Contending with Bart Ehrman

2013/04/29

This post reviews an essay in the book Contending with Christianity’s Critics, the latest installment in the Ultimate Philosophy Challenge that I undertook some time ago. This time I’m looking at Daniel Wallace’s essay “How Badly Did the Early Scribes Corrupt the New Testament?”.

I was looking forward to Daniel Wallace’s essay, because it is the first to directly address a professional skeptic whose work I’ve seen*. Wallace speaks to Bart Ehrman’s arguments for scriptural corruption – that is, the position that the texts of the Bible as we have them are not the same as those penned by the original first-century authors. He doesn’t address Jesus Interrupted (the book that opened this Challenge), but Ehrman’s earlier book, Misquoting Jesus (MJ from here on). So I had some more Ehrman to read. I didn’t mind – he’s a clear and engaging writer, and it was nice to have an excuse for a sidetrack from the apologetics.

Interestingly, the main disagreement Wallace has with Ehrman isn’t a deep split over how to approach the problem of New Testament studies. They both appeal to the same sort of evidence. They even agree on some key conclusions: of the seven major examples where Ehrman suggests important doctrinal points depend on passages that have been changed, Wallace flat-out agrees with Ehrman on three of them. (That is, Wallace agrees that the passages as we have them were not written by the original authors. He denies that this fact undermines important doctrines.) On the other points, he disagrees in highly technical ways, so that I cannot competently referee the disagreement.

What sort of differences can I evaluate?

Well, Ehrman focusses on the fact that we cannot be sure they are authentic, and Wallace focusses on the fact that we cannot be sure they are inauthentic.

Call me conciliatory, but maybe they’re both right. Maybe the original texts of the New Testament books were fairly close to what we have today. But, using evidence available to us, we cannot be certain how close, or on what points. A belief in Biblical inerrancy seems to be fatally undermined by the evidence. But it’s likely true that the original authors of the books in the New Testament believed most of the main things Christians today believe about Jesus.

The great lesson I took away from Ehrman’s book is that the evidence that has survived is undeniably altered in some places. There’s a whole lot of evidence that has not survived. (Ehrman and Wallace both talk about “patristic” writings – by early church fathers – that talk about texts we do not have any more.) What changes may have taken place without leaving a paper trail for people like Ehrman and Wallace to follow? All of the key evidence has spent most of its history in the hands of people who were hell-bent on making sure we believe one story: the now-dominant, orthodox story. It is biased evidence. Even knowing that, I’m willing to take it as probably being fairly close to the original, for the most part. But those qualifications (“probably” and “fairly close”) stand.

So much for the philosophical differences. Unfortunately, some of the content of this article is more personal. Wallace’s rhetoric leaves me with strong doubts about his inclination to be impartial. He uses the term “radical” about any view that departs from orthodox Christianity, and anyone who promotes such a view. And he distorts Ehrman’s own claims in rather easy-to-spot ways. Here is one of his main accusations (p152):

“There are more variations among our manuscripts than there are words in the New Testament,” argues Ehrman. Elsewhere he states that the number of variants is as high as 400,000. That is true enough but by itself is misleading. Anyone who teaches NT textual criticism knows that this fact is only part of the picture and that, if left dangling in front of the reader without explanation, is a distorted view. Once it is revealed that most variants are inconsequential – involving spelling differences that cannot even be translated, articles with proper nouns, word order changes, and the like – and that only a small minority of the variants alter the meaning of the text, the whole picture begins to come into focus. Indeed, less than 1 percent of the textual variants are both meaningful and viable.

(As a side note, even before I read MJ, the math of this jumped out at me. Less than 1% of 400,000. Wallace is basically saying, “Ehrman exaggerates. There are only upwards of four thousand meaningful and viable variants in the New Testament texts.” Is that supposed to inspire my confidence?)

And here is a passage from Ehrman that gives the claim Wallace pounces on (pp10-11):

Possibly it is easiest to put it in comparative terms: there are more differences among our manuscripts than there are words in the New Testament.

Most of these differences are completely immaterial and insignificant. A good portion of them simply show us that scribes in antiquity could spell no better than most people can today (and they didn’t even have dictionaries, let alone spell check).

Do you notice the immediate context of the line Wallace quoted above? The very next sentence completely undermines Wallace’s claim that Ehrman is alarmist in his rhetoric. Ehrman raises readers’ interest with an impressive statistic, then provides context, encouraging us not to over-interpret that statistic. Wallace claims that “Scholars bear a sacred duty not to alarm layreaders on issues where they have little understanding.” What about undermining a colleague’s credibility with selective quote-mining?

So Wallace is quite willing to use misleading rhetoric to undermine Ehrman’s credibility. But let’s return to the actual claims at hand.

