Some philosophers use this approach to tag certain premises, such as “Other minds exist” or “God exists”, as part of the basic foundation of a rational worldview. Such basic premises, they maintain, can be rationally embraced without any need for evidence or observation to back them up.

But instead of embracing foundationalism, philosophers can turn instead to the scientific method and learn from it. Let’s take a closer look at what I have in mind.

Science relies on making inferences and then devising tests to see if those inferences are reliable. Philosophy, traditionally, relies on deductive reasoning, as in

Premise: All men are mortal
Premise: Socrates is a man
Conclusion: Socrates is mortal

But the premises are recognized as needing to be buttressed by arguments of their own. Such as

Premise: Only men engage in the use of complex tools and language
Premise: Socrates engages in the use of complex tools and language
Conclusion: Socrates is a man

But even these premises need the support of a logical argument. Thus

Premise: I saw Socrates typing on the computer
Premise: Socrates explained to me in English what he was typing
Premise: A computer is a complex tool
Premise: English is a complex language
Conclusion: Socrates engages in the use of complex tools and language

Eventually we end up with an extremely long string of interlocking arguments in which the conclusion of one becomes the premise of another. But is it enough? Doesn’t each premise always need supporting argument, and each argument need premises which need arguments in a never-ending chain? Not always.

Some premises are different than others. Some premises are true “by agreed upon definition”.

Premise: A triangle is a polygon with 3 sides.
Premise: Figure A is a polygon with 3 sides.
Conclusion: Figure A is a triangle.

We may need a Premise which defines polygon and perhaps one which defines sides. But given an agreed meaning for its words, our first premise defines a triangle. We do not need (and can hardly imagine) a classical argument to support it as a premise. (The best we could do would be to utilize premises which constitute compatible ways of defining a triangle.)

So there are two types of premises: those which define things and those which describe some presumed “fact” about the world. Instead of calling all premises “premises” it would therefore be more useful to call some “definitions” and some “facts”. But there is something a bit odd here. The premises we call “facts” are precisely the ones that seem to need to be the conclusion of prior argument.

The General Semanticists distinguished between “inferences” and “facts” and we will find that distinction useful here. A fact is something that you can observe directly; an inference an assumption you make about things you can’t observe, but which might be observable by someone in the right position. The clock tells you it is 2 PM, so you infer that it is still daylight out. Or you observe sunlight streaming in the window and infer that it is sunny outside. Those are inferences. But only if you see the daylight or the sun directly do they become assertions of fact.

But here we must retreat: even our direct perceptions are not necessarily facts. We infer that the leaf we see on the tree is green because we see it as green—and yet, as we now know scientifically, neither the leaf nor the light reflected from the leaf is green. That the leaf has color is an inference which our brains have evolved to make on our behalf—not because it is “factual” but simply because it is useful. The brain has a built-in inference machine—eyesight—in which it takes hints from detected photons and manufactures colors and shapes from those hints. Sometimes the brain’s built-in inferences are wrong, and we experience an “optical illusion” as a result.

If you observe the way scientists (and other intelligent people) define something as “fact”, what you will observe is that facts are always built on prior, dependable inferences. It is a “fact” that the earth orbits the sun—of course we know that this supposed fact about the sun is built on a complicated framework of inferences about the apparent movement of the sun, planets & stars in the sky. At a lower level of abstraction, we know that our “direct observations” of the sun, planets & stars are themselves inferences—we don’t for example ever experience any of those things “moving” but instead infer that they have moved. And at an even lower level of abstraction, as mentioned earlier, our experience of sight is based on the brain’s inferences about the hints from photons gathered by the sensor cells in our retina. (Of course, that there are such things as “photons” or “sensor cells” are themselves very high level inferences—built upon many levels of inferences treated at each intervening level as facts.)

But back to our classical syllogisms. As we saw, some classical “premises” are “definitions” and others are “inferences.” We might ask, Does it make a difference what we call them? I believe the answer is that it can make a significant difference, and I will argue that the term “premise” ought to be dropped for the terms “inference” and “definition”. Consider the following,

Definition: all bachelors are unmarried.
Inference: John is a bachelor.
Conclusion: therefore John is unmarried.

In the traditional syllogism the first and second statements are merely premises, with the presumption that they are on a par. But by recognizing that the first statement is a definition of terms and the second an inference we have drawn about John, the argument is clarified. The conclusion, of course, is also an inference, since one of the premises it relies on is an inference. This is exactly as it should be, since our conclusion “John is unmarried” may serve as an inference in our next syllogism.

This approach helps us distinguish the following two arguments:

Inference: All men are mortal.
Inference: Jesus is a man.
Conclusion: Jesus is mortal.

Definition: All men are mortal.
Inference: Jesus is a man.
Conclusion: Jesus is mortal.

Per this last argument, there is something “inhuman” about someone who never dies, so that, for example, if Jesus is still alive on the cross 2000 years later he must not be a man after all. Whereas in the case of the prior argument you would not know which inference was false.

Or, taking the Christian doctrine of the trinity as a definition of Jesus, you might have:

Inference: all men are mortal
Definition: Jesus is a man
Conclusion: Jesus is mortal.

