Tagged: god
A New Argument From Suffering in Light of COVID-19
By R.N. Carmona
This will likely be as close as it gets to a personal post from me. I recently tested positive for COVID-19. At the moment, I do not know whether I am still positive. I will be getting another test on Wednesday. My hope is that I can go back to business as usual. I need to work; bills have to be paid. My focus here is a new argument yes, but it goes beyond that as we will see. Rather than the string of symptoms I have encountered, I want to focus on the mental aspects of my experience.
I have two lovely children that I have not been able to hug for almost six days now. I have not been able to kiss them. I have not been able to show any affection to anyone I love. I have not been able to receive any affection either. Because of this, I have been dealing with a lot of loneliness.
My father, who passed away in 2017, although no longer the voice of my conscience, is someone I think of often. I miss him dearly. His lessons still weigh on me and not a day goes by without me thinking whether he would be proud of the man I am today. One of the lessons that I consistently observe is to not get in the habit of letting myopia set in. In other words, yes, I tested positive and I am dealing with symptoms, on top of anxiety, loneliness, and grappling with questions about my mortality; however, other people have had it much worse. It is these people this argument has in mind.
I can easily imagine waking up last Thursday morning at 3am to the same cold sweat and terror I felt. Moreover, I can imagine the object of my terror turning out to be my experience. My mind was racing. I asked, what if I get pneumonia? What if I have to be intubated? What if there is an underlying issue that will pull the rug from under me? In all of this, I could not turn to a loved one. I needed a hug but could not get one. I needed someone to sit close to me and help me relax. Turning to a loved one at this time would put them at risk, so I had no such option.
Over the past few days, my symptoms have gotten progressively better. I am not a priori grateful. My gratitude is after the fact. I am grateful that I will probably have more days with my loved ones. I am seeing the light at the end. Soon I will be able to give my kids a warm embrace. I will be able to feel them in my arms again. My life has, for now, been prolonged and I can be a father to them. But the thought has occurred to me: what if my symptoms got progressively worse? I have not been able to show or receive affection for six days; six days could easily have been 15 to 30, or however long a hospital stay would have lasted.
Then it dawned on me. For many people, including Christians, this was their exact experience. They were isolated at home, probably hoping to be better within a few to several days; the Christians, no doubt, prayed to God for healing, to keep them company in their time of isolation and loneliness. For many of them, the prayers fell on deaf ears. Their symptoms got much worse, many developing life-threatening pneumonia. They were rushed to ICUs and intubated where they would spend more time away from their loved ones. The lucky ones, got back to their families. The Christians, thankful to God, were happy to be back with their families. But what of the people who had not embraced their loved ones for a month and never regained consciousness? What of the people who passed away? Where was God? Where was his comfort when they prayed? Where was his omnipotent power, fully capable of delivering them from a virus some of them did everything in their power to prevent? Why didn’t God answer?
I cannot imagine being my daughter, at an age where my affection can get annoying but also at an age where they are able to appreciate my love. I cannot imagine the fear they would feel seeing me stretchered out the door, to hear news that I had to be intubated, to have to wrestle with the idea that daddy won’t be coming home. They are at an age where losing a parent will be a lucid memory, an enduring pain, a massive loss. This would shape my daughter for the rest of their life. While I am grateful that they will likely not endure this pain, I think of the children who have. Good parents are not replaceable. I do not care if they are a Christian parent and while I am firm in my belief that they teach their children erred beliefs, I know that there are Christian parents who provide for their children, love them deeply, take care of their emotions, protect them, nurture them, and help them grow. I cannot imagine the pain of being orphaned in this way, especially when believing that God has all the power, mercy, and love to ensure that such suffering does not happen.
This is when one hears the old adage that sometimes God puts us through things so that we can better relate to people who go through similar experiences. I ask, how many people have to endure the same experience so that we can better relate to others? It was enough for me to deal with six days of this, to feel as though I was at the brink, to have more than enough time to contemplate my own fragility and mortality. It was enough to realize that others have had it worse and that for many, their story did not end the way they hoped; what’s worse is that the stories of their loved ones continue without them. For the many who survived the people we have lost, they have had to actually live through the devastation I had the privilege of merely worrying about.
We are on our own. If God existed, the extent of periods of isolation, loneliness, depression, anxiety, in addition to having horrible symptoms (in my case, losing most of my sense of smell, a fever, congestion, a loss of taste), would not be necessary to help us relate to others, i.e., soul-making theodicy. For human beings, the thoughts alone are horrifying enough. For a parent, to die too soon, to not see their children become adults, to not dance with their daughter at her Sweet 16, to not walk her down the aisle, to not attend their son’s next baseball game, and so on, the mere thoughts are terrifying enough. The thought of my absence in their life sends shivers down my spine. I do not need to experience the reality of it; I do not need to develop life-threatening symptoms and to settle on my life likely being over. More importantly, my children do not need to experience a reality in where I am dead. They do not need to see me in a suit, hands folded over my stomach, lifeless in an open casket that cost the people who survived me x amount of hundreds or thousands. They do not need to see me lowered into the ground.
Yet this was the reality many, including Christians, faced. Where was God? Where is God? The idea that God would create a social species to “test” them with periods of isolation, loneliness, anxiety, depression, and for some, suicidal thoughts, is puzzling. Especially when considering the damage these things do to people’s mental health, it is more perplexing still. Even if I granted the idea of sin, unrepentant sin is recompensed in Hell; whether eternal conscious torment or something else is for the theologians to argue over. A punishment for sin would not risk impairing someone mentally. What good is someone’s piety if they have lost their sanity?
I am not interested in formalizing this argument. I think the force of it is stronger rhetorically, written informally for readers to take in and think over. I think COVID-19, as Rieux in Camus’ The Plague conveyed about the Black Death, brings theism to its knees. A god that permits pandemics to take so many lives indiscriminately, leaving so many other lives in peril after such loss, either does not exist or is not the god theists so desperately want to exist. This is not about whether atheists/naturalists have an ontologically objective standard of evil because this argument does not focus on the existence of evil. This argument focuses on suffering, specifically mental health. If your beliefs are so biased that your first reaction is to change the topic or overlook the suffering of fellow human beings, including some of your own brethren, you may have to wonder whether you are a sociopath. Only a person with a severe lack of empathy will overlook what the last two years has looked like for our species as a whole. God is not powerful enough to replace a loving father or mother, to replace a son or a daughter.
Ultimately, I think this new angle on the Argument From Suffering is forceful and makes a powerful case against theism, but if it has not been clear, that has not really been my focus. My focus has been to humanize the experience of so many people throughout the pandemic, to get us to think about the severe pain some people are going through and have gone through over the past two years. A theist might respond that everyone will be reunited in the afterlife and while that may be comforting for some, that does nothing to change the reality some people are facing. The holidays just passed and a chair usually occupied by a loved one was empty. Somewhere in the world, a father enters his daughter’s room wishing he could kiss her goodnight and tuck her in. Elsewhere, a wife sleeps in a queen-sized bed hoping that the emptiness beside her is just a bad dream. I might be one of the lucky ones. Time will tell. But I am not taking this for granted and I am not taking it lightly. People have suffered a lot over the last two years. I mourn for them and I wish I could do more to bring them comfort.
The self-righteous will overlook this and find solace in the notion that atheism/naturalism offer no hope. At least with theism we can imagine life after death and seeing our loved ones again. In response to this, I maintain that this leads to one taking one’s short days for granted. One might as well procrastinate on affection, on spending quality time with loved ones if eternity is guaranteed. On naturalism, it is incumbent on us to be more mindful of how fleeting time is; one morning your daughter, just born, is being fed her first bottle and it feels like a blink before she’s in middle school. A defeater for this belief in an afterlife is that it allows some, if not most, believers to forgo finding ways to be there for people who are suffering; it is enough to give a person false hope and move on. A naturalist knows that more can be done and love in the present goes a longer way than a false promise in the future. If only I can sit in that empty chair next Thanksgiving and hope to remind a person of their deceased loved one; if only I can be there to wipe their tears away. People do not need the promise of comfort tomorrow; they need help today, a lot of them being suffocated by their pain at this very moment.
I’ll end with this. While your loved ones are here, hug them, let them know you love them, try to put into words why you value them so much. Belief in the afterlife is a lofty expectation that regrettably will not be met with a loftier disappointment. “Better the hard truth, I say, than the comforting fantasy.”
Argumentative Strategies Series: The Negation Strategy
By R.N. Carmona
Every deductive argument can be negated. I consider this an uncontroversial statement. The problem is, there are people who proceed as though deductive arguments speak to an a priori truth. The Freedom Tower is taller than the Empire State Building; the Empire State Building is taller than the Chrysler Building; therefore, the Freedom Tower is taller than the Chrysler Building. This is an example of an a priori truth because given that one understands the concepts of taller and shorter, the conclusion follows uncontroversially from the premises. This is one way in which the soundness of an argument can be assessed.
Of relevance is how one would proceed if one is unsure of the argument. Thankfully, we no longer live in a world in where one would have to go out of their way to measure the heights of the three buildings. A simple Google search will suffice. The Freedom Tower is ~546m. The Empire State Building is ~443. The Chrysler is ~318m. Granted, this is knowledge by way of testimony. I do not intend to connote religious testimony. What I intend to say is that one’s knowledge is grounded on knowledge directly acquired by someone else. In other words, at least one other person actually measured the heights of these buildings and these are the measurements they got.
Most of our knowledge claims rest on testimony. Not everyone has performed an experimental proof to show that the acceleration of gravity is 9.8m/s^2. Either one learned it from a professor or read it in a physics textbook or learned it when watching a science program. Or, they believe the word of someone they trust, be it a friend or a grade school teacher. This does not change that fact that if one cared to, one could exchange knowledge by way of testimony for directly acquired knowledge by performing an experimental proof. This is something I have done, so I do not believe on basis of mere testimony that Newton’s law holds. I can say that it holds because I tested it for myself.
To whet the appetite, let us consider a well-known deductive argument and let us ignore, for the moment, whether it is sound:
P1 All men are mortal.
P2 Socrates is a man.
C Therefore, Socrates is mortal.
If someone were completely disinterested in checking whether this argument, which is merely a finite set of propositions, coheres with the world or reality, I would employ my negation strategy: the negation of an argument someone assumes to be sound without epistemic warrant or justification. The strategy forces them into exploring whether their argument or its negation is sound. Inevitably, the individual will have to abandon their bizarre commitment to a sort of propositional idealism (namely that propositions can only be logically assessed and do not contain any real world entities contextually or are not claims about the world). In other words, they will abandon the notion that “All men are mortal” is a mere proposition lacking context that is not intended to make a claim about states of affairs objectively accessible to everyone, including the person who disagrees with them. With that in mind, I would offer the following:
P1 All men are immortal.
P2 Socrates is a man.
C Therefore, Socrates is immortal.
This is extremely controversial for reasons we are all familiar with. That is because everyone accepts that the original argument is sound. When speaking of ‘men’, setting aside the historical tendency to dissolve the distinction between men and women, what is meant is “all human persons from everywhere and at all times.” Socrates, as we know, was an ancient Greek philosopher who reportedly died in 399 BCE. Like all people before him, and presumably all people after him, he proved to be mortal. No human person has proven to be immortal and therefore, the original argument holds.
Of course, matters are not so straightforward. Christian apologists offer no arguments that are uncontroversially true like the original argument above. Therefore, the negation strategy will prove extremely effective to disabuse them of propositional idealism and to make them empirically assess whether their arguments are sound. What follows are examples of arguments for God that have been discussed ad nauseam. Clearly, theists are not interested in conceding. They are not interested in admitting that even one of their arguments does not work. Sure, what you find are theists committed to Thomism, for instance, and as such, they will reject Craig’s Kalam Cosmological Argument (KCA) because it does not fit into their Aristotelian paradigm and not because it is unsound. They prefer Aquinas’ approach to cosmological arguments. What is more common is the kind of theist that ignores the incongruity between one argument for another; since they are arguments for God, it counts as evidence for his existence and it really does not matter that Craig’s KCA is not Aristotelian. I happen to think that it is, despite Craig’s denial, but I digress.
Negating Popular Arguments For God’s Existence
Let us explore whether Craig’s Moral Argument falls victim to the negation strategy. Craig’s Moral Argument is as follows:
P1 If God does not exist, objective moral values do not exist.
P2 Objective moral values do exist.
C Therefore, God exist (Craig, William L. “Moral Argument (Part 1)”. Reasonable Faith. 15 Oct 2007. Web.)
With all arguments, a decision must be made. First, an assessment of the argument form is in order. Is it a modus ponens (MP) or a modus tollens (MT)? Perhaps it is neither and is instead, a categorical or disjunctive syllogism. In any case, one has to decide which premise(s) is going to be negated or whether by virtue of the argument form, one will have to change the argument form to state the opposite. You can see this with the original example. I could have very well negated P2 and stated “Socrates is not a man.” Socrates is an immortal jellyfish that I tagged in the Mediterranean. Or he is an eternal being that I met while tripping out on DMT. For purposes of the argument, however, since he is not a man, at the very least, the question of whether or not he is mortal is open. We would have to ask what Socrates is. Now, if Socrates is my pet hamster, then yes, Socrates is mortal despite not being a man. It follows that the choice of negation has to be in a place that proves most effective. Some thought has to go into it.
Likewise, the choice has to be made when confronting Craig’s Moral Argument. Craig’s Moral Argument is a modus tollens. For the uninitiated, it simply states: [((p –> q) ^ ~q) –> ~p] (Potter, A. (2020). The rhetorical structure of Modus Tollens: An exploration in logic-mining. Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics, 3, 170-179.). Another way of putting it is that one is denying the consequent. That is precisely what Craig does. “Objective moral values do not exist” is the consequent q. Craig is saying ~q or “Objective moral values do exist.” Therefore, one route one can take is keeping the argument form and negating P1, which in turn negates P2.
MT Negated Moral Argument
P1 If God exists, objective moral values and duties exist.
P2 Objective moral values do not exist.
C Therefore, God does not exist.
The key is to come up with a negation that is either sound or, at the very least, free of any controversy. Straight away, I do not like P2. Moral realists would also deny this negation because, to their minds, P2 is not true. The controversy with P2 is not so much whether it is true or false, but that it falls on the horns of the objectivism-relativism and moral realism/anti-realism debates in ethics. The argument may accomplish something with respect to countering Craig’s Moral Argument, but we are in no better place because of it. This is when we should explore changing the argument’s form in order to get a better negation.
MP Negated Moral Argument
P1 If God does not exist, objective moral values and duties exist.
P2 God does not exist.
C Therefore, objective moral values and duties exist.
This is a valid modus ponens. I have changed the argument form of Craig’s Moral Argument and I now have what I think to be a better negation of his argument. From P2, atheists can find satisfaction. This is the epistemic proposition atheists are committed to. The conclusion also alleviates any concerns moral realists might have had with the MT Negated Moral Argument. For my own purposes, I think this argument works better. That, however, is beside the point. The point is that this forces theists to either justify the premises of Craig’s Moral Argument, i.e. prove that the argument is sound, or assert, on the basis of mere faith, that Craig’s argument is true. In either case, one will have succeeded in either forcing the theist to abandon their propositional idealism, in getting them to test the argument against the world as ontologically construed or in getting them to confess that they are indulging in circular reasoning and confirmation bias, i.e. getting them to confess that they are irrational and illogical. Both of these count as victories. We can explore whether other arguments for God fall on this sword.
We can turn our attention to Craig’s Kalam Cosmological Argument (KCA):
P1 Everything that begins to exist has a cause.
