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As long as we’re discussing the decline of religion and the increase in atheism (see last week’s post) this seems as good a time as any to discuss a few interesting arguments concerning the existence of God I’ve come across recently. The first couple are from Miles Mathis. I forget where I got the link from, and as I was writing this up I googled Mathis, and it appears that some people really loathe him. Perhaps there’s a good reason for this, I have no previous acquaintance with his work, but I’d like to think I’m one of those increasingly rare individuals who feels that arguments can and should be judged in isolation without having to consider whether someone has committed a thoughtcrime in some other unrelated domain. I actually doubt that I am quite so pure, but it’s still a worthy goal.
So, what are these arguments you ask? Well Mathis begins by explaining that he is not an atheist, nor an agnostic, nor even a skeptic. As a defense, for eschewing all of these various labels, he points out that all of them depend on having a certain amount of data. Data that people who do adopt these titles simply don’t possess. He illustrates what he means by making the very valid point that commenting on, or in the extreme case, ruling out the existence of God is a very different endeavor from commenting on the existence of, say, Big Foot.
Of course, with the existence of Bigfoot and unicorns and so on we do have a great deal of information. We have made searches. The Earth is a limited environment and we have populated it widely and heavily and long. Even so, the mountain gorilla was not discovered until 1902, and huge populations of lowland gorillas were only recently discovered in the Congo. Which is to say that we may lean a bit to a “no” answer for existence of larger beings in smaller areas we have scoured quite thoroughly, but even then we may be wrong.
But in looking for proof of gods, our search is pathetically limited. By definition, a god is a being whose powers are far greater than ours, who we cannot comprehend, and whose form we cannot predict. This would make our failure to locate a god quite understandable. A very large or small god would be above or below our notice, and a distant god would also evade our sensors. Not to mention we only have five senses. If we are manipulated by gods, as the hypothesis goes, then it would be quite easy for them to deny us the eyes to see them. Only a god of near-human size in the near environs would be possible to detect. [links added by me]
This is not only an excellent point, but it would seem to go beyond being just a clever observation, perhaps Mathis has more properly identified a new sort of cognitive bias. Though it has elements of the ambiguity effect, anthropocentric thinking, attribute substitution and availability cascade, and that’s just in the A’s. Though perhaps we can boil it all down to metaphysical hubris. Mathis himself describes the position of the atheist as being “epistemologically stronger”:
By [epistemologically] stronger, I do not mean that the atheist is more likely to be right, I mean that the position of the atheist requires more proof. The theist does not say he knows that God exists, he says he believes it. Faith is a belief whereas knowledge is a certainty. This gives the religious person some wiggle room. He doesn’t need to talk of proofs, since a belief is never based on proofs. Belief and faith are built mainly on willpower. Atheists will say that such a foundation is quicksand, and I tend to agree, but atheists stand in even waterier mud.
From here he goes on to make another argument, one that’s very similar to the point I brought up in my post Atheists and Unavoidability of the Divine. That when atheists and agnostics engage in even the smallest amount of metaphysical imagination they come up with something very much equivalent to a God. They avoid labeling it as such, but despite this lack of a label they imagine something unequivocally god-like.
I’m grateful to Mathis for providing yet another excellent example of this phenomena:
…let us consider Christopher Hitchens. Hitchens has been called one of the four horsemen of atheism (along with Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and Sam Harris), and knowing him, it is likely a self-naming and self-glorification. Problem is, Hitchens is also famous for saying,
My own pet theory is that, from the patterns of behavior that are observable, we may infer a design that makes planet earth, all unknown to us, a prison colony and lunatic asylum that is employed as a dumping ground by a far-off and superior civilizations.
Hmmm. I suspect that the other three horsemen would have preferred he hadn’t said that. Why? Because proof of a superior civilization using the Earth as a dumping ground would be proof of gods, heaven, hell, judgment, and a host of other things. If the Earth is a dumping ground for the unfit, that makes it hell, or very close, and makes the planet of the superior civilization heaven, or very close. It makes the superior civilization a race of gods, since they have powers we do not, are unknown to us, and have long evaded our detection. And to find us unfit, they must judge us, almost as a god does. Since we are born here, not transported bodily here in later life, we are either damned as spirits, which would prove a soul, or we are damned by the lives of our ancestors, which would prove a “sins of the fathers” theory. Regardless, it is clear that Hitchens, no matter his opinion of Christians, has a heavy Biblical residue. Also notice that he believes all this without proof, and without apology for his lack of proof. Clearly, he is allowed to believe what he wants to, while other people can’t, even when his beliefs are shadows of theirs. Why he is allowed when they aren’t is not so clear, but we may conjecture that it is because he is a loudmouthed bully.