In this case if Jesus is still alive on the cross, then the inference “all men are mortal” must be false given the definition of Jesus. (I’m pretending that 2000 years is enough to infer immortality—of course it may not be). At any rate, I hope this shows that distinguishing between premises which are definitions and those which are inferences (even when the wording is identical) is clarifying—and therefore preferable.

Definitions are always tautological (& tautologies are always definitional). In classical syllogisms a premise may sometimes masquerade as an inference but sometimes turns out, on examination, to be tautological in actuality. (Several of the classical arguments for God existence have this flaw.)

There is a lot more that might be written on this topic. But I’ll stop with this: when there is a conflict between an observed inference and a definition, the scientist modifies the definition to fit the inference, whereas the theologian usually denies the inference to preserve the definition (or the basic belief, if they are a foundationalist philosopher). This is why many religions deny the inference of evolution.

It is also why science improves over time, and religion & philosophy do not.

No one has constructed a good argument that others have minds.

Of course, theists take it for granted that other people have minds: they see it as a basic belief, one that is quite rational and reasonable even though it may be impossible to prove. And they see this as justification for another basic belief that may be impossible to prove: the existence of a “divine mind” behind creation.

Essentially their argument is this:

No, I can’t prove that the divine mind exists, but so what? I can’t even prove that the person sitting next to me has a mind. Yet everyone agrees it is reasonable to believe in other people’s minds, therefore it must be reasonable to believe in a divine mind.

Not so fast, I say.

We learned as infants that other people have minds of their own, that their desires and intentions do not always accord with our own, and that things go better for us when we take other people’s minds (particularly our parent’s) into account. It is something every one of us learned inductively through experience and the school of hard knocks. Something which no one doubts unless they are attempting to do philosophy.

For any philosophers reading this, I’ll make it clear. The existence of other minds is an empirical observation, an inductive hypothesis which we reached as infants by essentially approaching the world the way a scientist would. Even little children can be good empiricists. Indeed, the fact that four-year olds can figure out the existence of other minds is evidence that the scientific method (albeit unconsciously) is natural to humans.

But let us become a philosopher and inductive reasoning from empirical observation is suddenly no longer good enough: we want proof. And this means, not evidence but a deductive argument from a set of premises. And here, Nash is telling us, “no one has a good argument that others have minds.” Nor is he alone. A great many professional philosophers would agree.

And yet it’s nonsense. True, no deductive argument can prove the existence of other minds. But that is because of a misunderstanding about deductive arguments. Consider:

All men have minds.
Socrates is a man.
Therefore Socrates has a mind.

That is a valid deductive argument, one which proves Socrates has a mind if its premises are correct. But premises always do one of two things: either they assert a definition (“let us say that Socrates is the name of a man”) or they assert an observed fact (“we have observed the existence of a man named Socrates”). Likewise, “All men have minds” can be taken as defining men as creatures who—by definition—have minds, or taken instead as making an empirical observation about men.

But how do we determine—ever—if an empirical observation is true? There is only one way: by inductive reasoning from observation and experience. Observational “facts” are determined inductively—not deductively. What might be termed “definitional” facts are either declared ex cathedra (a “basic belief”, in other words) or deduced by deductive argument from other definitional facts.

This is why philosophers spin their wheels trying to “prove” the existence of other minds. They are trying to reach a deductive conclusion drawn from definitional facts. Yet it is logically impossible to verify an observational fact that way. How then do we know that other minds exist? The same way the human infant learns that her parents have minds outside of her own: by inductive reasoning from experience. The same method used by scientists.

Furthermore, it follows that the conclusion of any valid deductive argument (“Therefore Socrates has a mind”) will never be an observational fact. It will always be a deduced fact. No deductive argument will ever prove that others have minds; at the same time neither will any deductive argument ever prove that the sun is fueled by nuclear fusion, or that grass is green, or any other empirically-derived observation.

This hints at what I’ve come to see as one of the major occupational hazards of doing philosophy (as opposed to, say, doing science): you come to expect important observations to be knowable by “pure reason.” And when it’s shown they can’t be known by pure reason, you lament that they are “unprovable” and therefore a matter of opinion or “faith”—or declare it a basic belief.

Again and again philosophers trip over the expectation that matters of fact are provable with a syllogism. It leads them to throw up their hands when faced with factual questions. After all a syllogism is only as good as its premises, and philosophers don’t do empirical observations. They don’t confirm premises. Philosophers evaluate arguments for logical validity—does the conclusion follow from the premises?—but philosophers are not in the business of validating premises. The philosophic method has an incredible hole: it can’t vouch for premises, it can’t determine matters of fact.

For that we need the scientific method. Or a four-year old.

If the way we determine “facts” is by turning to faith, then yes, that is intellectual dishonesty. As I’ve said before, faith is useless at discerning matters of fact. The reason is simple: faith justifies or proves whatever we want it to. You tell me Osiris doesn’t exist? I have faith he does. I believe it, that settles it, and therefore Osiris does indeed exist.

Faith is not a method for determining truth at all. In fact, faith begs the question of truth. Yet people who invoke faith usually pretend otherwise, and that is dishonest. Bad faith.

If that’s bad faith, what is good faith?

A good use of the word “faith” is any which doesn’t pretend it is a method of knowledge. Consider: “I have faith that my wife won’t cheat on me when she goes to Vegas this weekend. ” Or: “In our faith, we prefer to pray silently.” In the first, faith translates as “trust” or “confidence”; in the second it translates as “cult” or “religion”. Those are honest uses of the term.