P2 The universe began to exist.
C Therefore, the universe has a cause. (Reichenbach, Bruce. “Cosmological Argument”. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2021. Web.)
Again, negation can take place in two places: P1 or P2. Negating P1, however, does not make sense. Negating P2, like in the case of his Moral Argument, changes the argument form; this is arguable and more subtle. So we get the following:
MT Negated KCA
P1 Everything has cause iff it begins to exist. {(∀x)[(C)x ↔ (E)x]}
P2 The universe did not begin to exist.
C Therefore, the universe does not have a cause.
Technically, Craig’s KCA is a categorical syllogism. Such syllogisms present a universal (∀) or existential quantifier (∃); the latter is introduced by saying all. Consider, “all philosophers are thinkers; all philosophers are logicians; therefore, all thinkers are logicians.” Conversely, one could say “no mallards are insects; some birds are mallards; therefore, some birds are not insects.” What Craig is stating is that all things that begin to exist have a cause, so if the universe is a thing that began to exist, then it has a cause. Alternatively, his argument can be considered an implicit modus ponens: “if the universe began to exist, then it has a cause; the universe began to exist; therefore, the universe has a cause.” I consider this a much weaker formulation and since Craig or anyone else for that matter doesn’t come across things that didn’t begin to exist, interpreting his first premise as a biconditional makes more sense. Hence, the negation works because if the universe did not begin to exist, then the universe is not part of the group of all things that have a cause. This is why my original formulation began with Craig’s P1 because I consider it a biconditional. Notice that even if p and q are false, Craig’s P1 is still true. One way to make a biconditional true is if p and q are false. All that’s said by the Negated or anti-Kalam is that the universe is not within the domain of things that begin to exist. Therefore, the universe does not have a cause.
Whether the universe is finite or eternal has been debated for millennia and in a sense, despite changing context, the debate rages on. If the universe is part of an eternal multiverse, it is just one universe in a vast sea of universes within a multiverse that has no temporal beginning. Despite this, the MT Negated KCA demonstrates how absurd the KCA is. The singularity was already there ‘before’ the Big Bang. The Big Bang started the cosmic clock, but the universe itself did not begin to exist. This is more plausible. Consider that everything that begins to exist does so when the flow of time is already in motion, i.e. when the arrow of time pointed in a given direction due to entropic increase reducible to the decreasing temperature throughout the universe. Nothing that has ever come into existence has done so simultaneously with time itself because any causal relationship speaks to a change and change requires the passage of time, but at T=0, no time has passed, and therefore, no change could have taken place. This leads to an asymmetry. We thus cannot speak of anything beginning to exist at T=0. The MT Negated KCA puts cosmology in the right context. The universe did not come into existence at T=0. T=0 simply represents the first measure of time; matter and energy did not emerge at that point.
For a more complicated treatment, Malpass and Morriston argue that “one cannot traverse an actual infinite in finite steps” (Malpass, Alex & Morriston, Wes (2020). Endless and Infinite. Philosophical Quarterly 70 (281):830-849.). In other words, from a mathematical point of view, T=0 is the x-axis. All of the events after T=0 are an asymptote along the x-axis. The events go further and further back, ever closer to T=0 but never actually touch it. For a visual representation, see below:
Credit: Free Math Help
The implication here is that time began to exist, but the universe did not begin to exist. A recent paper implies that this is most likely the case (Quantum Experiment Shows How Time ‘Emerges’ from Entanglement. The Physics arXiv Blog. 23 Oct 2013. Web.). The very hot, very dense singularity before the emergence of time at T=0 would have been subject to quantum mechanics rather than the macroscopic forces that came later, e.g., General Relativity. As such, the conditions were such that entanglement could have resulted in the emergence of time in our universe, but not the emergence of the universe. All of the matter and energy were already present before the clock started to tick. Conversely, if the universe is akin to a growing runner, then the toddler is at the starting line before the gun goes off. The sound of the gun starts the clock. The runner starts running sometime after she hears the sound. As she runs, she goes through all the stages of childhood, puberty, adolescence, adulthood, and finally dies. Crucially, the act of her running and her growth do not begin until after the gun goes off. Likewise, no changes take place at T=0; all changes take place after T=0. While there is this notion of entanglement, resulting in a change occurring before the clock even started ticking, quantum mechanics demonstrates that quantum changes do not require time and in fact, may result in the emergence of time. Therefore, it is plausible that though time began to exist at the Big Bang, the universe did not begin to exist—thus, making the MT Negated KCA sound. The KCA is therefore, false.
Finally, so that the Thomists do not feel left out, we can explore whether the negation strategy can be applied to Aquinas’ Five Ways. For our purposes, the Second Way is closely related to the KCA and would be defeated by the same considerations. Of course, we would have to negate the Second Way so that it is vulnerable to the considerations that cast doubt on the KCA. The Second Way can be stated as follows:
We perceive a series of efficient causes of things in the world.
Nothing exists prior to itself.
Therefore nothing [in the world of things we perceive] is the efficient cause of itself.
If a previous efficient cause does not exist, neither does the thing that results (the effect).
Therefore if the first thing in a series does not exist, nothing in the series exists.
If the series of efficient causes extends ad infinitum into the past, then there would be no things existing now.
That is plainly false (i.e., there are things existing now that came about through efficient causes).
Therefore efficient causes do not extend ad infinitum into the past.
Therefore it is necessary to admit a first efficient cause, to which everyone gives the name of God. (Gracyk, Theodore. “Argument Analysis of the Five Ways”. Minnesota State University Moorhead. 2016. Web.)
This argument is considerably longer than the KCA, but there are still areas where the argument can be negated. I think P1 is uncontroversial and so, I do not mind starting from there:
Negated Second Way
We perceive a series of efficient causes of things in the world.
Nothing exists prior to itself.
Therefore nothing [in the world of things we perceive] is the efficient cause of itself.
If a previous efficient cause does not exist, neither does the thing that results (the effect).
Therefore if the earlier thing in a series does not exist, nothing in the series exists.
If the series of efficient causes extends ad infinitum into the past, then there would be things existing now.
That is plainly true (i.e., efficient causes, per Malpass and Morriston, extend infinitely into the past or, the number of past efficient causes is a potential infinity).
Therefore efficient causes do extend ad infinitum into the past.
Therefore it is not necessary to admit a first efficient cause, to which everyone gives the name of God.
Either the theist will continue to assert that the Second Way is sound, epistemic warrant and justification be damned, or they will abandon their dubious propositional idealism and run a soundness test. Checking whether the Second Way or the Negated Second Way is sound would inevitably bring them into contact with empirical evidence supporting one argument or the other. As I have shown with the KCA, it appears that considerations of time, from a philosophical and quantum mechanical perspective, greatly lower the probability of the KCA being sound. This follows neatly into Aquinas’ Second Way and as such, one has far less epistemic justification for believing the KCA or Aquinas’ Second Way are sound. The greater justification is found in the negated versions of these arguments.
Ultimately, one either succeeds at making the theist play the game according to the right rules or getting them to admit their beliefs are not properly epistemic at all; instead, they believe by way of blind faith and all of their redundant arguments are exercises in circular reasoning and any pretense of engaging the evidence is an exercise in confirmation bias. Arguments for God are a perfect example of directionally motivated reasoning (see Galef, Julia. The Scout Mindset: Why Some People See Things Clearly and Others Don’t. New York: Portfolio, 2021. 63-66. Print). I much prefer accuracy motivated reasoning. We are all guilty of motivated reasoning, but directionally motivated reasoning is indicative of irrationality and usually speaks to the fact that one holds beliefs that do not square with the facts. Deductive arguments are only useful insofar as premises can be supported by evidence, which therefore makes it easier to show that an argument is sound. This is why we can reason that if Socrates is a man, more specifically, the ancient Greek philosopher that we all know, then Socrates was indeed mortal and that is why he died in 399 BCE. Likewise, this is why we cannot reason that objective morality can only be the case if the Judeo-Christian god exists, that if the universe began to exist, God is the cause, and that if the series of efficient causes cannot regress infinitely and must terminate somewhere, they can only terminate at a necessary first cause, which some call God. These arguments can be negated and the negations will show that they are either absurd or that the reasoning in the arguments is deficient and rests on the laurels of directionally motivated reasoning due to a bias for one’s religious faith rather than on the bedrock of carefully reasoned, meticulously demonstrated, accuracy motivated reasoning which does not ignore or omit pertinent facts.
The arguments for God, no matter how old or new, simple or complex, do not work because not only do they rely on directionally motivated and patently biased reasoning, but because when testing for soundness, being sure not to exclude any pertinent evidence, the arguments turn out to be unsound. In the main, they all contain controversial premises that do not work unless one already believes in God. So there is a sense in which these arguments exist to give believers a false sense of security or more pointedly, a false sense of certainty. Unlike my opponents, I am perfectly content with being wrong, with changing my mind, but the fact remains, theism is simply not the sort of belief that I give much credence to. Along with the Vagueness Strategy, the Negation Strategy is something that should be in every atheist’s toolbox.
The Futility of Labels
By R.N. Carmona
Isms abound and nuance is sorely needed. I think my readers ought to follow my lead and shed their isms. In place of these various isms, they should offer clear definitions of what they mean by these isms. I think definitions are more robust and are more capable of giving, especially detractors, an idea of what a label means in practice. I will now outline a few of my various isms and unpack them, so that people can start to see the absurdity of opposing some of them. In place of these labels, I will offer explanations for why I identity with these views.
I. Atheism
Atheism is not merely an epistemic stance concerning belief in god, but a robust philosophical position that contains an analytic component. Analytic atheism is concerned with what is meant by theism and what is meant by God. Atheists, however, will not always agree with the answers provided by theists. A theist may respond to the first question and say that God is existence. An atheist might object by saying that such a definition is inconsistent with what theists commonly profess and that what they usually profess is much more elementary. God, for example, is man-like. He is pleased or displeased; given the latter, he is prone to anger. Furthermore, he purportedly has properties that cannot be attributed to mere existence: he is omniscient, omnipotent, eternal, timeless. The atheist could also respond by stating that defining God as existence is much too vague. The aim of a definition is description; this definition, however, fails to describe what is meant by God.
Analytic atheism also attempts to answer the question: what is atheism? To accomplish this, however, the normative component has to be consulted. The analytic component will provide theories of atheism or more simply, accounts of what atheism should be, therefore providing possible answers to the question of normative atheism. The analytic component is therefore, responsible for determining which account best captures what atheism is or alternatively, what an atheist is.
What an atheist is, is perhaps best defined by the approach s/he chooses. The approach chosen or a combination of these approaches might help us to arrive at a better definition of atheism. There’s fallibilism, deductive atheology, and inductive atheology. The latter two are encompassed by evidentialism. This position is arguably most familiar to modern atheists:
[A]theists have taken the view that whether or not a person is justified in having an attitude of belief towards the proposition, “God exists,” is a function of that person’s evidence. “Evidence” here is understood broadly to include a priori arguments, arguments to the best explanation, inductive and empirical reasons, as well as deductive and conceptual premises. An asymmetry exists between theism and atheism in that atheists have not offered faith as a justification for non-belief. That is, atheists have not presented non-evidentialist defenses for believing that there is no God.
McCormick, Matt. “Atheism”. Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. ND. Web. 21 Dec 2014
A priori arguments fall in the purview of deductive atheology. Such atheists would argue that the traditional view of God is incoherent. Such a God is not possible on this view. The characteristics God purportedly has are contradictory either in and of themselves or when one attempts to reconcile them. Take for example J.L Mackie’s explication of the Omnipotence Paradox: “can an omnipotent being make things which he cannot subsequently control? Or, what is practically equivalent to this, can an omnipotent being make rules which then bind himself?” (Mackie, J. L. 1955. Evil and omnipotence. Mind 64 (254): 200-212. Available on web.). This is a more generalized version of the Omnipotence Paradox, which usually asks: can God create a stone he cannot lift? Therefore, the paradox can be viewed as an argument attempting to show that omnipotence is incoherent in and of itself. The argument attempts to accomplish this by dividing omnipotence into two components, which I call functional and physical. Functional omnipotence is the capacity to will anything whilst physical omnipotence is the capacity to do anything. Therefore, the argument attempts to show that it is possible that God could will something he cannot do, in Mackie’s case, will something that he cannot control or in the general case, will the existence of a stone so heavy that he cannot complete the particular task of lifting it.
Another route such an atheist takes is the attempt to show that any given attributes of God are irreconcilable.
The combination of omnipotence and omniscience have received a great deal of attention. To possess all knowledge, for instance, would include knowing all of the particular ways in which one will exercise one’s power, or all of the decisions that one will make, or all of the decisions that one has made in the past. But knowing any of those entails that the known proposition is true. So does God have the power to act in some fashion that he has not foreseen, or differently than he already has without compromising his omniscience? It has also been argued that God cannot be both unsurpassably good and free.
McCormick, Ibid.
Another route available to such an atheist is to argue that we have not been offered an adequate concept of god (see Smart, J.J.C. “Atheism and Agnosticism”. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 9 Mar 2004. Web. 21 Dec 2014.). Concepts of god are often relative to this or that religion or subjective to this or that individual. Such concepts often do not agree with one another.
Perhaps the final route such an atheist can take is to argue that the failure of theistic arguments entails atheism. In other words, since arguments for God fail, it is reasonable to hold that god does not exist. Such an atheist, for example, will argue that since the Kalam Cosmological Argument fails to prove that God created the universe, we should believe that such an agent did not create the universe. Alternatively, she will argue that since the Ontological Argument fails to show the existence of a necessary being, this being is instead impossible. Whether or not these arguments hold are of no interest at the time. This is, however, how such an atheist will proceed.
An atheist operating under inductive atheology has several possible approaches. Whether or not one can prove a negative is too tangential a topic to cover here, but assuming it’s possible, one could offer Michael Martin’s argument:
P1 [A]ll the available evidence used to support the view that X exists is shown to be inadequate; and
P2 X is the sort of entity that, if X exists, then there is a presumption that would be evidence adequate to support the view that X exists; and
P3 this presumption has not been defeated although serious efforts have been made to do so; and
P4 the area where evidence would appear, if there were any, has been comprehensively examined; and
P5 there are no acceptable beneficial reasons to believe that X exists.
Martin, Michael, 1990. Atheism: A Philosophical Justification. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990.
What makes this argument inductive is P3 and P4. P3 and P4 hold hitherto and thus, there is the tacit assumption that they will hold going forward. In other words, that the future will resemble the past.
II. Naturalism
Naturalism is another argument available to an atheist operating under inductive atheology. This is, in fact, the prevalent approach among modern day atheists. Atheists may disagree on the details and therefore, espouse different sorts of naturalism. However, the more prominent forms are metaphysical and methodological. Methodological naturalism has two primary forms: constructive and deflationary. Deflationary is based on–not exclusively–the Natural Ontological Attitude (NOA). Arthur Fine describes it as follows:
I certainly trust the evidence of my senses, on the whole with regard to the existence and features of everyday objects. And I have similar confidence in the “cheek, double-check, check, tripe-check” of scientific investigation…So if scientists tell me that there really are molecules and atoms, and…who knows maybe even quarks, then so be it. I trust them and, thus, must accept that there really are such things with their attendant properties and relations.
Arthur Fine as quoted in Ritchie, Jack. Understanding Naturalism. Stocksfield, England: Acumen, 2008. 97. Print.
