From Russ Shafer-Landau, Moral Realism: A Defence:

Does this [view that science has done away with minor supernatural entities because they play no explanatory role in the world] mean that the progress of the natural sciences has given us equally good measure to deny God's existence? Not necessarily. Scientific progress would supply such reason only if theistic assumptions were in direct competition with naturalistic causal explanations. The reason we shouldn't believe in demiurges and sprites is because they are entities whose existence was to have been vindicated by citing their role in explaining the very phenomena that the natural sciences can now explain better. For most theists, God no longer plays that role. God isn't introduced to explain why a volcano erupted, or a hailstorm destroyed the crops, but instead for a variety of functions (e. g. as the author of the moral law) other than that of actively intervening in earthly affairs so as to continually cause all that occurs in the natural world. That sort of God would be one whose postulated existence would be in direct competition with the causal explanations offered by the natural sciences. But theists needn't take such a view, and so needn't fall prey to the argument that has entitled us to dismiss the minor supernatural characters (leprechauns, trolls, etc.) from our ontology. (114-115)

Michael Spencer of iMonk fame has asked for responses on a great open thread:

This thread is for this question: How have you resolved the tensions in your own life and thinking between science and your faith? What has been your journey? What was particularly significant in that journey?

I’m especially interested in those who were brought up in conservative Christian environments with typical conservative assumptions about the Bible.

The thread has attracted numerous interesting responses, some from professional scientists. The comments represent numerous perspectives, but almost all of them are from believers who have realized there is no substantive conflict between Christianity and the deliverances of science. Here's a sample from "Theo":

I didn’t encounter much tension between my faith and science growing up. We went to a Baptist church that occasionally taught on creationism and such, but they didn’t really shove it down our throats or make any “you must believe this or else..” sort of statements. My high school AP physics teacher was also the Bible club sponsor. I attended a Christian affiliated university (Baylor) and all my professors were Christian (or at least signed a statement of faith to get their job). So I breezed all the way through college with a masters in physics without ever having really been challenged in my faith as a scientist.

Now I am at a state university working on my Ph.D. My thesis adviser and many people that I work with are openly hostile toward Christianity. It is certainly a more challenging environment, but having known so many Christian scientists (not those kind) has left me with a confidence that I’m not alone in my faith.

Just one observation on the evolution debate. As an experimental physicist, I deal with exact equations and extraordinarily precise, repeatable measurements. All that is required of an evolutionary biologist is the ability to tell a good story (”the shape of the pig’s snout evolved over millions of years to be just the perfect tool to hunt out truffles”, or whatever.) I know they are doing their best with the facts they have available (and there is a bit more to it than just a story), but I find it humorous that it gets equal billing under the single term “science” along with physics or chemistry.

There are some great responses in the thread. I recommend reading through them if you're interested in the relationship between Christianity and science.

Mike Almeida at Prosblogion points out Closer to Truth (based on the PBS series), a very well-done website with interviews and videos on "cosmos, consciousness, and God." I'm currently watching an interview with Alva Noe on the mystery of consciousness. Very good stuff.

In the comments section of my last post on a typical silly argument by Richard Dawkins against religious belief, Uncle Skeptic said:

Allowing for some literary license with regard to generality and geography, the Dawkins quote is right on. If we can’t, in general, “judge an individual’s justification for her beliefs by the cultural soup from which those beliefs arise”, then how do you explain the overwhelming correlation between religion and geography? If you look at the geographical distribution of religions, it’s obvious that the vast majority of religious people do, in fact, acquire their religion based on the prevailing cultural soup.

A few points here. First, you are confusing sociological questions with epistemological questions. There are simple sociological reasons why we find high levels of religious uniformity among entire cultures, nations, and races: such uniformity allows for social cohesion, national identity, and a shared set of values. That people often adopt the beliefs of those around them is not new or surprising. Suppose 99% of the people of a culture believe the same thing on a particular religious subject - say, that humans are made in the image of God - and they believe simply because that's what their parents or their culture told them. This fact has exactly zero bearing on whether people actually are made in the image of God or not. As for me, if I'm trying to determine for myself what my view on human nature is, sociological facts about how and why this belief is widely held in my culture are entirely irrelevant. What only matters is whether I have good reasons for accepting it or not, and that is an epistemological question that is independent of sociological ones. If I have a suspicion that I have been duped or "indoctrinated" either for or against this belief, I need only to investigate the matter for myself. Just because a belief is held widely in one particular culture does not automatically make it wrong.

Here is Richard Dawkins in The God Delusion:

If you were born in Arkansas and you think Christianity is true and Islam is false, knowing full well that you would think the opposite if you had been born in Afghanistan, you are the victim of childhood indoctrination.

