Category: apologetics

Ben Goren on a major problem of Christian theology

September 4, 2015 • 9:00 am

Reader Ben Goren often makes comments on this website about a major flaw of Christian belief: the failure of God (or Jesus, who’s the same thing if you accept the Trinity) to intervene in dire situations involving endangered lives. This is, of course, the insoluble “problem of evil.” Ben sent me a longer piece on it, which I reproduce it below:

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The One Question a Christian Can’t Answer

by Ben Goren

Imagine you find yourself in one of any number of calamitous situations — somebody you’re with clutches her chest in pain and falls to the floor; you hear, coming from the far end of a dark alley, the voice of a frightened old man crying for help; a tree falls as you’re driving down a lonely road, missing you but smashing the car following you.

In all such cases, the very first thing you — or anybody else — would do is call 9-1-1. By now, it’s practically an instinct, even to the point of being unthinkable that you wouldn’t make that call. You might not know CPR; you might not be a big and burly cop; you might not have a MEDEVAC helicopter … but the 9-1-1 dispatcher has people standing by who meet all those qualifications and more, and will make sure they get where they’re needed the most as fast as humanly possible.

Though far from perfect, our first responders are amazingly effective. Sure, they might not be able to save everybody they’re sent out to help, and, of course, they can only help when they’re aware they’re needed. . . but hold that thought for the moment. Nonetheless, they do help, and help hugely, in ways that are regularly mind-blowing and humbling to those of us who aren’t in their line of work.

Which, of course, is why we all call 9-1-1 whenever their help is needed — and why we have such a low opinion of those who, when the need arises, fail to make the call. We’d be sympathetic if they tried but failed because of an equipment malfunction, of course, and we’d join them in expressing sadness at the missed opportunity to save the day. . . but, if the reason was anything other than that, the questions start to get probing, if not outright damning.

The claim, “I was afraid to get involved” might again garner some sympathy, but only in cases where the person with the phone was being at least implicitly threatened — the proverbial “gun to the head” or some other realistic concern of retribution. Even so, we would still hope that the person would find the courage and ingenuity to place the call anyway, despite the risk.

But an excuse like “I had too many other important things to do” isn’t going to win any sympathy at all. Even if you’re the world’s most important brain surgeon hurrying to the operating room to save the life of the world’s most important scientist, you’d still be expected to make the phone call—even as you’re rushing to save someone else.

And imagine the questions that would ensue if your reason was something along the lines of, “I had planned for this to happen since forever and did not see fit to interfere in the course of events as they unfolded according to my expectations.” No matter what, you’re gonna get grilled by a detective. . . and, if that statement turns out to be true, you can expect to spend some quality time in prison for some pretty serious crimes — conspiracy, at the very least.

Now, imagine that it’s not just a single incident you observed and yet stood silently by, but every such case everywhere. Never mind the fact that you’d be a pervert for looking in everybody’s bedroom windows, but to look in a bedroom window, see a lit cigarette fall from sleepy fingers and catch the curtains on fire and then not call 9-1-1 to get the firefighters on the scene before the baby in the crib burns to death in uncomprehending screaming agony, well, that would go unimaginably far beyond mere perversion and move solidly into the worst brand of criminal psychopathy. There are those who get their kicks from so-called “snuff” films, in which victims are murdered on camera for entertainment purposes, but you’d be hard pressed to imagine a more horrific type of criminal mind than the one who would seek out or produce such.

Yet that is exactly how every god of every religion is described. Most modern religions claim an all-knowing ever-present all-powerful deity, but even the ancient gods were far-seeing, far- and fast-roaming, and very strong.

Theologians offer all sorts of obfuscatory excuses on this subject, with an entire field of “study” devoted to it: “theodicy.” In common language, it’s the “problem of evil,” or, “Why do good things happen to bad people?” But the official discussion leads far astray from the reality of everyday life, getting tangled up in obscure questions of “freedom of the will” or placing the blame on an ancient ancestral maternal progenitor who procured culinary counseling from a speaking serpent.

Even more unsatisfying, theologians often reassure us that their gods do dispense justice, but they do so only after death— as if post-mortem divine retribution is of any help to the person bleeding out by the side of the road after running into a falling tree, or of any comfort to the umpteenth victim of a serial criminal who enjoys continued success despite the desperate efforts of investigators hoping for a lead or even the slightest hint of a clue.

A certain class of divine taciturnity can illustrate the point most graphically and also show the irrelevance of theological attempts to divert attention from this issue.

