Interviewing Jeff Schweitzer soon!

I feel sort of bad, because it took me about 4 months to read Jeff Schweitzer's awesome book, Beyond Cosmic Dice: Moral Life in a Random World. During that time, he actually took time out of his busy life to email me and ask if I had finished it – and I had to tell him that my internship was taking up all of my free reading time.

However, I have officially, finally, finished Mr. Schweitzer's book, and so you will find, in the coming weeks, an e-terview between he and I.

Beyond Cosmic Dice is perhaps not the book you would expect from the title. To me, the title suggests that the book is primarily about morality and ethics in a world in which there is no ultimate purpose or absolute morality. In a very real way, this is what this book is about, but not in the way you'd think.

Chapter 1 is an extremely compelling description of the difficulties in defining life. Schweitzer explains quite convincingly that life is not an either-or proposition. Rather, the difference between life and non-life is a gradation. Instead of life being white and nonlife being black, life is closer to blue and nonlife is closer to green, with gradual shades in between. One can look at a dog and say, "this dog is definitely alive" and one can look at a rock and say, "this is definitely not alive", but not all things are so easily classified. As he puts it, "Nobody would deny the existence of green or blue, yet nobody can define when one color becomes the other. That inability to draw a clear line between them does not diminish the reality of the two colors" (pp 46). This is important to understand because when people ask, "how did life arise out of nonlife" they imagine life and nonlife as binary constructs, when in fact they are constructs on a spectrum. "Life" is nothing more than "an arbitrary label we apply to distinguish extremes of complexity along a continuum" (pp 47).

After explaining that life is an arbitrary label, Schweitzer goes on to briefly explain evolution. What I find most spectacular about this chapter is that while I am a seasoned reader of explanations and treatises on evolution, he offered a very unique perspective. He explains that evolution has no direction, purpose or drive toward complexity. Humans, in all of their complexity, are not abnormal in the grand scheme of evolution. In the grand scheme of evolution, simple, single-celled organisms are much more favored by natural selection than complex beings such as us. As Schweitzer puts it, "bacteria can easily live without us, but we would die quickly without them" (pp 65). Bacteria and other simple organisms outnumber us by both sheer numbers and mass – we are the latecomers, a "biological aberration", and when humanity is gone, the bacteria will go on living, having for all intents and purposes not noticed our coming and going at all. If there is a god and he designed the earth for any type of organism, it is not for complex humans but for the single-celled. The earth is far more suited to their kind, and they can survive where we absolutely cannot.

Chapter 3 deals specifically with humans, and the fact that most of the cells in our bodies are not ours (they are the cells of microorganisms using our body as a convenient apartment complex) and most of our DNA is not human either. We are they, and they are us. The other characteristics that we believe make us unique and special (intelligence, tool use, self-consciousness, self-awareness, etc) are not uniquely human. They are present in other species as well, to different degrees. A cheetah could just as easily point out that they are the pinnacle of evolution because they are the fastest land animal, making our claims to superiority quite arbitrary. The only thing that really separates us from everything else is our capacity to choose to be moral.

I found the first three chapters to be the most enlightening aspects of the book. These chapters make up part I. Part II of the book (the next 3 chapters) deals briefly with how religion arose and the shortcomings of religious morality. Part III deals with cultivating a natural ethic based on part I. Schweitzer defines a natural ethic as, "based on the principal that with the ability to choose to be good comes the obligation to make that choice; Choosing to be moral is what makes us special. The act of choosing to live a good life is the foundation for all pleasure, peace and happiness" (pp 176).

All organisms exploit their environment to the maximum extent possible, and humans are the only organism capable of recognizing this and then rising above this exploitative relationship. We should do so because we can.

Schweitzer then lays out moral foundation that he feels arise out of this natural ethic, but he stresses that these are personal guidelines and not universal ones. While I absolutely understand this tack, I feel as though the loose link between the strong and insightful first half of the book and the guidelines for ethical behavior in the second half of the book leave something to be desired. I wanted the book to end as strongly as it started. It didn't, but in a way I think that reflects the reality of morality. I have yet to find a system of morality that operates prescriptively that is also based on solid foundations, and instead I am left with shades of gray and bell curves of behavior. Perhaps that means it is time for me to abandon my childish notion that moral questions can be examined in the same way that we examine other empirical facts about the universe.

Beyond Cosmic Dice is written in an accessible, almost conversational style and is an excellent read for non-theists and theists alike. It may even be a good starting point for a theist with a desire to better understand the naturalistic worldview.

3H1P: P.Keith on death

3H1P is a blogging project wherein three heathens (Ziztur, Flimsy and Petter) and one pastor (Keith) answer questions posed by readers of the blog and discuss various issues related to religion, philosophy, science, etc. If you have a question that you'd like to see answered by 3H1P, ask it in the comment box. We promise we'll probably get to it. The following is Pastor Keith's response to this question:

What are your feelings toward death (in other words, what happens when you die)?

I'm not a huge fan of death. I could do without it. But, like Anton Chigurh, it just keeps coming regardless of whether or not I approve. So I vacillate between fearing and running from death like Llewelyn Moss, or accepting its insatiability and living my short life to the full like Sheriff Bell. To state the obvious, my feelings toward death are not positive.

"What happens when we die?" is a unique question. Most questions have right and wrong answers. We can research, and change our answer if what we learn suggests a change is needed. However, with the question of what happens when we die, we discover the truth at a point where it is impossible for us to make any changes based on this information. This isn't a setup to Pascal's wager. This is simply an admission that the answer to this question only comes at the point where it's impossible to go back and trade our answer for the correct one. Though this fact sucks, to accept it is far wiser than to war against it.

The good news for this blogger is that I can say anything I want and you can't prove me wrong. I can recommend that at death we come face-to-face with the Flying Spaghetti Monster and loyal Pastafarians are ushered into an eternal paradise, where those who failed to worship him are crushed until they resemble that "marinara sauce" fast food chains give out with their mozzarella sticks- and you couldn't prove me wrong. So, I'm offering the idea that at death everyone who hasn't given me enormous sums of money is going to be tortured for eternity … yeah, that sounds about right. Now, of course, you don't have to give me an enormous sum of money, but you don't want to face an eternity of being crushed into marinara and find that you should have, now do you? Do you?!?

For me the question of what happens when we die is tied to other deep and difficult-to-answer questions like "Why are we here?" So allow me the opportunity to step back and try to give a long answer to a straight-forward question.

I am forever dumbfounded that something rather than nothing exists. While I do not understand everything about how this universe exists, I am currently persuaded – through my current scientific understanding, my present confidence in the Kalam cosmological argument, and other reasons – that this universe began to exist. The theory I currently prescribe to proposes that a causeless, necessary agent caused this universe to exist.

This persuasion that a necessary being caused this temporal universe suggests that this necessary being must be personal. If a personal being caused this temporal universe, then the reason for which that being caused the universe would also be temporal.

That temporal reason or purpose would seemingly be something the causeless agent could not achieve without that temporal creation. To me, it would otherwise be pointless to cause such a temporal universe. This train of thought leads me to consider what kind of things a causeless agent would be unable to achieve.

Admittedly, the long leaps in logic get even longer for me here … but today I still find these leaps to be shorter than others available to me. If tomorrow, I should find a more logical approach, I will be persuaded by it. One thing a causeless agent would still be unable to achieve is objectivity. Therefore, it is logical to consider if this universe exists to provide objectivity. If the universe would provide objectivity in a way a causeless, necessary being could not, it is sensible for us to consider why such a being would cause something objective to exist. In my life, the times I see objectivity most desired are in the areas of education (where something is objectively proven) or in the area of justice (where someone is convicted or set free based on the decision of an objective judge or jury). If this is the case, then this universe is an objective testing ground, perhaps a jury of sorts.