I am open to the possibility that Ehrman overstates the corruption of the biblical texts. Wallace is right that Ehrman would probably sell fewer books if he put more emphasis on the uncertainty and less on the possibility that the texts are altered. On the other hand, Ehrman came to these conclusions from within an evangelical belief system. He was a believer; he learned about the texts; and the evidence forced him against his inclination to reject the inerrantist position he preferred. That gives him far more credibility as an unbiased investigator than those who believe their salvation and self-identity rely on the conclusion they defend.

The question of how unchanged our modern reconstructions of the New Testament are from their original forms is a fascinating debate from a sociological standpoint. But I think I should close by pointing out that, however this debate comes out, it doesn’t really affect the underlying question at issue in the Challenge: does a god – the Christian God or any other – actually exist? If the Greek and Hebrew texts we have today are exactly the words written by the first people to put them to paper, and if those words faithfully record the recollections of the early Christians, it would still just be a report of the beliefs of some ancient people. It would, at best, make the merest smidge of a difference in my estimate of how likely a god is, or the possibility of life after death. It would have no affect on my moral rejection of the idea of substitutiary atonement or the doctrine of infinite consequences for finite actions.

Footnote:
* Yes, a couple of the earlier essays in this book responded to Dawkins. But they were responding to Dawkins’ philosophy (an area of interest to him, but not one where he is an expert), not his science (where he is a recognized leader in his field). This essay takes on Ehrman in his home arena: New Testament studies.

Posted in Bart Ehrman, beliefs, Christianity, questions/challenges, skepticism | 5 Comments »

Contending with history

2013/04/26

This is a review of the second section of the book Contending with Christianity’s Critics.

The Jesus of History

There are six essays in this section, but my reactions to most of them are similar enough that it really isn’t worth reviewing them separately.

The thing is, they all tend to lean on evidence from within the books of the Bible to support their claims. And that’s just silly. I mean, really? You have a collection of books, culled by a particular religious group from many alternatives and, in several cases, selectively edited in the process. This highly biased set of texts is then used as evidence – sometimes, different books within the set are put forward as independent sources of evidence! – of the theological position of the religious group that collected them.

Now, let’s be fair. If orthodox Christian beliefs do represent a faithful history of early-first-century events, then we would expect to have the books of the New Testament more or less as they exist today. (Perhaps with fewer internal contradictions, but not necessarily error-free.)

But then, if those beliefs are false, given people’s natural tendency to believe, even in spite of evidence to the contrary, it isn’t all that surprising that we have the books of the New Testament as they exist today. Including contradictions.

Now, for some brief responses to the individual essays.

First, Robert H. Stein outlines “Criteria for the Gospels’ Authenticity”. Some of them sound plausible, others less so. The examples from the gospels – particularly for the “criterion of embarrassment” – tend to be very weak. The only criterion that seems at all persuasive to me is the linguistic one: there are elements in the gospels that point to translation from an Aramaic oral tradition, and that point to a Palestinian geography. So yes, I’ll accept that the oral traditions that were the sources for the (Greek) gospels came from Aramaic-speaking Palestinians. To the extent that the others give anything reliable, it is about elements that skeptics (such as Bart Ehrman) would not disagree with: Jesus existed; he said certain things; he was crucified; his followers started a religion in the wake of his demise that flourished, evolved, and has come down to us as a thousand different communities, all with slightly different takes on slightly different subsets of text and tradition from that time. Unimpressive.

A further barrier to my accepting this approach is the assertion, made for example by Richard Carrier here and here, that the “criteria” approach is bankrupt. It is not a valid historical method for ascertaining reliability. I wonder if he elaborates on this in the next book in our series (The Christian Delusion contains 2 of his essays)? If any historians are reading this, please let us know your thoughts.

Ben Witherington III closes his essay “Jesus the Seer” by reminding us that “who a person is, who a person claims to be, and who others say a person is can be different.” (p111) And yet Witherington hangs all his certainty about who Jesus claimed to be on indirect evidence of what others said he was. Unimpressive.

Gary Habermas, in “The Resurrection of Jesus Time Line”, works back from a small sample of late, non-eyewitness textual accounts, through two or three levels of extrapolation. At each stage, possibilities are exaggerated to certainties with little or no consideration of alternative explanations. At no point is the inherently incredible nature of the resurrection claims even acknowledged, let alone accounted for. Habermas concludes that “this is the argument that has rocked a generation of critical scholars.” (p125) Really? So, are critical scholars recanting their skepticism en masse and accepting the literal resurrection? I can’t say for sure, but the content of Ehrman’s very recent book, Jesus, Interrupted, and the existence of the next volume in our challenge (The Christian Delusion, edited by John Loftus) seem to speak against this claim. Unimpressive.

