God As An Evil Super-Alien

Via morsec0de, an interesting observation:

I’m often told by Christians of certain stripes that they know God is good because the Bible says so. And thus, all the things he says in the Bible are good, regardless of how morally reprehensible they may seem to a secular humanist like me.

But if the Bible is all your evidence for God’s goodness, what’s to have stopped some powerful evil being from penning it and calling himself good? It certainly seems to match up with some of the Hebrew scriptures’ more wrathful picture of their deity. Not to mention a few of the more heinous teachings in the New Testament. (I’m looking at you, Paul and Revelation!)

Which brings up another group of believers: those who say it is through private revelation or their own feelings that they know that God is good.

Personally, I don’t see any reason why the Bible couldn’t have been inspired by Satan (or some other malevolent supernatural being), although in that case it would still be saddled with the problem of not having any obvious ‘otherworldly’ elements to distinguish it from any other holy text in existence. That’s not what this post is about, though.

While researching the Problem of Evil, I started to wonder what would happen if the argument was reversed. Assume the existence of an evil God, for whatever reason takes your fancy, and suddenly we’d have to talk about the ‘Problem of Good’. Even the counter-arguments would be largely identical in form – find an example of gratuitous goodness which is not counterbalanced by a greater example of evil and hey presto, the evidential argument from goodness is complete and our evil God is shown to probably not exist!

What started off as some idle musing on my part turned to serious consideration of a strange but oft-overlooked (by atheists) aspect of religious belief, which I’ll call ‘trust in God’. It falls under two headings.

1) Religious people will frequently hold the contradictory ideas that God is beyond our understanding and that they can somehow know certain facts about God.

This one is a bit of a no-brainer. God is apparently totally beyond our ken, existing in ways that we literally cannot conceive of. This claim frequently shows up when the arguments from hiddenness and evil start getting thrown around, at which point we are assured that any doubts we may have about God’s motivations are really just products of our own limited understanding – God is beyond our understanding.

God apparently loses that attribute as soon as one wishes to start listing what he likes or dislikes. God dislikes homosexuality – this we can know for sure. God is so just that he simply cannot help but condemn unbelievers to hell – this we can also know with certainty. But why does he allow suffering? And where is he, if we have yet to find him after hundreds of years of looking? And why did he wait such an astonishingly long time before making himself known, given that his word only came to us at the very last fraction of our existence so far?

There are two obvious counter-arguments to this. The first is that the Bible explains all (or at least all that we can know, and anything outside of it is mere speculation), but that gives up the claim to certainty. Anybody who’s sane will acknowledge that the Bible was, at the very least, not written directly by God. If God had any hand in it, his action was mediated through his fallible human followers. How do we know that their writings are trustworthy when it comes to facts about God which we cannot possibly verify? (For example: apart from the fact that it says so in the Bible, how could you know that God disapproves of homosexuality or adultery or even murder? How can you check if those ancient writers were correct?)

The second obvious (or at least common) counter argument is the idea that Christians (and Muslims and Jews and Hindus and, it seems, members of almost every other religion in existence) just know these things. Their knowledge is not empirical or verifiable – it just is. This is where the infamous ‘others ways of knowing’ tend to show up most frequently, for obvious reasons. To be frank, this kind of counter-argument is so weak that nothing more needs to be said about it. This sort of vague knowledge is just as unverifiable as the claims that it supposedly backs up, and is thus fairly useless.

2) Religious people will frequently hold the contradictory ideas that God is beyond our understanding that that they can somehow trust him utterly.

This is the one that really confuses me. God is apparently awe-inquiringly powerful and intelligent, on top of being beyond our understanding. Thank about that for a moment: you have a being who is supposedly all-powerful (or close to it), who knows everything (or close to it) and whose thought processes – if he has any – are totally inscrutable to us.