In recent history, a number of religious orders have been discovered to harbor vicious sexual child predators. The Catholic Church has been the most notorious in this regards, but the predation has spanned many denominations of many religions — and, indeed, to be fair, is far from an exclusively, or even predominately, a religious problem.

But the religious case is especially relevant to this discussion.

Whatever the religion, whatever the denomination, there are trusted official authorities who have committed some of the most horrific and repulsive crimes known to humanity. These people will, in the morning, convey to the congregation the commandments and desires of the corresponding deities and even actually manifest them in any number of ceremonies (such as transubstantiation); and, in the afternoon, they might rape children placed in their care.

And these monsters even use their positions of divine authority to compel the cooperation and silence of their victims. Children have been told by their priestly rapists that they’ll burn in Hell for all eternity if they tell anybody about the crime — and, again, these are the same priests who, along with their non-rapist colleagues, publicly preach similar messages of divine retribution for moral transgression in sermons and in classrooms. The exact same divine retribution, it must be noted, that (or so theologians say) excuses the lack of divine intervention in the first place.

Most corporations that discover an employee committing violent sexual assault would practically instinctively — once again — call the police. The perpetrator would be immediately fired, and the company may well issue a press statement condemning the crime and the criminal and putting as much distance as possible between itself and the horrors. And, of course, the company would bend over backwards to help in the investigation and prosecution. Many companies would also have the decency to voluntarily provide or make available all sorts of assistance, financial as well as medical and emotional, directly to the victim.

Yet not once in all of history has any deity ever alerted any civil authority to the misdeeds of one of its official representatives. For that matter, there hasn’t even been a single case of some minor insignificant demigod showing up at a press conference to read a “notapology” expressing vague regret over possible unspecified mistakes that might or might not have been made by an unnamed individual.

Even — indeed, especially — if you’re a non-Catholic Christian, this is a problem, even if all the members of your denomination are and have always been as pure and innocent as the driven snow. You may well think that the Pope is the antichrist and all Catholics are devil worshippers … which just gives Jesus as you understand him all that more incentive to call 9-1-1 on every last devil-worshipping Catholic priest every time he spots one of them sacrificing a child’s sexual innocence to Satan — exactly as you yourself would do should you be the one to stumble upon the priest raping a child behind the altar or in the confessional.

And that, at last, brings us to the question that nobody from any religion can satisfactorily answer — at least, not if at least one of its gods (however many there are) has enough awareness and ability to answer the simplest of prayers—or, for that matter, merely has a cellphone and the compassionate instincts of even a young child.

Why doesn’t Jesus ever call 9-1-1?

Jesus ‘n’ Mo ‘n’ Natural theology

August 26, 2015 • 9:15 am

Faith versus Fact talks a bit about the topic that the Jesus and Mo author covers in four panels in today’s strip:2015-08-26

Here are some gaps that theologians still use:

The origin of life
The mechanism of consciousness
“Fining tuning” of the laws of physics
Why the laws of physics are as they are
The “unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics”
Why humans are able to perceive true things
The “moral law” (humans’ instinctive feelings about right and wrong); this one is a favorite of Francis Collins, who says that the “moral law” MUST come from God.

I cover all these in FvF

 

I’m a philosopher! I haz a paper with Maarten Boudry on religious belief

August 25, 2015 • 10:30 am

At long last Massimo Pigliucci—who (along with others) has criticized my lucubrations about philosophy on the grounds that I have no credentials in the field—can cease and desist. For, along with a genuinely credentialed philosopher, Maarten Boudry, I have a paper in press in a real peer-reviewed philosophy journal (Philosophical Psychology). It’s coauthored with Belgian philosopher Maarten Boudry. Street cred!

The paper is in fact a critique of a paper published last year in Cognition by philosopher Neil Van Leeuwen from Georgia State University (all references, links, and downloads below). That paper, “Religious credence is not factual belief” (also here on Academia), made the claim that religious beliefs were neither pure fantasy nor statements about reality, but rather “credences” that have only a quasi-factual character. I won’t summarize the exchange in detail, as you can read the papers for yourself, but here’s the abstract of Van Leeuwen’s paper setting out why he sees religious beliefs as different from factual beliefs:

I argue that psychology and epistemology should posit distinct cognitive attitudes of religious credence and factual belief, which have different etiologies and different cognitive and behavioral effects. I support this claim by presenting a range of empirical evidence that religious cognitive attitudes tend to lack properties characteristic of factual belief, just as attitudes like hypothesis, fictional imagining, and assumption for the sake of argument generally lack such properties. Furthermore, religious credences have distinctive properties of their own. To summarize: factual beliefs (i) are practical setting independent, (ii) cognitively govern other attitudes, and (iii) are evidentially vulnerable. By way of contrast, religious credences (a) have perceived normative orientation, (b) are susceptible to free elaboration, and (c) are vulnerable to special authority. This theory provides a framework for future research in the epistemology and psychology of religious credence.