“How Scholars Fabricate Jesus”, by Craig A. Evans, is an interesting walk through some of the better-known extra-canonical Christian texts, such as the Gospel of Thomas (which, Evans notes, is featured in The Da Vinci Code). While Evans seems to be exaggerating the weight that critical scholars give to extracanonical material, this essay is largely an informative, interesting account of that material. (Note that, at least as Ehrman builds the case in Jesus, Interrupted, this material is irrelevant to the question of the historicity of the Gospels. They can be competently challenged on internal grounds alone.)

Daniel B Wallace’s essay, “How Badly Did the Early Scribes Corrupt the New Testament?”, is one I was particularly looking forward to, as it directly responds to Bart Ehrman. Unfortunately, it doesn’t respond to Jesus, Interrupted (JI), the Ehrman book that opened the philosophy challenge. Instead, it tackles Misquoting Jesus. I actually took the time to look through the latter book before reviewing this essay. This review will be presented in its own post – there’s a fair bit to chew on there. But, perhaps predictably, my overall conclusion was that Wallace’s arguments are unimpressive.

Michael Wilkins’ essay, “Who Did Jesus Think He Was?”, draws on gospel material to affirm the claim that Jesus saw himself as the same saviour that modern Christians see him as. Interestingly, Wilkins actually weaves in the fact that the Jewish picture of the Messiah presented in the Old Testament, the character expected by Jews (including Jesus’ disciples) is not the messiah that Jesus turned out to be. He suggests that this failure to fulfil the prophecies supports, rather than undermines, the claim that Jesus is the prophesied messiah. It is an odd and quirky approach, but not particularly impressive.

In all, this section was vaguely interesting – particularly Wallace’s essay. But all of the essays suffer from one central shortcoming, in the context of the Ultimate Challenge. By leaning on the texts of the Bible, they give insufficient reason to take any of their conclusions seriously. It is extremely unlikely that a reasonable outsider will accept the claims of any religion, based only on the texts that its adherents pick out as divinely inspired.

It should be noted that the book wasn’t (of course) written for the Ultimate Challenge. It reads more like a book that was written to give believers an excuse to keep believing, if they are worrying about the arguments offered by critics. Sort of an internal apologetics. So I can’t say whether the writers failed at their own goal. I can only say that their arguments fall flat from the perspective of this outsider.

Posted in books, religion, Christianity, atheism, Bart Ehrman | 3 Comments »

Insights as mutations

2013/04/12

“Insight, untested and unsupported, is an insufficient guarantee of truth, in spite of the fact that much of the most important truth is first suggested by its means.” – Bertrand Russell, in his essay “Mysticism and Logic”

I like this line. I like it because Russell manages to combine the rational person’s wariness of “gut feelings” as tests of truth, with an acknowledgement of the great value that such intuitions have in formulating hypotheses for science to test.

I also like it because it triggered a connection in my mind that I hadn’t considered before, between the operation of science and the operation of evolution. It boils down to a simple analogy:

Insight is to science as mutation is to evolution.

The great strength of modern science is of course the rigorous methods we have developed (methods of measuring, methods of analysing, and methods of thinking) for testing competing hypotheses and determining which is more likely to be true. But none of this would be worth anything without hypotheses to test, and the birth of many hypotheses is in personal intuitions that sprang into people’s minds, for reasons that may have little or nothing to do with reasoning or logic.

The great strength of evolution as a process is the tremendous power of selection – through competition, predation, sexual selection, whatever. Variations in the genetic instructions that confer advantages tend to proliferate, because the organisms carrying them reproduce more. But selection would be powerless without variations to work on. Variations are largely produced by mutation, a process that is blind to the selective advantage of any particular genetic change.

Insights are the raw material for scientific advances, just as mutations are the raw material for evolution.

There’s more.

The popular conception of science is rather mixed, but you often see in movies a lone scientist working away and then, at a critical moment, shouting “Eureka!” and solving the problem. The coolest thing about science in the eyes of moviemakers is (I suspect) the moment of intuitive insight. (The other side is that scientists are often thought of as following set procedures to come up with answers, without any creativity or spontaneity allowed.)

A common conception of evolution (frequently trotted out by creationists) is that it’s all about random change miraculously producing complexity. This is understandably laughed at – by creationists, who suggest that therefore evolution couldn’t be true, and by biologists, who suggest that evolution is not just random mutations. (The other side of popular conceptions of evolution is that it’s an inexorable progression – all about moving from more primitive to less primitive, from simple to complex – which is just as wrong.)

I don’t want to stretch an already thin metaphor, so I think I’ll stop there.

I’m not trying to suggest that any of these parallels provide support for either the scientific method or evolution. (Each of those stands very firmly on its own grounds.)

