It is just too easy to proclaim a mysterious god
More from John Shook’s The God Debates. I’m finding it very quotable.
Religion’s defenders often show a preference for defining atheism as the strongest claim to know that no god exists. If atheists cannot justify such a claim (and they can’t…), perhaps belief in god then appears reasonable?This tactic fails, since it uses the wrong definition of atheism and conveniently forgets how religious believers do claim extravagant knowledge of a supreme infinite being. It is religion that credits an extraordinary capacity for knowledge to humans, not atheism. [pp 22-2]
It is just too easy to proclaim a mysterious god, deride dogmatic atheism’s inability to prove that such a mysterious unknowable god cannot exist, and conclude that the faithful should not be criticized. [p 25]
Ordinary believers only feel more lost when a third theologian must be summoned to explain the precise difference between “god is the formless ground of all being in and for itself” and “god is the mystery of the self-evident that is wholly present.” [p 45]
That last one should be addressed directly to Terry Eagleton and Karen Armstrong!
The book is excellent. It sorts the familiar theist claims and arguments into categories in a useful way, as well as pointing out what’s wrong with them. I’m looking forward to the chapter on “Theology into the Myst.”
Precise and perceptive. How could he have possibly written that awful piece at HuffPo?
Can’t we? Just try me, Shook :)
Well, Steve, note the formulation “to know that no god exists.” Knowledge, in knock-down, drag-out philosophical debate, is an very elusive thing.
I think there is something to be said for the legitimacy of the belief that there is no god, even though that’s not quite what atheism is (atheism is the lack of belief in god(s)). There are good reasons to believe, affirmatively, that certain things—highest prime numbers, married bachelors, Tooth Fairies, Flying Spaghetti Monsters, celestial teapots, etc.—don’t exist. (Actually, with those first two examples, knowledge of non-existence is possible; I suppose a noncognitivist atheist would use those two examples to directly dispute Shook’s “they can’t” parenthetical.)
Well, Steve, note the formulation “to know that no god exists.” Knowledge, in knock-down, drag-out philosophical debate, is an very elusive thing.
I realise that. I’m quite prepared to back up a position of atheism based on a complete rejection of the existence of gods, even though atheism certainly can be not having a belief.
The elipse was a reference to a later chapter, which I haven’t read yet.
‘I think there is something to be said for the legitimacy of the belief that there is no god, even though that’s not quite what atheism is (atheism is the lack of belief in god(s)). There are good reasons to believe, affirmatively, that certain things—highest prime numbers, married bachelors, Tooth Fairies, Flying Spaghetti Monsters, celestial teapots, etc.—don’t exist.’
Sorry, but you are dead wrong on the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
Fortunately He is not a vengeful god and He smiles upon your folly with the indulgence an adult has towards a small child.
I’m happy to say that I define my atheism as a belief in the non-existence of gods rather than just a non-belief in god. I disbelieve in god just as I disbelieve in fairies and unicorns and don’t see the point of pretending that I’m just waiting for evidence. Nobody challenges my disbelief in Thor or Osiris or Coatlique so why should I hold back on my disbelief in other, more fashionable, gods?
Put it this way: I can’t be 100% sure I’m not a brain in a jar being deceived about an external world by mischievous imps. It would be an abuse of language to say that my ‘belief’ in materialism is merely a ‘lack of belief’ in impish hijinks on the basis a 0.0000% doubt about reality.
I can’t be 100% sure that my real name is David: I am aware of the confabulation associated with Korsakov’s Syndrome and there is a possibility my ‘memories’ are something I have just thought up – does that mean I don’t ‘believe’ my name is David? At least this case wouldn’t violate my entire conception of reality.
My atheism is conditional on new evidence about godhood not coming to light: I accept that there is a slight possibility that gods exist. This does not mean I don’t ‘believe’ gods don’t exist. Lets not pussyfoot around.
Sorry, 0.0001% doubt. Or thereabouts: it’s impossible to quantify.
If a religious ‘believer’ says that he is open to the 0.00001% possibility there is no god but lives his life as if there is one, attending church, following commandments, shunning shell-fish, mixed fibres and homosexuals, would you insist that he does not, in fact, believe in god? It’s an article of faith that the faithful will find their faith challenged on occasion – does that mean they are non-believers?
In fact, I’m quite willing to ‘risk’ the eternal damnation of my immortal soul to eat a packet of prawn cocktail crisps. I might *say* that I’m not 100% sure that there is no god who finds my actions offensive but my actions show a commitment to a belief such a god does not exist.
Shatterface:
Bring ‘im on. I eat
godsspaghetti for breakfast.Just as a gentle admonition, “disbelief” doesn’t mean “denial” or “belief in nonexistence.” Disbelief is actually a lack of belief. And confusion about that word is part of the reason why so many people fundamentally misunderstand atheism. That semantic quibble aside, I don’t think that “weak” atheism—a lack of belief in gods that is not accompanied by the affirmative (“strong” atheist) belief that there are no gods—is “pretending that I’m just waiting for evidence.” In my experience debating these matters, “weak” atheism is generally motivated by the notion that there is insufficient evidence of absence to justify a belief in that absence. It certainly doesn’t require the pose or notion that (1) theism is a reasonable hypothesis or (2) there’s a chance in hell that that evidence will ever come.
Your “fairies and unicorns” gambit is a entirely normal “strong” atheist rejoinder, and on the argument goes. I think the disagreement is fundamentally about what “belief” is (perhaps in various contexts of discussion), and what kind of justification it requires.
