From Eric MacDonald, who’s really on a roll these days. I’m so glad he started his own website.
There is a fundamental dishonesty built into religion. It comes out clearly in John Shook’s book, The God Debates, that I am reading just now. John Shook thinks that it is incumbent upon atheists to join in the God debates, to learn as much as we can about religion and its argumentation so that we can join in the debates at a reasonably high level of sophistication. This I am willing to do, because it amuses me, but when you come upon things like the following, one has to admit that the argument is about air (and I apologise beforehand for quoting at such length):
There are two basic ways to design nonexistence proofs. The “dialectical nonexistence proof’ argues that two or more characteristics of a specific god are logically incompatible. A definition of something having logically incompatible characteristics can only be the definition of a necessarily nonexistent entity. Successful dialectical nonexistence proofs can show that specific kinds of gods cannot exist. For example, many Christians believe both that god is perfect and that god can suffer along with us. Maybe these two characteristics are contradictory. Figuring out how a perfect being can suffer requires conceptual refinements to god to avoid the negative verdict of a dialectical nonexistence proof. And even if these refinements go badly and one characteristic of god must go, theology can revise its conception of god. Avoiding dialectical nonexistence proofs is, from a flexible theology’s point of view, just another way for humanity to learn more about god.
This is not a caricature. This is the way theologians actually go to work. For example, Chapter 4 (“Divine Agency, Remodeled”) of Marilyn McCord Adams’ book Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God, is devoted to precisely this process of redefining God in such a way as to accommodate both God’s goodness and the manifest evils of the world. It is simply preposterous to suggest that this is an appropriate procedure for learning anything about anything. It’s a bit like making the crime fit the punishment, rather than the other way about.
Avoiding dialectical nonexistence proofs is, from a flexible theology’s point of view, just another way for humanity to learn more about god.
Priceless. I guess humanity is doomed to forever endure the insufferable travesty that is theology.
No, In France, the teaching of theology was banned from state universities in 1905, and still is. About 10 years ago, a well-known astrologer (who appeared on French radio and television, tried to get a chair in astrology at the Sorbonne. Would she have succeeded at universities in the UK or other countries?
Well, theologians don’t seem to be much after academic positions these days (although I might be wrong in holding that view). My point is that we might have to endure them forever in the arena of public discourse. As long as Templeton money is available anyway.
There is one!
http://www.trinitysaintdavid.ac.uk/en/sophia/
Yes.
It’s good to know the twisted logic of Anselm, Augustine, and Maimonides is alive and well in contemporary theology.
You know, you don’t even have to get so rarefied to figure out that the very notion of a god is a self-contained contradiction.
What is a god but an entity that can work miracles? And what is a miracle but an occurrence of the impossible?
Yet, if something happens, it’s obviously not impossible — it happened! So either the things that whose we would deify are (allegedly) doing aren’t miracles, or they simply don’t happen.
Many attempt to salvage the concept by re-defining it to the point that a god can do certain things that others can’t…yet this would make us all gods. Roger Bannister became a god in ’54 by running faster than any other human possibly could (at that time). There are things each of us can do that no other can — though, granted, many of those things are humble and unimpressive.
And still, many attempt to redeem their gods. Their gods can do things that no human could possibly do, such as kick-start the Big Bang (ignoring for the moment whether it needed to be kick-started or if it even makes sense to say that it might have been kick-started). Yet why draw the line at kick-starting the Big Bang instead of, say, igniting stellar fusion? Should an alien that could willfully gather up interstellar dust (perhaps with tractor beams) and thereby create a new star be worthy of being called a god? Or at a galactic instead of a stellar scale? Or maybe the alien only has to be powerful enough to create a Niven-style Ringworld?
No, what is truly the defining characteristic of a god is that it is defined as such by fiat, and woe be unto those who dare pay attention to the man behind the curtain.
Cheers,
b&
Miracles are by definition physically impossible events, but that doesn’t mean that they are logically impossible. God is not subject to the laws of nature.
First, which god is it that you have in mind that’s not subject to the laws of nature?
Second, would you be so kind as to give an example of something that’s physically impossible yet logically possible?
Third, is this god of yours capable of drawing, on a flat piece of paper in Euclidean space, a figure with three sides and two right angles? If so, how do you propose that your god accomplish the feat; if not, how is that not a law of nature to which your god is subject?
Cheers,
b&
Perhaps this is better: “three sided polygon”
Just for pedantry’s sake. Otherwise, this would work: |_|
Good point — thanks!
b&
Yes. Richard Feynman shows how to do this on a very large but flat surface, (in his celebrated Lectures on Physics), but differentially heated so that one’s ruler changes length.
