God or No God? Schieber v. Symington

A Christian walks into a debate full of himself, giving a very one-sided story, and dissolving into emotional appeals... stop me if you've heard this one before.

Recently Justin Schieber of the Reasonable Doubts podcast met with Scott Symington to debate the question God or No God? While Justin serves on the advisory board of the Michigan chapter of the Center For Inquiry, co-hosts a popular podcast examining religious and philosophical claims, and has prior debating experience, the most I've been able to find about Scott is that he has a degree in educational leadership and currently works as a "medical physicist". During his opening speech, Scott admits this is his first debate, yet it doesn't prevent him from making some rather bold moves.

Schieber begins by noting that the god he wants to argue against is the god of classical theism, eternal, all-powerful, all-knowing, and perfectly loving. To make his case, he contends that three observations about our world are more likely if metaphysical naturalism is true, as opposed to supernaturalism being true. Metaphysical naturalism is the view that the natural world is all that exists - there are no gods, no angels, no souls, no afterlife. The three observations Justin puts forward are non-resistant unbelievers, pointless suffering, and the hostility to life in the universe.

Scott begins by attacking the 'negativity' of atheism, denouncing the fact that non-believers rarely propose explanations, or a positive worldview, of their own. This criticism is often directed at atheists, but over the years I've increasingly come to suspect that it may be disingenuous. Do we not know that it isn't true that any old suggestion is better than none at all? If we think about the pre-scientific idea of illness being caused by demons, it's easy to see how certain hypotheses can be harmful and may distract inquiry from where it needs to go to find the truth. There is likewise nothing inconsistent about refuting a hypothesis before one has an equally compelling alternative to put in its place.

Believers in the paranormal make the same criticism of skeptics, insisting that all we do is tear things down. Of course, skeptics frequently do offer explanations for paranormal phenomena, such as a trick of lighting, a lens flare on a camera, or fraud, and complex psychological ideas like cognitive dissonance and terror management theory are hallmarks of their work. Nonetheless, these alternatives seem rather mundane and unexciting compared to ghosts, aliens, government cover-ups, and the like. What believers are concerned about is not really that skeptics propose no 'positive' explanations, but that the explanations being discarded are the ones they want to be true. Justin gave three observations in his opening speech, and he offered the explanation he thinks is best suited to them. Perhaps the actual root of Scott's complaint is just that it differs from his own view.

One of the more astounding comments made by Symington is that if something is outside of nature, it's supernatural "by definition". Certainly this is the understanding of some people, but it is confronted by the long-debated problem of what we mean by nature. It's commonly thought that the natural world is synonymous with the physical world, but not all naturalists are physicalists. Does nature include just what the laws of physics describe? If there is another universe outside our own, would it be part of nature, too? Philosopher John Shook has cataloged nine varieties of naturalism, including reductive physicalism, liberal scientism, and eliminative pluralism, to name a few. [1] There are naturalists who prefer a strict definition and naturalists who prefer a broad definition. Some even define naturalism as the view that nothing supernatural exists, which would make Symington's simplistic statement circular.

The problem is that Scott needs his naive definition of supernatural to make his first cause of the universe resemble something more like a god and less like... well, a mysterious cause. Countless times throughout the debate, he claims that "all" of science shows there was a beginning to the universe. Although Justin counters by noting that the spacetime boundary is better thought of as the point where our current scientific understanding breaks down, by citing the reservations of physicist Sean Carroll, and questioning the usefulness of the god concept in explaining our origins, Scott plows relentlessly ahead, as if enough repeated assertions will make his one-sided portrayal of a hotly disputed interpretation of science into an indisputable reality. When Justin references a Hebrew scholar who argues that Genesis 1:1 shows a creation from pre-existing material rather than creation ex nihilo, Symington contests that the Hebrew words shamayim and aretz constitute a compound word that means "all natural things in the universe."

