Category: theodicy

Marco Rubio does theodicy

December 4, 2015 • 12:15 pm

I used to think that, among all the Republican candidates for President, Marco Rubio—the Conservative Kennedy—would ultimately get the nod (Trump is still leading the pack). I don’t like his views, but he doesn’t seem as much of a nutcase as Carson or Trump, and I wouldn’t have to scourge myself with whips if he was elected.  However, he’s still marinated in faith, and, as the Christian Post reports, Rubio undertook some theodicy in a talk in New Hampshire on November 30. Like all the GOP candidates, he parades his tiresome faith at every turn.

Rubio answered his rhetorical question about why God let the Paris attacks and the Twin Towers attack occur by raising one of the tired old tropes of Christianity: God’s plan is beyond our ken, but, in the end, it leads to ultimate justice (the video of his remarks is at bottom). The CP report:

The 44-year-old senator continued by saying that even when people pray to God for guidance, they are often not given the answers they want.

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This is a real book. Talk about making a virtue from necessity!

“We are ordered to have peace. The peace that you are left with is not the peace of ‘it’s going to all work out great.’ [JAC: Except that it will—see below.[ We are not promised that,” Rubio stated. “Those of us who share the Christian faith, the only thing we are promised is adversity. We are told you will be discriminated against, hated, you will be persecuted. Obviously, we are fortunate to live in a country where the persecution is relative compared to other parts of the world.”

. . . Rubio then explained that he was asked during a campaign event a few days prior, “Where was God on 9/11? Where was God in Paris?”

“I said, ‘where God always is — on the throne in Heaven.’ The question was how could God allow these bad things to happen? It always challenges us to understand that God’s ways are not our ways,” Rubio argued. “What we may interpret as bad, and most certainly is in the case of Paris or 9/11, even that is part of a broader plan for the universe and for our lives that we are just not going to know the answer to. God’s ways are not our ways.”

In other words, God Works in Mysterious Ways. How, then, does Rubio know that God is good rather than evil, or that he even takes an interest in justice?

Rubio then said that God’s master plan confuses people during challenging times just as small children are confused as to why their parents would let doctors hurt them with needles when getting a vaccine.

“All that child understood at 3 years or 4 years of age is that my father and my mother, who love me, is allowing a stranger to stick a needle in my arm, in this case, some other region of the body, and it hurts, it hurts a lot. ‘Why are they allowing me to be hurt by this stranger? I don’t understand that,'” Rubio said of his child. “But I understood. While that needle hurt for 3 or 4 seconds, that needle was going to prevent something much more dangerous and much more painful and much harder later on.”

What gets me about this is that Rubio asserts that “God’s ways are not our ways,” but then uses an example showing that God’s ways ARE our ways: like children, we’re given pain for some reason we can’t understand, but it’s given because it make things come right at the end. How does Rubio know that?

If God’s ways are truly mysterious, then how do we know anything about the nature of God? I suppose Rubio would reply that the Bible tells us about the nature of God. But then the Bible also tells us about God’s ways. The relevant example is the story of Job, whose sufferings were inflicted by God just to test whether he’d remain pious in the face of suffering. In other words, God tortured Job as a test of loyalty. And, I suppose, that’s why God killed off all those Parisians and New Yorkers—to see if the rest of us would retain our belief (and presumably our salvation) in our sorrow.

Of course, a God having such ways is empirically indistinguishable from no God at all.

h/t: Thomas

Prayer: what is it good for?; and a note on yesterday’s murders

December 3, 2015 • 10:00 am

Two contrasting sources (both provided by Matthew) give the same answer about the efficacy of prayer:

https://twitter.com/TheTweetOfGod/status/672174167832170496

I can’t help but think that the headline below, from yesterday’s Daily News is—perhaps unintentionally—a slap in the face of theists. It implies that either God let the shootings take place, or he’s leaving us on our own to solve the problem. Either way, it reflects a view of a god who’s neither omnipotent or omnibenevolent, though perhaps that’s a bit too much exegesis for a newspaper headline.

Today’s New York Times has two op-eds on the San Bernardino tragedy, both decrying the lack of gun control in the U.S. “The horror in San Bernardino“, the main piece (by the whole editorial board), includes this

Yet, even as grief fills communities randomly victimized by mass shootings, the sales of weapons grow ever higher. Holiday shoppers set a record for Black Friday gun sales last week. They left the Federal Bureau of Investigation processing 185,345 firearm background checks, the most ever in a single day, topping the Black Friday gun buying binge after the shooting massacre of 26 people at a school in Newtown, Conn., three years ago.