There is, after all, nothing wrong with being confident that your wife won’t cheat on you. Faith in this sense is good. –Unless, of course, there are reasons to doubt her fidelity: the way she gushes on about her boss; the inappropriately expensive earrings he gave her which she tried to hide; the very fact that he’s taking her to Vegas for a 3-day “business meeting”; the condoms you saw her slip into the suitcase for her trip. Faith is not appropriate in defiance of facts. In the face of contrary evidence, only the self-deluded remain confident.

With this as a guide, let’s translate a few typical invocations of faith.

“I have faith in God’s existence.”

Translation: I have complete confidence in my beliefs. If I say there’s a God then there is a God, no matter what anyone else says. I’m infallible.

“My faith in the Bible is unshakable.”

Translation: What should I believe, the Bible or my lying eyes? I choose the Bible, and I will be rewarded for that. Evidence doesn’t matter.

“The Atheist has faith too, faith that nothing exists.”

Translation: The atheist is just as confident in his belief as I am in mine, therefore I’m right and the atheist is wrong. God is real.

“In our faith we believe in the transubstantiation of wine into the blood of Jesus during the Eucharist.”

Translation: In our cult we participate in a ritual of human sacrifice and symbolic cannibalism, much like the Aztecs who would declare someone a living incarnation of the all-knowing all-seeing God (Tezcatlipoca, who had the power to cure disease and forgive sin), before slaughtering and eating the victim, uhh, I mean the living incarnation of God, in an annual sacrament.

Such is faith.

I bring this up because Richard Dawkings (The God Delusion) and Sam Harris (The End of Faith, Letter to a Christian Nation) have recently been called intolerant and “fundamentalist” for their blunt criticism of religious people who use (rather, misuse) faith to determine truth. The most recent such attack comes in this Associated Press article (it’s nearly Easter you see and media conglomerates see an opportunity to sell a few more ads).

Harris and Dawkin’s sin is that they didn’t stop at criticizing the religious fanatics who do bad things like flying planes into buildings or mistreating the mentally ill; no they had to go and criticize even moderate and liberal religious folk. Why? For “legitimizing” faith as a method of knowing.

Dawkins and Harris are exactly right. Faith — the misuse of faith — is exactly the evil at the heart of religion. It is what makes religion harmful as well as dishonest. And the liberal and moderate churches are as guilty of misusing the word “faith” as are the fundamentalists. In doing so they make intellectual dishonesty seem acceptable, even normal. And that provides cover for the fanatics.

Faith is what swept Bush into office in 2000 (faith, and a few ballot irregularities in Florida), and faith is what Bush sprinkled over all aspects of his administration. Faith told us to invade Iraq. Faith encouraged us to torture those we suspected of being terrorists and hold them for years without charges or trials. Faith protected the inhabitants of New Orleans from Katrina. Faith will prevent global warming.

Americans, I’ve noticed, are beginning to get just a little bit sick of faith. They are beginning to notice that it is mostly just bad faith. Confidence without competence. Belief without evidence.

Belief in defiance of the evidence.

So Silent He is Not There

After reading Francis Schaefer’s He is There and He is Not Silent, I realized for the first time how silent God actually was. Sure, it was claimed that God had been loud thousands of years ago, that even today God spoke privately to the hearts and minds of individuals, but — and this is the kicker — publicly God is silent. Imagine, I realized, if Congress passed laws but never published them, instead only letting certain “blessed” individuals know, in private, what laws they had passed. In such a case, how could anyone be certain what the laws were, or whose claims to know the laws were legitimate? Yet that is the situation with God’s laws.

That is the great flaw of revealed religion. It is always a matter of a few individuals claiming to be “blessed” with knowledge of God’s laws and intentions. The rest of us always receive the revelations of revealed religions from other humans, not from God direct. In fact, anyone can claim that God spoke to them and therefore that they speak for God, but there is no way to confirm or deny those claims. Unless God speaks directly and universally to all of us, speaks publicly, we have no reliable way of knowing his intentions — other than by studying the nature of the world itself.

Revealed religion is credible only when the revealing comes direct from God in a publicly confirmable way, not when it comes from humans claiming divine sanction. Moreover, if our revelations came direct from God there would be little debate about their content — whereas in fact what we see in the world is hundreds of religions with thousands of discrepancies, an indication of human not divine origins.

If God is not speaking directly and publicly, then natural religion is all we can have. In fact, revealed religion is worse than useless: if there is a God then human revelation is in fact dangerous to those who believe in it. Since it doesn’t come from God it is likely to be false — and for all we know displeasing to God.

The Problem with Prayer

Another thing I didn’t notice until well after becoming an atheist is the horrendous problem with prayer. To put it bluntly, prayer cannot be reconciled with God’s existence. Prayer exists to inform God of a problem or need and, if the prayer is successful, to talk him into doing something he was otherwise not going to do. It is difficult to view prayer in a way that is not insulting to God, for prayer is necessarily meant to be intercessionary. If prayer is not intended either to inform God or change God’s mind, then it has no purpose which is not achievable simply by hoping. But if prayer is nothing but hoping, then we should call it hoping, not prayer. And its content would consist of telling about our hopes. It would contain no requests addressed to God.

