Category Archives: Christianity

Plantinga’s Nutty Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism

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Where is Jesus?What better way to respond to atheists but to turn one of their own tools against them?  That’s the approach philosopher Alvin Plantinga tries to use with his Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism (EAAN).  It’s not a new idea, and both C.S. Lewis and Charles Darwin anticipated it.  In brief, the question is: how can a human mind that’s the result of the clumsy process of evolution be trusted?

About “Darwin’s doubt,” Plantinga argues that only Christians can have confidence that their interpretation of the world is correct.  Naturalists can’t prove that minds are reliable until they’ve proven that the source of this claim (the mind!) is worth listening to.

Here’s where Plantinga claims to have turned the tables:

The high priests of evolutionary naturalism loudly proclaim that Christian and even theistic belief is bankrupt and foolish.  The fact, however, is that the shoe is on the other foot.  It is evolutionary naturalism, not Christian belief, that can’t rationally be accepted.

He says that if evolution is true, human beliefs have been selected for survival value, not truth, so why trust them?  And yet our beliefs are reliable, suggesting to Plantinga that something besides evolution created them.

Before we get into the specifics of Plantinga’s argument, let’s first establish a baseline.  Plantinga and naturalists agree that humans’ needs and desires are pretty logically matched:

Plantinga normal world

This is straightforward.  You go toward cuddly things, you run from scary things, you get to clean air if you can’t breathe, and so on.  This is the world we all know and understand.  But Plantinga imagines the naturalist’s world in which these links are jumbled.  He imagines a hominid Paul who has some problematic beliefs about predators:

Perhaps [Paul] thinks the tiger is a large, friendly, cuddly pussycat and wants to pet it; but he also believes that the best way to pet it is to run away from it.

So Paul’s instincts toward tigers keep him alive, but only by luck.  But unreasonable beliefs don’t stop with tigers.  Plantinga imagines the naturalist’s view of the world with beliefs having no connection with reality.  That is, he imagines something like this:

Paul’s response to the tiger was just a roll of the dice, and he got lucky.  But Plantinga supposes that all of Paul’s beliefs are arbitrary, not just those about tigers.  Some actions in this chart are benign, but some are dangerous.  When Paul sees something scary, his reaction is to walk toward it.  When he’s drowning, he’ll try to sleep.  When he’s hungry, he’ll satisfy that need with fresh air, and so on.  With his basic desires paired with ineffective methods, this guy is clearly too dumb to live.

This is where natural selection comes in.  Natural selection is unforgiving, and actions that don’t lead to survival are discarded.  Evolution easily explains why Plantinga’s Paul could not exist.

An article at Skeptic.com neatly skewers Plantinga’s argument with a familiar example.

If a professional baseball player [incorrectly perceived reality,] that is, if his perception of the movement and location of a baseball was something other than what it actually is, then he would not be able to consistently hit ninety-five mile per hour fastballs.

As an aside, let me admit that I have a hard time maintaining respect for those at the leading edge of philosophy.  Do they do work that’s relevant and pushes the frontier of human knowledge?  I’d like to think so, but when this is the kind of argument they give, it’s hard to keep the faith.

My advice to philosophers: when you get the urge to play scientist, better lie down until the feeling goes away.

Photo credit: Wikimedia

Related links:

  • “EAAN—a sad footnote to an illustrious career,” Shamelessly Atheist blog, 8/22/09.
  • “Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism,” Iron Chariots Wiki.
  • PZ Myers, “Alvin Plantinga Gives Philosophy a Bad Name,” Pharyngula blog, 5/29/09.
  • Michael Dahlen, “What’s So Great About Kant?  A Critique of Dinesh D’Souza’s Attack on Reason,” eSkeptic, 8/17/11.
  • Greg Kokul, “The Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism,” Stand to Reason (video, 3:59), 8/15/11.
  • “Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism,” Wikipedia.