I haven't been able to locate any sources confirming Scott on this, but it may be a moot point anyway. As John Walton, Professor of Old Testament at Wheaton, explains:

...the lexical analysis suggests that the essence of the word that the text has chosen, bara', concerns bringing heaven and earth into existence by focusing on operation through organization and assignment of roles and functions... Matter was not the concern of the author of Genesis. The authors concerns were much like those in the ancient Near East. There the greatest exercise of the power of the gods was not demonstrated in the manufacture of matter, but in the fixing of destinies. [2]

If Professor Walton is correct, the act of creating heaven and earth was not seen as bringing everything into existence out of nothing, but something more like assigning a role to, or organizing, heaven and earth, perhaps as separate realms formed out of pre-existing material. Surely this sounds like pure heresy to the religiously conservative, but the fact that it also accords with the cosmological beliefs of other ancient Near Eastern cultures - which have been shown to have had an influence on the Bible's cosmology, despite Mr. Symington's careless dismissal of the Epic of Gilgamesh - makes it hard to refute without falling into special pleading.

Another argument Scott hammers on repeatedly is the resurrection argument. He refers at least twice to a survey of scholars taken from 1975 to the "present" that establishes four facts. Though he doesn't mention any names or further details, the survey is clearly one conducted by Gary Habermas and published in the Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus in 2005. [3] To my knowledge, Habermas has not published any recent updates of his study, which would mean the data is nine years old now, but there's plenty of better objections to it.

For starters, the survey doesn't poll a random sample of scholars, instead it chronicles scholarly publications on the subject of the resurrection. It includes articles in English, German, and French, yet there is no exact number given for how many Habermas documents in his study. He mentions that there are "more than 1400" publications on the resurrection, and then says in the next sentence that he "tracked these texts". The only figure Gary provides on any of the so-called trends in scholarly consensus is that "approximately 75%" of scholars - from some number that may or may not be 1400, who have published articles on the resurrection in English, German, or French between 1975 and 2005 - favor "one or more" of the arguments for the empty tomb chronicled in the study. Needless to say, this flimsy excuse for research, which holds up so many resurrection arguments made by apologists, is rife with problems.

Last but certainly not least, Scott fills out the debate with lots of digs at Justin. When he's not decrying speculation and subjectivity at every turn, Mr. Symington is accusing his opponent of thinking he 'knows better than god', of getting overly emotional, and of sitting in god's lap "to slap him in the face". He seems to think that only alternative explanations for every claim he makes, meeting all the evidence in all the right ways he wants, would be able to challenge the Christian worldview. Though I can appreciate the frustration of dealing with someone who just wants to criticize everything you say, this is not always what the debate between theists and atheists looks like, and it is not how things go in "God or No God?" Schieber presented his own arguments for atheism and addressed many of Scott's claims from a variety of angles, but Scott was apparently unsatisfied, even while he let plenty of important points slip by him unanswered.

Overall, this one was a clear win for Justin, though I think he could have responded better to the resurrection argument and fine-tuning. Scott's performance is exactly what Schieber hints at a couple times: arrogant, disrespectful to opposing views, and downright juvenile at times. He reminds me of the youth pastor who relies on bad jokes, over-confidence, and thinly-veiled ridicule to keep the attention of his audience. Hopefully this first debate will be a learning experience for him.

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Sources:

1. John R. Shook, Naturalism and Science (2007).

2. John Walton, Ancient Near Eastern Thought and the Old Testament (2006), p. 183.
3. Gary Habermas, Resurrection Research from 1975 to the Present (2005). 

Stop Pretending Your Standard is God's Standard

It always amuses me when Christians try to defend their beliefs by essentially belittling their own powers of reason and observation. 'I don't know if I trust myself enough to think I can figure it all out on my own.' 'I think it takes tremendous faith to believe you know better than god.' While statements like these largely straw-man the atheist position, they also reveal one major assumption behind most forms of theism that actually played a pretty big role in my own loss of faith. 

Most recently, I heard David Robertson give voice to this assumption in his second debate with Matt Dillahunty on the UK Christian radio show Unbelievable. David said he doesn't judge Jesus by his standards, he judges Jesus by Jesus' standards. When Matt rightly called this out as circular, noting that even Satan would look right by Satan's own standards, David disagreed and denied that he's in a position to judge, being that he can't trust himself absolutely. Fortunately, he has god's standard to rely on instead - or so David thinks.

