Is it Possible to Know That God Does Not Exist? (Part I)

At the Opinionator philosopher Gary Gutting of Notre Dame interviews atheist philosopher Louise Antony, a professor of philosophy at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

The interview is interesting for a number of things Ms Antony asserts, including her claim that she knows there is no God:

Gary Gutting: You’ve taken a strong stand as an atheist, so you obviously don’t think there are any good reasons to believe in God. But I imagine there are philosophers whose rational abilities you respect who are theists. How do you explain their disagreement with you? Are they just not thinking clearly on this topic?

Louise Antony: I’m not sure what you mean by saying that I’ve taken a “strong stand as an atheist.” I don’t consider myself an agnostic; I claim to know that God doesn’t exist, if that’s what you mean.

G.G.: That is what I mean.

L.A.: O.K. So the question is, why do I say that theism is false, rather than just unproven? Because the question has been settled to my satisfaction. I say “there is no God” with the same confidence I say “there are no ghosts” or “there is no magic.” The main issue is supernaturalism — I deny that there are beings or phenomena outside the scope of natural law.

With due respect to Ms Antony, I simply don't see how anyone can know such a thing. It's a bit like saying that one knows there are no living beings elsewhere in the universe. One can believe this, one can be skeptical or doubtful that there are any such beings, but how one can know that a transcendent mind does not exist is not at all clear, at least not to me.

Nevertheless, she doubles down on her claim a bit further on in the interview:

G.G.: O.K., .... But the question still remains, why are you so certain that God doesn’t exist?

L.A.: Knowledge in the real world does not entail either certainty or infallibility. When I claim to know that there is no God, I mean that the question is settled to my satisfaction. I don’t have any doubts. I don’t say that I’m agnostic, because I disagree with those who say it’s not possible to know whether or not God exists. I think it’s possible to know. And I think the balance of evidence and argument has a definite tilt.

But a "definite tilt" to the evidence, even if such a tilt existed, hardly warrants a claim to knowledge. Gutting goes on to ask her what sort of evidence she has in mind:

L.A.: I find the “argument from evil” overwhelming — that is, I think the probability that the world we experience was designed by an omnipotent and benevolent being is a zillion times lower than that it is the product of mindless natural laws acting on mindless matter.

Prof. Antony is surely speaking here of a psychological probability rather than a statistical probability since the latter is impossible to measure. Nevertheless, it's true that evil and suffering often make it difficult to believe that God exists, and if that were the only evidence we had then the existence of a benevolent, omnipotent deity would seem unlikely.

But the evil in the world is not the only evidence we have. It's only one element in what philosophers call our evidential set.

Imagine, for example, that every Chinese man you met on a trip to China was under six feet tall. If that experience was the only relevant evidence you had you might be justified in doubting that there are seven footers in China. But suppose you subsequently acquired several other bits of evidence. You learn, for example, that some Chinese play basketball, that some have even played in the NBA, and that some have even played center in the NBA. Perhaps you also read about a man named Yao Ming who was 7'6" and played for the Houston Rockets until 2011. As your evidential set expands, the force of the original piece of evidence begins to diminish.

Likewise with the argument from evil. Evil is only one element in our evidential set. There are dozens of good reasons for thinking that a God exists, and there are also ways of answering the argument from evil which greatly lessen its force. When considered as just one part of the entire body of evidence the existence of evil is not nearly as dispositive as Ms. Antony suggests.

We'll talk more about Gutting's interview with Professor Antony on tomorrow's Viewpoint.

Blinders

I'm sure we all have mental blinders that keep us from seeing what we don't want to see, especially on matters of religion and politics. I'm sure I do, and it'd be good for all of us to be made aware of what we're not seeing.

Since those best positioned to make us aware of what we're overlooking are those who stand on the other side of the political divide and can see our blind spots more clearly, I offer the following to my friends on the left:

Friends and family have asked how anyone could vote for a liar like Donald Trump. This would be a fair question were it not for the fact that these friends and family would have people vote for the same administration who for the last five years lied to us about Joe Biden's mental acuity.