I think that’s a perfectly defensible position.
The argument itself is too sophisticated for the majority of believers, methinks. The primary arguments for the lack of evidence of any deity are, “he chooses to remain unreachable,” and “he is unknowable” [insert pronoun of choice]. The inherent contradiction in saying, “I know what I don’t know,” is entirely lost on most.
It doesn’t really matter if any atheist says, “There is no god,” or not. Addressing the statement on its logic or provability fails to change anything about the existence of a deity, which is what needs to be pointed out every time it’s used. As Shook indicates, the ball remains in their court.
If you really like to play with heads, you can show that such a statement about no gods is not shown to be wrong, simply unsubstantiated – it can still be correct. What this does is make them have to address it from the evidence standpoint, which is exactly what you want them to do.
The argument I see most nowadays, however, is, “You’re not open-minded to the possibility of god’s existence.” This is supposed to get us defensive emotionally. But “open to possibilities” is really meaningless – the key is “open to evidence,” which actually has some use. Once you clarify this matter, that avenue for debate vanishes. It’s little more than word games to believers, but you can play by those rules too.
Holy sh*tballs, that’s nearly spot-on to my response to the “open-mindedness” argument. My/our definition of open-mindedness is (like you said) open to evidence. Their definition seems to be “a willingness to shut off all critical thought and temporarily deactivate one’s skepticism.”
[…] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Skeptic South Africa, Ophelia Benson. Ophelia Benson said: It is just too easy to proclaim a mysterious god http://dlvr.it/7ds0b […]
Steve:
I’m annoyed by that, too. I hate when people imply that “strong” atheism/gnostic atheism is somehow a weak position. If we’re treating God claims like all other claims, it ain’t.
Especially since absolute knowledge does not exist. There is useful knowledge, though, and there is certainly testable knowledge. I’m with Vic Stenger on this. It’s obvious that we can empirically rule out certain gods. That’s the whole reason the God of the sophisticated theologians is scrupulously kept nebulous. But, the minute someone claims their God, say, answers the prayers of the faithful—great! We can test for that (and we have). The minute someone says their God perpetrates certain miracles—swell! We can let the scientists have at it to determine whether such events were truly suspensions of the natural order. Did your God create the earth and the species, all at once, 6,000 years ago? Well that’s interesting: the evidence says that’s impossible (would you like some wheels for those goalposts?).
Imagine someone were to claim that the ghost who lives in his basement gave him herpes. We can’t know with absolute certainty that that didn’t happen. But we do know quite a bit about how herpes spreads, and that mechanism does not require a lascivious poltergeist. The man’s physician would be perfectly justified in saying that she knows it wasn’t no poltergeist. That’s how we use the word “know” in every other context. The philosopher’s game of deconstructing the concept of “know” is really not productive when it comes to the God question. It’s a ruse.
But the reason I can’t say I know that Karen Armstrong’s God does not exist is because her God has no frickin’ attributes! It’s just an asinine language game she plays (e.g., http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D_9w8JougLQ#t=43m10s/), her and the other sophisticated theologians.
I can’t be 100 percent certain that god doesn’t exist, but I bet I’m as certain about the nonexistence of gods as most theists are bout the nonexistence of fairies (and the gods they don’t believe in).
And for the same reasons.
Whatever percentage they want to give their disbelief in those invisible undetectable beingss, I’d be willing to give my disbelief in their god.
Andy-
Yes, that’s what I think.
But I go even further. I believe that the nature of the supernatural and a supernatural God, as those terms are in use today, is such that they are deliberately immune to evidence claims; these terms have “evolved” to resist vulnerability to reason. Even when a God is defined in conversations as having attributes, none of those attributes are possible to verify: how could we check that a being (such as the God of the Catholics) is infinitely large, eternal, and of infinite goodness? Not only that, but such attributes are logically impossible. It’s no accident that philosophers tend to be even more atheist than scientists (or so I’m told by philosopher friends).
I have developed a strident/militant atheist attitude. I am an atheist who believes that the question of the existence of gods has a simple answer: no, they don’t. Not even a chance. Even saying I’m 100% sure gives the absurd idea of theism some kind of credibility by putting it on a scale of probability.
I like to think of it this way: Some may insist that the historicity of the battle between Aslan and the Snow Queen should be a matter of discussion. I’m sorry, but wardrobes just don’t do that.
Steve, none of us believe that wardrobes do that.
The difference between saying “wardrobes definitely do that” and “wardrobes almost certainly don’t do that” is really an application to the discussion of the principles of the philosophy of science.
In my mind the distinguishing feature of “new atheism” is that it is primarily based on scientific rationalism and thus it is faced with the same constraints that working scientists face. What this means in effect is that we disavow our right to say we know for certain any facts but claim, instead, to know them at a high degree of probability. This is as true for the shape of the Earth as it is for the theory of relativity or the theory of evolution.
On a practical note I think you are mistaken in asserting certainty for the question of God. The argument that God has as much evidence as fairies, santa and leprechauns can be a much harder one for a theist to counter than someone who simply asserts that he or she is 100% certain that there is no God.
Steve and Andy:
No argument from me. I think we’ve perhaps fetishised the idea that proof is something that has to be 100% certain… only in the case of gods. In every other case, it’s perfectly acceptable to be sure beyond reasonable doubt, but somehow the god question is assumed – even by many atheists – to require more. Perhaps we’ve brought this on ourselves to some extent because we’ve fallen in the past for the type of gambit Just Al mentions above: we’ve become defensive when accused of being closed-minded. We’ve said “well of *course* I can’t be 100% sure…” because that seems superficially to fly in the face of an evidence-based approach without necessarily thinking it through.
