Yesterday I published an analysis and critique of an article that Yale psychologist Paul Bloom published in Atlantic, “The war on reason,” I sent him my piece and offered to let him respond here if he so desired.
He did wish to reply, and so I post below (without comments) his response:
I appreciate your thoughtful discussion of my Atlantic piece. It deserves a deeper response than I can give right now, but I would like to say four things:1. The point of my article was to defend the importance of reason in our everyday lives. I am arguing against those who believe that philosophical theory and psychological data show that we are fundamentally irrational beings. Apparently, you aren’t one of these skeptics. In fact, you seem puzzled that anyone would doubt the important of reason; at one point, you summarize my argument and write “Nobody claims otherwise”.Really? You should go to any psychology or neuroscience conference—or just reread my article, where I discuss the ideas of many of these skeptics.You cite me as saying “The genetic you and the neural you aren’t alternatives to the conscious you. They are its foundations.”, and then you add “Who says otherwise?”. Well, David Eagleman says otherwise. This quote is a response to his claim: “It is not clear how much the conscious you–as opposed to the genetic and neural you–gets to do any deciding at all.”2.
The metaphor “puppet” is grossly misleading and determinists should stop using it. Actually, only a certain sort of theist should ever use it. A puppet is something that looks like it has agency but that is really controlled by a person who is pulling the strings. Since neither of us believes that the fates of humans are dictated by external intentional forces, I hope we can agree that the term is a bad one. If you want a alternative phrase, I prefer one I heard from Tamler Sommers: “Biochemical Roombas”.3.
I don’t think that free will exists, and said so in many places, including here. I assume this argument is familiar to you and many of your readers, but here it goes again:“Common sense tells us that we exist outside of the material world—we are connected to our bodies and our brains, but we are not ourselves material beings, and so we can act in ways that are exempt from physical law. For every decision we make—from leaning over for a first kiss, to saying “no” when asked if we want fries with that—our actions are not determined and not random, but something else, something we describe as chosen.
This is what many call free will, and most scientists and philosophers agree that it is an illusion. Our actions are in fact literally predestined, determined by the laws of physics, the state of the universe, long before we were born, and, perhaps, by random events at the quantum level. We chose none of this, and so free will does not exist.”
4.
What about getting rid of other notions, like “choice”, “deliberation”, “responsibility”, and “moral responsibility”? I agree that most people have mistaken views about these, thinking of them in terms of (a) an immaterial soul and (b) free will. But this doesn’t mean that they don’t exist. People have mistaken views about all sorts of things, after all. Dan Dennett gives the example of time. Your average non-physicist—me, say—has all sorts of views about time that scientists know to be false. But nobody concludes from this that time doesn’t exist. Same for a psychological phenomenon like dreaming. I know that people have all sorts of beliefs about dreaming that are false—but I don’t say that dreaming doesn’t exist.Now, one might argue that notions like moral responsibility are essentially linked to false ideas, so that once the ideas corrected, the notions just have to disappear. In other words, “responsibility” is not like “dreaming”, it’s like “demonic possession”. I assume that this is your view. But I am not convinced, and don’t see that the philosophical and psychological literature—including the experimental philosophy work—supports this radical eliminativist position. It is an interesting issue, though. It wasn’t the focus of my Atlantic article—again, the article was a defense of reason—but it’s an area that I hope to explore in the future.
I could tell by the title, “The War on Reason” that Paul Bloom intended that this be an article arguing that reason exists, however I found that this central thesis got lost in the article. Perhaps there were just too many examples or it wasn’t clear how Bloom was setting up his proof, but I found free will took a bit of a front seat even though it was never called out specifically and only referenced as “choice”. Further, the article’s language sometimes suggests that the various scientific discoveries “attack” reason; as if experiments are being carried out specifically to show that reason does not exist – here is one example, “another attack on rationality comes from social psychology.”
Lastly, if Bloom does not hold that free will exists, this bit in the article seems to suggest otherwise:
This is much closer to an compatibilist position than an incompatibilist one.
In context, it doesn’t suggest free will to me. Determinism is fully compatible with our brains being constructed to be able to arrive at valid conclusons given a set of inputs. What he’s saying is that we have biological thinking systems that reflect “quality in, quality out” and “garbage in, garbage out” principles, and don’t typically function as “quality in, garbage out.”
