trying for thousands of years to find a way to determine what is actually true about ethics, the truth about what is good. And what I've discovered, both from thinking as clearly as I can about the subject as well as observing the staggering, monumental failure of philosophers and theologians to offer a reasonable methodology for determining the actual truth about what is good, is that the good is a simply a matter of opinion.

That the good is a matter of opinion doesn't disturb me personally in the least, but it's apparently a very bitter pill for a lot of people to swallow. We would really like to believe that it's true genocide, slavery, racism, murder, rape, theft, misogyny, bigotry, oppression, exploitation are objectively bad. But they're not. The best we can say is that people predominantly have the opinion that these activities are objectionable, and so we deprecate them socially, sometimes violently. We simply have to come to terms that our society is an evolving set of opinions; that our social development is not a "progression" in discovering the One True Set of Ethics. In just the same sense, DNA is just an evolving set of genetic information; it's not a progression of discovering the One True Organism or Species.

Sometimes we can allow conflicting opinions (like about the value of baseball) but sometimes we can't. Just because the status of women is a matter of opinion doesn't mean we must allow men whose opinion is that women are inferior free rein to oppress and exploit their wives and daughters. Learning all the different political ways to effectively reconcile conflicting opinions requires as much careful, patient intellectual work as does puzzling out all the different scientific ways to understand the physical universe.

But to even begin this task, we have to be on the right track. It took us five or six thousand years from the invention of writing to figuring out the right track for understanding the physical world: the scientific method. Once we found the right track, our scientific knowledge started increasing exponentially: indeed, this exponential increase is how we know we found the right track. But getting on the right track means getting off the wrong track. And even in science, people violently resisted getting off the wrong track. Power and privilege is a part of it: if some persistent delusion or myth affords someone power, privilege, luxury and ease, they're not going to blithely abandon that delusion.

But it's also a matter of identity: we are what we value. When we seek to change not just someone's values but the very foundation of those values, we're reaching into the very heart of their psyche. We are, in effect, almost "killing" one person and replacing them with another. Indeed many religious people conceptualize their conversion — and many atheists conceptualize their deconversion — as being reborn: they have changed the foundation of their values: they see themselves as a new person. It's tough, it's fraught with peril, but change — even the deepest metaphysical change — is inevitable.

Why the stupid?

Regular readers will note I've been posting a lot of The Stupid! It Burns! articles. Besides the pure entertainment value, there's a method to my madness.

One way or another, I've been talking and writing about atheism and religion for about 10 years. I started all sincere and engaged; I really wanted to discuss all the philosophical and scientific issues and figure out what was going on. But the problem with religion is: there is no there there. The arguments for religious belief aren't just mistaken, they're at best not even wrong. At worst, they consist of most egregious logical fallacies: Straw men, outrageously uncharitable interpretations, equivocations, elementary misuse of logic, begging the question. And I'm not just talking about the amateurs on message boards: William Lane Craig and Alvin Plantinga, for example, couldn't reason their way out of a paper bag if you gave them a squirt gun and a starter hole. But they're credentialed academics, so they can't possibly be making elementary errors, right? Sadly, they do. (Egregious misuse of logic and bad argumentation is pervasive in the entire academic philosophical community, not just among theologians and apologists.)

Atheists are chided for not engaging with the "sophisticated" theological arguments. The problem is, there aren't any. None. They all come down to: we're not absolutely certain about anything, it makes me happy to believe that my preferences, biases, and prejudices are objective truths about the universe, therefore God exists. All of theology and apologetics consists of wrapping this core position in as many layers of bullshit and doubletalk as possible, and quite a few very clever people have engaged in this activity.

It doesn't do any good to confront the religious with the facts, because they don't care about the facts. They'll just make facts up out of thin air, and deny the truth of any other inconvenient facts. It doesn't do any good to confront the religious with logical, rational arguments, because they don't care about logic and rationality. They're happy to use the forms of facts, logic and reasoned argument, but when those forms don't suit them, they'll abandon them without a second thought.

This unconcern with facts and reason is obviously illustrated in one tendency in apologetic writing: the religious argument for agnosticism. (There are a few examples in the most recent TSIB articles.) If agnosticism were compelled by the facts, then why are you a believer? The position is nonsensical. The outright lies too are not just exceptions, they're the rule: atheism claims certainty; there are no transitional fossils; the origin of life requires that DNA popped out of nowhere; the list goes on, and on, ad nauseam.

After a certain point, I realized that simply pointing out errors of fact and logic had no more effect than point out to a CEO that he has more money than a worker. He doesn't care that he has more money; in just the same sense the religious apologist doesn't really care that his logic is faulty and his supposed facts are in error.

