What are the “best” arguments for God? More kudos (and raspberries) for David Bentley Hart’s new book.

January 16, 2014 • 7:48 am

The most common critique leveled at New Atheists is that we attack only puerile, fundamentalist forms of religion, and never engage with the “best” arguments of the faithful: those adumbrated by Sophisticated Theologians™.  Never mind that most believers accept a view of God more anthropomorphic than as simply a “ground of being” or a deistic entity that made the world and then refused to engage with it further. If you want data to support this, at least for U.S. Christians, go here. Polls consistently show that around 70-80% of Americans believe in the existence of Heaven, Hell, Satan, and angels. And let’s not even discuss whether the majority of Muslims think of Allah as a “ground of being” rather than as a humanoid entity who tells them how to behave.  Anyone who claims that regular monotheists view God like Karen Armstrong’s Apophatic Entity or Tillich’s Ground of Being simply hasn’t gotten out enough.

Further, it’s obvious that the vast majority of harm done in the name of faith is done not by those who see god as a Ground of Being, but rather as an anthropomorphic entity who has a personal relationship with his minions and supplies them with a moral code. For it is the belief that God has wishes for humanity, and a code of right and wrong, that drives people to do things like oppose abortion and stem cell research, deny rights to women and gays, burn “witches,” throw acid in the faces of schoolgirls, and torture Catholic children with guilt about their masturbation.

The vast majority of believers don’t even read theology, and are barely aware of the arguments for God made by Sophisticated Theologians™.  So is it our real duty as atheists to refute those arcane theological arguments, or to prevent the harm done by religion? To me, the latter course is preferable. Still it’s also fun (and marginally profitable) to read and refute the arguments of theologians, for it’s only there that one can truly see intelligence so blatantly coopted and corrupted to prove what one has decided is true beforehand. Theology is the one academic discipline where people get paid not to investigate their beliefs, but to rationalize them. Yes, it’s more useful for atheists to point out to real believers the lack of evidence for their faith—and that in fact is what Dawkins did in The God Delusion—but it’s more fun to chase the tails of obscurantists like Alvin Plantinga and John Haught.

And now, apparently, those ranks include David Bentley Hart, who has written a new book that’s being touted as the most Sophisticated and Irrefutable Evidence for God Ever. The book is The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss, and although I haven’t yet read it (believe me, I will, and have ordered it), I posted a critique of Damon Linker’s blurb for the book that appeared in The Week magazine. 

Another encomium has just arrived for Hart’s book, this time from Oliver Burkeman, who writes at the Guardian that The Experience of God is “The one theology book all atheists really should read.” I’m not sure whether Burkeman is an atheist, but his piece comes across as pure faitheism: “you atheists won’t make any headway until you come to grips with the arguments for God made by people like Hart.” For Hart has presented the Best Case for God, and we’ve all ignored it. As Burkeman argues:

Yet prominent atheists display an almost aggressive lack of curiosity when it comes to the facts about belief. In The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins expertly demolishes what he calls ‘the God hypothesis’, but devotes only a few sketchy anecdotes to establishing that this God hypothesis is the one that has defined religious belief through history, or defines it around the world today. AC Grayling insists that atheists are excused the bother of actually reading theology – where they might catch up on debates among believers about what they believe – because atheism “rejects the premise” of theology. And when The Atlantic ran a piece last year entitled Study theology, even if you don’t believe in God, Jerry Coyne, the atheist blogosphere’s Victor Meldrew, called it “the world’s worst advice.” And on and on it goes.

I had to look up Victor Meldrew, who turns out to be a BBC sitcom character known for being a curmudgeon—though he had every right (like me) to be curmudgeonly.  And does Burkeman realize that I spent several years reading theology before I decided that it was mind-numbing and largely worthless exercise? It’s not like I haven’t heard their Best Arguments.

But on to our failures, as seen by Burkeman:

My modest New Year’s wish for 2014, then, is that atheists who care about honest argument – and about maybe actually getting somewhere in these otherwise mind-numbingly circular debates – might consider reading just one book by a theologian, David Bentley Hart’s The Experience of God, published recently by Yale University Press. Not because I think they’ll be completely convinced by it. (I’m not, and I’m certainly not convinced by Hart’s other publicly expressed views, which tend towards the implacably socially conservative.) They should read it because Hart marshals powerful historical evidence and philosophical argument to suggest that atheists – if they want to attack the opposition’s strongest case – badly need to up their game.