Santa Claus for Grownups

Another thing I didn’t recognize until years after becoming an atheist is the similarity between God and Santa Claus. Like the Easter bunny, Santa Claus serves the purpose of fostering in children a desire for supernatural agency, a magical being who can drop from the sky to provide for your needs & wants. Like the desire to secretly discover you are a prince or princess, or the wish for a fairy godmother to someday make you important, Santa Claus prepares the way for God.

I used to wonder why adults fed such illusions to children only to pop them later as they became older. Wasn’t that a bad strategy? Didn’t it risk making children skeptical of adult claims about God. But in fact, it doesn’t make them skeptical, rather is softens them up for more complete and satisfying fantasies, such as spending eternity in paradise. In fact, popping the childish myths helps establish adults as reliable authorities on supernatural beings. Adults “prove” that they know which supernatural entities are real (God) and which are only childhood fantasies (Easter Bunny). God, Santa Claus for adults, is the one supernatural entity children see their parents take seriously. After all, we don’t go to church, synagogue or mosque week in and week out for the others.

Mere Christianity

It was only after I stopped drinking the Christian cool-aid that I discovered how tremendous the gap between the case for God and the case for Christianity actually was. It was clear to me that the case for God’s existence was flawed, but at least it was rational and understandable. Theists were wrong, but they were reasonable.

But concede — just for the sake of their argument — that God exists, and that reasonableness comes to an end. Christians, I discovered, can provide no good reason to jump from God’s existence to Christianity. Almost inevitably, they start quoting from the New Testament, as if an appeal to ancient authority is all that is required to prove that Christianity — of all the religions in the world — is the correct one. Unfortunately for them, they have little else. Natural theology (reasoning from God’s nature, and the nature of the world) simply can’t get you from God’s existence to the truth of Christianity or any other revealed religion.

CS Lewis tried to fudge the gap by arguing that Christianity was so off the wall, such an unlikely story, that it had to be true. Christianity was a manly religion too, said Lewis, because it asks for a blind leap of faith. Competitors? they weren’t off the wall enough to be believable, or weren’t manly enough, or in the case of pantheism could be ridiculed as “pan-everythingism”. Lewis, the most famous of Christian apologists, was incapable of coming up with anything but emotional arguments for the truth of Christianity.

The Faithlessness of Faith

And really, that’s about the best any Christian has done in bridging the gap between the reasonableness of belief in God and the unreasonableness of Christianity. Nor have any other revealed religions done better. Reason can get you to God (though atheists will disagree), but beyond that faith is all there is. That would be “manly” faith, of course, faith confident and brash and unquestioning, something like the way the brash unquestioning Nazis were manly, I suppose.

The problem with faith, of course, is that it proves too much. Faith “proves” Hinduism and Islam and Mithracism as convincingly as it proves Christianity. As a method for determining truth, faith is useless.

Some theologians have tried to obtain at least the Christian attributes of God from natural theology, though even that is a bit tortured. The problem is, you can’t get the Bible from natural theology, or from studying the world, or from thinking about God’s nature. Nor the Koran, of course. And therefore you can’t get the doctrines of revealed religion except by blind faith. But why blindness should favor Christianity or Islam over Mithracism no one can explain. All faith is darkness, and therefore for the person who actually believes in God, useless. Even harmful.

If atheism is true, faith can be benign. But if there is actually a God then faith — because of its blindness — is an incredibly risky business to engage in. For faith pretends — without any reasonable evidence — to know all kinds of specific things about God. What if God doesn’t agree with your blind assertions? Worse, what if she/he/it feels insulted by them?

That’s the rub. If there’s one thing the revealed religions are good at, it’s insulting God. The faithful insist on painting the Supreme Being a buffoon as ignorant of science as they are, easily manipulated by prayer. In their warped vision God becomes an evil ruler plotting to burn billions of sentient beings in everlasting hell.

Having thoroughly insulted the being they bow before, believers had better hope atheists are right. Had better hope God is a mere phantom in the emptiness of silence space.

——

Note: this post has been slightly edited since first posted

“Why face off with the atheist whackjobs? Because extremism is extremism is extremism. No rational movement dedicated to intellectual courage and honesty should maintain a relationship with those for whom intellectual laziness, dishonesty, and cowardice are a way of life. Doing what must be done to insure the integrity of the left will require identifying our extremists, countering their mythologies, and acknowledging the dangers they pose to a truly liberal society.”

“For whom intellectual laziness, dishonesty, and cowardice are a way of life” — ouch! Charitably, she goes on to explain that “not all atheists are atheist extremists,” though we will see presently that by her criteria it would appear that all atheists are.

Barton lists 5 “outrageous” claims made by atheist extremists. PZ Myers, a biologist who writes the blog Pharyngula, has already made an excellent point-by-point reply, however since my perspective is slightly different, I’m going to attempt to do the same.

Is Atheism a Matter of Faith?

The first of the “extremist” claims made by atheist whackjobs, says Barton, is the following:

“Outrageous claim number 1: Atheism is based on evidence and reason and is philosophically provable or proven. Atheism is a matter of thought not belief. In other words, atheism is true; religion is false.”