. . . Congress has allowed the domestic gun industry to use assorted loopholes to sell arsenals that are used against innocent Americans who cannot hide. Without firm action, violent criminals will keep terrorizing communities and the nation, inflicting mass death and damage across the land.

The Republicans, of course, are saying these shootings reflect a need for better mental healthcare, but that party is largely responsible for dismantling the mental-healthcare system and putting many seriously ill people back on the street. And really, the line between a disaffected shooter and someone who’s mentally ill is nebulous. You can’t define shooters like those in San Bernardino as mentally ill, because that’s simply tautological. Many people who would not fall into the mental healthcare safety net because they lack a diagnosable condition—including terrorists, those who grab a gun in a moment of anger, or those who (apparently like the California shooters) are simply plotting revenge—would not be helped by expanding our psychiatric outreach.

And those who pin the uniquely American problem of mass shootings on mental illness alone must explain why American is unique in harboring so many mentally ill people. I refuse to believe that a surfeit of such people is the root cause of these tragedies. Somewhere in there is the unconscionable “freedom” of Americans to own guns.

Of  course we should give people greater access to mental healthcare, but that would mean raising taxes, which is a no-no. But one thing that’s less costly, and perhaps more efficacious, is restricting gun ownership. “Smart guns”, which can be fired only by the owner, or restricting gun ownership to hunters or members of gun clubs, would go a long way toward solving the problem. Remember that many guns used in the commission of crimes are legally owned guns that have been stolen. What we need are far fewer legally owned guns.

Nicholas Kristof’s piece, “On guns, we’re not even trying” is (at last) something he wrote that doesn’t make me cringe. He first adduces the frightening statistics:

So far this year, the United States has averaged more than one mass shooting a day, according to the ShootingTracker website, counting cases of four or more people shot. And now we have the attack on Wednesday in San Bernardino, Calif., that killed at least 14 people.

It’s too soon to know exactly what happened in San Bernardino, but just in the last four years, more people have died in the United States from guns (including suicides and accidents) than Americans have died in the wars in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq combined. When one person dies in America every 16 minutes from a gun, we urgently need to talk about remedies.

He then proposes three solutions: universal background checks (40% of guns are legally bought without such checks), banning people under 21 from owning guns, and curbing the ability of people on the terrorism watch list to buy guns (yes, they can: more than 2,000 such weapons were bought last year.) These are minimal solutions, but don’t go far enough.

It’s unthinkable in the present political climate to envision serious restrictions on guns, but remember, it was once unthinkable to give civil rights to blacks or legal marriage to gay couples. What we need is a change in public opinion, and it’s sad that the only way that change might happen is for far more people to be murdered. And even that won’t help, for America’s in the grip of gun madness.

Kristof ends on a clever note: asking Republicans to heed their #2 god:

. . . Ronald Reagan, hailed by Republicans in every other context, favored gun regulations, including mandatory waiting periods for purchases.

“Every year, an average of 9,200 Americans are murdered by handguns,”Reagan wrote in a New York Times op-ed in 1991 backing gun restrictions. “This level of violence must be stopped.”

He added that if tighter gun regulations “were to result in a reduction of only 10 or 15 percent of those numbers (and it could be a good deal greater), it would be well worth making it the law of the land.”

Republicans, listen to your sainted leader.

The numbers adduced by Reagan have of course increased since then—they’ve tripled. Here’s a figure from PolitiFact, which gives some caveats in the associated article, but in general the numbers below are pretty close to the mark (that site adds 27 to the terrorist-caused deaths and nearly 22,000 to the total Americans killed by guns). Their ratio of Americans killed by guns to Americans killed by terrorism is 4,250 to 1. Which is the greater problem?

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Finally, Grania has sent us a timeline for mass murders in the U.S., showing the nearly exponential increase over time. This is from Mother Jones, which quotes statistics from the Harvard School of Public Health:

harvard_timeline_AJ_2

As the article notes:

Rather than simply tallying the yearly number of mass shootings, Harvard researchers Amy Cohen, Deborah Azrael, and Matthew Miller determined that their frequency is best measured by tracking the time between each incident. This method, they explain, is most effective for detecting meaningful shifts in relatively small sets of data, such as the 69 mass shootings we documented. Their analysis of the data shows that from 1982 to 2011, mass shootings occurred every 200 days on average. Since late 2011, they found, mass shootings have occurred at triple that rate—every 64 days on average. (For more details on their analytical method, see this related piece.)