Now I think saying we can “clarify the notion of choice” is probably not as accurate as saying “we can speak of rationality even in the absence of free will choice.” However, I think the paragraph is pretty clear in its overall meaning even if one phrase in it is poorly, uh, chosen. 🙂
“Determinism is fully compatible with our brains being constructed to be able to arrive at valid conclusons given a set of inputs.” Comments like this neglect that determinism is also compatible with us being able to arrive at invalid conclusions. So, in a particular case, has determinism led me to a valid or an invalid conclusion? No doubt it seems to me that it’s valid; but how can I know that I wasn’t (pre)determined to think that it’s valid when it really isn’t? Well, I can’t! I just think whatever determinism directs me to think, be it true or false.
“Comments like this neglect that determinism is also compatible with us being able to arrive at invalid conclusions.”
I didn’t neglect it at all. You can have deterministic valid logic and deterministic invalid logic. The point is, since you can have both, you can talk about actors being rational or irrational without needing to invoke free will.
If there was no difference between valid and invalid deterministic logic, then we couldn’t talk about deterministic actors being rational or not. ‘Rational actor’ would not have any meaning. But since there is a differenc, the concept of a rational (vs. irrational) deterministic actor has meaning.
Sure, you can go down that hole (pointing out we don’t have any absolutely ironclad way of telling if we’re right or just deluded). But I don’t think we need such an absolute philosophical level of certainty about our conclusions before we can talk about whether an actor is behaving rationally or irrationally.
Yeah, he’s a compatibilist. I continue to see no difference between the two; the compatibilist position is an implication of the incompatibilist position, in the same way that Newtonian physics can be derived from Einsteinian physics.
Indeed. The only difference between the two positions is that incompatibilists maintain that “compatibilist free will” is inappropriate terminology.
This is the paragraph that stood out for me as well. Since the neural systems we use to analyze different options are physical, they are limited. So choices are limited. Otherwise you are forced to posit some non-physical (magical) reasoning ability outside these physical systems.
Bloom:
“The metaphor ‘puppet’ is grossly misleading and determinists should stop using it.”
Indeed.
“Now, one might argue that notions like moral responsibility are essentially linked to false ideas, so that once the ideas corrected, the notions just have to disappear.”
Being morally responsible is often linked to the false idea, held by some non-determinists (the majority of the folk, perhaps), that we could have done otherwise in an actual situation and thus deeply deserve praise and blame as ultimate originators, independent of cause and effect (Bloom: “not determined and not random”). When as determinists we drop that idea, it’s more difficult to justify non-consequentialist moral desert and related responsibility practices such as retributive punishment (although some compatibilists think it can be done – see Bruce Waller’s Against Moral Responsibility for some of their arguments). If the idea of getting one’s just deserts is essentially non-consequentialist, and if it’s central to the concept of moral responsibility (MR), then perhaps determinism undermines MR. But not other sorts of consequentialist responsibility, as Jerry has consistently pointed out.
Sorry, this was intended to go in the main comment section. It isn’t a response to Diana.
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Maybe it’s me, but this clarification does not clarify his original article for me.
I too thought there was a disconnected. But this reply is not too bad, on its own.
It is now apparent that Paul Bloom and Dan Dennett simply don’t like the cover picture of Sam Harris’ recent book, and they both used a lot of words to say as much.
I think they don’t like it for different reasons.
I do get what Paul Bloom is getting at: He’s arguing against people like Jonathan Haidt who tend to say stuff like because we have irrational tendencies, biases etc, maybe we should embrace them instead of honing our reasoning to be better equipped.
There is a lot of disturbing confusion in psychological and neuroscientific literature where people mix an is-ought stance and think that reason is overrated and maybe we should just go with our emotions, maybe train our emotions, but because they see reason as hopelessly inadequate (a little people -kind of argument, where psychologists say “let them have their biases, we can’t do anything about it”) then maybe we should just get rid of it.
Steven Pinker has also seen this same trend and has talked with Bloom about it, in I think a Bloggingheads TV video. Also in his book Better Angels, Pinker hoped to nudge psychologists away from their fatalistic view of human rationality.
This isn’t the first time I’ve read Paul Bloom expressing these sentiments. I think he wrote an article called something like “empathy is overrated”, which is highly related to this topic.
BTW, last I checked, my copy of Sam Harris’ book Free Will has a quite favourable blurb on it’s jacket written by Paul Bloom.
So even though he entertains some compatibilist views from time to time, his article isn’t meant to be one of them, he has other fish to fry.
A struggle to turn the tide from wishy-washy sentiments about reason being minuscule and not important (because people apparently don’t use their reason much and have flaws) and empathy being lovely and us needing to nudge people by their emotions because that’s what motivates people, to a more enlightenment-view of people still being deserving of respect in their ability to reason and think for themselves, less coddling with woolly emotions and clouding issues and cynical views of how we need to motivate people to do the right things.