This of course was welcomed by believers and accommodationists who, though they would delight in getting real evidence for God, at the same time try to insulate their God or their claims from any empirical testing by doubters. Van Leeuwen’s ideas were, for example, touted by Tonia Lombrozo at NPR.

However, Boudry and I thought that Van Leeuwen’s argument was flawed, and that all three points above (a, b, and c) were not always applicable to religionists, who in many circumstances act as if they really think their beliefs are true, and not just operative in special settings. So we wrote a response to his paper, and he’s responded to our response (this is how it goes in academia).

Since Van Leeuwen already put his response to our critique on Academia, even though our paper wasn’t yet out, Maarten just put our paper online, even though it remains in press. Ours is called  “Disbelief in belief: On the cognitive status of supernatural beliefs.” Maarten is first author, and here’s our abstract:

Religious people seem to believe things that range from the somewhat peculiar to the utterly bizarre. Or do they? According to a new paper by Neil Van Leeuwen, religious “credence” is nothing like mundane factual belief. It has, he claims, more in common with fictional imaginings. Religious folk do not really “believe” – in the ordinary sense of the word – what they profess to believe. Like fictional imaginings, but unlike factual beliefs, religious credences are activated only within specific settings. We argue that Van Leeuwen’s thesis contradicts a wealth of data on religiously-motivated behavior. By and large, the faithful genuinely believe what they profess to believe. Although many religions openly embraces a sense of mystery, in general this does not prevent the attribution of beliefs to religious people. Many of the features of religious belief that Van Leeuwen alludes to (e.g., invulnerability to refutation, incoherence) are characteristic of irrational beliefs in general, and actually betray their being held as factual. We conclude with some remarks about the common failure of secular people to face the fact that some religious people really do believe wildly implausible things. Such incredulity, as evinced by Van Leeuwen and others, could be termed “disbelief in belief”.

Van Leeuwen’s reply to this paper is called “Beyond fakers and fanatics: a reply to Maarten Boudry and Jerry Coyne“, which is also online. We’ll reply to his reply (we haven’t yet done that), and then the dust will settle.  There is no abstract to Van Leeuwen’s reply, but his argument is that religionists fall on a spectrum (as do the beliefs of a given religionist) between “fakers” (those who don’t believer a word of what they profess to believe), and “fanatics” (those who take all their religious beliefs as factual, just like they see the existence of airplanes as factual). That, however, isn’t what Maarten and I claim, as you can see from our paper. But you can read the exchange for yourself.

I’d welcome the thoughts of any readers, philosophers or not, who have the tenacity to plow through the entire exchange. But I maintain that I do have street cred in philosophy!

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Van Leeuwen, N. 2014. Religious credence is not factual belief. Cognition 133: 698–715. (See also here for full paper.)

Boudry, M. and J. A. Coyne. 2015. On the cognitive status of supernatural beliefs. Philosophical Psychology: in press.

Van Leewen, N. 2015. Beyond fakers and fanatics: a reply to Maarten Boudry and Jerry Coyne. Philosophical Psychology: in press.

At last it happens: a professor blames ISIS’s sex slavery on the West

August 23, 2015 • 1:45 pm

We’re used to leftist apologists blaming everything done by Islamic terrorists as the fault of the West and not the result of religious beliefs. This is of course a form of apologetics that simultaneously exculpates religion, satisfies the masochistic West-hating of many leftists, and patronizes Muslims: as underdogs, their behavior can’t lie within themselves, but in their stars—i.e., us.

Of course a problem with the “blame colonialism” thesis is that much Muslim violence is directed towards other Muslims (Sunni vs. Shia, for instance), or against groups like the Yazidis that aren’t responsible for “colonialism.” Further, if you read Lawrence Wright’s great book Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (a Pulitzer Prize winner), you’ll hear a persuasive case that the origins of the Muslim Brotherhood, and hence its successor terrorist organizations, lay not in colonialism but in pure hatred of the West’s immorality and modernity.

Nevertheless. the West-bashers and Muslim apologists persist. And now they’ve jumped the last shark, for we have, in the PuffHo, a piece that not only claims that the ubiquitous sex-slavery and rape by ISIS members has nothing to do with Islam, but that it’s actually the result of Western perfidy.