The Discovery Institute and its religious flaks respond to Ben Goren’s critique of theodicy

September 14, 2015 • 11:45 am

Ben Goren called my attention to a piece  on Uncommon Descent (the Discovery Institute’s anti-evolution and pro-religion website, though the second adjective is redundant)—a piece going after Ben’s recent post on this site that dealt with theodicy. I was vastly amused at the author’s (Vincent Torley) attempts to explain why Jesus never calls 9-1-1 (he mentions Lucifer!), as well as the additional theodicy promoted by the commenters.  And I saw that Ben is actually arguing with believers in the comments! So I asked Ben to write a short piece on the IDers’ response. Here it is, but do go look at Torley’s piece and some of the comments.

The Common Descent of the Omnincompetent

by Ben Goren

Some of all you may remember that, a week and an half ago, Jerry lent me the power of his bully pulpit to preach a sermon demanding an answer to why Jesus never calls 9-1-1. Vincent Torley of Uncommon Descent attempted a response…weakly.

In Torley’s own words, he refuses to “put forward an answer to Ben Goren’s question,” and, instead, identifies “a few background assumptions that Goren makes, in his argument.” He gives five assumptions of my argument that he takes issue with: that the gods share our responsibility for moral action; that lesser gods (including, confusingly, not merely the Heavenly Host but also Satan, in a later response) don’t act on behalf of the greater gods; that there are no unknown-to-us higher priorities which justify the inaction of the gods; that no humans (later clarified to mean Adam and Eve) have the prerogative to make decisions on behalf of all humanity; and that humans are capable of hearing and understanding the words of the gods. (Full disclosure: Torley wrote of the Christian pantheon, which I have generalized here.)

Torley further expands upon those assumptions in his response, turning them into powerfully weak excuses for Jesus’s omnincompetence.

I myself gave direct answers to each of Torley’s objections in the thread, and have continued to engage him. To his credit, he makes plain that he himself would call 9-1-1 in case of an emergency. . . but insists that, for any and all imaginable reasons, Jesus cannot possibly make such a call. Not even to stop a serial child rapist priest who has already raped dozens of children in his care—again, even though Torley himself would do so. Clearly, Christians themselves are infinitely more aware, capable, and moral than their gods. Their gods may be seriously fucked up, but they deserve credit for being better people—much better, comparatively—than their gods.

If you read through the comments, you’ll see just how remarkably prescient I was in my own essay. A common recurring theme is the one I identified as particularly unsatisfying, as many chose to “reassure us that their gods do dispense justice, but they do so only after death.” That one is very, very popular over there. And Torley himself replied to me by “[placing] the blame on an ancient ancestral maternal progenitor who procured culinary counseling from a speaking serpent.” Satan, by Torley’s and others’s description, can whoop Jesus’s ass even when Satan is hogtied and Jesus is loaded for bear.

I haven’t carefully read each and every of the four score and some-odd responses in the thread over there, so it’s possible I missed an honest, real, credible responses; if any of all y’all stumble upon one, I’d appreciate having it brought to my attention. I don’t have the time to reply to everybody over there, and likely won’t be welcome there much longer. But, by all means, feel free to join in the fun!

George Zimmerman says his shooting of Trayvon Martin was “God’s plan”; theologians disagree

March 26, 2015 • 12:22 pm

If you’re American, you’ll surely remember the killing of the black teenager Trayvon Martin Martin by George Zimmerman in Florida three years ago, with Zimmerman claiming that, as part of a neighborhood patrol, he was justified in shooting Martin because he was defending himself against a suspected trespasser. The murky details of the case, combined with the fact that Martin was black and Zimmerman white, ignited a racial conflict that has continued, promoted by similar cases, over the past three years.

Leaving aside the question of guilt or innocence, I want to point out that Zimmerman is now, according to PuffHo, claiming that his killing of Martin was “God’s will”. This brings the issue of theodicy—the apologetics of evil in a God-run universe—right down to earth:

In a video [JAC: below] released on Monday by the law firm Ayo and Iken, which represents Zimmerman, the 31-year-old said he has a clear conscience and does not believe things could have turned out differently that day in Sanford, Florida.