I agree.
Absent free will, almost everything still looks and feels the same: we still reason, we still deliberate, we still make choices. Perhaps the confusion arises because the definition of a “choice” is pretty much the existence of an alternative hypothetical course of action. Our knowledge of the absence of free will just tells us that if the tape of life were re-run, we ourselves would never choose the alternative hypothetical course at that particular moment. But it does not mean that the alternative does not exist, and that the choice does not still need to be made. It does not invalidate the process of reasoning or emotional impulse that leads us to make the choice. Thermostats make choices, supercomputers make choices, human beings make choices.
I think there’s a common misunderstanding about this, that leads to fatalism, to the bogus idea that the absence of free will means that there’s no point in deliberating, there’s never any point in trying to overcome instinct with reason, that there’s no point in trying to make BETTER choices. But that’s just utterly wrong. Absent free will, we are still making REAL choices for all the same good and bad reasons. We can still attach all the same kinds of value judgements to the quality of thought process that leads us to the choices we make, and the choices still have the same real-world consequences for ourselves and others.
Absent free will, deliberation will still yield better results than throwing darts at a board to decide what to do. Just as absent free will, doing algebra to answer the question “what does 2+2 equal?” will yield the correct answer more often than picking a number between 1-100 out of a hat.
However, absent free will, you do not choose whether you’re going to deliberate or throw darts. You do not choose whether to do algebra or pick a number out of a hat. Absent free will, you use whatever decision-making process you were deterministically fated to use.
Perhaps it’s just semantics, but I don’t agree. I’d say that what we do without free will should still be called “choosing”. We are presented with two alternatives, we use some sophisticated mental algorithm to pick one. That’s how I’d define choice. The fact that we can (in principle) predict deterministically what choices each individual will make does not mean that they are not still choices. I think entraining the concept of “freedom” with the definition of the word “choice” is sloppy, since we agree that “freedom of choice” is an incoherent concept.
When a thermostat analyzes temperature data and turns on the heating, do we call that a choice? Perhaps most people might not.
When a sophisticated supercomputer analyzes vast amounts of data and determines the optimum move in a chess game, has it “chosen” that move? I think most people would call that was a choice.
There’s no difference in priniciple between these two things, or between the supercomputer and the human. I’d call them all choices.
Fair enough – under your distinction between choice vs. free will, we have choices.
I do worry a bit, however, that by using the word choice in a way which is different from the vernacular, that you’re setting yourself up for a lot of miscommunications. IMO most people use the word ‘choice’ to denote freedom to choose.
Of course, maybe an initial miscommunication is not such a bad thing. Maybe your goal is to provoke a discussion about the difference between choice and free will. 🙂
My point is similar to what Paul Bloom says above:
“People have mistaken views about all sorts of things, after all. Dan Dennett gives the example of time. Your average non-physicist—me, say—has all sorts of views about time that scientists know to be false. But nobody concludes from this that time doesn’t exist.”
We make choices all of the time. Thermostats, superomputers, bacteria, cats, humans. We are all constantly making decisions. Now, it turns out that none of this “choosing” is “free”, because “free will” and “freedom of choice” are logically incoherent and unsupported by evidence. But I don’t think this means that we should say that “choice” does not exist. We should say that “free will” does not exist, and “choice” is something slightly different from what we thought it was. But we still choose.
I think, by the way, that this confusion is in part why there is so push-back against the idea that we have no free will. If people infer that “no free will” implies “no choice”, then they are likely to resist the idea, and rightly so. I KNOW that I am constantly making choices, because I can see constant evidence of that. What I can’t do, with a little reflection, is see any evidence that those choices were in any way free.
I think we need a new internet law:
“All discussions of “free will” and related topics are horribly confused because no-one ever clarifies what they mean by the terms they use, and if only people would clarify and define them then the compatibilists and incompatibilists would find themselves in entire agreement”.
Works for me.
I’m sure modesty forbade you from calling it “Coel’s Law” so I will propose it. (Say the two words fairly quickly to make it work properly).
I think we now all pretty much agree on what “dualist free will” means and that it is false, but after that we’re all over the shop.
We’ve not even started on clarifying “responsibility”, “moral responsibility”, “choice” etc etc.
It would be great. The compatibilists would listen to the incompatibilists and say, well, under those definitions of the terms I agree with you.
And the incompatibilists would listen to the compatibilists and say, well, under those definitions of the terms I agree with you.
