I don’t see how this is any different with what Richard Dawkins is doing with his claim.
You mean, Dawkins has latched onto atheism for irrational reasons and is generating whatever argument will sustain it, without regard to the evidence?
For anyone who has taken on the mantle of professional atheist, as Dawkins has, there is a danger of falling into that mode of argument. Do you have any reason to think he has in fact fallen?
Dawkins’s “the world looks like we would expect it to look like if there were no God argument” strikes me as a case of this. Notice how religious people claim to see evidence of God’s work all around them.
Dawkins’s “the world looks like we would expect it to look like if there were no God argument” strikes me as a case of this.
Dawkins has a case for drawing that conclusion. He is not merely pointing at the world and saying “Look! No God!” I have not actually read him beyond soundbites, merely know his reputation, so I can’t list all the arguments he makes, but one of them, I know, is the problem of evil. The vast quantity of suffering in the world is absolutely what you would expect if there is no benevolent deity overseeing the show, and is not what you would expect if there were one. (It could be what you would expect if there were an evil deity in charge, but Dawkins is arguing with the great faiths, none of which countenance any such being except in at most a subordinate role.)
Theists, on the other hand, must work hard to reconcile suffering with omnibenevolence, and what they work hard at is not the collecting of evidence, but the erection of an argumentative structure with the bottom line written in advance. For example, “suffering is good for the soul”, or “suffering is punishment for past sins”, or “man is inherently depraved and corrupt, and suffering is the inevitable consequence of his fallen state”, or just “God works in mysterious ways”.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, so to someone for whom “There is no God” is a sufficiently extraordinary claim, the existence of suffering may be insufficiently extraordinary evidence. But then one must ask, according to the principle of Follow-the-Improbability, where did that extraordinariness come from? What evidence originally led from ignorance of God (for we are all born ignorant) to such certainty that the Problem Of Evil becomes the problem of reconciling Evil with God, not the problem of whether that God really exists?
Notice how religious people claim to see evidence of God’s work all around them.
If they’re just pointing at things and saying “Look! God’s work!”, then that would be an example of the fallacy in the quote you linked. More often, though, they’re making the argument from design, pointing at specific things in the world that looked designed, and concluding the existence of a designer. This is not a stupid argument, but in the end it didn’t work. Historically, natural selection wasn’t invented by atheists striving to explain away apparent design: Darwin was driven from his theism by the mechanism that he found.
I can imagine lots of ways in which the world would be different if a superpowerful superbeing was around with the ability and will to shape reality for whatever purpose—but when I imagine the superbeing’s absence it looks like the world around us.
The trouble with theists considering a “world without God” is they generally think God created the world, so without him there wouldn’t be a world at all. Obviously, this is not what we observe.
On the other hand, attempting to point at things which clearly couldn’t exist without a Creator generally falls into the category of “god of the gaps”, both in terms of the criticisms it levies and, alarmingly often, in terms of already-understood science.
Perhaps a world of Boltzmann Brains? But then, I’ve never really seen the logic behind “if there was no God, everything would just be random”—where would this randomness come from, anyway?
On the other hand, a world without any life at all, or at least intelligent life, could be argued—after all, most of the universe is lifeless as it is, and probably always will be. But then we run into all sorts of awkward anthropic issues where nobody’s quite sure how to reason about probabilities anymore. Still, if God leads to intelligent agents with high probability, then our very existence seems to count as evidence for Him—even if we’re reasoning a priori from “I think therefore I am.”
But let’s assume life exists, which it does, so that’s a fairly solid assumption. God is good, right? Clearly a torture-world would be proof of his nonexistance, as what sort of omnibenevolent superbeing would tolerate it? But then there is disagreement on how much pain would prove the nonexistence of God. Some say a sufficiently superintelligent God should be able to arrange for no pain at all without sacrificing what we value. Others claim that morality actually requires unfathomably vast numbers of people’s horrific suffering because of Justice or somesuch.
And, of course, you get the people who claim that the world they observe fits exactly with what they deduce a priori about a world without God. On the other hand, these people never seem to make original predictions, which leads me to believe that their deductions are actually incorporating things science has already told them about this world instead of the logical consequences of their priors. (The same goes for believers who claim this is exactly what they would expect a world with God to look like if they found one.)
So … yeah, I have no idea why I wrote this long, rambling comment.
Well, the natural theology seems to suffer from the problem of arbitrary, easy-to-vary hypotheses. One could, as an alternative, engage in reflection on which hypotheses are non-arbitrary and hard to vary (otherwise know as, whisper it: metaphysics).