I feel entirely confident to say I’m 100% sure that no god exists for the reasons others have stated above. I’d change my mind if evidence turned up…. but I struggle to understand what that evidence could possibly be. Pictures of bearded men appearing on bagels isn’t going to do it. People in white robes healing the sick seems like evidence of people in white robes healing the sick and it seems a long stretch to claim it as evidence of a god. We’d need an astonishingly rich tapestry of interwoven evidence from a wide range of disciplines. I’m not sure I know what – if anything – that would look like.
As others have said, as soon as someone describes a way in which a supposed god interacts with the world, we can test it. Bring it on: everyone knows this isn’t going to work out well for the believer. So ‘sophisticated’ theologians are careful to invent gods that can’t be tested. Which means they can’t interact with the universe in any meaningful sense, which means there’s no reasonable way they can be said to exist.
In my mind the distinguishing feature of “new atheism” is that it is primarily based on scientific rationalism and thus it is faced with the same constraints that working scientists face.
I disagree. I think that the distinguishing feature of “new atheism” is that it does not accept the social conventions of dealing with religion, but speaks out.
I believe it is a mistake to place the matter of the existence of God on some scale of likelihood, as if it were some scientific hypothesis that could be verified by evidence. I believe that when looked at in detail, it becomes clear that claims of the existence of the supernatural and of theism aren’t really claims of fact, but expressions of psychological need. Because of that need, God has to have certain unverifiable attributes such as infinitude and perfection. Because of that need, the existence of God can’t be shown to be false by evidence. As rationalists we don’t need to play that game of continual goalpost moving. We should have given up the idea that there was any chance of getting a goal a long time ago. The playing field doesn’t even exist.
Is there a place where sophisticated-theologian-generated gems like these are collected? Because the collective effect of a dozen of these hilarious word salads should be enough to stop any Courtier’s Reply in its tracks.
Steve, there does seem to be some degree of genuine disagreement amongst the gnu community on this very question. The fact that the common theistic descriptions of God are inconsistent may be a good reason to say you are 100% that the God of the bible – as described there – is possible, but there are so many definitions of God that you are bound to find a few that, while lacking evidence, are at least consistent (the vague deistic kind of God, for instance). I don’t think it is problematic to admit that such a God is a possibility – so long as we also point out that there is no evidence that currently supports it and lots of evidence that disproves it.
As for the question of supernatural and natural – I think we are splitting hairs rather than shifting goalposts (and in saying that I realize I risk spilling a can of mixed metaphoric worms which will only come home to roost). Plenty of ‘supernatural’ things have been shown to be real effects – through the simple process of discovering how they work and thus moving them into the natural realm. The ones that haven’t – ghosts, psychic ability, Gods etc – simply remain unproven and likely untrue – exactly like fairies and leprechauns. It is likely that humans will discover things in the future that would appear supernatural to people today – and that these forces will join the currently known forces. Even a God, if evidence was ever forthcoming, would likely join the natural realm (hypothetically as a being in a previous universe that caused the big bang expansion in our universe).
This is a good discussion; the folks whose position I, in the end, disagree with are making very reasonable points (e.g., latsot: “we’ve perhaps fetishised the idea that proof is something that has to be 100% certain… only in the case of gods”) that aren’t made nearly often enough in public.
I think Sigmund’s clearly correct that “there does seem to be some degree of genuine disagreement amongst the gnu community on this very question.” And I’d say Steve’s right about Gnu-ism and social conventions about religion, as well.
This may be the most agreeable blog comment I’ve posted in months.
I’m relieved that there’s disagreement among us gnus and that while I may disagree with some of the comments above I understand the arguments they are making and respect the reasoning behind them.
So much clearer and more civil than anything coming from the ‘other side’.
Next time the theists start waffling on about atheism being the new orthodoxy post a link here.
I think that allowing ourselves to even get drawn into the discussion is falling for intentional redirection.
Sure, the universe is infinite while our knowledge is finite. So mathematically, any god you care to name or define, however vaguely, has a non-zero probability (and if you actually use that term, you’ll lose half of those who are even arguing with you.)
But so what? There is absolutely no path from “non-zero” to “so we get to deride homosexuality” or “women must hide their wanton faces.” The “truth-claim” of there being no god is not comparable and equal to any truth-claim about the authority to persecute, dictate, or pronounce.
It’s not an atheism versus religion issue. It’s a “right to impose on others” issue (for most of us, anyway,) and that’s the aspect we need to address. Anything else is a red herring.
Even if a god existed, religion has no methodology for learning about this god. Religion as a way of knowing is continually bandied about, but I can’t determine how religion comes to know anything. Just because religions offer answers to questions doesn’t mean the answers are any good. Answers are easy, right answers are hard, and dumb looks are free. If science is a method for overcoming the subjectivity of personal experience, then all religion is left with is personal experience and no means to determine if an experience was an interaction with god or just a dream.
Steve wrote:
Was it Tom Clark who wrote something like:
If this definition is true, then the god question is meaningless in any context other than a psychological, social or political sense isn’t it? To me, this strengthens the ‘hard’ atheist position that Steve takes. It also supports Just Al’s focus on the practical effects of religious belief in the society.