“I believe God has his plans, and for me to second-guess them would be hypocritical, almost blasphemous,” he said in the video.

Well, you know, you could make a case for that, for God is supposedly omnipotent and omniscient and benevolent. So He not only knew that Martin was going to die, but could have prevented it. But He didn’t? Why?

That’s the question that has plagued theologians for centuries, and there is no satisfactory answer. The only conclusion is that it was part of God’s plan for Martin to die, even if you think that that death was necessary to preserve “free will” in our species.

But of course theologians can’t tolerate that, so they do their usual dance of confused apologetics:

Though steeped in religious rhetoric, Zimmerman’s analysis does not sit well with many Christians who reject the notion that God wanted Martin to die.

“It’s a theology that’s different than mine,” Rev. John Vaughn, the executive vice president of Auburn Theological Seminary, told The Huffington Post over the phone. “My theology is one of much more that’s rooted in God’s love and that we have free choice and will.”

Pastor Victor Montalvo, who leads a congregation in Sanford just blocks away from where the teenager was shot, told HuffPost he believes Zimmerman should assume responsibility for his actions and repent.

“The idea that God willed for him to shoot Trayvon is absolutely ludicrous,” Montalvo said. “It’s not God’s fault that Trayvon is dead.”

Of course it is? God could have stopped it—if He existed! But here we see the waffling of theologians who out of one side of their mouth suggest that it might have been God’s plan, because some good came out of it, but out of the other assert that it couldn’t have been God’s plan. Those are the noises Monsalvo made:

Montalvo said the shooting brought to the forefront “seething” racial tensions that have existed in Sanford for generations. But, he added, it also has provided Christians with an opportunity to “stand in humility” and work to restore their communities. And this is where Zimmerman’s statement on Monday breaks down for the pastor.

“God can use even the worst situations,” he said. “But when you talk about the will of God, you talk about the desire of God,” and it’s not right to say that God would want this death.

“That God somehow wanted Trayvon to be shot and killed … We don’t see that in Jesus,” Montalvo said.

The fact that Montalvo “doesn’t see that in Jesus” is a meaningless statement. If he believes in an all-powerful and all-loving God, then somehow God did want Martin to be killed, even if it was a foreseeable byproduct of some greater good (like the nonexistent “free will” accepted by both believers and the average person, or even to give Christians a chance to be “humble”). If God allows murders like Martin’s to preserve “free will,” then of course God knew that Martin would die in that cause. But couldn’t He intervene from time to time to stop murders but still allow tax cheating and ATM thefts? Nobody would be the wiser.

Zimmerman is a nasty and odious piece of work, but he’s only carrying the Christianity of his region to its logical conclusion. He’s deposited a steaming mess in the laps of the clergy, and they don’t know what to do with it.

Australian religionist tries to explain why God allows evil; fails miserably

February 10, 2015 • 1:15 pm

Australia, though a pretty nonreligious country compared to the U.S., still has its pockets of faith. One was recently emptied on the Australian Broadcasting System’s (ABC’s) site “The Drum,” in piece written by Simon Smart, a man described on the ABC’s site as

. . . a Director of the Centre for Public Christianity and the co-author with Jane Caro, Antony Loewenstein and Rachel Woodlock of For God’s Sake – An Atheist, a Jew, a Christian and a Muslim Debate Religion. A former history and English teacher, he studied theology at Regent College, Vancouver. He is the author of a number of books including Bright Lights Dark Nights – the Enduring Faith of 13 Remarkable Australians.

All it takes is a degree in theology to screw up one’s thinking, or so it seems in Smart’s piece “Fry vs. God: the comedian’s concerns aren’t new.” In it, Smart attack’s Stephen Fry’s short response on theodicy in his interview with Gay Byrne on Irish television (I’ve put it below in case you’ve forgotten it or haven’t seen it.) Asked what he’d say to God if he encountered Him, Fry responded that he’d ask God why there’s so much unmerited evil in the world, like kids getting cancer.

Fry’s short response has caused a lot of consternation among Christians. I’m a bit surprised at that, because the problem of evil, which spawned the discipline of theodicy, has been around as long as Christianity itself.  Fry didn’t say anything that the Old Atheists didn’t say decades ago. But the old arguments need to be raised again with each generation of believers, and Fry is, after all, an immensely smart, popular, and likable man. His comments demand an answer.