And everything would be sweetness, light and fluffy kittens.
But that’s already happening. I think there’s plenty of valid discussion occurring right now between the two camps. And a lot of it is definition-based; we all agree its largely a fight over words and meanings.
I think the crux of the issue are the ideas about how words should be used. Incompatibilists, myself included, believe that compatibilists redefine words and terms in inappropriate ways that strip them of their original meanings.
I think ‘sweetness, light and fluffy’ needs to be earned..the hard way. One has to take the steps to muddle through massive amounts of history, semantics, perspectives, and knowledge, and even agenda.
History: e.g., traditional philosophical definitions
Semantics: e.g., definition of mind
Perspectives: e.g. definition of random (biologists interpretation vs. physicists vs. mathematician)
Knowledge: e.g. what time means (as Bloom points out, very different for different people)
Agenda: e.g., wishful thinking or personal experiences (some people want free will to be true, but they bloody know it is not and that can sometimes lead to some perplexing ideas)
RIGHT!! Same with “Liberal” and “Conservative” If we just agree on terms then everyone is saying the same thing. 😉
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It’s ironic that talking about “Free Will” and talking about “God” are quite similar. Because the term is imposed on the discussion, we waste a lot of time arguing whether the thing exists or not. What “is” it that free will is ostensibly explaining, in the same way “Goddidit” explains all observable phenomena? An observable thing?
John did X. Why? Free Will. Fine, I can jettison “Free Will”… do I jettison “choice” the verb “decided” and others? Do we need a grand, alternative theoretical framework to allow us to move our coats to this new peg, in the way that Darwinian evolution, and deep-time cosmology allow us to move our coats from the narrative peg of “God”.
I mean, seriously: A lot of my shift to atheism swung on the question, “What should I do differently in THIS situation, if I no longer posit a God as necessary or relevant hypothesis… if I no longer accept the assertion that the Bible is God’s dictated true word?”
I have to apply the same logic to addressing how I act in the world if I no longer posit the “reality” of my deciding or choosing to do things. What should I do differently? (That in itself implies a choice. D’oh!)
I’m having a much harder time wrapping my head around the “And, so?” questions arising from jettisoning free will, choice, decisions. (and as yet, Harris and Coyne haven’t clearly explained how choice and decisions still exist or matter if you say we’re determined.)
This ALMOST forces me into a “Life of Pi” conclusion: It may be TRUE that we’re determined, but isn’t the better, more interesting story the one we tell ourselves that we are guiding our little meat-sack ships and have executive control? Does telling ourselves, or others a story have an effect on the outcome? Do Coyne and Harris say, “Yes, you CAN have an effect on how the world is… but only on others, not on yourself, and your effect on others is not by any chosen action you take, but is the result of the action you will take, because you are determined by the history of particles in the universe.
Are Coyne and Harris simply reiterating George Harrison? “Turn off your mind, relax and float downstream.”
The question of “Determinism” seems to obliterate the foundation of my decision making approach: If this is a true concept/observation/idea, what will I have to do, or should I do, differently than I currently do it? It should inform the “choices” I make… and yet it seems to obviate the choice.
Regardless of the veracity of free will, you can assure yourself that you do not know what will happen to tomorrow. That ignorance makes your actions as legitimate as you want them to be.
Run up the hill, run up the hill faster tomorrow, and faster the next. Maybe you will not accomplish your goal. That does not mean you need to stop. Do not stop until its over.
The day you become afraid to fail is the day you may succeed in allowing some form of fatalism to take control.
I doubt you are like the people around me, but I am surrounded everyday by people who choose not to try and maybe it is because they are afraid to fail, maybe they think it is all a waste of time. So much potential in so many people.
Have no fear, fatalism is not near. But in the face of your argument about running up a hill, intentionally, and planning and setting goals, I have to take the Coyne/Harris position as a “deepity.” Yes, it is trivially true that every thing that has happened and will happen is a chemical/physical cascade since the beginning of time.
This sounds dangerously close to the “fine tuning” arguments of believers, I might whisper aside.
But taking that reality in hand, why should I stop planning or setting goals for improvement and change. Or rather, why should Coyne/Harris continue to do so?
I think Jerry will say, “Because you have no other choice. You’re going to do what you’re going to do… like finishing this sentence with one too many ellipses in it. It was destiny.”
Leaves me empty. I prefer setting goals, making plans, etc. They are my goals, dreams, adventures.
Cheers!
I can see compatibilists and incompatibilists agreeing there is no free will if free will is defined as the dualist free will.
