William Lane Craig and Me

I don't know how I missed this but I have just discovered that two years ago something that I wrote in the Huffington Post was discussed in a Podcast by Professor William Lane Craig.  Dr. Craig is an actual philosopher and one that atheist writer Sam Harris once said "seems to put the 'fear of God' into his fellow atheists." He has debated the whole gauntlet of the "new atheists" though Richard Dawkins famously chickened out of his debate with him at Oxford.  He is, in my estimation, a very impressive thinker and that he saw fit to discuss (for 20 min!) something associated with me is quite astounding.

In any event, if you have any interest in the Cosmological Argument for God's existence you might enjoy giving this a listen: A Rabbi Looks at the Kalam Argument.

Most of the information in the piece came from the writing of Theological Philosopher Edward Feser so at best I can only take credit for having understood what he said, but still.  You can see the original article here.

Seven Things Atheists Get Wrong

I had been meaning to post this for a while - an interesting perspective from a friend of a friend (David Marcus) at the Federalist:

In a spectacular and telling failure of journalism MSNBC reported recently that Pope Francis “broke with Catholic tradition” by asserting that the Big Bang theory is real. Instantly, the Internet responded with the name Georges Lemaitre, one of the creators of the Theory of Universal Expansion who also happened to be a Jesuit priest. He is also the first entry on a Google search of “Catholic Big Bang.”

That the MSNBC author did not bother to do one search before making a pronouncement about the faith of a billion people displays abysmal incompetence. But it also reflects very skewed and dangerous ideas about the nature of religion widely held in the media and creative class. As atheist Sam Harris put it in his article “Science Must Destroy Religion”: “the conflict between religion and science is inherent and (very nearly) zero sum.” This confrontational attitude ,which is unnecessary and harmful, springs from a slew of misconceptions about religion as a human phenomenon.

1. Religion Is About Morality, Not Creation Myths

It was apt that MSNBCs misnomer about the Catholic view of science concerned creation. Often the origin of the earth and of man plays a central role in the science versus religion debate. There are jokes about cave men riding dinosaurs, deep concerns about our children being exposed to the idea of intelligent design, and disdain thrown upon those who question the almighty power of science. But, frankly, creation, while fascinating, is not the most important aspect of the atheist critique of religion. Morality is. The means by which the earth was made plays an insignificant role in our daily lives. Moral choices, on the other hand, are made every day, and they have long, lingering effects.

2. Religion Is the Foundation of All Morality, Not Merely an Expression of It

The atheist approach to the non-empirical question of “how do we determine right from wrong” tends to be a negative ad campaign listing the horrors done in the name of religion. Whether it is the Inquisition or ISIS, atheists argue that these barbarities stem directly from the intolerance of religious texts and practices. On the surface it can be a persuasive argument, but upon deeper reflection it becomes murky.

Christopher Hitchens, of all people, inadvertently exposed the complexity of religion’s relationship to morality and barbarism in a debate. Confronted with the fact that Stalin was an atheist who committed genocide, he said:

In Russia in 1917 for hundreds of years billions of people had been told that the head of the state is a supernatural power...This has been inculcated in generations of Russians for hundreds of years, if you are Josef Stalin, himself a seminarian from Georgia, you shouldn’t be in the totalitarianism business if you can’t exploit a ready made reservoir of credulity and servility.

Hitchens is too clever for his own good here. In broadening the scope of immoral actions caused by religion to capture the acts of atheists, he broadens it so completely that it captures everything. Hitchens, in his eagerness to blame religion for Stalin’s atrocities asserts that religion is the foundation for all moral choices, not merely those made in religion’s name.

He is absolutely right. All of us, whether atheist, agnostic, or a member of a religion, practice morality based on religion. Without religion there would never have been morality. There was no peaceful, Adamite paradise of moral choice which religion sullied millennia ago. Before religion, there was murder and rape and all manner of horrors just as there are today. It was religion that first sought to constrain human actions through a moral code, not science. The same credulity and servility that led Russia to support Stalin leads us to believe that right differs from wrong and that we must choose (or serve) that which is right.