The problem is that such a position is entirely untenable. Whatever one believes about divine revelation, it cannot be the case that revelation is ever given in a completely uninterpreted, unfiltered, and direct way. The process of revelation, whether denoting anything true or not, always involves a sender and receiver; divine beings (god, angels, etc.) send revelations, which we human beings receive. To suppose otherwise is not just to move beyond revelation, but to suppose that there is no real distinction between humans and the divine, that we are synonymous with god in some sense. Perhaps, like Bishop George Berkeley thought, we are only ideas in the mind of god. Of course, such a radical view has plenty of its own problems, not least of which would be asking which divine mind we do inhabit.

If revelation has to be transmitted to us, by its nature, then what guarantee is there that it's transmitted accurately? More to the point, even if it is transmitted accurately, what guarantee is there that we've received it accurately? We know of many cases of transmitted information getting 'lost in translation' - radio signals, written texts, cultural norms, computer codes, even genetic material. Where there are senders and receivers, there are often errors occurring at several points along the way. Mr. Robertson likely finds it plausible that believers in other faiths might have malfunctioning receptors, could have been sent a corrupted message, or perhaps received their beliefs from a dubious source. What makes him think, against these alternatives, that he has truly received god's standard through divine revelation?

As I'd bet, there are only two responses someone like David would give. His revelation is trustworthy because god has protected its transmission, or his revelation is trustworthy because it has the sort of evidence and reasons it would need to be trustworthy. If the latter is the case, David must either admit there is, in fact, some personal standard he's using to make judgments about revelation, or he must continue to deny this and, in effect, retreat to the former response. However, the former response is nothing but an assumption - an article of faith - until support is given for it. When that support is provided, it will either be based on god, as ascertained by revelation, or it will have to be based on something independent of god. So round and round it will go till Robertson arbitrarily decides to stop questioning and rely on faith, or till he decides to join the rest of us who recognize the inescapable nature of perception, and finally starts talking standards of belief in a manner we can actually understand and assess.

I want to be clear, though, that I am not insinuating that we should fully trust our own senses to guide us to the truth. The problems I've noted as arising from methods of transmission arise in more areas than just religious revelation. There are many conceivable situations where it's not a good idea to depend on our intuitions and common sense, and psychology tells us there is much about the way our minds work that can cast doubt on the accuracy of such easy means of decision-making. Yet if we take these situations to indicate a general unreliability about ourselves, the conclusion that necessarily follows is not Christian theism, but solipsism. If we can't trust ourselves to reason about matters involving god, we certainly can't trust ourselves to reason about divine revelation. Nonetheless, a great many theists do, including David Robertson. The irony is that even his statement about not being in a position to judge Jesus by his own standard is itself a judgment call, as it is to judge that the sentence 'Jesus is good' comes from a divine source.

What I find particularly appalling about all of this is not the flawed reasoning, or even the hypocrisy behind it, but the way Christians like David use it as a platform on which to exalt themselves in false humility. The obvious implication is that someone who follows the perfect standard of an all-knowing, all-good god is in a better epistemic position than someone who doesn't. Though I can't deny this in principle, I can deny the naive substitution of one's own standard with 'god's standard', as Robertson attempts to get away with. If one wants to claim that the rule they live by is divine, let them state their case and support it with reason and evidence. If one wants to make the less fantastical claim that they try to make their own standard comport with a divine rule of law, this, too, at least is fertile ground for discussion.

But, please, stop pretending that your standard is god's standard rather than your own.

Bill Nye, Ken Ham, and Starting Points

Initially I had no intention of watching last night's creation versus evolution debate between Ken Ham and Bill Nye. I have listened to more than a fair share of other such debates, read numerous books on both sides of the argument, and - perhaps most importantly - I am very familiar with Ken Ham's position. I used to frequent Answers in Genesis when I was a believer, and I've watched scores of videos deconstructing Ken's claims. I knew Mr. Ham-fisted would basically hit the same five or six notes he always does, with precious little deviation:

• There are gaps in the fossil record.
• Evolution cannot explain the origin of life.
• Evolution cannot explain the origin of the universe.
• Evolution cannot explain the laws of logic.
• 'You weren't there, were you?'
• The Bible has all the answers.

 

After finding myself with some free time, and seeing friends commenting on the debate online, I decided to fire up the stream and check it out. I only caught things from the rebuttals and on, but the first words I heard out of Ken Ham's mouth told me I hadn't missed anything. "I would like Bill to explain where the laws of logic come from." Yes, Ken, we know you would. You're at the wrong place for that, though.