And we’re expected to trust a being like this? This is apparently where ‘faith’ comes into the equation, but let’s be honest – if God actually materalized in front of the world tomorrow, yet still had all of the properties I’ve just mentioned, who in their right mind would throw themselves at his feet and devote themselves utterly to him? How do you know he isn’t evil? How do you know that he isn’t systematically deceiving you (which, by your own admission, he could do with incredible ease if he wanted to)? How do you know that he is not, to use a cliche (and a misquote at that!), just a sufficiently advanced alien? How could you know? And keep in mind, in this scenario you at least have the luxury of knowing with certainty – with real, genuine ‘I’m-looking-at-him-right-now-and-so-is-everybody-else-on-Earth’ certainty – that this entity exists. In real life, all we have to go on is the testimony of some ancient writers. How difficult would it be for an evil god to mislead a few of the right people before sitting back and watching its work spread out through history like ripples in the surface of a pond?

The claim that God is somehow transmitting certainty into us is even more unsettling, because that is precisely what one would expect a powerful being to do if it wanted to undermine humanity. Actually, even if a good God was doing it, it would essentially be a form of mind control.

Why should we trust this supposed entity, which is so powerful and so beyond our understanding that, according to it (or at least its followers) we have no right to do anything but stand in awe before it?

My Least Favourite Form Of Theodicy…

…is the following, this example in response to the problem of evil:

Sullivan: My notion of a fallen world is related to the fact of mortality, which embraces almost everything on our planet, and causes terrible suffering to animals as well as humans. The difference is that, so far as we know, only humans experience this suffering as a form of alienation; we feel somehow as if we belong elsewhere, as if this mortal coil is not something we simply accept, as if our home was from somewhere else.

This, in my view, is our intimation of God, nascent in the long march of human existence only in the last couple thousand years, and unleashed most amazingly in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. Ni ange, ni bete. And from that disjuncture between what we sense of as our actual home and this vale of tears we perforce inhabit, comes our search for God. No reason can end that sense of dislocation because it is some kind of deep sense that is prior to reason.

That’s why I do not experience faith as some kind of rational choice or as some kind of irrational leap. I experience it merely as a condition of being human. (Source)

I’ve noticed that the only people who seem to believe in such a rarefied type of God are those who are most intimately acquainted with the arguments against his existence.

Needless to say, I have no idea what Sullivan means when he says that ‘we feel somehow as if we belong elsewhere, as if this mortal coil is not something we simply accept, as if our home was from somewhere else’. The ‘we’ in there might include more people than Sullivan, but it certainly doesn’t include me.

Defining the Divine

I don’t agree with everything in the following video, but the section on defining God (from about 4:30 onwards) is spot-on:

Let’s Talk About Moral Relativism

Relativism is fairly popular in academic circles at the moment, although it is thankfully not as ubiquitous as some people would have you believe. There are actually far more kinds of relativism than you might think, too – epistemological relativism, cultural relativism (very popular in many English departments, it must be said), logical relativism and good old-fashioned moral relativism. I subscribe only to the latter, for reasons that I might go into at some future date.

Before I get any inevitable comments about how moral relativism ‘can’t condemn the Holocaust’, let me point out two things: firstly, not all moral relativists are that strict or extreme in their outlook, and secondly, that is irrelevant. I frequently see the morality of others glibly dismissed based on the fact that it would make it difficult to condemn Hitler or because it is too Eurocentric or because it is not backed up by the weight of Scripture and will therefore lead people away from God. All of those concerns are totally irrelevant, for the simple reason that if moral relativism or Biblical morality or realism are correct then they are correct regardless of their consequences. At most, offering up this kind of argument is a rather underhanded attempt at accusing the moral relativist (or whoever) of being intellectually dishonest. It is not a valid argument against relativism itself.