I also don’t think that the parallels above reflect any deeper symmetries or underlying message. We are pattern-matching machines, and I think this was just an example of my brain making a match and sitting back to say “wow”.

Let me know if you think this is cool too. Or if you think I have missed some key consideration that demolishes the beautiful analogy.

At any rate, thanks to Bertrand Russell for inspiring this train of thought. Russell was the “New Atheist” of his day, and received at least as much ill-conceived condemnation and vilification as today’s generation get.

Posted in Bertrand Russell, evolution, reflections, science | Leave a Comment »

What tweaks Tim today

2013/04/05

I’m feeling under the weather right now (sore throat, since you ask), and it has left me feeling a tad peevish. So I thought, what better time to put pen to friendly blog?

I’ll try to make my tetchiness entertaining. Here for your edification are ten things that annoy me:

  1. “Humanists are just atheists who don’t want the pejorative label.” Oh, the gems that come from within one’s own tribe. I’ve only heard this one from other atheists. They ought to know better! The words “humanist” and “atheist” have different meanings. It may be that some people avoid the label “atheist” because of the negative optics associated with it; but for many of us the term “humanist” more completely describes our beliefs and values. It is, communicatively, a better word for what we’re trying to say. And for the record, I am a humanist and an atheist.
  2. “You need as much faith to be an atheist as to be a believer.” Give me a break. Saying “I don’t have enough evidence to believe, so I won’t believe” is not on the same level as saying “I don’t have enough evidence to believe, but I’ll believe anyway.” Sure, some atheists assign an unnecessarily pejorative definition to the word “faith”, but even under the most generous meaning, the above claim is ridiculous. Do you accept the tenets of Government-Binding Theory (in the syntactic analysis of language)? If you do, without seeing any evidence for it, then you are making a leap of faith. If you do not accept it, then you are not making a leap of faith. You are sensibly reserving judgment. That is the position of the atheist.
  3. Malapropisms, bad grammar, and vague language. Communication is such a fragile thing. Much suffering and strife can be traced back to unclear transmission of ideas, yet many people use language in any old slapdash way they fancy. You can almost feel the social glue dissolving as they speak. It’s like they want misunderstanding, confusion, and strife. (And yes, the Oxford comma is the appropriate, clear, and logical way to behave in civilized English prose.)
  4. If there’s even a possibility that Jesus died for your sins, isn’t that an offer worth considering? Emotional blackmail? Seriously? But leaving that aside, consider the proposition. People tell me that an all-powerful guy who created the universe arranged a brutal sacrifice of himself* to himself in order to permit himself to forgive me for the imperfections built into me by himself. And they expect me to be grateful?! No, if Jesus died for my sins as they describe, the universe is being run badly by an evil being. Human sacrifice is a practice that thoughtful, compassionate humans have grown out of. If gods have not also grown out of it, so much the worse for them. (*Part of himself, anyway. Temporarily.)
  5. Who are you to judge God? Who am I? I’m the one being asked to commit my life and behaviour to a being accused of child sacrifice, genocide, and helping people in statistically imperceptible but psychologically compelling ways. The believer who judges God to be good enough to worship is at least as arrogant as the disbeliever who judges him to be fictional and/or not worthy of worship.
  6. Rhetorical questions that beg for answers. For example, a creationist rhetorically asks, “What could possibly account for the way giraffes’ cardiovascular system is perfectly adapted to the problems of a long neck?” (example) Asking the question betrays a culpable lack of curiosity in the world around use. The only way someone can ask that and not get an answer is if they’re saying it in a one-way medium, like a film (thanks, Netflix, for that half-hour I’ll never get back), or if they’re talking to people who are even less curious about the real answers than the speaker. (By the way, the answer to the giraffe question is evolution. Like, real evolution, not the strange straw man that creationists imagine when they compose their semi-coherent polemics.)
  7. God is beyond human understanding. Then stop claiming to understand him! Saying “God is mysterious” when he seems to have done something bad, but “God is good” when he seems to have done something good is what we call special pleading, and it is monumentally unpersuasive. Take Government Binding Theory again. If I tell you it’s beyond human understanding, then catalogue how it concisely explains syntactic structure across a variety of languages and predicts what patterns we should and should not see in new languages, you will suspect that (a) it’s not actually beyond human understanding, and (b) my empirical claims are weak and I want to have an out. At any rate, you will approach the theory with sensible, appropriate skepticism.
  8. My internal grammar-nazi. Let me be completely clear here: I am very grateful to Mrs Church for guiding me through some of my key formative literary years. I have benefited greatly from her strict, no-nonsense approach to what is appropriate and what is heinous in grammatical constructions. But is it really a matter for moral repugnance when someone uses a double-negative? Does someone’s failure to use the Oxford comma really merit a black mark in my mental Rolodex? Is there really a word that one should never end a sentence with?
  9. Overstating the role of religion in the world’s evils. Honestly, atheists, there are a lot of other things out there that lead to more evil. Like money. Well, okay, that seems to seep into organized religion and produce some amazing exploitation. What about power? Hmm, same problem. The human tendency to tribalism and divisiveness? There we go: religions often preach unity and universality, so they’re free of that at least. Of course, they often disagree about whose unity and universality should be used. And those disagreements often turn violent, divisive, and tribal. Gah. Anyway, snarkiness aside, my original complaint stands. Religions aren’t the source for any of the world’s evils. The source is human nature. Religions are just really, really convenient conduits for them, made more amenable by their tendency to encourage blind faith over careful questioning and scrupulous doubt.
  10. Hell. One of the worst ideas that humans have ever come up with. What sort of person threatens a child, her friends, and her family with hell for honest dissent? I once met an otherwise pleasant woman who happily explained that, if she ended up in heaven and a loved one ended up in hell, it wouldn’t matter, because God would give her some sort of emotional lobotomy to prevent her from caring about the eternal torment of others. The idea of hell was not inflicted on my impressionable young psyche, for which I am very grateful to my parents. But I have known people who have been deeply scarred by the doctrine of hell. Some of them have since escaped its psychological prison; others have not. While I have no grand dream of a world without religion, hell is one meme that I would happily consign to the flames if I could.