I’m more with Steve on this, thanks to a good point made by Shatterface. How sure are we that we’re not in the Matrix? Well, not 100% sure, obviously. But more sure than we are of anything else, right? Because everything else we know is predicated on the notion that our sensory experience is not a simulation.
I’m at least as sure there’s no God as I am that I’m not in the Matrix, and since “belief that I am not in the Matrix” is the upper bound on certainty, for all practical purposes, I know that there is no God.
No, that’s exactly what this definition is trying to avoid. If everything mental can be explained through material causal principles, then materialism is true. If there is at least one mental phenomenon with causal power — i.e., it can influence matter — that cannot be reduced to material causation — i.e. a disembodied mind that can influence matter; psychokinesis might also qualify — then materialism is false. It’s an attempt to make materialism scientifically falsifiable, not an attempt to relegate anti-materialism to psychology or sociology.
Yes…that’s the real point, for me. I don’t know everything there is in the universe, to put it mildly. Maybe there’s a something somewhere. Maybe if humans encountered that something they would think the name “God” fit it. I don’t know. But what difference does it make? What we’re talking about is the humanish god that issues orders and that people worship. How one gets from “maybe there’s something somewhere” to rules and demands and worship is beyond me.
I come at this from the other direction. Centuries of physics, chemistry and biology indicate that vitalism is dead and so the default position has to be that everything mental is explainable through material causal principles. If not, then the physical world is full of vast amounts of magic that should have been detectable. We should not need to build supercolliders to detect funny physics. Dualism contradicts all of modern science. It should be up to those who make supernatural claims to first show how physics is broken and where we can find that breakage. Vitalism died centuries ago. But the dinosaur of supernaturalism seems not to have yet noticed its mortal wound, and it’s still staggering on.
Is there a term for people who don’t really care if there is or isn’t a god, but who are 100% certain that your religion is bullshit?
Right. We don’t know supernaturalism is false a priori, from definitions of “natural” and “supernatural” and “science.”
We know the definition of supernatural from how people use the word, and I think that Pascal Boyer and Richard Carrier have it about right.
Supernatural means something, pretty much being irreducibly mental or teleological, or having irreducible mind- or intention-related properties.
That’s the difference between a powerful alien and a god. Gods are technically powerful “aliens” (they’re different from us), but they are alien in a particular way. They don’t have the powers they do mainly by having super technology, but by fairly direct connection to supernatural essences of things.
(E.g., Aphrodite doesn’t make you fall in love by rewiring your brain or slipping you a dose of Ecstasy and a shot of oxytocin. She does it by just making you fall in love, or something close to that, like willing some love into existence, directing it at somebody, and zapping you with it. She can do that because that’s the kind of being she is, which you are not. She’s not a very technical geek grrl alien, she’s a freaking Love Goddess.)
Way too often, atheists and scientists let religious people move the goalposts and talk about the supernatural as though it was just weird (alleged) stuff science can’t study. That is not what people normally mean by supernatural, never has been, and never will be. People don’t just believe that there are things science doesn’t know. They think there are certain kinds of supernatural entities—e.g., disembodied minds, “forces” of intention or love, etc.
All of the things we recognize as supernatural beliefs <i>when we’re not talking about apologetics</i> have certain things in common, and are not intrinsically unfalsifable—they’re eminently falsifiable, many have been falsified, and empirically, they appear to be uniformly false.
There is no vital essence with intrinsic teleology, and there is no immaterial soul with intrinsic intentionality. Biology just doesn’t work that way, and neither do minds. Both are matters of suitably organized machinery and processes, made out of entirely mindless, nonteleological, non-intentional matter.
I can imagine a universe with irreducible teleology and intentionality, and I can imagine a God of that universe who I’d recognize as supernatural and more than just a powerful alien with sufficiently advanced technology.
I don’t see any evidence that we live in such a universe, and I see overwhelming evidence that we don’t.
That seems to imply that the standard science fiction tropes of psionics and telepathy and advanced aliens who are “pure minds” aren’t actually science fiction. I think most of us, though, can imagine a universe in which such beings exist without thinking that such completely undercuts naturalism. Perhaps it undercuts a form of materialism, but not necessarily naturalism. (It is only because we don’t possess such powers that we think of them as somehow “unnatural” — if all of us could read minds and move objects with our thoughts, it would be perfectly natural.)
Andy:
I don’t think that’s right. She doesn’t assert anything, except when she does. She’s inconsistent about her claims, and likes to push the idea that her stuff is entirely consistent with science, but there’s a clear trend in her stuff to support supernaturalish ideas, which I’d say are recognizably supernatural.
In particular, she claims that humans have a faculty of “intellectus” that transcends mere reason, and can fairly directly apprehend Deep Truths, even if it can’t articulate them.
It’s quite clear that she’s not talking about a simple delusion or brainfart, or something explicable in materialist terms. She’s clearly talking about some kind of ESP for divining the ultimate nature of reality. (It has the lucky property that you can’t speak the “truths” it gives you access to, so nobody can refute them.)
That’s actually a strong claim, which is falsifiable in principle, and she piles other claims on top it, e.g., that mystics in all religious traditions—when they do mysticism right, i.e., her way—find the same deep truths. (She tells the ones who report something else Ur Doin it Rong.)
Karen Armstrong isn’t an atheist, or at least isn’t a naturalist in the sense of being a materialist. She believes in irreducibly spooky woo, and really is religious.
You generally find that kind of irreducible spooky “spiritual insight” in religions that people say are consistent with science and even atheism—e.g., particularly austere forms of Buddhism.