I have to say, I’m not particularly happy about being a moral relativist. I would like it very much if there was some way of telling with any degree of certainty what is ‘right’ and ‘wrong’, but so far I’ve only come to the depressing conclusion that a person’s morality is no more objective than is their taste in music or their political allegiances. Again, this is not a situation that I enjoy, but it seems to be true. I’ve always been highly suspicious of any claim to have discovered moral truths or ‘facts’, for the simple reason that those moral truths always seem to coincide perfectly with what a person believed in before they made their discovery. A Christian will never ‘discover’ that, actually, the Qur’an contains the greatest moral truth of any holy book, just as a staunch liberal will never ‘discover’ that his conservative enemies have had it right all along. This alone doesn’t invalidate any argument in favor of objective morality, for obvious reasons, but it has left me pretty disillusioned with the whole business.

We all know somebody (or a great number of somebodies) who will defend their opinions on trivial matters as if they were stone-cold fact. On matters of taste in art or music or books, and especially when it comes to political affiliations, we all expect that people will treat what is obviously a subjective opinion as though it were objectively correct. Why do we look at moral opinions any differently? Surely only because they are more important to us. We all want to be able to condemn the Holocaust on the strongest terms possible, collectively unaware that having a desire to condemn something as wrong is hardly a rational starting point if we want to discover objective moral truths (again, for obvious reasons).

I would argue for relativism because it seems to be the most reasonable position to adopt, not because I like it. Am I alone in this, or are there others who grudgingly accept that relativism is probably correct but wish that it wasn’t? Or are there any theists out there who believe that their God has mandated morality from on high but who don’t agree with the content of his pronouncements? (And I mean genuinely don’t agree – I’ve seen too many people who’ll say something along the lines of ‘Yes, this part seems barbaric and arbitrary, but here’s why it’s actually 100% acceptable.)

Why I’m an Atheist, Part Six: The Logical Problem of Evil

I was going to cover the Ontological Argument today, but it’s really, really boring. So instead I’m doing the famous Problem of Evil! What fun.

Any atheist will tell you that we spend far more time replying to theistic arguments than we do advancing anti-theistic arguments of our own. I think this supports the common atheist claim that we merely lack belief in God rather than actively saying that he doesn’t exist, but the general reluctance of many atheists to make proactive arguments of their own does have a downside. It casts atheism as an endlessly defensive position, nothing more than a set of rebuttals to the constant onslaught of theism. Even requests by atheists to ‘prove God’ very quickly turn into attempts at refuting one of the standard arguments for his existence, since those are what theists most frequently reply with.

Despite all of that, there are some good anti-theistic arguments out there. The most popular and well-known of these is the Problem of Evil, which often gets shortchanged on the internet by being presented as ‘evil exists therefore God doesn’t QED’. Needless to say, it’s a bit more complex than that, as it should be given its very long history. The first thing to keep in mind is that it can be divided into two distinct types: the logical problem of evil and the evidential problem of evil . Let’s start with the former.

The Logical Problem of Evil

The logical problem of evil is deductive, and seeks to demonstrate that the existence of God is logically incompatible with the existence of evil. For simplicity’s sake I’m going to go with the standard monotheistic definition of ‘God’, although I’ll have more to say on that later (as usual). This type of the argument goes back to Epicurus, but has of course been altered and refined over time. In more recent years it has received something of a revival under the philosopher J.L. Mackie. His version is well worth reading if you can get your hands on it (citation at the bottom of this post), but the gist of his kind of argument can be summed up like this:

1. If God exists, then God is omnipotent, omniscient, and morally perfect.
2. If God is omnipotent, then God has the power to eliminate all evil.
3. If God is omniscient, then God knows when evil exists.
4. If God is morally perfect, then God has the desire to eliminate all evil.
5. Evil exists.
6. If evil exists and God exists, then either God doesn’t have the power to eliminate all evil, or doesn’t know when evil exists, or doesn’t have the desire to eliminate all evil.
7. Therefore, God doesn’t exist. (Source)

As you can see, it’s a good deal more involved than just ‘evil exists, now explain God’. This kind of argument is one which involves an apparent contradiction between God’s attributes (omniscience, omnipotence, and being wholly good) and a fact about the world (the existence of evil). Other anti-theistic arguments highlight apparent contradictions just between the attributes, but those are, I feel, of a less compelling nature.