It is not cheating.
But if the measurement units aren’t uniform, the space isn’t truly Euclidean. Einsteinian? Yes. Euclidean? No.
b&
What is your definition of “Euclidian”?
then I think we’ve just determined that Feynman was in fact God.
The standard one that includes things like the famous five postulates. Granted, the parallel postulate can now be derived independently from the other four, but Feynman’s very clever hack does, of course, break it. That’s the whole point of his exercise.
Regardless, it also misses the bigger point. Feynman’s nonuniform “flat” space is no more evidence of divine powers than the famous white bear of the north — or of, say, redefining “3” to equal “4.”
Permit me to re-refine the original question: “Is this god of Myron’s capable of drawing, on a flat piece of paper in uniform Euclidean space, a polygon with three sides and two right angles?” I think that should be sufficient to demonstrate my real point, that there are things — lots of things — that truly are impossible and impervious to any and all attempts to handwave away with cries of “Omnipotent!” Good luck, for example, causing two waves of different frequencies to occupy the same space without causing interference patterns (and, please, spare me the trouble of the pedantry necessary to specify they must be waves of the same type in the same medium, and all the rest).
Cheers,
b&
Be, I don’t wish to waste too much time on this rather trivial point, but *I* can draw a figure with 3 sides and 2 right angles, on a flat space that obeys the parallel postulate. All that is required is differential heating such that an hyperbolic region is created.
In his SIX NOT-SO-EASY PIECES Feynman was describing how to understand curved space in Chapter 6.
He showed that a bug on a sphere would not be able to tell if it was living on a sphere or a differentially heated flat hotplate:
“Now we want to consider still a third kind of creature. He is also a bug like the others, and also lives on a plane, as our first bug did, but this time the plane is peculiar. The temperature is different at different places. Also, the bug and any rules he uses are all made of the same material which expands when it is heated. Whenever he puts a ruler somewhere to measure something the ruler expands immediately to the proper length for the temperature at that place. Whenever he puts any object–himself, a ruler, a triangle, or anything–the thing stretches itself because of the thermal expansion”
But the surface of a sphere & the surface of the hotplate (as described) are not Euclidean ~ in that (for example) parallel lines WILL meet before infinity
EXCEPTIONS:
where the radius of the sphere is infinite or…
the hotplate is equi-temperate (made up word)
Michael
Again, whence do you derive this seemingly privileged “definition” of Euclidian?
You allude to it in the elliptical phrase: “in that (for example) [sic] parallel lines WILL meet before infinity”, but this is not necessarily true for even the hotplate scenario with the above-mentioned triangles.
Let me reply on behalf of Myron.
Jesus is said to have turned water into wine (without the usual processes of adding grape juice, fermentation etc). I think this is, in the everyday meaning of the words, physically impossible. But it is not logically impossible.
By “not logically impossible” we mean that we think we can imagine water suddenly turning into wine. Can we, though? And is it even the case that anything we think we can imagine is logically possible?
If we can’t imagine a thing, does that prove it to be logically impossible? I can’t imagine space of 11 dimensions as postulated by some string theories.
In my view only self-contradictory or incoherent propositions are logically impossible.
Are you in training as the philosophical replacement for Mary Midgely?
No, I parted company with Midgley after reading her review of The Selfish Gene.
Last I checked, water contains only hydrogen and oxygen (ignoring trace impurities commonly present).
Wine, on the other hand, contains significant amounts of carbon and small-but-essential amounts of most of the non-noble elements in the first four groups of the periodic table. These elements are present in fairly precise ratios and arranged in very complex molecules and compounds.
Turning water into with without using a grape vine therefore would require nuclear transmutation at a bare minimum, along with some bordering-on-magic chemical alchemy. Huge amounts of energy would be required as well as released. The technology is only theoretically imaginable today — and, even then, would almost require the technology of a civilization that’s already built a Dyson Sphere.
Far simpler would be to have a squeeze bottle of ethanol up one sleeve and powdered concentrates of the pigments and similar stuff up the other sleeve.
In either case, the base claim is clearly as much of a fictional element of the Jesus mythology as the exact same claim is in the mythologies of Bacchus, Dionysus, and countless other nearly-indistinguishable ancient gods.
I’ll grant you the possibility that Jesus turned water into wine when you can first show evidence that any of his contemporaries (the authors of the Dead Sea Scrolls, Philo, Pliny the Elder, the Roman Satirists, etc.) noticed him doing so and you can demonstrate that all the other gods who did the same trick were fakes. Using the same standards of evidence, of course.