Well, Smart has responded to Fry. As with all attempts to give a religious justification of evil, though, he fails miserably. Here’s how Smart explains why an all-loving and omnipotent god tortures children (my emphasis):

Ultimately when a Christian stops to consider the struggle of human existence they will want to point to the death and resurrection of Jesus as the centre of a very long, and still unfolding, story of how God launches a plan to redeem the world from its misery – a portrait of a God who has not remained aloof from the suffering but rather has become part of it.

The resurrection of Jesus points to God condemning all the things that have destroyed life, and promising a day when the weight of history and all the centuries of human cruelty, sadness and loss will be overcome. Is it enough? Not everyone will think so.

The biblical picture offers a promise of the possibility of a new beginning when murdered children will be raised up and restored, where families torn apart by violence will find peace and harmony again. It presents a vision of a time where crushing loneliness will be a thing of the past, where bodies broken and ravaged by disease or old age will be restored to strength and vitality, where people who have experienced grinding poverty will find abundance, where children ripped from their mother’s arms in a tsunami will be ushered in to new life. In the end Christianity is a story of the denial of the powers of darkness and violence and cruelty and hatred and heartbreak. And in their place the victory of goodness and mercy; kindness and love.

Every aspect of this vision is predicated on Jesus rising from death. If that didn’t happen, then it is right and proper to join Stephen Fry and to throw the whole thing out the window.

This is completely insane. It simply says that because of Jesus all things wrong will be made right in the next world.  But that doesn’t answer the question at all, for the evil has still already occurred in our world! Even if there’s a new beginning, the end was often pretty bad.  And God could have prevented those bad endings.

Is it better to have a kid who dies horribly of cancer subsequently find peace and harmony in heaven, or for that kid to not have gotten cancer in the first place, causing horrible suffering for herself and her parents? Which way of ordering the cosmos would be better? I would have thought that a truly good God would create a world in which there was no suffering of innocents and people went to heaven as well. Or why not just have a heaven that everyone lives in, and cut out the middleman? In fact, why make people in the first place? Smart gives no answers.

This week I’ve seen more than one Christian use similar arguments to justify evil, and they all seem blinkered to the problems. If God is omnipotent, he can do anything he wants, and if he makes innocents (or animals) suffer horribly, there must be a good explanation. The only credible ones left to believers are a). That God is sometimes evil, as he was in the Old Testament, or b). We don’t understand God’s ways. Any other explanation is pilpul. The most parsimonious explanation is, of course, that there is no God and “evil” is simply expected in an evolved world, a world where mutations cause cancer, people get infectious diseases, the tectonic plates move, and animals and microbes evolved to kill other animals.

At least Smart has the honesty to admit that if there were no Resurrection, then Christanity crumbles at its core. But his argument that the Resurrection justifies natural evils doesn’t hold water.

In the end, Smart plays his trump card: even if we don’t know whether there is a God, or why, if there is a good God, he creates evil, we have to keep the myths alive because of the Little People:

We may even, as Fry claims to have done, conjure up a degree of optimism in the face of the implications of a godless universe. But if we arrive at that point it would be fitting to acknowledge that, while doing nothing to rid ourselves of suffering we will have removed a source of profound hope that for centuries has sustained millions of people in the face of life’s joys and sorrows.

h/t: Phil

Making a virtue of necessity: doubt as “a crucial part of faith”

September 30, 2014 • 7:35 am

On September 18 I discussed the confession of Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury, that he had experienced some heavy doubts about God’s existence, based on God’s distressing lack of appearance on the planet. Surprisingly, though, Welby had no doubts about Jesus. I found that quite astonishing, for Jesus has meaning to Welby only as the son of God (as well as a third of the Godhead, given that Anglicans accept the Trinity). How can you doubt God and be certain about the divinity of Jesus?

At any rate, Julia Baird (an Australian opinion writer for the New York Times who also has a Ph.D. in history) has taken to her keyboard to defend Welby in a Sept. 25 Times op-ed,, “Doubt as a sign of faith.”  Her thesis is, in her words, this: “Doubt is a crucial part of faith.”

But her piece does not start off well:

Certainty is so often overrated.

This is especially the case when it comes to faith, or other imponderables.