After presenting the argument, Mackie goes on to list a few of what he calls ‘adequate solutions’ to the problem: theists could deny God’s omnipotence in some way (God cannot prevent all evils), or deny that evil exists, instead defining it as a privation of good (a popular response). However, he goes on to claim that many of these adequate solutions are never fully adopted by theists – those who claim that God is not omnipotent in this regard will probably still believe him to be omnipotent in other ways, and those who say that evil is a privation of good would probably think of such privation as itself being evil.

He then goes on to name some fallacious solutions. I won’t go into them all in depth, because really, the most important one is the claim that evil is necessary for the existence of human free will. This is the most common theistic response to the problem of evil, and is often assumed to trump it completely. (Another important and related response is one that runs something like ‘The world is, in the long-term, better off with evil than without evil’. I won’t cover it here, but do look it up.)

According to many theists, it is an extremely good thing that humans are endowed with free will. However, in order for us to be truly free, as opposed to merely having the illusion of freedom, it is necessary that we be capable of choosing to do evil. Yes, God could have limited our choices, or prevented our evil choices from having any real consequences, but either would destroy our freedom. According to this solution to the problem of evil, the good free actions of humanity are, on balance, better than the evils which are produced by that freedom, and also better than those actions would be if they were determined by God. Mackie attempts to counter this reply, but I personally feel that it goes a long way towards wrecking the logical problem of evil. It’s possible to debate endlessly over the exact meaning of ‘freedom’ and ‘goodness’ (and trust me, people have), but in the end I feel that there is too much ‘wiggle room’ in this kind of argument. Remember, it is trying to show that God’s existence is logically contradicted by the existence of evil, which means that there should be no great uncertainty as to the terms and assumptions involved.

However, I will say two things more about this version of the problem. Firstly, it is telling that almost no theists are willing to concede that God is not all-good, or is indifferent to human affairs, or that his conception of ‘goodness’ is so totally alien to our own that what we see as evil he sees as good. (And on that last one I’m not talking about evil as being a pre-requisite for some future, greater good which we would recognize as such. I mean that no theists will admit to the possibility that God’s ideas of good and evil are simply utterly different to our own.) It bears repeating that theists and atheists alike use philosophical arguments to buttress their positions rather than in a spirit of discovery. I’ll be saying much more about this in the next post, where I’ll discuss the evidential problem of evil.

(Oh, and I should reiterate that this is a fairly superficial treatment of the whole subject. I’m giving you my opinions on all of these arguments, along with some of the background information necessary to understand that opinion, but these posts are by no means complete guides to any of theistic or anti-theistic arguments. There’s a lot more that can be said about them on both sides, but unfortunately, I don’t have time to write about it all.)

Mackie, JL, ‘Evil and Omnipotence’ in Mind, New Series, Vol. 64 No. 254 (Apr. 1955), pp. 200-212.

The Saga Continues

Laurie Higgins of the IFI has issued an open letter to Hemant Mehta (AKA The Friendly Atheist), in which she explains that, no, she isn’t trying to get him fired…she just wanted to let parents know about hisdangerous ideas. By sending a letter to his supervisors.

By sending a letter only to his supervisors.

Head on over and give Mehta your support. Yes, some of us atheists can be awfully mean and disrespectful to the specialness that is religion, but Mehta definitely does not deserve to be tarred with that particular brush.