The author is Kecia Ali, an associate professor of religion at Boston University, and her piece is called “The truth about Islam and sex slavery history is more complicated than you think.” (When you see the words “more complicated than you think,” you know you’re in for some apologetics). Her piece was apparently motivated by a recent New York Times article on ISIS’s “theology of rape” by Rukimi Callimachi, a piece I wrote about recently. Callimachi’s piece is mandatory reading.

In brief, Ali’s arguments are these: yes, ISIS practices sex slavery, but that the practice is not inherent in Islam, as some Muslims don’t approve of it. Further, other societies had slaves, too, so human bondage is not uniquely Islamic. (Duh! Is any nefarious behavior limited to only one religion?). Further, ISIS’s sexual depredations are publicized by Western media only because they fit into our desired narrative of Islamic “barbarity.” Finally, the sexual abuse is all our fault: we invaded Iraq, and the U.S. Constitution permits slavery (!!!).

In short, Ali’s argument is so flawed that it is, as Wolfgang Pauli reportedly said about sloppy thinking in physics, “not even wrong.”

Her arguments:

1.  Many Muslims don’t sanction slavery and sex slavery, so ISIS’s position isn’t ubiquitous; ergo, it’s not religiously based. Ali’s quote:

Though ISIS soldiers attribute religious merit to enslavement of Yazidi girls and women, many other Muslims, like those ISIS criticizes in its propaganda, oppose its actions and categorically reject the possibility of contemporary slavery. Callimachi suggests that “Scholars of Islamic theology disagree … on the divisive question of whether Islam actually sanctions slavery.” She quotes me expressing the position that “sexual relationships with unfree women” were “widespread” in the seventh century, and not “a particular religious institution.” Princeton theology researcher Cole Bunzel, her opposing voice, disagrees. He points out, reasonably, that repeated scriptural and jurisprudential references to slaveholding (which include the permissibility of sex with “those your right hands possess”) exist. While he notes that “you can argue that it is no longer relevant and has fallen into abeyance, ISIS would argue that these institutions need to be revived.” This is a fair representation of ISIS’s position. Yet this does not mean, as critics of Islam would have it, that the Islamic State’s position on the legitimacy of owning — and having sex with — slaves is unquestionable. (For premodern Muslim jurists, as well as for those marginal figures who believe that the permission still holds, the category “rape” doesn’t apply: ownership makes sex lawful; consent is irrelevant.)

Yes, there’s disagreement among Muslims on this issue, but only because slavery is currently seen as immoral by some. But that isn’t the case in the Qur’an, nor is it in the Bible. As Ali admits, the prophet Muhammed himself owned slaves, including female ones whom he impregnated. Christians have retreated from the Old Testament’s approbation of slavery, but ISIS is not like modern Christianity. ISIS is a group that wants to return to the “fundamentals” of Islam, restoring the original caliphate—a caliphate that, of course, permitted sex slavery. Ali adds this:

Others scholars point out that just because the Quran acknowledges slavery and early Muslims, including the Prophet, practiced it doesn’t mean Muslims must always do so; indeed, the fact that slavery is illegal and no longer practiced in nearly all majority-Muslim societies would seem to settle the point. It is one thing for committed religious thinkers to insist that scripture must always and everywhere apply literally, but it is ludicrous for purportedly objective scholars to do so. Anyone making that argument about biblical slavery would be ridiculed.

Indeed, but recall that the Qur’an is taken far more literally as “scripture” by Muslims of all stripes than is the Bible taken literally by Christians. Ali’s argument here is that because some Muslims don’t accept slavery, then sex slavery doesn’t come from religion and, in fact, that it’s wrong to take it from religion. That’s as fatuous as claiming that because Orthodox and Conservative Jews observe the Sabbath punctiliously, while most Reform Jews don’t, then observing the Sabbath doesn’t come from religion.

In truth, ISIS is perhaps the truest adherent to the original form of Islam, while Muslims who oppose sex slavery, moral as they are, are deviating from the roots of the faith.

2. Because other societies did it too, slavery wasn’t particularly Islamic. Ali:

Still, early Muslim slavery (like early Muslim marriage) wasn’t particularly a religious institution, and jurists’ ideas about the superiority of free over slave (and male over female) were widely shared across religious boundaries.

. . . In the thousand-plus years in which Muslims and non-Muslims, including Christians, actively engaged in slaving, they cooperated and competed, enslaving and being enslaved, buying, selling and setting free. This complex history, which has generated scores of publications on Muslims and slavery in European languages alone, cannot be reduced to a simplistic proclamation of religious doctrine.

