Deathbed conversions have always seemed to me like a Hail Mary Pass, proving nothing about religion and much about desperation.
That’s a great line from a pretty great Roger Ebert blogpost about Christopher Hitchens. Hitchens is dying, you see - of cancer, so it’s painful and takes a long time. He may survive, but in any case he’s pretty badly in the thick of it right now. So, predictably, all kinds of despicable religious groups are hovering over his still-breathing corpse like undertakers waiting for him to babble something about belief in God so that they can take it as whatever low standard of “confirmation” they operate by.
I think it’s remarkable that religious people seem to need this kind of confirmation. One would think that it would be just the opposite. One would think that they would be embarassed to put so many eggs in a basket so easily refuted. People break, after all, under torture and say all kinds of things that they don’t really mean - that are, in fact, in sharp contradiction to everything they actually believe in - on a hope that they KNOW is illusory that it will somehow save them from pain. That’s just how it works. Why would a deathbed conversion be anything else? It is in fact exactly the same - you scare someone enough (and death is scary!) and he will say anything, even if he knows it’s not true. Using deathbed conversions as confirmation that your belief system is true is a bit like using Galileo’s confession under torture as evidence that the Sun revolves around the Earth. The actual Truth is always beside the point with these people.
Indeed, we should be suspicious of ANYTHING associated with someone who has nothing to lose. Curiously, religion seems to depend mostly on exactly that. All religious conversion stories - at least, all the famous ones - are about desperate people grasping at straws. That means something, and it’s not very flattering to religion.
An apocryphal story about Enrique Fermi, probably about other professors as well: student comes into Fermi’s office, surprised to see that Fermi’s got a horseshoe over his door and says, “Professor, you don’t believe in that, do you?” Fermi replies, “Of course not! But they say it works even if you don’t believe in it.”
HA! But it’s as depressing as it is funny, because it highlights something disturbing about religion: religious belief is cheap. Not real religious belief, but the kind of shallow religious belief that most people I know have. You know, there’s no proof either way, and OK, all things equal it’s probably not true, but it doesn’t seem to cost anything to believe in it, so why not?
Kinda reminds me of the “Black Jesus” episode of Good Times:
It’s the one where JJ paints a picture of Ned the Wino as Jesus, and putting it on the wall brings a string of good luck to the Evans family. They hang it next to Florida’s standard Jesus picture. In an argument about whether to take it down or leave it up, James points to the old Jesus and says “He ain’t gonna hurt, but HE’s [pointing to Black Jesus] gonna help!”
The point is - there’s a bias toward adopting religious beliefs. Two things seem to be correlated, and proving a negative is impossible. So, not only are they correlated, they’re causally related for all you know. Sure, the odds are against it, but what does it hurt? If it’s a simple as putting a picture on the wall, why not? Even, if you’re like Fermi (or whoever it wasn’t), if you don’t really believe in it, it’s the “what does it hurt?” that’s the catch. If it’s true, it works whether you believe in it or not. And if it doesn’t, well, what’s the harm?
Sure enough, by the end of the episode, even Florida doesn’t mind Black Jesus being on the wall. No one in the family really believes in it, but if it can’t hurt, it can’t hurt!
“What’s the harm?” That’s the question atheists have to do a better job answering. And not with irrelevant references to the Crusades or the Inquisition. The people seriously asking the “what’s the harm” question aren’t the kind of people who start Crusades or Inquisitions, and so these examples are straw mans to them. But the thing is, there is harm, and it’s all in terms of opportunity cost. Specifically, on the individual level, it’s in terms of getting one’s private hopes up about something that’s not true - and in terms of having an inconsistent worldview, one that’s not completely reality-based. True, the cost of these things is very low, given how little emotional investment is required to get started - but the point is that paying no cost for no return is better than paying some cost, no matter how seemingly insignificant, for no return. And on the aggregate level there are material costs. One - potential, as it turns out - material cost of putting Black Jesus on the wall in the episode is that JJ wasn’t going to be able to enter it - his best painting - in a competition. James, being a loving father, of course takes it down and insists that JJ enter it, but probably only because JJ was feeling down because Thelma had just finished telling him he wouldn’t amount to anything ever. If not for that, the picture might have stayed on the wall, and JJ would have nothing to enter. The same is true of the horseshoe in Fermi’s office. If it’s trash, that’s one thing, but if it’s still useful in any way then, well, there’s some use it’s ipso facto not being put to. Insignificant in this one case, but factor that over everyone who takes up resources to support some kind of silly superstition and you have real misallocation effects. And of course this case is pretty easy to make for things like the tax-exempt status of churches in the US. Whatever you think about government giving breaks to the charities that churches support, a subsidy is a subsidy - and effectively making the land and building materials that go into their construction cheap with respect to competeing building projects is a subsidy. Resources get allocated to religion out of proportion to real demand - a clear inefficiency.
Again, yes, the fixed costs are low. So does it really hurt? Well, no, not that much - at least, not initially. (Getting committed to a belief that started out as a superstition can, of course, get quite costly. Let’s ignore this in the interest of fairness, even though it happens all the time.) The point is that there are costs. The idea that entry is free is an illusion - but a persistent one, as opportunity costs are well-known to be the kinds of things that non-economists tend to ignore in their calculations of value. If you’re getting nothing in return, no cost is always better than low cost.
Luke Burrage’s latest podcast pillories Robert J. “Canada” Sawyer’s Calculating God, a book so richly deserving of pillorying that this analogy is impossible to complete to anyone’s satisfaction. So it was great fun. If you hate Robert Sawyer and/or this book in any way, head on over to the Science Fiction Book Review Podcast for some well-deserved validation.
So, scratching about on Sawyer’s website after that, I came across this general bit of sense on atheist arrogance. In particular - it’s a rebuke of the general marketing approach taken by the Modern Skeptical Movement - their tendency to take as strategy the mocking of believers. And it’s one of those things that although I agree with the general point, I can’t credit many of the arguments.
The point is right on: atheists don’t have any positive beliefs, so they should stop acting like self-righteous believers. The obligatory money quote:
But atheism is no more a religion than not playing chess is a hobby
Right. And I think we’re supposed to complete the analogy that since no one goes around loudly declaring how much they don’t play Chess, or ridiculing anyone else for playing Chess, that Atheists shouldn’t go around doing these things on account of not believing in religion.