Donald Trump has an uneasy relationship with the truth, to be sure, but at least there's no doubt that he's the president. Who has actually been the de facto president for the last two and a half years of the Biden administration? Ron Klain? Jeff Zients? Jill Biden? Hunter Biden?

Why did the Biden people lie about the president's debility so adamantly and for so long?

Speaking of lies and Hunter Biden how many times did Joe Biden tell us he had no conversations with Hunter about his business dealings? How many times were we lied to about Hunter's sleazy laptop being Russian disinformation so that it wouldn't diminish Joe's chances in the 2024 election?

How many times has Biden lied about the circumstances of his son Beau's death? How many times has he just made up stories about his life? How many times did he or his administration tell us the border was under control and to the extent that it wasn't there was little he could do about it?

One of his most egregious lies was telling the American people that no American servicemen and women had been killed abroad during his presidency. This despite the loss of thirteen Americans in the Abbey Gate debacle in Afghanistan and three more to a missile attack in Jordan. Is it only Trump's lies that matter to people? Is a lie worse if it comes from Trump and less bad if it came from Biden?

I have a couple of friends who claim to be strongly pro-life. Yet they can't understand why anyone would vote for a man as flawed as Donald Trump who, despite those flaws, is perhaps the most pro-life president in our history, rather than voting for Kamala Harris who supports removing almost all restrictions on a woman's right to kill her unborn child.

A lot of folks are sure that Donald Trump is a fascist, and perhaps he does list toward authoritarianism, but I've heard very little from those who condemn his and his supporters' alleged penchant for fascism about contemporary political violence perpetrated by the left. Why are so many liberals so silent about the BLM riots, the Antifa violence, the assassination attempts, the Tesla bombers, and so on?

Political violence is the trademark of fascism and is at least as common on the left as it is on the right. Indeed, in our current political moment it seems to be much more a feature of the left.

What would those who are willing to spend years in jail for vandalizing Teslas and assaulting Tesla owners say if asked why they harbor such a deep hatred for Elon Musk? What exactly has Musk done that makes him the object of so much loathing? That he has trimmed the bureaucracy? That he has saved taxpayers billions of dollars by finding and eliminating waste and fraud? What?

Speaking of taxes, why is it that people who think we should all pay more in taxes often take all the deductions to which they're legally entitled? If they think we should all pay more, why don't they?

Why is it that those who demand that we throw open the doors of our country to whomever wishes to come in nevertheless lock the doors of their homes and cars when they leave them? Why open the doors to the country to those in need but close the doors to our homes to those in need?

It's ironic that those who are most vocal in their desire for peace are often the most vocal in their disdain for the one president who has probably done more to bring peace to the world than any of his predecessors. If Trump fails to get a ceasefire in Ukraine and a satisfactory conclusion to Hamas' war against Israel it won't be for lack of trying. Would peace be any more likely were Kamala Harris our Commander in Chief?

I asked a relative once why she so despises Trump. Her answer was that Jean Carroll accused him of having assaulted and raped her (he was found not guilty of rape) some years ago and that he was in general an odious human being. Perhaps so, but had Biden stayed in the race she would've voted for him despite his perverse weirdness around women and children and despite the fact that he was credibly accused of sexual assault by Tara Reade and despite the fact that he was accused by Jill's first husband, Bill Stevenson, of having had an affair with her while she was still married to Stevenson.

My relative did vote for Kamala Harris whose husband once publicly slapped a woman so hard it almost knocked her down and who hired a secretary solely because of her looks and "friendliness." Is there a significant difference between these cases on the "odious" scale?

As I said above, I'm sure we all have political blinders that keep us from seeing what we don't want to see. It'd be good for all of us, including those hostile to Trump and Musk, to recognize ours.