Evolutionary theory is not a theory about the fundamental foundations of reality. It's not a theory about the nature of logic, even. It's also not a theory about the origin of life from non-living matter, the origin of the universe, or the origin and meaning of morality. As everyone who stayed awake in Biology class knows, the theory of evolution is a theory about the diversity of life. It explains why there are so many different lifeforms, including us. It tells us that random mutations in our genetic material are 'selected' by mother nature in ways that favor our survival. Those organisms that miss out on mutations that allow others to endure a hostile environment, or to stand a better chance of finding a mate, do not reproduce and eventually die out. Different species emerge when one group of organisms evolves to the point that they can no longer produce viable offspring with the other group(s).

Now, of course that's a very cursory and simplified explanation of evolutionary theory, but there it is. The theory doesn't purport to answer how the first cell came about, how the cosmos began, or anything of the sort. There are other scientific theories attempting to resolve those questions, but evolution by natural selection is not one of them. In making such demands of evolution, Mr. Ham-bone only showed that he doesn't actually understand the theory he's pretending to refute.

But consider what Ken is proposing in place of evolution. His "theory" (which is not a theory in any scientific sense, as Bill Nye adequately demonstrated in the debate) is not simply a competing explanation for the diversity of life. Creationism does purport to answer questions about the origin of life, the origin of the universe, the origin of morality, the nature of logic, the fundamental foundations of reality, and lots more. The creationist claim isn't just that god made humans, or that god made all living matter. There is no room for alternate possibilities in creationism; it can't be that god made life, but we don't know where matter came from, or that god created the cosmos, but logical absolutes just are brute facts. If you permit any alternative explanations, you leave space for the puzzling question of why one and not the other. Why can't other things be brute facts, too? Why it isn't acceptable to say we don't know where the universe came from and leave it at that?

However, creationists are not so concerned with how god created any particular thing as much as they seem concerned with that he created it. Creationism is the bizarre "theory" of everything that offers no explanatory mechanisms for what it pretends to explain - indeed, it even seems incapable of providing them! The Bible might say that god spoke and the world came into being, but this bald assertion could hardly be called a mechanism for explaining the actual process of divine creation. For one reason, it makes no sense of the fact that we find layers upon layers upon layers of working parts inside everything in the universe, down to nearly inconceivable subatomic scales. If a watchmaker could construct a watch simply by speaking it into existence, it seems absurd to think he would still bother to do it in such a way as to assemble gears, springs, glass, and all the individual parts into the whole. Why not just create a magic, irreducible watch?

Any answer to the question can only be speculation, no less conjectural than entertaining an answer to how many angels can fit on the head of a pin. And here is where the real trouble begins, because with no mechanism to make predictions with, or to test and experiment with, creationism is dead on arrival. It's not science, nor is it a theory. In fact, I don't see how it qualifies as any good kind of explanation at all, even to the "who" question. When archaeologists ask themselves who built Stonehenge, they don't just consider identities of different ancient peoples, they consider the resources that were available to them, the knowledge they would have possessed, and, most importantly, how they might have used their resources and knowledge to construct the monument. Unfortunately, the construction methods used at Stonehenge are still a matter of widespread debate, and so too, as we would expect, is the identity of the builders. Even though there are many old legends attributing the site to different sources, the question of who built Stonehenge remains as speculative as how they built it.

This is what amused me about Ken Ham's frequent appeal to "starting points" during the debate. His starting point he proudly declared to be the Bible - a collection of old documents that have been given countless interpretations over the centuries, which are known to have been redacted and borrowed from earlier stories, [Origins of the Old Testament] which show evidence of anachronism, [Finkelstein, The Bible Unearthed; Cline, From Eden to Exile] and which have all the hallmarks of a pre-scientific worldview. [Paul Tobin, The Physical Sciences] On this foundation, Ham wants to build his case for his "theory" of everything that is incapable of providing explanatory mechanisms for its claims. It's not hard to see why this is an inadequate starting point... unless you're wearing Ken's "biblical glasses", or dogma blinders as I call them.