I can imagine lots of ways in which the world would be different if a superpowerful superbeing was around with the ability and will to shape reality for whatever purpose
Looking at your examples, they all seem to boil down to “things that violate this-world!ArisKatsaris’s intuitions about how the world works”. If you lived in a world were any of the things you described in your comment occurred you wouldn’t be impressed by them. To adapt the post I linked to: If you demand miracles, miracles won’t convince you.
If you lived in a world where any of the things you described in your comment occurred you wouldn’t be impressed by them.
What does being “impressed” have to do with anything? I’m talking about believing in someone’s existence.
I don’t deny the existence of the Pope. I don’t deny the existence of the American President. I’m not impressed by either but I don’t deny them. I don’t deny the past existence of dinosaurs. I don’t even deny the existence of King David and Agamemnon as historical figures. I make fun of the people who deny the existence of historical Jesus (or Socrates or Mohammed). So why would I deny the existence of God, if I saw a world that looked to me like it has more evidence about his existence than his non-existence?
You are assuming that I started looking this from a non-believer’s perspective, but it’s what made me an unbeliever. Back when I was at school I started by just disbelieving in the Genesis story because the world looked like it would look as if evolution was true—a God throwing around dinosaur bones to prank us was even more incompatible with Christianity than “look, it’s not meant as a literal story”. Then step-by-step, more and more things spoken by Christianity just didn’t seem to fit the world around me. Not the omnibenevolence and omnipotence of god, not the nature of the soul (why does the mind depend so much on biochemistry of the brain). By my college years only some unanswered questions about the mystery of consciousness or existence could be said to even be used as a hole to fit a relevant God in.
From “Christian” in my childhood to “Christian mostly but I don’t accept everything that religion says” in highschool, to “agnostic” in college, to “agnostic-leaning-atheist” in my post-college years, and finally having the guts to just say “atheist”.
I didn’t start from a position of disbelief which I found ways to maintain—I started from a position of belief which could simply no longer be honestly maintained in the face of the evidence.
Notice how religious people claim to see evidence of God’s work all around them.
But they can only see it after the fact. I am not aware of any case in which a theist said “If God exists, we would expect to see X. Now we haven’t seen X yet, but God exists so we probably will observe X some time in the near future.” And then we observed X.
Religious people do this all the time; they call it “fulfilling prophecies”. Atheists usually discover that such prophecies are hopelessly vague, but theists disagree; they believe the prophecies to be quite specific; or, at least, specific enough for their purposes, given the fact that their God obviously exists.
You mean, Dawkins has latched onto atheism for irrational reasons and is generating whatever argument will sustain it, without regard to the evidence?
For anyone who has taken on the mantle of professional atheist, as Dawkins has, there is a danger of falling into that mode of argument. Do you have any reason to think he has in fact fallen?
YouTube source (44s)
I am itching to downvote Dawkins for that.
Dawkins’s “the world looks like we would expect it to look like if there were no God argument” strikes me as a case of this. Notice how religious people claim to see evidence of God’s work all around them.
Dawkins has a case for drawing that conclusion. He is not merely pointing at the world and saying “Look! No God!” I have not actually read him beyond soundbites, merely know his reputation, so I can’t list all the arguments he makes, but one of them, I know, is the problem of evil. The vast quantity of suffering in the world is absolutely what you would expect if there is no benevolent deity overseeing the show, and is not what you would expect if there were one. (It could be what you would expect if there were an evil deity in charge, but Dawkins is arguing with the great faiths, none of which countenance any such being except in at most a subordinate role.)
Theists, on the other hand, must work hard to reconcile suffering with omnibenevolence, and what they work hard at is not the collecting of evidence, but the erection of an argumentative structure with the bottom line written in advance. For example, “suffering is good for the soul”, or “suffering is punishment for past sins”, or “man is inherently depraved and corrupt, and suffering is the inevitable consequence of his fallen state”, or just “God works in mysterious ways”.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, so to someone for whom “There is no God” is a sufficiently extraordinary claim, the existence of suffering may be insufficiently extraordinary evidence. But then one must ask, according to the principle of Follow-the-Improbability, where did that extraordinariness come from? What evidence originally led from ignorance of God (for we are all born ignorant) to such certainty that the Problem Of Evil becomes the problem of reconciling Evil with God, not the problem of whether that God really exists?
If they’re just pointing at things and saying “Look! God’s work!”, then that would be an example of the fallacy in the quote you linked. More often, though, they’re making the argument from design, pointing at specific things in the world that looked designed, and concluding the existence of a designer. This is not a stupid argument, but in the end it didn’t work. Historically, natural selection wasn’t invented by atheists striving to explain away apparent design: Darwin was driven from his theism by the mechanism that he found.
