Category: Atheism

The Rise and Triumph of the Bayesian Toolshed

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Bayes LawIn Asimov’s Foundation, psychohistory is the mathematical treatment of history, sociology, and psychology to predict the future of human populations. Asimov was inspired by Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire that postulated that Roman society was weakened by Christianity’s focus on the afterlife and lacked the pagan attachment to Rome as an ideal that needed defending. Psychohistory detects seeds of ideas and social movements that are predictive of the end of the galactic empire, creating foundations to preserve human knowledge against a coming Dark Age.

Applying statistics and mathematical analysis to human choices is a core feature of economics, but Richard Carrier’s massive tome, On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt, may be one of the first comprehensive applications to historical analysis (following his other related work). Amusingly, Carrier’s thesis dovetails with Gibbon’s own suggestion, though there is a certain irony to a civilization dying because of a fictional being.

Carrier’s methods use Bayesian analysis to approach a complex historical problem that has a remarkably impoverished collection of source material. First century A.D. (C.E. if you like; I agree with Carrier that any baggage about the convention is irrelevant) sources are simply non-existent or sufficiently contradictory that the background knowledge of paradoxography (tall tales), rampant messianism, and general political happenings at the time lead to a likelihood that Jesus was made up. Carrier constructs the argument around equivalence classes of prior events that then reduce or strengthen the evidential materials (a posteriori). And he does this without ablating the richness of the background information. Indeed, his presentation and analysis of works like Inanna’s Descent into the Underworld and its relationship to the Ascension of Isaiah are both didactic and beautiful in capturing the way ancient minds seem to have worked.… Read the rest

On Killing Kids

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Mark S. Smith’s The Early History of God is a remarkable piece of scholarship. I was recently asked what I read for fun and had to admit that I have been on a trajectory towards reading books that have, on average, more footnotes than text. J.P. Mallory’s In Search of the Indo-Europeans kindly moves the notes to the end of the volume. Smith’s Chapter 5, Yahwistic Cult Practices, and particularly Section 3, The mlk sacrifice, are illuminating on the widespread belief that killing children could propitiate the gods. This practice was likely widespread among the Western Semitic peoples, including the Israelites and Canaanites (Smith’s preference for Western Semitic is to lump the two together ca. 1200 BC because they appear to have been culturally the same, possibly made distinct after the compilation of OT following the Exile).

I recently argued with some young street preachers about violence and horror in Yahweh’s name and by His command while waiting outside a rock shop in Old Sacramento. Human sacrifice came up, too, with the apologetics being that, despite the fact that everyone was bad back then, the Chosen People did not perform human sacrifice and therefore they were marginally better than the other people around them. They passed quickly on the topic of slavery, which was wise for rhetorical purposes, because slavery was widespread and acceptable. I didn’t remember the particulars of the examples of human sacrifice in OT, but recalled them broadly to which they responded that there were translation and interpretation errors with “burnt offering” and “fire offerings of first borns” that, of course, immediately contradicted their assertion of acceptance and perfection of the scriptures.

More interesting, though, is the question of why might human sacrifice be so pervasive, whether among Yahwists and Carthiginians or Aztecs?… Read the rest

Language Games

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Word GamesOn The Thinking Atheist, C.J. Werleman promotes the idea that atheists can’t be Republicans based on his new book. Why? Well, for C.J. it’s because the current Republican platform is not grounded in any kind of factual reality. Supply-side economics, Libertarianism, economic stimuli vs. inflation, Iraqi WMDs, Laffer curves, climate change denial—all are grease for the wheels of a fantastical alternative reality where macho small businessmen lift all boats with their steely gaze, the earth is forever resilient to our plunder, and simple truths trump obscurantist science. Watch out for the reality-based community!

Is politics essentially religion in that it depends on ideology not grounded in reality, spearheaded by ideologues who serve as priests for building policy frameworks?