But what,  exactly do we mean by “the opposition’s strongest case”? I can think of three ways to construe that:

1. The case that provides the strongest evidence for God’s existence.  This is the way scientists would settle an argument about existence claims: by adducing data. This category’s best argument for God used to be the Argument from Design, since there was no plausible scientific alternative to God’s creation of the marvelous “designoid” features of plants and animals. But Darwin put paid to that one. Theologians now rely on arguments involving the fine-tuning of the universe or the supposed “innate morality” of human beings (more on that tomorrow), but these have good secular alternatives.

2. The philosophical argument that is most tricky, or hardest to refute: in other words, the argument for God that has the greatest degree of sophistry.  This used to include the Ontological Arguments, which briefly stymied even Bertrand Russell. But we soon realized that “existence is not a quality”, and that, in fact, existence claims can be settled only by observation or testing, not by logic.

3. The argument that is irrefutable because it’s untestable.  Given that arguments in the first two categories are now untenable, people like Hart have proposed conceptions of God that are so nebulous that we can’t figure out what they mean.  And because they are not only obscure but don’t say anything about the nature of God that can be compared to the way the universe is, they can’t be refuted. To any rationalist or scientist, this automatically rules them out of rational consideration, for if an observation comports with everything, and can’t be disproven, it is totally useless as an explanation of reality. I might as well say that there’s an invisible teddy bear that sustains the universe, and without my Ineffable Teddy there would be no cosmos.  But nobody can see that bear, for he is the Ursine Ground of Being: ineffable and undetectable, though his Bearness permeates and supports everything.

And this, in fact, is what Hart has apparently done in his new book. Burkeman summarizes Hart’s Irrefutable God by quoting Linker’s characterization of it:

… according to the classical metaphysical traditions of both the East and West, God is the unconditioned cause of reality – of absolutely everything that is – from the beginning to the end of time. Understood in this way, one can’t even say that God “exists” in the sense that my car or Mount Everest or electrons exist. God is what grounds the existence of every contingent thing, making it possible, sustaining it through time, unifying it, giving it actuality. God is the condition of the possibility of anything existing at all.

Not only is this meaningless (I’ll read Hart’s book to see if I can suss out any meaning), but it’s also untestable.  And there is not an iota of evidence for such a God, so on what grounds should we believe it? Hart claims that this is the conception of God that has prevailed throughout most of history, but I seriously doubt that. Aquinas, Luther, Augustine: none of those people saw God in such a way. And it’s certainly not the view that prevails now, as you can easily see by Googling a few polls. I can make up yet another God with just as much supporting evidence Hart’s: God is a deistic God who has always been there but has done nothing. He didn’t even create the universe: he let that happen according to the laws of physics, from which universes can arise via fluctuations in a quantum vacuum. My God is just sitting there, watching over us all, but only for his amusement. He’s ineffable and indolent.

I claim that my Coyneian God is just as valid as Hart’s God, for neither can be tested, and thus there’s no reason to believe in either.

As Burkeman notes, Hart has removed God from the class of entities the exist and transformed Him into merely an Idea: a philosophical concept that can be subject only to philosophical arguments:

God, in short, isn’t one very impressive thing among many things that might or might not exist; “not just some especially resplendent object among all the objects illuminated by the light of being,” as Hart puts it. Rather, God is “the light of being itself”, the answer to the question of why there’s existence to begin with.

. . . Since I can hear atheist eyeballs rolling backwards in their sockets with scorn, it’s worth saying again: the point isn’t that Hart’s right. It’s that he’s making a case that’s usually never addressed by atheists at all. If you think this God-as-the-condition-of-existence argument is rubbish, you need to say why. And unlike for the superhero version, scientific evidence won’t clinch the deal. The question isn’t a scientific one, about which things exist. It’s a philosophical one, about what existence is and on what it depends.