NOA is an alternative to scientific realism and anti-realism. “Both realism and anti-realism add an unwanted philosophical gloss to science” (Ibid.). Therefore, the position neither agrees with scientific realism nor anti-realism. At first glance, NOA may sound exactly like scientific realism, but there are key differences that should be considered (e.g. the correspondence theory of truth doesn’t factor into Fine’s NOA). Constructive naturalism differs from NOA because it “involves commitment to a definite method for resolving ontological matters” (Ibid.).Such a naturalist may make use of, for example, Quine’s Naturalized Epistemology.
Metaphysical naturalism absorbs methodological naturalism. The view could be defined as follows:
Metaphysical naturalism seeks to explain every feature of our reality through only natural entities and causes, without the need of god(s) or the supernatural in any part of one’s worldview and life philosophy. In other words, a “big picture” explanation of reality can be reached without any appeal to religion, making religions such as Christianity unnecessary and extraneous to answering the big questions in life.
Ferguson, Matthew. “Thinking about the ‘Metaphysics’ in Metaphysical Naturalism”. Civitas Humana. 26 Apr 2014. Web. 21 Dec 2014.
Metaphysical naturalism is a robust worldview that often requires lengthy elucidation. This has been done by, for example, Richard Carrier who states:
[I]f you want to know what we believe on almost any subject, you need merely read authoritative works on science and history–which means, first, college-level textbooks of good quality and, second, all the other literature on which their contents are based. The vast bulk of what you find there we believe in. The evidence and reason for those beliefs is presented in such works and need not be repeated…
Carrier, Richard. Sense and Goodness without God: A Defense of Metaphysical Naturalism. Bloomington, Ind.: Authorhouse, 2005. 67. Print.
Where such authorities are silent, metaphysical naturalism is capable of providing possible answers. Take, for instance, consciousness. Metaphysical naturalism can offer cogent explanations within the physicalist framework. For instance, with respect to consciousness, some naturalists have offered some version of supervenience. On fallibilism, an atheist can argue that a theist has come to a given conclusion because he hasn’t considered all the relevant evidence (McCormick, Ibid.). In fact, part of this attitude plays a role in discussions between theists and atheists. Theists, generally speaking, make it quite obvious that they are not aware of all of the relevant evidence. William Lane Craig, for example, employs a perfunctory or selective grasp of cosmology in order to support his KCA. It is reasonable to conclude that if he were aware of all of the evidence or if he did not omit counter-evidence, his conclusion would be different. Unfortunately, this might be too generous. Craig has been made aware of the evidence and regardless of the fact, he still chooses to endorse the KCA. So in some cases, it is not just that a theist’s knowledge is fallible, but it is that they disregard the fact and do not care to correct it. Even worse, apologists are in the habit of omitting evidence to the contrary.
Lastly, the definition “lack of belief in gods” is inadequate because it alludes to everyday beliefs. It is correct to say I lack or do not have the belief that Jesus died for my sins and resurrected three days later, and then ascended to the right hand of the Father where he now intercedes on my behalf. Religious beliefs of this sort are not properly epistemic beliefs, which are “the attitude[s] we have, roughly, whenever we take something to be the case or regard it as true” (Schwitzgebel, Eric. “Belief”. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2019. Web.). Atheists, therefore, have the epistemic belief that the available evidence makes it much more probable than not that there are no gods or spiritual entities whatsoever. Naturalism, whether some of us like it or not, is a framework that has imposed itself on us. Even in cases where we assume supernatural or paranormal explanations, thorough investigation renders a much more mundane explanation. For some people, it is difficult to accept that the world is not fantastical. Severed limbs do not regenerate in the name of Jesus, people do not rise from the dead when a spell is invoked, and our ancestors do not protect us from physical harm. Thorough investigations only yield naturalistic, reproducible explanations. So when someone proclaims a belief that does not speak to knowledge or truth, but rather, faith, I can definitely say I do not share or that I lack that belief. Now when speaking of properly epistemic beliefs, I have the attitude that atheism is the case; atheism is true in that the various claims of religion do not hold up to scrutiny and that moreover, gods are entirely absent in the scope of all of our explanations. In other words, star formation, planet formation, the arrangement of the earliest, simplest metabolisms, the evolution of species, and ultimately, every model of the universe’s origin do not require a god in order to make sense.
When atheism is spelled out in this much detail, detractors are given no room to disingenuously offer a definition they prefer, one that allows them to malign atheists and misrepresent what they stand for. The label of atheism is futile. The definition or perhaps better said, the practice clearly spells out what it is that I stand for. The same applies to naturalism. The label no longer applies. Instead, I prefer to make explicit what I mean by it. Kai Nielsen explains the intimate connection between atheism and naturalism best:
Religions, whether theisms or not, are belief-systems (though this is not all they are) which involve belief in spiritual realities. Even Buddhism, which has neither God nor worship, has a belief in what Buddhists take to be spiritual realities and this is incompatible with naturalism as is theism as well, which, at least as usually understood, is a form of supernaturalism. Naturalism, where consistent, is an atheism.
Nielsen, Kai. Naturalism and Religion. Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus, 2001. 30. Print.
III. Feminism
The Fourth Wave may be the most powerful wave yet, but a glaring issue limits its power: there are people who not only misunderstand feminism, but also either stand against feminism or misrepresent feminism. The former and the latter are more related than one realizes. Those who misrepresent feminism are very often responsible for those who stand against it. Some Christians and Muslims believe that women are inferior to men and will therefore oppose feminism by default, but there are anti-feminists who do not have religious reasons for opposing feminism. Their reasons are based on the misunderstandings of self-proclaimed feminists.
To set feminism straight, a return to the basics is required. Once the different schools of feminism are made explicit, misunderstanding should be quelled. Misunderstanding occurs due to oversimplification of the thought of one school or another. I agree with Richard Carrier, who stated that, “Feminism is often badly understood by people who don’t study it well or don’t read widely among contemporary feminist authors” (Carrier, Richard. “A Primer on Fourth Wave Feminism”. Freethought Blogs. 5 Apr 2015. Web. 8 Apr 2015.). A successful movement, of course, has to move against some form of oppression or move toward some end, but it also has to stop and gather its fugitives. It, in other words, should not exclude people who want to identify with it. However, it should be responsible for ensuring that its members understand the movement. It is responsible for its reputation and since the reputation of the movement is based on its members, cohesion and continuity are a must. We are in a digital age in where people listen to someone on a YouTube channel or a blogger in the blogosphere. It is a readily accessible form of media. It is often short and sweet when compared to a book, so the more learned and educated in a movement have to stop to protect the movement from misunderstanding and mischaracterization. To do this, one must gather the fugitives, and to accomplish this, they have to be shown where they have gone wrong. They need to be corrected. Often what is needed is a return to the basics.
Fugitives are the people anti-feminists get these ideas from, young girls who are themselves anti-feminists or who identify a feminists and confess to things that are not at all in keeping with the movement: that feminists hate men; that feminists want to exclude them; that feminists seek female dominance and perhaps a matriarchy; that feminists are looking to devalue masculine attributes; that feminists ignore the effects the patriarchy has on men and that they, in fact, ignore men’s issues across the board. These ideas are not true to feminism, but there’s still the question as to why people think they are. Mackay has a succinct summary of feminism and not surprisingly, she alludes to common misconceptions:
Feminism is one of the oldest and most powerful social movements in history; it is a revolutionary movement, and that means change. There is so much wrong with the present system that we can’t just tinker round the edges, we need to start again; our end point cannot be equality in an unequal world. This is also the reason why feminism is not struggling to simply reverse the present power relationship and put women in charge instead of men (though this is a common myth about feminist politics). Feminism is about change, not a changing of the guard.
Mackay, Finn. “Radical Feminism: Feminist Activism in Movement”. Times Higher Education. 19 Feb 2015. Web. 8 Apr 2015.
What kind of change is the label of feminism about? Feminism concerns securing equality for women. Women should have the same opportunities men have. Women should have the same rights men have. Women should be respected in their careers the way men are; they should be paid equally. There should be no sex-based differences in academia, the workplace, at home, or anywhere else. When this is spelled out, it is an uncontroversial perspective. There should be no reason for anyone to oppose the affirmation that women should be equal to men.
IV. Black Lives Matter
Likewise, there should be no opposition at all when I say that Black people and minorities, more generally, should be equal to Whites. There is nothing wrong with saying that if a Black man commits a crime or fails to comply with police, he should not be gunned down. White men have committed crimes on a much larger scale and were escorted away in handcuffs. White men do not have to worry about police officers kneeling on their necks or shooting 41 rounds at them. Timothy McVeigh murdered 168 people, including 19 children, in an act of domestic terrorism, and he walked away with his life (Gumbel, Andrew. “Oklahoma City bombing: 20 years later, key questions remain unanswered”. Guardian. 13 Apr 2015. Web.). That is because he was given the right to a fair trail. In this country, a Black man selling loose cigarettes on a corner can be the victim of extrajudicial execution. There is nothing controversial about saying that even the life of an accused Black criminal matters. Innocent until proven guilty applies to Black people or at least, it should apply to Black people.
The same applies to Asian Americans, who have recently become the target of hate crimes across the country. Implicit here is that I am opposed to anyone who endorses stereotypes about ethnic groups. So when the former President joked about the “Kung Flu” and blamed China repeatedly for the COVID-19 outbreak, that was one of the many reasons I opposed him, his administration, and his supporters. It is absurd to me that right-wingers in America are roundly opposed to racial equality. They are also opposed to women securing equality. There is a sense in which my political opponents are wholly aware of what these labels mean and yet, they routinely choose to ignore the definitions, no matter how clearly they are explained. It is not any lack of clarity or sense on my part, but rather an obstinate decision to oppose progress of this sort at every turn. Political affiliation should not keep anyone from accepting my definitions or identifying with them. If your political party prohibits you from even seeing the need for racial equality, abandon the party or admit to having abandoned your moral integrity. There are no two ways about it.
V. Leftist
In the past, I have used this term and I have done so to differentiate myself from Democrats. I am not a Centrist, a sycophant who condones incompetence and corruption on both sides while pretending that they are both exemplary. Neither political party in the United States is morally admirable. While it is the case that Democrats are marginally better, there is still a lot that they get wrong, hence my anti-Democratic, anti-Capitalist stances. I do not support the American idea of Democracy because, like Mbembe, I recognize that it has a nocturnal body: colonialism and every human rights violation that has followed from it from slavery to the Jim Crow era to mass incarceration of Blacks after a fabricated crack-cocaine epidemic. The United States is a hegemony, a pseudo-Empire precisely because it destabilizes entire regions by rightfully overthrowing despots and making the critical mistake of leaving a power vacuum in their place. Terrorist factions are just a small part of this country reaping what it sowed, but I digress.
Proponents of Capitalism are enamored with the idea of Capitalism. They, however, ignore the reality of it. Inequality the world over is perpetuated by Western ideas and interference. In the year that COVID-19 has wreaked havoc in the United States, workers have lost over $3.7 trillion to date while the wealth of top billionaires has increased by $3.9 trillion. This can be seen as one of the largest redistributions of wealth in history (see here and here). A lot more can be said about Capitalism, perhaps in a separate post for another day. The point I am making now is that the labels of Black Lives Matter, feminist, anti-Capitalist, and the like do not necessarily pertain to Far Left politics. Once these labels are made explicit, in that one makes clear what they mean in practice, it should strike anyone as absurd to be diametrically opposed to these positions.
That leaves open the question as to why people on the right see these positions as fundamentally opposed to their brand of politics. Again, if your political party imposes these discriminatory and even racist views on you, it is good sign that you should renounce it. There are ways to be fiscally conservative, a proponent of small government, and so on without subscribing to views that promote racial, gender, and wealth inequality. I fail to see how what I have had outlined is unclear or nonsensical. The isms, once unpacked, should not be as controversial. This is why I prefer stating my positions clearly, so that there is no room for misconstruing, misrepresenting, straw manning, and so on. There is, in my book, a difference between an opponent and an enemy. The enmity I reserve for my enemies has everything to do with the fact that they think their ignorance is better than my knowledge, their apathy superior to my empathy, their desire to oppress groups they dislike equal to my desire for equality. Opponents, by contrast, can have their minds changed. The omission of relevant facts is not the same as ignorance. My enemies intend to ignore that which disagrees with or defeats their views and more importantly, they intend to cause harm to people like myself, so they do so by weaponizing their right to vote to further marginalized groups they want to harm. Then they pretend to be innocent because they are not drawing a firearm. They might as well. Voting for a candidate that does not care about the plights of minorities, women, non-Christians, etc. is a deliberate attempt to harm these groups. You are not innocent.
Ultimately, labels in and of themselves are futile. We should do away with labels and instead flesh out what we stand for. This leaves little room for error and leaves our enemies fully exposed. This is not to say that people cannot disagree with atheism and naturalism, for instance. They are more than welcome to. What this does mean is that they cannot make the vacuous claim that I suppress God in my unrighteousness or that I hate God or that I choose to not believe because I prefer to indulge sinful concupiscence. These are comfortable things Christians say to avoid the fact that people have good reasons for not believing in God. My robust descriptions of atheism and naturalism leave no room for speculation of the sort. It gives them no space at all to go with a definition that allows them to slander people like myself. Labels do not accomplish this. Fuller descriptions of what is meant by a label go much further. Let us abandon our labels and instead, describe in greater detail what we stand for.
Rebuking Rasmussen’s Geometric Argument
By R.N. Carmona
My purpose here is twofold: first and foremost, I want to clarify Rasmussen’s argument because though I can understand why word of mouth can lead to what is essentially a straw man of his argument, especially in light of the fact that his argument requires one to pay for an online article or his book Is God the Best Explanation of Things? which he coauthored with Felipe Leon, it is simply good practice to present an argument fairly. Secondly, I want to be stern about the fact that philosophy of religion cannot continue to rake these dead coals. Rasmussen’s argument is just another in a long, winding, and quite frankly, tired history of contingency arguments. In in any case, the following is the straw man I want my readers and anyone else who finds this post to stop citing. This is decidedly not Rasmussen’s argument:
Rasmussen has no argument called The Argument From Arbitrary Limits. Arbitrary limits actually feature in Leon’s chapter in where he expresses skepticism of Rasmussen’s Geometric Argument (Rasmussen Joshua and Leon, Felipe. Is God The Best Explanation For Things. Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan. 53-68. Print.). Also, Rasmussen has a Theistic conception of God (omnipresent, wholly good, etc.) that is analogous to what Plantinga means by maximal greatness, but Rasmussen does not refer to God using that term. Perhaps there is confusion with his use of the word maximal conceivable. While given Rasmussen’s beliefs, he implies God with what he calls a maximal foundation, “a foundation complete with respect to its fundamental (basic, uncaused) features” (Ibid., 140). He makes it clear throughout the book that he is open to such a foundation that is not synonymous with God. In any case, his maximal conceivable is not a being possessing maximal greatness; at least, not exactly, since it appears he means something more elementary given his descriptions of basic and uncaused, as these clearly do not refer to omnipresence, perfect goodness, and so on. There may also be some confusion with his later argument, which he calls “The Maximal Mind Argument” (Ibid. 112-113), which fails because it is relies heavily on nonphysicalism, a series of negative theories in philosophy of mind that do not come close to offering alternative explanations for an array of phenomena thoroughly explained by physicalism (see here). In any case, Rasmussen has no argument resembling the graphic above. His arguments rest on a number of dubious assumptions, the nexus of which is his Geometric Argument:
JR1 Geometry is a geometric state.
JR2 Every geometric state is dependent.
JR3 Therefore, Geometry is dependent.
JR4 Geometry cannot depend on any state featuring only things that have a geometry.