Likely. But we don’t really seem to base our daily interactions on rationality either. 538 Science tells us that it has taken decades to arrive at the conclusion that vitamin supplements are probably of little use to those of us lucky enough to live in the developed world. Before that we latched onto indirect signaling about vitamin C, E, D, B12, and others to decide how to proceed. The thinking typically took on familiar patterns: someone heard or read that vitamin X is good for us/I’m skeptical/why not?/maybe there are negative side-effects/it’s expensive anyway/forget it. The language games are at all levels in promoting, doubting, processing, and reinforcing the microclaims for each option. We embrace signals about differences and nuances but it often takes many months and collections of those signals in order to make up our minds. And then we change them again.

Among the well educated, I’ve variously heard the wildest claims about the effectiveness of chiropractors, pseudoscientific remedies, the role of immunizations in autism (not due to preservatives in this instance; due to immune responses themselves), and how karma works in software development practice.… Read the rest

Humbly Evolving in a Non-Simulated Universe

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darwin-changeThe New York Times seems to be catching up to me, first with an interview of Alvin Plantinga by Gary Cutting in The Stone on February 9th, and then with notes on Bostrom’s Simulation Hypothesis in the Sunday Times.

I didn’t see anything new in the Plantinga interview, but reviewed my previous argument that adaptive fidelity combined with adaptive plasticity must raise the probability of rationality at a rate that is much greater than the contributions that would be “deceptive” or even mildly cognitively or perceptually biased. Worth reading is Branden Fitelsen and Eliot Sober’s very detailed analysis of Plantinga’s Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism (EAAN), here. Most interesting are the beginning paragraphs of Section 3, which I reproduce here because it is a critical addition that should surprise no one but often does:

Although Plantinga’s arguments don’t work, he has raised a question that needs to be answered by people who believe evolutionary theory and who also believe that this theory says that our cognitive abilities are in various ways imperfect. Evolutionary theory does say that a device that is reliable in the environment in which it evolved may be highly unreliable when used in a novel environment. It is perfectly possible that our mental machinery should work well on simple perceptual tasks, but be much less reliable when applied to theoretical matters. We hasten to add that this is possible, not inevitable. It may be that the cognitive procedures that work well in one domain also work well in another; Modus Ponens may be useful for avoiding tigers and for doing quantum physics.

Anyhow, if evolutionary theory does say that our ability to theorize about the world is apt to be rather unreliable, how are evolutionists to apply this point to their own theoretical beliefs, including their belief in evolution?

… Read the rest

Instrumenting Others

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slave-marketJerry Coyne takes down Ross Douthat’s New York Times column in The New Republic along multiple dimensions, but perhaps the most interesting one is his draw-down of the question of what exactly Christian morality amounts to? We can equally question any other religious morality or even secular ones.

For instance, we mostly agree that slavery is a bad idea in the modern world. Slavery involves treating others instrumentally, using them for selfish outcomes, and exploiting their human capacity. Slavery is almost unquestionable; it lacks many of the conventional ambiguities that dominate controversial social issues. Yet slavery was quite acceptable in the Old Testament, with the only relief coming for the enslavement of Jews by Jews with the release of the slaves after six years (under certain circumstances). Literal interpretations of the Bible resort to expansive apologetics to try to minimize these kinds of problems, but they are just the finer chantilly skimmed off human sacrifice, oppression, and genocide.

So how do people make moral choices? They only occasionally invoke religious sentiments or ideas even when they are believers, though they may often articulate a claim of prayer or meditation. Instead, the predominant moral calculus is girded by modern ideas and conflicts that are evolving faster than even generational change. Pot is OK, gay marriage is just a question of equality, and miscegenation is none of our business. Note that only the second item has a clear reference point in JCM (Judeo-Christian-Muslim) scripture. The others might get some traction using expansive interpretations, but those are expansive interpretations that just justify my central thesis that moral decision-making is really underdetermined by religious thinking (or even formal philosophical ones). Moral decision making is determined by knowledge and education in an ad hoc way that relies on empathic and intellectual reasoning.… Read the rest

The Churches of Evil

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The New York Times continues to mine the dark territory between religious belief and atheism in a series of articles in the opinion section, with the most recent being Gary Cutting’s thoughtful meditation on agnosticism, ways of knowing, and the contributions of religion to individual lives and society. In response, Penn Jillette and others discuss atheism as a religion-like venture.