Therefore it’s immune to refutation.  Whether God “is” now depends, as Bill Clinton anticipated, on what your definition of “is” is.  But this is all a stupendous confidence game. Not only is Hart wrong in claiming that his conception of God is valid since it’s the one embraced most consistently through “the history of monotheism,” but, as all scientists know, how widely something is accepted is no evidence for its validity. For the vast majority of modern history, women were viewed as intellectually inferior beings.  But that is simply a culturally-conditioned belief that supports no argument for female inferiority. Likewise, just because a bunch of Sophisticated Theologians™ agreed on God as a Sustainer of the Universe and Ground of All Being does not make it so.  Why on earth does that argument have any force at all?

Burkeman (and Hart) note that one way to dismiss Hart’s argument that only a minority of believers accept the Ground-of-Being God is “to prove the point with survey data about what people believe.” Well, I just did that above, and could adduce much more data. People believe in a personal and anthropomorphic God: one who has humanlike emotions, cares about us, and wants us to behave in certain ways. So Hart’s argument fails in the only way it can be tested. But we’re supposed to dismiss it on another ground—a dismissal that’s impossible since Hart has made his concept irrefutable:

But second, even if you could show that most believers believe in a superhero God, would that mean it’s the only kind with which atheists need engage? If a committed creationist wrote a book called The Evolution Delusion, but only attacked the general public’s understanding of evolution, we’d naturally dismiss them as disingenuous. We’d demand, instead, that they seek out what the best and most acclaimed minds in the field had concluded about evolution, then try dismantling that. Which is also why atheists should read Hart’s book: to deny themselves the lazy option of sticking to easy targets.

As I pointed out in my earlier post, these situations are not comparable. The arguments for evolution are based on evidence, not philosophy, and can be comprehended by the average person: one who, for example, read my book.  Hart’s arguments are simply made-up stuff, and even though he’s smart and uses big words, there is no more evidence for his God than there is for the anthropomorphic Gods of Alvin Plantinga or Rick Warren. In other words, the difference in expertise between theologians and “average” believers is small—not nearly as great as the difference in expertise between professional evolutionists and science-friendly laypeople.  The difference between theologians and believers is not their differential acquaintance with the truth about God, but the greater acquaintance of theologians with the history of theology. People like Hart, despite their intelligence, have no more handle on the nature of God than do Joe and Sally in the street. Theologians are, as we all know, simply making stuff up, and then selling it using their academic credentials and fancy words. Let Hart give us one bit of evidence that he has greater insight into God than anyone else, and then I’ll pay attention to what he has to say. Otherwise, I see him as retreating to the Last Redoubt of the Theologian: the definition of God as something that cannot be refuted (and therefore something that cannot be supported).

Isaac Chotiner at The New Republic has pointed out some of these problems in a new piece, also based on Linker’s blurb for Hart: “The case for God’s existence is empowering atheists.” As Chotiner notes, Hart appears to have redefined god in a way that immunizes Him against disproof, simply by equating God with emotions shared by many people:

Linker continues with this: “In a move sure to enrage atheists, Hart even goes so far as to argue that faith in this classical notion of God can never be ‘wholly and coherently rejected’ — and not only because it may very well be self-contradictory to prove the nonexistence of an absolute, transcendent ground of existence.”

If this is not tautologous enough for you, try [Linker’s] comment:

The deeper reason why theism can’t be rejected, according to Hart, is that every pursuit of truth, every attempt to be good, every longing for beauty presupposes the existence of some idea of truth, goodness, and beauty from which these particular instances are derived. And these transcendental ideas unite in the classical concept of God, who simply is truth, goodness, and beauty. That’s why, although it isn’t necessary to believe in God in some explicit way in order to be good, it certainly is the case (in Hart’s words) “that to seek the good is already to believe in God, whether one wishes to do so or not.”

Here I would turn again to Linker’s comment implying that the “major world religions” have a view of God similar to the one that Linker lays out above. If you think this is the case, ask yourself how many major world religions will consider you a believer in their particular faiths just because you merely state that you “seek the good,” which I would hope nearly all of us do.

In summary, Linker is unable to make a case for God that doesn’t define God as such an intrinsic part of the universe (“truth, goodness, and beauty”) that God exists by definition. If I were a religious believer, I would likely neither appreciate the concessions that Linker has made, nor go along with his account of my beliefs.