Before we take this quote too seriously, we should consider the fact that this is the same Richard Dawkins who claimed that raising a child Catholic is worse than sexually abusing him. Credibility issues aside, what can we make of statements like the one above? This sort of reasoning is very prevalent in the writings of the new atheism of Dawkins, Harris, et al. But this is a typical Dawkinsian non-argument. There is no there there. What is the point of such statements other than to offer intellectual kudos to those who already disbelieve in any particular religion? Consider the following variation on the above quote:

If you were born in Arkansas and you think representative democracy is the best form of government and that Islamic theocracy is the worst, knowing full well that you would think the opposite if you had been born in Afghanistan, you are the victim of childhood indoctrination.

Or how about this one:

If you were born in 1980 and you think the world is round instead of flat, knowing full well that you would think the opposite if you had been born in 1089, you are the victim of childhood indoctrination.

If you can understand the silliness of the two latter statements, you should be able to understand the silliness of the first. You don't necessarily judge an individual's justification for her beliefs by the cultural soup from which those beliefs arise. Consider the following three facts:

(1) I live in a culture where a majority of the people believe Christianity is true.
(2) My parents taught me to believe that Christianity is true.
(3) I believe that Christianity is true.

And these:

(4) Aziz lives in a culture where a majority of the people believe that Islam is true.
(5) Aziz' parents taught him to believe that Islam is true.
(6) Aziz believes that Islam is true.

Now, it's obvious that facts (1)-(3) have no bearing on whether Christianity is true or not, just as (4)-(6) have no bearing on whether Islam is true or not. Let's add one more fact to our list:

(7) If I had been born in Aziz' family, I would have believed that Islam was true instead of Christianity.

Dawkins' contention is that if I am aware that facts (1)-(7) are true, then I should conclude that I am a victim of "childhood indoctrination."

But why? The circumstances under which I form a belief are different animals from the reasons I have for holding that belief. I suppose that by Dawkins using this sort of reasoning he means to hold up a simple truism: we shouldn't believe something just because it is widely believed in our own culture. This is obvious, but trivial. Dawkins is attempting to twist this simple truism into some sort of cudgel against religious belief. But just because it is true that some religious people hold their beliefs because they were raised in a religious culture, and because they themselves have not done enough reflection to have good reasons for their beliefs, does not mean that all of them do. And just because some parents indoctrinate and propagandize their children into religious belief does not mean that all of them do. I think most religious parents attempt, to the best of their ability, to give their children good reasons for why they think their religious views are right and others are wrong. That some parents fail miserably at this task is probably a contributor to the apostasy rate of children of religious believers, but that too is a different discussion altogether.

Consider again my above variations on Dawkins' statement. Suppose someone were to use my first hypothetical statement to mock Dawkins for believing that representative democracy is superior to Islamic theocracy. What would his response be? I think he would simply point out that representative democracy is the best form of government for Reason A, Reason B, Reason C, and so forth. If he is justified in doing this, why is the religious believer not justified in doing the same thing? Facts about what someone would believe in a possible world in which they were raised in a different culture are irrelevant to the justification for the beliefs they hold in this, the real world. If we were to adopt this sort of skepticism, then it wouldn't just be religious beliefs that we would have to be skeptical about, but our moral beliefs, our political beliefs, and any other beliefs that fall short of being justified by naked logic or direct experience. Once again, for all his blustering and cuteness, the darling of the new atheists poses no convincing argument against the justification of religious belief. Dawkins always disappoints.

No, I'm not dead. Neither am I incapacitated, unmotivated, or otherwise incapable of blogging. The simple reason for my absence is this: I used to blog during downtime at work. I was promoted in February, and now I have no downtime at work. I want to keep blogging on a regular basis, but I just haven't quite figured out how to do it. To prove my sincerity in this matter, I offer this, an actual post.

Most of you are aware that the unsettling web hegemon known as Google has a Books section wherein the Google masters want to digitize as many books known to man as possible. For practical purposes many of these books are largely worthless, since most are copyrighted and you can only view a few pages. But many of the books have copyrights that have expired (I assume), so Google offers them for free viewing and as downloadable PDFs. The majority of these are older books from previous centuries, and this means that many classic philosophical and theological works are there for the taking. Here I offer downloadable links to some of these that I recently found while browsing through Google Books. Just click and save:

• Augustine, Seventeen Short Treatises of St. Augustine, Bishop of Hippo


• Augustine, The City of God, vol. II


• Timothy Dwight, Theology: Explained and Defended, in a Series of Sermons


• A. H. Strong, Systematic Theology


• George Fox, The Works of George Fox


• The Church of England, The Book of Common Prayer (1815)


• John Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy


• Spinoza, The Chief Works of Benedict de Spinoza


• Aristotle, The Organon, or Logical Treatises, of Aristotle


• Aristotle, Aristotle on His Predecessors, Being the First Book of His Metaphysics