We can dissect Cutting’s argument while still being generous to his overall thrust. It is certainly true that aside from the specific knowledge claims of religious people that there are traditions of practice that result in positive outcomes for religious folk. But when we drill into the knowledge dimension, Cutting props up Alvin Plantinga and Richard Swinburne as representing “the role of evidence and argument” in advanced religious argument. He might have been better to restrict the statement to “argument” in this case, because both philosophers focus primarily on argument in their philosophical works. So evidence remains elusively private in the eyes of the believer.

Interestingly, many of the arguments of both are simply arguments against a counter-assumption that anticipates a secular universe. For instance, Plantinga shows that the Logical Problem of Evil is not incoherent, resulting in a conclusion that evil (neglect “natural evil” for the moment) is not logically incompatible with omnibenevolence, omnipotence, and omniscience. But, and here we get back to Cutting, it does nothing to persuade us that the rapacious cruelty of Yahweh much less the moral evil expressed in the new concept of Hell in the New Testament are anything more than logically possible. The human dimension and the appropriate moral outrage are unabated and we loop back to the generosity of Cutting towards the religious: shouldn’t we provide equal generosity to the scriptural problem of evil as expressed in everything from the Hebrew Bible through to the Book of Mormon?… Read the rest

SOOO or OOO

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An ever-present flaw in almost all theology and apologetics–and a flaw that is easily remediable–is the requirement for omnipotence, omnibenevolence, and omniscience (OOO) on the part of the structure of God or the gods. We see this in the argumentative doldrums of the Problem of Evil, with practitioners like William Lane Craig and Richard Swinburne building-out elaborate explanatory theodicies in an effort to justify or, at least, allow for an OOO deity. There are extensional consequences, too, like Paul Draper’s argument that an OOO-deity may be obligated to create more than just a single worshipful species given the known extent of the universe.

And what if we remedy the flaw by simply declaring that the OOO assumptions are unnecessary for deities? What if we simply loosen the requirement to something like “God is super-powerful and super-good?” Let’s call this the semi-OOO god theory or SOOO for short. Does SOOO short-circuit the most problematic issues that arise in placing the gods so far above us that we no longer resemble them at all? (an interesting side note: given Christianity’s obsession with the avatar-like character of Christ, it hardly seems aesthetically wrong to assume a flawed God).

The theological and apologetic problems do seem to evaporate, though philosophical arguments evaporate, too:

  • The Ontological Argument: The premise requiring God to be the greatest possible being (Anselmian formulation) immediately goes away. Therefore, there is no Ontological Argument. God doesn’t exist, but only on the initial premise. God may still exist as an SOOO deity.
  • The Cosmological Argument: No impact; the First Cause could be just about anything, as before. Only pre-scientific societies necessarily associate such a cause with an OOO deity.
  • The Problem of Evil: There are actually many formulations of the Problem of Evil, and it remains debated to this day, yet the primary formulation currently fashionable among apologists requires evil (at least moral evil, but sometimes also “natural” evil) in order to provide a proving ground for our moral character.
… Read the rest

Teleology, Chapter 5

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Harry spent most of that summer involved in the Santa Fe Sangre de Cristo Church, first with the church summer camp, then with the youth group. He seemed happy and spent the evenings text messaging with his new friends. I was jealous in a way, but refused to let it show too much. Thursdays he was picked up by the church van and went to watch movies in a recreation center somewhere. I looked out one afternoon as the van arrived and could see Sarah’s bright hair shining through the high back window of the van.