Ham-ster man's other two notes, about the gaps in the fossil record and indirect observation, go to show that in addition to having no clue about what evolutionary theory posits, he also has no clue about what is important in a sufficiently explanatory theory. I would like to see him ask a homicide detective if he was present for the murder he's solved on indirect observations. Ken seems to have this crazy idea that eyewitness testimony is the strongest kind of evidence one can have for anything, and while I can't help but suspect it has something to do with his faith in the orthodox view of the gospels, I can say there are tons of studies by Elizabeth Loftus and others showing that eyewitness memory is, in fact, quite easily fooled. Likewise, the gaps in the fossil record as not as significant a challenge to evolution as Ken would like us to believe. [Kathleen Hunt, Transitional Vertebrate Fossils FAQ] Even generally speaking, the fact that a theory cannot account for absolutely everything it describes, or that it relies on indirect observations, is not going to undermine that theory as badly as it will if there is no working mechanism. Mechanisms allow us to make predictions and test claims in ways that can resolve apparent gaps and strengthen our confidence in a theory.

I should say I do think we all bring our own unique perspectives to the table of discussion and debate, but whether it's accurate to call these "starting points" is another question. Have we come to these points by a priori or a posteriori means? Frankly, I'm less interested in that argument than I am in how you think you can demonstrate the truth of your claims. Even if you want to start with an assumption and try to show how much sense everything makes if we grant it, you still need to state your case and expect that assumption to be questioned. When Ken Ham calls the Bible his "axiom", I think he abuses the concept of an axiom. The Bible is not self-authenticating in any sensible way, and there are, as I've already noted, quite a few problems with it.

On the other hand, it seems to me that there can be axioms that are far more defensible. Ken ironically asked Bill to account for the laws of logic, but the law of noncontradiction and the law of identity can be taken as self-evident axioms in a way that the Bible cannot. If one were to try and show the law of noncontradiction to be false, for example, she would only wind up affirming it. To meaningfully undermine the law of noncontradiction, you would have to assume that the law could not be both true and false simultaneously. But this assumption is what the law of noncontradiction states. There is no analogous manner in which refuting the Bible would be to affirm the Bible, and if the laws of logic are conceivably self-evident in this way, there is actually no need to account for them - they account for themselves.

What all could be built on these sorts of axioms is a subject for another time, and it's important to remember that the creation/evolution debate is a different ballgame. While I was at first slightly perturbed by Nye's refusal to even acknowledge Ham's red herrings, perhaps it was a good move to not let things descend into a deeply philosophical quibble that would've been ultimately irrelevant. Evolution in no way conflicts with, or establishes, the laws of logic, for reasons already given.

Nye did do an excellent job of showing that he really knows science and the scientific method, however, and Ken couldn't help but preach to the converted, since it's all he knows how to do. In a debate where science is meant to play so eminent a role, Ken only hurt himself by appealing to scriptural authority and to vague individual authorities, rather than keeping the discussion centered on facts and evidence. But then again, after all we've seen that Mr. Ham doesn't know, it shouldn't be surprising for me to say that I don't think he knows what makes facts reliable facts, and what makes evidence good evidence. To quote mine a passage from a very old book, if one were to write down all that Ken Ham doesn't know, "I suppose that even the whole world would not have room for the books that would be written."

My Thoughts on the Craig v. Harris Debate

In the recent debate between William Lane Craig and Sam Harris, I was pleasantly surprised to see Craig cast out of his comfort zone at a few points - something that rarely seems to happen in the debates he has participated in. The question for this debate was: "Are the foundations of moral values natural or supernatural?" Craig's position on morality is that there is no objective basis for moral values apart from god. Amusingly, he uses a very abstract idea of god, though he is an Evangelical Christian, and he tries to wiggle his way out of challenges to the moral character of his god by semantically stating that the issue is "moral ontology" (what is moral), not "moral epistemology" (how we know it's moral).

My problem with this is that epistemology seems like it has to be involved in a discussion about where the foundations of moral values lie. Even in ontologically considering morals, we deal with the issue of why we think certain things are moral and why others are not. That was the question of the debate that Craig should have dealt with - how do we know moral values are supernatural as opposed to natural? But instead of making his own positive case for divine morality, he spent the majority of the debate criticizing Harris' view and dissecting his 'moral landscape.' Here's the kicker, though: if you demonstrate that moral values are not natural, you still have to demonstrate that they are supernatural. It could be that they're neither.