If this caused universe is intended to serve as an objective testing ground, I propose that this universe exists to test the competing theories of love and hate. The twin forces identified by these words are the most powerful I have experienced in my lifetime. The tension between these two forces is carried in memes and narratives of love versus hate stretching across cultures and throughout time.

I have been asked before, "Is God good because He achieves a standard of goodness that is outside Himself ... or is God good because He is powerful and whatever He considered good would be considered good and we would be unable to access any standard of goodness outside of that?" This is a good question ... one that hides a charge. This question alleges that it is possible that God is only good because He is powerful, rather than because He actually is good. Such a question could only be answered by an objective test ... or the assembling of an objective jury. Such a test should show whether love or hate is good, and whether goodness is just a matter of power. If I am correct that a causeless being caused this universe in order to test said being's confidence that love is better than hate, then I propose that such a being is characterized by what I call love (which builds up and openly welcomes exploration) rather than by what I call hate (which destroys and tolerates no questioning).

My faith tradition upholds the view that God welcomes challenge and appeals to this universe as an objective testing grounds. A reading of the first chapters of Job reveals Satan accusing God of showing favoritism ... that Job's life of love exists only because God has unreasonably filled his life with good things. God takes this accusation seriously and allows measures to be taken to assure that objectivity is maintained. God allows Satan to test if Job lives a life of love and faithfulness objectively, and not because he has been dealt a better hand. The rest of the book of Job details Job's experience in continuing to find love and wisdom while his quality of life is systematically destroyed by Satan. The story of Job ends with the last chapter detailing how at the end of this experience, God lavishes good things on Job. Because Job has been loving when his life was in shambles, God is able to lovingly bless him without violating the objectivity of life's experiment.

My faith tradition also sees the value of prayer through the lens of a universe-as-testing-grounds model. That a causeless being would favor some part of this universe over another would be favoritism … and would invalidate the purpose of this universe. But a personal causeless being would not disqualify the universe's objectivity to grant selfless requests offered by one temporal being on behalf of others. In fact, the act of prayer on behalf of another is itself an act of love. Like Job, faithfulness to show love regardless of circumstances provides our objective testimony and allows that loving necessary being I call God to personally express love out without interfering with the primary purpose for this universe.

This all brings us back to what I think (if by now I can be accused of thinking … surely the stacking of unproven premises on top of one another hardly qualifies as thinking ;-)) happens after one dies. I do not know what happens after one dies. I know that the body ceases to function. I know that any recognizable existence in this world ends at that point.

I grasp that death like Anton Chigurh will keep coming until it has me. I grasp that hatred will keep charging until it has destroyed the whole universe. But by faithfulness to an ideal, I grasp what I consider a secret to this universe … that love cannot be destroyed by hate.

So my confidence is that love is a way of life that is not destroyed at death. Rather, one who holds faithfully to love even as he or she faces death casts their vote as one small part of this objective jury.

I see this in my faith tradition, where Jesus himself describes what happens after death as a sorting of sheep and goats in Matthew chapter twenty-five. While theologians often take this and other similar passages as inferring reward and punishment, I see in them a counting of a sort of vote. Those who lived in love (for fun read Matthew 25 as Jesus describes the actions of those he sorts … this is plainly a sorting of love and hate … not a sorting of religious affiliation) go to the right and those who lived in selfish hatred go to the left. As I best understand it, those who lived in love will join in whatever eternal existence looks like as jurors testifying objectively to the supremacy of love. Those who lived in hatred will join in whatever eternal existence looks like as jurors testifying to the total destruction of hatred. Regardless of how many choose love and how many choose hatred, … our final states will themselves give testimony that love itself is good, while hatred finds its end.

So, at death, I believe we enter into an eternal state testifying to the value of love or the impotency of hatred. We provide an objective testimony that the causeless being that caused this universe could never have provided, thus fulfilling the temporary purpose of this universe. Of course, if I am wrong I will not be able to do anything about it once I found out. Until that day, I will do my best to offer my life as a testimony to love, whether such testimony survives my body's death or meets its end along with me.

And so Chigurh will keep coming and I can't stop him. Like Sheriff Bell I am resigned. I dream of lost money. I dream that my father is up ahead am and he's building a fire. And I wake up.

Insufficient Christianity: 27.1

Lewis spends all of chapter 27 talking about how Jesus died for our sins, and to be honest I don't really feel as though I have anything insightful or profound to say about most of the chapter. He writes again about how dirty and filthy and worthless people are unless they are real Christians and imbued with the Holy Spirit. Suffice to say, Lewis echoes typical Christian theology about not being able to understand or be a part of god without Jesus, though he makes no mention of being unable to be drawn into the Holy Spirit unless you profess belief. I suppose that is coming though.


Lewis says that the "Natural life" which is the type of life that nonchristians necessarily have, "is something self-centred, something that wants to be petted and admired, to take advantage of other lives, to exploit the whole universe. And especially it wants to be left to itself: to keep well away from anything better or stronger or higher than it, anything that might make it feel small. It is afraid of the light and air of the spiritual world, just as people who have been brought up to be dirty are afraid of a bath. And in a sense it is quite right. It knows that if the spiritual life gets hold of it, all its self-centredness and self-will are going to be killed and it is ready to fight tooth and nail to avoid that."


Couldn't we say the same thing Lewis says of "dirty people" of "clean people"? That is, people who are brought up unexposed to dirt and always kept clean are afraid to get dirty.


I can see here why some anti-evolutionists get offended at the idea that humans and other animals are descended from a common ancestor. To say that we are descended from a common ancestor is to say that we have the "natural life". It is to say that we are selfish exploiters of everything including fellow humans, that we hate things stronger than we are, that we want to be petted and admired. Perhaps it would be better to show that Lewis and others who think the way he does are mistaken about what the "natural life" means.


To me, the implications of there being no god are that no one is special or chosen above anyone else by an ultimate power. It means that this life is the only life we have and that this life is not a stepping stone on the way to eternity or a switch that leads us to either damnation and destruction or eternal life. Because this life is the only one we have and other people's lives are the only lives they have, exploiting people or infringing on their rights is one of the highest offenses imaginable. Because this earth was not tailor-made with us in mind by a god with infinite power, we have to take care of it as best we can so that those who are born after we are long gone continue to have the best means at a fulfilling life. It means realizing we won the genetic lottery, given that so many possible combinations of DNA will never get the chance at life. It means realizing just how insignificant we are, realizing that there is no ultimate purpose in this universe and then saying, "So what? I'll make my life have a purpose even though one day all of humanity will be gone and the universe will go on ticking perfectly fine without us" rather than expecting something else to hand us some purpose that was decided for us before we were born. Being given a purpose is easy – just find out what it is and do it. Giving yourself a purpose is something I will probably wrestle with my entire life. Making a decision about my own purpose is made more difficult by people who insist that without their god life is meaningless.


Sometimes I look at something beautiful – my relationship with Flimsy, for example – and I realize that in all likelihood, relationships like that have a maximum length of 80 years or less. After that, something beautiful is lost forever. It does not return. It does not live on. We are intricate, complex, amazing creatures, and each one of us is a finite, tiny piece of the world that will one day just… cease. Even things that are more permanent cannot last forever. I look at the city I live in, and I realize that most of these buildings, these roads, these communities – will go on without me. They will stay. A building has more permanence than a human being but is still so temporary. One day, all of those buildings and streets will be gone.