And, finally, since other tyrants in the Middle East promote sexual abuse for ideological reasons, it can’t be religious:

By focusing on religious doctrine as an explanation for rape, Americans ignore the presence of sexual abuse and torture in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and in Assad’s Syria by the regime and other factions in its vicious ongoing war.

This is the argument that if some evil deeds are practiced by diverse societies, and for diverse reasons, then religion is exculpated. It’s like saying that because Jews cut off the foreskins of their male infants, and so do Muslims, then that’s not based on religion at all.  I’m distressed, but not surprised, that a scholar like Ali can make an argument like this—one that exculpates Islam as a motivation for any evils. But this is what we’ve learned to expect from left-wing academics; and I’m sad to say that my beloved Left is now practicing such intellectual sleight of hand.

3. The West is exaggerating the dimension of the problem. Get this:

None of this is to deny the horror of the systematic rapes Callimachi reports or the revolting nature of the theology she describes. It is to point out that there are reasons why the story of enslaved Yazidis is one that captures the front page of the New York Times: it fits into familiar narratives of Muslim barbarity.

Now there’s West-bashing raised to a high art! Although the New York Times may have a liberal slant, the Yazidi story (which was extremely powerful) is only one of a series on ISIS’s actions, and it’s there not because it demonizes Muslims, but because it alerts us to the horrors going on in the Middle East, horrors that we all must understand and ultimately address.

4. Finally, it’s all the West’s fault anyway. Ali’s last paragraph gives the game away:

In focusing on current abuses in the Middle East, perpetrated by those claiming the mantle of Islam, Americans — whose Constitution continues to permit enslavement as punishment for crime — deflect attention from partial U.S. responsibility for the current crisis in Iraq. Sanctions followed by military invasion and its brutal aftermath laid the groundwork for the situation Callimachi describes. Moral high ground is in short supply. The core idea animating enslavement is that some lives matter more than others. As any American who has been paying attention knows, this idea has not perished from the earth.

Please, Dr. Ali, could you tell us: given ISIS’s aim of restoring the Caliphate and its murder of other Muslims and non-colonial Yazidis, how our invasion of Iraq, dumb as it was, “laid the groundwork for the situation Callimachi describes”? Is our invasion of Iraq morally equivalent, as you imply, to the rape, torture, and enslavement of thousands of Yazidi women, and the murder of their husbands and sons? Are we to be held responsible for every act of torture and brutality committed by terrorists in the Middle East?

I reject that claim, and make the counterclaim that Ali is trying to exculpate not only Islam, but Muslims, from the acts they commit, blaming those acts on us instead. That’s false and patronizing, as well as unscholarly and disingenuous. Ali has a bill to sell, and is clearly not an objective scholar.

As for the US Constitution permitting enslavement, well, click on the link Ali provides, and it takes you to the 13th Amendment to the Constitution, to wit:

Section 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

Section 2. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

That eliminated slavery and peonage in the U.S., a decision buttressed by the Peonage Act of 1867, which prohibited holding people in involuntary servitude until they work off debts. If enslavement and involuntary servitude remain, it is as criminal punishment, when prisoners must work as a condition of their sentence. (The more onerous forms of this, like chain gangs, no longer exist. Now prisoners make license plates, work in machine shops, or tend gardens.) But work as punishment is not at all equivalent, despite what Ali implies, to what ISIS is doing to Yazidi women. Her bringing up the very strict 13th Amendment, which basically outlawed all slavery of non-convicts, is meant to deflect attention from ISIS’s sex slavery.

I have to say that I find Ali’s argument truly revolting—not just because it’s intellectually weak and actually deceptive, but because it debases the entire realm of university scholarship of which I’m a member. When I see pieces like hers—lame apologetics that are meant from the outset to reinforce an opinion already held—I thank Ceiling Cat that I am a scientist: a member of the guild in which using your scholarship to reinforce emotional commitments is considered a sin.

Fearless Faith: how students can keep their faith in the face of atheist professors

August 20, 2015 • 9:30 am

Reader Chris sent me this item with the note, “I am loath to call this one interesting, but it’s right up your alley; Christians pushing for apologetics in college to stop the hemorrhaging. Then again, consider the source.”

Well, the source is The Christian Examiner, and the short article is called “College students need apologetics in face-off against atheist professors“. It describes a seminar, “Fearless Faith,” designed to arm students against the purported onslaught of godlessness that they face when they go to college.  Christians are really paranoid about that, and I suppose the basis is that professors are far more atheistic than the public in general, though not even half of us, even at “elite universities” are atheists and agnostics. And, of course, we teach EVOLUTION, and MARXISM, making us even more suspect.