JR5 Geometry cannot depend on any state featuring only non-concrete (non-causal) things.
JRC Therefore, Geometry depends on a state featuring at lest one geometry-less concrete thing (3-5) (Ibid., 42).
Like Leon, I take issue with JR2. Leon does not really elaborate on why JR2 is questionable saying only that “the most basic entities with geometry (if such there be) have their geometrics of factual or metaphysical necessity” and that therefore, “it’s not true that every geometric state is dependent” (Ibid., 67). He is correct, of course, but elaboration could have helped here because this is a potential defeater. Factual and metaphysical necessity are inhered in physical necessity. The universe is such that the fact that every triangle containing a 90-degree angle is a right triangle is reducible to physical constraints within our universe. This fact of geometry is unlike Rasmussen’s examples, namely chair and iPhone shapes. He states: “The instantiation of [a chair’s shape] depends upon prior conditions. Chair shapes never instantiate on their own, without any prior conditions. Instead, chair-instantiations depend on something” (Ibid., 41). This overt Platonism is questionable in and of itself, but Leon’s statement is forceful in this case: the shape of the chair is not dependent because it has its shape of factual or metaphysical necessity that stem from physical necessity. Chairs, first and foremost, are shaped the way they are because of our shape when we sit down; furthermore, chairs take the shapes they do because of physical constraints like human weight, gravity, friction against a floor, etc. For a chair not to collapse under the force of gravity and the weight of an individual, it has to be engineered in some way to withstand these forces acting on it; the chair’s shape is so because of physical necessity and this explains its metaphysical necessity. There is therefore, no form of a chair in some ethereal realm; an idea like this is thoroughly retrograde and not worth considering.
In any case, the real issue is that chair and iPhone shapes are not the sort of shapes that occur naturally in the universe. Those shapes, namely spheres, ellipses, triangles, and so on, also emerge from physical necessity. It is simply the case that a suspender on a bridge forms the hypothenuse of a right triangle. Like a chair, bridge suspenders take this shape because of physical necessity. The same applies to the ubiquity of spherical and elliptical shapes in the universe. To further disabuse anyone of Platonic ideas, globular shapes are also quite ubiquitous in the universe and are more prominent the closer we get to the Big Bang. There are shapes inherent in our universe that cannot be neatly called geometrical and even still, these shapes are physically and therefore, metaphysically necessitated. If JR2 is unsound, then the argument falls apart. On another front, this addresses Rasmussen’s assertion that God explains why there is less chaos in our universe. Setting aside that the qualification of this statement is entirely relative, the relative order we see in the universe is entirely probabilistic, especially given that entropy guarantees a trend toward disorder as the universe grows older and colder.
Like Leon, I share his general concern about “any argument that moves from facts about apparent contingent particularity and an explicability principle to conclusions about the nature of fundamental reality” (Ibid., 67) or as I have been known to put it: one cannot draw ontological conclusions on the basis of logical considerations. Theistic philosophers of religion and unfortunately, philosophers in general, have a terrible habit of leaping from conceivability to possibility and then, all the way to actuality. Leon elaborates:
Indeed, the worry above seems to generalize to just about any account of ultimate reality. So, for example, won’t explicability arguments saddle Christian theism with the same concern, viz. why the deep structure of God’s nature should necessitate exactly three persons in the Godhead? In general, won’t explicability arguments equally support a required explanation for why a particular God exists rather than others, or rather than, say, an infinite hierarchy of gods? The heart of the criticism is that it seems any theory must stop somewhere and say that the fundamental character is either brute or necessary, and that if it’s necessary, the explanation of why it’s necessary (despite appearing contingent) is beyond our ability to grasp (Ibid., 67-68).
Of course, Leon is correct in his assessment. Why not Ahura Mazda, his hypostatic union to Spenta Mainyu, and his extension via the Amesha Spentas? If, for instance, the one-many problem requires the notion of a One that is also many, what exactly rules out Ahura Mazda? One starts to see how the prevailing version of Theism in philosophy of religion is just a sad force of habit. This is why it is necessary to move on from these arguments. Contingency arguments are notoriously outmoded because Mackie, Le Poidevin, and others have already provided general defeaters that can apply to any particular contingency argument. Also, how many contingency arguments do we need exactly? In other words, how many different ways can one continue to assert that all contingent things require at least one necessary explanation? Wildman guides us here:
Traditional natural theology investigates entailment relations from experienced reality to, say, a preferred metaphysics of ultimacy. But most arguments of this direct-entailment sort have fallen out of favor, mostly because they are undermined by the awareness of alternative metaphysical schemes that fit the empirical facts just as well as the preferred metaphysical scheme. By contrast with this direct-entailment approach, natural theology ought to compare numerous compelling accounts of ultimacy in as many different respects as are relevant. In this comparison-based way, we assemble the raw material for inference-to-the-best-explanation arguments on behalf of particular theories of ultimacy, and we make completely clear the criteria for preferring one view of ultimacy to another.
Wildman, Wesley J. Religious Philosophy as Multidisciplinary Comparative Inquiry: Envisioning a Future For The Philosophy of Religion. State University of New York Press. Albany, NY. 2010. 162. Print.
Setting aside that Rasmussen does not make clear why he prefers a Christian view of ultimacy as opposed to a Zoroastrian one or another one that may be proposed, I think Wildman is being quite generous when saying that “alternative metaphysical schemes fit the empirical facts just as well as the preferred metaphysical scheme” because the fact of the matter is that some alternatives fit the empirical facts better than metaphysical schemes like the ones Christian Theists resort to. Rasmussen’s preferred metaphysical scheme of a maximal foundation, which properly stated, is a disembodied, nonphysical mind who is omnipresent, wholly good, and so on rests on dubious assumptions that have not been made to cohere with the empirical facts. Nonphysicalism, as I have shown in the past, does not even attempt to explain brain-related phenomena. Physicalist theories have trounced the opposition in that department and it is not even close. What is more is that Christian Theists are especially notorious for not comparing their account to other accounts and that is because they are not doing philosophy, but rather apologetics. This is precisely why philosophy of religion must move on from Christian Theism. We can think of an intellectual corollary to forgiveness. In light of Christian Theism’s abject failure to prove God, how many more chances are we required to give this view? Philosophy of religion is, then, like an abused lover continuing to be moved by scraps of affection made to cover up heaps of trauma. The field should be past the point of forgiveness and giving Christian Theism yet another go to get things right; it has had literal centuries to get its story straight and present compelling arguments and yet here we are retreading ground that has been walked over again and again and again.
To reinforce my point, I am going to quote Mackie and Le Poidevin’s refutations of contingency arguments like Rasmussen’s. It should then become clear that we have to bury these kinds of arguments for good. Let them who are attached to these arguments mourn their loss, but I will attend no such wake. What remains of the body is an ancient skeleton, long dead. It is high time to give it a rest. Le Poidevin put one nail in the coffin of contingency arguments. Anyone offering new contingency arguments has simply failed to do their homework. It is typical of Christian Theists to indulge confirmation bias and avoid what their opponents have to say. The problem with that is that the case against contingency arguments has been made. Obstinacy does not change the fact. Le Poidevin clearly shows why necessary facts do not explain contingent ones:
Necessary facts, then, cannot explain contingent ones, and causal explanation, of any phenomenon, must link contingent facts. That is, both cause and effect must be contingent. Why is this? Because causes make a difference to their environment: they result in something that would not have happened if the cause had not been present. To say, for example, that the presence of a catalyst in a certain set of circumstances speeded up a reaction is to say that, had the catalyst not been present in those circumstances, the reaction would have proceeded at a slower rate. In general, if A caused B, then, if A had not occurred in the circumstances, B would not have occurred either. (A variant of this principle is that, if A caused B, then if A had not occurred in the circumstances, the probability of B’s occurrence would have been appreciably less than it was. It does not matter for our argument whether we accept the origin principle or this variant.) To make sense of this statement, ‘If A had not occurred in the circumstances, B would not have occurred’, we have to countenance the possibility of A’s not occurring and the possibility of B’s not occurring. If these are genuine possibilities, then both A and B are contingent. So one of the reasons why necessary facts cannot causally explain anything is that we cannot make sense of their not being the case, whereas causal explanations requires us to make sense of causally explanatory facts not being the case. Causal explanation involves the explanation of one contingent fact by appeal to another contingent fact.
Le Poidevin, Robin. Arguing for Atheism: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion. London: Routledge, 1996. 40-41. Print.
This is a way of substantiating that an effect is inhered in a cause or the principle, like effects from like causes. This has been precisely my criticism of the idea that a nonphysical cause created the physical universe. There is no theory of causation that permits the interaction of an ethereal entity’s dispositions and that of physical things. It is essentially a paraphrase of Elizabeth of Bohemia’s rebuttal to Cartesian dualism: how does mental substance interact with physical substance? This is why mind-body dualism remains in a state of incoherence, but I digress. Mackie puts yet another nail in the coffin:
The principle of sufficient reason, then, is more far-reaching than the principle that every occurrence has a preceding sufficient cause: the latter, but not the former, would be satisfied by a series of things or events running back infinitely in time, each determined by earlier ones, but with no further explanation of the series as a whole. Such a series would give us only what Leibniz called ‘physical’ or ‘hypothetical’ necessity, whereas the demand for a sufficient reason for the whole body of contingent things and events and laws calls for something with ‘absolute’ or ‘metaphysical’ necessity. But even the weaker, deterministic, principle is not an a priori truth, and indeed it may not be a truth at all; much less can this be claimed for the principle of sufficient reason. Perhaps it just expresses an arbitrary demand; it may be intellectually satisfying to believe there is, objectively, an explanation for everything together, even if we can only guess at what the explanation might be. But we have no right to assume that the universe will comply with our intellectual preferences. Alternatively, the supposed principle may be an unwarranted extension of the determinist one, which, in so far as it is supported, is supported only empirically, and can at most be accepted provisionally, not as an a priori truth. The form of the cosmological argument which relies on the principle of sufficient reason therefore fails completely as a demonstrative proof.
Mackie, J. L. The Miracle of Theism: Arguments for and against the Existence of God. Oxford: Clarendon, 1982. 86-87. Print.
Every contingency argument fails because it relies on the principle of sufficient reason and because necessity does not cohere with contingency as it concerns a so-called causal relation. Mackie, like Le Poidevin, also questions why God is a satisfactory termination of the regress. Why not something something else? (Ibid., 92). Contingency arguments amount to vicious special pleading and an outright refusal to entertain viable alternatives, even in cases where the alternatives are nonphysical and compatible with religious sentiments. In any case, it would appear that the principle of sufficient reason is not on stable ground. Neither is the notion that a necessary being is the ultimate explanation of the universe. Contingency arguments have been defeated and there really is no way to repeat these arguments in a way that does not fall on the horns of Le Poidevin and Mackie’s defeaters. Only the obdurate need to believe that God is the foundational explanation of the universe explains the redundancy of Christian Theists within the philosophy of religion. That is setting aside that apologetics is not philosophy and other complaints I have had. The Geometric Argument, despite using different language, just is a contingency argument. If the dead horse could speak, it would tell them all to lay down their batons once and for all, but alas.
Ultimately, contingency arguments are yet another example of how repetitive Christianized philosophy of religion has become. There is a sense in which Leon, Le Poidevin, and Mackie are paraphrasing one another because, and here is a bit of irony, like arguments result in like rebuttals. They cannot help but to sound like they each decided or even conspired to write on the same topic for a final paper. They are, after all, addressing the same argument no matter how many attempts have been made to word it differently. It is a vicious cycle, a large wheel that cannot keep on turning. It must be stopped in its tracks if progress in the philosophy of religion is to get any real traction.
Why Dispositions Make More Sense Than Powers
By R.N. Carmona
Consider what follows some scattered thoughts after reading an excellent paper by Marius Backmann. I think he succeeds in showing how the Neo-Aristotelian notion of powers is incongruous with pretty much any theory of time of note. My issue with powers is more basic: what in the world are Neo-Aristotelians even saying when they invoke this idea and why does it seem that no one has raised the concern that powers are an elementary paraphrase of dispositions? With respect to this concern, Neo-Aristotelians do not even attempt to make sense of our experience with matter and energy. They seem to go on the assumption that something just has to underlie the physical world whereas I take it as extraneous to include metaphysical postulates where entirely physical ones make do. Dispositions are precisely the sort of physical postulates that adequately explain what we perceive as cause-effect relationships. What I will argue is that a more thorough analysis of dispositions is all that is needed to understand why a given a caused some given effect b.
My idea that powers are an elementary paraphrase is entailed in Alexander Bird’s analysis of what powers are. He states:
According to Bird, powers, or potencies, as he calls them alternatively, are a subclass of dispositions. Bird holds that not all dispositions need to be powers, since there could be dispositions that are not characterised by an essence, apart from self-identity. Powers, on the other hand, Bird (2013) holds to be properties with a dispositional essence. On this view, a power is a property that furnishes its bearer with the same dispositional character in every metaphysically possible world where the property is instantiated. If the disposition to repel negatively charged objects if there are some in the vicinity is a power in that sense, then every object that has that property does the same in every metaphysically possible world, i.e. repel negatively charged objects if there are some in the vicinity.
Marius Backmann (2019) No time for powers, Inquiry, 62:9-10, 979-1007, DOI: 10.1080/0020174X.2018.1470569
Upon closer analysis of Bird’s definition, a power just is a disposition. The issue is that Bird and the Neo-Aristotelians who complain that he has not gone far enough have isolated what they take to be a power from the properties of an electron, which is a good example of a particle that repels negatively charged objects given that some are in its vicinity. Talk of possible worlds makes no sense unless one can prove mathematically that an electron-like particle with a different mass would also repulse other negatively charged particles. However, though it can easily be shown that a slightly more massive electron-like particle will repulse other particles of negative charge, its electrical charge will be slightly higher than an electrons because according to Robert Milikan’s calculation, there seems to be a relationship between the mass of a particle and its charge. The most elementary charge is e = ~1.602 x 10^19 coulombs. The charge of a quark is measured in multiples of e/3, implying a smaller charge, which is expected given that they are sub-particles. So what is of interest is why the configuration of even an elementary particle yields predictable “behaviors.”
To see this, let us dig into an example Backmann uses: “My power to bake a cake would not bring a cake that did not exist simpliciter before into existence, but only make a cake that eternally exists simpliciter present. Every activity reduces to a change in what is present” (Ibid.). The Neo-Aristotelian is off track to say we have power to bake a cake and that the oven has power to yield this desired outcome that do not trace back to its parts or as Cartwright states of general nomological machines: “We explicate how the machine arrangement dictates what can happen – it has emergent powers which are not to be found in its components” (Cartwright, Nancy & Pemberton, John (2013). Aristotelian powers: without them, what would modern science do? In John Greco & Ruth Groff (eds.), Powers and Capacities in Philosophy: the New Aristotelianism. London, U.K.: Routledge. pp. 93-112.). Of the nomological machines in nature, Cartwright appears to bypass the role of evolution. Of such machines invented by humans, she ignores the fact that we often wrongly predict what a given invention will do. Evolution proceeds via probabilities and so, from our ad hoc point of view, it looks very much like trial and error. Humans have the advantage of being much more deliberate about what they are selecting for and therefore, our testing and re-testing of inventions and deciding when they are safe and suitable to hit the market is markedly similar to evolutionary selection.