• Aristotle, William David Ross, John Alexander Smith, The Works of Aristotle


• Kant, Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason


• William James, Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking


• William James, The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy


• Herbert Spencer, Essays, Scientific, Political, and Speculative


• Berkeley, A New Theory of Vision and Other Select Philosophical Writings


• Hume, Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects, vol. II


• Hume, The Philosophical Works of David Hume


• Hume, Philosophical Works, Part II


• Locke, The Works of John Locke, vol. VIII


• Thomas Reid, An Inquiry Into the Human Mind: On the Principles of Common Sense

Therefore, those who have no experience of reason or virtue, but are always occupied with feasts and the like, are brought down and then back up to the middle, as it seems, and wander in this way throughout their lives, never reaching beyond this to what is truly higher up, never looking up at it or being brought up to it, and so they aren't filled with that which really is and never taste any stable or pure pleasure. Instead, they always look down at the ground like cattle, and, with their heads bent over the dinner table, they feed, fatten, and fornicate. To outdo others in these things, they kick and butt them with iron horns and hooves, killing each other, because their desires are insatiable. For the part that they're trying to fill is like a vessel full of holes, and neither it nor the things they are trying to fill it with are among the things that are.

- Socrates, in Plato, The Republic, Book IX, translated by G. M. A. Grube

In other words, it's better to spend your life seeking the true, the beautiful, and the good, than wasting it by merely indulging the flesh. Here's a pictorial representation:



Any questions?

The Southern Seminary website has been updated with MP3 links to Alvin Plantinga's lectures on science and religion that he gave on campus a few weeks back. I attended the lectures but haven't posted about them yet, simply because I had already heard or read virtually all of the material he covered. Much of the content in his lectures at Southern was identical to what he said in his Gifford Lectures a few years ago. I did get to ask Professor Plantinga a question during one of the question-and-answer sessions, and I may post about that in the near future. Unfortunately the audio files do not include the questions that were posed during these sessions. Nevertheless, since Plantinga is one of my heroes it was a great thrill for me to get to hear him in person and to (briefly) interact with him. My work/school/church schedule prevents me from going to any APA or SCP meetings where I might otherwise get to hear him, so I'm grateful that he chose to spend a few days with us at Southern. Here are links to the lectures:

• Oct. 23, 2007 - "Science and Religion: Why does the Debate Continue?"
• Oct. 24, 2007 - "Divine Action in the World"
• Oct. 24, 2007 - Ph.D. Graduate Club luncheon (Correction: Plantinga did not deliver this lecture at the luncheon. The topic was "Evolution and Scripture Scholarship" and he gave it on Wednesday afternoon. He was originally scheduled to meet in our Wednesday doctoral colloquium, but the demand to hear him was so high that the powers-that-be made it another public lecture.)
• Oct. 25, 2007 - "Evolution vs. Atheism"

Here is a must-read post by Bill Vallicella: Does the Atheist Deny What the Theist Affirms?. I have no time to comment now. Perhaps later. Perhaps not.

From the Southern Seminary newswire, here are the details on Plantinga's lectures on campus later this month:

Dr. Alvin Plantinga, John A. O'Brien Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, will be the Fall 2007 Norton Lecturer, October 23-25. The Norton Lecture Series is as follows:

Tuesday, October 23 11:30 a.m., Heritage Hall "Science and Religion: Why does the Debate Continue?"

Wednesday, October 24 10:00 a.m., Heritage Hall "Divine Action in the World"

Thursday, October 25 11:30 a.m., Heritage Hall "Evolution vs. Atheism"

The lectureship was established in 1910 by a gift from George W. Norton II (1865-1924). The Norton Lectures were established in an effort to bring world-class scholars to the Southern Seminary campus to present lectures that would challenge our community and make a significant contribution to Christian scholarship and Christian intellectual life. The founding vision of the Norton Lectures and originating concerns include the relation between science and religion, and the relation of philosophy to theology.

I was just browsing the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and saw that the fine Christian philosopher Peter van Inwagen has a new entry on Metaphysics.

... then be prepared to fight traffic in the nine circles of hell.

[HT: Brandon]

Here is an article on how the philosophy of Ayn Rand encouraged many of today's business leaders to be a bit more selfish in their lust for financial success. You will often hear Ayn Rand labeled a "philosopher," but the truth is that academic philosophers today largely ignore her. Why? The short version of the answer to that question is that she is so utterly full of crap. There is no long version.

In another Rand-related news, I've recently been playing through Bioshock, an Xbox 360 game that uses the philosophy of Rand as the foundation of its narrative. I haven't finished it yet, but as of now it seems that one aim of the story is to show how vacuous her ethical and social theories really are. The setting is "Rapture," an underwater city built by an eccentric industrialist who wanted to found a new society based on Rand's philosophy of Objectivism. One of the main characters is even called "Atlas." Unsurprisingly, things go horribly awry in the Randian utopia of Rapture, and the player is forced to resort to large amounts of firepower to correct them.