I can see agreement between camps as well that there is such as thing as free will if free will is defined as uncoerced intention.
So basically this is just a contest who gets to define the term.
I think Paul Bloom is clearly compatibilist.
There’s no free will of the dualist kind.
But there is choice and responsibility.
The Profs Dennett and Harris’s discussion on determinism looks like any other discussion upon phrases that are social constructions, (Free Will, determinism, compatibilism) which is ‘scholasticism’ (arguing without fact) I really never expected to see such flamboyant displays of scholasticism on the WEIT site!
When the Social Constructions of the terms of reference (Free Will, Determinism) are unpacked, the facts of the exercise of human choice are too complicated and beyond controlled experiment.
Prof Kahneman’s work upon the deterministic content of many decisions is the sad result of atypical lab experiment, extrapolated to cover all cases. Determinists were able to show, for example that street-made choices upon such things as guess the price of champagne or on gambling free money (BBC ‘Horizon’ program) were heavily deterministic, being based upon prior clues suggested by the invigilator, but the misleading part is that the bulk of the 2000 to 10,000 human choices made each day do not have the moderator setting the parameters as we saw in those street-examples. In other words, determinism is written into the experiment by the moderators, and so misleads everybody. Oh so typical of the Social Sciences to take the expected results of their experiment onto the streets with them! The religious methodologies writ large! (Prof Kahneman is a Princeton psychologist although his Nobel is for economics)
Throughout the WEIT discussion there is a constant confusion of heavily deterministic scenarios such as those of criminal lifestyles, with Free Choice in minor things. Decision Theory has no place in daily life. Any cost-benefit analysis in human choice is quite rare, and largely confined to academia.
Those who support the idea that humans are exempt from physical causation struggle to find the source of randomness, and falsely look to quantum physics or the uncertainty of radio-active decay, but there is a simpler and more compelling explanation of randomness in choice. It comes from the fact that all human decisions exist upon a timeline. And the intersection of that timeline with the multiple choices under consideration forces an arbitrary conclusion. The public at large have gained confidence in the lack of consequence, and choose with equanimity. In fact most people have devised a simple system for making choices which are seemingly arbitrary. It all depends upon the time allocated for the choice. You don’t spend all day considering what socks. You have milliseconds to decide. The exigencies of the timeline forces you to reach for the nearest. Therefore the colour of your socks is not really choice at all. Free Will is an illusion. And so is determinism. There is a lot more going on in the human brain.
I think the clearest conclusion we can make is not to be cocky about these issues.
Stop being Lord Kelvin!
The sure things are:
1. no god / spirit / dualism, religions are false here.
2. material world is deterministic, human brain is part of it.
The rest are conjectures. Important to discuss about them, finding things, but the facts are so thin (we have not yet agree on a working model of human mind), propose hypotheses or ideas, do not be cocky about them.
Jerry, here is an interesting article titled “Closing the Free Will Loophole” where they use distant quasars to set the detectors. http://web.mit.edu/press/2014/closing-the-free-will-loophole-0220.html tlee
I know I shouldn’t take time to read these articles about “free will” – but I can’t help myself.
Well, you know what they say: “that sucks”. (Or is the company name a pun on “I, Robot”?)
What is wrong with biochemical autonomous robot?
That unnecessarily constrains determinism to be universally predictive determinism, which is difficult to square with deterministic chaos. I believe Einstein may have prescribed to a universally predictive block universe. It is certainly the simplest way to realize a semiclassical spacetime (with general relativity and quantum field theory).
But Einstein died before Lorenz published his findings on the fundamental unpredictability of weather.* Even without the question of the Planck spacetime volume cutoff, perfect local predictivity would require infinite computational resources.
I don’t know how a vote among scientists on the nature of time would come down. But I suspect the outcome can share a similarity to a vote on the nature of quantum mechanics. Maybe some scientists would vote on each main alternative theory.
*Or, my favorite, the simplest model of an Otto engine that shows each cycle is chaotically different. Not much, but enough to contribute to the vibration problems.
But Einstein died before Lorenz published his findings on the fundamental unpredictability of weather.*
This is good.
A lot of people now are post-newtonian but still einsteinian. They think in term of total determinism as if the universe is a big complicated space-time clockwork …
Not only quantum-mechanic disrupt that view, lorentzian complexity is even bigger issue.
The world is indeed stranger than what most people CAN imagine ..
Hey gang, isn’t this an oxymoron (apolgies if this has already been metnioned above):
“experimental philosophy”
When experiments are performed, data taken, and results analyzed, then we are talking science, not philosophy.