Cheers,
b&
All that you say simply goes to confirm that water-into-wine is impossible, or at least highly implausible, unless there is a god who can perform miracles. I don’t deny that. I do still maintain that it’s not logically impossible.
When theologians can provide something – anything! – to indicate that their god-concepts have any grounding in reality, then (and only then) should we bother to engage them.
Otherwise it’s as relevant as debating whether those pinhead angels prefer crunk to pop & lock.
I should have been a theologian! I am so good at bullshit. Srsly, just ask me.
But you also have to completely without morals or conscience, can you manage that?
You appear to be thing of Priests & Popes.
Many theologians are armed with morality & consciences.
Many are atheist, in my (admittedly) anecdotal experience.
Damn. for “thing”, read “thinking”.
Coyne’s blog is superior to most, esp wrt the nested comments, and the truly unparalleled email response advice, but falls down in the notable lack of an “edit” facility.
If it were possessed of such a beastie, it would be well nigh on perfect.
But of course, the character of god itself has shifted not-so-slightly over the ages to fit the data. For example, the “bearded man in the sky” image was once the norm, but now many believers consider it a caricature. Ken Miller has a theology highly unorthodox among Catholics, just like Francis Collins’ among evangelicals. For a being that is supposed to be transcendental and absolute, he certainly lends himself to lots of cosmetics.
I am reminded of this YouTube video in which the theologians, Crossan and Borg, share their definitions of God. Crossan goes with the “driving force of evolution”, while Borg conceives of God as “Isness.” I guess it serves to shield them from the dreaded atheist label.
Isness, really? REALLY?? WTF does that even mean? Fuck me I’m speechless …
From the OED:
“Isness”
a. The fact that a thing is. b. That which a thing is in itself; essence.
1865 J. H. STIRLING Secret of Hegel II. III. i. 4 Seyn, in Germany, often in Hegel himself, means the abstraction of sensuous Isness. 1884 ‘SCOTUS NOVANTICUS’ Metaphysica Nova et Vetusta VI. 146 The moment of being or is-ness yields identity (A = A); and as this is-ness is given in concreto as a determined somewhat which is, we have the category of Essence as derivative category from Being. 1888 J. MARTINEAU Stud. Relig. I. II. i. 183 Both the fact of Being or ‘is-ness’ of each thing and the real nature of Cause are guaranteed to us by the free act of percipience. 1893 Dublin Rev. Jan. 217 That which the intellect first perceived is the transcendental essence or ‘isness’ of the thing. 1918 [see GOOD A. adj. 14c]. 1942 Mind LI. 257 Any one..who sets out along the via negativa in this spirit is confessing in the very act that ‘is’ can never be tortured into ‘isness’. 1955 A. HUXLEY Genius & Goddess 46 The girl is who she is. Some of her isness spills over and impregnates the entire universe. 1965 L. R. HUBBARD Scientology Abridged Dict., Is-ness, one of the four conditions of existence. It is an apparency of existence brought about by the continuous alteration of an As-is-ness. This is called, when agreed upon, reality.”
This is why I loathe philosophy.
Join the club!
No, the defining characteristic of a gos is that you can exist in more than one place at a time, but cannot be compelled to do so. It is really just a skill that can be learned, and anyone who figures it out is technically a god. Steven Brust spelled this out pretty clearly in his novels, Yeesh!
gos = god, don’t ya know?
Clearly, the keys of your keyboard exist in more than one place at a time and are therefore gods.
Cheers,
b&
I will now sacrifice a goat to the all-mighty Qwerty, Lord of Input.
Make it a pig, in the form of a full rack of baby back ribs, and you’ve got yourself a deal….
b&
All atheists should read Shook’s brilliant book in order to familiarize themselves with the different types of theological argumentation:
* Shook, John R. /The God Debates: A 21st Century Guide for Atheists and Believers (and Everyone in Between)/. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010.
Eric MacDonald is in the process of doing just that – on behalf of many of us, I’m sure. Jerry’s quote above is from Eric’s post today, over on Choice in Dying. I suggest you read that critique, as yet incomplete but already most revealing.
One of the problems with the “Atheists should learn something about religion” style of accusation is that it simply demonstrates that it hasn’t occurred to the Theist in question that many atheists know quite a lot about Religion, as well as its rather troubled maiden aunt, Theology.
There’s as much value in a serious debate on “nonexistence proofs” with a Theologian as there is in a debate on Irreducible Complexity with an ID proponent.