Chotiner is absolutely correct here. If you define God as simply the set of our most admirable aspirations, then of course God exists. But you could also define God as the set of our most unpalatable aspirations: greed, duplicity, criminality, and so on.  And that kind of god could also exist by definition: as the Ground of All Evil.  I claim that, in fact, there’s just as much evidence for that god as there is for Hart’s God.  The reader might amuse herself by thinking of other kinds of irrefutable gods.

So if I had to ask Hart three questions, they would be these:

1. On what basis do you know that God is a Ground-of-Being God instead of an anthropomorphic God? (In your answer, you cannot include as evidence the dubious claim that this is the kind of God that most people have accepted throughout history.)

2. How do you know that your Ground-of-Being god embodies truth, goodness, and beauty rather than lies, evil, and ugliness?

3. What would the universe look like if your God didn’t exist?

h/t: Christopher

Two squirrels for Thursday

January 16, 2014 • 5:55 am

They’ll never replace cats, but squirrels are the Official Website Rodent™. Here are two great ones..

The first is from photographer Andrei Stancu (see his site for lots of great squirrel photos), and has been captioned:

“Well you can tell by the way I use my walk—I’m a woman’s man, no time to talk”

Strutting squirrelHe’s clearly on his way to get two slices.

And this is from reader “w”, who labels it “squirrel exultant.” Atheists will see it as celebrating the wonders of life; religionists as praising God for making a world that was intelligently designed to contain nuts:

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p.s. If you haven’t looked at Matthew’s post right below, please do so immediately. It’s an amazing video of how falcons hunt using falcon-mounted cameras.

Amazing bird’s-eye view of how falcons hunt

January 16, 2014 • 5:47 am

by Matthew Cobb

This dramatic video of how falcons hunt just popped in my Tw*tter feed from the Journal of Experimental Biology (@J_Exp_Biol). I fear that crows were harmed in the making of this film.

The blurb below the video says:

Suzanne Amador Kane, working with falconers across the globe, has discovered that falcons pursue prey by keeping the image of the prey in the same place on their retina during the pursuit as they close in. This movie shows ground breaking footage capture by movie cameras mounted on hunting falcons filmed by Eddy De Mol and his colleagues Valerie Collet and Francois Lorrain.

You can read the original article from the Journal of Experimental Biology, free to all, here.

Thursday: Hili Dialogue

January 16, 2014 • 3:26 am

Today’s Hili dialogue is a first: the only one originally created in English. There’s thus no Polish translation:

Hili: Jerry said I was a Queen.
Sarah: But in English all female cats are called “queens”.
Hili: We are not interested in that information.

(Photo: Sarah Lawson)

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I notice that Hili, insisting that she’s a real Queen, has started using the royal “we.”

All countries shall have prizes

January 15, 2014 • 3:30 pm

Reader David sent me this map from Business Insider showing what each country leads the world in. A lot of it will be visible by clicking the image below to enlarge it, but go to the original map to read everything and see how some things were measured.

As Michael Kelly at BI notes:

A wonderful map created by William Samari, Ray Yamartino, and Rafaan Anvari of DogHouseDiaries illustrates what every country does better than every other country.

They collected the information from various sources and sprinkled in some quirkier rankings since many countries led the world in multiple things.

“Myanmar leads the world in ‘Speaking Burmese.’  That’s kind of a silly thing but still true,” Anvari told BI. “UK leads in fascist movements, but that’s all movements in history, not active movements.”

Most interesting to me: Nepal, Bulgaria, Costa Rica, Rwanda, Finland, the Netherlands, Australia, and. . . SWEDEN!

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The Discovery Institute gets terminally desperate: considers evolutionary rebuttals of creationist arguments as “condemning religion”

January 15, 2014 • 2:19 pm

The Discovery Institute, losing its battle for Intelligent Design (ID) on all fronts (they can’t even get it taught in a Texas community college!) has resorted to a desperation move: attacking the characters of evolutionary biologists.  How this will give evidence for ID is beyond me: perhaps they think that if they show character flaws in evolutionists they thereby discredit our discipline. But whatever happened to their promise to that “scientific” evidence for ID was “right around the corner”? They seem to have forgotten that one.