If the earth is to become an inhospitable ball of charred rock, does it really matter if something is there to cry over the annihilation of life and every last visage of human existence? Honestly, I'd love to be there rather than nowhere at all, but wanting something does not make it real, so I intend to make the best of the things I know for certain that I have.


Impermanence is not grounds for exploitation. It is grounds for ensuring that in our impermanence we do not take away the ability for anyone else to make the most of their own impermanence.

How do you justify your beliefs? Part 2 of 2

In part 1, I divided religious people into fundamentalists and moderates, and noted that fundamentalists have a fairly consistent epistemic basis for their world view: Our Holy Book speaks complete truth, and in areas where it is silent, we must fall back on fallible human science. It is not untroubled, as there are some contradictions in every scripture I’m aware of, but as a basic principle, it is sound. Moderates, who accept such scriptures as “mostly true” or serving as sources of useful truths, but do not accept their complete inerrancy, are in a trickier situation, because in saying that the scripture is less than perfectly true, they have implicitly conceded that its claims are subject to external validation and that the scripture itself is not an authorative source.

God of the gaps

To recapitulate the end of the last post, if the Bible is subject to independent verification, none of its claims that isn’t supported by independent evidence can be taken for granted, and there’s no longer any reason to believe in any of it. Even those who like to see their god in every gap where science has yet to shed light—to claim that he interacts with the world by manipulating quantum uncertainties, for instance, as certain apologists do—have no justification for stretching this (already very flimsy) argument to a specific theistic deity. We can all see how lame an argument it really is: “According to quantum physics, we mere humans can’t tell exactly where that electron is at any given moment; therefore, it may be that God is moving it; therefore, Jesus died for your sins.” Some hand-waving modern theologians claim this; skeptics don’t take them seriously, and neither do fundamentalists, and nor should they.

The God-of-the-gaps argument is, of course, very weak to begin with. By saying that “God acts where science has yet to explore”, your god will shrink into smaller and smaller gaps as science advances—but this is really incidental. More to the point, your god becomes an unfalsifiable claim, and unfalsifiable claims are inherently worthless.

If it isn’t falsifiable, it isn’t true

Strong words: Let me back them up at least a little. It is of course common knowledge that science places great value on falsifiability: We won’t accept a hypothesis, let alone graduate it to the coveted status of scientific theory, unless you can use it to generate falsifiable predictions—in essence saying, “This hypothesis is what I believe; if I’m right, we can run an experiment/look through a telescope/check under a rock and find X; whereas if I’m wrong, we’ll find Y instead.”

But if we think about this for a moment, it’s important not just to science, but to epistemology. If something is not falsifiable—if there’s no hypothetical observation you could possibly make that would lead you to decide that a belief is false—then what you are saying is, in fact, that you can think of no difference between a universe where it is true, and a universe where it is not. What does it even mean to say that something is true, if a universe with or without it are indistinguishable? It certainly doesn’t mean “true” in the sense that I am accustomed to using the word!

Errors in the Bible

Now we get back to these nagging little nitpicking things: Did Judas hang himself, or burst asunder in a field? Does Yahweh, or does he not, plan for some people to be damned? Did he, or did he not, ever change his mind? I agreed earlier that these are incidental things that don’t alter the central message of the Bible, and I wasn’t playing games with you: I believe this is true. It does, however, cast aspersions on biblical inerrancy—in fact, they disprove it. No matter how minor the errors or contradictions may be, if the Bible has any, it’s not an inerrant document, and even if you argue that they are all minor (with which I would not agree), the basis of presumed inerrancy that made it a sound epistemic basis has collapsed. Either you can accept everything the Bible says as fact, or you cannot; since you cannot (without severe cognitive dissonance), you can’t use it as the basis of your epistemology.

If the Bible was wrong about how Judas died, if it disagrees in parts on what such-and-such person said, how can you be absolutely sure that it’s correct on some other matter of what someone said? (Even small errors can change meaning, and it doesn’t get better in translation, let alone multiple translations.) If you can’t be sure whether Yahweh ever changed his mind, or whether some people are predestined for Hell, how can you be sure that Yeshua was his son, that man was created before woman, that…well, anything? Once you admit that the Bible is at all less than perfect, you’re down to saying “Whatever the Bible says is probably true…only some things aren’t, and here are some samples”, there’s no reason to hold any individual claim as necessarily true without independent verification—and so it goes.

Question for the readers

I am genuinely curious, if any of the religious among ye have had the patience, time, and energy to read this far: What is the basis of your epistemology, and how would you falsify your belief? In other words, why do you believe as you do, and what would it take for you to change your mind?

To be fair, I will give a sample of an answer for my own beliefs. I’m tempted to specify what I would need to falsify beliefs in, say, universal gravitation, or the non-existence of fairies, but I’ll play nice and address issues that religionists are in fact likely to disagree with me upon.

For instance, to convince me that my position as an atheist is wrong, a god might show up and blaze writing in burning meteorites across the night sky: “Hey, atheists, I exist!” Or you might find, written in the human genome, encoded in, say, ASCII and English, or Unicode and ancient Hebrew, a message like “This human made by Yahweh, father of Yeshua; all rights reserved”. Or faith healers might develop the ability to actually perform miracles that can’t be explained away—restore lost limbs under laboratory conditions with skeptical magicians like James Randi or Penn and Teller present. There are lots of ways.

On the subject of evolution by natural selection, the famous fossil rabbits in the pre-Cambrian is a good idea. We needn’t go so far, though. The cdesign proponentsist idea of irreducible complexity is not actually a bad one. (As we should expect, they didn’t come up with it but took it from Darwin: Chapter VI of Origin, the famous absurd in the highest degree passage.) If any purportedly evolved structure could be shown to be impossible to produce by gradual evolution, evolutionary theory as we know it certainly could not be true. It’s not an inherently silly idea; it’s just that all of the instances fall flat, and all the evidence is for evolution, so it’s sufficiently unlikely that a solid instance ever be found that I’m comfortable in accepting evolution as a fact. But certainly I can conceive of a difference between a world where evolution is true and one where it is not.

How about you? What do you believe—if differently from me? What is your epistemological justification? And, most importantly, how would you know if you were wrong?

How do you justify your beliefs? Part 1 of 2

As regular readers will have noticed, I have been on a bit of an epistemology spree lately—thinking about thinking, why I believe what I believe, and what logical justification I have for doing so. Now, I’d like to muse out loud on the same topic as applied to religious belief—thus, of course, leaving the subject of what I believe.

To recap what I do believe as a starting point, however: I am a naturalist; I am an empiricist (though not in a philosophically naïve way of assuming that our senses directly report the truth); I believe that the scientific method is the best way of finding truth.

Obviously, religious people as a group believe otherwise, to one degree or another. Many people insist that religious belief is not incompatible with a scientific worldview, but nobody seriously insists that a scientific worldview leads to religion—that there’s real, empirical evidence of Yahweh or Allah or Zeus.

It will be useful for my discursive purposes to divide religionists into two camps, based on their reactions to areas where scientific findings conflict with established religious beliefs. One camp will privelege to science, cede the point, and basically insist that their religion provides truth where science has nothing to say. The other camp will give precedence to their religious beliefs and assert that where there is conflict, the science must be wrong, come hell or high water. The first comprises religious moderates; the second, religious fundamentalists; in particular, I will be talking about fundamentalists of an Abrahamic kind, who believe in the literal truth of the Torah (are there fundamentalist Jews?), Bible, or Qur’an.