Overrated? Wouldn’t you want to be certain that your faith was right? After all, you’re staking a lot of your life, and all of your afterlife, on what you believe. And certainty in other matters, so long as it’s supported by evidence, is what you want. (I think she’s talking about real empirical certainty, not simply one’s assertion that one is right.)

To defend her thesis, Baird first lists some religious people who have had religious doubts, including Welby himself , Mother Teresa (her diary entries on this are now well known), C. L. Lewis, Flannery O’Conner, Benjamin Franklin, and even Jesus himself, who, says Baird, cried out on the cross, “My God, why have you forsaken me?” Well, that might not be Jesus’s doubt about God’s existence, but anguish about why God didn’t save him.

Indeed, according to scripture Jesus did say that, but in only two of the four Gospels, Matthew and Mark. Here are his final words in all four gospels:

  • Luke 23:34: Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they do.
  • Luke 23:43: Truly, I say to you, today you will be with me in paradise.
  • John 19:26–27: Woman, behold your son.Son Behold your mother.
  • Matthew 27:46 & Mark 15:34 My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?
  • John 19:28: I thirst.
  • John 19:29-30: It is finished.
  • Luke 23:46: Father, into your hands I commit my spirit.

If Baird quoted Luke or John, we wouldn’t see that doubt, so she’s cherry-picking. Did Luke and John simply leave out those crucial words of doubt, or did someone make them up? (Baird appears to believe they are real, for she implies, as we’ll see below, that she’s a Baptist.)

But never mind. Her view that doubt is inherent in faith, is largely (but not completely) correct. How can it not be for many? If you’re committed to believing a bunch of superstition lacking evidence, and yet you’re a thinking person who bases the rest of your life on things for which you’d like evidence, then sometimes you must wonder if all this stuff is real.  That’s all well and good, but, given the nature of faith, how does one resolve those doubts? This is the question Baird avoids:

Just as courage is persisting in the face of fear, so faith is persisting in the presence of doubt. Faith becomes then a commitment, a practice and a pact that is usually sustained by belief. But doubt is not just a roiling, or a vulnerability; it can also be a strength. Doubt acknowledges our own limitations and confirms — or challenges — fundamental beliefs, and is not a detractor of belief but a crucial part of it.

This is truly making a virtue of necessity.  For there is no good way for a believer to actually resolve those doubts, for there is no evidence to appeal to. How can Welby call on evidence to convince himself that God really exists? After all, it’s that lack of evidence that raised his doubts in the first place! At least Baird admits that faith is “persisting in the presence of doubt,” that is, pretending that something exists when you’re not sure it does.

No, there are only two ways to quell those doubts. First, just decide to quietly shelve them and convince yourself that you were right all along, or conjure up some “evidence,” like a frozen waterfall or a beautiful evensong, to get you back on track.  But that is just confirmation bias. Or, you can do what Baird’s pastor does, and just say that maybe it doesn’t matter if what you believe is true, so long as it produces good things:

My local pastor, Tim Giovanelli, a Baptist whose ocean-swimming prowess has lassoed scores of surfers and swimmers into his church, puts it simply: “For Welby, myself and many others, it is not that we have certainty but have seen the plausibility of faith and positive impact it can make. In a broken world, that can be enough.”

But where does the “plausibility” come from? Doesn’t Giovanelli really mean “logical possibility”? It is the mistaking of the logical possibility (and emotional appeal) of a God for the plausibility of a God (something that Alvin Plantinga does continually, and on purpose), that mistakenly leads the doubters back to faith.

Yes, religious doubt is natural, and inevitable in rational people, but the whole goal of religion is to quash it. Granted, some, like Welby, will admit it (though I suspect that people like Al Mohler, Ken Ham, and William Lane Craig don’t have such doubts), but in the end they always decide that they were right all along—on no evidence—and plow ahead as before, like a ship going around an iceberg. I doubt that Welby’s newfound doubts will affect his sermons or public pronouncements from now on: he will certainly act as if God and Jesus exist when he talks to his flock.

At the end, Baird compares the doubts of believers with those of rationalists, quoting the mathematician and philosopher Bertrand Russell:

If we don’t accept both the commonality and importance of doubt, we don’t allow for the possibility of mistakes or misjudgments. While certainty frequently calcifies into rigidity, intolerance and self-righteousness, doubt can deepen, clarify and explain. This is, of course, a subject far broader than belief in God. [JAC: Really?  How can religious doubt itself  “clarify and explain” without some way of resolving it?]

