Incredulity as a Moral Failure

I keep encountering arguments from incredulity in the speculative religious community. An argument from incredulity is just an assertion by the arguer that they can’t imagine how something is possible. In two recent examples, the arguers are the Christian faithful and are trying to deconstruct materialist counterarguments to their speculations about collections of facts. I think this is both an intellectual and a moral failure. It is an intellectual failure when the speculators don’t choose the obvious stance with regard to unknowns and unknowables: I don’t know. It is a moral failure when the consequences of such intellectual failures leads to weakly-justifiable faith constructs that harm or might harm others.

Let’s take a couple of examples. First, we have Ross Douthat (I know, I know, I spend too much time on him, but he does have a big platform being at New York Times). He has a forthcoming book about why one should believe in a religion, although he is not forceful about which particular one is the right choice for any individual, it seems. But here is a recent set of three arguments from that book. They all rely on incredulity in some way.

  1. The fine tuning argument. Ross thinks it is highly improbable that some physical constants in our universe happened by chance. He also thinks that one materialist solution to that happenstance is to speculate about multiverses. In the multiverse solution, there are many universes (maybe a cosmic foam with little universe bubbles!) and ours just happened to be goldilocksish for the structure we observe. Of course, we can speculate all day about this. We can instead say perhaps we have been having infinite Big Bangs as a single universe expands then collapses.
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Rationality and the Intelligibility of Philosophy

6a00d83542d51e69e20133f5650edd970b-800wiThere is a pervasive meme in the physics community that holds as follows: there are many physical phenomena that don’t correspond in any easy way to our ordinary experiences of life on earth. We have wave-particle duality wherein things behave like waves sometimes and particles other times. We have simultaneous entanglement of physically distant things. We have quantum indeterminacy and the emergence of stuff out of nothing. The tiny world looks like some kind of strange hologram with bits connected together by virtual strings. We have a universe that began out of nothing and that begat time itself. It is, in this framework, worthwhile to recognize that our every day experiences are not necessarily useful (and are often confounding) when trying to understand the deep new worlds of quantum and relativistic physics.

And so it is worthwhile to ask whether many of the “rational” queries that have been made down through time have any intelligible meaning given our modern understanding of the cosmos. For instance, if we were to state the premise “all things are either contingent or necessary” that underlies a poor form of the Kalam Cosmological Argument, we can immediately question the premise itself. And a failed premise leads to a failed syllogism. Maybe the entanglement of different things is piece-part of the entanglement of large-scale space time, and that the insights we have so far are merely shadows of the real processes acting behind the scenes? Who knows what happened before the Big Bang?

In other words, do the manipulations of logic and the assumptions built into the terms lead us to empty and destructive conclusions? There is no reason not to suspect that and therefore the bits of rationality that don’t derive from empirical results are immediately suspect.… Read the rest