That being said, the components of a machine do account for its function. It is only due to our understanding of other machines that we understand what should go into building a new one in order for it to accomplish a new task(s). Powers are not necessary because then we should be asking, why did we not start off with machines that have superior powers? In other words, why start with percolators if we could have just skipped straight to Keurig or Nespresso machines or whatever more advanced models that might be invented? Talk of powers seems to insinuate that objects, whether complex or simple, are predetermined to behave the way they do, even in the absence of trial runs, modifications, or outright upgrades. This analysis sets aside the cake. It does not matter what an oven or air fryer is supposed to do. If the ingredients are wrong, either because I neglected to use baking powder or did not use enough flour, the cake may not raise. The ingredients that go into baked goods play a “causal” role as well.
Dispositions, on the other hand, readily explain why one invention counts as an upgrade over a previous iteration. Take, for instance, Apple’s A14 Bionic chip. At bottom, this chip accounts for, “a 5 nanometer manufacturing process” and CPU and GPU improvements over the iPhone 11 (Truly, Alan. “A14 Bionic: Apple’s iPhone 12 Chip Benefits & Improvements Explained”. Screenrant. 14 Oct 2020. Web). Or more accurately, key differences in the way this chip was made accounts for the improvement over its predecessors. Perhaps more crucially is that critics of dispositions have mostly tended to isolate dispositions, as though a glass cup’s fragility exists in a vacuum. Did the cup free fall at 9.8m/s^2? Did it fall on a mattress or on a floor? What kind of floor? Or was the cup thrown at some velocity because Sharon was angry with her boyfriend Albert? What did she throw the cup at: a wall, the floor, Albert’s head, or did it land in a half-full hamper with Sharon and Albert’s dirty clothes?
Answering these questions solves the masking and mimicker problems. The masking problem can be framed as follows:
Another kind of counterexample to SCA, due to Johnston (1992) and Bird (1998), involves a fragile glass that is carefully protected by packing material. It is claimed that the glass is disposed to break when struck but, if struck, it wouldn’t break thanks to the work of the packing material. There is an important difference between this example and Martin’s: the packing material would prevent the breaking of the glass not by removing its disposition to break when struck but by blocking the process that would otherwise lead from striking to breaking.
Choi, Sungho and Michael Fara, “Dispositions”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2018 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.).
I would not qualify that the packing material prevents the glass from breaking by blocking the process that would result if it were exposed. The packing material has its own properties and dispositions that we have discovered through trial and error making this material good at protecting glass. Packing paper was more common, but now we have bubble wrap and heavy duty degradable stretch wrap, also capable of protecting glass, china, porcelain, and other fragile items. The dispositions of these protective materials readily explain why their encompassing of fragile objects protects them from incidental striking or drops. If I were, however, to throw a wrapped coffee mug as hard as I can toward a brick wall, the mug is likely to break. This entails that variables are important in this thing we call cause and effect.
A perfect example is simple collisions of the sort you learn about in an elementary physics course. If a truck and haul speeding down a highway in one direction at ~145 km/h, and a sedan traveling in the opposite direction at cruising speed of ~89 km/h collide, we can readily predict the outcome and that this particular collision is inelastic. The speeding truck would likely barrel through the sedan and the sedan will be pushed in the direction the truck was traveling in. The vehicles’ respective speeds and masses are extremely important in understanding what goes on here. There is no sense in which we can say that trucks just have a power to mow things down because a collision between the truck in our original example and a truck and haul driving at roughly the same speed in the opposite direction results in an entirely difficult outcome, a perfectly elastic collision in where both trucks collide and come to an immediate halt after the effects of the impact are fully realized.
Neo-Aristotelian analyses of powers give us nothing that is keeping with physics. What these explanations demand is something they imagine happening behind the veil of what science has already explained. There are just dispositions and what is needed is a more critical analysis of what is entailed across each instance of cause and effect. Power ontologies beg the question, in any case, because they require dispositions to make sense of powers. That is because powers are just a cursory analysis of cause-effect relationships, a way of paraphrasing that is overly simplistic and ultimately, not analytical enough. Power ontologies, along with talk of dynamism, which properly belongs to Nietzsche not Aristotle, severely undermine the Neo-Aristotelian project. Nietzsche’s diagnosis of causation makes this clear:
Cause and effect: such a duality probably never exists; in truth we are confronted by a continuum out of which we isolate a couple of pieces, just as we perceive motion only as isolated points and then infer it without ever actually seeing it. The suddenness with which many effects stand out misleads us; actually, it is sudden only for us. In this moment of suddenness there is an infinite number of processes that elude us. n intellect that could see cause and effect as a continuum and a flux and not, as we do, in terms of an arbitrary division and dismemberment, would repudiate the concept of cause and effect and deny all conditionality.
Nietzsche, Friedrich W, and Walter Kaufmann. The Gay Science: With a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs. New York: Vintage Books, 1974. 173. Print.
Nietzsche describes a continuum and a flux, in other words, a dynamism thoroughly unlike what can be attributed to Aristotle’s theory of causation. So the fact that Neo-Aristotelians even speak of a dynamism feels like a sort of plagiarism, since they are associating the idea of a dynamism with a thinker that said nothing to that effect. Nietzsche is critical of Aristotle’s causal-teleological marriage and can be seen as explicitly accusing Aristotle and also Hume of arbitrarily splicing a dynamic continuum in an ad hoc manner that does not find justification in metaphysical ideas. If Nietzsche had been properly exposed to modern science, he would probably agree that this splicing does not find justification in physical ideas either. The hard sciences confirm a continuum, preferring complex processes from which predictable results follow. There is just no sense in which we can apply any theory of causation to a chemical reaction. What features in these reactions are the properties and dispositions of the elements involved and how they are constituted explains why we get one reaction or another. Any talk of dynamisms is properly Nietzschean in spirit and as should be clear in his words, there is no invocation of powers.
Suffice to say that a deeper analysis of dispositions also explains away the mimicker problem. Styrofoam plates simply do not break in the way glass plates do and their underlying composition explains why that is. Ultimately, Neo-Aristotelians are not in a good position to get to the bottom of what we call cause and effect. Aside from the difficulties Backmann sheds light on, the notion of powers is incoherent and lacking in explanatory power, especially at levels requiring deeper analysis. Predictably, I can see Neo-Aristotelians invoking an infinite regress of sorts. In other words, is it simply the composition of the glass interacting with the composition of a hardwood floor that results in the glass shattering or is there more to the story? To that I would respond that events like these happen within a causally closed space-time system. It is then when we will be asked who or what decided that a glass cup should break on impact when landing on a hardwood floor? Well, who or what decided that a compound fracture of the tibia is expected given that it receives a strong enough blow from an equally dense or denser object? The Neo-Aristotelian will keep pushing the buck back, demanding deeper levels of analysis, effectively moving the goalposts. What will remain is that there is no intelligence that decided on these things, i.e., there is no teleological explanation involved in these cases, because then they would have to account for undesired ends like broken bones.
In the end, I think that the deepest level of analysis will involve a stochastic process in where degrees of probability encompass possible outcomes. Not every blow leads to a broken tibia. Dropping a glass cup on just any surface is not enough to crack or shatter it. There are cases in where angular momentum as a result of a human foot can change a falling glass cup’s trajectory just enough to ensure that it does not break upon hitting the ground. I have met people quite adept at breaking these kinds of falls with a simple extension of their foot. As such, probabilities will change given the circumstances on a case by case basis. This element of chance at the deepest level of analysis coheres perfectly with the universe we find ourselves in because even the fact that we are beings made of matter, as opposed to beings made of anti-matter, is due to chance. Apparently, God has always rolled dice. On this, I will let Lawrence Krauss have the last word:
Because antiparticles otherwise have the same properties as particles, a world made of antimatter would behave the same way as a world of matter, with antilovers sitting in anticars making love under an anti-Moon. It is merely an accident of our circumstances, due, we think, to rather more profound factors…that we live in a universe that is made up of matter and not antimatter or one with equal amounts of both.
Krauss, Lawrence. A Universe From Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing. 1st ed. New York, NY: Free Press, 2012. 61. Print.
A Refutation of Bruce Gordon’s “Argument From The Incompleteness of Nature”
By R.N. Carmona
Before setting out to formulate Gordon’s “Argument From The Incompleteness of Nature,” a general note is in order. After years of dealing with the more common arguments for God, e.g., the Kalam Cosmological, Moral, Fine-Tuning, Teleological, Ontological arguments, I began to notice that such arguments collapse when the complexity of the facts are analyzed. For instance, P1 of the Moral Argument states that “If God does not exist, objective values and duties do not exist.” This has proved to be the most controversial premise of the argument, but analyses of what is meant by objective, values, and duties lead us in directions where we can apprehend morality along these lines without God being necessarily involved. What I’m noticing now about more complex Theistic arguments is that they collapse when the simplicity of the facts are put on the table, i.e., when simple considerations are taken into account. This also applies to Gordon’s argument. To see what I mean, it will be necessary, first and foremost, to frame Gordon’s argument.
G1 “Quantum mechanics reveals a genuine ontological indeterminacy and incompleteness present in nature” (Gordon, Bruce L.. The Necessity of Sufficiency: The Argument From The Incompleteness of Nature. Two Dozen (or so) Arguments for God: The Plantinga Project, Edited by Walls, Jerry L. & Dougherty Trent. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. 420. Print.)
G2 “Since all physical cause-and-effect relations are local, however, the completeness of quantum theory implies the causal-ontological incompleteness of physical reality: the universe is shot through with mathematically predictable non-local correlations that, on pain of experimental contradiction, have no physical explanation” (Gordon, 421)
G3 “Quantum theory raises fundamental questions about the coherence of material identity, individuality, and causality that pose a prima facie problem for naturalistic metaphysics” (Gordon, 423)
G4 (By way of inference) it is probable that all naturalistic interpretations of quantum mechanics contain conceptual shortcomings (Gordon, 423-429)
GC1 Therefore, “a theistic variant of the Copenhagen interpretation brings metaphysical completion to quantum theory so as to resolve the fundamental puzzle” (Gordon, 423)
GC2 Therefore, “God’s existence and continuous activity is the best explanation for the reality, persistence, and coherence of natural phenomena, and the account of divine action best meeting this explanatory demand is a form of occasionalist idealism” (Gordon, 436)
Gordon also condenses his argument as follows:
Now, in quantum physics we are confronted with a situation in which material causality falls irremediably short of explanatory demand, for there is no collection of physical variables jointly sufficient to the explanation of irreducibly probabilistic quantum outcomes. On pain of postulations to the contrary refuted by experimental violations of Bell inequalities, an ontological gap exists in the causal structure of physical reality that no collection of material causes can be offered to fill. So if a prior commitment to metaphysical naturalism constrains us, no non-naturalistic (transcendent) explanation is available to bridge this gap, and we must embrace the conclusion that innumerable physical events transpire without a sufficient cause, that is, for no explanatorily sufficient reason. In short, Copenhagen orthodoxy, framed in a purely physical context, entails a denial of the principle of sufficient reason (PSR) understood as the general maxim that every contingent event has an explanation. (425)
Right away, one can see how G1 through G3 hold insofar as scientific ignorance remains the case. But first, it will be useful to take note of what motivates Gordon to think that there is any truth to these premises. His primary motivations are informed by what he thinks is the inability of physicists to solve the measurement problem and that, at least from what he interprets is a fault of naturalism, quantum interpretations violate the Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR) and/or are metaphysically implausible. If Gordon can draw his conclusions by way of induction, by ruling out particular interpretations yet to be offered on the basis of the shortcomings of six more general interpretations, then a naturalist has more warrant to rule out Theism by way of induction, by highlighting the many failures of Theism to square with scientific facts and its many more failures to offer sound philosophical arguments. God was once a local deity, intimately involved in matters far more mundane than quanta. It was widely believed that God created the Earth, not via the gradual work of physical laws, but as intimately as a potter forms his vase. Christians of the past even set out to prove God’s involvement in the world. Donald Prothero gives us a prime example:
Other geologists and paleontologists followed Cuvier’s lead and tried to describe each layer with its distinctive fossils as evidence of yet another Creation and Flood event not mentioned in the Bible. In 1842, Alcide d’Orbigny began describing the Jurassic fossils from the southwestern French Alps and soon recognized 10 different stages, each of which he interpreted as a separate non-Biblical creation and flood. As the work continued, it became more and more complicated until 27 separate creations and floods were recognized, which distorted the Biblical account out of shape. By this time, European geologists finally began to admit that the sequence of fossils was too long and complex to fit it with Genesis at all. They abandoned the attempt to reconcile it with the Bible. Once again, however, these were devout men who did not doubt the Bible and were certainly not interested in shuffling the sequence of fossils to prove Darwinian evolution (an idea still not published at this point). They simply did not see how the Bible could explain the rock record as it was then understood.
Prothero, Donald. Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why it Matters. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007. 56-57. Print.
Going over the litany of examples throughout history is not necessary because Theism’s lack of explanatory success informs the behavior of today’s Theists. Therefore, it suffices to point out that Theists have gone from asserting that God is intimately involved in every aspect of reality, in addition to positing that the Bible renders an infallible account of many historical events, including a global flood, to relegating God to the outskirts of human knowledge where the refulgence of science remains unfelt, as hidden somewhere before the Big Bang, active solely in quantum phenomena that evade the experiences of even the most devout believers, and as grounds for some explanation of human consciousness that allows for the continuance of consciousness after death, i.e., a philosophy of mind that entails the existence of the soul, e.g., Cartesian dualism, Aristotelian hylomorphism, panpsychism. Gordon’s argument is a prime example of this retreat to the far reaches of scientific ignorance, hoping with all his might that he will find God at the fringes of reality. If naturalism has pushed Theism this far, then it is safe to say that Theism is teetering on the edge, that any argument Theists put forth now are highly likely to fail, and that it is only a matter of time before Theism plunges into the abyss.
Before exposing glaring issues with Gordon’s conclusion, I will go over issues with his analysis of the many worlds interpretation (MWI) and the Ghirardi-Rimini-Weber spontaneous collapse interpretation (GRWI). Then I will provide an overview of two interpretations that circumvent the measurement problem and one of its entailments, the observer effect. Prior to that, there are already issues with his analysis of the PSR that sound suspiciously like Plantinga’s EAAN or worse, Lewis’ Argument Against Naturalism. Gordon states:
Suppose, among all of the events that happen in the universe, there are countless many that happen without cause or reason. If this were true, we would have no principled way of telling which events were caused and which were not, for events that appeared to have a cause might, in fact, lack one. Our current perceptual states, for example, might have no explanation, in which case they would bear no reliable connection to the way the world is. So if the PSR were false, we could never have any confidence in our cognitive states. (425)
It is important to note that scientists are only concerned about causes inasmuch as they have explanatory power. If a cause does no explanatory work, then it does not help them to get a better understanding of a given phenomenon. Think of Nancy Cartwright’s $1,000 bill descending in St. Stephen’s Square. Scientists simply do not care to arrive at a model that accurately predicts where the bill will land and more precisely, about its exact movements through the air prior to landing. This particular example, that involves any number of difficult to quantify variables, e.g., bird droppings hitting the bill on the way down, dust particles slightly changing the bill’s trajectory, wind speeds, does not help scientists better understand drift, free fall, etc. Physicists already have general principles that help them understand how, for instance, a basketball succumbs to the magnus effect. A disposition of the ball, in particular its shape, makes it susceptible to this effect whereas the dispositions of the bill guarantee that it will drift wildly during the entirety of its descent to the ground.