Oops.
Oops because, of course, people do go around ridiculing people who play Chess and making damn well sure that everyone around them knows just how often they never play Chess. People even get beat up for playing Chess. So there went that analogy - BOOM - in a puff of pale blue powder.
The whole essay is a string of category errors and cherry picking, in fact.
Here’s the complete wording of that section on not playing Chess:
More: the skeptics who trot out the FSM are playing into the hands of those who try to dismiss atheism as just another religion. But atheism is no more a religion than not playing chess is a hobby. In a world in which we have a war not on terror but rather on religiously inspired violence, in which sectarian fighting spills blood on every continent, it’s vital to keep clear that there is an alternative to religion.
Note the insidious assumptions. First - that if something is an alternative to religion, it will necessarily avoid sectarian fighting. But that is patently untrue. All kinds of things that are not religions involve sectarian fighting. All you need to have sectarian fighting are sects - ok, “factions” if you’re going to pick irrelevant nits about etymology - and plenty of things that aren’t religions have those! Then there’s the concommitant assumption that rejection of a thing can never constitute the basis for a group identity. But again, that’s patently untrue. To use a Canadian example that Sawyer can understand - Edmonton fans in NHL are proud of what they call the “ABC Rule,” where “ABC” stands for “Anyone But Calgary.” Part of being an Edmonton Oilers fan is, apparently, emphatically NOT being a Calgary Flames fan. So there.
But Christians don’t display a fish in support of creationism (something most educated Christians don’t believe in anyway; they know that life evolved from simpler forms, thank you very much). Rather, they’re declaring their adherence to a moral code: blessed are the peacemakers; if someone strikes you on the right cheek, offer them your left; forgive and forget. Responding to that with a smug joke about evolution not only misses what the Christians were saying, but it makes the atheists look mean-spirited.
I actually largely agree with this one. That is, I really agree that the Darwin fish are silly. Darwinism isn’t a social movement, it’s a scientific theory, and so ideally it doesn’t merit tribal symbols any more than any of the infinite iterations of String Theory does. Ideally. But here in reality, there is a disturbingly large number of Christians who fail to meet Sawyer’s description. It is for these Christians that the Darwin fish are on display. Yes, the Darwin fish are obnoxious - but they are no more obnoxious, I think, than the people who put fish on their cars NOT to advertise their adherence to a moral code so much as to display tribal loyalty. It’s an empirical question what constitutes the majority of the fish-displayers, of course, but I wouldn’t be surprised - and neither would Sawyer, if he’s honest with himself - to find that there is not much overlap between that group of Christians who adhere to the pacifist moral code and those Christians who feel the need to advertise their allegiance on their cars. And I think that because, frankly, there is nothing about adherence this moral code that needs to be advertised any more than there is any need to advertise one’s belief in widely-accepted scientific theories. The fish - on both sides - were never about what they purport to represent.
Where the essay goes really off the rails for me is the gratuitous nationalism at the end, though.
The skeptical movement in the United States has been an abject failure. It’s done nothing to prevent the election of an anti-science fundamentalist to the White House (and I, for one, certainly wish the guy with his finger on the button didn’t think there was a better world after this one). It’s done nothing to quell the fight to expunge evolution from classrooms. It’s done nothing to counter — and, yes, maybe even is responsible for — the public perception of atheists as evil, arrogant people.
It really does beg two questions - (1) what would constitute “success” for this man and (2) why are we only picking on the skeptical movement in the United States? As to the first - social movements take time. You don’t clobber together a movement and then - BLAM, SHAZAM! - things change! And he really ought to know better, considering he used this example earlier:
See, those who prefer same-sex partners brilliantly remade their public image by taking a word that had been quaint even when The Flintstones had used it in their theme song back in 1960 and giving it a vibrant new meaning. “You may be happy,” they said, “but we’re gay.” And with a cheery rainbow logo, colourful parades, and self-deprecating humour, they won over almost everyone whose first name isn’t Stephen and whose last isn’t Harper.
Again with the factual problems. They haven’t won over anything like “everyone but Stephen Harper” (even allowing for poetic license), nor are they all uniformly cheerful and self-deprecating. Even passing familiarity with the gay movement suffices to cought up tons of counterexamples, in fact. And there’s nothing so odd about that. The Civil Rights Movement in the US was anything but uniformly peaceful - even though one of its most prominent leaders was avowedly a man of peace. I think it would be hard to sell a version of Civil Rights history that lays all the successes of the movement at Martin Luther King’s feet and blames all the setbacks on Malcolm X. Real history is just more complicated than that - and while we can certainly appreciate the admirable restraint of the public face of the movement, it’s going a bit far to effectively make it the whole of the movement’s success. More likely, there was a kind of symbiosis there: Malcolm X and those like him made the threats of violence credible, and King capitalized on the fact that he was a mainstream-acceptable alternative.
But the point is really that - whatever view you take of what made the Civil Rights Movement so ultimately effective, you have to concede that it took time. It wasn’t as though Brown v. Board of Education got handed down and that was that - far from it! It’s half a century later and there are still racial kinks that need working out. Nor is it like gay rights in Canada are decided and over. Tolerance was imposed on the Canadian public by judicial fiat - Parliament was ordered by a court in British Columbia to draft legislation allowing same-sex marriage, which it did. But, for the sake of argument, let’s consider the gay marriage question settled in Canada and the racial equality quesiton settled in the US. It took about 30-40 years in each case, right? So why doesn’t atheism get any mulligans? And since when is the goal of the Skeptical Movement to keep anyone out of office who believes in God? I don’t think that’s a fair criterion of success - and anyway, if we adopt it, then Canada is hardly doing better: name even one Prime Minister who hasn’t been religious? (Nope, not Trudeau. I’ll buy Brian Mulroney privately, but somehow I think Sawyer is going to weasel and insist we stick to his public statements, something he of course wouldn’t do on other issues, like determining how sincere Mulroney was about Meech Lake, or whatever have you.)