This has given rise to the execrable movie “God’s Not Dead,” in which a religious student outwits a professor who spews nonstop atheism at his students, and, at the end, the professor finds Jesus after being hit by a car (see the trailer here). It’s also spawned the Jack Chick tracts in which professors are portrayed as God-hating, Darwin-loving nitwits. A classic example is the famous “Big Daddy” strip. Here are the last few panels of that strip, in which the pwned professor gives up, and his lies about evolution are characterized as destroying belief:

Screen Shot 2015-08-20 at 7.37.23 AM

In truth, most professors are believers, though many aren’t. But few of us impose our atheism on students as does Kevin Sorbo in “God’s Not Dead”, or even bring it up. I don’t think I’ve ever mentioned my nonbelief in three decades of teaching. Yes, I teach evolution and tell students that there’s no evidence for creationism, and let them see how the evidence militates against one view and for the other. But I’ve heard of no professors that act like the pompous Christian-bashing professor of “God’s not dead.”

And it’s not just evolution-hating fundamentalists who fear the Atheist Professoriat. The real reason Christians fear college is because they know that it encourages doubt and thinking, and they know that those attitudes are inimical to accepting blind faith. Young people are leaving the Church in droves, and, as the Barna Institute found, three of the reasons that kids vote with their feet is that churches seem unfriendly to science, that churches are overprotective, and that churches are not friendly to young folks who doubt. To Christians, doubt is the enemy, and to professors, especially those of us in science, doubt is a great virtue.

At any rate, the Examiner reports that Fearless Faith is running a series of seminars designed to gird the students’ loins against heathen professors and their nefarious influence.

An apologetics training in response to an increasing number of grieving parents who have heard these words from their college students looks at ways students can speak respectfully, but firmly to their professors, many of whom are atheists.

The instructors at Fearless Faith are convinced a contributing factor to why 70 percent of young evangelicals admit to abandoning church is a lack of worldview and apologetics training for students in how to resist the influence of their atheist professors.

Frank Turek, founder of CrossExamined.org and author of I Don’t Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist, offers the Fearless Faith seminar to address the fact that college professors are five times more likely to be atheists than the general public and may be hostile toward Christianity.
Unprepared students who find the college environment frightening and toxic can easily fall into a crisis of faith.
. . . Fearless Faith is a day-long seminar given at churches to teach students fearlessness about defending their faith. Students will learn how to respond calmly and respectfully when their faith is challenged, how to find flaws in common arguments for atheism, and how to defend the basic tenets of Christianity.
God forbid that they should begin doubting! This program is evidence that many Christians don’t want students to doubt (in contrast to some liberal religionists who claim that doubt is essential to belief), but need them to accept faith blindly (that’s why it’s called “faith”).
Here’s one more bit:

Analytical thinking and certainty about one’s own beliefs are necessary for this [Fearless Faith] approach.

“When your Marxist professor lectures on topics like socialism and cultural relativism, just take good notes and try to think of questions that expose flaws in his worldview,” Adams recommended. [Mike Adams is a Fearless Faith instructor.]

“For example, ‘Professor, isn’t putting Jews in ovens wrong regardless of the geographical location and time period of the people doing it? In other words, isn’t there such thing as a universal moral code?'”

This shows again the strong connection between Christianity and the claim that a universal moral code can come only from God. (This “moral law is one bit of “evidence” touted by National Institutes of Health director Francis Collins as evidence for a deity.) But, of course, the “moral code” is not universal, nor does it defy explanation by both evolution and secular reason. Faith Verus Fact takes us this issue in detail.

It’s a curious but telling that Christians feel the need to have such programs and seminars to combat what they see as the onslaught of atheism, while atheists don’t have similar programs to combat the onslaught of religion, which, in the US, is far stronger than the occasional lucubrations by nonbelievers. Atheists don’t need such programs because, in general, we are much more willing to examine our worldviews, and because we prize doubt far more strongly than do Christians. Doubt and lack of evidence for religious claims are, after all, what led many of us to give up God in the first place.

And here’s a video touting the Fearless Faith program:

A new criticism of science as an exclusive “way of knowing”

August 17, 2015 • 11:00 am

UPDATE: I left a comment after Kolossváry’s piece simply saying that I analyzed his argument in this post, and giving the link. That comment has been removed.

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By now I’m well familiar with arguments that science, like religion, is based on faith. That argument is often made by religionists to try to drag down science’s epistemology to the level of religion’s, and it’s bogus. It’s bogus because, as I’ve argued before, “faith” in science really means “confidence based on experience”—which is not at all the same thing as religion’s “faith” as “belief without evidence.”