Fundamentalists

The fundamentalist camp, for all their various faults, actually has a simple and superficially coherent basis for their epistemology. “Our creed,” they say, “is the Truth; on matters where it will not speak, fallible human science is the best we can do, but knowing that it’s fallible, the Eternal Truth will always trump it.”

And so far as it goes, this seems coherent: The epistemic principle is clear, in any case. It does run into some problems when the creed turns out to contain contradictions. The Christian Bible, for instance, contradicts itself on how many sons Abraham had, whether God wants some people to go to Hell, whether blood sacrifices wash away sin, how Judas died, and a few hundred more… But it has been argued, and at first glance it looks fair, that these are fairly incidental and inessential to the central message.

Unless we look further and find a problem, this worldview seems basically sensible, if you once accept the basic premises—and indeed, it seems largely a matter of premises at this point: The fundamentalist begins with the premise that the Bible is revealed truth; the skeptic, such as I, begins without it. At worst, then, I could accuse the fundamentalist of not looking further (epistemically speaking, anyway).

Religious moderates

Let’s turn aside for a moment and consider the religious moderate, who does not grand automatic primacy to religious claims. We found that the fundamentalist has a fairly coherent basis for his belief system—this, alas, does not seem to be as true for the moderate.

The Christian moderate, for instance, starts from a viewpoint that the Bible contains revealed truth, but must acknowledge that as centuries have passed, scientific progress has been made and much that was once believed to be literally true must be discarded as untrue (or at best metaphorical or allegoric), and much that was once seen as just and right is now considered unjust and wrong.

The need for scriptural inerrancy

I will be the first to applaud the moderate for using reason and moral judgement to figure out what’s true and what’s right rather than blindly accepting some written word or Word on the matter. However, this completely invalidates the Bible as a sole source of truth. —And a religious scripture has a need to stand on its own as a source of truth, because it has nothing to back it up.

We skeptics don’t need authorative sources, indeed we do not hold any source as sacred: We know that the very authority of the most respected source relies precisely on the ability of others to verify that it is correct. We laud Darwin, for instance, as being intelligent and right about an astonishing number of things (however wrong on many details) because other people have come after him, figured out ways to hypothetically disprove him, and found that none of these ways turn out to work. We think that On the Origin of Species is a good book not because it was written by Darwin, but because a century and a half of research, palæontology, experiments, and other books all back up its main thesis.

This is not the case, and indeed cannot be the case, for ‘revealed’ knowledge: The whole point (and definition) of a revelation, in this sense, is that it doesn’t come from something you could have found out by investigating the world. This means that a book of revealed truth is without corroborating evidence, and the most that can be hoped for is a lack of contradicting data. As such, a certain sense of absoluteness hangs about any such scripture. The Bible tells the truth, or it does not tell the truth.

What does it mean, after all, to say that the Bible tells us some things that are true (“there is a god”, “that god is Yahweh of the Hebrews”, “Yahweh had an only begotten son named Yeshua”, “Yeshua was executed to excuse us for the errors of our distant ancestors”), and other things (“the Earth was created in a week”, “it was morally justified to murder babies in the interest of invasion”) are not true? It means that the Bible cannot be taken at face value: If you allow empirical evidence to falsify the Bible, you admit that it’s not inerrant, and any one of its facts may be inaccurate; as such, it’s no longer epistemologically cogent to accept any of its facts without independent verification.

Once you reach this conclusion, the whole enterprise falls apart. If the Bible is subject to independent verification, none of its claims that isn’t supported by independent evidence can be taken for granted, and there’s no longer any reason to believe in any of it. Even those who like to see their god in every gap where science has yet to shed light—to claim that he interacts with the world by manipulating quantum uncertainties, for instance, as certain apologists do—have no justification for stretching this (already very flimsy) argument to a specific theistic deity. We can all see how lame an argument it really is: “According to quantum physics, we mere humans can’t tell exactly where that electron is at any given moment; therefore, it may be that God is moving it; therefore, Jesus died for your sins.” Some hand-waving modern theologians claim this; skeptics don’t take them seriously, and neither do fundamentalists, and nor should they.

This is continued in part 2.

CRI Presuppositions

I don’t know why, but on Twitter I follow the Christian Research Institute. I think this is because I like being given opposing viewpoints to dissect in the middle of the afternoon.

This afternoon, CRI Twittered a link to an article written by a Ph.d candidate in philosophy, the central message of which is that atheism is presumptuous.

The irony of this is that the author himself bases his analysis of atheism as “presumptuous” based on… presumptuousness. Observe:

“Atheist Antony Flew has said that the "onus of proof must lie upon the theist."1 Unless compelling reasons for God’s existence can be given, there is the "presumption of atheism." Another atheist, Michael Scriven, considers the lack of evidence for God’s existence and the lack of evidence for Santa Claus on the same level.2 However, the presumption of atheism actually turns out to be presumptuousness. The Christian must remember that the atheist also shares the burden of proof, which I will attempt to demonstrate below.

“First, even if the theist could not muster good arguments for God’s existence, atheism still would not be shown to be true.3 The outspoken atheist Kai Nielsen recognizes this: "To show that an argument is invalid or unsound is not to show that the conclusion of the argument is false.... All the proofs of God’s existence may fail, but it still may be the case that God exists."4

Nielsen is absolutely correct. Doing this (concluding that the conclusion of an argument is false because the argument is invalid or unsound) is what is known as an argumentum ad logicam. Just because an argument is invalid does not mean that the conclusion of the argument is false. For example:

P: All dogs have four legs

1.Poseidon (a pet of mine) has four legs

C: Poseidon is a dog.

In fact, Poseidon is a dog. This argument is invalid, but the conclusion of this argument is still true.

But, here lies the problem. What exactly does the author mean by “atheism”? I take atheism to mean something like, “Coming to the conclusion that the evidence for god is insufficient” or “lack of theism” or, “lack of belief in god”.

In this way, “atheism” is the position that “there are no good arguments for god’s existence”. “arguments”, I hope,  refers not only to philosophical arguments but arguments based around empirical evidence as well.

It is true that god may exist, even though there is no evidence for god and the arguments for god’s existence fail. I doubt it, and that is my position as an atheist. The author of this piece seems to be defining atheism as the hard position that gods do not exist. This is not a viewpoint that most atheists share.

“Second, the "presumption of atheism" demonstrates a rigging of the rules of philosophical debate in order to play into the hands of the atheist, who himself makes a truth claim. Alvin Plantinga correctly argues that the atheist does not treat the statements "God exists" and "God does not exist" in the same manner.5 The atheist assumes that if one has no evidence for God’s existence, then one is obligated to believe that God does not exist — whether or not one has evidence against God’s existence. What the atheist fails to see is that atheism is just as much a claim to know something ("God does not exist") as theism ("God exists"). Therefore, the atheist’s denial of God’s existence needs just as much substantiation as does the theist’s claim; the atheist must give plausible reasons for rejecting God’s existence.

Plantinga does not correctly argue this. Some atheists might not treat the claims “god exists” and “god does not exist” in the same manner, but of all of the atheist literature I have read (I’ve read Dennett, Harris, Dawkins, Hitchins, Carrier, and more. I’ve listened to countless atheist podcasts and have read countless arguments, blog posts and had countless conversations with atheists) no one has ever made the claim that “god does not exist” is NOT a truth claim. Plantinga and the author of this piece are creating a straw man atheist and then knocking him swiftly down.

“God does not exist” is a truth claim, and one that needs to be substantiated with evidence. Of course, this is pretty difficult given that most theists use unfalsifiable claims to prove that their god exists. Using only falsifiable claims, proving that there is no god is easy. In an argument about the truth of a proposition, we can safely ignore unfalsifiable claims, as they cannot contribute to evidence. The problem is that theist generally must rely on unfalsifiable claims to prove the existence of their god, unless their god is a doorknob.