Once again we have another piece of evidence illustrating that atheists have no problem imagining a God, it seems to be more that they just find the ones put forth by the various religions to not be to their tastes. I don’t want to spend too much time rehashing my own arguments in this space, but for those without the time to go back and read my previous post, here’s another example:
Richard Dawkins, widely regarded as the poster child for aggressive atheism said the following:
Whether we ever get to know them or not, there are very probably alien civilizations that are superhuman, to the point of being god-like in ways that exceed anything a theologian could possibly imagine.
In what sense, then, would the most advanced SETI aliens not be gods? In what sense would they be superhuman but not supernatural? In a very important sense, which goes to the heart of this book. The crucial difference between gods and god-like extraterrestrials lies not in their properties but in their provenance. Entities that are complex enough to be intelligent are products of an evolutionary process. No matter how god-like they may seem when we encounter them, they didn’t start that way.
I’m not arguing that the distinction he makes concerning the provenance of gods isn’t an important one. But what if there were a religion that both understands that distinction and comes down on the same side of it as Dawkins? As a matter of fact there is, what Dawkins describes is in all essential respects what Mormon’s believe. Does this mean that Dawkins is on the verge of converting? I very much doubt it. In other words both Dawkins and Hitchens can imagine the existence of god-like beings. They just can’t imagine these god-like beings behaving like the God that all those creepy religious people believe in.
For the final argument I want to revisit Pascal’s Wager, or rather a variant of the wager those in the rationalist community have labeled Pascal’s Mugging. And I’ve always got the impression that the latter was devised in order to make the former seem more silly.
Presumably all of my readers are familiar with the wager, so let me explain what the mugging is. First the scenario assumes that you are a utilitarian, that you “choose those actions with outcomes that, after being weighted by their probabilities, have a greater utility”. As a utilitarian your forced to make any number of difficult choices, where the probabilities are unclear, but in this particular scenario, you’re approached by someone claiming to be able to cause an implausible level of harm unless you give them all your money. You’re being mugged, but in a way that resembles Pascal’s wager.
To make the example more concrete, imagine that the “mugger” says that they are an alien, of god-like power (note the connection to the above) and that unless you give them all of your money that they will use their alien superpowers to destroy the planet Omicron Persei 8 along with its 8 billion sentient inhabitants. As a true utilitarian you’re now forced to calculate the probabilities involved and decide whether to give the person all of the money you’re currently carrying (let’s say it’s $100 to make it easier) or whether, with infinitesimal probability, to refuse, and by so doing doom 8 billion Omicronians to death.
As I said, the probability that the mugger is in fact an immensely powerful alien is infinitesimal, but how infinitesimal? There are various ways to try to judge this probability, but they mostly boil down to the message, the messenger, and your priors.
One of the first things that jumps out at you is how self-serving his message is. How much incentive he has to lie in order to get the money he obviously needs. And of course the idea that he has the god-like powers he describes and yet still needs you to give him $100 is also a huge red flag. But what if instead he’s offering to help you. Maybe instead of trying to take $100 he’s insisting that he has to give you $100 or they will all die. You would still assign a low probability to the story being true, but the whole character of the interaction has changed. Also you would probably have no problem taking the money “just in case”.
You might recognize that Omicron Persei 8, is a Futurama reference. That would probably also make his threat less credible. But what if, instead of claiming billions of sentients would die, the mugger made the claim that giving him $100 would be a good deed, and provide spiritual benefits, both in this life and the life to come. Suddenly, for many if not most people, the connection is a lot easier to swallow. Finally, what if his message wasn’t limited to the brief threat I outlined above, what is he had a whole book on the subject which you could read? (Perhaps at gunpoint?) And what if the book was persuasive and well written? How does that affect things?
Moving on to the messenger, perhaps it shouldn’t make a difference, but I think most of us would react differently if the messenger were in a suit and spoke with a British accent, as opposed to a messenger who was tattooed, appeared high, and leavened his demands with profanity. What if the messenger wasn’t a stranger at all, but rather your father? Or what if there were more the one person telling you about this event? What if there were millions? What if they included all of your ancestors? (We’ll set aside for the moment how these ancestors communicate with you.)
Finally, if we’re talking about a bayesian utilitarian (or even if we’re not) we have to consider their prior estimates for there being ultra-powerful aliens, and whether any given individual, particularly one demanding $100, might be one of these aliens. Understandably when all of this combined together the prior probability is going to be very low, but we’ve also show that once you start tweaking the message and the messenger the probability can change pretty dramatically. In fact even if we moderate everything about the “mugging” and leave only the ultra-powerful alien, what’s your prior probability on that?