But here’s the real howler:
But perhaps there’s a ray of hope. Despite its gift counter, the Centre for Inquiry, Ontario, has dubbed itself “A New Canadian Voice for Reason, Science and Secularism.” If that’s just an empty PR slogan, then it will accomplish as little as its American counterparts have.
But if the Centre can really bring a new voice (one that’s polite and charming) and a Canadian voice (one that’s self-effacing and inclusive) to the Modern Skeptical Movement, then it might actually do some good.
And then maybe, just maybe, atheists will start feeling comfortable about coming out of the closet.
HELLO! Out of the closet, here! As are you, Robert J. “Canada” Sawyer. And this guy. And him as well. And thousands and thousands of equally-prominent others. Though it’s a bit strange to have to “come out of the closet” for something that Sawyer earlier argued wasn’t an identity. Relevant to the point above: if the great virtue of the New Candian Approach to Atheism® is that it’s “self-effacing and inclusive,” how is it going to go about advocating that religious people be barred from office? I mean, if the purportedly non-inclusive US version can’t accomplish this, then how is an inclusive one going to? Doesn’t being “inclusive” sort of imply that you don’t mind religious people - even the “anti-science fundamentalists,” provided they don’t prevent you doing science - running for and winning office? So are we then judging the Canadian version by a different standard? More to the point, since when is “Canadian” synonymous with “self-effacing and inclusive?” That certainly doesn’t describe any Canadians I’ve met - most of whom go out of their way to be mean to Americans and to call attention to just how Canadian they are, and just how much better that supposedly is than the alternatives. Now - no doubt that doesn’t apply to all Canadians, but as anyone whose read Sawyer’s novels knows, it certainly applies to HIM, which makes it particularly ironic that he’s the one currently doing the peddling of this factually-challenged stereotype.
Of course, this kind of base nationalist pandering is every bit as bad - if not worse - than what he’s accusing the Arrogant Wing of the Atheist (non-)Movement of doing. The Skeptical Movement isn’t ONLY in the United States, it doesn’t seem to have had more success anywhere else than it has in the US, and if we’re judging success by how religious the general population is, then Canada has a lot further to go than most of the nations that have branches of the Center for Inquiry (though, admittedly, not as far as the US).
Alright, that’s probably too much metaphorical ink spillt over Sawyer. I agree with the basic point: yes, atheists would do better to drop the superiority act. But honestly, I know of very few who act the way Richard Dawkins and PZ Myers do. Most atheists are happy to live and let live - and that’s whether or not they’re Canadian. Sawyer’s an engaging writer, and his books are actually entertaining reads. Too bad - in his novels as well as his essays - he seems only capable of burning straw men.
Driving a co-worker to work this week, I have to listen to a spiel about the Dalai Lama - who visited recently, and whom she refers to as “His Holiness.” The lecture comes because I’m asking what the oft-mentioned rivalry between the two Buddhist centers in town is, and apparently it’s that one is Catholic and the other Protestant. Meaning, as you can probably guess, that one accepts the Dalai Lama’s status as some kind of holy figure, and the other prefers to practice their “religion” without the mumbo-jumbo.
As an atheist who is Definitely Not Buddhist, one of these options gets a lot more respect from me than the other, obviously. Since I’m not in a position to think that there’s anything special about a self-described “brat” who was essentially chosen at random, I have a lot more respect for people who opt for the pope-less version of the religion.
But thence comes the dilema: do I make any effort to keep this opinion to myself while we’re talking about this subject?
It’s a constant problem for me, actually. On the one hand, atheism isn’t just something for me. To the extent that you suspect that God is an illusion, and to the extent that you believe that people are, in general, better off acting on true premises than false ones, then you’ve inevitably got to believe that - in general - people are better off not believing in God. And I do believe it. And so I want to do something to make their silly opinions socially costly - both because I think they themselves are ultimately better off for it, and because I think a more secular society is in general safer for atheists like me to inhabit. On the other hand, there’s nothing about her belief that is directly threatening to me. Until she decides to start passing laws or using public money to promote her religion, it’s no skin off my back that she believes the Dalai Lama is the 14th reincarnation of some super righteous dude. Oh, I admit, I feel a bit bullied by the constant use of the “His Holiness” title, but minor annoyance is a poor excuse for picking fights, and I’m within my rights to just call him “the Dalai Lama” in response.
I think the right answer here is that you do make some minor effort to avoid evangelizing - and the reason has everything to do with that word ultimately. Yes, people are ultimately better off not believing in God. I have to believe that as an inevitable consequence of my worldview. But there’s a long way from here to “ultimately,” and I don’t think I know what all the stops along that road are. This is one of those rare opinions that’s both arrogant and humble all at the same time. It’s arrogant in the sense that I’m claiming to know more about at least this aspect of the universe than she does - to wit, that she’s deluded and I’m not. But it’s humble in that I don’t presume to know enough about how religion works or what it buys people or what an individual’s circumstances and needs are to believe that I have a foolproof medicine here.
The truth about atheism is that it doesn’t offer any direct benefits. Everything that you get out of it is ultimately indirect. It saves you time by clarifying where the burden of proof is, so you can eliminate a whole host of hypotheses about how the universe works out of hand. It forces you to be more honest with yourself in a lot of ways too - because you don’t get the kinds of epistemic trump cards that faith gives you. But these effects aren’t that pronounced, I guess - and even so they’re not direct consequences of any “belief in Atheism.” Rather, they’re things that are true of anyone who adopts a healthy skepticism in any domain - religion being just one possible example.
Religion, by constrast, can be directly beneficial or harmful. Even if it’s not true, mere belief in it can have positive and negative consequences. Mentally it can be used to comfort, to reassure, to focus, and of course also to abuse and to self-deceive. It can spur people to good and bad deeds for which they would otherwise lack justification. It can organize and even civilize communities - and of course it can destroy them as well. And all of this is because religion is a positive, affirmative belief IN something. Atheism is neither an active belief nor a conscious rejection - it’s just a passive rejection of something for which the burden of proof has not been met - an “I’m not gonna buy any until your sales pitch improves” response.