Obviously, I think Craig failed spectacularly, but what about Harris? Sam is my favorite of the four horsemen of the 'New Atheism', and I have to say I was impressed with him in this debate. Having seen Hitchens bomb miserably in debate with Craig, as well as several other atheists, I didn't have much hope for Harris. But he had a positive argument on his side, which he defended well, and he also made a couple excellent responses to some of Craig's nonsense.

For some time, I've wished that an opponent of Craig in a moral debate would draw attention to the fact that Craig merely defines god as a good and moral being - he provides no evidence, no argument, and no reason to think that a supreme being would have to be good. As Harris poignantly stated, why couldn't it be an evil god? Christian apologists love to talk about god as a moral lawgiver, but defining god into this is just irresponsible, especially when thousands of gods through history have not been moral or lawgivers. Why should we allow Craig to slide this into the definition of god as if it were self-evident? Big kudos to Harris for pointing out this problem in the debate.

Another thing I found amusing was how dismissive and even derogatory Craig was toward Harris' idea of well-being as goodness. In virtually every moral paradigm, though, well-being seems to be at the heart of what is considered good. Harris brilliantly showed that Craig's moral paradigm relies on it too, when he simply asked why hell is a bad place to go to. Craig completely misunderstood the question, saying that Christianity is about recognizing that god is worthy of worship and other warm fuzzy gibberish. But why should we want to avoid hell? Because god is worthy of worship is not an answer. The implication is that hell is a place of horrible suffering and torment, and if you don't want to go there, you should believe. In other words, hell is a bad place because it greatly diminishes well-being. There's nothing else that can be said about the threat of hell. Even if a Christian merely defines hell as eternal separation from god, that still is a harm to well-being according to the Christian worldview. Craig's morality is just as reliant on well-being as Harris'.

A couple of questions during the Q&A also really caught my attention. At one point in the debate, Craig stressed the difference between understanding the meaning of something and understanding how something works (ontology vs. epistemology) by explaining that we understood what the word light meant before we knew it to be electromagnetic radiation. One girl took this analogy a step further and pointed out to Craig that before we knew what light scientifically was, we thought it came from god(s). If we were wrong about that, could he be wrong about the source of morality? Her question wonderfully illustrates what I just said about moral ontology and moral epistemology. In a debate on the source of morality, especially one phrased as a dilemma, it is imperative to make a case for how we know something is moral, not just what morality means under your worldview. After all, like the ancients misunderstood light as a divine phenomenon, perhaps your view of morality could be wrong. Craig replied by again distinguishing between ontology and epistemology, though, utterly ignoring the problem she had pointed out.

In my review of Sam Harris' latest book, I explain that the is-ought distinction is a very misunderstood issue, even by many noteworthy thinkers. Craig raises the is-ought 'problem' during the debate, and later in the Q&A, he is asked if god is either an "is" or an "ought". Craig says god is an "is". The questioner then follows up by asking if any "ought" can be derived from the fact that god exists, or that god "is". Craig says no. The questioner then points out that Craig has a lot of unsupported premises in his arguments. Craig tries to weasel his way out of it, of course, but the student is right. Many of Craig's arguments take the form of god is x, therefore we ought to do y. As one example: god is a moral lawgiver, therefore we should follow god's moral law. The irony is that this wouldn't be a problem for Craig if he understood that the is-ought distinction doesn't actually prohibit us from deriving an "ought" from an "is", but with his current misunderstanding, the student backed him into quite a corner.

Overall, I found the debate very engaging, perhaps one of the best recent debates with Craig that I've seen. I'm still waiting for someone to note that Jesus himself endorsed a morality of a natural kind, though, when he instructed to "do to others what you would have them do to you" in Matthew 7:12. No appeal to the supernatural, just morality as a vehicle of interaction between our fellow human beings, as it should be. It's when we interject third party gods, things, or persons that the trouble begins, and this is no more apparent than in Craig's Divine Command Theory. A law will never be a moral value, because the point of laws is to enforce certain values. Craig has morality back-asswards.