Unless, of course, he’s using the term metaphorically (“way-out-there” philosophy or “avant garde” philosophy). But it doesn’t seem so:
“But I am not convinced, and don’t see that the philosophical and psychological literature—including the experimental philosophy work—supports this radical eliminativist position.”
But, then again, maybe there aren’t enough letters after my name …
“Hey gang, isn’t this an oxymoron…?”
I thought so too (& still do) when I first noticed the term. Unfortunately, I first noticed it at The Edge:
http://edge.org/panel/headcon-13-part-viii
(Unfortunately because that at least gives it the imprimatur of some pretty heavyweight intellects…I guess…)
It would be cool if someone devised a testable hypothesis so we could proceed from its results. A formidable challenge formulating a thesis statement, of course, due to the definitions problem.
See today’s NY Times for an interesting dialogue
Here it is.
THE STONE FEBRUARY 25, 2014, 12:30 PM
Arguments Against God
By GARY GUTTING
The New York Times
The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers and other thinkers on issues both timely and timeless.
Tags:
Atheism, Philosophy
This is the second in a series of interviews about religion that I am conducting for The Stone. The interviewee for this installment is Louise Antony, a professor of philosophy at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and the editor of the essay collection “Philosophers Without Gods: Meditations on Atheism and the Secular Life.”
Gary Gutting: You’ve taken a strong stand as an atheist, so you obviously don’t think there are any good reasons to believe in God. But I imagine there are philosophers whose rational abilities you respect who are theists. How do you explain their disagreement with you? Are they just not thinking clearly on this topic?
Louise Antony: I’m not sure what you mean by saying that I’ve taken a “strong stand as an atheist.” I don’t consider myself an agnostic; I claim to know that God doesn’t exist, if that’s what you mean.
G.G.: That is what I mean.
L.A.: O.K. So the question is, why do I say that theism is false, rather than just unproven? Because the question has been settled to my satisfaction. I say “there is no God” with the same confidence I say “there are no ghosts” or “there is no magic.” The main issue is supernaturalism — I deny that there are beings or phenomena outside the scope of natural law.
I say ‘there is no God’ with the same confidence I say ‘there are no ghosts’ or ‘there is no magic.’
That’s not to say that I think everything is within the scope of human knowledge. Surely there are things not dreamt of in our philosophy, not to mention in our science – but that fact is not a reason to believe in supernatural beings. I think many arguments for the existence of a God depend on the insufficiencies of human cognition. I readily grant that we have cognitive limitations. But when we bump up against them, when we find we cannot explain something — like why the fundamental physical parameters happen to have the values that they have — the right conclusion to draw is that we just can’t explain the thing. That’s the proper place for agnosticism and humility.
But getting back to your question: I’m puzzled why you are puzzled how rational people could disagree about the existence of God. Why not ask about disagreements among theists? Jews and Muslims disagree with Christians about the divinity of Jesus; Protestants disagree with Catholics about the virginity of Mary; Protestants disagree with Protestants about predestination, infant baptism and the inerrancy of the Bible. Hindus think there are many gods while Unitarians think there is at most one. Don’t all these disagreements demand explanation too? Must a Christian Scientist say that Episcopalians are just not thinking clearly? Are you going to ask a Catholic if she thinks there are no good reasons for believing in the angel Moroni?
G.G.: Yes, I do think it’s relevant to ask believers why they prefer their particular brand of theism to other brands. It seems to me that, at some point of specificity, most people don’t have reasons beyond being comfortable with one community rather than another. I think it’s at least sometimes important for believers to have a sense of what that point is. But people with many different specific beliefs share a belief in God — a supreme being who made and rules the world. You’ve taken a strong stand against that fundamental view, which is why I’m asking you about that.
L.A.: Well I’m challenging the idea that there’s one fundamental view here. Even if I could be convinced that supernatural beings exist, there’d be a whole separate issue about how many such beings there are and what those beings are like. Many theists think they’re home free with something like the argument from design: that there is empirical evidence of a purposeful design in nature. But it’s one thing to argue that the universe must be the product of some kind of intelligent agent; it’s quite something else to argue that this designer was all-knowing and omnipotent. Why is that a better hypothesis than that the designer was pretty smart but made a few mistakes? Maybe (I’m just cribbing from Hume here) there was a committee of intelligent creators, who didn’t quite agree on everything. Maybe the creator was a student god, and only got a B- on this project.