The question for an atheist tempted to evangelize is this: given that religion can have both positive and negative effects on believers, will the damage done by removing the positive effects it’s having on this individual (until suitable replacements can be found - which for some people can take a VERY long time) be adequately compensated for in the short term by freeing him from its negative effects? The complicated phrasing is there because it’s a complicated question even if you DO know all the good and bad effects a given religion is having on a given person at a given time in his life. And of course, in reality no one ever DOES know - not completely, not even if you’re an analyst or a close confidant. It’s especially difficult to know in the case of religion because it’s a private and deeply irrational thing. Who knows what uses anyone puts it to in the privacy of their mind? In the long term, of course, any individual will be better off without it. I have to believe that. But learning replacements for the emotional crutches and motivations, and often the clarity of focus that religion can provide - well, that can take extensive therapy. It’s like learning to use your fingers again after severe nerve damage. When you take out a crucial piece of someone’s world view and ask them to start over without it, you’ve handicapped them. Not permanently, but definitely for a little while at least.
Or actually - the analogy I prefer is of a hugely corrupt society, like India at the time of writing. There is a lot of corruption in the Indian bureaucracy, and it’s finally a real issue because India’s economy is taking off big-time, and all the bribes that are meant to grease the wheels are just gumming up the works. For the first time ever there’s a credible public demand that it stop, and I’m certain the country will soon be making great progress on that front. But it’s interesting to note, all the same, that it probably wouldn’t be a good idea for it to just vanish tomorrow - and that’s because it’s enough of a problem right now that India’s internal economy probably depends on it. Bureaucrats can’t maintain their current lifestyles without bribes, and the size of the bureaucracy and the amount of money paid in bribes every year is a consumer spending reality. The economy would need time to adjust to everything from wildly different consumer preferences to the release of talent from the government pool once jobs in officialdom can’t pad their official renumeration under the table. Of course you want corruption gone; of course it’s a stranglehold on the economy. OF COURSE the country would be better off without it. But just because everyone’s better off without it doesn’t mean they’d be better off if it disappeared tomorrow. These things take time.
Of course, in reality it’s never so dramatic as all that. For one thing, it’s vanity to assume that anyone can talk a religious person out of his convictions: it simply can’t be done, for if there’s anything well-insulated against rational criticism, it’s the faith-based human imagination. So for this reason, one needn’t worry too much about the impact his atheist evangelizing is going to have on a believer. If the believer wasn’t already considering dropping religion, nothing you say is ultimately going to be persuasive. For another thing, religion is greatly subconscious - so even if someone does consciously leave religion, the actual process of weeding out all the assumptions and tendencies takes much longer. Even in those cases where you do succeed, Nature sort of steps in to enforce kind of reintegration period anyway. And finally, a lot of atheists believe in mumbo-jumbo of their own - so even if you can get someone to stop believing in God, there are all sorts of lesser things they can latch onto. So there’s absolutely no need to walk on eggshells. Convincing anyone to change any wrongly-held belief is an uphill battle, but the hill is never as steep as with religion.
So you don’t evangelize as a general rule - partly because it’s just futile and generally counterproductive (you won’t convince them, but you might strain the relationship trying), and partly because it’s not clear that you’re doing them a favor to begin with. If you’re going to start a revolution, as they say, you’d better have a plan for what happens when you win. With religion, it’s just really hard to plan, because no one really knows what it is, what function it serves, or why people believe in it at all. Best not to manipulate things you don’t understand.
Now, that rule is not an absolute. Religion is more and less important on a case-by-case basis, and in most cases in the younger generation I think it’s less important. And the shallower the roots, the easier it is to weed. I think there’s very little harm evangelizing around people under 30. In my experience, most younger people who profess some kind of faith these days are doing it more for to signal some kind of belonging and not so much out of actual conviction. Working to push such a person over the line to atheism is completely harmless. And really, I think that’s enough. After all, “live and let live” is a foundational principle for Libertarians, so if people have strongly-held religious beliefs that’s only my business when they start attacking me because of it. If someone’s determined to believe in things that I think are fantasy, well, who am I to say he can’t? The question is only whether he will try to enforce his beliefs on me. And generally speaking, when a religious group lacks even the illusion of general support, they’re safe to be around (with, of course, exceptions for people like Westboro Baptist and the Taliban). So it’s enough, I think, to gently nudge the casual believers over the line, and leave the big fish to fry themselves.
What a long-winded way to state a rule of thumb! So here it is in the short version: avoid antagonizing religious people - unless that’s just fun for you (and it can be, I freely admit!). If it doesn’t have to come into the conversation, why should it? But for people who are only mildly religious, why not? It’s a short step over the line, but that line is there, it’s real, and it’s important. So I guess it comes down to “First, do no harm. But if you’re not doing any harm, do heal the patient!”
Interesting (though in retrospect probably obvious) thought gelled out of a discussion with Alexis about animal rights: there are both raising and lowering solutions to inequality problems, and a lot of times people get pigeonholed into saying things they don’t really mean by failing to consider the raising solution if they’ve already thought of the lowering solution, or vice versa.
I’m not just borrowing terminology from Syntax. “Raising” and “Lowering” for meta-politics is this: when you’re confronted by a percieved inequality, such that one group is, from where you stand, getting an unfair share of the attention surrounding something, there are two broad ways of evening things out. You can “raise” the other groups to the status of the privileged, or you can “lower” the privileged to the status of the excluded. And of course two corollaries probably go without saying here: (1) that of course one can both raise and lower at the same time in the same problem space and (2) that raising and lowering will in many situations be empirically indistinguishable anyway, as they are relative terms.
I wonder whether there isn’t a correlation between awareness of the existence of “lowering” solutions and predilection for libertarian political tendencies.