Illinois Family Institute Vs. The Friendly Atheist

The Illinois Family Institute has written an incredibly inane post in which they flail ineffectually at Hemant Mehta, who you may know as The Friendly Atheist.  It doesn’t take much to get a group like the IFI after you, but the charges they’re levelling at him are particularly ludicrous:

• He pointed out a double standard in freedom of speech laws to do with religious speech generally getting a free pass. (Note that he was not calling for religious speech to be banned.)
• One of his commentors said positive things about polyamorous relationships. Yes, that’s one of his commentors. He also reposted something that somebody on a forum wrote, again in favor of polyamory. (For the record, I’m all for polyamory too. I have no idea why it’s regarded the way it is.)
• He directed his readers to Dan Savage’s column.
• He’s an atheist.
• He’s an atheist who’s also a maths teacher.

You’ll probably notice that only one of these is about something he actually wrote himself. Apparently the IFI has never heard the phrase ‘grasping at straws’.

With Mehta’s imaginary sins accounted for, they move on to this little gem:

It’s astonishing to me that a teacher, someone who is supposed to be a role model for students, would ever recommend that anyone visit Dan Savage’s offensive column.

Some parents fail to understand the adolescent mind: they fail to understand that teens are often predisposed to affirm the ideas of adults whom they find cool or personable or funny or iconoclastic.

Attention, IFI: You are so far out of touch that at this point you’d need a space shuttle to find your way back. Teenagers do not think their maths teachers are cool – especially if those maths teachers don’t bring up anything iconoclastic or subversive in the classroom.

But honestly, who would you rather have teaching your children – an intelligent, dedicated man like Hemant Mehta, or one of the prejudiced dingbats from the IFI?

Why I’m an Atheist, Part Five: The Fine-Tuning Argument

Here it is – the big one. The distilled essence of hundreds of years of theological and philosophical arguments for the existence of God. The ultimate challenge to atheism!

The Hubble Ultra Deep Field

All right, I’m being a bit melodramatic. The Fine-Tuning Argument, which you’re probably already familiar with if you’re reading this, is sometimes presented as a one-stop, knock-down argument for God’s existence, but most philosophers don’t see it that way. It’s a good argument, I’ll grant it that, but it isn’t some sort of atheism-killer.

First, let me go back to the Cosmological Arguent. One of its biggest problems is that it doesn’t really seem to answer anything. Theists will claim the the first cause or unmoved mover or what have you is God, but the standard atheist response (to which I have yet to see any good answer) is ‘Where did God come from?’ If we say that God always existed, then why couldn’t the Universe, in some primordial state, always have existed? And if we say that God created himself (which is not a common rejoinder, despite what some atheists think), how is that any more plausible than the Universe creating itself? You cannot simultaneously say that ‘everything must have been created’ and that ‘God is uncreated’, not without an injection of pure faith that ultimately draws its authority from your religion’s dogma. I’ll be hammering on this point much more in the future, but once again we see theists and atheists alike attempting to railroad the discussion in such a way that the only possibility on the table is the monotheistic God or no God at all – there are apparently no other options.

But anyway, back to the Fine-Tuning Argument. What theists need is some evidence that the cause of the Universe is also a cosmic designer, and arguments from the design of living organisms are no longer good enough. But the Fine-Tuning Argument seems to fit the bill, because it questions the conditions of the entire Universe. Here’s a version as presented in Philosophy of Religion: An Historical Introduction, which isn’t a great book but is the only one I have to hand at the moment:

(1) The Universe has a large number of life-facilitating coincidences between causally unrelated aspects of the physical universe. For example, the ratio of the density between an open university that goes on expanding for ever and a closed universe that collapses upon itself is extremely narrow, and the density of the universe is in that range. In addition, if any of the fundamental physical constants (strong and weak nuclear forces, electromagnetic force, electron charge) had differed even minutely from what they in fact are, the universe would not have supported life. Intelligent life could only have evolved in an extremely narrow range of possible universes.

(2) The probability that this could have occurred by chance is infinitesimally low.

(3) Therefore, it is much more probably that our universe was intelligently designed than that it occurred by chance.