Mom explained that they seemed to be evangelical, meaning that they liked to bring as many new worshippers into the religion as possible through outreach and activities. Harry didn’t talk much about his experiences. He was too much in the thick of things to be concerned with my opinions, I think, and snide comments were brushed aside with a beaming smile and a wave. “You just don’t understand,” Harry would dismissively tell me.

I was reading so much that Mom would often demand that I get out of the house on weekend evenings after she had encountered me splayed on the couch straight through lunch and into the shifting evening sunlight passing through the high windows of our thick-walled adobe. I would walk then, often for hours, snaking up the arroyos towards the mountains, then wend my way back down, traipsing through the thick sand until it was past dinner time.

It was during this time period that I read cyberpunk authors and became intrigued with the idea that someday, one day, perhaps computing machines would “wake up” and start to think on their own.… Read the rest

Mental Religious Math

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The Los Angeles Times reports on an article from Science that shows that analytical thinking and religious belief may be inversely proportional. That may not be news to some, but at least one of the example problems (that the religious failed to complete at higher rates than the non-religious) is quite interesting:

A bat and a ball cost $1.10 in total. The bat costs $1.00 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?

Here there is an initial intuitive leap that says that $1 more than 10 cents is precisely $1.10. Therefore, the ball costs $0.10 or 10 cents. It is easy and clear, but the math undermines that result:

Bat + Ball = $1.10

Bat = Ball + $1.00

(Ball + $1.00) + Ball = $1.10

2*Ball + $1.00 = $1.10

2*Ball = $0.10

Ball = $0.05

Bat = $1.05

This result makes sense if one considers that the cost of the bat must be greater than $1.00 because it is $1.00 more than the ball (and not $1.00 itself). But it is obscured by the initial intuitive leap based on simple subtraction.

But that example is a pretty hard one to reconcile concerning historical and faith-based judgments. I doubt that there is good reason to suspect that mathematical prowess and intuitive dispositions about the costs of things correlates with faith decisions because I suspect that there are other reasons that the faithful believe what they believe. Specifically, most religious faithful believe because they were told to believe by their parents or community. The fact that they do so doesn’t seem to translate into mathematical prowess or ineptness. They may very well score more poorly on these kinds of results because of other individual differences like that those who are more predisposed to critical analytical skills are less likely to have come from highly religious backgrounds, and vice versa.… Read the rest

The Orchard of Belief

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CherriesOne of the most important impacts of the “new atheists” was to break religious discussion out of its silos. Before their recent rise, it was easy for the sophisticated secularist to laugh at the Pat Robertsons because they seemed absurd caricatures of Christianity in America. It was equally irrelevant to the Catholic theologian what analytical philosophy was up to in worrying over the meaning of meaning. And Muslims largely kept to their mosques. But with the critiques of the new atheism came a new willingness to hold remarkable, frank, and intelligent discussions about religion and modern life.

Take Andrew Sullivan’s article in Newsweek that attacks a range of Christian movements within the US through the critical lens of the Jefferson Bible. Sullivan promotes the sermon-on-the-mount Jesus as a radical guru focused exclusively on love. The surrounding texts and their subsequent grafting onto church doctrines are the source of strife both within Christianity and in its interactions with other peoples down through history.

And so as Andrew Sullivan cherry picks on Jefferson’s intellectual plantation, Gary Cutting of Notre Dame points out that there is not much fruit on the vine in the New York Times:

Read alone, the Sermon on the Mount will either confuse us or merely reinforce the moral prejudices we bring to it.

The moral messaging is just too diffuse for Cutting to be able to render into a ethical road map: Should we try to maximize happiness or focus on individual rights? Is the state the proper vehicle for charity? Is democracy better than totalitarianism? These are all contemporary notions that are beside the point in the orchard of Sullivan’s love.

We can contrast this sparring with Ross Douthat at Slate in his ongoing debate cycle centered on his new book, Bad Religion, that picks at the same line of criticism as Sullivan with regard to some of the current strains of evangelism in America.… Read the rest