I think that’s one reason people who believe such things tend to call their religions “religion” rather than just philosophy. They think they have a magical connection to some deep truth or wisdom or something that surpasseth what their computational brains can know, and that (rightly) feels “religious.”
They are wrong about the spooky insight, IMHO, and they are wrong for the very same reason that they’re right that their views are religious. They believe in thinly veiled supernatural woo.
It’s my impression that essentially all woo and all “religion” has this kind of feature—belief in magical (irreducibly intentional) things properties like “energies” or “vibrations” or “deep aspects of reality” that do interesting things that no actual energy or vibration or deep aspect of reality could possibly do, because real energies, etc. are not sensitive to interesting high-level properties of things, like life or health or truth or love.
People often don’t recognize their own beliefs as supernaturalist when it comes to woo—e.g., accepting that there is a life energy in natural herbal supplements, and not realizing that’s anti-scientific—because they take a supernaturalist ontology for granted.
I suspect that many people, and maybe most, are still vitalists to some extent. (I’m pretty sure most New Agey types are, and lots of other people.) They recognize that bodies are like machines in some ways—e.g., that hearts are pumps—but think there’s life force making things alive, somehow, too. That’s really sad.
Thank you helping me with that Paul W and Dan L.
I misunderstood the meaning of ‘non-mental’ in that definition.
Tulse,
I think things like telepathy and telekinesis are interesting examples.
Those powers can be either natural or supernatural, depending on how they work.
Suppose, for example, that it turned out that our brains generate radio signals as a side-effect of the electrical impulses they use, and that other brains could use their own neurons as antennas and resonate to them, to some extent, such that some ideas would be transmitted to others heads in some form they could eventually learn to recognize to a limited extent.
If that materialist story panned out—if you could make it work, as you can fillings that receive AM radio broadcasts—it wouldn’t seem supernatural. It’d just be surprising and funky. But really, it wouldn’t be much weirder than the kinds of things people already know they can do. (Like unconsciously sensing others emotions from facial expressions, without being able to articulate how. Given how amazingly cool that is, what’s a little radio between friends?)
On the other hand, if we somehow found out that we really do have souls, distinct from our brain functioning, with an irreducible force of will and such, and that souls could directly transfer thoughts to other minds without encoding and decoding them in something resembling material form, or even representing them in the roughly computational way our brains do, that’d really be something. And if there was something like a direct force of mind, such that minds really could just move matter around without physical actuators anything like muscles responding to nerve impulses, that’d be really special.
Many of us would say “Holy crap! the supernatural really does exist after all.” I would. I’d say we had been mistaken to think that the supernatural didn’t exist.
(Especially if it was shown that many reports of “the supernatural” that I’d previously dismissed had been reporting real events of that same real sort. I’d think that “the supernatural” was a name given to a real category of phenomena people had actually encountered, and that now that I encountered it, I realized it was real.)
I would say that “the supernatural exists” even if people had often misdescribed it in various non-crucial ways. (E.g., some examples not panning out, and turning out to be simple hallucinations or delusions rather than the real thing—just as the existence of “fools gold” doesn’t mean there isn’t such a thing as real gold.)
I could even believe that JHWH exists, if he turned out to be somebody I’d recognize as a god in the above sense, that people had actually encountered and told stories about, even if those stories were mostly fictional. I’d say there’s a real JHWH, and the mythologized JHWH. So, even JHWH might conceivably actually exist, although a lot of specific stories about him are internally inconsistent nonsense. (The Problem of Evil pretty clearly shows he’s not quite what they say.) Still, a Stargate-like story could possibly be true, and he might be just an alien, like in Stargate, or an actual god, like in some other “science fiction” or “fantasy.”
So back to science fiction and psi stuff…
I’d say that a lot of “science fiction” is partly fantasy with science fictional trappings, where they introduce things like psychic powers to advance the plot, and make no attempt to even suggest how they could be scientifically plausible. It’s just a fact about the universe they live in, that you have to accept, suspend disbelief, and move on.
Often, they make it fairly clear that they’re not introducing general supernaturalism, and are sticking to a mostly naturalistic paradigm—the psychic powers they’re introducing don’t have any big metaphysical implications, like ghosts and gods—it’s just the usual telepathy or telekinesis trope you see in science fiction. (And if they encounter something beyond that, that seems like a supernatural god, you should still suspect that it’s really just sufficiently advanced technology.)
I used to hate that, being so sciency, but I’ve gotten used to it; it’s just a literary conceit, and I can accept a few conceits. Science fiction isn’t generally scientifically plausible, and the difference between harder science fiction and fantasy is in how many goofy unscientific tropes you have to accept, and how big they are.
What I still hate is when you just can’t tell what the hell else they’re likely to do, because they don’t have any particular line in mind between naturalism plus tropes and full-on supernaturalism. I hate “science fiction” that’s written for people who actually believe in the supernatural, and don’t mind the natural and supernatural being freely mixed with no rules, rather than using a few handy supernaturalish tropes in a limited way.
One painful example is the “midichlorians” in the later Star Wars movies. The Force is clearly supernatural—there’s just no way you’re ever going to cash its irreducibly high-level properties out in naturalistic, reductionistic terms, so don’t fucking try, okay? The idea that somehow “midichlorians” make The Force work in a non-supernatural way just makes it more explicitly and excruciatingly stupid. It’s not like Star Wars isn’t obviously just high fantasy in science fictional trappings—an evil Empire, rescuing the Princess, the Evil Lord, the Light and Dark sides of the Force, Knights in freaking swordfights, etc. It’s a kitchen sink of tired tropes, and fun mainly for being so utterly shameless about it. (And shamelessly mixing them, e.g., Kung Fu apprentice knights against Nazis with planet-destroying destructo-beams.) When they start shame-facedly excusing The Force, as though that were the big problem in accepting their fantasy universe, it’s just embarrassing for everybody. (As standup comics say, commit to the joke.)