Consider gay marriage. The fundamental injustice is that heterosexuals have de facto property rights that homosexuals do not. And here is an issue where I think that the “raising” solution is inappropriate. Typically this issue gets framed in terms of what gays are being denied, and so the obvious solution that occurs to everyone is to extend the marriage franchise to include them. We have hetero marriage, so it seems unproblematic to extend this to include homo marriage. But to me this isn’t the REAL issue, and assuming that it is is a mistake that leads to all sorts of nasty side effects. For example - it leads people to make the frankly ludicrous suggestion that love between the members of a homosexual couple is somehow less real until the government puts a stamp of approval on it. The idea that anyone’s feelings need legitimizing by the state is laughable in any other context, and yet on this issue people buy into it because they cannot think how else to articulate their frustrations. Another nasty side effect is that the problem of government sanction of lifestyle is not eliminated, merely transformed. Other kinds of a priori legitimate relationships are left out in the cold, such as polygamy, polyandry, group unions, temporary unions, and good ol’ fashioned living in sin. By continuing to exclude these groups, people who argue that the government should stay out of people’s bedrooms ironically end up legitimizing its role there.
None of these problems come with the “lowering” solution, however. The lowering solution is to take official sanction away from heterosexual couples. It just says “fine, we agree, this privilege is no longer justified (if it ever was), so now you have to live like everyone else.” Under the lowering solution, the government really does get out of everyone’s bedrooms, and everyone is on a level playing field. To the extent that there are legal marital unions, it’s up to the people involved and their lawyers to hammer out a contract.
I think lowering type solutions appeal to libertarians because they are minimalist. We don’t say it out loud often, but one of our motivations for wanting to shrink the government - in addition to just wanting to leave people free - is wanting to make the law clear and accessible. And lowering solutions typically do that. They ELIMINATE special exceptions in favor of laws that apply to everyone equally. To the extent that laws can be made simple and universal, the system itself becomes simple, universal, and easier to maintain.
My question is whether this is a general category of thinking that extends to other domains as well, such that people with libertarian sensibilities could be identified by their positions on other issues. And I think it’s possible it can. The discussion with Alexis was about animal rights, but including animal cognition. She’s a vegetarian, and her reasoning there is that animals are sentient, and so we owe them moral consideration - what is typically called an “ethical vegetarian.” And I really agree - that animals are sentient and that we owe them moral consideration. I will not use products that I believe are unnecessarily tested on animals, and I prefer to eat meat (such as beef) that I know has been killed humanely. I don’t have any ethical problem with eating animals - since this seems to be the natural order, and humans are certainly evolved to be ominvores - but I can certainly understand the case from the other side. I have a problem with any moral system that extends full rights to animals - but only because of the communication barrier. Animals don’t seem to extend rights to me, and since rights are reciprocal, I can’t really do it unilaterally, etc.
In any case, the relevance to raising and lowering is that I hear a lot of goofy opinions about animal cognition that I think are the result of applying a raising solution when a lowering one is more appropriate. A lot of vegetarians (though not Alexis, I should hastily add!) - wanting to persuade people to give up meateating - are led to make exaggerated claims about the mental abilities of animals. It is a raising solution in that it attempts to raise animals to the status of humans, and it doesn’t work because it’s self-evident that animals do not have the same range of reasoning abilities nor the same mental capacity that humans do. The lowering solution avoids this problem though - and the lowering solution here is to give up on the idea that human mental abilities are different in kind, in favor of saying they are just different in magnitude. In other words, give up on the idea that humans have souls - at least for political and ethical purposes, which is independently appropriate in a secular society anyway.
And this extends, much more interestingly, to the question of whether machines can think. As far as I’m concerned, they can, and this is not an interesting question. Edsger Dijkstra puts it nicely:
The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim.
In other words, computers only don’t think if you’re willing to ascribe some sort of unjustified mystical status to human thinking. If you’re not - and I’m not - they do. They recieve inputs, process them internally, and produce outputs. It’s thinking - just as humans do. It may not be done according to exactly the same methods - and certainly it’s not done in the same medium - as human thinking, but if we ever replicated a human brain in silicon it would be essentially the same. This falls under the rubric of “to the rational mind, nothing is inexplicable, merely unexplained.” Human thought - especially consciousness - is largely unexplained, but I reject the idea that it is inexplicable! And this is, it seems to me, a lowering solution rather than a raising solution. The raising solution would be to say that there IS something inherently mysterious about thought, but that computers (bzw. animals) can do it - whatever it may be - too, and so they’re in the privileged group. Mine and Dijkstra’s opinion is a lowering solution because it asserts that there’s nothing special about human thinking - it is just thinking, and if there’s a difference between human and computer thinking then it’s a difference in complexity and wiring, not in fundamentals. I am a meat machine.
Applying raising solutions when lowering ones are more appropriate also accounts for the ease with which people are confused by the charge that Atheism is a religion. This is a raising solution - but to an insidious end. In using it, Chrisians seek to afford Atheism the same categorical status that their religion has in hopes of avoiding their burden of proof (this, at least, is already a named fallacy). So they say things like “Atheism is a faith, because it’s asserting that which can never be satisfactorily proven: the existence of a negative.” But of course Atheism is making no such claim. What believers fail to understand is that atheists aren’t as concerned with them as they are with atheists. Not believing in God has the same status as my not believing in all those other things that I don’t believe in because I have not been supplied with adequate evidence: unicorns, leprechauns, the Loch Ness Monster, magic, telekinesis and so on. It’s not that these things are a priori impossible, it’s just that (a) believing in them would require some revisions to the model of the way the world works that I’ve built up on the basis of my experiences, and (b) although I might be willing to do that if I had seen convincing evidence of their existence, there isn’t any such convincing evidence. The burden of proof is on the people who believe in unicorns, leprechauns, the Loch Ness monster, magic, telekinesis … and God. *I* am the one who is owed an explanation - and everyone knows this, and they further know that the burden of proof has never satisfactorily been met, and so one sneaky way around this problem is shifting it to me by “generously” “raising” Atheism to the status of a religion. My point here is that I think so many people fall victim to it because there is a general tendency to err on the side of raising solutions. But the lowering solution is the appropriate one: religion is a hypothesis about reality that has to meet the same burden of proof as any other. It may well be that individual believers have access to information that they cannot share with the rest of us (because it is available only by mystical and personal revelation), and that obviously suffices to ground their own beliefs, but it is inadequate for anyone else. I am an Atheist until someone can show me either that there is a God (in which case I will become a believer), or that it is likely that there is a God (in which case I will become an Agnostic). I call myself an Atheist because I do not overlook lowering solutions to the same extent that most people do. (Most people - recently including Noah, to my mild chagrin - implicitly accept the validity of the raising options and call themselves “Agnostics” out of a misguided sense of fairness).