Now, however, a religious blogger at Patheos—a guest poster on The Evangelical Pulpit site—has taken the reverse tack, claiming that in fact decisions about good art, good music, and good religion can be made scientifically, on a basis identical to that used to adjudicate scientific fact. He is, of course, wrong.

What makes this claim—that objective truth is equivalent to subjective opinion—so weird is that it’s being made by a scientist, István Kolossváry. Here’s how he’s described (complete with the advantages he sees to faith) at the site:

István Kolossváry is a scientist and professor working in the research field of computer simulations of chemical and biological systems. He holds multiple advanced degrees from the Budapest University of Technology and the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. István has been a researcher at various universities and pharmaceutical research labs in Europe and in the United States including Columbia University and most recently a New York based private research organization. He won the 2006 Hungarian Academy of Sciences Book Award in Chemistry for co-authoring Introduction to Computer Aided Drug Design. Over 25 years in his career as a scientist, István has privately grappled with the chasm between science and theology, two disciplines he holds dear. In his debut work The Fabric of Eternity, István shares results from years of scientific inquiry into the works of divine providence and concludes there is solid scientific evidence to suggest that rejecting God and His loving care is against human nature. www.istvankolossvary.com

And here are some arguments from his piece, “Is the scientific method exclusive to science?” It is an attack on some of the arguments in my latest book, Faith Versus Fact: Why Science and Religion are Incompatible. I’ll try not to spend a lot of time on this; I’m bringing it up only because Kolossváry makes claims one doesn’t see very often. Here’s his thesis:

. . . In this blog post I am not going to argue pro or con [whether “science is based on verifiable facts whereas religion is based on unprovable faith”], I simply want to advocate a straightforward generalization of the scientific method and suggest that it can be used beyond the scope of science, including the arts and religion. The way the scientific method works is quite simple, and it has been amazingly successful for the past five hundred years. Observation of natural phenomena and/or pure theoretical thinking (nowadays aided by computer simulation) lead to ideas that will crystallize in a scientific theory.

Jerry Coyne and the new atheists dismiss religion, because religion is based on faith and not fact. Interestingly, the new atheists, or nobody for that matter dismisses the arts, though. So, how is art tested? What works of art are refuted and what works of art are here to stay? I argue that art is tested by the same scientific method—with people replacing the apparatus in the experiment.

So how does this work? It’s by a consensus of subjective opinion!:

Some would say that the most sensitive experimental device is a pencil standing on its tip; the tiniest push would make it tip over. I would argue, however, that the human person is infinitely more sensitive and is an ideal instrument to experimentally verify artwork. Why do we listen to Mozart and not Salieri, what crystallizes the collection of pieces displayed in the great art museums of the world over time, and what works are delegated to the dungeons of underground storage, once acquired by museum curators as prospective works of art? The masterpieces of art are selected by the same scientific method, by how much they touch the souls of people and the selection  process takes a long time, all too often beyond the years of the artist so he or she can enjoy success. The exact same thing in literature, what will determine which novels or poems people read a hundred years after they had been written? Bad literature, bad music, bad paintings are repudiated by the scientific method using people as the experimental apparatus.

Well, there are a lot of people who prefer Hemingway to Fitzgerald, and vice versa, and few people agree with my opinion that Thomas Wolfe was certainly in that 20th century pantheon as well. (In fact, English professors have told me that Wolfe was simply a bad writer, which I contest strongly!). I and some others thought the movie Tree of Life was pompous and execrable, but many critics deemed it a masterpiece. Who is right? How can we tell?

In truth, there is no consensus of opinion about art nearly as solid as the consensus that a normal water molecule has two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atoms, or that the earth is 4.5 billion years old. And how do you objectively resolve the question of whether Andy Warhol’s paintings were masterpieces, or that Andres Serrano’s “Piss Christ” was also one? Public opinion on many of these issues vacillates (remember that many of Sinclair Lewis’s novels were once seen as masterpieces, but many find them hackneyed today, though he won a Nobel Prize for Literature). In contrast, many scientific “facts” are unlikely to change: they are as close to absolute truths as we can get. And when scientific consensus does change, it’s not just a shift in opinion, but a shift in opinion that reflects new data, as when we learned, from various methods, that the continents were actually drifting after all. What new data has led to Thomas Wolfe falling out of favor?

Now it is true—even likely—that some things appeal to people aesthetically because they evoke a neuronal reaction based on culture or evolution. E. O. Wilson, for example, has suggested that we prefer grassy landscapes with trees (and a view from a hill) because that was the landscape on which we evolved in Africa (and being on a hill has adaptive advantages). But does this mean that someone who prefers a desert landscape is wrong? We may find that preference for one type of painting versus another, say Rembrandt versus Jackson Pollock, rests on consistent ways the human brain is organized.