My first clause is going to annoy people, but please, keep reading.
The process described by Shook is perfectly valid…
IF AND ONLY IF
… we first accept the premise ‘God exists’ as a key assumption.
This fact forms the basis of my fundamental objection to theology as a whole.
Theology approaches the question of God’s existence by generating enough obfuscatory white noise to cover up the fact that that it all boils down to assuming the desired conclusion up-front.
That being the case, theology cannot be used to support the conclusion of God’s existence.
And that being the case: If it ain’t evidence, why should we bother?
I can see the whole ‘because it amuses me’ angle, and I can see the whole ‘because becoming conversant in theology will appeal persuasively to believers’.
But in terms of the core epistemic value, theology doesn’t carry squat.
What’s the point?
If we had some ham, we could make ham and eggs for breakfast tomorrow — but only if we also had some eggs.
The theologian concludes that breakfast is, in fact, ham and eggs, even though it’s just a slice of moldy bread with a schmear of rancid margarine.
The rationalist acquires a hog, a sow, and a bunch of pullets. Breakfast tomorrow is still moldy bread topped with rancid margarine, but breakfast a year from now and forever after is, indeed, ham and eggs.
Cheers,
b&
But have you deeply thought about how good ham and eggs would taste? Have you read the thoughtful treatises by serious people about how good ham and eggs would taste and the different ways they can be prepared?
Ultimately, the question of whether breakfast really is ham and eggs is irrelevant. What matters is what the narrative of ham and eggs tells us about the human condition. Atheists will never understand this.
What the narrative of ham and eggs tells us about the human condition is that humans must eat to continue living. Try obtaining physical nourishment from theological(or any other)texts and see how long you survive.
Yes – our bodies may die and wither without physical sustenance, true.
But the spiritual sustenance of the idea of Eggs and Ham… That can grant us eternal life.
Please, you poor, bitter, craven little heathen – accept our Lord and Saviour Sam-I-Am into your heart.
And eat Eggs and Ham for all eternity with us, or suffer the purgatory of The Pan – or worse yet, The Fire.
(It’s amazing how far you can stretch a metaphor when you put your mind to it).
But we sophisticated theologians no there’s no such thing as eternal life. Instead, we see the eternal life offered by the idea of ham and eggs as a metaphor for the joyful transcendence that some people report feeling.
It’s true that you can only experience that transcendence if you are alive, and you can only stay alive by eating food that literally exists, but that doesn’t make a metaphorical breakfast any less important than a literal breakfast.
*know
(sotto) …just don’t tell the clergy about our views on eternal life… don’t want to upset any little old grannies, right?
I agree with you completely.
Theologians believe in God? Amazing!
Theologians don’t spend much time constructing “proofs” of God – there are only so many options, and they’ve been done to death. Most of what they write does require acceptance of a religious perspective as a starting point.
But they tend to believe that they have had some “personal experience” of God. They talk with others, who claim similar experiences. For them, God is a real part of their experience.
You can reject that recounting of experience as neurosis or hallucination. The question then becomes why the hallucination is so widespread and enduring.
But to say that have no evidence is just wrong. They are talking about a personal experience you may not have had, like schizophrenia or runner’s high. It may be a waste of time (it is to me), but there isn’t anything “dishonest” about them doing so, and they don’t lack evidence in their minds.
Most theology, even so-called sophisticated theololgy, doesn’t even pass the smell test. It all boils down to “suppose that something that hasn’t been observed is true, then through tortured logic divorced from reality shows that magic man done it”. Of if you’re a liberal theologian “magic man or woman might have done it via tweaking things at the quantum level”.
Ah, yes. Where would the warriors of woo be without their quantum whiznozzles?
Cheers,
b&
Quite.
It starts with the conclusion, and tortures, confabulates, or rejects the evidence to suit.
I think you have made a bad mistake in reading this book instead of ‘the Evolution of Bruno Littlemore’. So far, I’m half way through, and it’ great fun.
“Figuring out how a perfect being can suffer requires conceptual refinements”
It’s not a refinement, it’s a step back. And each step back makes their God less powerful and more irrelevant.
Of course they prefer to call it “refinement” because of PR issues.
You could look at it as revising their hypothesis as new evidence comes to light. But it’s not enough for your hypothesis not to contradict the evidence.
Yes, you could look at it as a too ambitious theory. At first their proponents claim their wonderful mechanism can explain EVERYTHING, and then all the critics write papers testing it and the proponents spend the rest of their careers making excuses, having angry arguments and surreptitiously limiting more and more the range of influence of their theory, until it ends up being applied just to certain aspects of some obscure regional branch of some subspecies of crab living in Gabon.