I don’t see how so.
I can imagine lots of ways in which the world would be different if a superpowerful superbeing was around with the ability and will to shape reality for whatever purpose—but when I imagine the superbeing’s absence it looks like the world around us.
When I try to ask the theists what the world would have looked like without God, I don’t get very convincing answers.
The trouble with theists considering a “world without God” is they generally think God created the world, so without him there wouldn’t be a world at all. Obviously, this is not what we observe.
On the other hand, attempting to point at things which clearly couldn’t exist without a Creator generally falls into the category of “god of the gaps”, both in terms of the criticisms it levies and, alarmingly often, in terms of already-understood science.
Perhaps a world of Boltzmann Brains? But then, I’ve never really seen the logic behind “if there was no God, everything would just be random”—where would this randomness come from, anyway?
On the other hand, a world without any life at all, or at least intelligent life, could be argued—after all, most of the universe is lifeless as it is, and probably always will be. But then we run into all sorts of awkward anthropic issues where nobody’s quite sure how to reason about probabilities anymore. Still, if God leads to intelligent agents with high probability, then our very existence seems to count as evidence for Him—even if we’re reasoning a priori from “I think therefore I am.”
But let’s assume life exists, which it does, so that’s a fairly solid assumption. God is good, right? Clearly a torture-world would be proof of his nonexistance, as what sort of omnibenevolent superbeing would tolerate it? But then there is disagreement on how much pain would prove the nonexistence of God. Some say a sufficiently superintelligent God should be able to arrange for no pain at all without sacrificing what we value. Others claim that morality actually requires unfathomably vast numbers of people’s horrific suffering because of Justice or somesuch.
And, of course, you get the people who claim that the world they observe fits exactly with what they deduce a priori about a world without God. On the other hand, these people never seem to make original predictions, which leads me to believe that their deductions are actually incorporating things science has already told them about this world instead of the logical consequences of their priors. (The same goes for believers who claim this is exactly what they would expect a world with God to look like if they found one.)
So … yeah, I have no idea why I wrote this long, rambling comment.
I agreed with that, although it seems
Well, the natural theology seems to suffer from the problem of arbitrary, easy-to-vary hypotheses. One could, as an alternative, engage in reflection on which hypotheses are non-arbitrary and hard to vary (otherwise know as, whisper it: metaphysics).
Looking at your examples, they all seem to boil down to “things that violate this-world!ArisKatsaris’s intuitions about how the world works”. If you lived in a world were any of the things you described in your comment occurred you wouldn’t be impressed by them. To adapt the post I linked to: If you demand miracles, miracles won’t convince you.
What does being “impressed” have to do with anything? I’m talking about believing in someone’s existence.
I don’t deny the existence of the Pope. I don’t deny the existence of the American President. I’m not impressed by either but I don’t deny them. I don’t deny the past existence of dinosaurs. I don’t even deny the existence of King David and Agamemnon as historical figures. I make fun of the people who deny the existence of historical Jesus (or Socrates or Mohammed). So why would I deny the existence of God, if I saw a world that looked to me like it has more evidence about his existence than his non-existence?
You are assuming that I started looking this from a non-believer’s perspective, but it’s what made me an unbeliever. Back when I was at school I started by just disbelieving in the Genesis story because the world looked like it would look as if evolution was true—a God throwing around dinosaur bones to prank us was even more incompatible with Christianity than “look, it’s not meant as a literal story”. Then step-by-step, more and more things spoken by Christianity just didn’t seem to fit the world around me. Not the omnibenevolence and omnipotence of god, not the nature of the soul (why does the mind depend so much on biochemistry of the brain). By my college years only some unanswered questions about the mystery of consciousness or existence could be said to even be used as a hole to fit a relevant God in.
From “Christian” in my childhood to “Christian mostly but I don’t accept everything that religion says” in highschool, to “agnostic” in college, to “agnostic-leaning-atheist” in my post-college years, and finally having the guts to just say “atheist”.
I didn’t start from a position of disbelief which I found ways to maintain—I started from a position of belief which could simply no longer be honestly maintained in the face of the evidence.
It has to do with computing P(our universe|God exists).
But they can only see it after the fact. I am not aware of any case in which a theist said “If God exists, we would expect to see X. Now we haven’t seen X yet, but God exists so we probably will observe X some time in the near future.” And then we observed X.
Religious people do this all the time; they call it “fulfilling prophecies”. Atheists usually discover that such prophecies are hopelessly vague, but theists disagree; they believe the prophecies to be quite specific; or, at least, specific enough for their purposes, given the fact that their God obviously exists.