Any event appearing to be caused does not immediately invite scientific scrutiny. Only events that do explanatory work or are suspected of having some explanatory power over a given effect, specifically in relation to a theory or model, are worth examining. In any case, it does not follow from the possibility that the PSR is false that our perceptual states have no explanation or cause. Therefore, that we can have no confidence in our perceptual states is completely non sequitur. Neuroscientists, cognitive scientists, and psychologists have done plenty of work to show that our perceptual states do have explanations, regardless of whether the PSR is true or not. Thus, if the PSR turns out to not be the case, our perceptual states are not among events lacking a cause or an explanation.
A general note of relevance is in order. Gordon’s citations are mostly decades old, which any peer reviewer in philosophy would immediately be suspicious of. Of the Many Worlds Interpretation, Gordon states: “So which way of building the universal wavefunction is to be preferred? This difficulty, known as the “preferred basis problem,” reveals that the branching process itself is completely arbitrary from a mathematical standpoint and therefore, from the abstract point of view presupposed by the MWI, not reflective of any physical reality” (427). Setting aside the non sequitur, “not reflective of any physical reality,” his primary authority informing this statement, namely David Wallace in 2003, no longer considers preferred basis to be an issue. Gordon would know that if he had read Wallace’s 2010 paper “Quantum Mechanics on Spacetime I: Spacetime State Realism,” in where he states:
We might sum up the objection thus: wave-function realism requires a meta-physically preferred basis… This objection is probably most significant for Everettians, who generally regard it as a virtue of their preferred interpretation that it requires no additional formalism, and so are unlikely to look kindly on a requirement in the metaphysics for additional formalism. Advocates of dynamical-collapse and hidden-variable theories are already committed to adding additional formalism, and in fact run into problems in QFT for rather similar reasons: there is no longer a natural choice of basis to use in defining the collapse mechanism or the hidden variables. We are not ourselves sanguine about the prospects of overcoming this problem; but if it were to be overcome, the solution might well also suggest a metaphysically preferred basis to use in formulating a QFT version of wave-function realism.
Wallace, David, and Christopher G. Timpson. “Quantum Mechanics on Spacetime I: Spacetime State Realism.” The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, vol. 61, no. 4, 2010, pp. 697–727. https://arxiv.org/pdf/0907.5294.pdf. Accessed 1 Feb. 2021.
Lev Vaidman, Professor at the School of Physics and Astronomy in Tel Aviv, corroborates this: “due to the extensive research on decoherence, the problem of preferred basis is not considered as a serious objection anymore” (Vaidman, Lev, “Many-Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Edward N. Zalta (ed.), Fall 2018, https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2018/entries/qm-manyworlds/).
Gordon raises a second difficulty for the MWI: “The second difficulty lies in its treatment of quantum probabilities” (Ibid.). Worse than using outdated sources is Gordon’s misrepresentation of a source that actually disagrees with his statement. Simon Saunders, in “Chance in the Everett interpretation,” actually states: “To conclude: there is no good reason to think EQM is really a theory of over-lapping worlds. If questions of overlap of branches are to be settled by appeal to the underlying mathematics, in terms of vector space structure, then there is at least one natural mereology in terms of which worlds that differ in some feature, since orthogonal, are non-overlapping” (Saunders, Simon (2010). Chance in the Everett interpretation. In Simon Saunders, Jonathan Barrett, Adrian Kent & David Wallace (eds.), Many Worlds?: Everett, Quantum Theory & Reality. Oxford University Press.). Saunders attempts to “solve the problem without introducing additional structure into the theory” (Vaidman, Ibid.) and yet Gordon tells his reader to “see Saunders et al. 2010 for extensive polemics regarding it” (Ibid.). This is an egregious level of malpractice that can only be explained by his desperation to prove his belief in God.
Turning now to his analysis of GRWI, the prospects for his argument do not improve. Gordon states of GRWI: “The problem is that it cannot be rendered compatible with relativity theory or extended to the treatment of quantum fields in this form” (Ibid.); “the theory remains radically non-local and has the additional drawback of eliminating the possibility of particle interactions and thus any physics of interest” (Ibid.); and “there are no versions of the theory in which the collapse is complete, with the consequence that all “material” objects have low- density copies at multiple locations, the presence and effect of which linger forever in the GRWI wavefunction” (Ibid.). The first and third concerns are not an issue for GRWI. The first issue simply restates the more general difficulty physicists have had with reconciling quantum mechanics and general relativity; this would then be an issue for the entire enterprise of quantum mechanics, so we would essentially be tossing the bath water, baby and all! The third issue is an appeal to ignorance. That there is currently no version of GRWI offering a collapse that is complete does not mean that scientists ought to give up on the search for a version containing a complete collapse. This leaves the second concern, which is addressed in Tejinder Singh’s 2018 paper “Space and Time as a Consequence of GRW Quantum Jumps,” where he deploys GRWI to solve the measurement problem. Singh states:
This classical metric is in turn produced by classical bodies, according to the laws of general relativity. And classical bodies are themselves the result of GRW localisation. Thus it is not reasonable to assume space to exist prior to the GRW quantum jumps. Rather, it seems quite intuitive that space results from GRW collapses taking place all over the universe. Space is that which is between collapsed objects. No collapse, no space. This also helps us understand why the GRW jumps take place in space: it is because space in the first place is created because of these jumps.
Singh, Tejinder. “Space and time as a consequence of GRW quantum jumps.” TZeitschrift für Naturforschung A73 (2018) 923. https://arxiv.org/pdf/1806.01297.pdf. Accessed 1 Feb. 2021.
Singh considers Hilbert space as more fundamental than classical space, so these GRW jumps occurring in Hilbert space give rise to the classical fabric of space we are accustomed to. He posits that the wave function is contingent on the configuration space where the particle moves through time, to potentially infinite degrees of freedom. This then results in a complete collapse of the wave function. Gordon’s hasty conclusion no longer holds if Singh has succeeded in offering a version of GRWI containing a complete collapse of the wave function.
This is setting aside the fact that Gordon overlooked what many consider an updated or even upgraded version of MWI, namely the Many Interacting Worlds Interpretation (MIWI). The MIWI differs from the MWI in that all quantum phenomena are the result of an inter-universal repulsive force acting on worlds in close proximity to one another, thus explaining any dissimilarity between them. Michael Hall, et. al. conclude that the MIWI can reproduce quantum interference phenomena, in addition to offering advantages with respect to computational modeling. They note that on the de Broglie–Bohm Interpretation, the wave function denoted by Ψ, even when it is a very large value allows computer modeling to focus on high density regions in configuration space, specifically regions where calculation errors have to be corrected to analyze convergence given norms of angular momentum (see Hall, Michael J. W., Deckert, Dirk-André, and Wiseman, Howard M.. Quantum Phenomena Modeled by Interactions between Many Classical Worlds. Physical Review X, 2014; 4 (4) DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevX.4.041013).
There is also the Lindgren-Liukkonen Interpretation (LLI), championed by two quantum physicists that take Ockham’s Razor seriously. Given this, their quantum interpretation is a statistical interpretation that solves the observer effect. In other words, there is no logical reason, to their minds, why the results of a measurement are dependent on an observer. They dispense with the notion of a conscious observer changing the result of measurements. The LLI shows that any epistemological and ontological issues that stem from the uncertainty principle are solved given that the uncertainty principle is a fixed property of stochastic mechanics (see Lindgren, Jussi and Liukkonen, Jukka. The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle as an Endogenous Equilibrium Property of Stochastic Optimal Control Systems in Quantum Mechanics. Symmetry, 2020; 12 (9): 1533 DOI: 10.3390/sym12091533
Gordon not only failed to rule out enough interpretations of quantum mechanics to make his conclusion more likely, but he failed to rule out the best defenses of, at least, two of the interpretations he is skeptical about. The larger issue for Gordon is that even if he managed to rule out say, twenty interpretations in quantum mechanics, his conclusion simply does not follow and if it did, there are simple considerations that render it untenable. Recall: “God’s existence and continuous activity is the best explanation for the reality, persistence, and coherence of natural phenomena, and the account of divine action best meeting this explanatory demand is a form of occasionalist idealism” (Gordon, 436). It follows from this that God’s existence and continuous activity is the best explanation for the reality, persistence, and coherence of viruses, diseases, natural disasters, and pretty much any undesired consequence a Theist can imagine. Clearly, Gordon does not want to admit these natural phenomena into his conclusion, choosing instead to special plead for any cases he thinks suit his argument. In other words, one of his concerns fits better on his foot: Suppose, among all of the events that happen in the universe, there are countless many that happen without God’s continuous activity, e.g., pretty much all the bad stuff. If this were true, we would have no principled way of telling which events were caused by his activity and which were not, for events that appeared to have been caused by God, in fact, were not. It is far more probable therefore, that God has no hand in any event in the natural world, not even granting a retreat into the quantum realm.
Ultimately, if a Theist wants to continue to assert that God has a hand in the unification of quantum and classical phenomena, they need to take a different route than Gordon has. Gordon severely undermines his own project by using outdated sources, being completely unaware of the fact that one of the authors of one of his primary sources changed their mind and actually proved the opposite of what seemed to lend a hand to Gordon’s argument, and overlooking a number of interpretations that may provide a stable and complete collapse of the wave function, thus solving quantum paradoxes, like the measurement problem and related observer effect. More damning to such arguments is that if a personal, loving deity saw fit to retreat to the far reaches of metaphysical reality, then he can have no desire to be known or detected by even people who are hopelessly devoted and attached to him. Quanta lies so far outside of the everyday experience of human beings that the idea that God is asking us to pursue him into the microcosms of the quanta is, quite frankly, nonsensical. It makes more sense that retreats like Gordon’s, into profoundly metaphysical territory, has everything to do with Theism’s failure to square with science, in addition to offering philosophical arguments or proofs that are sound or, at the very least, cogent and without controversy. This is precisely the prognosis for Theism and the relentless advances of science and philosophy, closely in tow, do not look poised to provide any remedy. Gordon’s argument, while complex, completely collapses in the face of simple considerations, which is a happy irony given his claims about the quantum wave function.
A Summary of My Paper
By R.N. Carmona
I have submitted a paper to Philosophical Studies addressing Dustin Crummett and Philip Swenson’s paper. Admittedly, this is my first attempt at publishing in a philosophy journal. I took a swing with no guidance, no co-author, and no funding. There is of course a chance it gets rejected, but I am hoping for the best. In any case, I think my paper provides heuristics for anyone looking to refute Evolutionary Moral Debunking Arguments like Crummet and Swenson’s. Let us turn to how I dissect their argument.
They claim that their Evolutionary Moral Debunking Argument Against Naturalism (EMDAAN) stems from Street’s and Korman and Locke’s EMDAs. The latter EMDAs target moral realism while Crummett and Swenson’s targets naturalism. The issue with theirs is that they grossly overlook the fact that both Street and Korman & Locke do not argue that naturalism is threatened by EMDAs. Street argues that her practical standpoint characterization of constructivism sidesteps any issues her EMDA might have presented for her naturalism. Korman and Locke target the minimalist response and in a separate paper, not cited by Crummett, relativism. They do not target naturalism either.
At first glance, I compared Crummett and Swenson’s argument to Lewis’ long-defeated Argument Against Atheism. They state: “The problem for the naturalist here is that, if naturalism is true, it seems that the faculties responsible for our intuitions were formed through purely natural processes that didn’t aim at producing true beliefs” (Crummett & Swenson, 37). One can easily see how they paraphrase Lewis who says:
Supposing there was no intelligence behind the universe, no creative mind. In that case, nobody designed my brain for the purpose of thinking. It is merely that when the atoms inside my skull happen, for physical or chemical reasons, to arrange themselves in a certain way, this gives me, as a by-product, the sensation I call thought. But, if so, how can I trust my own thinking to be true? It’s like upsetting a milk jug and hoping that the way it splashes itself will give you a map of London. But if I can’t trust my own thinking, of course I can’t trust the arguments leading to Atheism, and therefore have no reason to be an Atheist, or anything else. Unless I believe in God, I cannot believe in thought: so I can never use thought to disbelieve in God.
Marsden, George M.. C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity : A Biography. Princeton University Press. 89. 2016. Print.
This is a known predecessor of Plantinga’s Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism (EAAN). Therefore, the first angle I take in the paper is to show how Crummett and Swenson did not understand Street’s paper. Perhaps it is the sheer length of her excellent paper (over 50 pages) or perhaps they were so intent on addressing New Atheists that they overlooked her more robust approach to showing how anti-realism fares against EMDAs. I think her paper makes a lot more sense when read in conjunction with her overview of constructivism (see here). Bearing that in mind, I attempt to divorce Crummet and Swenson’s EMDAAN from Street’s EMDA against moral realism. Korman and Locke’s project is markedly different, but their work does not help Crummett and Swenson’s argument either.
With the EAAN now in focus, I show how Crummett and Swenson’s EMDAAN just is an iteration of the EAAN. The EAAN applies to general truths. Put simply, Plantinga argues that if we take seriously the low probability of evolution and naturalism being true despite the fact that that our cognitive faculties formed from accidental evolutionary pressures, then we have a defeater for all of our beliefs, most notably among them, naturalism. Crummett and Swenson make the same exact argument, the difference being that they apply it to specific beliefs, moral beliefs. Given that moral beliefs are a sub-category within the domain of all beliefs, their EMDAAN is an iteration of the EAAN. Here is an example I did not pursue in my paper, call it the Evolutionary Scientific Debunking Argument.
RC1 P(Sm/E&S) is low (The probability that our faculties generate basic scientific beliefs, given that evolution and science are true, is low.)
RC2 If one accepts that P(Sm/E&S) is low, then one possesses a defeater for the notion that our faculties generate basic scientific beliefs.
RCC Therefore, one possesses a defeater for one’s belief in science.
Perhaps I would be called upon to specify a philosophical view of science, be it realism or something else, but the basic gist is the same as Crummett and Swenson’s EMDA. I am, like them, targeting a specific area of our beliefs, namely our beliefs resulting from science. My argument is still in the vein of Plantinga’s EAAN and is a mere subsidiary of it.
After I establish the genealogy of Crummett and Swenson’s argument, I turn the EAAN on its head and offer an Evolutionary Argument Against Theism. If Plantinga’s argument holds sway and the Theist believes that evolution is true, he is in no better epistemic shape than the naturalist. Therefore, Plantinga’s conditionalization problem, which offers that P(R/N&E) is high iff there exists a belief B that conditionalizes on N&E, is an issue for Theists as well. In other words, perhaps the probability that our cognitive faculties are reliable given that evolution and naturalism are true increases iff there is an added clause in the conjunction. Put another way, the probability that our cognitive faculties are reliable, granting that evolution and naturalism and (a successful philosophy of mind), is high. This successful philosophy of mind will have to show precisely how a brain that resulted from naturalistic evolutionary processes can generate the sort of consciousness capable of acquiring true beliefs. The theist who says P(R/T&E) is high is begging the question because merely asserting that “God ensured that there would be some degree of alignment between our intuitions and moral truth” ((Crummett & Swenson, 44) does not help the Theist avoid the conditionalization problem.
With that established, and I cannot give too much away here because this is the novelty in my paper, I argue that the only recourse the Theist has, especially given that they have no intention of disavowing Theism, is to abandon their belief in evolution. They would have to opt, instead, for a belief in creationism or a close variant like intelligent design. In either case, they would then be left asserting that a Creationary Moral Confirming Argument in Favor of Theism is the case. I explore the litany of issues that arises if the Theist abandons evolution and claims that God’s act of creating us makes moral realism the case. Again, the Theist ends up between a rock and a hard place. Theism simply has far less explanatory power because, unlike naturalism, it does not account for our propensity to make evaluative errors and our inclination toward moral deviancy. If God did, in fact, ensure that our moral intuitions align with transcendent moral truths, why do we commit errors when making moral decisions and why do we behave immorally? Naturalism can explain both of these problems, especially given the role of reason under the moral anti-realist paradigm. Evaluative errors are therefore, necessary to improve our evaluative judgments; reason is the engine by which we identify these errors and improve our moral outlook. The Theist would be back at square one, perhaps deploying the patently mythical idea of a Fall to account for the fact that humans are far from embodying the moral perfection God is said to have.