And they should be mindful of the beam in their own eye: despite their claim that ID isn’t religiously motivated, virtually everyone at the Discovery Institute is religious, and some of them (like Paul Nelson and William Dembski) unwisely proclaim their religious motivations when they think they’re out of earshot.

So now, in their efforts to support ID, they’ve started a “hyprocrisy watch” on Professor Ceiling Cat.  But the “hypocrisy” they discern in me in is ludicrous, as recounted in their latest screed at Evolution News & Views by David Klinghoffer, “Hypocrisy watch: Jerry Coyne, Dr. Hedin’s persecutor, turns to teaching teligion in the science classroom.”

What is the hypocrisy I evinced this time? It’s this: I called for Eric Hedin at Ball State University to stop pretending that ID was science in his Physics and Astronomy class, and stop proselytizing for religion in that class. In other words, at a public university, I said it was unconstitutional (and bad science) to teach discredited religious views as science.

But then I apparently did the same thing! What oh what did the pernicious moggie do?

I answered student questions about my book at a class in Genetics and Evolution at Duke University (a private school). I do this every year, and often the students ask questions that are religiously-inspired critiques of evolution, or stuff that they’ve heard about evolution from creationist sources. I answer these questions and criticisms as best I can. And here are the two I wrote about when I Skyped the class from Poland:

I addressed, by Skype, an introductory evolution/genetics class taught by my ex-student (and now chair of biology at Duke) Mohamed Noor. They are reading my book and asked lots of questions. As usual, most of those questions were about the intersection of science and religion — students are really curious about that. Several students had also read ID books and asked me about Haeckel’s “fraud,” as well as more conventional creationist questions about why evolution didn’t violate the Second Law of Thermodynamics (a softball!).

Well that certainly got Klinghoffer’s knickers in a twist!  In his mind, correcting the misconceptions of students who raise objections to evolution, whether or not those objections derive from religion, is the same as teaching religion in a class. As Klinghoffer says:

Coyne instructed a course on “evolution/genetics” about what he himself terms “religion”: specifically, “the intersection of science and religion,” intelligent design, “creationist” challenges to evolution based on the Second Law of Thermodynamics, and no doubt more along the same lines.

In his mind, it is acceptable to teach about religion in a science class, so long as you are condemning it. It’s acceptable to teach about intelligent design, so long as you are condemning it. It’s acceptable to teach about “Haeckel’s ‘fraud,'” as long as you’re minimizing it. It’s acceptable to teach about challenges to Darwinian evolution based on the Second Law of Thermodynamics, so long as you’re denying that the challenges have any force to them.

This is crazy.  Any scientist has the right to correct student misunderstandings about science in the name of good science education.  Or does Klinghoffer think that I should refuse to answer the objection that the Second Law of Thermodynamics prohibits evolution, because that’s “”condemning religion.” In fact, I answered both of the questions he mentions without condemning religion at all, so how is religion even involved in this issue? Nor did I say that my answers proved that God didn’t exist—something that Eric Hedin didn’t refrain from when he used scientific observations of the cosmos as evidence for God.

Really, these guys don’t have enough to do, so they trawl my website looking for these ridiculous examples of “hypocrisy.”  It doesn’t irk me at all, though, for it’s funny: it shows that they’ve failed in their main aim to get American schools to teach intelligent design, and expel materialism from public science classes.

It’s a shame, because I’m sure Klinghoffer has enough brains to have really made something of himself—to have accomplished something for the good of humanity beyond Lying for Jesus.  When I see guys like him—who are by no means dumb—wasting their lives in such futile efforts, I remember the scathing dispatches of H. L. Mencken from Dayton, Tennessee during the Scopes trial. This description of William Jennings Bryan was from the Baltimore Evening Sun, July 17, 1925:

The old boy [Bryan] grows more and more pathetic. He has aged greatly during the past few years and begins to look elderly and enfeebled. All that remains of his old fire is now in his black eyes. They glitter like dark gems, and in their glitter there is immense and yet futile malignancy. That is all that is left of the Peerless Leader of thirty years ago. Once he had one leg in the White House and the nation trembled under his roars. Now he is a tinpot pope in the coca-cola belt and a brother to the forlorn pastors who belabor half-wits in galvanized iron tabernacles behind the railroad yards.