So this sort of error is pervasive. Now, I’m not making any claim that it’s always an error to prefer the raising solution to the lowering one. But I guess I am making the claim that people are more likely to err on that side than the other - if only because they are more existentially comfortable with “building things up” than “tearing things down.” One of the reasons why Libertarianism is a hard sell is because it tears things down, and if we’re going to sell it at all we face the problematic task of selling a system of negative liberties as a progressive step forward. People are inherently unsatisfied with answers that are “none of the above,” and too frequently that’s what our answer is. But of course I assume in general that there are also cases where the raising solution is appropriate in an environment where the lowering solution has been applied instead.
An interesting question is which Socialism is? I can see the case both ways. On the one hand, it’s a lowering solution because it focuses on bringing down the rich and powerful to the level of everyone else. On the other hand, it’s a raising solution, because it focuses on extending the status of the privileged to all citizens. But I think what asking this question at all really serves to illustrate is that we can’t always extend neat models of categorizing things to all domains. Socialism is neither a raising nor a lowering solution - it is simply a category error, based on false assumptions about the purpose of government and the ends of human society.
The loony Christian lobby just officially stepped off the deep end. I have no idea what the message of this video is, but it’s definitely worth two minutes of your time. Hat tip Obama Shill Andrew Sullivan, via Will Wilkinson.
Dnesh D’Souza is back up to his old tricks: misrepresenting Atheism rather than doing a Christian Apologist’s duty, which is recommending faith. This time, the springboard is an article in Discover (which, for reasons mysterious, D’Souza doesn’t link in his column). The gist of the article is that there are just “too many coincidences” in how the laws of the universe are set up. Basically, even slight changes in the laws of physics would make it impossible for the universe as we know it to exist, meaning that life would not exist (for example, if electrons weighed twice as much as they actually weigh, stars would burn out in a million years rather than billions, and life wouldn’t have time to evolve). D’Souza, predictably, takes this as evidence that there is a Creator - because how else can we explain all these “coincidences?”
Click on the link and take a look at the article and you’ll see that D’Souza is engaging in what we might call the Argumentum ab Advertismum - “Argument from Advertising.” The article isn’t really about the search for God, but is rather about the Multiverse Theory - you know, that theory that gave Spock a beard on Star Trek. The only reason there are references to God in the article at all is because the reporter inserts them there - presumably to sensationalize a dry subject to sell magazines (and no doubt it made a subscriber out of D’Souza, so hey!). The original reason for the Multiverse Theory - as the article itself makes clear if you bother to read it, actually - was to explain why the universe has a uniform temperature throughout. This is a problem for the Big Bang Theory, though not for other theories of cosmology. So the real motivation was to plug up some holes in the Big Bang Theory - not, as D’Souza wants his audience to think, to explain these “embarassing coincidences.”
The “embarassing coincidences” are generally “explained” by an appeal to the Anthropic Principle - which really just says that the question itself is misleading: if these “embarassing coincidences” hadn’t happened, then we wouldn’t be here to ask these questions. Some supporters of the Anthropic explanation have jokingly styled it cogito, ergo mundus talis est (”I think, therefore the world is as it is”). The point being that this is a truism; it is invoked to answer a pointless question.
The logical error being made here is obvious. For one to be troubled by why the laws of the universe are the way they are, then one first has to assume that they could have been otherwise. The problem is that it’s not clear what this means. At what point was the universe in a position to operate according to different laws than the ones according to which it does in fact operate? And according to what principle did the principles of the universe decide to be what they are? Of course, these questions are not nonsensical to religious people who have long postulated a framework for the formation of laws of reality. For them, the laws of the universe could’ve been otherwise if God had decided otherwise. Fair enough. But I don’t think you can reason that the other way. That is, it’s fair enough to say “because I believe in God, these questions are not nonsense.” But I’m not sure it’s fair to say “because I take these questions seriously, I must believe in God.” Starting without any prior prejudice on the question of whether or not there is a creator, it’s just as valid to say that the questions are nonsense. I don’t need to speculate on why the laws of the universe are what they are because my job is simply to document the laws of the universe and make predictions about its future on that basis. Once you start asking about why a framework of physical laws is one way and not another, you’re already outside the realm of science and in the realm of pulling things out of your ass (the politically correct term for this is “metaphysics”). So sure, one answer we might pull out of our ass is that God decided that the laws would be this way - but there’s no reason I can see why this explanation has any claim to prominence over any other product of one’s ass - say, the idea that there are infinite numbers of universes representing all possible arrangements of laws and we just happen to be in this one, one of the few we can plausibly inhabit. Or maybe that everything in the world is the product of minor perturbations on cosmic strings, whose composition we’re not allowed to ask about. In any case, the point is that once you start asking metaphysical questions like “great, we have these laws, but why not other laws?” you’re overreaching as far as “science” is concerned. It isn’t that they’re illegitimate questions, it’s just that they’re not scientific questions.
Now, if D’Souza wants to leap from here to “God created the world and made us all sinful until Jesus died on the Cross,” that’s his business, of course. He might even be right, for all I know. My point is just that he didn’t get there by reading a bunch of science books and then in a flash of insight saying “Of COURSE! It couldn’t have been otherwise! Every poorly-translated word of the Bible is true, by God!” Hardly. If you’re going to believe in Christianity, it’s going to be for reasons that are completely oblivious to what you did or didn’t learn in Physics class.
Well, my point is that I think people like Dawkins and Hitchens know that. The brand of religion that they’re arguing against in their books isn’t the idea that there might maybe be a Creator. They doubt it, of course, but they don’t rule it out. Nor do they have any problem with people saying “there might be a Creator, for all I know.” What they insist on is that bit I put in itallics - the “for all I know.” It isn’t idle religious speculation they mind, it’s religious certainty. It’s the kind of organized religion that claims to have answers about the nature of the universe so specific as to require that people go to Mass and eat bread together at least once a year on a highly specific day. The kind of arrogance that, for example, leads people to vote on political marriage questions based on what they think God wants - as if they even know there is a God, let alone His opinion on marriage.