Free Will Skepticism (Pt. II)

I posted Part I of this topic on Saturday (see the post below this one). I concluded that entry by noting that the consequences of widespread acceptance of determinism would be so dire that some philosophers believe the masses shouldn't be exposed to the "truth" that free will is just an illusion. The Guardian's Oliver Burkeman offers Saul Smilansky as an example:

Saul Smilansky, [is] a professor of philosophy at the University of Haifa in Israel, who believes the popular notion of free will is a mistake, [but that] although free will as conventionally defined is unreal, it’s crucial people go on believing otherwise ....“On the deepest level, if people really understood what’s going on...it’s just too frightening and difficult,” Smilansky said.

“For anyone who’s morally and emotionally deep, it’s really depressing and destructive. It would really threaten our sense of self, our sense of personal value. The truth is just too awful here.”

Smilansky is right about the consequences of a deterministic view of human choice. Not only would it do away with the idea that humans deserve reward and punishment, it would also do away with the idea of moral guilt. It would also strip our species of any notion of human dignity, equality, or rights.

Here's Burkeman:

By far the most unsettling implication of the case against free will, for most who encounter it, is what it seems to say about morality: that nobody, ever, truly deserves reward or punishment for what they do, because what they do is the result of blind deterministic forces. “For the free will sceptic,” writes Gregg Caruso in his new book Just Deserts,...“it is never fair to treat anyone as morally responsible.”

Were we to accept the full implications of that idea, the way we treat each other – and especially the way we treat criminals – might change beyond recognition.

For Caruso, who teaches philosophy at the State University of New York, what all this means is that retributive punishment – punishing a criminal because he deserves it, rather than to protect the public, or serve as a warning to others – can’t ever be justified....Retribution is central to all modern systems of criminal justice, yet ultimately, Caruso thinks, “it’s a moral injustice to hold someone responsible for actions that are beyond their control. It’s capricious.”

The preceding paragraph illustrates why so few philosophers believe we can live consistently as determinists. Caruso uses words like "unjustified" and "capricious," but if determinism is true there are no acts which are justified or unjustified, and there certainly is no caprice.

Everything happens as the inevitable consequence of the initial conditions of the Big Bang. To complain that an act is unjustified is meaningless and to allege that an act is capricious is to imply that it could have been otherwise than it was, which is nonsense if determinism is true.

Caruso commits the same inconsistency in the next section. Burkeman writes:

Caruso is an advocate of what he calls the “public health-quarantine” model of criminal justice, which would transform the institutions of punishment in a radically humane direction.

You could still restrain a murderer, on the same rationale that you can require someone infected by Ebola to observe a quarantine: to protect the public. But you’d have no right to make the experience any more unpleasant than was strictly necessary for public protection. And you would be obliged to release them as soon as they no longer posed a threat.

But how, assuming the truth of determinism, can we speak of a "right" to do something and an "obligation" to do something else? These words are meaningless if there are no genuine choices. If at every given moment there's only one possible future how can people have a right or an obligation to do other than what they've been determined to do?

Like so many philosophical questions, the question of free will really comes down to the question of God. If one doesn't believe in God then it's indeed difficult to see how we could have free will even though we'd find it impossible to live consistently as a determinist.

But if God does exist then it's possible that He has endowed us with an immaterial self (mind or soul) not subject to physical law and out of which not only conscious experience but also genuinely free choices arise.

Put differently, if you believe that there are at least some moments in your life when you're genuinely free to choose between two alternatives, then to be consistent you should be a theist. If you are a naturalistic materialist then free will certainly would seem inexplicable, but if determinism is true why are the implications so disturbing and why can't we live consistently as determinists?

As Burkeman admits, he has to live as though determinism is false:

I’m certainly going to keep responding to others as though they had free will: if you injure me, or someone I love, I can guarantee I’m going to be furious, instead of smiling indulgently on the grounds that you had no option.

In this experiential sense, free will just seems to be a given.

Burkeman has much more to say about "Free will Skepticism" at the link. The article's a bit long, but worth reading in that it does a good job of presenting the determinist challenge to those who believe in libertarian free will.

Free Will Skepticism (Pt.I)

There's an interesting article at The Guardian by Oliver Burkeman a couple of years back on the topic of free will.