Which strikes me as 3 distinct claims in one; let’s try to dissect them individually beginning with the last, which appears to be presented as a summary of the other two. “In other words, atheism is true; religion is false.” In Barton’s mind, evidently, it is extreme for any atheist to claim that atheism is true. Yet how could it be otherwise? To be an atheist, ipso facto, is to believe atheism true and its opposite false. Likewise, to be a theist is to believe that theism is true and atheism false.

Put another way, if you don’t believe theism is true, you’re not a theist; if you don’t believe atheism is true, you’re not an atheist. One goes with the other as a matter of definition. Hardly seems extreme.

But perhaps Barton means to concentrate on the second part: “religion is false.” Now, I’d be the first to argue that’s very vague phraseology. Religion is such an all-encompassing word. It includes various belief systems but also feelings, states of being, intuitons, institutions, you name it — and many of those things are neither true nor false. They are not the kinds of things truth or falsity can be applied to.

I won’t deny that some atheist writing quickly somewhere hasn’t written that religion is false, but what they meant by that, surely, is that religous beliefs are false. Now obviously it would go too far to argue that all beliefs held in the name of religion are false, since that would indict “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” as well as “Accept Jesus Christ or you will go to hell.” I doubt anyone on the left, much less left-leaning atheists, object to the Golden Rule. On the other hand, we can be quite sure that every atheist rejects the divinity of Jesus as well as hell and divine punishment. It sort of goes with the atheist territory, you might say.

So we see that what Barton considers an outrageous claim, “atheism is true; religion is false,” is too loose of a summation of what atheists actually claim. It needs to be rewritten this way,

“Atheism is true; religious beliefs based on theism are false.”

I can’t imagine any atheist disagreeing with that. Yet in Barton’s view, this apparently paints us all as extreme.

But surely that can’t be what Barton means — that atheists are “extreme whackjobs” simply because they believe their belief in atheism is true. She asserted earlier after all that not all atheists are extremist. Problem is, she doesn’t seem to leave any way for an atheist not to be an extremist by her criteria if the atheist actually believes there is no God – if, that is to say, they are an atheist.

But maybe she’s just being inexact with her language. Let’s look at the rest of the first “outrageous claim” she attributes to atheists. “Atheism is a matter of thought not belief.” This also strikes me as inexact phraseology, since thought and belief aren’t (under most definitions) opposites. What she means, I suspect, is that whackjob atheists claim that atheism is a matter of reason not faith.

Faith boils down to something like this:

“God said it. I believe it. That settles it.”

Which begs the question of how one knows God said it, much less the question of whether there is, in fact, a God at all. Yet to a great many religious people, faith is sufficient. They fail to appreciate that faith has an achilles heel: it justifies every belief. One might as well say,

“Isis said it. I believe it. That settles it.”

All it settles is your gullibility.

You won’t find an atheist who doesn’t find faith insufficient for belief. According to Barton, apparently, that makes us wackos.

No Proof, only Faith?

Working backwards to the first sentence in her claim, we come to “Atheism is based on evidence and reason and is philosophically provable or proven,” which obviously she considers to be nonsense. Now, the key word here is “philosophically”. Atheism is essentially the opposite of theism, and theism has a multitude of forms. There are many gods under the banner of theism, including God. Atheist arguments differ — often remarkably — depending upon which god or God is the subject of debate.

For the vast majority of supernatural beings denied by atheists, no “philosophical” proof is possible: you can’t devise a deductive argument to prove convincingly that ghosts don’t exist, any more than a deductive argument can prove the non-existence of aliens roaming around the earth. Deductive arguments, in fact, don’t work to settle purely factual questions, as I have explained elsewhere.

But that doesn’t mean factual questions can’t for practical purposes be settled. Settling factual questions is what science excels at. It is a matter of weighing evidence and competing claims and determining which ones work best. Science does it all the time. It is a method which has allowed us to cure diseases and send men to the moon.

If there’s no evidence for ghosts or aliens a la Hollywood, it hardly seems extreme to disbelieve in them. It hardly makes you a whackjob. And if it did, we’d have to paint science itself with the same brush.

Drawing conclusions about existence or non-existence simply doesn’t require deductive proof. Yet, as it turns out, the Judeo-Christian-Islamic God is a special case because that God is defined as perfect (omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent) and the creator of the world. That exposes this specific God to the possibility of philosophical disproof. And the case for disproof is surprisingly strong. Although atheists may ultimately be wrong in asserting it, there is nothing inherently outrageous in the claim that the non-existence of this perfect creator-God is provable.

(Note: I term the case against the perfect God of monotheism “specific atheism” and the case against other gods and entities “general atheism” in order to make this crucial distinction between the type of deity being debated.)

Barton attempts to defend her position this way:

“Ultimately, however, the supernatural’s existence or nonexistence cannot be supported by evidence or proven by reason. Both [atheism & theism] are a matter of faith and therefore belief. In the absense of verifiability, neither can claim to be absolute truth.”

But this is simply a fallacious either-or. In essense she is saying that either something can be verified as absolutely true, or it is simply “a matter of faith”. But no factual matter — and God’s existence/non-existence is a factual matter — can be deductively proved or absolutely verified (the exception being when the claim in question is logically self-contradictory). Every scientific statement is subject to possible future falsifiability simply because science deals with factual questions. Is Barton therefore going to castigate scientists as extremists or whackjobs for believing in evolution or arguing that continents move? Of course not.

