Over at the Australian ABC site, Brother Blackford has a nice piece on the “Intelligence squared” debate, in which Russell and two others debated three theologians on the question of “Atheists are wrong.” (i.e., “does God exist?”). It looks like the anti-godders were more effective, because while those who were goddies stayed about the same before and after the debate (about 28%), the godless figures were bumped during the debate from 56% to 66%, all of these coming from the “undecided” column. That shows that people on the fence are those most likely to be convinced.
Russell’s piece, reprising the debate, is called “Intelligence squared debate: on the crucial points, atheists have got it right.” Russell points out what I am seeing more and more of: traditional arguments for God’s existence just don’t carry much weight these days. Instead, faithful and faitheists alike rely on arguments why the institution of religion itself is good:
Indeed, no argument of any kind for the existence of a god was developed by them in any concerted way.
Instead, their argument seemed largely an attempt to persuade you that you don’t properly realise what you owe to religion, particularly Christianity. In fact, I acknowledge that the world does not yet realise what it owes religion. But unfortunately for my opponents, it’s beginning to suspect the truth. . .
. . .Much of the argument from the affirmative speakers relies on what is supposed to be a moral malaise in the contemporary world, as if this can be attributed to atheists. Much of what they said was just empty moralising. Nothing follows from it about the existence of a god.
He touches on many things in his piece, including morality and the inconsistency of the fact of evolution and natural selection with a loving God:
So why would an all-powerful, all-knowing God of Love choose a process that foreseeably produces so many atrocious outcomes for the creatures involved?
Why would an all-powerful, all-knowing God of Love choose the cruel, brutal operation of evolution, in which species supersede each other? You can’t reconcile the process of evolution with the existence of such a god.
Theologians have answers, of course, but they’re no more convincing than any other form of theodicy, which truly is the Achilles’ Heel of Abrahamic religion. In the end, because there aren’t good arguments for God’s existence, the atheist side was the winner.
I don’t claim to have proved, once and for all, that no gods exist. No high-profile atheist makes that claim – not Richard Dawkins, not Christopher Hitchens or Sam Harris – and neither, generally, do philosophical atheists in universities. Atheists don’t usually make such an overweening claim.
But we do claim that no satisfactory argument has ever been put for believing in any kind of god. Furthermore, there are good reasons to see religion as man-made and at least to rule out the popular idea of an omnicompetent God of Love.
Atheists are not wrong when they decline to accept the God story. On the crucial points, atheists have got it right.
A video of the debate should be available soon at the Intelligence Squared site.
Scott Stephens’ post-debate article: The unbearable lightness of atheism
Shredded by PZ: Believe in mad rubbish because it’s good for you
Love it
Peter Jensen: Why atheists are like flat-earthers
Tracey Rowland: Atheists are fundamentally wrong about the human
Scott Stephens: The unbearable lightness of atheism
Tamas Pataki: The only rational option is to ditch all gods
Jane Caro: Atheists are not wrong; not about God, anyway
Russell Blackford: On the crucial points atheists have got it right
I’m not sure that I have ever read anything more disingenuous than the above piece by Jensen.
I have- I read a transcript of Expelled.
But Jensen managed to reveal his utter ignorance of both atheists and flat-earthers at the same time.
Just to clarify, that piece by Scott Stephens is a revised version of what he actually said in the debate. My piece is my best reconstruction of what I actually said in the debate (in which I had various notes but actually ended up not relying on them that much; I believe that it’s much more effective not to read from notes but to speak spontaneously as far as possible).
None of these pieces on the ABC Portal is supposed to be post-debate thoughts, though they may incorporate some points that weren’t expressed in quite that way on the night. They are all supposed to represent what we said, or at least versions/approximations of it.
I suspect that Scott Stephens’ piece may have grown a bit in length and complexity, but anyway you can all see for yourselves exactly what was really said when the debate is televised on the ABC (if you’re in Australia) or when the video is up on the IQ2oz site.
I think we’ve seen a harmless bit of tomfoolery here. 56% godless to 66%? In one evening at one event?. I love it. I suspect that some of the “fence-sitters” were in fact “our people” under cover, putting a check mark in the fence-sitters” box before the event began, then switching over at the end. Those kinds of things are equivalent to online polls, and skewing them has no moral or ethical implications
“I suspect that some of the “fence-sitters” were in fact “our people” under cover, putting a check mark in the fence-sitters” box before the event began, then switching over at the end. ”
I suspect that too. But quite clearly, that makes us cleverer than the “goddies”, who don’t ever seem to think of it or else too afraid to deny Him even in jest. 😉
Seriously, folks, that’s not how it works. Some “undecideds” may actually have been faitheists who were persuaded that forthright atheists are not so bad after all, and that the question of God’s existence is the crucial point – in fact I wouldn’t be surprised, and part of my tactical approach was to win such people over. But IQ2 debates always produce substantial shifts as audiences simply find one team more engaging or convincing. I doubt that it’s one component of the audience engaging in tactical voting.
Actually, it’s fascinating watching some of these debates, as I did in preparation, and seeing what happens.
Probably just my prejudice showing, but I’d expect that if any side colluded in advance to manipulate the outcome it would be the religious. They do have a track record of being far more disingenuous; the end justifies the means & all that…whatever it takes to bring the benighted to God.
On the one hand, theologians inform us that God, in order to preserve a major role for faith, does not want it known for certain that he exists.
On the other hand, these same theologians spend their professional lives endeavoring to establish proofs-positive that God is indeed a reality.
To the extent that they are able to convince however many that their proofs are valid, are they not undermining God’s desire to remain hidden?
Perhaps there is a special room in hell for theologians where torments are apportioned with respect to how successful they have been in blowing God’s cover.