(Yes, I see what I did there. What can I say? It’s a repugnant idea, but it’s a useful metaphor.)

Posted in fun, me | Leave a Comment »

Definition: free will

2013/02/05

I was listening to a skeptical podcast – the Legion of Reason (http://www.legionofreason.com/), out of Calgary – and the topic of free will reared itself. It’s a fascinating topic, because (as in this case) many people who agree with me about atheism, humanism, and loads of related social positions disagree very firmly about the appropriate attitude to free will.

I would like to clarify and expand on what I have said recently on this blog about free will. First, though, I thought I would start by exploring the definition.

Like my previous definition posts, I will present how I see it free will, and point out some of the ways that people differ.

First, note that the term “free will” is made of two words. So let’s start with a simple definition:

Free will is the unconstrained (free) exercise of one’s intention to act (will).

No problem so far. But what counts as a constraint?*

This is where people differ. For me, unconstrained means that, when I have a desire to act (whatever the reason for or source of that desire), I am able to follow through.

When I want to stand up, I can. I am not tied down; I am not too weak.

When I want to go bungee-jumping, I can. I do not have a subconscious aversion preventing me from taking that last step; I do not have overly-protective parents hiding my keys to keep me from driving to the jump site.

Constraints can take the form of physical bonds, financial shortfalls, or even irresistable psychological compulsions (addiction is an interesting area for examining edge-cases in free will).

Other people – the “libertarian free will” crowd – consider that any reliable causal predictor of a decision is an intolerable constraint, undermining freedom of will. The most popular expression of this is the claim that determinism undermines free will. That is, if the universe really does operate according to immutable, universal laws of cause-and-effect that completely determine the behaviour of everything in the universe, then everything we do is physically “constrained” to a single possibility (whether or not we can ever know that possibility in advance).

I find this position odd for two reasons: the “chain-link” and the “character”.

First, even if my actions are determined in advance, it may still be the case that my intentions (part of the physical universe) are the proximate cause of my actions: I stood up because I wanted to stand up. Sure, I may have wanted to stand up because my bladder was full, which was because of all the tomato juice I had consumed earlier, which was because of that unfortunate incident with the skunk, and so on and so on to the beginning of our clockwork universe. But the immediate reason I stood up was because I chose to. It was an exercise of my will. My will is a crucial link in the great causal chain that led to the event. To me, the idea of freedom is how that link that is my intention relates to the link that is the outcome, not how it relates to all the other links.

Second, it baffles me that mere predictability is considered a defeater for free will. Just because someone can guess what I’m going to do does not make me less free. If my child cries out in pain, I run to help them. That behaviour is predictable. In fact, part of being a good parent is letting my children know deep down that I will react that way. Does that mean I am not exercising my free will when I choose to help them? Of course not. Is my obedience to traffic laws a subjugation of my free will? No, it’s an expression of it. I try to cultivate a character that leads me to behave well. This entails being predictable in a wide range of situations.