The "debate" about religion and atheism isn't really a debate. It's not a dialectic between facts and theories, or between conjectures and proofs. It's fundamentally an ethical debate: how should we go about finding the truth? Should we come up with a position and find reasons to support it, or should we discover the actual facts and try to come up with the best explanation for those facts?

My nose wouldn't be so far out of joint if the religious explicitly took the first approach. This is our faith, we believe it before rational investigation, and we enjoy the intellectual exercise of exploring this faith logically. (To his credit Plantinga does explicitly take this approach. Paraphrasing from memory, he says that the best we can say about religion is that it's not internally contradictory.) But, by and large, religious apologists don't take the former approach. Instead, they secretly change the rules of finding and explaining the facts, and then appear to argue that the ordinary rules of scientific inquiry support their theological prejudices. The enormous prestige of ordinary scientific and rational inquiry almost forces them to do so.

Even when they're saying that science and religion are substantively different, that scientific inquiry simply has nothing to say about religion, they're still being hypocritical and disingenuous. The issue goes beyond one particular way of knowing things: religion goes to the heart of what it means to say you actually know something, and, more importantly what it means to say that something is true. Only the most vacuous deists and fideists come right out and say, "Hey, I have no idea whatsoever whether by beliefs are true, but I believe them to be true anyway," and even these fideists are misusing true.

What's true has to be true for everyone; if I say something is true, and you say the same thing is false, at least one of us has to be mistaken. And if I say I know something, then everyone has to be able to know it. When we're not talking about what's true for everyone and what everyone can know, we're talking about preference.

And fine: if you yourself prefer to believe, for example, that gays are icky, women should be subservient to men and babies, then say so. Take ownership of your own preferences. I have at least some respect for a person who says, "I myself just fucking hate those goddamn faggots," than I do for someone who tries to pawn of his own prejudice on God. It goes both ways too: I have a lot more respect for someone who says, "I myself want gay people to be happy, fulfilled and have all the civil rights and privileges enjoyed by straight people." If you say to me, "God loves gay people as much as straights," my first reaction is, "So, what you yourself think isn't relevant? If God told you to hate and oppress gay people, you'd just as happily do so?" I don't care what you think God thinks about gays, I want to know what you think about gays. I can talk to you about what you think.

Once you push any sort of belief onto God, I just can't talk to you about it. How can I change God's mind? I can't engage your reason, because you're not arriving at your beliefs by reason. I can't engage your compassion, your empathy, your sympathy, your fellow feeling, because the minute you push your ethical beliefs onto God — even an ethical belief I agree with — all of your emotional and empathetic connections to other people become irrelevant, in just the same sense that my empathy for someone who falls off a cliff and is terribly injured is irrelevant to my opinions about the law of gravity.

The facts don't matter. Reason doesn't matter. Knowledge doesn't matter. The truth doesn't matter. Religion is nothing more than at best infantile fantasy and at worst a justification for sadism and oppression. You can't reason someone out of an irrational belief. All you can do is praise and condemn, or point and laugh. If enough people choose to condemn religious thought, it will go away (or at least become marginalized). In exactly the same sense, enough people chose to condemn slavery and rape, and these ideas have become substantially marginalized.

After ten years of looking, I'm convinced that there's no gem of truth hidden in the enormous pile of bullshit that is religion and theology. If there were, some clever apologist would have found it. Instead I see the mound of bullshit being piled higher and deeper, so the religious can say at least, "You haven't investigated everything, so you can't be certain there's no truth there." This position is itself patent bullshit. Show me the truth, and I'll change my mind. Until then, I'm going to look at the bullshit, call it bullshit, and condemn the bullshit artists for trying to hide the truth, whatever it might be.

The Stupid! It Burns! (No True Scotsman edition)

More teens becoming 'fake' Christians

If you're the parent of a Christian teenager, Kenda Creasy Dean has this warning:

Your child is following a "mutant" form of Christianity, and you may be responsible.

Dean says more American teenagers are embracing what she calls "moralistic therapeutic deism." Translation: It's a watered-down faith that portrays God as a "divine therapist" whose chief goal is to boost people's self-esteem.

You've got mail!

I got an email a few minutes ago from Reclaiming the Mind Ministries, which included this little gem:

Elective: Critical Thinking

Join Robert Bowman this Fall as he takes you through issues in critical thinking in 8 weeks. You can expect a clearer understanding of what logical fallacies entail, common mistakes people make when presenting arguments, and how to avoid these mistakes yourself.

Rob is a well know apologist and author of several books. His teaching approach is thorough and informative yet tangible.

To get the gears turning in your head enroll now.

I wonder how I got on their mailing list.