3. Religion Was the Foundation of Society, Not an Addition to It

In his insightful essay, “Primitive Religion and the Origin of the State”[1] philosopher Marcel Gauchet goes a step farther, arguing that without religion there would be no state. He writes that “by going back in time to the religious tie between supernatural founder-givers and human heirs-debtors, we can elucidate the system of primitive links that produces the social space.” It was this debt to supernatural, irrational powers that created the very notion of acting in accordance with what is good. Whether all, or some, or none of the admonitions in Leviticus or the Koran are really moral is beside the point. They are part of humanity’s search, stretching to the invisible past, for guidelines or maxims that produce good actions and the structures to encourage them.

4. Atheists Do Believe

The question most often posed to atheists who complain about the presence of the Ten Commandments or a creche in public spaces is, “Since you don’t believe, why does it bother you so much?” This is the wrong question. The right question is, “Since you do believe, why does it bother you so much?” Because most atheists do believe, and I stress the word believe, that they are capable of understanding right from wrong. They provide no scientific justification for such a belief because no such scientific justification exists.

5. Science Can’t Teach Us Right from Wrong

Even if it were proven that there is a “generosity gene” or that there are evolutionary advantages to cooperative behavior, such things would not inform us how to act in a given situation. The activation of a gene or the selfless actions of our ancestors may well provide a subconscious impulse for moral action, but that impulse must still be translated to the conscious mind. Upon finding a $20 bill on the floor, we must still decide whether to keep it or look for its previous owner based on stories we tell ourselves. Science cannot tell us these stories, and the moment it tries to it becomes religion.

The idea of a cold finite existence ending in complete oblivion is not the harshest concept an atheist must swallow. Far more present and paralyzing is the notion that our actions are devoid of moral consequence. As Hitchens points out, so ingrained is our credulity towards morality and our servility to it that most people cannot ignore it. It is not merely silly superstitions that atheists seek to remove from our personal and policy choices, it is the idea that an objectively, morally correct choice is even possible. But even if we accept the premise that morality is entirely subjective, we still have to decide how to act.

6. Religion Complements Science, It Doesn’t Oppose It

This is where religion, far from being the natural enemy of science, comes to its aid. Just as believers must always fight nagging doubts about the truth of their beliefs, the atheist must fight nagging beliefs when confronted with moral choices. Just as there is no paradox in a believer knowing that science can reveal important details of how the physical world operates, there is no paradox in an atheist knowing that religion and its ancient history of moral investigation is relevant to moral understanding.

In his masterpiece “The Glass Bead Game,” Herman Hesse envisions a future Europe in which there are two basic powers. The first is the elite group of players of the game, a mysterious enterprise in which all of human knowledge is manipulated and combined to create pure, rational truths. The other is the Roman Catholic Church, which remains essentially unchanged in the world of the novel. Hesse knew that at some points the cold, rational understanding of the world must give way to metaphysical musings. The book’s central character stands between these two powers, influenced by both. Most Americans stand similarly between these obligations to science and to religion.

7. Ignorance of Religion Is Ignorance of History, For Atheists and Everyone

The systematic removal of religious texts, practices, and imagery from our public lives is not a worthy goal. When the Ten Commandments are placed on a wall, nobody believes they are the actual tablets Moses brought down from Sinai’s mount. They are a representation of an ancient message that one can believe is sacred or secular but that one cannot claim is insignificant. It is possible to encounter and explore a religious text without imbuing it with supernatural significance. Harold Bloom does just that in his insightful “The Book of J,” which explores the work of one Old Testament writer through the lens of literary criticism.

Secular approaches to religion such as Bloom’s are far superior to the idea of hiding religion from education or public discourse. We have to understand that for thousands of years our culture and every culture based its moral choices on very simple sets of stories—stories which many of us have stopped telling each other. That has a terrible effect on our ability to understand our culture and its past. Try reading “Moby Dick” without a working knowledge of the Bible. It becomes little more than a tall tale about fishing.

Showing respect for a person or culture’s religious beliefs, even if you disagree with him, is simple common courtesy. I am asking atheists to do much more. I am asking them to understand and embrace the role religion played in creating the world we live in, and to see that religion was not merely the author of good moral choices or bad moral choices but of the very concept of moral choice.

Later in his essay, Harris argues that “religion is fast growing incompatible with the emergence of global, civil society.” This, in a nutshell, is what atheists get wrong. It is only through religion, and its metaphysical, moral obligations that global society is possible at all. As Harris pulls the offending thread of religion out of the global moral tapestry, it falls apart, replaced only with his preferences. In the end the battle, between atheists and believers in the area of moral choice is little different than the battle between Jews and Muslims. All of us have contributions to make, and no side will ever prove its unique power to teach us how we should choose.