I know that there is some psychological monitor inside all of us that doesn’t like the idea of any constraint – real, practical, or metaphysical – on our behaviour. When I hear libertarian free-will advocates declaiming, I often have to step back before I see again why their arguments fall flat. But it bugs me that so few people seem to see that the aspects of freedom which are important to them in daily life do not depend on libertarian free will. It bugs me that they never seem to see the conflict between virtue – the development of a character that consistently chooses to follow predictable patterns of virtuous behaviour – and this idea of completely acausal decision-making. I think my approach above not only captures my own aesthetic preferences regarding the definitions of free will, but also the way we tend to apply the concept to our real lives. We are not worried about whether some unknowable causal chain irrevocably caused us to want to do what we did, but rather whether we were able to do what we intended.

I think the above works, regardless of whether one sees the “will” as part of the physical world (materialism) or existing in some separate realm (dualism). I also think it is essentially independent of the question of whether a god exists or not.

Though I’ve looked at free will in this way for several years, I don’t know if I’ve ever articulated this particular position. So I would like to know if you can see any obvious holes in the compatibilist position I am promoting here. Do you? If so, please let me know!

On the other hand, are there any other compatibilists out there who agree with my position? Or libertarians who find the above arguments thought-provoking?

Any theists or folks familiar with theological approaches to free will? What do you think? My impression is that most theists are libertarians, but I have heard that Calvinists and perhaps some others are determinists, and so may have some sort of compatibilist approach to free will. Or they may just deny that we have free will.

Footnote:

* I may address what is meant by “intention to act” at a later date, or in the comments if people want to bring it up. For now, I’ll just assume it’s fairly obvious.

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Posted in Uncategorized | 3 Comments »

Duty and futility

2013/02/02

Oh, woe is me!

Anyone who has been watching me eke through the Ultimate Philosophy Challenge (put forth by Luke Muehlhauser) over the past year and a half may have noticed that my postings have become more and more sporadic.

I could claim real-world interference with my writing, but that would be a distraction. The fact is, I am rapidly losing my motivation.

I did not undertake the challenge expecting it to change my mind. But my experience of Luke’s writing and podcasting (+here) suggested that this challenge would put in front of me the most thought-provoking apologetics, rather than the appalling works I had previously run across. I had read C. S. Lewis’ Mere Christianity before I had even heard of humanism and begun self-identifying as such; Lee Strobel’s Case for a Creator as I was beginning to explore things and identify as a humanist; and most recently John Blanchard’s book, Does God Believe in Atheists, which I reviewed in a series of five posts on this blog (1 2 3 4 5). Summary: apologetics in print have seemed as self-congratulatory and vacuous as the more degenerate online discussions of atheism versus Christianity (from either side).

Anyway, having appreciated and occasionally been challenged by the balance and pursuit of truth (as opposed to confirmation) that Luke exemplified, I had hopes that these authors he was pointing me to (none of whom, Christian or atheist, I had read before) would at least make me pause for thought, and perhaps puncture one or two of the more comfortable, self-satisfied conclusions I was happy to hold.

But I find that the atheist arguments are familiar and seem sound, and the apologists’ arguments are familiar and easily refuted. They set up straw men of real atheist positions, and subject their own arguments to only the flimsiest tests. I enjoy being proven right as much as the next guy, but it’s disappointing that this challenge isn’t more challenging. Is it because I actually do have the right answer already? Is it because I’m too close-minded to see the value in the opposing arguments, or the flaws in the atheist arguments? Either hypothesis is consistent with the superficial details of the experience.

 

I know that an open mind is necessary in order to grow toward truer belief. But I can’t help think of the prayer experiment I undertook with our Mormon missionary friends back in Edinburgh. They said to pray honestly for insight, I tried it, I got not message from Heaven. They said to keep trying until I got a message. But to keep asking the same question until the answer comes out the way you want is not the way to truth. So I ended that experiment. If I ever get reason to believe that it’s worth trying again, I will, but until then I have a reasonable conclusion based on honest testing.

I feel like the same thing is happening with Christian apologetics at large. I had a suspicion that there wasn’t any knock-down argument for God, based on my previous experience. I have tried out the best arguments, recommended by what seemed to me to be an open-minded, thoughtful source. And they’ve failed to stir my doubt-o-meter. Case closed?

Not quite. The problem is, I’m really just halfway through the Challenge. I still have a book by Swinburne and one by Craig to wade through, in addition to two further atheist offerings. And that’s after I finish the current book – a dense pack of essays ranging from transparently vapid to impenetrably opaque, without offering any illumination.

I can’t plead the excuse sometimes used in clinical trials – that people seem to be suffering or dying from one leg of the experiment – for halting early. I’m just really, really tired of wading through garbage philosophy, in the interest of fairly testing what is really a very low-probability hypothesis. (Christianity is only one of many popular theistic hypotheses of roughly equal prior probability; and all of them are but a subset of the domain of logically possible deistic hypothesis).