[HT: Drudge]

Speaking of big Al, his debate with Paul Draper on "Evil and Evolution" is now up at Internet Infidels. The introduction by Draper is here. I haven't had time to read it yet, but it ought to be interesting.

I don't know the details, but I just found out that Alvin Plantinga will be delivering the Norton lectures on the campus of Southern Seminary in October. I will definitely be there. Scant details here.

My posts on Richard Dawkins' 'Ultimate Boeing 747 Argument' against the existence of God are finished. Below you will find links to all the posts in this series as well as a few others that deal with Dawkins' claims. Or you could always just peruse the Contra Dawkins sub-category. I now wash my hands of the man.

Theism Defeated? A Response to Richard Dawkins' 'Ultimate 747 Argument' Against the Existence of God

• Formulating the Argument


• Formulating the Argument (part 2)


• Counterargument 1


• Counterargument 2


• Counterargument 3

Special Dawkins Bonus Posts!

• Richard Dawkins' non-argument against arguments from religious experience


• Tech savvy atheists and head-in-the-sand theists


• Dawkins jumps the shark


• Richard Dawkins = Cosmo Kramer

[This is the final part of my series critiquing Richard Dawkins' 'Ultimate 747 Argument' against the existence of God. Previous entries can be found here, here, here, and here.]

Counterargument 3: A Complex God Can Exist Necessarily

To see how this final counterargument runs, recall some of the premises of the various formulations of the 747 argument I outlined in previous posts. The first three premises of 747m are:

(i) All entities (potential or actual) possess organized complexity (C) in degrees.

(ii) For any degree of C possessed by any entity E, however, E’s possessing C entails E’s possessing improbability of existence (I) in a degree that is proportional to the degree of C possessed by E.

(iii) For any degree of I possessed by E, however, E’s possessing I entails E’s possessing a level of explanatory requirement (R) in a degree that is proportional to the degree of I possessed by E.

The move from (i) to (ii) and from (ii) to (iii) is questionable. It seems that Dawkins’ boldness allows him to muster the confidence to posit necessary connections between organized complexity, improbability, and explanatory requirement in a striking way. Is this move legitimate? It's hard to see how it is. Discussion of metaphysical issues of this sort is almost impossible without referring to the concepts of necessity and contingency. Thus Dawkins’ argument is incomplete; it doesn’t deal with issues it needs to deal with if it wants to arrive at its conclusion in a convincing manner. Traditionally theists have viewed God as a necessary being. Every created thing, however, is contingent. This just means that of quarks and Quakers, pandas and people, and molecules and mollusks, none of them have the power to exist on their own. God, however, being a necessary Being, does have the power to exist on His own. In fact, He’s the ground of all being Himself (“I AM”), and nothing can exist apart from His necessity. If God were to disappear, everything else would disappear as well.

On theories of ethical subjectivism (there are various stripes: emotivism and prescriptivism are two prominent varieties), moral facts are not facts about human actions or states of affairs but about the people who view those actions or states of affairs. Thus when the subjectivist says, "Slapping unsuspecting pedestrians for fun is bad," the predicate "bad" refers not to the slapping-act but to something in the speaker's attitude toward the slapping-act.

In my own thinking on metaethics I prefer to think of metaethical questions in the terms of moral properties. Are moral properties real? If so, where do they reside? When we think of the question in this way it clarifies the problem that many people have with ethical subjectivism. If I say, "This tire is round," I am saying that the tire possesses the property of roundness and that this property is not in me but in the tire itself. It exists outside of me. I neither create nor facilitate the property's existence. It exists whether I am there to perceive its existence or not. The tire just has this property, and my own opinions on the matter are thoroughly irrelevant.

Now consider the ethical subjectivist who says, "Slapping unsuspecting pedestrians for fun is bad." The substance of her ethical theory is that the property "bad" is possessed not by the act itself but by something in the mental state of the agent considering or viewing the act. So it turns out that the subjectivist is not saying something about slapping people at all; she's just saying something about herself.

From my beach reading, Arthur C. Clarke's The Fountains of Paradise:

2069 June 08 GMT 1537. Message 6943. Sequence 2. Starglider to Earth.

The hypothesis you refer to as God, thought not disprovable by logic alone, is unnecessary for the following reason.

If you assume that the universe can be quote explained unquote as the creation of an entity known as God, he must obviously be of a higher degree of organization than his product. Thus you have more than doubled the size of the original problem, and have taken the first step on a diverging infinite regress. William of Ockham pointed out as recently as your fourteenth century that entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily. I cannot therefore understand why this debate continues.