Most of the atheists I know have a problem with the truth claims of religion. Not because they are religious claims, but because they are truth claims that are made without substantiation or proof. The atheists I know assume that if there is no evidence for god, then there is no evidence for god.

“Third, in the absence of evidence for God’s existence, agnosticism, not atheism, is the logical presumption. Even if arguments for God’s existence do not persuade, atheism should not be presumed because atheism is not neutral; pure agnosticism is. Atheism is justified only if there is sufficient evidence against God’s existence.

This depends on how you define agnosticism and atheism. These two terms need to be defined clearly before we can make claims such as the one above, and I don’t think I agree with the definitions the author seems to be implying. It would be dishonest of me to make up a definition of Christianity that 99% of Christians disagreed with.

Let’s assume that I make the claim that clover cures lung cancer. The proper position with regard to this claim is lack of belief that clover cures lung cancer. That is, “I do not believe clover cures lung cancer.” The author claims that this is illogical, and that the logical position is, “I don’t know if clover cures lung cancer”. Which, I suppose is fair, assuming this is the first time anyone has proposed that clover cures lung cancer and no experiments or observations have thus far taken place.

Let’s say we perform experiment after experiment trying to prove that clover cures lung cancer. Over and over - no matter how many people we use, no matter which formula of clover we use, no matter if it is ingested, infused, smoked, snorted, or bathed in – we show through experimentation that clover has no effect on lung cancer whatsoever, and in some cases (such as when it was smoked), clover makes lung cancer worse. Let’s say we perform these experiments for 100 years, in city after city, using billions of research dollars.

After all of that, is the proper position, “I don’t know if clover cures lung cancer”? No. The proper position is, “there is no evidence that clover cures lung cancer”.  Even, “clover does not cure lung cancer” is not a far stretch. According to the authors, “clover does not cure lung cancer” is illogical. Acloverists are presumptuous. Acloverists are making a positive claim.
“Fourth, to place belief in Santa Claus or mermaids and belief in God on the same level is mistaken. The issue is not that we have no good evidence for these mythical entities; rather, we have strong evidence that they do not exist. Absence of evidence is not at all the same as evidence of absence, which some atheists fail to see.

What strong evidence against Santa and mermaids might this be, exactly? If I were having a conversation with this author, I’d really like to hear his reasons for denying Santa and mermaids. Is it because… Santa is impossible? Is it because we’ve never observed a mermaid? Because there is… an absence… of… evidence?

Absence of evidence actually is evidence of absence (See my friend Saint Gasoline's recent post on this. He presents a very well-rounded argument that is too long for me to reprint here). Once again, think of the clover example above. Is it right to say that absence of evidence that clover cures lung cancer is not evidence that clover does not cure lung cancer?

“Moreover, the theist can muster credible reasons for belief in God. For example, one can argue that the contingency of the universe — in light of Big Bang cosmology, the expanding universe, and the second law of thermodynamics (which implies that the universe has been "wound up" and will eventually die a heat death) — demonstrates that the cosmos has not always been here. It could not have popped into existence uncaused, out of absolutely nothing, because we know that whatever begins to exist has a cause. A powerful First Cause like the God of theism plausibly answers the question of the universe’s origin. Also, the fine-tunedness of the universe — with complexly balanced conditions that seem tailored for life — points to the existence of an intelligent Designer.

These are not credible reasons. I’ve covered these in previous posts so I won’t rehash them again, but suffice to say that these arguments come from a oversimplification or misunderstanding about the nature of the universe. Even if the First Cause argument were credible, the huge leap to Christianity (as the author expects) does not follow.

“The existence of objective morality provides further evidence for belief in God. If widow-burning or genocide is really wrong and not just cultural, then it is difficult to account for this universally binding morality, with its sense of "oughtness," on strictly naturalistic terms. (Most people can be convinced that the difference between Adolf Hitler and Mother Teresa is not simply cultural.) These and other reasons demonstrate that the believer is being quite rational — not presumptuous — in embracing belief in God.

The moral argument is one of the weakest arguments around. Populations survive based on a balance between behavior that increases survival and behaviors that decrease survival. If murder or selfishness were a culturally accepted standard of behavior, then what would happen to a population that embraced that behavior? Morality is objective (as in, it is not a product of mere internal opinion but is something outside of the individual and informed by reason) and not just cultural. It is easy to account for “oughtness” using naturalistic terms. Saying that morality is “either objective, universal and given to us by god” or “cultural” and then moving on to disprove that it is cultural does not prove that morality was handed to us by god because this is a false dichotomy.

Funny how you can prove position A is presumptuous by being presumptuous in strawmanning position A into a presumptuous position, isn't it?

Insufficient Christianity: 10.1

This is a critique of chapter 10 of the book Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis. You can find the critique of this book so far by clicking the “C.S. Lewis” tab at the bottom of this page. You can also find an online copy of the book by clicking the link at the bottom.

The first half of this chapter is interesting because Lewis lays out two bits of apologetics: one a very popular apologetics argument and one less so.  We’ll start with the first.

In this argument, Lewis points out that this process of atonement and receiving a “new life” as a Christian involves at least these three things: belief, baptism, and partaking in Communion/Mass/Lord’s Supper. He says that he really does not see why these three particular things are the conductors of new life. He likens this to sex: when people are children, they don’t know how sex works, and they could never guess that mommy and daddy bonking each other nine months before they were born produced them. It seems so odd to children when they learn of conception that many of them react in disbelief. Lewis says, “Now the God who arranged that process is the same God who arranges how the new kind of life-the Christ life--is to be spread. We must be prepared for it being odd too. He did not consult us when He invented sex: He has not consulted us either when He invented this.”

To me, this argument could be used to explain the actions of any religious practice – and if you can use an argument to explain the actions of any religious practice, it has no authority as an argument. The issue we take with the Christian religion in particular is not that it is odd, but that its followers can use it to justify unethical behaviors. To use a recent example: when you believe so strongly in your religion that you are willing to let your own children die for it (in the case of parents neglecting medical care for their children in favor of prayer), yet you believe it is immoral to allow certain sounds to escape your mouth because those sounds insult your god, we consider your moral compass to be fundamentally broken by your religion.

The truth is that the universe is unmistakably odd. We humans only understand the universe within the narrow band created by the lumpy tissue and the exchange of sodium ions from one area to the next within our skulls. When I call religion odd, this is not because it is oddness atop a mountain of evidence. It is because it is odd, and that oddness stands alone. If there were compelling evidence, I would gladly change my mind and shake the hands of the individuals responsible for such change. If I believed in god I would fully expect his ways to be beyond my understanding. Alas, the crux lies in the premise.

In the second argument, Lewis says that he believes Jesus is god due to his authority. He says that most of the mundane things we believe in we believe on authority, and so believing Jesus is no different:

“Do not be scared by the word authority. Believing things on authority only means believing them because you have been told them by someone you think trustworthy. Ninety-nine per cent of the things you believe are believed on authority. I believe there is such a place as New York. I have not seen it myself. I could not prove by abstract reasoning that there must be such a place. I believe it because reliable people have told me so. The ordinary man believes in the Solar System, atoms, evolution, and the circulation of the blood on authority--because the scientists say so. Every historical statement in the world is believed on authority. None of us has seen the Norman Conquest or the defeat of the Armada. None of us could prove them by pure logic as you prove a thing in mathematics. We believe them simply because people who did see them have left writings that tell us about them: in fact, on authority. A man who jibbed at authority in other things as some people do in religion would have to be content to know nothing all his life.