The first thing to notice is that this is a probabilistic argument, which seem to be in vogue among philosophers of religion at the moment. It is not saying ‘Here is a deductive argument which proves that God exists’, but rather ‘given this, is it not more likely that God exists?’

The second thing I’d like to point is the rigid insistence on framing the argument in terms of life, and intelligent life at that. In virtually every formulation of this argument I’ve ever seen, humans (‘intelligent life’) are heavily implied to be the purpose for which the universe was created, as evidenced by the number of ‘life-facilitating coincidences’ found in its basic structure. Why the focus on intelligent life? Some people will claim that God, if he exists, must have desired to create intelligent life because he is all-good, but that’s just another example of the railroading I brought up a minute ago. There is no reason to assume that God would have desired to create us; we could just as easily talk about the number of star-facilitating coincidences in the universe, or the number of nubula-facilitating coincidences, or so on. The same physical constants that allow life also allow for everything else in the universe, and only in the midst of an anthropocentric fit  would we be justified in assuming that everything else in existence is here to facilitate our existence.

In fact, I would argue that such a conclusion is actually nonsensical. Theists frequently talk about design and purpose in the Universe as if both are self-evident, but I frankly don’t see it. (I suspect what they’re really talking about is design and purpose in their own lives, which is nothing special – people see design where this is none all the time.) Even the briefest acquaintance with cosmology reveals a Universe that is mind-bogglingly huge, old and, as far as anybody can see, totally devoid of purpose. The vast, vast majority of the Universe cannot sustain any sort of life we can comprehend and will almost certainly never be able to do so. It is by and large a lifeless place of inert matter, lethally cold or hot or airless or bathed in deadly radiation. That we can survive on a tiny fleck of rock in an unfathomably large void of certain death is precisely what one would expect if life was a natural process that arises only when the conditions are precisely right. Why is it so difficult for life to find a safe harbor in a place that was supposedly created just so that it could flourish?

We humans have been alive for only a tiny fraction of the time that the Universe has been in existence. Our entire written and archaeological history is laughably brief compared even with the physical history of our planet, let alone the Universe as a whole. Some theistic philosophers would say that consciousness is somehow special or takes a privileged place in the Universe, but I don’t see any reason to assume why this should be so. Even in a created Universe, it is entirely possible that we are merely the result of blind physical and chemical processes – as much as it might offend our sense of specialness to think so. If we’re being honest, we must admit that anything in the Universe could be a potential God’s true purpose, yet I doubt many theists will come forward to argue that God made the Universe so that Jupier and its 63 moons could fly about the Sun for billions of years. Why? Because they already know what kind of God they want to believe in.

You’ll probably have noticed by now that I haven’t refuted the central point of the Fine-Tuning Argument. That’s because I don’t know whether or not the Universe has been fine-tuned  by God or whether that fine-tuning is just a naturalistic illusion, as the appearance of design is in living organisms. Nobody does. However, what I am willing to state firmly is that the Fine-Tuning Argument is not necessarily reason to believe in God, and it is certainly not reason to believe in any specific God. I hope that in time we know more, in which case it will be science which sheds more light on the situation rather than philosophy, but I contend that the correct response to a mystery is not to immediately rush towards the solution with the least evidence available to back it up – which is precisely what theists would like us to do.

God, Gays, Eugenics and Crappy History

Whoo boy.

Eugenics is a touchy subject. It’s been abused so much in the past, most notably by the Nazis, that even mentioning it in polite company is likely to raise more than a few eyebrows. Of course, religious fundamentalists have been quick to jump on the ‘eugenics is inherently evil’ bandwagon in order to demonize both ‘Darwinists’ and atheists, two words that many of them seem to be believe are synonyms. Anybody who accepts evolution, we are told, would like nothing more than to sterilize the degenerate and shovel the racially inferior into crematoria.

Now, take that steaming bucket of insanity and add homosexuality to the mix. You’re already morbidly curious, aren’t you?