This is one of the justifications for why I keep bringing up Fermi’s Paradox. It’s a paradox for a reason. Our prior estimate for the probability of other intelligent aliens should by all accounts be very high. And further, we would also be very surprised if they weren’t vastly more powerful than us. Accordingly it’s mostly the implausible threat (plus the Futurama reference) that gives us such low priors. Strip those away and at the very least you would no longer call the probability infinitesimal.
Obviously there are a lot of moving parts at this point, and just as obviously you probably know what direction I’m headed with all this. As I said, my impression is that lots of people use Pascal’s Mugging as a quick and dirty way to dismiss Pascal’s Wager. But as I’ve hopefully shown, each step one takes towards making the example more closely resemble how religion actually works, makes it less silly and more probable.
A belief in God and religion does not come from nowhere. It’s not something you’re hearing about from one person with no prior context. It’s something that’s been around for thousands of years. Nor is there a single messenger, not only are there millions of other believers, but for most people there is a long line of ancestors. All of whom thought belief and religion were good ideas to one degree or another. Finally, I know people are going to disagree about money as a motivation and using the threat of harm befalling people in a world outside of this one, but as I and others have pointed out, religion makes the lives of its adherents better. Which is to say, most people are paradoxically better off agreeing to be mugged.
The point of all of the above is not to talk someone into religion solely by pointing out more problems with some common atheist arguments. Such an endeavor would obviously be futile. Nor is the point to stretch these arguments beyond where they can reasonably be applied, they’re interesting, but the argument over God’s existence has been going on for a very, very long time and these points are only the tiniest additions to that argument.
Also, if I’m being honest, part of my reason for bringing these points up, is that they make my team look better and the other team look worse. Sort of a Christians rule atheists drool motivation, if you will. But that point aside, what I’m hoping people will take away from this post and all of my posts on this topic is a caution against being overly flippant about the question of God’s existence.
Critics of Pascal’s Wager often ask us to consider it in isolation shorn of emotion, community, history or earthly benefits, reducing it to something shallow and silly like Pascal’s Mugging. That it’s a choice rational people consider once and just as quickly dismiss before moving on with their life. But in reality all of life and all of history is tied up in this choice.
Perhaps there is no God. I believe that there is, and I’ve bet my entire life around that belief. I freely admit that everyone is free to make that bet however they choose, and that many people are going to make a choice different than mine. What I will not concede is that this choice is silly or trivial, rather I believe it’s the most important choice we’re ever called upon to make.
A far less important choice is deciding whether or not to support this blog. I make light of that choice every time I post, but I consider it neither trivial nor silly. And for those who do support it, my gratitude, much like the reward of Pascal’s Wager, is infinite. Should you want a piece of that, consider donating.
I think here we are confusing gods with simply having more. The humans of the North Senintel island lack technology and have no connection with the rest of human culture. Are we gods to them? To a small degree, I think we are as a sort of parlor trick. “I will use my lighter to make fire and the natives will worship me as a god” is a common trope in literature but in real life this ‘trick’ only worked for a bit. “The natives” figured out rather quickly that the visitors with the stuff weren’t magical at all.
Here I think we have to break a bit with your view of gods. The aliens who might have used earth as a dumping ground for the inferior, might have more power than humans, they might have judged us, but we would have on the face of it no reason to give their judgment moral worth. Just like the indigenous people who Columbus enslaved to secure gold almost certainly did not think the European lust for gold was some metaphysical truth but a simple brute fact that put them at a disadvantage. If a bear eats me, I may understand the bear judges it wants food more than it wants to hear my witty banter, but I’m not going to be fooled into thinking the bear is morally superior to me.
The Hitchens example, then, wouldn’t be a human-god relationship but simply native-developed person relationship. The story would probably be less a religious parable and more a cheap sci-fi story where acts 2 and 3 entail the humans overthrowing the aliens using earth as an aslyum/dumping ground/prison (in fact wasn’t that Battlefield Earth?).
Any “more” you can imagine exists on a continuum, and I don’t think there are necessarily any discontinuities, and we have to draw the line between human, but conceivable and godlike and inconceivable. What sort of abilities would be sufficient for you to call someone possessing them a God. Hitchens seems to be talking about souls being embodied on Earth as punishment, that seems pretty Godlike to me. And even Dawkins talks about abilities beyond what we could imagine. If an alien had master faster than light travel would that be enough to consider them Gods.