We’ve heard this argument, or one like it, from various sources. The central problem I see with this argument is that while things like New York or the Solar system or blood flow can be measured objectively, the claims of religion cannot. It is easy for me to accept that New York exists (having not been there) for several reasons:

1. New York is a city. St. Louis is also a city (that I live in), so I know things like cities exist. I have been to many other cities besides St. Louis. I have seen many pictures and videos of New York, and know many people who have visited New York. It is no impeccable feat of faith to accept that New York exists.

Now, let’s pretend that I currently am incapable of observing New York in any way. If 30% of the world told me New York existed, but was floating 15 feet above Rhode Island, 20% of the world told me New York existed, but was actually an ancient sunken city, 10% of the world told me New York existed, but was a part of every city, 10% of the world told me New York existed but only in my heart, 10% of the world told me that New York was actually called Planet X and was a mystery planet in our solar system we could not actually observe at all, and they all told me that I could not see New York unless I really believed in New York with my whole heart, I’d side with the 20% remaining who had come to the conclusion that there is no New York.

2. If someone whom I trust told me something that was contrary to empirical evidence, I would not trust them, no matter how great an authority figure they were. I trust Flimsy very much. If he told me he had Taco Bell for lunch, I would not ask for evidence. If he came home from work one day insisting that he had been abducted by aliens in the Taco Bell drive through during lunch, I would not believe him. This is because I apply a standard of evidence to extraordinary claims: namely that the more extraordinary the claim, the greater wealth of evidence such a claim must have before I accept it.  We apply this standard all the time: if a telemarketer calls us, we know the offer is probably too good to be true. If someone claims to have discovered the cure for cancer, we require evidence. We understand that our senses deceive us: this is why we do not think our dreams are real. We might not know for sure what will happen if we stop paying our mortgage, but we do not stop paying it simply because we cannot know for sure whether or not it will matter.

3. I believe in evolution because I have studied the theory, and the theory makes sense. I need no authority other than my rational mind and observation.

4. History is another matter. I do not blindly accept histories as Lewis says, neither do historians. History is far more complicated than simply accepting things we see written. I would not accept a history if it contained things contrary to physical laws or empirical evidence. There are two stories of Nazi Germany: I accept the one with evidence. I understand that fables, legends and stories are told along with histories. How do we determine which is which? How is a talking wolf less extraordinary than a talking serpent? How is it that a story of a man walking on water is believable, but a story of a man on a flying carpet unbelievable?

5. Finally, other people will claim that they believe in their gods on authority. What do we do with a spiritualist who believes in the authority of her spirit guides, the new-ager who believes in the authority of her psychics, the Muslim who believes in the authority of Mohammad, the conspiracy theorist who believes in the authority of the Holocaust denier? I would imagine that Lewis might look at the claims of these authority figures and analyze them based on reason, observation, empirical evidence, and the like. He would absolutely apply some measure of standard to the claims made by other religions, yet in this one instance when his religion is on the line, these standards do not apply. It is not unreasonable to apply the same standard by which we judge other claims to our own claims.

Mere Christianity Online

Insufficient Christianity: 9.2

Here is part II of my critique of chapter 9 of Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis. For those of you out of the loop, we’ve been going through Mere Christianity argument by argument and deconstructing them; partly because no one else has done this, and partly because I need a hobby and this is it.

So far, Lewis has led us down a rabbit hole of non-sequiturs and profound-sounding but inapplicable metaphors. At this point he is running with scissors, and those scissors are his religion.

He continues on by defining “repentance” using the Lewis Dictionary of Christianity (not a real book) as: surrendering to his god by realizing just how wrong and worthless you are so that you may start your life over again because that is the only way to fix all the fucking up you’ve done. Apparently this involves unlearning self-will. It sounds quite a bit like an Alcoholic’s Anonymous 12-step program to me. Apparently though, there is a catch. Once you read this catch, you’ll see why it is a catch.

“And here comes the catch. Only a bad person needs to repent: only a good person can repent perfectly. The worse you are the more you need it and the less you can do it. The only person who could do it perfectly would be a perfect person--and he would not need it.

Here is why Lewis thinks god cannot just do the repenting himself: “Now if we had not fallen, that would be all plain sailing. But unfortunately we now need God's help in order to do something which God, in His own nature, never does at all--to surrender, to suffer, to submit, to die. Nothing in God's nature corresponds to this process at all. So that the one road for which we now need God's leadership most of all is a road God, in His own nature, has never walked. God can share only what He has; this thing, in His own nature, He has not."

So who might this perfect person be, who can actually repent perfectly? Obviously it can’t be god, because god doesn’t suffer and die. Hmm… I think his name starts with J.

Sometimes, honestly, I marvel at the silliness of the ideas of repentance and atonement. I wish someone could explain to me why an omni-powerful god would create beings in his image, recognize that they are all horribly flawed by nature, send himself down to his creation as one of them to atone to himself for the sins of the things he created, and then reject them if they don’t believe he did this. This is supposed to be flawless, perfect, beautiful godly justice. The compass of justice, I bend thee.

Mere Christianity Online

Insufficient Christianity: 8:1

For those of you just joining us, here’s a recap: we’re thoroughly dissecting C. S. Lewis’ book Mere Christianity in excruciating detail. This is chapter 8. The previous chapters can be found by going to the bottom of this post and clicking the “C. S. Lewis” label. You can also find an online copy of Mere Christianity using the link at the bottom of this post.

Chapter 8 is amusingly titled, “The Shocking Alternative”. Of course, what Lewis is referring to here is an alternative to atheism and deism. The shock, you’ll surmise, is that the alternative is Christianity.

Lewis begins this chapter by stating that Christians ‘believe that an evil power has made himself for the present the Prince of this World.” He says that a skeptic will then ask if the existence of evil is in accordance with the Christian god’s will. His answer is: free will allows for evil. He says this is akin to a mother’s will being for her children to clean up after themselves, but sometimes they don’t. 

That’s all well and good, except that a mother would not punish a kid who didn’t clean up after himself with eternal hell and separation from mommy because the kid didn’t do or think the correct thing while calling this act “perfect justice”. But, Lewis has not made this claim yet, so I am merely speculating that as a Christian he believes in Hell and in his god’s perfect justice.

As an aside, I don’t think Lewis’ definition of free will is not a counter-causal definition, so I’ll tentatively accept that (somewhat simplified) definition.

“Some people think they can imagine a creature which was free but had no possibility of going wrong; I cannot. If a thing is free to be good it is also free to be bad. And free will is what has made evil possible.

Doesn’t Lewis’ concept of god throw a wrench into the idea that he can’t imagine a creature which is free but cannot be bad? Does Lewis’ god have free will? If so, then wouldn’t it also be free to be bad? If having free will means you have the capacity to be bad, then Lewis’ god either does not have free will, or it has the capacity to be bad.

“Why, then, did God give them free will? Because free will, though it makes evil possible, is also the only thing that makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having.

Lewis has this backward. Love/joy/goodness seems to be a consequence of our capacity to be good or bad, not the purpose of being able to be good or bad. Lewis goes on with an unsupported assertion that his god wants us to be freely united to him and each other and that this union is really super awesome. He gives no rationale.

Lewis’ next point is that we can’t argue with the things god says because he is the source of our reasoning power so we can’t be right and his god wrong. Of course, this conclusion only works if we agree with all of Lewis’ other prior premises and conclusions, namely that morality proves there is a god, and that said god is the Christian god, only god, and that the Christian god created everything and is all good (despite the fact that we don’t know if this god has free will or not). Lewis has failed to support that there is a god. He has failed to support that his god is the source of our reasoning powers, and he has failed to support that his god is all good. If we are incapable of judging his god’s actions, how do we know he is good?