[1]Gauchet, Marcel, “Primitive Religion and the Origin of the State,” New French Thought,Lilla, Mark (1994).

Help, I Don't Exist!

I find neuroscientist Sam Harris to be considerably more interesting than most of his fellow "New Atheist" thinkers and, despite my fundamental disagreement with him on many matters of critical importance, I often find myself interested in his approach to various topics and periodically in agreement with what he has to say.  Recently, Harris who has lectured extensively on the topic of consciousness has been studying and practicing Eastern Meditation, for the purpose, he says, of revealing that the "self" does not really exist. 

Why is Dr. Harris doing this?  Because he is a materialist who believes that physical reality is the only reality and the problem of consciousness has long been an irritating thorn in the side of the materialist worldview.  He wants to explain how it could be that we all have a sense of unique self-hood - a tall order considering that it has been widely recognized that no one has any idea how a material entity could be consciously aware of itself.  This oddity is openly acknowledged by most of the great thinkers on the topic.  For instance, it’s been described by philosopher and cognitive scientist David Chalmers as "the Hard Problem."  As he once wrote:

It is undeniable that some organisms are subjects of experience. But the question of how it is that these systems are subjects of experience is perplexing. Why is it that when our cognitive systems engage in visual and auditory information-processing, we have visual or auditory experience: the quality of deep blue, the sensation of middle C? How can we explain why there is something it is like to entertain a mental image, or to experience an emotion? It is widely agreed that experience arises from a physical basis, but we have no good explanation of why and how it so arises. Why should physical processing give rise to a rich inner life at all? It seems objectively unreasonable that it should, and yet it does.

This problem has also been explored in NYU philosopher Thomas Nagel's work "What is It Like to Be a Bat?," which is intended as a refutation of Reductionism,  the idea that a complex system is simply a sum of its parts. Reductionism would argue that all mental processes could be fully described if all of the physical processes in the brain could be described.  The "Hard Problem" then is that there is no reason to expect that the bat should have an experience of "bat-ness" and yet it would seem obvious that it does.  If the brain (ours or that of any animal) is only a machine—an arrangement of physical components that obeys the laws of physics like a computer or a calculator—all that it should be doing is executing its program (how the program came to be in the first place is another matter).  The calculator presumably has no experience of calculator-ness, so why should we be any different?  Yet clearly we are; hence the "hard problem."

Dr. Harris has a solution in mind: our consciousness. Our awareness and experience of our "selves," is simply an illusion.  As he recently said in a NYT's interview:

The feeling of being a subject inside your head, a locus of consciousness behind your eyes, a thinker in addition to the flow of thoughts [is not real]. This form of subjectivity does not survive scrutiny. If you really look for what you are calling “I,” this feeling will disappear.

He illustrates this with a picture:

His thinking is that just as there really is no square here but only the illusion of one, so too is the feeling of one's "self" equally illusory.  I'm not sure that there is any great correlation between an optical illusion (which has no awareness of itself and hence no experience to negate) and the universal awareness of self that we all have and which he struggles to explain away.  Furthermore, I'm not at all uncomfortable with counter-claiming that the square does indeed exist but simply exists in a different way than the three-quarter black circles do.  In the same sense that Jews would claim that the soul (or any spiritual entity) cannot be measured but only implied from what can be measured, so too the square. 

Harris claims that the goal of the mystics is to remove the "I" from our consciousness - which is the fiction that blocks us from perceiving the true reality (according to Harris): there is no true "I."  This would appear to align nicely with Buddhism and conceivably part of what attracts him to this sort of exploration is that Buddism has no God concept.  

Some questions regarding this whole approach:

1. Who or what is doing the realizing when it's realized that there is no "I?"  The illusion? 
2. If there's no "I," how is this realization remembered, since memory would presumably be a function of the "I?" 
3. What the overall goal of this exploration?  What do "I" hope to gain in discovering that I don't really exist?
4. How do we know that it's not the disappearance of the sense of an "I" that is actually illusory?

The whole enterprise of attempting to come to such a paradoxical and non-intuitive realization that there is no “I” and no true self would appear to be wholly subjective and lacking the standards of scientific rigor that the "New Atheists" generally claim to embrace.  How would we hope to test this idea?  In commenting on this problem, Harris acknowledges that "Whatever we study, we are obliged to take subjective reports seriously, all the while knowing that they are sometimes false or incomplete."