So this is my dilemma. I am engaged in an exercise that feels increasingly futile. And yet, as part of my duty to the pursuit of truth, I cannot reasonably beg off the remaining part of the exercise. So I should carry on. But, knowing that my state of mind is increasingly opposed to the whole endeavour, I’m not sure I can claim to be fairly evaluating the ideas I’m coming across.

I’m tempted to leave off – take an indefinite hiatus. But that isn’t really a solution is it? It’s just an escape.

I’m tempted to just skim through the remaining books. But that isn’t really an honest fulfilment of my original resolution to fairly examine the claims.

I’m honestly puzzled here. I think I’m procrastinating toward the hiatus solution by default. There’s always something more interesting to do/read/whatever than this. Perhaps I should skip to the next book (an atheist collection – perhaps a bit more palatable), to help get back in the mood for the project.

What do you do when you have a task that (a) has no deadline or external pressure to finish, (b) feels futile or pointless, but (c) you feel some sense of duty or responsibility to complete? Have any of you undertaken this challenge or something similar? How did you overcome (or succumb to) the hurdles you encountered?

Do you have any insight that would let me see the problem in a different light, perhaps resolve the dilemma more easily?

Posted in atheism, books, philosophy, questions/challenges | 6 Comments »

Merry Christmas

2012/12/25

That’s right. I said it.

“Merry Christmas!”

And to all those who think that’s a cunning shibboleth of religious identity, let me add, “Happy holidays!”

I’m not going to spend much time on this – it’s a day for family and food and love, not online rants. But I’ve had one too many Pointed Comments, in Facebook and elsewhere – people Pointedly wishing me Merry Christmas. Or, just as silly, Pointedly wishing me Happy Holidays.

So let me lob my own two bits in.

I was raised in an essentially non-religious household. We occasionally went to church on Christmas with my grandparents, so I knew the historical source of the holiday. But beyond that, and the odd lyric in a carol, its mythical origin was not part of the day.

And we still called it “Christmas”.

So I’m putting my foot down. I am an atheist; I celebrate the season in an entirely nonreligious way. And I call it Christmas. That’s my tradition, and I have as much right to it as any indignant Christian.

Oh, and while I’m venting, can I just ask how on Earth the phrase “Happy Holidays” is anti-religious? Is it possible that these folks who are so keen on being seen to defend tradition have not considered the traditional (ie, etymological) origin of the word “holiday”: “holy + day”?

For me, to refer to today as “Christmas” is no more an implicit plug for Christianity than a reference to Wednesday is a plug for the ancient pagan god Woden of Britain, or eating cereal is a form of homage to the Roman goddess Ceres. (Nor, despite my somewhat tetchy comment above, do I feel that the word “holiday” retains any particularly religious connotations.)

Anyway, whatever you are doing today, whether you are celebrating a religious festival, a non-religious gathering, or if you’re just spending a regular day, I wish you a good one.

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »

Merry Christmas

2012/12/20

I haven’t blogged much lately. I suppose I could list excuses – working on my career, settling in to a new city, spending time with the kids.

But I’ll just sum them up with a little spin, and say that I’ve been gathering material to work into blog posts when I get back into it.

Meantime, because it is the season and I’m once again in a northerly enough latitude to seriously suffer from shortened daylight at this end of the Earth’s orbit, I thought I’d post a video of my current favorite Christmas song. Enjoy the song, and more importantly enjoy the people around you over the solstice season.

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »

Rational magic

2012/10/29

I like to think of myself as a rational person. This is an uphill battle for someone like me, a conglomerate of biological systems jury-rigged one on top of the other since my ancestors were worm-like proto-chordates. But it’s a battle worth fighting.

I also like science fiction and fantasy novels. To some, this seems to conflict with the rational, truth-seeking, reality-loving side (though in fact it only encourages and reinforces it).

Well, now both sides of my geekiness can wallow in a new realm of literary and logical deliciousness.

Imagine this: some tiny event in Harry Potter’s past means he grows up among scientists instead of among vindictive, spiteful relations. When his letter from Hogwarts comes, he responds not with open-mouthed wonder but with the skepticism of a rational materialist. (This is without changing a jot about how magic actually works in Rowling’s universe, mind you.)

This is the premise of Eliezar Yudkowski’s fan-fiction epic, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. It has been underway since January last year, and is now up to 85 chapters (and counting). I blasted through them all in a dreadfully short time, and am now waiting impatiently for the next installment. I am thinking of starting at the beginning and listening to the podcast version, just to fill the time.

If you liked Rowling’s Harry Potter books at all, and seriously want to improve your rationality, then I can only imagine this will be a delightful romp for you.

But then, it is a stretch for me to imagine anyone not enjoying Rowling’s books for any reasons that are not sad and dogmatic. And I find it difficult to sympathize with anybody who doesn’t want to improve their own rationality.