This argument can also be applied to any god and is thus completely useless in proving anything. I could say, for example, that we can’t question the actions of Allah because Allah created us and is all good. When you have magic and supernaturalism on your side, you can prove anything.

Lewis goes on to talk about Satan’s sin of wanting to put himself first, be the center, and be god.  He asserts that Satan taught this sin to all of humanity. Because humans think they can “invent some sort of happiness for themselves outside God, apart from God,” they have created all of the bad things in the world – “money, poverty, ambition, war, prostitution, classes, empires, slavery”. All of this is due to trying to find something outside of god to make us happy.

I have to wonder why Lewis even needs Satan (who he supposes exists without any proof whatsoever) to explain all of this. If god gave us the capacity to either be good or be bad, aren’t we just doing what god gave us the capacity to do? We don’t need a superpowerful bad guy to explain that we screw things up.

Lewis goes on to say that his god’s solution to this was 1. consciousness. 2. Jesus!

If you think I am skipping huge chunks of his book in which he provides a decent rationalization for this, you’re dead wrong. He doesn’t.

The “shock” of this chapter is that this Jewish dude showed up and told people he was god. Lewis describes this as “quite simply, the most shocking thing that has ever been uttered by human lips.” Apparently some Jewish guy showing up claiming to be god and capable of forgiving any sins is so asinine that it must be true. Otherwise, this is pure silliness.

My vote is for pure silliness. Lewis is actually arguing (for the second time in his book) that if someone says something incredibly absurd, the absurdity makes it more likely to be true.
You know, atheism seems patently absurd to lots of people…

Mere Christianity online

Epistemological pragmatism: Skeptical thinking in a resource-limited world

This ties in to my last post on skepticism and the scientific method as a way of thinking. I apologise if this reads as dense and amateurishly philosophical, but to me, it is important to examine not just what I believe, but also—and in fact much more importantly!—why I believe it, and whether that “why” makes sense. If it doesn’t, I have some serious reconsidering to do…

As skeptics, we know that the scientific method is a good way to look at the world. We know that logic trumps intuition, that successful prediction beats rationalisation; we know the logical fallacies people tend to make; and by arming ourselves with an understanding of cognitive biases, we can conquer them in the areas where we are ourselves most vulnerable. We are perfectly well aware that knowledge requires scientific investigation, and we certainly know that the Argument from Authority is a logical fallacy most foul.

And yet we found much of our knowledge on authority.

Is this true? How can it be? How can it be justified? How can we know anything, if we do something we know to be a fallacy?

It is, of course, true. The simple fact is that the world is a very complicated place. If there ever was a time when anyone could master the sum of human knowledge, it was countless millennia ago, and it certainly far predated the scientific method. While we as a species learn more and more, the fraction of all human knowledge that any one person can have consequentially grows smaller and smaller. Darwin probably knew all about evolutionary biology even apart from that which he set down, but to understand it all today you would have to catch up on 150 years of research. Want to understand physics? After you’ve mastered calculus and differential equations, I have a few hundred books to help get you started…

So while we can set up a set of principles whereby we know that knowledge can rationally be attained, economy of scale dictates that no one person will ever learn all about everything he needs to know. Even someone with a doctorate is only an expert in a narrow sub-field of one particular field of one scientific discipline. This narrow but deep knowledge, hard-earned with experiments and comprehended (we may hope) from first principles, is indeed the gold standard to which we would like to hold knowledge in general—but because we have jobs, because we have other things to do, and because we can’t expect to live more than 80 years or so, there’s no way we can actually apply that standard to most of our lives.

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So what can we do? Well, we can do precisely what we are doing: Rely on credible experts, use good judgement, and so forth. These things, however, fall lamentably short of the lofty goals alluded to above, and at first glance look suspiciously like precisely those practices we abhor: Argument from Authority, raising personal experience (or anecdotal evidence, or case series, …) above proper science, and so forth. I argue that this is not equivalent, and I shall defend my position. All the same, I will be the first to admit that this limitation is a weakness.

Using good judgement and relying on credible experts is all very well and good, but suffers from a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem. It’s difficult to judge whether a purported expert is credible or a loon when he claims expertise in a field you know nothing about. If the papers are available, that won’t help you much when you’d need a decade of studies and a Ph.D. to understand the mathematics and the lingo.

The first thing we have to ask, when we face any claim, is How do you know it is true? Even if you know nothing of the subject, it is often possible to determine whether principles are based on reality or lunacy. Here is my guideline:

Given two alternative explanations, where one claims a scientific explanation and cites purported evidence and the other does not, prefer the scientific explanation. 

This is simple and obvious, but I think it’s fairly powerful. If I’m just critical enough to check if there is a plausible explanation, I can rule out wide swaths of nonsense—even in fields where I am not qualified to judge the details of anyone’s explanations or assess the reliability of anyone’s data! If I catch two oncologists discussing the relative merits of radiation therapy versus chemotherapy in a heated manner, each waving tables and research publications, I have little or no hope of assessing whose argument is stronger. However, I can reasonably assert that each of them is better at treating cancer than, say, an acupuncturists, because at least they have explanations that may very well be true, whereas the acupuncturist hasn’t a leg to stand on.

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Sadly, that rule, however valuable, can only rule out the very wildly nonsensical. What if you are faced with a dilemma where you have to put your trust in one of several opposing viewpoints but you lack the expertise to rule any of them out as implausible? What if, for instance, I have to make a life-or-death choice to go with one and only one of my hypothetical oncologists? This may be a little more controversial, but I’m going to recommend that you put your trust in the scientific consensus. Of course, it’s very true indeed that the majority opinion—even of experts—can be wrong, but this is not quite so major a problem as it may appear at first glance.
The common objection is Science has ‘changed its mind’ many times in the past—how can you be sure that it won’t happen again? In fact, it probably will, so you’ll most likely turn out to be wrong! 

First, while some “brave mavericks” with wild new ideas turn out to be right, most of them turn out to be wrong (and are soon forgotten, which is why this fact is not so obvious). Especially in alternative medicine, a lot of people seem to consider themselves the rebels bucking the staid establishment, comparing their ostracisation from mainstream medical culture to the persecution of Galileo—but To wear the mantle of Galileo, it is not only necessary to be persecuted: It is also necessary to be right. (Alternatively: True, they laughed at Galileo—but they also laughed at the Marx brothers.)

Second, some fields—notably medicine—were pretty horrible before the 20th century or so. It’s often argued that homeopathy gained traction in the first place because mainstream medicine at the time was so dangerous that it was better to go untreated—thus homeopathy, by doing nothing, avoided doing the harm a normal doctor would have done. However, we may have some confidence that this is no longer the case because we actually do statistics now. We can compare mortality rates for treated versus untreated people suffering some condition, so we know that modern medicine (though far from perfect!) is in fact better (in a very large number of cases, vastly better) than doing nothing. Thus, the scientific consensus today is superior to the scientific consensus 200 years ago by the first principle above—the modern one relies on solid principles, the old one did not.