People like Klinghoffer, it seems, have completely bypasssed the Peerless Leader stage and gone directly to the end stage of Tinpot Pope.

My snake-handling piece in The New Republic, and a note

January 15, 2014 • 11:46 am

Just for the record, The New Republic has republished (with some changes) my website piece on the refusal of a Tennessee grand jury to indict a snake handler despite his blatant violation of the law. My revised piece is called “Snake handler not charged with abusing animals thanks to Tennessee definition of ‘religious freedom’.”

While looking for extra links for the NR piece, I found an absolutely stunningly dumb article from the Washington Post: “Mack Wolford’s death a reminder that serpent handler should be lauded for their faith.” WHAT? The author, Ralph Hood, says this:

As a long time student and even admirer of the faith of handlers, I am persuaded that there is a curious bias in America culture. This bias permits high risk behaviors among consenting adults for all kinds of dangerous activities, from car racing to hang gliding to football but excludes religious ritual.  Why should religion be any different?  Among believers, the plain meaning of Mark is clear. The imperative to handle serpents does not include the caveat that one cannot be bitten, maimed or even killed. The tradition documents this fact as does concern over the death of Pastor Wolford.

Yet from the handler’s perspective, the issue is not that one dies.  I have heard it preached on more than one occasion that “nobody gets out of this life alive.” The issue for handlers is not that you die, but how you die.  Dying obedient to the Lord is what is crucial and assures salvation. Handlers believe in an eternal with God and believing in and practicing the Word of God is what assures this. Most handlers die from causes other than serpent bites. But for those, whom God brought to his bosom by a bite, one need not mourn a loss of life, but applaud the handler’s belief that they have gone home to be with their God.

One need not legislate against a practice among consenting adults, comforted by their King James Bible, sincere in their effort to practice all that their God commands, and whose death like the bite of the serpent lacks the sting and futility that outsiders attribute to it. “O death, where is thy sting?  O grave, where is thy victory? (1 Corinthians 15:55). ” These words from the King James Bible may ring hollow in a rapidly secularizing society, but not among those that believe in a literal transcendence. As Barb Elkins, the grand matriarch of the Jolo church once told me, “If you do not believe in handling, pray for those who do.” May God bless Pastor Wolford and his family.

Well, I agree that we shouldn’t pass laws preventing adults from engaging in dangerous practices in the service of their faith: that’s discrimination against religion, and takes away from adults the right to do what they want so long as it hurts nobody else. (Of course, we have to think about how this practice affects others, including the children who are taught it!). But it is by no means “laudable” to play with venomous snakes in the service of God.  The difference between snake-handling and other dangerous practices, like race-car driving or football, is that with sports there is the possibility of a tangible reward at the end: you win, and can get lots of $$.  You know that if your team wins the Superbowl, or you win the Indy 500 race, you’re gonna go home with a lot of dosh. But the “victory” in snake-handling is illusory: you supposedly go to heaven by playing with snakes for Jesus.  There’s not an iota of evidence for that, and therefore the activity is profoundly stupid.  If you want to handle snakes as a form of thrill-seeking, as did Steve Irwin (he ultimately died from a stingray barb piercing his chest), fine—so long as you don’t injure the animals—but to say it’s “laudable” when it demonstrates your faith in God is simply crazy.

Faith in fact is never “laudable,” for it’s not admirable to believe in something without evidence.  But when that belief risks your life (and Mac Wolford had a wife and daughter), it is not only not laudable, but contemptible.

If you want a contrast with Hood’s ludicrous piece, read this moving eyewitness account, also in The Washington Post, by Lauren Pond, “Why I watched a snake-handling pastor die for his faith.” Be sure to see the photo gallery by clicking on the picture at the top (warning: it shows photos of Wolford after the bite and right before he died).