The flaw in Barton’s reasoning is that she relies on the old agnostic canard that both theism and atheism rely on faith. That shows an ignorance of the arguments on both sides. Sure, some theologicans do rely ultimately on faith, but most do not. Most believe they have a convincing case for God’s existence; atheologians believe they have a convincing case on the other side. Obviously there is disagreement, but it doesn’t follow because intelligent people disagree with each other that their arguments are based on faith.

True enough, the ignorant agnostic, who hasn’t examined the arguments closely enough to make a determination as to which side has the best case, may conclude that they personally could only decide the issue by tossing a coin — i.e. by faith. For them to make a call between the two positions would require faith — but it does not follow logically that theists or atheists therefore base their position on faith.

There is, in short, an arrogance born of ignorance in the claim that intellectual disputes about God’s existence boil down to faith. I don’t say this idly. Consider for example the recent “conversion” of long-time atheist philosopher Antony Flew to theism (specifically deism). Anyone who tried to argued that Flew’s change of position was a matter of “faith” — or of switching from one “faith” to another” — would demonstrate only their profound ignorance of the issues and arguments involved.

Logically, Barton’s accusation of extremism applies equally to every theists who believes there is a solid case for believing in God and that “therefore theism is true.” This makes it clear, I think, that for this first “claim” at least, it is actually Barton who is the extremist.

Is Naturalism Extremism?

The 2nd of the 5 outrageous claims Melinda Barton attributes to atheist extremists is as off-the-wall as the first.

“Outrageous claim number 2: Since the natural is all that we have or can scientifically observe and/or measure, it is all that exists.”

According to Barton this is easy to refute: “Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.” To which this atheist replies that it is even less true that absence of evidence is evidence of presence.

What exactly is so outlandish about wanting evidence before believing something?

Barton apparently does think that asking for evidence is outrageous. She writes,

“[T]he supernatural’s existence cannot be refuted solely by our inability to observe it. Maybe a supreme being’s properties or our own are simply preventing direct observation. It’s a logical possibility. It is simply not one for science to consider. In the end, however, it is almost certain that there are things that exist that are beyond any of our philosophies.”

But even if we accept Barton’s line of argument here, we can’t—based on lack of evidence—determine which unevidenced entities (of the hundreds of billions of possibilities) actually exist and which don’t. Thus it becomes as necessary to believe in Astarte as in Aten, in the God who hates Christians as in the God who loves Christians. For by Barton’s reasoning, not to believe in the God who hates Christians is as extreme as not to believe in the God who loves Christians: without a requirement of evidence there is simply no way to distinguish the validity of the one belief from the validity of the other. All beliefs must be accepted as equally valid and equally likely.

In my book, it is not the atheist insisting on evidence who is being extremist, but Barton whose philosophy of giving equal weight to lack of evidence makes it impossible to choose rationally between beliefs. Nor can her argument be confined to religious matters, for lack of evidence can be applied to hypothetical physical as well as hypothetical non-physical claims.

Let’s be clear. Scientists do sometimes conclude that undetectable things exist, but they do so not because there is no evidence but rather because there is indirect evidence which makes the hypothesis reasonable. Likewise most theologians don’t base their theology on lack of evidence, as Barton seems to think, but rather on what they maintain is indirect evidence for a God.

No atheist I’ve ever met rejects the possibility of indirect evidence for deity. We remain atheists because the arguments from indirect evidence we’ve encountered so far (the design argument is one such example) seem to us less convincing than alternatives.

Is All Religion Oppressive?

That is the next indictment Barton levels against atheists.

“Outrageous claim number 3: All religion is oppressive.”

Here the key word is “all”, since virtually any sociological claim that includes the words all or every should be suspect upfront as likely to be false. A thoughtful atheist would never say all religions are oppressive because it is quite obvious that at least some religions (Sufis, Quakers, and Zen Buddhists come immediately to my mind) don’t fit the claim. Tellingly, the quote Barton finds to support her assertion that some atheists make this claim does not in fact contain the word “all”. She quotes from “The International Manifesto for Atheistic Humanism” as follows:

“Religion is oppressive. The act of subjugating human will to ‘divine will’ is oppressive. The practice of obeying clergy, of letting them make our decisions for us, is oppressive and irresponsible.”

I don’t agree with the manifesto on this point (where they see oppression I see something quite different: an abrogation of individual moral responsibility). But the key thing is that their generalization does not include the word “all.” They seem to be arguing that religion in general is oppressive. Perhaps they are right. Perhaps they are wrong. But it doesn not seem to be necessarily false on its face the way the claim that “all religion is oppressive” would be clearly false.

Barton admits that “it’s every easy to show many instances of oppression stemming from religion”, so it does not appear that she would object to the claim that religion is sometimes oppressive. Nevertheless, she argues that religion sometimes spearheads social and political liberation and other positive things. I agree. I certainly don’t buy into the notion that religion is necessarily oppressive or always oppressive. It may be that some atheists do. If so I would agree that they are extremist.

Will Eradicating Religion Bring About Utopia?

The 4th claim Barton attributes to whackjob atheists is one I’ve never heard anyone claim.