Antony Flew and God

David Kenney mentions atheist philosopher Antony Flew's "conversion": There Is A God – How the World’s Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind, Antony Flew. One should not draw many conclusions from this conversion; certainly the conclusion that Kenney draws

The lesson is obvious—if Flew, a son of a Methodist minister, can go so far away from Christianity as to affirm in public discourse that there is no God, make an academic career as a philosophical atheist, but be turned to theism based on evidence, then the case for God is far stronger than many may have considered.

is entirely unwarranted.

(Of course, not only is Flew not the world's most notorious atheist (Dawkins has probably wrested that title from Madelyn Murray O'Hair), Flew is not even in the top 10 notorious atheists. To the extent that any philosopher can be notorious*, Flew is not even the most notorious atheist philosopher (that title almost certainly belongs to Daniel Dennett, or perhaps Michael Martin).

*Hence the Wikipedia links for all the philosophers, so you'll know who I'm talking about.

That any philosopher accepts anything should not impress anyone. Philosophy is, after all, a profession where idiots such as Alvin Plantinga and Richard Swinburne are held in real esteem even by their nominally atheist colleagues. And whatever else they might be good at, philosophers have very little training in making and evaluating specifically evidentiary arguments; philosophers (at best) specialize in making logical arguments. I can't overstate the value of specialized training: it's not enough to be clever, you need to know the right questions to ask. Scientists, for example, are notoriously bad at debunking fraudulent psychics; the most renowned debunker is James "The Amazing" Randi, a professional magician.

Flew's conversion rests on the flimsiest of evidence. Historian and atheist philosopher Richard Carrier corresponded with Antony Flew regarding his conversion. Carrier reports that Flew emphasizes repeatedly that

My one and only piece of relevant evidence [for an Aristotelian God] is the apparent impossibility of providing a naturalistic theory of the origin from DNA of the first reproducing species ... [In fact] the only reason which I have for beginning to think of believing in a First Cause god is the impossibility of providing a naturalistic account of the origin of the first reproducing organisms.

But Flew himself later concedes that

I now realize that I have made a fool of myself by believing that there were no presentable theories of the development of inanimate matter up to the first living creature capable of reproduction.

Antony Flew did not convert to any sort of theism; at best he converted to the most abstract and mechanical deism. Flew writes to Carrier in October 2004 that

I do not think I will ever make that assertion [that probably God exists], precisely because any assertion which I am prepared to make about God would not be about a God in that sense ... I think we need here a fundamental distinction between the God of Aristotle or Spinoza and the Gods of the Christian and the Islamic Revelations. [emphasis added]

Evidence for one proposition is not by definition evidence for a different, fundamentally distinct proposition. A deistic "God" is no closer to Christian theism than is the most materialistic atheism.

Worst of all, using Flew's "conversion" in any sense is sad, pathetic and patently offensive. Death comes to us all, all too often preceded by infirmity physical and mental. Flew's so-called conversion comes when he was 81 years old, and his friends paint a picture of a man with mind succumbing to the depredations and indignities of old age. Carrier writes

During the course of 2005, Flew cut off all correspondence and now refuses to speak to any member of the press. When Matt Donnelly, a reporter for Science and Theology News, asked him for permission to read and quote his letters to me, Flew refused, and insisted that even his phone conversations with Donnelly not be used. A friend and eyewitness whom I trust reported to me that he and another prominent secular humanist spoke to Flew in private during his recent visit to New York for the 25th Anniversary conference of the Council for Secular Humanism in October of 2005. They found him to be philosophically incoherent. He affirmed his belief in an uncaring, uninvolved, unconscious (yes, unconscious) Jeffersonian Deity, but despite half an hour of questioning as to why, he could not give any specific reason for this belief. ...

In recognition of his "conversion," [in May 2006] Antony Flew was awarded the Phillip E. Johnson Award for Liberty and Truth at Biola, an Evangelical Christian university in La Mirada, California. Flew accepted it in person... I have received communications from several eyewitnesses in attendance who all confirm that Flew appeared to sleep through most of it, said little, and what he did say was difficult to understand.

In November 2007, Carrier writes,

Flew has now confessed to the fact that he did not write a word of [There Is A God, There Is a God: How the World's Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind] (even though it is sold under his name), and apparently knows (or remembers) little of its contents, despite the publisher's assurance that he signed off on it (though even his publisher confesses doubts about Flew's ability to remember essential details). Oppenheimer presents sufficient evidence to confirm that Flew's failing memory is what I would call clinically serious, and I believe his mental decline is now more or less confirmed.

Really, is this the best, or anywhere near the best, that Christians can do? An aged man with a failing memory, taking a position far away from their own on the flimsiest of evidence?

The Stupid! It Burns! (long-winded rant version)

31 Reasons Atheism and ”Patience” Are Wrong: My Reply to An Atheist: 6,136 words, each word burning the mind of the thinking reader more painfully than the last.

And I thought I was a long-winded bastard!