As far as whether the aliens judgement should count as moral, that gets deep into the weeds of philosophy, but the mere fact that they can do it, and despite the science fiction tropes will never be able to do anything has to count for something.
I think a God would have to transcend the universe rather than simply doing a better job at mastering it than I have.
I’m skeptical of a god that simply grows up (out?) of the universe. I think many of us do not consider such an entity quite the same thing. If you recall Q from Star Trek, I think most of us would view him as not God, even though he appeared to have infinite power.
This is an interesting perspective. It kind of defines away ancient Greek and Roman views of God as being outside the set. Not because they have greater power than humans, but because they don’t possess moral superiority to them.
It also defines away the Host’s god as outside the set of what you’d consider god. This is part of the problem of the argument between atheists and believers when it comes to definitions of faith of any kind: the actual set of what people consider to be worthy of worship is necessarily broad. This makes the atheist’s job in an argument feel akin to a game of whack-a-mole. Any argument they raise can be disputed by someone who genuinely believes in a religious tradition to whom the argument is not applicable, and who therefore dismisses it. To the atheist this feels like shifting the goalposts after every point they make; to the believer who genuinely holds that opinion, it feels like the atheist is arguing against certain specific archaic and/or mainstream religious traditions but then lumps all religious belief together under that narrow banner and calls religion “debunked” prematurely.
It’s fine to say, “I think God must have quality X”, but Jeremiah clearly believes in a God who does not possess those specific qualities – a God who arose out of the universe and whose existence was once as finite as ours. Does that mean Jeremiah doesn’t believe in God, or just that his religious tradition doesn’t fit within the set you’ve defined?
I’m not convinced by arguments that attempt to define atheists as a sort of theists-from-a-different-perspective. I trust when an atheist says they don’t believe in a supreme being that they’re accurately describing their perspective. They don’t believe in a creator despite themselves, and this idea isn’t a secret they keep from themselves.
Such a person might be willing to consider the hypothetical that advanced life has developed to the point where they now have supreme power and influence beyond their home world, but would still need to be convinced to follow any race of extra-terrestrial super-beings in ordering their moral life day-to-day. They would certainly require empirical proof of those supreme beings’ non-hypothetical existence as a starting point to the conversation, and would resent anyone who suggested they will be condemned if they don’t follow an unknown race of aliens from a far-off planet who seek to control behavior on Earth.
Indeed, this seems like a shift in our understanding of gods. The usual image of a god is someone outside the universe. You could kill a god, defeat a god, even bargain with a god, but you can’t become a god. There’s no path between point A and G (“a human” to ‘god”).
On the other hand, you can become a lawyer, or a carpenter or a singer. Hitchens’ aliens who lock us up in the planetary insane aslyum called Earth….well all that stands between us and them would be a series of scientific discoveries and corresponding investments.
This is why the ‘natives will worship me as a god when I use my lighter to make fire” doesn’t work. The native may not know how the lighter works but he does know after a few moments its not magic.
Here’s where I think you gotta break the barrier. Magic rather than technology. You don’t get to Star Wars from Star Trek.
It’s not a concept of god that many mainstream Christians have adopted, but that’s a selective sub-set of all people who actually believe in God. It’s fine to reject the idea that God is physically embodied within the universe, but that doesn’t mean all religious people must do so – or even that there’s a particularly good reason for them to do so.
Consider the idea of a Great Filter for civilizations, and we get even closer to bridging the host’s concept of god with current hypotheses about long-term civilization development. It’s not a great leap to imagine a benevolent external species that sees current human development as on course to wipe itself out (not pass through the next great filter) unless it adopts certain behavioral normative shifts.
If moral imperatives must be adopted for civilizations to pass beyond the point where they’ll self-destruct, that’s the same thing as divine commandments. If those imperatives are revealed to humanity by aliens who have already passed beyond that filter, that’s functionally equivalent to being handed down from on high.
If, in order for our technology to advance to the level where it’s so advanced as to be all-powerful, we must as a society adhere to those divine commandments handed down from on high, we’ve defined a situation exactly like exaltation to godhood as the host defines it. That’s different from “here’s how to use a lighter” or cargo cult analogies. That’s “you will become Gods if you follow the revealed Gospel; otherwise you’ll be destroyed.”
The only difference between these musings and deification is that deification concerns individual behavior and destiny, whereas discussion of benevolent aliens guiding civilizations is concerned with group-level behavior and destiny. To blend to two together, we’d need the religious view to embrace the idea that some day those unwilling to adhere to the requisite moral imperatives will be purged, thereby ensuring that entire society is composed of only those capable of passing through the next great filter.