“Outrageous claim number 4: The eradication of religion in favor of secularism will bring about utopia.”

The closest thing I find to this sentiment is in John Lennon’s song Imagine. Barton says Marxists and anarchists hold this viewpoint in particular. Anarchy, it would seem to me, is not a goal people on the left should have. Anarchy, in fact, is what you get when you decapitate a government, as the United States did to Iraq with its “Shock and Awe” bombing campaign. Anarchy is pretty much the result in Iraq, and it’s not pretty. Marxism, with its eventual “withering away of the State” is equally undesirable, either because the State “withers away” (resulting in something like Iraq) or more likely because it fails to wither away and instead becomes oppressive the way the Soviet Union was and China is.

Neither is an appropriate vision for the left, quite regardless of whether one is an atheist or not.

Nevertheless, religion as it generally exists today is a barrier to a progressive vision of life. It is not coincidence that Bush’s strongest support comes from the most religious Americans, with those who attend church most often being the most likely to have voted for him in 2000 and 2004. They supported him on detaining suspected terrorists forever, without trial or charges; they supported him on “taking the gloves off” during interrogations; they supported him on attacking Iraq; supported him on the Patriot Act, supported him on denying global warming, on Faith-based government, on free-speech zones, on opposition to gay marriage.

Perhaps that support is due to their tendency to rely on faith, on blind allegiance to a church which can be transferred easily to blind allegiance to a party or a President. Perhaps it is simply because they think like Bush does. Or perhaps their belief in afterlife prevents them from caring enough about life to embrace progressive causes. I don’t know. But I do know that in America, liberal churches are greatly outnumbered by conservative churches, and that makes religion more the problem than the solution. Of course, religious fundamentalism is a worldwide problem, one which plausibly threatens to tear apart the fabric of civilization — particularly if we attack Iran with tactical nukes.

Our problem is that science has provided us with tremendous and powerful technologies, but our morality is mired in dinosaur religions thousands of years old. The gap is gradually becoming too wide to hold together. Unless we can flush out the afterlife religions and replace them with life religions, the future does not look pretty.

In Barton’s mind, I suppose, such opinions paint me as an extremist. But it is not utopia I dream of, but simply the survival of civilization.

Do Religions Force or Convince or Coerce?

For her last missive, Barton launches the following:

“Outrageous claim number 5: All religious people want to force you or convince you or coerce you to believe as they do.”

Once again we see the word “all” in order to attempt to make atheists seem more extreme than they actually are. Nor, Barton admits, can she find a quote including the word “all” to back her assertion up. But it is, she asserts, “the claim I’ve heard most often in conversations with friends and readers of the atheist persuasion”. My suspicion, however, is that it is Barton — not her atheist friends and acquaintences — who applied the word “all” in this context.

If you take the “all” away and replace it with “most”, it becomes a reasonable claim. Barton would object, I gather, even here, since she castigates atheists for “judg[ing] all religions by their negative experiences with or feelings about Christianity”. She stresses that her religion (she’s “a practitioner of Judaism”) doesn’t attempt to force anyone to change their beliefs — either by proselytizing or coercion. Well, I’ve never met an atheist who claimed otherwise about Judaism. Maybe there are some ignorant teenage anti-Semitic atheists somewhere who think otherwise, but whatever they are they are not progressives.

No, Barton sets up a strawman argument by adding the word “all”. The reality is that the vast majority of Americans are Christians — and don’t forget that worldwide there are some 2 billion Christians (1 billion Muslims). Christianity grew to such a size because it very much is in the business of converting non-believers to belief. That’s the whole idea behind revivals and missionaries. The entire Protestant game is to save souls by turning them to Jesus.

Nor is there anything wrong with that. I fully support the right of every human being to try to convince others of the rightness of their particular religious beliefs.

But Christianity has long been in the coercion business too, as any overview of the history of the religion makes more than plain. During the middle ages it wasn’t unknown for Jews to be given the choice of converting to Christianity or leaving the country — or worse. Everyone knows about the inquisition and the burning of witches, and everyone should know about the equally horrific treatment of other people and groups deemed heretics and infidels.

Historically, Christians have rarely hesitated at using the power of government to force their religious beliefs upon others — even (or especially) upon other Christian denominations. Our American forebears suffered greatly under the oppression of the Church of England backed by the power of Colonial governments, and for that reason insisted on the separation of church and state. Still, in the United States the last imprisonment for blasphemy (of an atheist) was a scant hundred years ago.

In the 1860′s Christians pressured the U. S. Government into putting “In God We Trust” on coinage and in the following century on all money. In 1954, “under God” was made part of the Pledge of Allegiance, implying that theism was an integral aspect of allegiance to country. President Bush Sr. suggested during a Presidential campaign that atheists could not be good citizens. There are fringe Christians today (fringe, except that some of their followers have gotten positions in the Bush administration) who want to see the United States turned into a theocracy and atheists put to death.

Christianity is coercive by nature because it is based on the belief that life on earth is fodder for afterlife. Better to threaten someone in an effort to “save their soul” or kill them in order to safeguard others from the risk of “eternal torture” in hell. Worse, Christianity is hinged on the concept of collective punishment. Just as God collectively punished all mankind for the sins of Adam, many Christian Americans today believe God punishes the United States because of its non-believers.