The speaker here is "Starglider," a robotic alien probe that passes through our galaxy on an information-gathering mission. Clarke means Starglider to be an immensely intelligent entity, a sentient logical computer with the accumulated knowledge of a thousand intelligent species at its disposal. As much as I admire Clarke and enjoy his writings, I find it difficult that a super-intelligent being would propound such a sophomoric argument for the non-existence of God (and I assume that Clarke means Starglider to be speaking for himself here). Starglider's statement first jumped out at me because of its conspicuous similarities with Dawkins' 747 argument, against which I have been voluminously blogging lately. Indeed, the argument is downright Dawkinsian in its cheeky assumptions about its own cogency, as if it decisively ends the debate.

[In previous posts I introduced Richard Dawkins' "Ultimate 747 Argument" against the existence of God. Dawkins has recently made this argument the centerpiece of his book, The God Delusion. In my first post I pointed out that the argument suffers from a debilitating lack of clarity. In the second post I attempted to construct the argument formally so that we would have an easier time of dealing with it. In my last post I presented my first counterargument. Now I present my second. All page references are from Dawkins, Richard, The God Delusion (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2006). One quote is from Dawkins, Richard, The Blind Watchmaker (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, Inc., 1996).]

Counterargument 2: God is Not Necessarily Complex

Recall that on Dawkins’ system of probability, an entity’s improbability of existence is directly proportional to the level of complexity that entity possesses. The first three steps of 747m are:

(i) All entities (potential or actual) possess organized complexity (C) in degrees.

(ii) For any degree of C possessed by any entity E, however, E’s possessing C entails E’s possessing improbability of existence (I) in a degree that is proportional to the degree of C possessed by E.

(iii) For any degree of I possessed by E, however, E’s possessing I entails E’s possessing a level of explanatory requirement (R) in a degree that is proportional to the degree of I possessed by E.

All this means is that, for example, my 1996 Nissan Pathfinder is more complex, and therefore more improbable, and therefore requires more explanation for its existence, than a three pound rock. For this second counterargument, however, we are going to focus on premise (vi) from 747m:

(vi) For any entity E1 that brings about the existence of entity E2, the degree of C possessed by E1 must necessarily be greater than the degree of C possessed by E2.

And (xv) from 747e:

(xv) However, if God created biological life then He would necessarily be more complex than even the most complex example of biological life.

Also, 747s can’t succeed without accepting either (vi) or (xv) as an implicit assumption, so it seems that this premise is crucial to the overall success of every version of the 747 argument.

Jeffrey Lowder of Infidels fame poses an interesting question to theists. He relates a story by the atheist philosopher Walter Sinnott-Armstrong. After his debate with Bill Craig, Sinnott-Armstrong received an email from a theist calling him

a "small minded" "egotist," "an arrogant fool," and a "pompous PhD," then added "it is pathetic that the College allows you in a classroom," and "That you don't [believe in God], I am sorry to have to inform you, calls into question your intelligence." Then it concluded, "Please be assured that this theist will impartially consider any persuasive response you can offer and, as such, I look forward to continuing this dialogue with you."

Lowder then poses his question to Christians, and to evangelicals in particular:

What are your thoughts about the email sent to Sinnott-Armstrong? Do you condone the email? Do you condemn it? Or are you indifferent? Do you agree with Sinnott-Armstrong that "Many theists feel perfectly justified in abusing atheists"? Why?

I'll respond to Lowder's question, but first I'd like to point out that this sort of behavior runs both ways. Christians make inane, cruel, vitriolic, and incorrigibly stupid statements to their ideological opponents at an astonishingly high rate. But there are atheists who do it too. See here for a good example of one of those enlightened brights sharing his special brand of intellectual clarity with us knuckle-dragging theists.

[In previous posts I introduced Richard Dawkins' "Ultimate 747 Argument" against the existence of God. Dawkins has recently made this argument the centerpiece of his book, The God Delusion. In my first post I pointed out that the argument suffers from a debilitating lack of clarity. In the second post I attempted to construct the argument formally so that we would have an easier time of dealing with it. In this post I present my first counterargument to Dawkins' claims.]

Counterargument 1: The 747 Argument Fails to Show that Theistic Belief is Irrational

First, Dawkins understands his argument to be a very powerful ontological or metaphysical argument, outlined in the last post as 747m. The problem here is that even in this version Dawkins is mixing his metaphysics with his epistemology in an unacceptable way. Consider premise (iii). Recall that (iii) was:

(iii) For any degree of I possessed by E, however, E’s possessing I entails E’s possessing a level of explanatory requirement (R) in a degree that is proportional to the degree of I possessed by E.

Furthermore, according to premise (iv) the degree of R possessed by E is directly proportional to the degree of I possessed by E. But (iii) contains a subtle and not entirely legitimate assumption. To understand this, consider the following two propositions:

(HI) It is highly improbable that God exists.

(HR) It is highly irrational to believe that God exists.