I’d like to address this post, in which a Christian blogger uses bad history and a handful of non sequiturs to argue that gay people would be much worse off without religion. It is a reply to this article, in which the exact opposite is argued. Here we go:

Let’s for a moment imagine there was no religion, how would homosexuals fare??

With a brief history lesson, you need longer imagine. Let’s rewind to WWII.

The Germans are in the grip of Nazism and ideals of a racial superiority and are in conflict with the rest of the world.

The idea of racial superiority originated in Darwinian principles of evolution and survival of the fittest. These Darwinian principles gave birth to a new study called Eugenics.

Wait, stop right there. A couple of problems:

1. Social Darwinism is distinct from both eugenics and the theory of evolution, which it is only very loosely based on. Although it may be possible to ‘improve’ our species by selective breeding and the like, nothing in evolution suggests that weeding out those typically labelled as ‘degenerate’ by totalitarian states will result in an overall improvement in the species. The criteria for what kinds as an ‘improvement’ in the first place is always supplied by ideology, not by science, and generally relies on the faulty assumption that preventing criminals (for example) from having children will somehow reduce the number of criminals. As far as we can tell, inclination towards crime is not a genetic trait, and as such it cannot be passed from one generation to the next.
2. ‘Survival of the fittest’ (natural selection) is the exact opposite of eugenics, in which certain people are weeded out by humans as being ‘unfit’.
3. What does racial superiority have to do with homosexuality?
4. The USA conducted a huge eugenics program decades before the Nazi party even existed. It was mainly targetted at people with mental illnesses, although some states were given the power to sterilize anybody who they saw as ‘unfit’. Some Nazi leaders at the Nuremburg trials apparently claimed that the American eugenics programs inspired them to commit their own crimes against humanity, although we can’t be certain that they were telling the truth. All in all, the USA conducted eugenic sterilization for almost sixty years. Is the USA an atheist country?
5. Germany under the Nazis was most definitely not an atheist state, nor was Nazism an atheist ideology. True, it didn’t put too heavy an emphasis on religion or God, but neither did it reject them.

That should be enough to refute the main points of the post, but the author goes on to claim that ‘the Eugenics Society’ (he doesn’t say which one) accepted evolution, and therefore must have been atheistic in nature because ‘Anyone who believes in God cannot accept Evolution. So, no, they did not believe in God.’ Er, right. Do I even need to reply to that one?

From the fact that the Nazis (who were not atheists) practiced eugenics, the post goes no to conclude that gay people would be ‘exterminated’ if not for religion. That obviously makes no sense, and it still wouldn’t make sense even if every proponent of eugenics in history had been an atheist because atheism isn’t eugenics. There is nothing about atheism which demands that its adherents support eugenics, nor is there anything about atheism which demands that its adherents think of homosexuals as being degenerate or unfit to reproduce (or live, for that matter). In fact, gay rights activists have frequently commented on the fact that their most reliable supporters can be found among atheist groups . Even a quick check of atheist blogs on WordPress will reveal that atheists tend to be far more supportive of gay rights than Christians.

Why I’m an Atheist – Part Four: The Teleological Argument

Following on from my previous post in this series, here are some of my thoughts on the infamous Teleological Argument for the existence of God. Now, for a lot of people the word ‘teleological’ is synonymous with ‘Creationism’, which is an unfair way of looking at it. So here’s a quick history lesson:

‘Teleology’ is usually thought of in terms of design, but it’s more frequently used in the context of a ‘final cause’. This is how the ancient Greek philosophers thought of the concept, and it’s how the word is more frequently used. Think about it in relation to historiography; if an historian says that WWII started because of (among much else) German dissatisfaction with the Treaty of Versailles, they are using a non-teleological approach. This is how historians are supposed to think these days, and it’s also how scientists think – they explain an event or phenomenon with the events that took place before it. On the other hand, saying that WWII started because of a pre-ordained plan for the history of the world would be a teleological approach, because in this scenario WWII occurred in order to move towards a final cause. For obvious reasons, this kind of explanation isn’t used by serious historians today.