Of course, it is pretty evident nowadays that Islam is worse than Christianity.
Don’t misunderstand me. Most Christians and Muslims are moral and decent folk who are not coercive. But their decency derives from their humanity and not, unfortunately, from their religion.

Barton’s Judaism to the contrary, the dominant religions today — Christianity and Islam — do try to “force or convince or coerce” people under their jurisdiction “to believe as they do”. To point that fact out is not extremist. Not in my book.

Is Atheism the Enemy of Freedom and Liberty?

In conclusion Barton admits that atheists — or atheist extremists as she prefers to call us — are a small minority who currently endanger no one’s liberty. But she warns, someday that could change.

“While most who believe in the separation of church and state hold that only government support of religion in the public sphere should be forbidden, the atheist extremist may take it one step further to forbid the private display of religious symbols in public places.”

All I can say is that I’ve never met an atheist who would support something like that, and I seriously doubt that Barton has either. She brings up the example of France “forbidding the wearing of yarmulkes, crosses, hijabs, and the like” in public schools — but let’s face it, France does a lot of things (like forbidding foreign words on billboards) that no American, atheist or otherwise, would ever countenance.

Finally, Barton says,

“. . . the greatest danger the atheist extremist poses now is to the integrity and success of progressive movements. If we are to truly uphold the liberal ideals of freedom and liberty, we must stand against extremists of all stripes who would threaten those ideals. Secondly, in a nation comprised predominantly of those who believe in some sort of supreme being, our success as a movement depends on disavowing the atheist extremist as a legitimate voice of the left. Finally, our commitment to truth demands we counter the fallacies being perpetuated in our name.”

Given that most of the supposedly outrageous “fallacies” Barton lists are, as we have seen, either not so outrageous after all or not spouted by atheists of any stripe, one begins to wonder if Barton’s real argument is strategic. Maybe all the whackjobbery business is nothing but a smokescreen for her real message, which is that progressives should expell atheists from their number for reasons of strategy.

“. . . in a nation comprised predominantly of those who believe in some sort of supreme being, our success as a movement depends on disavowing the atheist . . .”

Perhaps that would be good strategy, though it doesn’t strike me as very progressive. But if this is Barton’s real messge, why not just come out and say so? Why smoke up the message with so many weak arguments?

Come to think of it, there’s already an organization on the left side of the political spectrum with a sign out that says “atheists not welcome.” It’s called the Democratic Party.

– — –

You can read Melinda Barton’s full article here: “The Left’s Own Religious Extremists”

PZ Myers, reply in the blog Pharyngula can be found here. He was also invited by The Raw Story to respond, which is here.

Rev. William Alberts: Time for People of Faith to Censure Bush

Alberts writes,

‘Resolving disputes peacefully was the first thing out of President Bush’s mouth and apparently the last thing on his mind. His pre-war public posture was that of a man of faith and peace. At his March 6, 2003 news conference, he said, “I pray daily. I pray for wisdom and guidance and strength. . . . I pray for peace. I pray for peace.” (The New York Times, Mar. 7, 2003) Two weeks later he ordered the bombing of the Iraqi people and the invasion of their country.’

Albert follows by impolitely bringing up the, ahem, public record as known so far. That records makes it clear that invading Iraq was on the agenda from day 1, and that the administration deliberately deceived the public in order to get their war. “I pray daily…for peace” indeed!

Alberts also pushes people of faith to call for Bush’s impeachment. But he overlooks one little detail. The one constant and dependable group these last 5 years, the segment of the American population that has steadfastly voted for, cheered on, and championed our current President, is none other than people of faith.

Perhaps what we should be asking is this: Why were people of faith so easily manipulated by the administration and shepherded along like, well, sheep?

Answer: that is what people of faith are good at — being sheep. And faith is the sheepdog that makes it possible.

Which is understandable. Feeling are, after all, not thoughts. They can’t be proved—or disproved. They just are.

Which is why religion animates us, and philosophy does not. Religion is built of feelings, not thoughts. That’s why we refer to a religious outlook as a “faith”, and insist one must “have faith”. Religion is a matter of feelings.

And feelings are never wrong.

Nor right.

Only thoughts can be wrong or right—and religion, we see, begins with feelings. With the undeniable.

And yet, we interpret. We give meaning. We declare that this feeling—or that one—is of God. (For a thing built on feelings, there sure is a lot of thought put into religion.)

Thoughts, however, are always right or wrong. They are never undeniable.

So religion carries a core which is undeniable, felt but uninterpreted. And a large halo of thought circles around the core.

Like all thought, it is inherently questionable.

Like all thought, it must be questioned.

But it must always be understood that the religious core—felt but uninterpreted—remains untouched.

The halo of thought is what we usually have in mind when we think of religion. But it is important to remember that it is only peripheral.

It is not our thoughts but the reverence we feel toward certain feelings which constitutes religion. When I feel joy at being a mortal body, or fear and awe before the dark vast forest at night, or gulp the wind into my lungs like delicious draughts of water—that is when I am experiencing religion. If I talk reverently about these feelings, then I am being religious.

But as soon as I leave behind my reverent talk about feelings (my talk of faith), and begin to discuss religious meaning and truth, then I have entered the arena of reason: of skepticism, logical analysis, evaluation. And faith no longer applies.