The conclusion of Dawkins’ argument (or at least to 747m and 747s) is (HI). But (HI) is a metaphysical claim, while (HR) is an epistemological claim. It is clear that Dawkins thinks that (HI) somehow entails or at least implies (HR).

The atheists over at the Internet Infidels are hosting a series of philosophy of religion debates by leading philosophers. God or Blind Nature? Philosophers Debate the Evidence is edited by Paul Draper and ought to be very interesting. The first debate on the physicalism/dualism question in the philosophy of mind is already up, and there are some interesting ones coming down the line, including Paul Draper vs. Al Plantinga on "Evil and Evolution" and Quentin Smith vs. Robin Collins on "Science and the Cosmos."

[HT: John Depoe]

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors, so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light.

- Carl Sagan [HT to Space.com]

The above image is a photo of Earth seen from a distance of 4 billion miles. It was taken by the Voyager 1 space probe in 1991. I haven't read Pale Blue Dot, the book by Sagan from which the corresponding quote is taken, but if the passage above is a good representation of the ideas that Sagan presents in the book, then I think we can identify two philosophical assumptions on his part that are of dubious merit.

[Note: In a previous post I introduced Richard Dawkins' "Ultimate 747 Argument" against the existence of God. Dawkins has recently made this argument the centerpiece of his book, The God Delusion, but in my previous post I pointed out that the argument suffers from a debilitating lack of clarity. In this second post I attempt to construct the argument formally so that we will have an easier time of dealing with it. In order to ensure that I treat Dawkins' argument fairly I have formulated three different versions of his argument. In future posts I will show how theists can respond.]

The Metaphysical Version of the 747 Argument

Dawkins’ explicit claim is that the 747 Argument is aimed at (G), the proposition that such a being as God actually exists. If so, then the argument is essentially about metaphysics. It purports to show the extremely high improbability that a certain type of being actually exists. If we assume that his argument is against (G), and that his comments referring to certain theistic design arguments are only incidental to this primary aim, then we have an argument that looks like the following:

Here is an observation by Victor Reppert:

One interesting point about many ethical philosophies is that while they make no reference to a theistic God, they do seem to be grounded in metaphysics, and the kind of metaphysics at work is one that a modern naturalist would have trouble accepting. Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics are prime examples. Plato's moral philosophy is based on the Form of the Good, which shares certain characteristics with the theistic God, and which can be known through a process of recollection where we recollect what we were aware of in a pre-existence. Aristotle is based on the idea of an inherent purpose for human life, and Stoic ethics is a response to Stoic metaphysics. No one seems to be suggesting that ethics will be all just the same regardless of metaphysics. Even if a personal God isn't required for ethics, doesn't it seem plausible that at the very least some sort of metaphysics is required that most naturalists today would have a hard time accepting. Is it reasonable to reject what Kant called a metaphysics of morals?

There's a good discussion going on in the comments section of Reppert's post. I think Reppert is right on this. The old apologetic claim that you can't have morals without God is not exactly right. The naturalist does indeed have some philosophical options for believing in a true, objective moral system in the absence of the Lawgiver of traditional theism. He can be a Platonist, for example, and there are other cognitivist ethical theories that posit some objective ground of moral facts that fit nicely with naturalism broadly defined (see this book, which I recently started but have unfortunately had to set aside, for a nice roundup of the current metaethical scene). But Reppert's point is that the available options don't fit too well with "modern" naturalism, by which I assume he means the form of naturalism that is dominant in the sciences, which is very often physicalist in character. When you start talking about abstract "facts" on a naturalistic worldview - facts like, "A square has four right angles," and, "It is wrong to toss little Jimmy into the well for laughs" - you have to do some wiggling to claim that the facts represent objective non-mental realities. A naturalist can't put a square, for example, in a test tube and study it. He can't do it with the moral fact proscribing the tossing of little Jimmy into the well either. So if he is going to say that these things are real in the same way that the chair I am sitting on is real, he has to monkey with his metaphysics so that immaterial realities can co-exist with the material realities.

[Note: All page references are from Dawkins, Richard, The God Delusion (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2006).]

In his recent book, The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins claims that he has formulated an argument against the existence of God that decisively trumps all challengers. Dawkins, the Oxford biologist and plucky standard-bearer for militant anti-theism, is supremely confident that his ‘Ultimate 747 Argument’ against the existence of God is not only successful in its aim of debunking theism, but that it is practically immune to any argument that can be brought against it. Indeed, Dawkins thinks the argument is more convincing than even the argument from evil, and that, “this argument … demonstrates that God, while not technically disprovable, is very very improbable indeed.” (109) Thus Dawkins takes his argument to be a particularly compelling inductive argument, one that shows the extreme improbability of God. In his view, this argument

is indeed a very strong and, I suspect, unanswerable argument … The argument from improbability, properly deployed, comes close to proving that God does not exist. My name for the statistical demonstration that God almost certainly does not exist is the Ultimate Boeing 747 gambit. (113)

The conclusion of this argument, “is close to being terminally fatal to the God Hypothesis.” (61) In this series of posts based on a recent paper I wrote, I want to show that Dawkins' confidence in this argument is wildly misplaced, and that the theist's only trouble in answering it will be in determining which of the several available options will do the best job.