Pointless Parables

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I like some of the parables in the New Testament.  The parables of the Good Samaritan and the Prodigal Son, for example, give good examples of the right path and add to the moral vocabulary of the West.

Lately, however, I’ve come across a few modern apologetic parables that fall far short of those in the Bible.  Let me start with “The Blind Faith of Atheism” a tediously long story making a very small point.  (I’ve abbreviated all the parables here.  You’re welcome!)

An atheist professor was harassing his Christian students about their God belief, so they challenge him to a debate.  The arrogant professor agrees, thinking he could shut down this God thing once and for all.

The atheist’s opening remark likens God belief to Santa Claus belief.  We give up one when we grow up; why not both? 

The Christian then goes through a long process of arguing that the atheist doesn’t know everything, to which the atheist agrees.  And now he releases the snare: isn’t it possible that evidence of God could exist in that huge fraction of all knowledge that the atheist doesn’t understand?  “Have you been to South Yemen?” the Christian asks.  “Maybe God is in South Yemen.”

The debate isn’t going his way, so the atheist complains that the debate isn’t fair.

The Christian pushes his point and gets the atheist, now meek and whiney, to admit that the claim “There is no God” is indefensible and that the atheist’s claim is actually a faith position.  A little more back and forth, and the atheist slinks away, publicly humiliated.

This is rather like the Chick tract in which the nasty Biology professor gets shredded and then converted by a calm and polite Christian.

Chick tract that argues that God doesn't exist

So the moral is: don’t say, “God absolutely, for sure doesn’t exist.”  Okay, but I already knew that.

In the first place, very few atheists are certain that there is no God.  They would say instead that they have no God belief, just like the Christian has no Poseidon belief.

Second, “there is no God” is a faith position just like “there are no unicorns” is—that is, not at all.  Could unicorns exist?  It’s possible, but the evidence strongly argues that they don’t.  We don’t have faith that unicorns don’t exist; we trust that they don’t because we have evidence that they don’t.  In the same way, belief in God is a faith position, but following the facts where they point (and tentatively concluding that God is in the same bin as Zeus, Shiva, and the other gods from history) is a trust position.

Next up, the story of a man and his barber.

As the barber trims the man’s hair, he says that he doesn’t believe in God.  He points to the problem of evil—why would there be so much pain and suffering in the world if God existed?

Wanting to avoid antagonizing the man who had his coiffure in his hands, the Christian customer doesn’t engage in the argument, but after leaving the shop, he sees a man with a scruffy beard and long unkempt hair.  He returns to the barber shop and says, “I just realized something—barbers don’t exist either.”

“But I just cut your hair!” the barber replies.

“If barbers existed, there would be no one with long hair, like the man I just saw.”

“Don’t blame me if they don’t come to me.”

“Exactly!” the Christian replies.  “And we can’t blame God if we don’t go to him.  He exists; the problem with pain and suffering is that people don’t seek God.”

Huh?  But Christians do go to God.  How does that help the pain and suffering in the world?  How does that remove pain and suffering from just the lives of Christians?  How does that undo the damage from tornadoes or tsunamis?  Praying to a God, even one who’s not there, can bring comfort, I’ll admit, but that’s hardly what the Christian in this story is claiming.

Finally, a well-made video from the Macedonian Ministry of Education and Science.

The video opens with a schoolboy running into school.  The time period looks to be about 1900.

The teacher at the front of the room speaks in German, with English subtitles.  He declares that if God exists then he is evil.  If he created everything, then he created evil, right?

Our schoolboy protagonist stands to challenge this: “Professor, does cold exist?”

“Of course it does.”

“No, sir, cold doesn’t exist.  Heat exists, and cold is merely the absence of heat.  Professor, does darkness exist?”

“Of course.”

“No, sir.  Darkness doesn’t exist.  It is merely the absence of light.  In the same way, evil doesn’t exist.  Evil is the result of what happens when man does not have God’s love in his heart.”