With Crummett and Swenson’s argument now thoroughly in Plantinga’s territory, I explore whether the anti-realist can solve the conditionalization problem. I suggest that evolution accounts for moral rudiments and then introduce the notion that cultural evolution accounts for reliable moral beliefs. Cooperation and altruism feature heavily into why I draw this conclusion. So P(Rm/E&MAR) (if evolution and moral anti-realism are true, the probability that our faculties generate evaluative truths) is high given that cooperation and/or altruism conditionalize on our belief that evolution and moral anti-realism are the case. We are left with P[(Rm/E&MAR) & (C v A)] or P[(Rm/E&MAR) & (C&A)]. In other words, if evolution and moral anti-realism are true, and cooperation and/or altruism conditionalize on our beliefs that evolution and moral anti-realism are the case, the probability that our faculties generate evaluative truths/reliable moral beliefs is high.
Ultimately, like Moon, I think my paper will provide fertile ground for further discussion on the conditionalization problem. The jury is still out on whether the naturalist’s belief that evolution and naturalism are true even requires a clause to conditionalize on that belief. In any case, much can be learned about EMDAs against naturalism from the vast literature discussing Plantinga’s EAAN. I think that my arguments go a long way in dispensing with EMDAs in the philosophy of religion that target naturalism. When one considers that the Theist cannot account for moral truths without unsubstantiated assertions about God, it is easy to see how they are on less secure ground than the naturalist. If the Theist is a Christian or a Muslim, then they ought to be reminded that their scriptures communicate things about their gods that are not befitting of moral perfection. If the choice is between naturalism and the belief that a god who made parents eat their children is, despite all evidence to the contrary, morally perfect, I will take my chances with naturalism!
A Refutation of Weaver’s “An Objection to Naturalism and Atheism from Logic”
By R.N. Carmona
Weaver’s argument, although robust, commits what I think is a cardinal sin in philosophy: “An objection from logical considerations against atheism is one which attempts to show that some deliverance of logic is at odds with atheism or something strictly implied by atheism” (Weaver, C.G. (2019). Logical Objections to Atheism. In A Companion to Atheism and Philosophy, G. Oppy (Ed.). https://doi.org/10.1002/9781119119302.ch30). One should not get in the habit of drawing ontological conclusions on the basis of logical considerations and though Weaver makes a good attempt to justify his conclusion, there are too many areas in his composite argument that are vulnerable to attack. There are parts of his composite argument that are clearly stated in his own words, but other parts have to be sifted out from his discussions, specifically on logical monism and classical logical consequence (CLC). Also, the conclusion that atheism is false has to be gathered from his discussion following his claim that ontological naturalism is false.
A general note, prior to proceeding, is in order. Weaver’s paper is quite technical and not at all easy for the untrained eye to read, let alone understand, so I will endeavor to avoid technicality wherever necessary; I will only permit pursuing one technical element because I disagree with Weaver’s treatment of supervenience, how he conveniently begs the question regarding reductionist materialism (if only to ensure that his argument is not met with immediate difficulty), and the conclusion he believes follows. More importantly, I think that the domestication of philosophy within the ivory towers of academia was a critical misstep that needs to be rectified. While analytic philosophy has its use, its abuse makes philosophy the slave of academic elites and therefore, keeps it well out of the reach of ordinary people. Philosophy, therefore, if it is to be understood by laypeople, needs to be communicated in ordinary, relatable language. Since my interest is to, first and foremost, communicate philosophy in an approachable way, I tend to avoid technicalities as much as possible. With that said, it is not at all necessary to quibble with Weaver’s logical proofs of validity (especially because validity matters much less than soundness) or Williamson’s notion that contingentist statements can be mapped onto necessitist ones and vice versa, but that “The asymmetry favours necessitism. Every distinction contingentists can draw has a working equivalent in neutral terms, but the extra commitments of necessitism allow one to draw genuine distinctions which have no working equivalents in neutral terms. If one wants to draw those distinctions, one may have to be a necessitist” (Williamson, T.. “Necessitism, Contingentism, and Plural Quantification.” Mind 119 (2010): 657-748. 86. Web.).
Williamson and Weaver, following his cue, are both guilty of ignoring logical atomism, so ultimately, it does not matter if the validity of logical statements suggests that necessitism about mere propositions is probably true because ultimately, we are not talking about mere propositions but rather Sachverhalte, “conglomerations of objects combined with a definite structure” (Klement, Kevin, “Russell’s Logical Atomism”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2020 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.)). This is perhaps Weaver’s motivation for dismissing Carnap who was anti-metaphysical. It can be argued, therefore, that reinstating metaphysics or overstating its importance is necessary for any argument against naturalism and/or atheism or conversely, for Theism, to get any traction. The fact remains, however, that propositions comprising a sound logical argument are dependent on real world experiences via the senses. The proposition “there is a cat” may speak to the fact that either i) one believes they have seen a cat in whatever space they find themselves in ii) one knows and can confirm that there is a cat in their vicinity iii) there is presently a cat within ones field of vision. While I grant that propositions can speak to entirely imaginary or, at least, hypothetical entities, all propositions rely on entities we have identified in our common tongue. Therefore, statements like “there is a cat” will always rely on content not necessarily entailed within a given proposition. There is still a question as to the context of such propositions and the preciseness of what one is trying to say.
Weaver’s Composite Argument Against Naturalism and Atheism, and Its Problems
With these preliminary concerns in our rearview, I can now turn to Weaver’s composite argument and provide a few avenues for the atheist to refute his argument.
W1 Since situationspf do not exist (“I will therefore be entitled to reject…the existence of situationsPF” (Weaver, 6).), situationsC exist.
W2 Given situationsC , classical logical consequence (CLC) is the case.
W3 From W2, necessitism is true.
W4 “If necessitism is true, then ontological naturalism is false.”
W5 “Necessitism is true.”
W6 “Therefore, ontological naturalism is false” (Weaver, 15).
W7 From W6, “Necessitism is true and modal properties are indispensable to our best physical theories.”
W8 If W7, “then there is a new phenomenon of coordination (NPC).”
W9 “Necessarily, (if there is an NPC, it has an explanation).”
W10 “Necessarily, [if possibly both (atheism is true and there is an NPC), then it is not possible that the NPC has an explanation]”
C “Therefore, atheism is false” (Weaver, 18).
Setting aside that Weaver assumes that suitably precisified situations (situationspf) cannot exist and the problems he would face if just one instance of such a situation does exist, there is a way to show that even on the assumption that just classically precisified situations (situationsC) exist, it doesn’t follow that CLC holds. Weaver seems to think that CLC follows from a schema concerning mere validity: “A deductive argument is valid, just in case, there is no situation in which the premises are true and the conclusion false” (Weaver, 4). I think it is straightforwardly obvious that a typical non sequitur already violates this schema. Consider the following:
P1 If it is cloudy outside, there is a chance of precipitation.
P2 It is cloudy outside.
C Therefore, the Yankee game will be postponed.
The first two premises are true perspectively. In New York City, at this present hour, it is partly cloudy outside and there is thus, a chance of precipitation. However, the conclusion is false because the New York Yankees are not even in Spring training and it is out of the norm for them to have a regular season home game in late January. The above argument can prove true given not only at least one extra premise, but also the fact that it is not winter but spring, and that the MLB regular season is underway. This goes a long way in showing that propositions are usually missing crucial content and are true given specified context. Perhaps, then, Weaver should provide a different schema to ground CLC.
Weaver, unfortunately, does not give an adequate account of what he means by situationspf and what such situations would look like. It is enough to reiterate that the existence of even one such situation takes him back to square one. This is aside from the fact that a rejection of pluralism entails a rejection of arguments operating outside of classical logic, e.g., Plantinga’s Modal Ontological Argument, which rests of the axioms of S5 modal logic. A thorough rejection of free logical systems would limit Theists to the domain of classical logic, which will prove unforgiving since nothing like God seems operative in the real world.
Weaver’s dependence on situationsC and CLC proves problematic and is one place for an atheist to focus on. Another avenue for an atheist to take is W4 and W5. Is the notion that ontological naturalism is false conditional on necessitism being true? I do not think Weaver established that this premise is true. Furthermore, aside from exploring whether these clauses have a conditional relationship, one can simply ask whether necessitism is true. The jury is still out on whether necessitism or contingentism is the case, and there may yet be a synthesis or a handful of alternative positions that challenge both. Given the current state of the debate, I am uncommitted to either position, but I am suspicious of anyone siding with one for sake of attempting to disprove a position they already assume is false, which, in Weaver’s case, are naturalism and atheism.
In plain language, the perspective of necessitists falls flat or appears to be saying something nonsensical. Williamson outlines where disagreement lies:
For instance, a contingentist typically holds that it is contingent that there is the Thames: there could have been no such river, and in those circumstances there would have been no Thames. By contrast, a necessitist typically holds that it is necessary that there is the Thames: there could have been no such river, but in those circumstances there would still have been the Thames, a non-river located nowhere that could have been a river located in England. Thus the contingentist will insist that necessarily if there is the Thames it is a river, while the necessitist allows at most that necessarily if the Thames is located somewhere it is a river.
Williamson, T.. “Necessitism, Contingentism, and Plural Quantification.” Mind 119 (2010): 657-748. 9. Web.
Contingentists deny the necessity of the Thames, whether river or not. These identity discussions extend further when one considers people. Manuel Pérez Otero explores this and tries to synthesize these two opposing point of views (see Otero, Manuel Pérez. “Contingentism about Individuals and Higher-Order Necessitism.” Theoria: An International Journal for Theory, History and Foundations of Science, vol. 28, no. 3(78), 2013, pp. 393–406. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/23926328. Accessed 25 Jan. 2021.). Though Otero’s synthesis is tangential for our purposes, it shows that this binary Weaver thinks exists is one of his own making, essentially a false dichotomy. Given the issues necessitism presents for ordinary language, and the likelihood of one of its alternatives being true, it follows that necessitism is probably false. An exhaustive defense of a position I am not committed to is not at all required to show where Weaver has gone wrong.
This takes us to Weaver’s treatment of supervenience and his New Phenomenon of Coordination (NPC), which states:
Why is it that modal properties and notions enter the verisimilitudinous fundamental dynamical laws of our best and most empirically successful physical theories given that modal properties do not weakly supervene upon the physical or material? (or) How is it that the material world came to be ordered in such a way that it evolves in a manner that is best captured by modally laden physical theorizing or dynamical laws given that modal properties do not even weakly supervene upon the material and non-modal? (Weaver, 17)
If necessitism is probably false, then ontological naturalism still has a chance of being true. This is despite the fact that Weaver failed to show that the falsity of ontological naturalism is conditional on necessitism being true. A stronger route for him to have took is to argue that ontological naturalism is false iff necessitism is true because even if turns out that necessitism is true, ontological naturalism can also be true. Weaver has not established that they are mutually exclusive. Therefore, an atheist can feel no pressure at all when confronted with NPC. This is setting aside that Weaver appears to be undisturbed by the incongruity of our scientific and manifest images. One would think a reconciliation is required before proclaiming that the material world is organized via modally laden physical theories and dynamic laws that supervene, whether strongly or weakly, on the material world.
The primary issue with Weaver’s assessment is the assumption that all atheists must be committed to reductionist materialism or physicalism to be a consistent ontological naturalist. There are alternative naturalisms that easily circumvent Weaver’s NPC because such a naturalist would not be committed to any version of supervenience. As an example, this naturalist can hold, to put it as simply as possible, that scientific theories and models are merely representations. Therefore, the modality of scientific theories need not supervene on the material world at all. Given a representationalist account of scientific theories, perhaps something like a reverse supervenience is the case.
∎∀𝑥∀𝑦(∀𝐹 𝐹𝑥 ≡ 𝐹𝑦 ⟶ ∎∀R R𝑥 ≡ R𝑦 )
Necessarily for any entity x and for any entity y, [(if for any material property F, (x has F, just in case, y has F), then necessarily, for any representational property M, (x has M, just in case, y has M)].
Scientific theories and models are, in other words, more akin to impressionist paintings than a group of modally laden propositions. This is a more commonsense view in that a scientific model is a portrait of the real world. While there is a feedback between the model and the material world, in that theories have to be tested against reality, theories and models are not conceived in a vacuum. Real world observations impose the postulates of a theory or render a portrait that we call a model. Ptolemy misconstrued planetary orbits and attributed their motions to invisible spheres rather than the ellipses we are familiar with. He was not far off the mark, especially given that there is an intangible involved, namely gravity, but his impression was inexact. This is what a representationalist account of scientific theories would look like and whether something like reverse supervenience is necessary does no real harm to the account.
The last route atheists can take is in Weaver’s conflation of atheism and naturalism. Though I am sympathetic to the conflation, like Nielsen, who stated, “Naturalism, where consistent, is an atheism” (Nielsen, Kai. Naturalism and Religion. Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus, 2001. 30. Print.), the same need not apply in vice versa. In other words, the following statement need not be the case: “atheism, where consistent, is a naturalism.” While I am also partial to that statement, even going as far as defending it in Philosophical Atheism: Counter Apologetics and Arguments For Atheism, that gods do not exist does not entail that no immaterial beings can exist. It could be the case that no iteration of god exists, but that ghosts do. Weaver’s conflation seems to rest on the assumption that naturalism is the antithesis of supernaturalism. Naturalism is also opposed to paranormal phenomena, so there can be defeaters of naturalism that are not also defeaters of atheism. In other words, a definitive proof of the paranormal does not debase the thesis that gods do not exist. A definitive proof of one’s great grandma roaming the estate does not imply that God or any other god undeniably exists. Nielsen’s statement implies only that a disproof of atheism is also a disproof of naturalism, but this does not work in the other direction.
Ultimately, in light of the composite argument above, one that I think is true to Weaver’s overall argument, fails to disprove ontological naturalism and atheism. There is far too much controversy in a number of places throughout his argument to regard it as convincing. The argument needs to be critically amended or entirely abandoned because in its present form, it does not meet its end. My rebuttal provides fertile ground for further exploration with respect to necessitism, contigentism, and any possible syntheses or alternatives, in addition to what is required to contradict naturalism and atheism. God, whether the idea Theist philosophers defend, or a more common concept tied to a particular religion, is still resolutely resigned to silence, hiddenness, and outright indifference. Therefore, Theists have their own onus that must go beyond even a successful argument against naturalism and/or atheism.
Problems With Pruss’ Argument For An Omniscient Being
By R.N. Carmona
What follows is Alexander Pruss’ Argument For An Omniscient Being. While he does not exactly give his argument a ringing endorsement, admitting that he is skeptical of the first two premises, there are other problems that elude him and any theist who believes that omniscience is possible. Pruss formulates the argument as follows:
1. The analytic/synthetic distinction between truths is the same as the a priori / a posteriori distinction.
2. The analytic/synthetic distinction between truths makes sense.
3. If 1 and 2, then every truth is knowable.
4. So, every truth is knowable. (1–3)
5. If every truth is knowable, then every truth is known.
6. So, every truth is known. (4–5)
7. If every truth is known, there is an omniscient being.
8. So, there is an omniscient being. (6–7)
Pruss, Alexander. “An odd argument for an omniscient being”. Alexander Pruss Blog. 2 Nov 2020. Web.