You’re saying all civilizations face a Kobayashi Maru. How did Kirk deal with that?
Or let me be a bit less cryptic. The story you seem to be describing is some previous civilization passed thru a filter, it nearly destroyed them but they got thru it (good luck, help from some other more advanced civilization, whatever). They said “that was really close, it is really easy to see how we almost got tripped up at that point. Let’s help growing civilizations avoid that little trap”.
OK but this seems to imply some meta knowledge here. That all civilizations will go through that filter. Will they? How can this be known? Wouldn’t it be easier to remove the filter? Instead of telling everyone to watch out on the fifth step from the last because it is rotten, why not just replace it with a new step? Seems almost unethical not to replace the step but instead rely upon the less mature to read the 300 page book you wrote warning about that step.
All civilizations will be most at risk during the filter. For sure? I could see if five of us are playing a video game, we all might get stuck on a particular tough boss, but if the game is well designed we might get stuck in different place, some players finding some spots easy to navigate while others find it hard.
Your impossible filter may not be mine. Unless there’s some filter dynamics that says all civilizations must face the same filters and find them all very difficult to navigate. But now we are back to traditional understandings of gods and God. The Greek view was that the gods could not overturn how nature worked, hence they were inferior to it, although they could apply ‘magic’ in some limited domains. God is understood not only to have knowledge of ‘filter dynamics’ but to utimately have control over all of it. This is not the same as simply passing thru a filter, understanding it, and helping others get past it too.
It’s not that I object that some religions might focus on the ‘filter navigator’ type of god but that leaves the God question unaddressed. Who set up these filters? Why are they so dangerous? What dynamics drive them? Simply having passed thru a filter successfully does not automatically confer upon someone the authority to be a ‘navigator’ or even speak intelligently about it. Likewise I could imagine a computer programmer who never actually played the game fully explaining what sections of code make a tough boss character work so well and why it is so hard to beat him.
Ultimately I think it is fine to say you have a religion built around the idea “someone was here before, they got thru it, they want us to make it through as well”. But what does that religion say about God? It could say he doesn’t exist, or that he does. If he does, then the someone who went thru it before maybe nice but isn’t necessarily the ultimate authority or point here (much like when you were a Freshman in HS the Seniors were in some ways like gods but not necessarily the ultimate authority).
Let’s consider Santa Claus. In terms of playing Santa Claus, you got it. Your parents played Santa when you were very little and now you play Santa for your kids. How about actual Santa Claus? He would exist as a type of god, he might cause people to be good and give gifts but no amount of gift giving on your part could make you Santa. Question then for any religion that bases it’s God(s) on the first type of bleief, what does it say about God(s) of the second type, if anything?
I’m thinking of a different type of filter than you are. Take the video games analogy. Let’s make it a first person shooter where you have one life.
You progress through the game, acquiring and learning to use a series of weapons that are progressively more powerful than the last. Each helps you progress to the next level, beat bosses, etc. Each functions similarly to the last: aim at target, pull trigger. Sometimes they’re a little different from one another like a sniper rifle a fully-automatic. They require different tactics, but you learn to use them through trial and error and get father through the game.
Then you pick up a divide bomber best with a dead man switch. If you keep learning with this new season the same way you’ve learned to use previous weapons you’ll kill yourself and never progress to the next level. Not having seen one of these before, you put it on and pull the trigger. It does nothing until you take your finger off the trigger and then it’s game over. The trick isn’t just that you have to use this new season in a different way, but that you need to avoid using it at all.
This is a good civilizational analogy to nuclear weapons. The problem isn’t just that we don’t know how to use them, but that we need to learn how to be the kind of society that refuses to use them. It’s been less than a century since they were last used in combat, and it’s still not clear we will avoid killing ourselves off entirely. The same type of Doomsday scenario could easily be told about biological weapons. As a biologist, I’m more concerned about those, because I know that the cost and technical limitations of creating a civilization killer are far lower than for nuclear weapons.
This is what I’m talking about in a great filter/Fermi paradox sense. Thus it’s not the kind of filter you can get rid of by taking something tangible away. If an arms race mentality will eventually create weapons that will wipe a species out, the way to remove that filter is to teach the species to modify its behavior.
You’re right that belief in a benevolent society wanting to help us overcome a filter event is not empirically derived, or naturally inferred. What has been hypothesized is the idea that the existence of great filters explain the Fermi paradox. Barring a benevolent external force interested in helping humanity out, be it God, aliens, or what have you, we may be doomed sooner or later.
“dive bomber best” was supposed to be suicide bomber vest. Swype failed me again…