Although Burkeman writes the article in such a way as to suggest that he himself is a determinist, or what he calls a "free will skeptic," he admits at the end of the piece that he "personally can’t claim to find the case against free will ultimately persuasive; it’s just at odds with too much else that seems obviously true about life."

Nevertheless, almost all of the people he cites in the article are determinists with the opinions of some compatibilists* mixed in, but he doesn't mention any arguments from those philosophers who believe we have libertarian free will*.

I've pulled a few passages from Burkeman's article that help to give a sense of it. Let's start with this one:

Nothing could be more self-evident [than that we make free choices]. And yet according to a growing chorus of philosophers and scientists, who have a variety of different reasons for their view, it also can’t possibly be the case. “This sort of free will is ruled out, simply and decisively, by the laws of physics,” says one of the most strident of the free will sceptics, the evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne.

Leading psychologists such as Steven Pinker and Paul Bloom agree, as apparently did the late Stephen Hawking, along with numerous prominent neuroscientists, including VS Ramachandran, who called free will “an inherently flawed and incoherent concept” in his endorsement of Sam Harris’s bestselling 2012 book Free Will, which also makes that argument.

According to the public intellectual Yuval Noah Harari, free will is an anachronistic myth – useful in the past, perhaps, as a way of motivating people to fight against tyrants or oppressive ideologies, but rendered obsolete by the power of modern data science to know us better than we know ourselves, and thus to predict and manipulate our choices.

It's important to note that each of these thinkers is a naturalistic materialist. Their determinism is a derivative of their prior belief that all that exists are matter and the physical laws which govern it. Being committed to that ontology it's not surprising that they would be free will skeptics, since materialism allows no room for any deviation from physical law. As Burkeman says at one point, "Our decisions and intentions involve neural activity – and why would a neuron be exempt from the laws of physics any more than a rock?"

If, however, naturalistic materialism is false, if there's more to us than just our material bodies and brains, if we also possess an immaterial mind or soul, then the strength of the argument for determinism is substantially diminished.

Burkeman explains why the free will question is crucially important:

...the stakes could hardly be higher. Were free will to be shown to be nonexistent – and were we truly to absorb the fact – it would “precipitate a culture war far more belligerent than the one that has been waged on the subject of evolution”, Harris has written.

Arguably, we would be forced to conclude that it was unreasonable ever to praise or blame anyone for their actions, since they weren’t truly responsible for deciding to do them; or to feel guilt for one’s misdeeds, pride in one’s accomplishments, or gratitude for others’ kindness.

And we might come to feel that it was morally unjustifiable to mete out retributive punishment to criminals, since they had no ultimate choice about their wrongdoing. Some worry that it might fatally corrode all human relations, since romantic love, friendship and neighbourly civility alike all depend on the assumption of choice: any loving or respectful gesture has to be voluntary for it to count.

The consequences of widespread acceptance of determinism would be so dire that some philosophers believe the masses shouldn't be exposed to the "truth" that free will is just an illusion. I'll talk about that when I post Part II on this topic on Monday.

*Compatibilism is the notion that even though our choices may be determined, it makes sense to say we’re free to choose as long as our choices are caused by internal causes like reasons, rather than external constraints. Compatibilists think determinism and free will are both true. Libertarian free will is the view that there are some moments in which one can genuinely choose between two or more possible futures.

Politics In Church

Ryan Burge is a sociologist who specializes in religious matters. He recently put together some data on how eager preachers are to deliver political sermons and how eager Christians are to hear such messages in Church. The short answer to both is "not very much."

Here are a couple of charts he put together based on his data:

Burge writes:

I get the very clear sense from this data that any pastor who chooses to speak up about political division in the United States is going to anger a whole lot of their flock. In most churches, 40-50% of people think that their clergy should avoid discussions of political division completely.

Then, another 30-40% mostly think that this is a bad idea. You just don’t see a lot of church-going folks who are keen on their pastor talking about what is going on in the world of politics, just the opposite.

This is interesting because the perception among a lot of secular folk is that churches are hotbeds of political indoctrination. Burge mentions this:

Doing a lot of public facing work on religion has taught me that a significant number of people who aren’t religious or don’t attend church on a regular basis have a misperception about what happens on a Sunday morning.