Yudkowski has preserved the tone and spirit of the original books quite nicely. Anyway, I’m not going to waste any more of your time, or risk dropping any spoilers. Go, check it out. Let me know if you like it.

Posted in Eliezar Yudkowski, entertainment, skepticism | Leave a Comment »

The precariousness of libertarian free will

2012/09/01

I’d like to give you a glimpse of how I view free will and why.

This will not be a strictly formal philosophical argument. I have to admit some non-rational reasons for holding the position I hold. (Not irrational, I hope – I try not to contradict myself or the evidence, but you can’t ground every motivation in a reason that is itself grounded. Sooner or later, you have to accept something just because.)

I’ll start with a label: I am a determinism agnostic. I mean, I really don’t know whether our universe is completely governed by deterministic laws of cause and effect, or if there is some corner of real non-determinism in it. Not only that, I suspect it will forever remain impossible to know this absolutely.

Certainly a great deal of the universe’s behaviour is deterministic, from the cosmic-scale laws of gravity to the microscopic laws of cellular biology and chemistry. But is there some corner of indeterminacy? Some part of the universe’s behaviour that isn’t completely pre-destined based on prior causes? Some think the quantum world gives us that, in the apparently random variations of position or velocity observed at the smallest levels. In counterpoint to this idea of undirected indeterminacy is the hope of many that we – and perhaps other, more powerful players in the universe – have a ‘get-out-of-determinism-free’ card in the form of libertarian free will.

I don’t know. Looking at the trend of our understanding of the universe, and acknowledging my own aesthetic inclinations, I would guess not. I suspect it’s determinism all the way down. But I don’t know.

So does that mean I have no way to really decide whether or not we have libertarian free will? That I’m just going with my gut on this?

I’ll be honest: that’s part of it. But I also have two more substantial reasons for sticking with my compatibilist stance: one epistemological and one pragmatic.

The epistemological reason is this: it is possible to have positive evidence that event A is caused by event B; but it is impossible to have positive evidence that A is not caused by anything. Positive evidence for B causing A would be something like this: I usually observe A to follow B, and when I run an experiment to manipulate whether B occurs or not, I find A only occurring after B, but not after other events*. But what would show that A has no causal determiner? Nothing. Literally. The best I can ever hope for on that score is that, after a whole lot of honest searching, I fail to find some causal determiner of A. I can never be sure that a causal determiner isn’t just around the corner, and I can never exhaustively test all of the possible causes. So my best proof is nothing – no actual evidence contradicting the idea that A is undetermined, but no evidence confirming the idea either.

So libertarian free will can, in principle, be shown not to exist; but it can never, even in principle, be shown to exist.

Which brings me to the main pragmatic reason for preferring a compatibilist over a libertarian approach to free will. Someone who adopts a libertarian stance must beware the day that evidence is found to undermine that stance. Some function central to questions of free will may be found to have a clear, irrefutable physical cause - decision-making, execution of intentional action, whatever**. Libertarians are banking on the immediate physical exercise of free will having no determinate physical cause, but as described above they can never prove it. They can only declare that it hasn’t yet been disproven.

The compatibilist is safe in two ways. First, as mentioned above, it is impossible to conjure positive evidence against determinism. Second, even if such proof were possible, the compatibilist is not committed to determinism. Compatibilism simply claims that meaningful free will is compatible with a deterministic universe, not that it requires such a universe.

So, on the one hand are the libertarians, who could lose a key foundation of their stance any day if the right evidence is discovered. This seems to be a very precarious position to be in. On the other hand are the compatibilists, whose stance is secure under any empirical evidence that we might reasonably anticipate.

That, in a nutshell, is why I prefer a compatibilist stance:

  1. It is more aesthetically pleasing to me. In other words, my gut leans in that direction.
  2. It is more empirically supportable: any evidence on the question is either inconclusive or supports determinism.
  3. It is more pragmatically reliable: knowledge about the real world is very unlikely to undermine the stance, while such knowledge could easily undermine the libertarian stance.

So what does the world look like from this perspective? How do I fit myself into this picture as a meaningful actor in my own life? I’ll try to give you some answers on that soon. Stay tuned. For now, why don’t you let me know what you think? Do you agree? If you agree, do you lean toward compatibilism or do you still prefer to bet on libertarianism? What, honestly, do you think influences your view of free will?

Footnotes:

* There are more subtleties to demonstrating causality, and it would never be absolute proof that A is caused by B, but it is possible to get strong evidence in favour of that hypothesis.

** Indeed, such evidence may already be trickling in. For example, there was a study in 2008 and another in 2011 that showed the “moment of decision” as experienced by individuals could be anticipated by a machine watching brain function (see here and here for details).

Posted in free will, philosophy, reflections | 1 Comment »

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