In any case though, I don’t see that claiming to know that there is no God requires me to say that no one could have good reasons to believe in God. I don’t think there’s some general answer to the question, “Why do theists believe in God?” I expect that the explanation for theists’ beliefs varies from theist to theist. So I’d have to take things on a case-by-case basis.
I have talked about this with some of my theist friends, and I’ve read some personal accounts by theists, and in those cases, I feel that I have some idea why they believe what they believe. But I can allow there are arguments for theism that I haven’t considered, or objections to my own position that I don’t know about. I don’t think that when two people take opposing stands on any issue that one of them has to be irrational or ignorant.
G.G.: No, they may both be rational. But suppose you and your theist friend are equally adept at reasoning, equally informed about relevant evidence, equally honest and fair-minded — suppose, that is, you are what philosophers call epistemic peers: equally reliable as knowers. Then shouldn’t each of you recognize that you’re no more likely to be right than your peer is, and so both retreat to an agnostic position?
Why is an all-knowing and omnipotent God more likely than a God who was pretty smart but made a few mistakes?
L.A.: Yes, this is an interesting puzzle in the abstract: How could two epistemic peers — two equally rational, equally well-informed thinkers — fail to converge on the same opinions? But it is not a problem in the real world. In the real world, there are no epistemic peers — no matter how similar our experiences and our psychological capacities, no two of us are exactly alike, and any difference in either of these respects can be rationally relevant to what we believe.
G.G.: So is your point that we always have reason to think that people who disagree are not epistemic peers?
L.A.: It’s worse than that. The whole notion of epistemic peers belongs only to the abstract study of knowledge, and has no role to play in real life. Take the notion of “equal cognitive powers”: speaking in terms of real human minds, we have no idea how to seriously compare the cognitive powers of two people.
G.G.: O.K., on your view we don’t have any way to judge the relative reliability of people’s judgments about whether God exists. But the question still remains, why are you so certain that God doesn’t exist?
L.A.: Knowledge in the real world does not entail either certainty or infallibility. When I claim to know that there is no God, I mean that the question is settled to my satisfaction. I don’t have any doubts. I don’t say that I’m agnostic, because I disagree with those who say it’s not possible to know whether or not God exists. I think it’s possible to know. And I think the balance of evidence and argument has a definite tilt.
G.G.: What sort of evidence do you have in mind?
L.A.: I find the “argument from evil” overwhelming — that is, I think the probability that the world we experience was designed by an omnipotent and benevolent being is a zillion times lower than that it is the product of mindless natural laws acting on mindless matter. (There are minds in the universe, but they’re all finite and material.)
G.G.: Why do you think other philosophers don’t see it that way?
L.A.: To cite just one example, Peter van Inwagen, my friend and former teacher, assesses the situation very differently. He believes that we do not and cannot know the probability that the world we experience was designed by an omnipotent and benevolent being (which I estimate as close to zero), and that therefore the existence of suffering in our world gives us no reason to doubt the existence of God. He and I will be arguing about this in a seminar this coming summer, and I look forward to it. Don’t bet on either one of us changing our mind, though.
G.G.: What about positive cases for God’s existence? When I interviewed Alvin Plantinga, he cited religious experiences as making a strong case for theism. Mightn’t it be that he has evidence on this issue that you don’t?
L.A.: Many theists I’ve talked to — including Plantinga — say that they have or have had experiences in which they have become aware of the presence of God. I’ve never had such experiences.
G.G.: That doesn’t mean that Plantinga and others haven’t had such experiences.
L.A.: O.K., if you hold my feet to the fire (which is what you’re doing), I’ll admit that I believe I know what sort of experiences the theists are talking about, that I’ve had such experiences, but that I don’t think they have the content the theists assign to them. I’ve certainly had experiences I would call “profound.” Many were aesthetic in nature — music moves me tremendously, and so does nature. I’ve been tremendously moved by demonstrations of personal courage (not mine!), generosity, sympathy. I’ve had profound experiences of solidarity, when I feel I’m really together with other people working for some common goal. These are very exhilarating and inspiring experiences, but they are very clearly about human beings — human beings at their best.
G.G.: Would you say, then, that believers who think they have good reasons for theism are deceiving themselves, that they are actually moved by, say, hopes and fears — emotions — rather than reasons?
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L.A.: I realize that some atheists do say things like “theists are just engaged in wishful thinking — they can’t accept that death is the end.” Theists are insulted by such conjectures (which is all they are) and I don’t blame them. It’s presumptuous to tell someone else why she believes what she believes — if you want to know, start by asking her.