Annual Edge Question, and my answer

January 15, 2014 • 8:48 am

The annual “Edge question” has been published along with its answers. As you may know, Edge is the website run by John Brockman, the world’s premier agent for writers of popular science, who is a tough customer (beneath which lurks a softhearted Jewish grandfather) as well as someone with a remarkable feeling for the Zeitgeist about popular science. It was John, as I recall, who pushed Richard Dawkins to publish The God Delusion at just the time when it would hit the hardest.

Every year John poses to many of his authors a question that we’re supposed to answer in 1000 words or fewer, and these questions are ultimately collated and issued as a book. This year’s question is this one:

THE 2014 EDGE QUESTION 

Science advances by discovering new things and developing new ideas. Few truly new ideas are developed without abandoning old ones first. As theoretical physicist Max Planck (1858-1947) noted, “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.” In other words, science advances by a series of funerals. Why wait that long?

WHAT SCIENTIFIC IDEA IS READY FOR RETIREMENT?

Ideas change, and the times we live in change. Perhaps the biggest change today is the rate of change. What established scientific idea is ready to be moved aside so that science can advance?

We were asked to title our mini-essays simply with the name of the idea that we thought should be retired.

You can see the list of 174 responses on the same page (those respondents include many famous scientists, philosophers, and public intellectuals) and you can read all the answers here.  I noticed that Sam Harris published his answer on his website: what he wanted discareded was “Our narrow definition of science.” That is, Sam sees no hard-and-fast distinction between science and other forms of rational inquiry such as philosophy, and wants to jettison the narrow definition of science as “what scientists do”. I’ve been saying that for a long time (I use plumbing and car mechanics as examples of “science construed broadly), so of course I like his answer.  And since Sam saw fit to publish his answer, I’ll publish mine.  The concept I want to discard doesn’t seem like a scientific idea, but a scientific/philosophical idea, which by Sam’s lights, however, makes it scientific.  And John had no problem with it.

Yes, folks, I don’t expect you’ll all agree with me, but I think it’s time to jettison the notion of. . .

Among virtually all scientists, dualism is dead. Our thoughts and actions are the outputs of a computer made of meat—our brain—a computer that must obey the laws of physics. Our choices, therefore, must also obey those laws. This puts paid to the traditional idea of dualistic or “libertarian” free will: that our lives comprise a series of decisions in which we could have chosen otherwise. We know now that we can never do otherwise, and we know it in two ways.

The first is from scientific experience, which shows no evidence for a mind separate from the physical brain. This means that “I”—whatever “I” means—may have the illusion of choosing, but my choices are in principle predictable by the laws of physics, excepting any quantum indeterminacy that acts in my neurons. In short, the traditional notion of free will—defined by Anthony Cashmore as “a belief that there is a component to biological behavior that is something more than the unavoidable consequences of the genetic and environmental history of the individual and the possible stochastic laws of nature”—is dead on arrival.

Second, recent experiments support the idea that our “decisions” often precede our consciousness of having made them. Increasingly sophisticated studies using brain scanning show that those scans can often predict the choices one will make several seconds before the subject is conscious of having chosen! Indeed, our feeling of “making a choice” may itself be a post hoc confabulation, perhaps an evolved one.

When pressed, nearly all scientists and most philosophers admit this. Determinism and materialism, they agree, win the day. But they’re remarkably quiet about it. Instead of spreading the important scientific message that our behaviors are the deterministic results of a physical process, they’d rather invent new “compatibilist” versions of free will: versions that comport with determinism. “Well, when we order strawberry ice cream we really couldn’t have ordered vanilla”, they say, “but we still have free will in another sense. And it’s the only sense that’s important.”

Unfortunately, what’s “important” differs among philosophers. Some say that what’s important is that our complex brain evolved to absorb many inputs and run them through complex programs (“ruminations”) before giving an output (“decision”). Others say that what’s important is that it’s our own brain and nobody else’s that makes our decisions, even if those decisions are predetermined. Some even argue that we have free will because most of us choose without duress: nobody holds a gun to our head and says “order the strawberry.” But of course that’s not true: the guns are the electrical signals in our brain.

In the end, there’s nothing “free” about compatibilist free will. It’s a semantic game in which choice becomes an illusion: something that isn’t what it seems. Whether or not we can “choose” is a matter for science, not philosophy, and science tells us that we’re complex marionettes dancing to the strings of our genes and environments. Philosophy, watching the show, says, “pay attention to me, for I’ve changed the game.”