The vast majority of pastors aren’t talking about politics on a regular basis and when they touch on anything that may be in the political realm it’s about topics like racism and income inequality. Both can be discussed in fairly apolitical ways.

I wonder if this is true of African American churches. Many people have the impression that they're more political than churches that are mostly white, but if Burge has any data on this he didn't present it in his article.

He closes with this:

The other side of this is that huge majorities of congregations just want to avoid politics entirely from the pulpit. They don’t want their pastor or priest to try and discuss the political divides that we are facing. Being around church people my entire life, that’s the clear impression I’ve always gotten.

They see Sunday worship as a respite from all the Culture Wars and the talking heads and the political battles that seem to consume our every waking moment.

Yes, there are pastors who are expressly political. You often see them on social media - but this data makes the point clear: these religious leaders are outliers. They must be understood in that context.

Burge has more on this topic at the link.

A Biologist Confronts Wokeness

Outspoken atheist and evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne has written a column for the Wall Street Journal in which he states his reasons (and those of fellow atheistic scientists Richard Dawkins and Steven Pinker) for resigning from the Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF).

Coyne explains that the organization has abandoned science by capitulating to those who insist that a woman is "whoever she says she is." Coyne wrote a letter rebutting transgender ideology, which the Foundation published but then removed from their website because, they declared, its publication was "an error of judgment," “does not reflect our values or principles,” and had caused “distress.” The FFRF, they insisted, stands “firmly with the LGBTQIA-plus community.”

Coyne sees this as misguided and the Foundation's censorship as a betrayal of science.

There's an irony in Coyne's complaint, however. As David Klinghoffer relates at Evolution News, Coyne has omitted two relevant points from his WSJ article. Here's Klinghoffer:

First, he has himself been an enthusiastic censor, seeking, if I may borrow his own words, to “silence critics who raise valid counter arguments.” In fact, he won the Censor of the Year Award from the Center for Science in Culture back in 2014 for his efforts to silence a Ball State University astrophysicist, Eric Hedin, for teaching a course on “The Boundaries of Science.” The course pointed students to, among other things, some literature on intelligent design.

In his war on Dr. Hedin — a younger, less powerful, and untenured scientist — Dr. Coyne joined forces with none other than his good buddies at the Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRP). They went over Hedin’s head and succeeded in getting the course canceled. Hedin tells the story in his book Canceled Science.

Has Coyne come to regret any of this, now that he’s winning plaudits as a defender of free speech? As recently as 2022, nine years after the fact, he was still mocking Hedin at Coyne’s blog, "Why Evolution Is True" (“Eric Hedin beefs about being ‘canceled’ at Ball State by the FFRF and me”).

Using his power and the prestige brand of his university to bully someone like Hedin was nothing less than loathsome. Coyne was a pioneer of “cancel culture” well before the term came into vogue.

Indeed, Darwinians, so far from being champions of free speech, have been among the most censorious people in our culture, demanding that all university instructors toe the Darwinian line or suffer unhappy professional consequences.

Klinghoffer continues:

And second, what about the gender binary position that Coyne also champions? If it’s mistaken to believe a man can become a woman, fairly competing against women in women’s sports, using women’s locker rooms and restrooms, demanding to be housed in women’s prisons, and all the rest, how did this mistaken way of thinking arise? What forces in the culture help us understand where it came from?

In his op-ed, Coyne blames existentialism, postmodernism, and critical theory. He complains that “some forms of feminism” hold that “sex is a social construct.” Coyne harrumphs, “This is a denial of evolution.”

Klinghoffer wants to argue that transgender ideology is not at all a denial of evolution but rather is perfectly compatible with it which is true, but I'd go one step further. I'd agree with Coyne that transgenderism is a product of existentialism, postmodernism, and critical theory, but these are all, in many respects, outgrowths of the atheism Coyne himself embraces.