And the crabs are invisible.
Wonderful!
That quote reaffirms something for me. Spending one’s time looking through microscopes or telescopes or going on day in and day out about how brilliant Charles Darwin or Einstein or Richard Feynman were is not the single true path to a healthy atheism.
“Gods” are not there. Why? Because the idea that they are is absurd out of the gate–a conclusion available to any reasonable and reasoning person on the planet, not just those whose work appears in Science or Nature.
When my father turned 55, it did not take any brilliance among his children to point out that he couldn’t play basketball like he used to. We would do well, similarly, I think, to remind ourselves that it is not necessarily anyone’s superb intellect or academic superiority that allows one to be an atheist–nor to effect damaging blows against the ideas of religion or god-belief.
But, just as with my father, it’s important to point it out. Otherwise, people may get hurt.
This is one of the key differences between good scientific writing and theological and philosophical writing. Scientists may produce highly technical documents for one another to save space, but when they are popularizing or teaching, they spare no ink to explain concepts as clearly as possible. Theologians and Philosophers seem to be quite content that people may not ‘get’ it, and the fog in the mind that comes from so many poorly used big words serves as a good way of hiding the lack of anything there. Because science works, and has laws and principals, its always possible to break it down into a way for people to process, which is its greatest strength in these arguments.
You can’t be a good scientist without critical thinking, but you can’t be a theologian with critical thinking.
Well, one *can* be a theologian who is possessed of critical thinking, if one is a-theist, and one dismisses the whole concept.
There are a few around, I am given to believe.
Bishop Spong springs to mind for some reason.
I think that’s what Richard Dawkins meant when he coined the term “deepity”.
RD did not Coyne the term.
One Daniel Dennett so did.
🙂 very droll!
Crimony! Out of this one thing is clear (to me, anyway):
Theology is mumbledy-peg, played with words.
Yep! By being inconsistent, i.e. holding two contrary viewpoints at the same time, we discover more about god.
Codswallop.
” [By]holding two contrary viewpoints at the same time, we discover more about god.”
Codswallop, indeed. Amusingly, one nevertheless does learn a lot about theology when a theologian makes the argument.
So it occurs to me while reading this that showing that a hypothetical phenomenon leads to a logical contradiction is not a particularly fullproof way of discovering physical reality. A tremendous number of statements regarding relativity and quantum mechanics appear logically nonsensical from an uninformed point of view. Even if we ignore how poorly words like “perfect” and “omnipotent” are defined, showing that a completely hypothetical premise leads to logical contradictions is a rather empty (dis)proof — maybe our assumptions are just all wonky.
Over time I’ve been moving away from the Logical Problem of Evil in favor of the Evidential Problem of Evil — rather than worry about what an omnipotent being logically can or cannot do, I simply observe that if there is a God, she is either rather impotent, or else a terrible monster. Either way, nobody really deserving of worship.
In any case, as Eric says, this is all air. When one strips away preconceptions, the idea of god(s) is just silly. The Problem of Evil was useful in my deconversion, but in maintaining my present position it is completely superfluous. The whole premise is just absurd, so why worry about the particulars?
Relativity and quantum mechanics are perfectly logically self-consistent with themselves and with every experimental observation ever made. They contradict each other in the theoretical and as-yet-unobserved realms where they overlap, but the quest to resolve those conflicts is what’s been driving physics for almost a century, now.
What they do do is describe reality in environments radically different from everyday human experience, and what we find is that simply extrapolating our common expectations is insufficient to accurately describe those other environments.
For example, it would seem to human experience to be a contradiction for a feather to fall at the same rate as a hammer, yet that’s exactly what happens on the Moon.
Quantum mechanics and relativity describe parts of the universe that are far more radically different from human experience than the surface of the Moon, so it should be no surprise that our intuitions fail us even more miserably.
As for the Problem of Evil, all that is necessary is to answer the two questions implied by Epicurus: Is there evil, and does there exist one or more gods capable of eliminating said evil?
If the answer to either question is, “no,” then there’s no Problem of Evil. However, of course, humans are pretty much united in agreeing that evil exists; the departure comes when theists insist that their gods could, if they really wanted to, eliminate it. As Epicurus so elegantly demonstrated, all the excuses (including “Free Willies”) are admissions of either or both malice and incompetence. “Shit, or get off the pot,” as Dad would say.
Cheers,
b&