As much as I dislike the idea, it's time to start blogging on Richard Dawkins and his anti-theisic crusade. I'm currently putting the final touches on a paper critiquing Dawkins' "Ultimate 747 Argument" against God's existence that he so loudly trumpets in The God Delusion. When I finish it I'll put it on the still under-represented Writings section. Until then I thought I'd start posting summaries of ideas I formulate in the paper.

Today our topic is Dawkins' treatment of arguments from religious experience as they are used to (1) justify belief in God or (2) "prove" God's existence. I'm not sure Dawkins understands the difference between these two purposes, but I'll set that aside for now. Dawkins thinks he can do away with arguments from religious experience in a mere six pages (if you find this hubristic, consider that he spends even fewer pages on Aquinas' five ways). However, even in these six pages there isn't much of an argument. Dawkins' contention is that the human brain has very sophisticated "simulation software," and that somehow spiritual experiences are manufactured by this fine piece of biological engineering. Here is a characteristic bit of Dawkinsian wisecrackery on the subject:

You say you have experienced God directly? Well, some people have experienced a pink elephant, but that probably doesn’t impress you. Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper, distinctly heard the voice of Jesus telling him to kill women, and he was locked up for life. George W. Bush says that God told him to invade Iraq (a pity God didn’t vouchsafe him a revelation that there were no weapons of mass destruction). Individuals in asylums think they are Napoleon or Charlie Chaplin, or that the entire world is conspiring against them, or that they can broadcast their thoughts into other people’s heads. We humour them but don’t take their internally revealed beliefs seriously, mostly because not many people share them. Religious experiences are different only in that the people who claim them are numerous.

Brandon Watson: Hume and the Infamous Footnote

Here's an interesting metaphysical exercise: imagine a possible world W where nothing exists, and by "nothing exists" I just mean that in W the standard furniture of the universe is absent: physical things like gravity, planets, and human bodies and personal things like you, me, and God. Now, as Christians we will say that no world can exist without God, since He is the necessary Being who grounds all other being. This is right, but I'm setting it aside for this exercise. Our question is this: would it be right to say of this world that "nothing exists" as I have just done?

Maybe. But to answer the question we need to tackle the sticky issue of the ontological status of abstract entities such as numbers, propositions, and certain types of properties. We are tempted to say of W that it is truly an empty world, that is, that it is right to say of it that "nothing exists." But consider the number seven; would it exist in W? Certainly there would be no entity in W that would instantiate what we might call a seven-related property, and a seven-related property is a property like having seven parts. In W there wouldn't be, say, a mousetrap made up of seven parts, and thus there wouldn't be anything exemplifying the property of having seven parts. Further, since nothing physical like a mousetrap exists in W, then no seven-related property is instantiated at all. But again, would the number seven itself exist?

Consider the following argument for God's existence:

1. Whatever begins to exist has a cause.
2. The universe began to exist.
3. Therefore, the universe has a cause.

This is the famous kalam version of the cosmological argument for God's existence, popularized in recent decades by Bill Craig and over which much ink has been spilled by theists and atheists alike. The question is this: is the religious believer acting rationally in accepting the above argument in the support structure for his belief in God? Notice the question is not, "Does the argument succeed?" but, "Is it rational to view the argument as supporting theistic belief?" The atheists generally argue against kalam by claiming that the argument fails: by challenging one of the premises, or claiming that the conclusion doesn't follow from the premises, or by pointing out that even if the argument is sound, it doesn't prove that the cause of the universe is anything like what theists call "God," just to name a few.

I think the second question is more appropriate, not because of any glaring flaw in kalam but because the last few hundred years of philosophy has shown us that it is difficult to achieve indubitable certainty on any matter from any argument. It's difficult to produce a rock-solid argument for the existence of the external world, or for past events, or for the existence of other minds, just to name a few very popular examples. Why think that God's existence can be proved to any greater extent than these? Now, maybe God, being the ground of all existence, can be proved in just such a way by just such an argument. But maybe not. It seems that the whole of Scripture doesn't point to people coming to knowledge of God by arguments to His existence but by encounter with Him directly or with His attributes indirectly.