I’ve long regarded the fence sitters as the primary group to convince. They’re much more likely to accept a rational answer than the die-hards.
Do you know if this will be archived on the Intelligence Squared podcast?
I don’t really care for the argument that natural selection is inherently “brutal,” what with species superseding one another.
I get how it’s brutal to be hunted and preyed upon, but how is it brutal that over time species X died out and species Y filled its niche, due its superior adaptations to the environment in which it lived? All members of species X were going to die eventually (as all all members of every species), and it doesn’t seem like a brutal fact of life that species “rise” and “fall.” It’s not like an organism suffers some special pain when its species loses in the game of natural selection.
Which isn’t to say arguments for religion are anything other than nonsense.
I’m with you on this. Predation, parasitism, and disease are brutal. Natural selection, not so much. Natural selection is just the statistical result of a lot of individual triumphs and tragedies. To call it cruel in the aggregate is like blaming the police blotter for compiling crime statistics.
Thirded.
Sure, you’re quite correct: species themselves don’t suffer. The point I was trying to make, but perhaps didn’t word well in that particular sentence, was that all these things are aspects of biological evolution that God should have been able to see. Once he set up such a system, he was responsible for the ways it (foreseeably to an omniscient being) unfolds.
In partial mitigation, remember we only had 9 minutes to give our main speeches and 2 minutes to give our final replies. This sort of debating is very tactical, and some nuance gets lost. Some things had to be explained to the audience, or evoked for the audience, very quickly – or else we had to adopt a narrow focus in nailing down just one or two points – and in all honesty I thought the version I gave to the ABC site should be as close as I could reconstruct to what I actually said in the time available, rather than adding nuances, qualifications, etc., that it wasn’t possible to express on the night.
We’ll all find out what I really, really said when the video is available. 🙂
But again, I do understand (I think) and acknowledge the point y’all are making.
Yes, certainly the blame for cruelty in nature must attach ultimately to God (for those who believe in him). No argument there.
Yet it seems to me a case could still be made that choosing to create humans via evolution by natural selection is not in itself blameworthy. An omnicompetent God could presumably have come up with a scheme of evolution that permits natural selection without competition for food or other material resources. All that’s really required for natural selection to operate is differential reproduction (not differential survival), so competition for mating opportunities should suffice. But God didn’t do it that way; he chose to implement natural selection in a world of material scarcity, forcing organisms to treat other organisms as food, and that’s where the cruelty arises.
And while he was at it, he could have insured that humans wouldn’t be saddled with residual traits from their quadrapedal ancestors that left them prone to bad backs, sinus infections, and kidney stones.
I am pleasantly surprised, I would have believed from recent events in australian schools that religion had a more insidious grip.
That said, I don’t really care for the implicit claim that philosophy would be the adjudicator of whether gods exist or not as espoused in the last paragraphs. If philosophy could prove any of those alternatives, or more generally anything, it has had millenniums to do this.
The observable fact is that philosophy is very much as useless as religion in getting to facts. Empiricism routinely does that, and even better, it is in no danger of making overweening claims, it is in its very nature that it has to constantly overrule itself.
Dawkins is trying to quantify his remaining uncertainty of a creator agent, so he is onboard on this – the christian god is a “delusion”, it “almost certainly does not exist”. For Dawkins it isn’t a proof but an “argument from improbability” that a creator agent, by necessity more complex than the complexity what we observe, would spontaneously arise out of nothing.
I don’t see what would be the so terrible if we would be able to quantify our uncertainty precisely. Nothing would change. Except that instead of using an impractical claim that involves fantastically low probabilities of having something at least as complex as a universe spontaneously arise, we would stop at the far more useful everyday probabilities against which we can test our observations and theories.
We would “under-ween”, have to suppose less, compared to what people try to do today.
More pertinently, I have the feeling, right or wrong. that the idea that we if we would put atheism on a stronger observational footing we would overreach is derived from the same source as the theological claim of agnostics that “we can’t say anything on existence of gods”. It irritates me, and it doesn’t seem to have any rational foundation.
Yeah… not that irritation ever is pertinent in an analysis. Sorry about that, um, overreach. =D
Like!!
If philosophy could prove any of those alternatives, or more generally anything, it has had millenniums to do this.
quoted for great justice!
oh, btw, am I wrong in thinking the plural should be millennia?
I think you’re absolutely correct, but there’s been a move here to get rid of classical endings; the New York Times style manual, for instance, now calls for millenniums, curriculums, etc. Bleah! So far, at least, not datums.
As an Australian, we are fortunate to have the ABC which is a bastion of educated sense. On the whole we are a secular country (much like Canada), with the odd encroachments from the religious zealots. However, it is assumed that evolution will be taught in schools, and religious nutters are known as that. My daily textbook is Radio National (as well as subscribing to WEIT and other sources of academic wisdom). RN (Radio National) has programs such as ‘The Philosopher’s Zone’ and ‘The Science Show’ which may appeal to you.
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/philosopherszone/
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/scienceshow/
Russell points out what I am seeing more and more of: traditional arguments for God’s existence just don’t carry much weight these days
Well, the real arguments for God’s existence are just plain embarrassing to bring up in debates. (I.e. they talk to invisible people who claim to be gods, and the entire universe conspires to send little ol’ them signs, etc.)
I hope that got as big a laugh in the debate as it did when I read it. 🙂
You’ll see! 😉
This relates to one of the frequent pointless criticisms that is made against the New Atheists “You aren’t going to convince (hard-core) theists”. That’s probably true for most hard-core theists. But there are plenty of people out there who are either undecided or unsure theists. They can be convinced and in the process we can undermine religion’s undeserved intellectual respectibility.