Atheism leads to skepticism about the possibility of absolute truth, and that epistemic skepticism manifested itself in the 20th century in existentialism, postmodernism, and critical theory. If Coyne believes that transgender ideology is a betrayal of science, perhaps he should examine how and why the atheism on which he stands has resulted in the ideas that have produced it.

You can read the rest of Klinghoffer's piece at the link.

Why Would Anyone Oppose This?

What reasons does anyone have for opposing any of the following:

• deporting non-citizen supporters of terrorist organizations
• deporting non-citizen rapists, child molesters, and murderers
• exploiting natural gas and nuclear energy to meet our electrical needs
• eliminating waste and fraud in the government
• removing ineligible recipients from social security and medicare rolls
• tightening border security and vetting immigrants
• measures to insure that only citizens vote
• measures to enable minority kids to get out of failing inner city public schools
• protecting girls and women from men who delude themselves and others into thinking that they're really women and should be able to compete against girls in sports and who demand to dress in female locker rooms and be incarcerated in women's prisons.

If you have a friend or family member who thinks any of these should be opposed and who votes accordingly, you might ask them why.

Why Taiwan Matters

There's much in the news about a possible conflict between the U.S. and China over the island of Taiwan, and a lot of us might wonder why we should risk WWIII over an island thousands of miles away from us but only about 100 miles off the Chinese coast.

In his book Seven Things You Can't Say about China (see yestrday's post on VP), Tom Cotton, the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, lays out the importance of Taiwan for our future well-being in a chapter titled China Could Win.

The Taiwanese people are mostly descendants of Chinese refugees fleeing from the mass murderer Mao Zedong in the wake of the Chinese civil war in the late 1940s. Under their leader Chiang Kai-shek these refugees formed their own government and declared themselves to be independent of China. We guaranteed their safety then and have guaranteed it ever since, despite the fact that China sees Taiwan as part of China and threatens to take it by force.

Cotton writes that a Chinese invasion of Taiwan would precipitate a stock-market crash causing millions of Americans to lose their jobs. The severing of ties with China would result in depleted goods on store and pharmacy shelves, and soaring prices. All of this would lead to a worldwide "Great Depression."

Our automobile industry, along with all the supporting industries and businesses - steel, aluminum, dealerships, parts stores, etc. - would be devastated. As would everything, such as agriculture, that depends on transportation to get goods to market.

The tech industry and every industry that relies on electronics would also be ruined since Taiwan is the dominant producer of the world's most sophisticated computer chips. Anything that uses these chips, which is almost everything, would soon be unavailable.

If the U.S. failed to come to Taiwan's aid against China, or even if we did but failed to prevent the invasion, our alliances would weaken as other countries reassessed our willingness or ability to meet our commitments.

Controlling Taiwan would permit China to project power into the Pacific and cut off the sea lanes that run through the South China Sea, virtually isolating Japan and South Korea from their main suppliers of oil. The Philippines and Southeast Asia would be in even greater peril from Chinese military and economic domination.

Once America's military protection from China was no longer seen to be reliable, nations would feel the need to develop their own nuclear deterrent, and nuclear weapons would proliferate.

Totalitarians around the globe would be energized to increase the repression of their people and invade their neighbors knowing that the U.S. was no longer the economic and military threat to them that it once was.

China would be in a position to dictate economic terms to much of the world, including, perhaps, the U.S., and demand that other countries stop trading in dollars, which would wreak havoc upon Americans seeking loans to buy homes and whatever else was still available.

There are numerous other consequences of a Chinese assault on Taiwan that Cotton addresses in his book, but he closes the chapter with this:

China could defeat America in the global struggle for mastery; it all starts and really ends in Taiwan. No one can predict with certainty how a Chinese invasion of Taiwan would end up, especially without knowing how the United States would respond. But however it turns out, it would set off a catastrophic chain of events. The only winning strategy to preserve American primacy is to deter Chinese aggression in the first place.

Much of the world is focused on Ukraine and the Middle East at the moment, but the bigger threat to world peace is China, and we need to understand why. Buying and reading Senator Cotton's book is a good way to help us do that.