As for “pure minds,” I dunno. Sometimes science fiction seems to just appeal to supernaturalist dualism that a lot of people actually believe, and really scientifically-minded people don’t, but may accept it as a literary conceit. (E.g. mind-swap scenarios where dualistic metaphysics are just taken for granted, to advance the plot, and interesting philosophical questions are studiously ignored.) But sometimes they’re clearly trying to leave it open to a naturalistic interpretation—the “pure minds” are made out of “pure energy” or some kind of pattern in the fabric of space-time that doesn’t require normal material bodies, but is still naturalistic, i.e., whatever they’re made out of, reductionism would still apply. They’re not made out of plain matter matter, and maybe not even plain energy energy, but they’re made out of something in at least roughly the usual reductionist sense.
Or maybe I’ve learned to be too charitable, to keep my sanity while wathcing/reading bad science fiction. I’m not sure. I try not to look too closely if the stupidities aren’t very glaring.
I don’t think that quite captures it. Surely, if we simply had supernatural powers, we wouldn’t find that bizarre. But we likely would still make the distinction. If we were disembodied minds with irreducibly intentional powers, we’d look on mere mortals as mere mortals—we’d take it as “natural” that we were supernatural, while the mere mortals weren’t. (Irrespective of whether we were actually immortal—you get the idea, I hope.)
In fact, I think that’s basically how many actual people actually feel about other actual people, to some extent. Many people think they are more “spiritual” than others—have a supernatural gift for divining certain kinds of truths—and condescend to others, who are more limited. They actually think they have supernatural souls that give them supernatural insight, and think that other people are more mired in mere physical reality.
That’s the kind of thing that people may not call “supernatural,” but is recognizably a belief in the supernatural. They only don’t call it “supernatural” because they take it as the normal arrangement—it’s not strikingly or remarkably supernatural because everybody (supposedly) has a supernatural soul, and many people have such supernatural “spiritual” gifts.
In any given culture, the explicit, marked term “supernatural” is not used for the everyday supernatural, that fits with the accepted supernaturalist background assumptions. It’s only used for entities or situations in which the supernatural intrudes on the natural in an unusual way, or to an unusual extent.
For example, in most cultures, dualism is taken for granted, and it’s assumed that a normal conversation between you and me involves your soul communicating with my soul, but through our physical mouths and ears in the normal way involving sound. That happens all the time, so it’s not called supernatural.
It’s only called supernatural if your soul interacts with my soul in an unusually direct way, e.g., bypassing speech and transferring thoughts directly from mind to mind. Only then is it freaky enough to deploy the term “supernatural.”
I think that if some of us possessed enough such powers to a significant enough extent, we’d still think of them as “supernatural”—i.e., beyond what more limited beings can do in more “natural” ways—and we’d realize that we were “supernatural” beings. We’d get used to the idea that we were gods, even though of course it would seem “natural” for us to be supernatural. (There’s no contradiction there, just a difference in word senses.)
My own decision to stay on the side of “probably doesn’t exist” rather than “definitely doesn’t exist” is more for my own sake as an atheist rather than a decision designed to give comfort to believers. As I mentioned above it allows one to use the rhetorical tactic of bringing up the probability of things based on evidence (the God is as likely as Santa and Leprechauns argument) without being sidetracked into defending a ‘certainty’ of Gods non existence. Secondly I think its wrong to completely rule out any possibility at the start – a falsifiable God hypothesis might one day be described so I leave that open as a possibility (albeit a vanishingly unlikely one).
In practical terms most of us gnus have the same attitude here – we see no evidence for a God but will examine any if it is ever presented. It is simply the standard skeptic position – just applied to a religious rather than a paranormal question (holy ghost rather than ghost).
If I’m being honest, the main reason I say I know gods don’t exist is linguistic rather than epistemological. I simply insist upon using the word “know” in exactly the same way we all do in every other context. We’ve been bullied into this notion that unless we possess absolute certainty (which, again, does not exist) we cannot say we “know.” There’s this bullshit notion that a true rationalist would not say she “knows” gods don’t exist. Nonsense! The fact that our minds can conjure up remote contingencies in which it’s possible for fairies to live at the bottom of the garden, does not preclude us from saying, in everyday parlance, that we know the fairies don’t exist. Now technically, that’s “pending further evidence,” I suppose. But, suffice to say, the evidence that came about would have to be so worldview altering that it would destroy much of what we also know to be true. Testable evidence that invisible fairies are what’s actually making the daisies grow would upset more than a few scientific applecarts. So we can comfortably say we know they’re not there.
In everyday parlance, we say we “know” something when all the evidence points to that conclusion, and there is no compelling (or rational) reason to believe otherwise. E.g., I know my wife’s birthday is November 22nd; I know James Joyce did not write Harry Potter.