At the end, we see the name of this precocious schoolboy: Albert Einstein.  We’re left with the tagline: “Religion is knowledge too.  Bring religion back to school.”

With a tagline like that on a government video, I guess there’s not much separation of church and state here.  And a Macedonian ministry puts together a German video with English subtitles?  Why not Macedonian subtitles?  What possible goal of theirs could this serve?

Putting aside this mystery, this isn’t an honest portrayal of Einstein’s religious beliefs, at least not in his later life.  And we can quibble about whether evil is something or the absence of something, but the final statement (that evil is the result of not having God’s love) is simply an assertion without evidence.  Unconvincing.

Is it me, or have Christian parables gone downhill?

(And if you hear of any more, let me know!)

Photo credit: Rafael Lopez

Churches and the Corporate Org Chart

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(Today, I’m pleased to have a guest post from Richard S. Russell, an atheist from Wisconsin and commenter at this blog.)

In these difficult economic times, you may have heard more than usual about GDP. It’s short for “Gross Domestic Product” and is the dollar value of all the goods and services produced within a given country (or state or region) in a year. “Goods” are products, material objects that customers want; “services” are procedures, actions performed to help customers. Together, these products and procedures reflect the wealth generated by the economy.

In the U.S., a lot of goods and services are produced by big corporations, which are organized to do so effectively and efficiently, using those techniques much beloved of Econ 101 courses, division of labor and specialization.

Here’s an organization chart for a typical manufacturing corporation, one that produces material goods:

And here’s what goes on inside each of those little boxes:

(1) Management makes decisions, tells everyone else what to do, and handles investor relations.

(2) Internal Services support the rest of the company in general; the category includes accounting, info tech, personnel (human resources), labor relations (employment relations or ER), safety, maintenance, regulatory compliance, and legal.

(3) Research and Development (R&D) investigates new ways of doing things and tests them out.

(4) Purchasing acquires raw materials, equipment, and property.

(5) Manufacturing (the biggest part of the company, employing the most people) generates actual useful products.

(6) Inventory Control deals with both raw materials and finished products and includes transportation, warehousing, shipping, delivery, and quality assurance.

(7) Marketing uses media to spread the word that people should buy the company’s products.

(8) Sales works directly with individual customers to get them the products they want in exchange for their money.

(9) Customer Service works directly with customers who are having problems with a product.

The chart gets slimmed down a little if we’re talking about services instead of goods. Here’s an org chart for a typical service corporation:

Notice that manufacturing has vanished altogether (no goods being produced), and that the bulk of the people working for the company are the ones directly helping customers. You still have Purchasing and Inventory Control, but these are much smaller operations (since they now deal mainly with furniture and office supplies instead of heavy machinery and raw materials) and so are generally subsumed under Internal Services.

Finally we have the kind of organizations that produce neither goods nor services, namely churches. Here’s how they work:

There are still lots of entries under Management (bishops, archbishops, abbots, cardinals, popes, etc.), since these guys (by which I mean “men”) are really into hierarchy.

There’s the normal array of Internal Services, with the diminished activity under ER (no unions, heavy emphasis on conformity and obedience) and regulatory compliance more than offset by the need for lots of work under legal (discrimination, pedophilia, etc.).

Nothing under R&D. (Create something new?!)

Nothing under Purchasing. (Spend? Contribute to the economy?!)

Nothing under Manufacturing. (Useful products!?)

Nothing under Inventory Control.

But tons and tons o’ time is devoted to (or, more properly, “wasted on”) Marketing and Sales. In fact, in the absence of goods and services, it’s the only thing religion does at all. In other words, the priest class spends all its time pushing companionship with themselves, in return for nothing useful or even (as in the case of more traditional prostitutes) pleasurable.