In my new book “The Definitive Case Against Christianity: Life After The Death Of God,” I state the following:
God’s belief in propositions has to change in accordance with migrating facts. While it is true that the Sun is currently one astronomical unit away, that will not always be the case. At every moment when the Sun begins to expand during its Red Giant phase, the distance between the Earth and the Sun will gradually decrease until the Sun ultimately ends all life on our planet, if not disintegrating it entirely. At each moment, it will be incumbent on God to update his knowledge by changing his prior beliefs concerning the distance between these two bodies. It is prerequisite for facts to be fixed in order for God to be immutable. Since facts are not fixed, his beliefs and corresponding propositions about any given state of affairs have to change — otherwise he fails to be omniscient. (193)
A Christian might assert that there is a simple solution to the issue I have raised: God is also omnipresent. The issue with this objection is that God’s perspectives would be in direct contradiction with one another and so, from the perspective of other sentient beings, he would regard two logically contradictory propositions as true. From our perspective, he would believe in a truth and a lie, namely that from Earth, there is a supernova two million lightyears away, but in Andromeda, there is no longer a supernova to speak of. In other words, since the light from this event took two million years to reach humans on Earth, humans are just now learning of this supernova in Andromeda whereas an intelligent species on a planet relatively near to the event in Andromeda would report no supernova at that location. Perhaps it happened long before they emerged or before they were advanced enough to observe, record, and describe such an event. The fact remains that their present does not feature this supernova event while ours does.
Another fun example from theoretical physics involves watching someone falling into a black hole. The following is a summary of the relativistic experiences the observer and the faller would have:
1. The light coming from the person gets redshifted; they’ll start to take on a redder hue and then, eventually, will require infrared, microwave, and then radio “vision” to see.
2. The speed at which they appear to fall in will get asymptotically slow; they will appear to fall in towards the event horizon at a slower and slower speed, never quite reaching it.
3. The amount of light coming from them gets less and less. In addition to getting redder, they also will appear dimmer, even if they emit their own source of light!
4. The person falling in notices no difference in how time passes or how light appears to them. They would continue to fall in to the black hole and cross the event horizon as though nothing happened.
“Falling Into a Black Hole Sucks!”. ScienceBlogs. 20 Nov 2009. Web.
God’s omnipresence, therefore, fails to solve the issue because in order for him to have all possible perspectives, he would have to hold contradictory propositions on pretty much any and all events in our universe. He would have our perspective in the Milky Way as well as the point of view of the Andromeda galaxy’s civilization. He would also have the perspectives of the observer and the faller in our black hole example. The glaring issue is that he would have these perspectives at the same time and in the same respect, thus resulting in contradictions. Perhaps one can still find a way to try and circumvent these issues.
Given the idea that a day is as a thousand years and vice versa for God (2 Peter 3:8), if he, for sake of argument, experiences time-laden events in God-days (equivalent to one human millennium) or even all at once, God would make entirely different claims from the ones we believe to be knowable. In other words, while we are discussing here and now, before and after, duration, and the such, God would state something like the following: “all of the people, places, events, etc. that existed from the first century through the tenth century CE existed simultaneously.” For us, this is unlike propositions we believe are knowable, indeed nonsensical. God, therefore, being a timeless being cannot know anything about time-laden truths. It would be incumbent on him to not be timeless, but then, he is immediately confronted with the relativity of experience in the physical universe.
More importantly, 5 is debatable despite Fitch’s Knowability Paradox. Pruss states: “The argument for 5 is the famous knowability paradox: If p is an unknown truth, then that p is an unknown truth is a truth that cannot be known (for if someone know that p is an unknown truth, then they would thereby know that p is a truth, and then it wouldn’t be an unknown truth, and no one can’t know what isn’t so)” (Ibid.). The tendency, however, to leap from the possibility of knowing every truth to someone knowing every truth is dubious. It is similar to the leap rooted in Anselm: conceivability implies possibility. Worse still is that Pruss leaps from possibility to actuality. One should not draw ontological conclusions on the basis of logical considerations.
Pruss would appreciate an example from mathematics, namely that mathematicians work with infinity in their equations and even think of it as a real, tangible object in the universe. Unfortunately, there does not seem to be a physical correlate to infinity. Pradeep Mutalik, writing for Quanta Magazine, explains:
While “most physicists and mathematicians have become so enamored with infinity that they rarely question it,” Tegmark writes, infinity is just “an extremely convenient approximation for which we haven’t discovered convenient alternatives.” Tegmark believes that we need to discover the infinity-free equations describing the true laws of physics.
Mutalik, Pradeep. “The Infinity Puzzle”. Quanta Magazine. 16 Jun 2016. Web.
With this in mind, one can see that though mathematicians logically consider and defend the concept of infinity, one should proceed with caution in terms of stipulating that reality features anything like this concept. It follows then, that just because all truths are potentially knowable, there does not already exist a being that knows all things. Aside from the problem resulting from the relativity of truth, stemming from the relativity of space-time especially as one approaches the speed of light, there is this unjustified assumption that possibility implies actuality. In the main, possibility does not necessarily entail probability, the latter of which having to be established before concluding that something exists. Given these brief objections, one should maintain that there is no omniscient being.
Ultimately, a lot more can be said. All humans can really say about knowledge is what they experience with respect to acquiring it. As such, we would be wise to recall that we acquire knowledge first by way of awareness and conscious focus on what it is we are inquiring about. A truly omniscient being, which would be difficult to distinguish from a being who knows all things except how to play billiards or count to infinity (the conclusion of my Argument From Vagueness (see The Definitive Case Against Christianity, 194), would first and foremost have to be perfectly aware and focused for all of eternity. If this being loses focus at any point, myriad truths would have changed, progressing toward inevitable obsolescence, and new truths, that are not all related to the old truths, would have emerged. This being would therefore, have lost its claim to omniscience. This is setting aside that humans can apprehend truths intuitively, without having dedicated concentrated inquiry into a matter. Other sentient beings could have this capacity as well. In any case, the likelihood that an omniscient being exists is practically zero.
In A World Without Atheism
By R.N. Carmona
“If God really existed, it would be necessary to abolish Him.”
Bakunin, Mikhail. God and State. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2012. Print.
What if Christians were right? Imagine if apologetic arguments, the so-called classical proofs of God, held sway. Imagine also that the case for atheism proved untenable. Imagine a world in where the existence of the Christian god is undeniable. Christians do not have to imagine such a world. To them, the world I describe reflects precisely the world we live in. They either believe this and cannot be dissuaded of it or they claim to know that he exists even if they do not exactly understand how it is they know. For others, it is a matter of fervent faith. Whatever the case may be, for the Christian, God indeed exists.
For sake of argument, I am going to agree that we live in a reality perfectly in keeping with what Christians believe. Therefore, for the time being, God exists. Now that I have made this known, I endeavor to learn more about him. I think momentarily about where to acquire this knowledge about God. I want to know as much about him as possible. I do not care so much about what people say about him. Like any real being, there must be a direct way of getting to know him. Christians say quite a lot about prayer, but to spare my knees, I will forgo praying. There has to be another way then.
Even though there are Christians who are not convinced of Sola Scriptura and who do not believe the Bible to be the infallible Word of God, the fact remains that any theologian or apologist I can talk about God with derives what they know or what they think they know from the Bible. It is here that the earliest servants of God made their knowledge of him known to us. This is where I will look. What is even more exciting is that God has revealed to us integral information about his creation, his character, his motivations, and his plan.
In the Christian’s world, we have a word for the position I am now espousing: agnosticism. I do not know that this God exists. Nor do I know that he does not exist. I do not claim any knowledge either way. I am merely interested in this irrefutable case for God’s existence and I want to see if it is possible to get to know him in a more intimate way. My curiosity has led me to the Bible.
Despite Christian claims, Bakunin’s words continue to gnaw at me. What could he possibly mean by this? All I have ever heard is that God is good, merciful, and wants to bless you with life in abundance. He wants to forgive all of your sins, love you, protect you, and aide you in your times of need. So what on Earth is Bakunin on about!?
Since the Bible is the genesis of all knowledge of God, I have made it my mission to read every single word. I am fascinated by Christians who believe it is infallible. It is perfectly written, without fault, lies, or falsehoods, and it contains the very words of God. I wonder about those who profess this belief while having failed to read every word God has written. I will spare everyone the beginning because you are all familiar enough with the story of Adam and Eve. I will just pause to wonder why God would set Adam up for failure. If he did not want Adam to eat from the tree, then why was the tree in the Garden? Perhaps God wanted him to eat from the tree? Well then, why punish him and Eve for doing so? And why would he allow that wily serpent to be in their midst? Surely, God, being omniscient, had to have known that Eve would be powerless to resist the serpent’s deception. And if he saw Adam failing and the cascade of consequences that would follow, why not scrap this plan and start from a reality in where Adam succeeds in obeying him? This is the first, original sin and the reason why I am wretched, the Christian preaches. This just is not fair because who is to say that I would have failed where Adam did. Or you, for that matter! If any one of us would have failed in Adam’s stead, then we were already flawed to begin with. A perfect god created an imperfect man…on purpose.
Oh let’s set this all aside. He is good. He is merciful. He is loving. There will be an explanation for all of this that will help me to make sense of it, surely. I then make my way through Genesis and after Genesis 6 and 7, I am at a loss for words. A family of eight were the only righteous people on the planet!? Please tell me the infants and children were spared. I frantically scour the pages to make sure I am not missing something, but no matter how hard I look, God drowned the entire world except for Noah and his family. He drowned infants and children. He must have because there is just no way everyone on Earth at the time were adults. And aside from the two to seven of a kind spared on the arc, he also drowned every animal. There is something rather odd about the fact that God does not mention plants. I cannot bring myself to understand how they share in our blame.
Collect yourself here, please! Remember, he is good, merciful, loving. There is a reason for all this, I assure you! Enough with the stream of consciousness! If I am writing this now, certainly I have made my way through the entire Bible. That I have! With no hesitation at all, I understand Bakunin now. I cannot be an atheist because this god exists, but it is necessary to disobey, oppose, and ultimately abolish him. I am an advertheist! I stand against God. “Are you mad!?,” yells the Christian. Listen, for just a moment.
At midnight the Lord struck down all the firstborn in the land of Egypt, from the firstborn of Pharaoh who sat on his throne to the firstborn of the captive who was in the dungeon, and all the firstborn of the livestock. And Pharaoh rose up in the night, he and all his servants and all the Egyptians. And there was a great cry in Egypt, for there was not a house where someone was not dead. Exodus 12:29-30
“God has a reason! Your finite mind cannot question the infinite wisdom of God. Just because you’re not privy to why he did this doesn’t give you the right to question God. Who are you to question him!? Where do you get your morals from if not from God?”
So of all the things God could have revealed to us, he decides to leave this a mystery? Does he think so little of me that I would not comprehend a good explanation, assuming there is one, for why he did this? What exactly is the point of telling me this particular story if he isn’t going to address my moral outrage? I have a higher estimation of my own intelligence and I can’t picture modeling human societies after this approach to justice, namely punishing criminals by way of their infants. This does not sit right with me! And it shouldn’t sit right with you! This is why Bakunin said what he said and why I identify as an advertheist. It may be futile to oppose the most powerful being in the universe, but if slaying infants is his way of punishing people who offend him, I don’t want anything to do with this being. And you omitted this truth! You lied to me. You only ever said he was good, merciful, loving, protective, and yet this contradicts that.
“Then if you walk contrary to me and will not listen to me, I will continue striking you, sevenfold for your sins.And I will let loose the wild beasts against you, which shall bereave you of your children and destroy your livestock and make you few in number, so that your roads shall be deserted. Leviticus 26:21-22
“God has a reason!” Let me stop you right there. You’re painfully redundant. Just imagine that you broke the law and police come to your door with a warrant to arrest you. Everything goes as usual: you’re informed as to why you’re being arrested, you’re read your rights, and then you’re handcuffed. Just when you think you’re going to be put into the back of a police car, the officers tell you, “our K9s here are going to now kill your children; this is part of your punishment for breaking the law!” Is this justice? Would it be fair to punish your children, even in the event that you took someone’s life?
Now therefore, kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman who has known man by lying with him. But all the young girls who have not known man by lying with him keep alive for yourselves. Numbers 31:17-19
“Stop quoting the Qur’an!” No, my friend, this is from the Bible. Go see for yourself. You told me God is omniscient, he knows everything. Clearly, the ancients didn’t make much of what we call pedophilia, but if you want to keep claiming my morals are derived from your god, then how come he seems ignorant of pedophilia? The Ten Commandments say nothing about acting on sexual attraction toward children and God appears to tell the Israelites to keep the young girls as sex slaves. Did he not foresee a time in where pedophilia would be widely regarded as taboo and in where remonstrances against child sex trafficking would be common? Perhaps we are more moral than your god is. This is why you should disobey, oppose, and abolish him. If verses like this continue to show up, I will have no choice but to conclude that God is an evil being.
But if it makes no peace with you, but makes war against you, then you shall besiege it. And when the Lord your God gives it into your hand, you shall put all its males to the sword, but the women and the little ones, the livestock, and everything else in the city, all its spoil, you shall take as plunder for yourselves. And you shall enjoy the spoil of your enemies, which the Lord your God has given you. Deuteronomy 20:12-14
God also seems perfectly okay with rape. You mean to tell me that these women, who were forcibly removed from their homes, and this after their husbands were murdered, consented to sleeping with the very men who murdered their husbands? To add insult to injury, these men are now posing as the fathers of their little ones. In what world does God think this is okay? Why did he exclude from his revelation his justification for these actions? If he were good, merciful, loving, and wanted to spare me from eternal suffering, this would be explained because these verses will turn a lot of people away. I wanted to know God and from what I gather, he is like Hitler, Mussolini, and the despots and tyrants in the annals of history. It was necessary to overthrow and abolish these men. The same must be said of God if there is any good in you.
There are many more verses that show that this god of yours is a vicious being. What do you make of this? If God still speaks to you and reveals things to you, perhaps you can get him to explain himself. Plead with him and get him to make known this great justification you continue to allude to. Or will you now admit that there is no such justification and that it is merely a comfortable rationalization you appeal to in order to suppress doubt?
- Leviticus 26:27–29
- Judges 11:29-40
- 2 Kings 2:23-24
- Isaiah 13:15-16
- Isaiah 14:21
- Ezekiel 5:10
- Ezekiel 9:5-6
- Hosea 9:11-16
- Hosea 13:16
The list goes on and on. It really drives home what Dawkins said about God:
The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.
Dawkins, Richard. The God Delusion. New York: Bantam Books, 2006. Print.
I am grateful that this being does not really exist, but if he did, as the Christian continues to believe, it would be necessary to abolish him. I would live my life in open rebellion to this god, even if it meant losing my life. God is nothing more than a celestial grifter, the Christians his obedient marks who have gone as far as making atrocities legal so that they can carry them out in his name. This is why I am perpetually flabbergasted by their claims to a moral high ground, to a transcendent, objective morality. There is no way one can pretend, let alone honestly say, that they derive their moral knowledge from a being who mandated a penal system based on guilt by paternity/maternity, pedophilia, sex trafficking, rape, infanticide, and genocide. If Christians are not going to conclude that this being does not exist, then it is a moral imperative that they motion to abolish God. I would not offer even the barest obeisance to this being, let alone devote what remains of my life to him. Neither should you.
The Philosophy Corner 