The philosopher Bertrand Russell put it best. The whole problem with the world, he wrote, is that “the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.”

But there are two differences between the kind of doubt evinced by Baird and that mentioned by Russell.  First, when a scientist or empiricist doubts something, say string theory, they don’t go around proclaiming that it is true. They admit constantly that it is plausible but unsettled. Scientific “truth” only comes with substantial empirical verification. In contrast, the believers who have doubts, like Welby, ultimately go their merry way and forget that they had those doubts, saying that they’ve been resolved by further reflection. But reflection can’t resolve doubt unless you have a way of adjudicating the conflicting positions.

And that brings us to a crucial difference between religion and science. In science doubts are resolved by evidence. If you don’t have evidence that string theory is correct, you don’t tell yourself and others, “upon deeper reflection, I have clarified to myself that it is indeed right.” If you don’t have good evidence, you stop promoting your theory as the truth; instead, you persist in asserting that it’s undecided. But will be a cold day in July (in the northern hemisphere!) when Welby and Baird, who have even less evidence for God than physicists have for string theory, start doubting God’s existence publicly and frequently. Unless the doubts of the faithful are resolved by “deep reflection”—almost always the case—they become nonbelievers.

Baird’s article is a prime example of what I call The Great Sausage Machine of Theology: a mental appartus that converts scientific and empirical necessities—in this case a lack of evidence for one’s beliefs—into theological virtues.  And, like sausage-making, the working of the Theological Grinder are best kept hidden. By exposing them, Baird has revealed their intellectual vacuity.

David Barash on the incompatibility of science and faith

September 28, 2014 • 11:59 am

As I mentioned two posts ago, David Barash, a biologist at the University of Washington who works on animal behavior and evolution, has a post in today’s New York Times, “God, Darwin, and my college biology class.”  It’s basically an argument for the incompatibility of science and religion, and I like it a lot, not the least because I agree with him 100%.

But there’s one thing about his piece that bothers me: Barash’s article is about how he tells his animal behavior class that science and religion are incompatible. In other words, he’s making theological arguments at a public university. But first let’s back up and see what he says.

Barash discovered that a lot of his students aren’t comfortable with evolution because it contravenes their religious beliefs. He thought that, as his course progressed, the facts would win out and the discomfort would dissolve. It didn’t. Therefore, Barash decided to have what he calls “The Talk” with his students, telling them directly how evolution clashes with religion.  In The Talk, he considers and then discards Steve Gould’s NOMA gambit (see two posts back), an argument claiming that science and religion each have important and non-overlapping roles to play, the former in ascertaining facts about the universe, the latter in arbitrating meanings, morals, and values. Barash:

There are a few ways to talk about evolution and religion, I begin. The least controversial is to suggest that they are in fact compatible. Stephen Jay Gould called them “nonoverlapping magisteria,” noma for short, with the former concerned with values and the latter with facts. He and I disagreed on this (in public and, at least once, rather loudly); he claimed I was aggressively forcing a painful and unnecessary choice, while I maintained that in his eagerness to be accommodating, he was misrepresenting both science and religion.

In some ways, Steve has been winning. Noma is the received wisdom in the scientific establishment, including institutions like the National Center for Science Education [NCSE], which has done much heavy lifting when it comes to promoting public understanding and acceptance of evolution. According to this expansive view, God might well have used evolution by natural selection to produce his creation.

. . . So far, so comforting for my students. But here’s the turn: These magisteria are not nearly as nonoverlapping as some of them might wish.

. . . As evolutionary science has progressed, the available space for religious faith has narrowed:

Indeed. As I’ve harped on incessantly, religion makes many existence claims about the real world or the real Universe. That’s one reason why NOMA has been heavily criticized by theologians, who resent being told that they can’t say anything about what exists. (This will all be hashed out in The Albatross.)  And NOMA is indeed the received wisdom by science organizations like the NCSE, the National Academies, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, which even has a Templeton-funded “Dialogue on Science, Ethics, and Religion program“—something wildly inappropriate for such an organization.

But Barash, to his credit, is no accommodationist, and in The Talk he points out three areas in which science and religion make incompatible claims. (The indented discussion below is my writing, not Barash’s.)