The most telling part of the chart, though, is Customer “Service,” where the ironic quotation marks emphasize the difference between what a church does and what an actual contributor to GDP does. A responsible, reputable company assumes that, if you’ve got a problem, it’s their own product’s fault, or the result of shoddy service from one of the company’s representatives. But in the case of religion, any counseling they provide for people with problems is designed to show, first and foremost, how the religion itself is never, ever at fault, that the problem is entirely the customer’s, because he or she didn’t follow directions properly. In short, the motto of Customer “Service” for a church is “The customer is always wrong.”

In effect, since religion never solves any problems (not even those of its own making), Customer “Service” is just another mechanism under Sales and Marketing, which is why it’s shown as subsidiary to those activities on the skeletal org chart above.

You know the short word for any activity that’s all talk and no walk (or, as they say in Texas, all hat and no cattle)? Scam!

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Using the Monty Hall Problem to Undercut Christianity

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What is Christianity?I first came across the Monty Hall Problem 20 years ago in Parade magazine:

Suppose you’re on a game show, and you’re given the choice of three doors: Behind one door is a car; behind the others, goats.  You pick a door, say No. 1, and the host, who knows what’s behind the doors, opens another door, say No. 3, which has a goat.  He then says to you, “Do you want to pick door No. 2?”

Is it to your advantage to switch your choice?

Most people think that it doesn’t matter and that there’s no benefit to switching.  They’re wrong, but more on that in a moment.

Humans have a hard time with probability problems like this one.  You’d think that we’d be fairly comfortable with basic probability, but apparently not.

Here’s another popular probability problem: how many people must you have in a group before it becomes more likely than not that any two of them have the same birthday?

The surprising answer is 23.  In other words, imagine two football teams on the field (11 per team) and then throw in a referee, and it’s more than likely that you’ll find a shared birthday.  If your mind balks at this, test it at your next large gathering.

Now, back to the Monty Hall Problem.  A good way to understand problems like this is to push them to an extreme.  Imagine, for example, that there are not three doors but 300 doors.  There’s still just one good prize, with the rest being goats (the bad prize).

So you pick a door—say number #274.  There’s a 1/300 chance you’re right.  This needs to be emphasized: you’re almost certainly wrong.  Then the game show host opens 298 of the remaining doors: 1, 2, 3, and so on.  He skips door #59 and your door, #274.  Every open door shows a goat.

Now: should you switch?  Of course you should—your initial pick is still almost surely wrong.  The probabilities are 1/300 for #274 and 299/300 for #59.

Another way to look at the problem: do you want to stick with your initial door or do you want all the other doors?  Switching is simply choosing all the other doors, because (thanks to the open doors) you know the only door within that set that could be the winner.

One lesson from this is that our innate understanding of probability is poor, and a corollary is that there’s a big difference between confidence and accuracy.  That is, just because one’s confidence in a belief is high doesn’t mean that the belief is accurate.  This little puzzle does a great job of illustrating this.

Perhaps you’ve already anticipated the connection with choosing a religion.  Let’s imagine you’ve picked your religion—religion #274, let’s say.  For most people, their adoption of a religion is like picking a door in this game show.  In the game show, you don’t weigh evidence before selecting your door; you pick it randomly.  And most people adopt the dominant religion of their upbringing.  As with the game show, the religion in which you grew up is also assigned to you at random.

Now imagine an analogous game, the Game of Religion, with Truth as host.  Out of 300 doors (behind each of which is a religion), the believer picks door #274.  Truth flings open door after door and we see nothing but goats.  Hinduism, Sikhism, Jainism, Mormonism—all goats.  As you suspected, they’re all myth.

Few of us seriously consider or even understand the religions Winti, Candomblé, Mandaeism, or the ancient religions of Central America, for example.  Luckily for the believer, Truth gets around to those doors too and opens them to reveal goats.

Here’s where the analogy between the two games fails.  First, Truth opens all the other doors.  Only the believer’s pick, door #274, is still closed.  Second, there was never a guarantee that any door contained a true religion!  Since the believer likely came to his beliefs randomly, why imagine that his choice is any more likely than the others to hold anything of value?