Perhaps what Professor Harris and the Eastern mystics mean is something akin to what Judaism teaches - that the destruction of the ego (a warped perception of the self) will free our minds (or souls) to be able to perceive the "Universal Mind" or Infinite Consciousness that we call God.  It’s difficult to assert, as Harris does, that if people just think about it enough that they will come to understand that their most basic sense of consciousness is not really there.  The advantage of such an approach is that it conveniently elides the conclusion that many would be drawn to make – that our pervasive and universal sense of self is quite real and that given that there is no explicable physical basis for it there must be a metaphysical one.  

The "New Atheists" Are Not Logical

As I've mentioned before, the "New Atheist" crowd are a group of people with above average intelligence who happen to be gifted in the art of the spoken and written word.  Richard Dawkins is a biologist by training, Chris Hitchens was a journalist, Sam Harris was trained in neuroscience (plus a BA in philosophy).  Of this group only Daniel Dennett has advanced training in Philosophy - receiving his Ph.D from Oxford.  As such, the first three could be forgiven to some extent for failing to truly understand what it is that they claim to be refuting.  Dennett, it would seem, has no excuse.

This group has done inestimable harm to the general public by wrapping their flawed and incomplete comprehension of theology in a veneer of erudition and confidence.  Often more bluster than substance, these aggressive and often intolerant people are long on attitude and short on facts.  For instance, Richard Dawkins believes that he refuted the Cosmological argument in "The God Delusion" by claiming that the main thrust of the argument is that "everything has a cause" and therefore "what caused God?"  The only issue is that no one ever presented the argument like that - not Aristotle, nor Aquinas, nor Al Ghazali nor Maimonides.  The argument has always been that "that which begins to exist has a cause" which closes the loop on the "what caused God" rebuttal.  So one of two things is possible - either a) he was unaware of this - which would seem highly unacceptable for someone writing a book refuting God's existence (without refuting any of the actual arguments that theists make in favor of His existence) or b) he did it willfully - which is deceptive and intellectually dishonest.  Which one do you think it is?

Ok, so maybe they're not that versed in classical theology but they sure can think!  Isn't the force of their reason enough to put the last nail in the coffin of the the folly that is religion?  Not so much.  I recently came across an essay by Ian Kluge on a website called www.bahaiphilosophystudies.com that outlines the (very many) logical errors in the writing of these four men.  His stated aim of the piece is not to demonstrate their lack of theological prowess but rather to "show that their reasoning is not to be trusted."  Here's a sample from the Hitchens section:

I.  GOD IS NOT GREAT by Christopher Hitchens

# 1: much of this book is an extended non sequitur: proving that God does not exist is logically distinct from God’s nature, i.e. God may be evil but He may exist nonetheless.

# 2: It is also a category mistake, i.e. confusing the category of existence with the category of ethics. Goodness or badness cannot prove that something does or does not exist.

# 3: “It must seek to interfere with the lives of nonbelievers or heretics or adherents of other faiths.” (p. 17): Besides being an error of fact, this is non-sequitur: it does not follow from the fact that some religions have ‘interfered’ that all have or that all “must” do so as part of their inherent nature.

# 4: This is also an unsupported assertion and an sweeping generalization (fallacy of accident), i.e. a confusion/conflation of ‘some’ with ‘all,’ i.e. a failure to note exceptions.

# 5: “Once again, religion has poisoned everything.” (p. 27) Rhetorical exaggeration: this has no reasonable content, i.e. is logical and scientific nonsense, i.e. this is not a proposition that is amenable to scientific testing and has no scientific meaning at all – which leads Hitchens into inconsistency since he thinks our thought should be scientific.  It is irrational: how could religion poison mother’s milk, the manufacture of ball-point pens, and the activity of bird-watching? What does “poisons” actually mean? If he means it as a metaphor it is either an example of poetic license, hyperbole, in which case there is no point trying to prove it – it can’t be; or it is meant literally, then H has discovered scientific evidence of a new agent that can poison mother’s milk, the manufacture of book-ends and prospecting for beryllium. He provides no such evidence. This claim is pure rhetoric, i.e. has no reason to support it but relies on emotional connotations.

He makes 119 points in part I and an additional 180 points in part II.  Read it and see if you feel that these folks are the brilliant thinkers they are purported to be.

Bravo Mr. Kluge...