It is disrespectful, moreover, to insist that someone else’s belief has some hidden psychological cause, rather than a justifying reason, behind it. As a “lapsed Catholic,” I’ve gotten a fair amount of this sort of thing myself: I’ve been told — sometimes by people who’ve just met me or who have never met me at all but found out my email address — that I “only” gave up my faith because (a) the nuns were too strict, (b) I wanted to have sex or (c) I was too lazy to get up on Sundays to go to church.
I believe I have reasons for my position, and I expect that theists believe they have reasons for theirs. Let’s agree to pay each other the courtesy of attending to the particulars.
G.G.: But when you talk about reasons in this way, you seem to mean something like “personal reasons” — reasons that convince you but that you don’t, and shouldn’t, expect to convince other people. And you agree that theists can and do have reasons in the same sense that you do. Many atheists hold a much stronger view: that they have good reasons and theists don’t. Do you agree with this?
L.A.: No, I don’t think reasons are “personal” in the sense you mean. Justificatory relations are objective. But they are complex. So whether any given belief justifies another is something that depends partly on what other beliefs the believer has. Also, there may be — objectively — many different but equally reasonable ways of drawing conclusions on the basis of the same body of evidence.
It’s likely that the conscious consideration of reasons plays a relatively small role in our acquiring the beliefs we do. An awful lot of what we believe is the result of automatic unconsciousness processing, involving lots of unarticulated judgments. That’s perfectly O.K. a lot of the time — if the process is reliable, we don’t have to be able to articulate reasons. I think the proper place for reasons — for demanding and giving reasons — is in interpersonal interaction.
G.G.: What do you mean by that?
L.A.: Reasons are the answer I give to someone who asks me why I believe something, or — more urgently — to someone who asks why she ought to believe something that I’ve asserted. In the public sphere, I think reasons are extremely important. If I’m advocating a social policy that stems from some belief of mine, I need to be able to provide compelling reasons for it — reasons that I can expect a rational person to be moved by. If I refuse to give my employees insurance coverage for contraception because I think contraception is wrong, then I ought — and this is a moral ought — to be able to articulate reasons for this position. I can’t just say, “that’s my belief, and that’s that.” A sense of responsibility about one’s beliefs, a willingness to defend them if challenged, and a willingness to listen to the reasons given by others is one of the guiding ideals of civil society.
G.G.: But doesn’t a belief in God often lead people to advocate social policies? For some people, their beliefs about God lead them to oppose gay marriage or abortion. Others’ beliefs lead them to oppose conservative economic policies. On your view, then, aren’t they required to provide a rational defense of their religious belief in the public sphere? If so, doesn’t it follow that their religious belief shouldn’t be viewed as just a personal opinion that’s nobody else’s business?
No one needs to defend their religious beliefs to me — not unless they think that those beliefs are essential to the defense of the policy they are advocating.
L.A.: No one needs to defend their religious beliefs to me — not unless they think that those beliefs are essential to the defense of the policy they are advocating. If the only argument for a policy is that Catholic doctrine says it’s bad, why should a policy that applies to everyone reflect that particular doctrine? “Religious freedom” means that no one’s religion gets to be the boss.
But usually, religious people who become politically active think that there are good moral reasons independent of religious doctrine, reasons that ought to persuade any person of conscience. I think — and many religious people agree with me — that the United States policy of drone attacks is morally wrong, because it’s wrong to kill innocent people for political ends. It’s the moral principle, not the existence of God, that they are appealing to.
G.G.: That makes it sounds like you don’t think it much matters whether we believe in God or not.
L.A.: Well, I do wonder about that. Why do theists care so much about belief in God? Disagreement over that question is really no more than a difference in philosophical opinion. Specifically, it’s just a disagreement about ontology — about what kinds of things exist. Why should a disagreement like that bear any moral significance? Why shouldn’t theists just look for allies among us atheists in the battles that matter — the ones concerned with justice, civil rights, peace, etc. — and forget about our differences with respect to such arcane matters as the origins of the universe?
This interview was conducted by email and edited. The previous interview in this series was with Alvin Plantinga.
Gary Gutting is a professor of philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, and an editor of Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. He is the author of, most recently, “Thinking the Impossible: French Philosophy Since 1960″ and writes regularly for The Stone.
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If you want a alternative phrase, I prefer one I heard from Tamler Sommers: “Biochemical Roombas”.
Not such a good alternative. Roombas are designed by agents. Human beings aren’t, at least not yet. Let’s resist the temptation to use language that implies or suggests design when we don’t really mean it.