The thing that’s offensive about every single column that Dnesh D’Souza has ever written is this presumption that a tie goes to the believers. Wrong. It’s just the opposite, in fact. Ties on religious questions - at least religious questions as a domain of communal knowledge - go to the non-believers. Tricking someone into thinking it’s strange that the universe is the way it is isn’t an acceptable basis for a worldview. Really, this technique is no different than convincing yourself that a perfectly familiar word like ivy sounds strange by repeating it 20 times slowly. I don’t know why we use that particular combination of syllables to refer to that particular species of plant, but I do know that it doesn’t matter. All that is required is that members of the same linguistic community agree on an appropriate combination and use it consistently. It doesn’t matter that it “could have been otherwise,” that indeed it is otherwise (in, say, Japanese). And so sure, if we sit around and repeat all the known laws of the universe to ourselves slowly over periods of years (say, as a Physics instructor), I guess they’re bound to seem strange at some point too. But just feeling it doesn’t make it so. The laws of the universe, like the combinations of syllables that make up words, are arbitrary. It doesn’t matter why they are one way and not another, the point is that they function consistently. If they were different, then the universe would be a different place, just like if English operated according to a different Phonology and different Syntax it would be not English but Some Other Language. Indeed, trying to trick someone into believing in God by saying that the universe, if even slightly different by nature, couldn’t have supported life at all, is putting the cart in front of the horse in exactly the same way that it would be to argue that Evoltuion has as its purpose the creation of Language by noting that even slight changes in human physiology would’ve made spoken communication impossible. It’s absurd. It’s true enough that the evolution of Language depends on a staggering number of what D’Souza would no doubt like to call physiological “coincidences,” but nothing about this leads anyone to the goofy supposition that Evolution has a “purpose.” Evolution is just a dumb global process. That it produced language-capable creatures is interesting, to be sure, but it’s hardly cause for wonder or amazement. That’s just how things turned out is all.
D’Souza is, of course, free to use whatever facts about the universe he likes to prop up his favorite superstitions on his own time. What I object to is this insistence on mischaracterizing the beliefs of others for the purpose of manipulating people to see things his way.
But of late atheism seems to be losing its scientific confidence. One sign of this is the public advertisements that are appearing in billboards from London to Washington DC. Dawkins helped pay for a London campaign to put signs on city buses saying, “There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.” What is striking about these slogans is the philosophy behind them. There is no claim here that God fails to satisfy some criterion of scientific validation.
Gee, might that be because they are bus slogans? Because now that you mention it, I’ve never seen a religious billboard that makes the claim that God satisfies some criterion of scientific validation either. Or a religious billboard that makes the claim that God satisfies any criterion of philosophical validation, for that matter. But I’ve certainly seen a lot of religious billboards. Does this mean that religion has given up apologetics? That the Discovery Institute packed up and went home and stopped advancing the argument that God needs a place in the science books? Hardly. No one would be so absurd as to claim that all religious arguments needed to fit on the space of a billboard. And yet D’Souza wants to people to believe that Dawkins gave up the goat on all the arguments in his book - which isn’t even out of its first print edition yet, unlike, say, the Summa Theologica - on the basis of a billboard. Obviously not.
The surest sign I have, in fact, that Christians don’t really, in their heart of hearts, believe all the crap they say is that so many of them spend this much time gaming the referee rather than playing the game. If you ask a Christian questions about the presence of evil in the world, he will be happy to tell you that he doesn’t fully understand God’s Plan, but that this isn’t a threat to his worldview. Why, then, should the fact that scientists are unable to fully explain the universe be a threat to the scientific worldview? Christians never say. No Christian takes a billboard slogan put up by some other Christian as his entire profession of faith, and indeed most would be offended if I suggested that they did. Why, then, should we Atheists be presumed to stand and fall on the basis of what Dawkins puts on buses in London? To call it a “mischaracterization” of the debate would itself be a mischaracterization on the basis of understatment.
There used to be a time as recently as 50 years ago when Christian apologists were not this silly. There used to be a time when they read philosophy and science and put a lot of time and thought into coming up with intelligent, if flawed, arguments in favor of their worldview. What happened? Now what we get are these cheap jabs. God must exist because Physics can’t tell me why the universe is this way and not another. Really? Atheism is giving up its pretentions of rationality because I saw a pro-atheist billboard the last time I was in London that didn’t mention science. Honestly?
In actual fact, though, he does take enormous care throughout the interview to be patient. Although he regards it as “clearly wicked” to call the child of Catholic parents “a Catholic child”, he quickly adds, “it’s equally wicked to say this is an atheist child. I would never say that.” He can’t help adding, “Of course, some people would say all babies are atheist, because they don’t believe in anything.” But when I ask if he’d say that, he considers for a moment before replying, “Well, I’m not sure that’s a very sensible way of putting it actually.”
I agree with him - this is a point that needs clearing up.
I like to refer to Atheism as the “default” position on religion. The justification goes like this: because religious beliefs flatly contradict daily experience and are not obviously true, the burden of proof falls on the believers. That means that in absense of a compelling case, people who are “confused” on the matter of God should assume that there is no such thing. Put differently, since adopting a belief in God would require one to radically alter his daily perception of the world to include things that he cannot be sure are there - probably through an act of will - then it is the sort of thing one should not do without a good reason. This might take the form of a really clever logical argument that most of us have never heard, but it’s more likely to be some kind of supernatural experience. Absent such a thing, there is no reason to apply one’s will to edit his perceptions, and so he should not. An Atheist is what you are if no one has given you a good reason to believe in God.
So what, one might ask, is an Agnostic? Yes, that’s the rub. I think Agnosticism as it’s currently understood is a bit of a problematic category. People who are in the habit of saying that they “don’t know” whether there is a God or not like to call themselves Agnostics - usually to stress that they are open to the possibility that it might all be real. But on this definition, it’s hard to see a substantive difference with Atheists, as all honest Atheists admit the logical possibility that there is a God, even if they think it hugely unlikely. So what need “Agnostic?”