I believe the reason so many of us are apprehensive about saying we know gods don’t exist is not because such a statement would be unbecoming of a rationalist, or something like that. Rather, it’s because we’ve been bullied by theistic sophists whose mission is to make their own unfounded beliefs seem plausible. As Steve described upthread, they wish to place their beliefs on “a scale of probability” when their beliefs don’t even deserve that kind of consideration. So many of us always say that there’s just as much evidence for God as there is for Santa—so I say, let’s let our language reflect that conviction. Is there anyone here who is apprehensive about saying she/he knows that Santa is not real, that he’s a made-up construct? I know Santa is not real. I know God is not real. The word “know” is being used sensibly in both statements. Don’t let William Lane Craig tell you otherwise.
Also, in my own humble way, I’m after a shift in the centre of gravity of debate. I want to be far more radical about ideas of theism and supernaturalism, to the point where even a debate about the use of the words has to be justified. Not, of course, that everyone will want to share this position. But having some people visible take this more radical position may help. It also helps if, like me, you honestly believe that this position is correct!
I was recently very encouraged by an interview with the neurobiologist Colin Blakemore, in which the Chief Rabbi asked him if he seriously believed that all the feelings and emotions and free will of a human were just the result of a physical brain, and Blakemore answered something like “yes, of course!”. I like the idea of actively and unapologetically embracing the hardest of materialist views, because:
Exactly!
Very, very interesting ideas on supernaturalism and irreducible mind/teleology/etc, Paul. Any thoughts on what that implies about evidentiary questions, e.g., the little argument between Myers and Coyne about whether there ever could be evidence for gods (or I suppose, in your case, for the supernatural)? Could you imagine evidence that the supernatural, as you’re taking it to be defined, exists? What would that look like?
Rieux:
I’m on Jerry Coyne’s side. I think we know (defeasibly and provisionally) that the supernatural doesn’t exist in the same way that we know phlogiston doesn’t exist—empirically. We have no evidence for it, and evidence that the supposedly supernatural stuff actually has natural explanations, so there’s nothing left for the supernatural to do. Supernatural phenomena are supposed to be observable one way or another—that’s how we supposedly know about them at all—and absence of evidence is therefore evidence of absence.
I do find it difficult to imagine that supernaturalism could be true, at this point, given how well reductionism has worked in explaining the supposed supernatural. (That’s reductionism broadly speaking, including functional reduction, e.g., the brain as a kind of computer, not naive “greedy” reductionism. Supernaturalism tends to be more reductionistic than naturalism in a funny way, e.g., thinking that being a person reduces more or less directly to having a soul, which can just do mind stuff. Supernaturalism is largely about incredibly naive greedy reduction to implausibly irreducible essences.)
One piece of evidence that supernaturalism is true would be if Harry Potter turned out to be pretty much true, and the previously secretive wizards and witches came out of the woodwork and demonstrated the ability to do various kinds of magic that would be really, really hard to explain naturalistically.
Another interesting demonstration would be the identification of actual “lucky charms” and cursed objects that demonstrably made people possessing them lucky or unlucky at levels far above chance and in ways that were not just self-fullfilling prophecies and obviously far beyond any humans’ control. If naturalism is true, it’s hard to imagine how such Luck could possibly work—it would require that mindless low-level events like fair coin flips or even quantum (otherwise-)randomness somehow be sensitive to their very indirect and high-level consequences, like what would count as working out beneficially or detrimentally for a particular human in particular situations. That’d be a lot like omniscience, and comparably astonishing.
That’s one thing that I wish more people realized—that even a free-floating superstitious belief in simple Luck goes against everything we know scientifically about how the universe actually works. Finding out Luck was real would be like finding out the world is actually flat after all, but much more profound. It’d freak me right out.
Evidence like that wouldn’t convince me right away, given how it goes against my basic understanding of the universe. I’d have to seriously entertain a bunch of other possibilities, like that I was just dreaming, or batshit crazy and hallucinating, or had been hypnotized to believe these things were happening, or was a brain in a vat being punked by an evil scientists, or that superintelligent aliens were punking all of us with sufficiently advanced technology.
Still, it would be impressive evidence that would quickly and seriously weaken my commitment to naturalism. All the sudden supernaturalism would be something I couldn’t just dismiss as vanishingly improbable.
Likewise, if intercessory prayer to a certain deity demonstrably worked—even if only with small but repeatable effects—but other prayer didn’t, or backfired, I’d have to seriously entertain the possibility that the deity in question was supernatural and might reasonably be called a god or even God. I wouldn’t jump to the conclusion that it was omnipotent or omnisicient, or was a moral authority, or created the universe, or anything like that, but I’d sure be spooked and start paying attention to stuff that I currently dismiss as ridiculous.
To be fair to PZ, he said “god” not “the supernatural.” He may still be willing to accept evidence for the supernatural. Furthermore, the reasons given have to do with how poorly defined the term “god” is. If you were to define “god” as a particular phenomenon and then give evidence for it, no doubt PZ would say, “Fine, you have adduced evidence for god as defined in this context.” Which is probably going to be something rather different than what most people want to do with the term “god.”
The other point I’d make is that human beings have been working for several thousand years to figure out how the world works (in earnest for a few hundred) and that “supernaturalism” at this point means, “any of an uncountable infinity ways the world could have worked but turned out not to.” So saying “supernaturalism is true” or “the supernatural is real” is pretty much equivalent to saying “human inquiry up to this point has arrived at a large body of internally consistent but nonetheless very wrong conclusions.” But most of the evidence we could use to adduce this belongs in the class “human inquiry up to this point.” A few startling tests wouldn’t suffice to show that the supernatural is real — scientists would need to spend several decades working at a feverish pace to not only adduce the new evidence for the supernatural, but to overturn the old evidence against it. We’d need to amass enough evidence to overthrow the last few hundred years of science before we could really say anything like “supernaturalism is true.”