So why does the term “free will” still hang around when science has destroyed its conventional meaning? Some compatibilists, perhaps, are impressed by their feeling that they can choose, and must comport this with science. Others have said explicitly that characterizing “free will” as an illusion will hurt society. If people believe they’re puppets, well, then maybe they’ll be crippled by nihilism, lacking the will to leave their beds. This attitude reminds me of the (probably apocryphal) statement of the Bishop of Worcester’s wife when she heard about Darwin’s theory: “My dear, descended from the apes! Let us hope it is not true, but if it is, let us pray it will not become generally known.”

What puzzles me is why compatibilists spend so much time trying to harmonize determinism with a historically non-deterministic concept instead of tackling the harder but more important task of selling the public on the scientific notions of materialism, naturalism, and their consequence: the mind is produced by the brain.

These consequences of “incompatibilism” mean a complete rethinking of how we punish and reward people. When we realize that the person who kills because of a mental disorder had precisely as much “choice” as someone who murders from childhood abuse or a bad environment, we’ll see that everyone deserves the mitigation now given only to those deemed unable to choose between right and wrong. For if our actions are predetermined, none of us can make that choice. Punishment for crimes will still be needed, of course, to deter others, rehabilitate offenders, and remove criminals from society. But now this can be put on a more scientific footing: what interventions can best help both society and the offender? And we lose the useless idea of justice as retribution.

Accepting incompatibilism also dissolves the notion of moral responsibility. Yes, we are responsible for our actions, but only in the sense that they are committed by an identifiable individual. But if you can’t really choose to be good or bad—to punch someone or save a drowning child—what do we mean by moralresponsibility? Some may argue that getting rid of that idea also jettisons an important social good. I claim the opposite: by rejecting moral responsibility, we are free to judge actions not by some dictate, divine or otherwise, but by their consequences: what is good or bad for society.

Finally, rejecting free will means rejecting the fundamental tenets of the many religions that depend on freely choosing a god or a savior.

The fears motivating some compatibilists—that a version of free will must be maintained lest society collapse—won’t be realized. The illusion of agency is so powerful that even strong incompatibilists like myself will always act as if we had choices, even though we know that we don’t. We have no choice in this matter. But we can at least ponder why evolution might have bequeathed us such a powerful illusion.

Let me add one thing here, which is a point also made by the philosopher Bruce Waller in his remarkable book Against Moral Responsibility. (The book’s thesis is that because we are the products of our genes and environments, and cannot “choose” how to behave, we must discard the notion of moral responsibility, which depend on the notion that we can choose between the “good” and “bad”. But before you start raising objections about how society would fall apart without this, or about how some philosophers have comported determinism with moral responsibility and free will, read how Waller answers those objections.)

Waller points out that while philosophers have thought of diverse ways to rescue our notion of moral responsibility even in the face of determinism, those ways are orthogonal and often incompatible.  The same holds for free will, which is closely connected with moral responsibility (Waller happens to be a compatibilist, but his notion of “free will” seems pretty lame to me—the one weak link in an otherwise wonderful book.)  There is only one kind of incompatibilism: we don’t have free will in any sense because we are beings whose molecules obey the law of science.  But there are gazillions of different forms of compatibilism: ways to rescue the notion of free will. That diversity shows you right off the bat that there is no easy way to claim that humans have moral responsibility. As Waller says of those who try to rescue that responsibility, “These are wonderfully creative theories, but their sheer number indicates their problems.”

I am convinced that philosophers want to save the notions of free will and moral responsibility because our sense of having these facilities is so strong that we are forced to believe in them (and rationalize them, which philosophers seem to do with the same facility that theolgoians rescue the notion of God) despite the evidence that our “choices” are the inevitable products of our genes and our experiences.  An added factor is that philosophers like Dennett and van Inwagen (I don’t mean to imply that they share the same ideas!) have said explicitly that if the public truly thought that they couldn’t make real, free choices, or had a moral responsibility stemming from the idea of free will (Dennett’s a compatibilist; van Inwagen a libertarian), society would fall apart. I don’t believe that, for I don’t see hard determinists acting immorally.