Bill Vallicella has an interesting post on why, in the end, metaphysics is more important than logic. He deals with Fred Sommers' turn away from the former to the latter because he thought it was somehow a superior field of philosophical inquiry. But I think the Maverick is right here:

At the end of the day, how important is it to prove that the inference embedded in 'Some girl is loved by every boy so every boy loves a girl' really is capturable, pace the dogmatic partisans of modern predicate logic, by a refurbished traditional term logic? ... As one draws one's last breath, which is more salutary: to be worried about a silly bagatelle such as the one just mentioned, or to be contemplating God and the soul?

This reminds me of something the late Ron Nash said in one of his introductory textbooks. He was discussing the analytic turn in twentieth century philosophy and the suspicion analytic philosophers often held for "system building." He writes:

During my master's and doctor's studies in philosophy, I took many courses from such analytic philosophers. I remember spending one semester examining a single sentence from the writings of David Hume. I spent another semester exploring the two-word expression "I can." I look back with admiration at the creativity of the professors, even though I remember many days in which I felt certain there were better ways to spend my time.

I understand the sentiment here. Neither Nash nor Vallicella are against logical or linguistic analysis (as one look at the Maverick's blog can tell you). They just (rightly, in my opinion) think that there is no good reason to prefer logical questions over metaphysical ones. Linguistic and logical analysis may seem to be more fruitful and accurate methods of inquiry, but they really aren't, and metaphysics - which is more likely to deal with traditional religious questions such as sin, salvation, and eternal life - is actually more important. We are reminded here of William James' notion that religious questions present us with forced options. We may not be certain about the answer to the questions, but their (potentially eternal) importance forces us to make a decision one way or the other.

I think this point is important for Christian philosophers. I see a tendency for some young Christians who want to do philosophy start out full of energy and vigor for being Christian philosophers. That is, they want to do philosophy to the glory of God and to provide rational support for the faith. But then they do their M.A. or their Ph.D. at a state school and their fire for the faith gets dimmer and dimmer, until in the end they may still call themselves a Christian philosopher, but really they're just a regular philosopher who happens to attend Sunday services. They busy themselves with current problems and issues in analytic philosophy, most of which are (1) not concerned with or (2) downright dismissive of religious issues. And this happens, I think, because of what Vallicella was talking about: they steep themselves in the received academic wisdom, which - since the abandonment of Hegelianism by Russell and others around the turn of the century - sees logical and linguistic analysis as superior to religion and metaphysics.

And I think this is tragic. These Christian philosophers aren't apostasizing by any means (although some of them do apostasize, and others get dangerously close), they're just becoming useless for the kingdom. They don't want to risk their academic necks by forcefully arguing for theism or Christianity, and so they stay in their safe philosophical ghettos. But I think they have forgotten an important notion that comes from (of all places) the writings of Karl Marx: the point is not to understand the world, but to change it. Now, I think we Christians can appreciate the point here while promoting a very different type of change for the world than foisting the silly economic system of Marxism upon it. As Christian philosophers, we should seek both to understand the world by doing philosophy and to change it by advancing the kingdom of God. To abandon the latter for supposedly good philosophical reasons will not excuse us on the day of judgment. God is interested in the soundness of syllogisms, but He's more interested in the salvation of souls.

A Happy Easter to all on this Resurrection Sunday. Two things, one related to this great day and one not so much:

• Johnny Dee has a few nice quotes on the Resurrection.
• Here is Wikipedia's list of Calvinist philosophers. The list is depressingly short, and I would characterize a few folks on the list more as Christian apologists than academic philosophers (Schaeffer, Van Til). Of course those two things are not mutually exclusive, and being an apologist rather than an academic philosopher is not necessarily a bad thing. Give me a page of Schaeffer over a thousand tomes of Rorty any day.

My friend Aaron Hernandez, who has degrees in both biology and philosophy, recently took offense with me for something I said in this post:

Biologists do not often make good philosophers, and vice versa.

Alright Aaron, I grant the point. This statement doesn't seem fair. There is nothing in the intellectual makeup of biologists qua biologists that prevents them from being good philosophers. Indeed, intellectuals cross over disciplines quite often and have valuable things to say. So perhaps I should qualify my statement a bit, and say rather that a professional biologist, untrained in philosophy, is not as likely to make as good of an argument on any philosophical subject as a trained philosopher is. Likewise, a professional philosopher, untrained in biology, is even less likely to do biology successfully than a trained biologist.

The context of this statement was Richard Dawkins' critique of theism in his book The God Delusion. Dawkins fancies his arguments against belief in God as being devastating to theism and unanswerable by theism's proponents. But Dawkins, as I hope to show in a paper I'm writing, fails at this Herculean task he has set out for himself. His infamous '747 Argument' against God's existence is interesting, but lacks the logical potency that he thinks it has. The theist has multiple avenues of response, and I think most of us are justified in passing right over it as not being especially compelling.

So, again Aaron, I apologize for the statement. I needed to clarify what I meant, that it was the likes of Dawkins and P. Z. Myers that I was criticizing, not biologists who actually know something about philosophy.