It would also raise real questions about the nature of fundamental physical laws. If, for the first 10,000 years of human history physical sciences seem to be the best guide, and then we switch over to some metamagical consensual hallucination, how are we supposed to take either one as the fundamental nature to the universe? Or is there some metalaw that decides between objective reality and consensual hallucination every couple thousand years?
Although Paul can point to a few examples of what would amount to big anti-science surprises, I don’t think that’s enough to say, “Oh well, supernaturalism could be true.” Questions about how we could have been fooled so long, how do we know we’re not fooled now (about the truth of supernaturalism in this hypothetical example), and whether it’s possible to know truth only to have it pulled out from under you all seem relevant to the possibility and reasonableness of supernaturalist hypotheses, I think.
Remember that in a world where “luck” (for example) is real, it’s totally natural. The only people in that universe talking about a fair coin toss would be the philosophers, and most people would probably dismiss such talk as meaningless. If this is the case, can “supernatural” ever mean anything but “some way in which the universe does not actually work”?
Dan L.:
I don’t think that the term God is that poorly defined—it’s just that people bogify the actual concept when they do apologetics. I think “god” is a family resemblance term, but there are only a very few basic meanings that actually have any currency in modern Western society, and only a very few more that ever had any currency anywhere at any time, and all the meanings have something in common.
(That’s a big part of Pascal Boyer’s cognitive anthropological point in Religion Explained. “Supernatural” just isn’t that vague a word—people can instinctively tell the difference between supernatural concepts and natural ones, even if they can’t articulate what distinction they’re making. To understand what distinction they’re intuitively making, you have to understand the mental schemas by which they categorize things, and what things cross-classify in certain ways.)
Gods are supernatural persons with superhuman supernatural powers, or pervasive impersonal things with person-like supernatural (attributes, or some of each. (I also think “supernatural” is a much clearer concept than many people think, once you articulate it properly, so that’s a much narrower set of categories than it may sound like.)
At one extreme, you have the powerful old supernatural guy with the beard, but irrespective of his bodily appearance, if any, he’s a person with something resembling a human mind (with beliefs, desires, goals, plans, etc.) and with superhuman supernatural attributes.
At the other extreme, you have some New Agey concept of a non-personal God that’s something like an invisible blue glow that pervades the universe, and is somehow good and/or true and/or wise and/or loves us and/or embodies progressive teleology, despite not actually being a person and maybe being something like a mysterious inexorable impersonal regularity like Karma or The Force from Star Wars.
In between you have the orthodox Christian theological concept of God, heavily influenced by Greek philosophy, who on one hand is sorta timeless and impersonal and mysteriously not like a human at all. (It doesn’t have to think, exactly, for example, because it already knows pretty much everything.) On the other hand, He’s very much like a person in that he has beliefs (all true) and desires (wants us not to sin) and so on.
Nobody in our culture uses the term “god” in earnest for something that isn’t roughly like one of those things, or both.
E.g., nobody really thinks that a “first cause” or “ultimate ground of all being” counts as God simply by virtue of being a first cause ultimate ground of all being. What Stephen Weinberg expects a Theory of Everything to look like—arguably the ultimate or penultimate ground of all being—simply would not count as God or even “a god” by the intuitive standards of anybody who actually cares about those concepts. That’s clearly not what “God” really means.
Here’s an example of something that might or might not be God, depending on how it works: quantum mechanics.
Quantum mechanics as understood by your average physicist is clearly not god by anybody’s sincere standards. It might be the ultimate reality, but it’s nothing remotely like a person, and has no intentionality or teleology whatsoever, much less irreducible intentionality or teleology. It’s not mental or teleological; it’s not anywhere close. It’s dumber than dirt and just weird as shit. The ways that it’s weird as shit—mindblowingly counterintuitive—just don’t even come close to making it supernatural, for physicists. They’re just weird in a non-supernatural way, because they don’t have anything directly to do with anything basically interesting, like truth or beauty or justice or love or thought or consciousness or sex and rock and roll.
Now consider the bullshit versions of quantum physics that you get from New Age loons and hucksters like Deepak Chopra. (Or the theological heirs to Teilhard de Chardin.) They’re interesting to New Agey types because they are supernatural—there’s some deep and basic connection between minds and matter, such that minds create their own reality or some shit like that. Maybe Mind or Consciousness (or Progress) is an irreducible weird essence of the fabric of reality itself, and our minds (or evolving physical and mental forms) just give it a particular form for expressing itself. And often, you get mind over matter—minds don’t just reduce to matter, because at base, matter is made out of the essence of Mind, or it’s all a dream that irreducible Minds dream consensually, interacting to produce apparently material reality, or some irreducibly high-level stuff like that interfering with the boring low-level stuff.
The bottom line is always some kind of irreducible essentialism about mental mind-related or teleological properties—an assumption that those kinds of phenomena are not just high-level phenomena made out of regularities in brute matter and energy and plain old impersonal stuff, in the usual scientific/reductionist way. They’re where things are heading because the system as a whole has a goal, or a profound “essence” making itself “manifest”, or a low-level consciousness struggling toward self-awareness, or something high-level (irreducibly mental or teleological) like that.
[…] Butterflies and Wheels there is an excellent quote by John Shook from The God Debates: It is just too easy to proclaim a mysterious god, deride […]