Here I like to fall back on a little well-intentioned prescriptivism. Since “Agnostic” etymologically means “without gospel” - i.e. without a fixed set of beliefs on God - then I would prefer to use it to refer to those people who strongly suspect that there is a God (or supernatural presence of some kind in the universe), but don’t commit themselves to any specifics about this belief. So all those people who describe themselves as “not religious, spiritual” - they’re Agnostics. Also - all those people who honestly don’t know, but give it about a 50-50 chance - they’re Agnostics. One type of individual that is frequently lumped in with Agnostics but which I would prefer to classify Atheist is the type of person who believes that it is logically impossible to decide whether God exists. That is, maybe there is a God, but because one can’t prove it one way or the other (indeed, he believes that he can prove that one can’t prove it one way or the other), he adopts the sensible strategy of assuming it isn’t there. I consider this type of person an Atheist because they have reasoned their way out of any theological connection. It’s a philosophical commitment to living one’s life as though there were no God, even if it turns out there really is one. That’s gotta be Atheism.
I haven’t read The God Delusion, so I don’t really know where Dawkins draws his lines, but I think it must be somewhere similar because the way I understand the quoted passage above, it isn’t exactly fair to describe a child as an “Atheist” until that child is sufficiently mature and informed to make an idependent decision. This sort of speaks against the idea of Atheism as a “default,” and more of it as a firm position. That’s a bit uncomfortable for me because it skates dangerously close to the standard religious trap: of saying that Atheists are people who are certain that there is no God and, as such, are people of faith themselves. But however dangerously close it skates and however uncomfortable it makes me, I think it’s right. Atheism is not a “faith” - certainly not in the sense that allows religious people to exploit their specious technicality - but it is, I think, a conscious decision. It is a commitment to the idea that there is (probably) no God. It is not a blind commitment of the kind that would make it a faith, but it is a commitment.
Still, it was interesting to see it mentioned because I hadn’t really spent much time thinking about whether Atheism is a conviction or not. As I say, this is an area where we have to be careful, because too much admission that it’s a “conviction” buys you the same tired retort from the religious crowd that it’s a “faith like any other, but an empty faith.” Yeah, yeah. A conviction is not a faith, however. A conviction is just a belief about which one feels certain, though there is no way to properly test it. For example, it would be fair to describe my political beliefs as “convictions,” since there is no way I know to actually test Capitalism - certainly not in laboratory conditions. I come to that belief by starting with first principles, reasoning that the ideal political system will be Capitalist, and then looking at history and seeing confirmation for my conclusions in the way human events have played out. That is no one’s idea of a conclusive proof that Capitalism is the best currently available system, and so I cannot have a scientific certainty about my beliefs. But it is the best I believe anyone can do, and so I call my political beliefs a “conviction.” So it is with Atheism. It isn’t the same as faith, because what I haven’t done in either case is committed myself to believing in either despite evidence to the contrary, as religious people are in the habit of doing. If someone can show me conclusively that there is a God, I’m happy to change course.
The overall point, though, is that on reflection it might be a bit misleading to call Atheism a “default.” It IS the default in the sense that it’s the position one comes to when the people on whom the burden of prrof rests fail to meet it. But in social reality, where there is a huge amount of pressure to adopt a religious belief of some kind, it is better described as a conviction, since one pretty much has to reason his way out of a paper bag to get to it. So, logically a default, but socially a conviction in that social pressure renders it pretty difficult to adopt the logical default without having to explain oneself - and defend oneself against a lot of nonsense.
There’s an interesting post at UK Polling Report about a ComRes Survey intended to mimick an earlier Gallup Poll concerning demographic prejudices in US voting. This poll was done back when it seemed plausible that Mitt Romney would be the Republican nominee (thank God that didn’t come to pass!), and the question was how much of a liability his Mormonism would be. Gallup took the opportunity to survey people about a number of candidate descriptions - including age (72 and older - i.e. McCain), sexual orientation, religion (Islam was not included) and … atheism. It turns out that US citizens object to atheists more than anything - with fully 53% saying that they would not vote for an atheist for president, all other things equal. Gays and old guys were next in line - with 43% indicating refusal to vote for a gay, and 42% refusal to vote for someone … erm, John McCain’s age. Unfortunately, there are no data on Muslims, so we don’t know whether that religion is even more objectionable than Atheism, but aside from that possibility, Atheists are THE persona non grata in American politics. OUCH!
The UK Polling Report post points out that Britons are as likely to be racist as Americans - which is to say, barely at all. Equal numbers of Britons and Americans are uncomfortable with a black President/PM, and that number, at 5%, is encouragingly low. (Of course, that with the caveat that it’s right at the boundary of “acceptable,” and if the Bradley Effect is real this number is actually higher than it seems.) Similar numbers of Britons also don’t mind going public with their ageism, with about 43% objecting to the idea of a 70+-year-old PM. Sexism is somewhat lower in the UK - 7% of them objecting to a woman vs. 11% for us. There was a question about divorce on both surveys, but I decline to report on it because there were significant differences in phrasing. Where it gets interesting is with Atheism. While lower than in America, the number is surprisingly high in the UK as well: 20%.
One might not have guessed it, but not believing in God would appear to be almost as much of an electoral handicap for a potential leader in the UK as being Muslim or gay.
But therein lies the difference. We don’t have numbers for Muslims in the US, but the point is that gays are much more acceptable to US voters than Atheists. In fact, the profiles of voters in both nations couldn’t be more different. Minorities and women are - broadly speaking - acceptable in both places, but there similarities end. While a disturbingly large number of Britons object to Muslims and gays, they are still more tolerant of them (well, gays, anyway) than US voters. And while Britons are most concerned that their candidate not be too old - argubly sensible, given the demands of the job, though that of course should be judged on a case-by-case basis - Americans are most concerned that their President believe in some mystical sky bully. While it does matter to some degree which flavor of supersitious nonsense the candidate subscribes to (Catholics are marginally better than Jews; Jews are greatly preferable to Mormons), apparently any flavor is better than none at all.
So I hereby declare myself more discriminated against than any other minority group. That gives me unlimited license to guilt trip the government into buying me a house and a college education and giving me a job I don’t qualify for, AND it allows me to refuse to tip waiters. Ain’t America grand?