William Paley’s famous ‘watchmaker argument’ is also teleological, but conflates the ides of a final cause with that of design. In his Natural Theology, he makes various arguments for the existence of a cosmic Designer (God) based on the complexity of living organisms. The most well-known of these is a comparison between nature and a pocket watch:

In crossing a heath, suppose I pitched my foot against a stone, and were asked how the stone came to be there; I might possibly answer, that, for anything I knew to the contrary, it had lain there forever: nor would it perhaps be very easy to show the absurdity of this answer. But suppose I had found a watch upon the ground, and it should be inquired how the watch happened to be in that place; I should hardly think of the answer I had before given, that for anything I knew, the watch might have always been there. (…) There must have existed, at some time, and at some place or other, an artificer or artificers, who formed [the watch] for the purpose which we find it actually to answer; who comprehended its construction, and designed its use. (…) Every indication of contrivance, every manifestation of design, which existed in the watch, exists in the works of nature; with the difference, on the side of nature, of being greater or more, and that in a degree which exceeds all computation.

-William Paley, Natural Theology (1820) [From Wikipedia]

This might seem like something William Dembski would write, but comparing Paley to the luminaries of the modern Creationism movement isn’t entirely fair. Paley’s argument no doubt seemed far more reasonable in his own time than it does now, and he was most definitely not anti-science. This is an important point to keep in mind; Paley was looking for evidence of God in what he assumed was a divinely-created world, whereas modern Creationists attempt to undermine the entire business of science because it contradicts the idea of a divinely-created world in the first place. Paley was also not the inventor of this kind of argument, but was rather following in the tradition of other Christian apologists.

The most obvious reply to the watchmaker argument is that the theory of evolution renders it impotent. We now know where complex organisms came from, and it would be difficult to argue today that nature as a whole has any sort of discernible ‘purpose’ that isn’t driven by completely blind natural processes. We do not need to invoke the supernatural in order to explain the complexity of the Universe.

So, is that it? Well, not quite. There is one other criticism of the watchmaker argument that I’m sure was probably advanced in Paley’s own time, but here’s my take on it. Every single watch in human history, we can be reasonably certain, was designed and built by humans. Nobody has ever known a watch to spring into existence unaided, or to give rise to other watches – thus, we can be reasonably certain that watches are designed. But living organisms are different, in that they always come into being without any obvious intervention by a designer. If there is a designer at work every time a new living entity comes into being, then it must be so subtle and invisible that we have yet to be able to detect it. We can also know, with relative certainty, that a watch was made for a purpose. Indeed, the purpose of a watch is self-evident, and even if it wasn’t we could simply ask the person who designed it why they did so. The same is not true of nature, in which any perceived purpose is likely to be a figment of human imagination and nothing more. The comparison between nature and a watch is therefore a very poor one.

So, that’s the watchmaker argument out the window. It isn’t taken seriously by most philosophers any more, as far as I can tell, but it still gets bandied about by the likes of CARM. (If you’re looking for something humorous to read, their pages on atheism and evolution are hilariously stupid. Their article on atheistic morality in particular is wonderfully condescending.) But although the watchmaker analogy is flawed, its general methodology definitely isn’t. It is reasonable to assume that we could know whether not the Universe was designed by examining some aspects of it, and philosophers have put forward extremely refined versions of the Teleological Argument in recent years. Their reasons for doing so are obvious. As I said last time, something like the Cosmological Argument on its own doesn’t even come close to proving that the Christian (or Islamic, or Jewish, or what have you) God exists, but if you could prove that the Universe had an uncaused cause as its beginning and that it appears to have been designed for the purpose of sustaining life…well, then you’re a lot closer to philosophically establishing a basis for belief in God.

Next time I’ll be covering the Fine-Tuning Argument, which is probably the most popular modern variant of the Teleological Argument.