  • The argument from complexity. As we all know, evolution dispelled this most powerful argument for God when Darwin showed that “design-like” features could arise from a purely naturalistic process. This conflicts with creationist religion, though Barash doesn’t mention that many more liberal faiths simply say that evolution happened but God either set it in motion, knew it would happen, directed it toward specific ends (i.e., H. sapiens) or intervened in subtle and undetectable ways.  In this sense the conflict between science and faith can be somewhat resolved, though such theistic accommodationism still requires that we abandon naturalism. If you’re a true naturalist, theistic evolution is still incompatible with science. If you argue that God set up the universe knowing in advance that evolution would occur but didn’t intervene (and that’s claimed by a fair number of believers), then there’s not really any practical incompatibility, for the difference between that and naturalistic evolution is nil.
  • Human exceptionalism.  Barash notes that there is no evidence that humans are special in any supernaturalistic sense: “. . we are perfectly good animals, natural as can be and indistinguishable from the rest of the living world at the level of structure as well as physiological mechanism.” Again, if you think humans were a teleological goal of evolution, requiring God’s planning or intervention, or have souls or a kind of behavior (say, morality) that can’t be explained by naturalistic processes, then yes, human exceptionalism is incompatible with science. If you think, though, that humans were simply an inevitable or likely result of a naturalistic process, the incompatibility is barely discernible.
  • The existence of evil. This, to me, is the most powerful of Barash’s arguments for incompatibility between science and religion. Theists must perforce explain evil—both “moral” evil (humans doing bad things to other humans) and “natural” evil (diseases like childhood cancer, earthquakes, and other stuff that kills innocent people)—as part of God’s plan. There’s no easy way to reconcile these with a loving and all-powerful god, though the entire discipline of theodicy is devoted to the effort. I haven’t yet seen a successful reconciliation, and theists know, deep in their hearts, that the problem remains. But such “evils” are, as Barash explains, easily understandable in a naturalistic universe: they’re an inevitable result of either evolution, physics, or geology.

Barash ends The Talk this way:

I CONCLUDE The Talk by saying that, although they don’t have to discard their religion in order to inform themselves about biology (or even to pass my course), if they insist on retaining and respecting both, they will have to undertake some challenging mental gymnastic routines. And while I respect their beliefs, the entire point of The Talk is to make clear that, at least for this biologist, it is no longer acceptable for science to be the one doing those routines, as Professor Gould and noma have insisted we do.

He’s absolutely correct here, both in highlighting the tortuous arguments of accommodationists and in saying that the brief of scientists is not to reconcile religion with science. We shouldn’t be doing theology.

But in fact, and this is my beef (a small one, like a filet mignon): Barash may not be accomodating science with religion, but he’s still discussing their relationship, and his view of their incompatibility—in a science class. I wouldn’t do that, especially in a public university. One could even make the argument that he’s skirting the First Amendment here, mixing government (a state university) and religion. After all, if Eric Hedin can’t tell his students in a Ball State University science class that biology and cosmology are compatible with belief in God, why is it okay to say that they’re incompatible with God?

While I do touch lightly on the religion/science issue in class when discussing the historical evidence for evolution—by saying that Darwin’s arguments won the day because the facts he adduced did not comport with the creationist views of the day—that’s about as far as I’ll go. It is my job to teach science, not to discuss the religious beliefs of my students, to show how science opposes them, or to try to tell them they can have Darwin and Jesus, too.  I am not there to dispel any discomfort that arises when some students realize that religion doesn’t sit so nicely with evolution. I am there to teach them the latest ideas and facts about evolution, period. If students ask me, “Well, Professor Coyne, how do you think that relates to religion?”, I’ll tell them that if they want to discuss it, I’ll be glad to make an appointment to talk in my office.

In other words, while I think Barash is 100% right, and that religion and science are indeed incompatible in critical ways (see The Albatross), I think he needs to knock off giving The Talk. It is not science, but a form of theology or philosophy.  By all means let him trumpet his views in The New York Times, as he did so well, or any other similar venue. I admire him for standing up to public opinion and accommodationist organizations like the NCSE. But I’m not so sure that this stuff belongs in a science class. Nevertheless, if Barash insists on giving The Talk, he might as well make the other big refutation of NOMA: religion isn’t the only repository for thinking about meanings, morals and values. For surely the students have heard about something called “philosophy.”

h/t: Tom C. and many other readers who called Barash’s piece to my attention.