Every believer plays the Game of Religion, and every believer believes that his religion is the one true religion, with goats behind all the hundreds of other doors.  But maybe there’s a goat behind every door.  And given that the lesson from the 300-door Monty Hall game is that the door you randomly picked at first is almost certainly wrong, why imagine that yours is the only religion that’s not mythology?

Finding Jesus Through Board Games

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Does Jesus exist?The Atheist Experience podcast discussed an interesting apologetic several years ago.  Here is my interpretation of this thinking.

Imagine a board game called “Monopoly Plus,” an updated version of the popular board game.  There’s a track around the outside of the board that’s divided into cells.  Each player is represented by a token on the board—a dog, a car, a top hat, and so on—and each player in turn rolls dice to see how many steps to move.  You start with a certain amount of money, and you can buy the properties that you land on as you move around the board.  Players who then land on one of the owned properties must pay the owner rent, and the owner can pay to improve properties so that the rent is higher.

Here’s how you win: you must accept Jesus Christ as your lord and savior.

Yep, that’s a pretty bad game.  The motivations within the game have absolutely nothing to do with how you win.

Now take that idea about a million times larger, and we have the game of Christianity®—ordinary reality filtered through a Christian worldview.  It’s far more complicated than any board game.  In Christianity, there are good things (love, friendships, possessions, accomplishments, personal victories, etc.) and bad things (illness, death, sorrow, disappointment, personal defeats, etc.), and skillful players maximize the good things and minimize the bad.

Immersed in this huge mass of complexity, we’re told that, in the big picture, it all doesn’t matter.  To win the game you must accept Jesus as your lord and savior.

Why is the game of Christianity any less out of touch with reality than the game of Monopoly Plus?

Photo credit: Wikimedia

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Philosophical Grounding: A Parable

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God's existence doesn't seem likely. Why imagine that Jesus is real?Consider this parable:

A certain mathematician, in a philosophical mood one day, wonders what grounds his mathematics.  The math works, of course, but he wonders if he’s missing something foundational.

He consults a friend of his, a theologian.  The theologian knows almost nothing about mathematics, but he knows his Christianity.

The mathematician says, “Mathematics is like an inverted triangle with the most advanced math along the wide top edge.  The top layer is grounded on the math below it, which is grounded on what is below, and so on through the layers, down to arithmetic and logic at the point at the bottom.  And that’s where it stops.”

The theologian nods his head wisely.  “I see the problem—what does the bottom rest on?”

The mathematician was silent.

“In your view, it rests on nothing,” said the theologian.  “It just sits there in midair.  But the problem is easily resolved—mathematics and logic comes from God.  There’s your grounding.”

“Are you saying that I need to convert to Christianity to be a mathematician?”

“No, just realize that you are borrowing from the Christian worldview every time you make a computation or write an equation.”

Satisfied that this nagging problem has been resolved, the mathematician returns to his work and thinks no more of it. 

The End.

So, is the mathematician any better off?  Is he faster or more accurate or more creative?  Do his proofs work now where they hadn’t before?  In short, did he get anything of value from the whole episode?

I’ve heard this “grounding” or “atheists borrow from the Christian worldview” idea many times, but I’ve yet to discover what this missing thing is that is being borrowed.

“God did it” is simply a restatement of the problem.  “God did it” is precisely as useful as “logic and arithmetic are simply properties of our reality” or “that’s just the way it is” or even “I don’t know.”  A curious problem has been suppressed, not resolved.  In fact, the theologian himself has his answer resting in midair because he provides no reason to conclude that God exists.  His claim is no more believable than that of any other religion—that is, not at all.

The person who stops at “God did it” has stated an opinion only—an opinion with no evidence to back it up.  It doesn’t advance the cause of truth one bit.

Mathematics is tested, and it works.  Scratch your head about what grounds it if you want, but God is an unnecessary and unedifying addition to the mix.