This may explain a consensus of opinion about art, but does it make Rembrandt objectively better than Pollock? What about the person who prefers Pollock? Can you say she’s just wrong? Surely not in the sense that the person who says that the Earth is 10,000 years old is wrong! And that is Kolossváry’s error. While subjective opinion may, at bottom, be grounded on objective facts about the brain, this does not mean that, in the absence of that information, we can accept the vagaries of human opinion about art as “true.” For brains differ, and opinions differ, and we all know that even are evolved preferences don’t make those preferences “right.” We may have evolved to be xenophobic, but in today’s world that doesn’t work so well.

Kolossváry then extends the “truth” argument to politics and religion:

Similar in political systems. The ones that people tolerate stay longer and the ones that oppress people will be thrown over, sooner or later. I believe that the same scientific method can be applied to religion. The new atheists don’t seem to understand the difference between God and religion and between faith and religion. We are talking about religion here, the main branches Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, and Judaism with all their factions, and hundreds of other religions. Religion is a shared human response to God’s calling and it is a unique and precious human experience.

In this sense politics is like morality, which I believe at bottom rests on subjective preferences for what kind of society you want. If you favor democracy (or utilitarianism) because you think it has certain salutary effects, you can certainly test whether those effects really obtain, at least in principle. But in the end your preference for one political system (e.g., a Republican versus a Democratic administration) is based on preferences that cannot be objectively justified.

Religion is even worse, for one’s “preference” is, by and large, based on where you lived, and who your parents were. Which religion is “right” is an unresolvable question, at least by “scientific” methods, and Kolossváry makes it even worse by asserting, without any “scientific” evidence, that “God’s calling” really exists!

So if Kolossváry really thinks that a choice among religions—which one is better or “truer”—can be made on scientific grounds, let him justify that. For his method for “verifying” religions, which seems to mean which ones are “true” in a scientific sense (remember, he’s claiming here that one can “test” the verify of religions in the same way science tests its propositions) is ludicrous:

Religions are in large part man made, especially in their every day manifestations at temples, churches, mosques, congregations, assemblies, etc., and they change over time. What if not people would be best suited to test them? The scientific method can be applied to religions similar to the arts; the more they touch the human soul and the more they make people agents of good the more they are verified but when they do harm, they are repudiated. It is people who test religion through their ultra sensitive souls far more advanced than any man made instrument. The statement so loudly voiced by the new atheists that religions are irrational, simply does not stand to reason.

Well, if you claim—and this again is based on subjective preferences—that the effects of religion on human behavior should be X and Y, then that can n principle be tested as well. But defining what “agents of good” really do may be very different for a Quaker and for a radical Muslim! Many Muslims feel, for instance, that Islam, as the “final” revelation from God, is the right religion, and so it’s okay to call for the execution of gays and apostates.

Well, religion has been “tested” à la Kolossváry , and here are the results (again largely reflecting not people’s cogitation about different faiths and then choice of the “best” one, but simply the vagaries of history and geography). Religion has never been a matter of voting with your feet, but simply where your feet first touched the ground when you were a child.

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Which religions have been “verified”, and which “repudiated”? I would claim that Islam is, at present, more harmful than Buddhism, but neither has been repudiated. Since there are more Muslims than Buddhists, does that mean Islam is a “better” or “truer” religion?

In truth, Kolossváry doesn’t even seem to know the difference between judging something by its effects and judging something as objectively true. His last sentence, saying that religions can’t be irrational, is confused in just that way: it mistakes the actions motivated by religion with whether their epistemic claims have any basis in reality.

h/t: Jeff G.

The atheist’s purpose: readers’ responses

August 11, 2015 • 9:05 am

I’ve just skimmed the responses to Tom Chivers’s series of interviews on how atheists find purpose in their lives, and one reader’s response stuck out like a sore thumb. It’s a perfect example of confirmation bias: believing what you WANT to be true. Here it is:
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I don’t have an innate desire to find meaning, but rather an innate desire to make the best I can of my ephemeral existence. When pressed to say why we see our lives as having a “meaning”, we tend to answer by saying what gives us pleasure and satisfaction. The reader above somehow tries to gather this behavior under the tent of religion. At any rate, as Voltaire said in 1763 (in French, of course), “The interest I have in believing in something is not a proof that the something exists.”

Another reader gave the appropriate response to Mr. Irvine:

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