Third, most scientific improvement is gradual. It is not the case that every paradigm shift means that everything that went before it is bullshit. I will be the first to agree that Einstein’s model of the universe with time as a dimension rather than a metaphysical constant, where everything is relative to the speed of light, and gravity is modelled as spacetime curvature rather than Newton’s unexplained attraction—this is a very wonderful model and in fundamental ways very superior to the Newtonian model. But that doesn’t mean that Newton was dead wrong! In fact, he was pretty close in many respects—close enough to launch spacecraft and send them to other planets. This gradual progress means that while

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Finally, when dealing with an individual claim, we can get an idea of somebody’s credibility in areas where we lack the expertise to assess his claims directly by building a picture of his credibility in fields where we can assess it. Of course, a person could in principle be simultaneously a pathological liar and a brilliant scientist, but in our day-to-day lives, when we have to assess whether a specific claim made by a specific person, we’ll never take a known liar on his word. Strictly speaking, this is an ad hominem argument: I seem to suggest that you reject claims based not on what is in them, but the negative traits of the person making them! This isn’t quite true; I’m not categorically rejecting such claims, but I reject them coming from untrustworthy people. If I hear the same claims coming from someone I judge to be credible, I will of course reconsider.

The other half of the above equation is, to reiterate, to judge a person’s credibility based on the claims in areas where we can assess them. Someone who is in the habit of making claims on subjects he knows nothing about—well, he may not exactly be lying, but you know that he is disqualified as a reliable authority. If you can ascertain whether he has a track record of being right (or being wrong) in areas related to the subject at hand, this can build an even more detailed picture.

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Of course, if you are faced with a purported expert who, for all you know, is generally very credible indeed, who makes a claim you are personally incapable of verifying or falsifying, based on what seems to you to be a solid, scientific backing…he may well be wrong, or misleading you. It’s not a perfect world, and no one is or ever was perfect. No amount of scientific thinking guarantees infallibility; what the scientific method does offer us is, at best, an asymptotic approach to the truth. We use it not because it is perfect, but because there are no better alternatives.

Petter’s guide on How To Think

What science is

Science is a process of finding the truth¹ by

1. Making observations (gathering data);
2. Constructing a model (forming a hypothesis);
3. Making predictions based on the model;
4. Verifying the predictions, and throwing out the model if it’s wrong.

Of course that’s a very rough generalisation, but that’s the basic idea: You need data to construct a model; you need a model to generate predictions; and if you don’t have any verified predictions (which means they must be falsifiable! —it’s not verified unless you leave room for failure if the model’s wrong), it isn’t science.

Scientific explanations aren’t like that, though. A scientific explanation of an already-observed phenomenon is not science; it’s just based on it. It cannot be science: In order for it to be science, I need to construct a model and check that it’s a good model. We don’t always do this when we explain something scientifically. Instead, a scientific explanation is an explanation of some phenomenon or occurrence based on what science has shown is feasible. If you show me an example of purported levitation, or a UFO sighting, or similar, and I explain (very reasonably and probably correctly) that there are natural explanations for what I’ve seen, I’m just observing that it fits the current scientific models.

I will now make the rather bold claim that the scientific way of thinking is by far the best way to arrive at truth about the world. I feel comfortable brushing aside “intuitive knowing” and other such nonsense in a footnote, but there are a few wrinkles that deserve some attention.

In defence of Occam’s Razor

Occam’s Razor is the philosophical principle that out of any set of explanations, the simplest is always to be preferred:

Numquam ponenda est pluralitas sine necessitate.
(Plurality must never be posited without necessity.)
Frustra fit per plura quod potest fieri per pauciora.
(It is futile to do with more things that which can be done with fewer.)

William of Ockham

My own favourite formulation runs somewhat as follows:

Given two explanations of a phenomenon, all else being equal, choose the one that requires the fewest assumptions.

This always looks like a suspect—why should we prefer the simpler explanation? Aren’t explanations of things sometimes genuinely and necessarily complex? How on Earth can you justify basing a depiction of reality on something so vague and susceptible to error?
The answer to this is twofold. First, note my inclusion of all else being equal—of course if we have two explanations for a set of phenomena, both of which generate testable predictions, and one of them produces significantly better fits to newly observed data, that’s a pretty good case to support this one even if it’s more complex. Occam’s Razor isn’t to be used as an excuse to throw out superior models.

Secondly, it is an unfortunate fact that for any phenomenon, you can generate an infinite number of explanations by making them increasingly complex. A simple example is found in every statistics class, where we find that anytime we try to fit a polynomial curve to a set of data points, we can always achieve an equally good or better fit by increasing the order of the polynomial (making our explanation more complex). In fact, more complex explanations are here usually better fits to the data, because the data have measuring errors and so don’t fit exactly to the predicted curve of the right explanation, whereas a very high-order (complex) polynomial can jitter up and down to match every blip in the data.

It should be pretty clear that we can’t get very far if we attempt to maintain an infinite number of explanations for everything we try to explain. Instead, we choose the simplest explanation that works and resort to more complicated ones only if it turns out that the predictions we get from our simpler models aren’t up to snuff. Of course, this process is empirical—we may find out only in time that our model has shortcomings. Unfortunately, it’s the only way we have to proceed; it would be nice if we had some more absolute way of finding out truth, but we don’t. (This is why it is often said of science, properly done, that it tends to approach the truth asymptotically—it can never reach an unassailable, absolute position of Truth, but every subsequent model, because it has to account for all the data that the old model did explain, as well as the data that we’ve found the old model fails to explain, is a better model than the last.)


A more colloquial sort of defence of Occam’s Razor is to observe that it is the principle whereby we explain the world in terms of things we know to be possible, rather than positing arbitrarily things that we don’t know have even a chance of being true. In an example that I freely acknowledge to be something of a reductio ad absurdam, if I leave some chocolate on the table next to a child, turn around for a minute, then return to find the chocolate gone, and the child claims that he did not eat it, but rather that the chocolate was teleported away by aliens for scientific study, I would be an idiot to believe him—not because it is absolutely impossible, but because one explanation (he’s lying) rests on observably possible things (children sometimes eat chocolate; children sometimes lie), whereas the other postulates something (the existence of aliens with teleportation technology) for which there is no evidence.

Jumping from that insultingly trivial example to something that actually is a matter of debate, some people claim that the human mind cannot be the product of the brain alone, but must also rely on something called a soul, or other immaterial and scientifically undetectable entity that is not a product of material causes. Here, the naturalistic explanation is a lot less obvious—we cannot at present show how the mind results from the brain. Some would also argue that the alternative explanation (there is a soul) is less absurd than the alien hypothesis (though I would disagree).

The difference, however, is purely quantitative. We know that brains and minds are very intimately connected—we can observe the mental and psychological effects of damage to the material brain, artificial or natural alterations of brain chemistry, et cetera; we can scan activity in the physical brain correlated with thoughts and emotions; we can view the material development of the brain from embryo to developed organ. The assumption in the naturalist model is just this: That in a complicated neural network consisting of a hundred billion neurones, with feedforward and feedback loops, and modulated and assisted by glial tissue and chemical catalysts in the form of neurochemicals; in such a network that has, furthermore, evolved by fairly well-understood principles of natural and sexual selection, sufficient complexity has arisen to explain the minds that we now experience.

The soul hypothesis may look simpler because it can be summarised more briefly, but its assumptions are actually huge. It postulates the existance of something for which we have no evidence whatsoever—the materialistic hypothesis is complex, but it rests on established facts. Furthermore, it postulates that this intangible soul—which no scientific instrument has been able to detect—is yet able to exert causal effects on the material brain, since it is very clearly established that it is in the brain that our motor impulses originate. (René Descartes thought that the soul operated on the brain through the pineal gland.)

It also suffers the difficulty that if we be allowed this one, completely unfounded assumption (there exists a soul), it is difficult to see why we should disallow any unfounded assumption as a valid rival, so long as it is not falsifiable; for instance, I might equally well claim that your brain is run by a computer program (written by aliens, or the NSA, or the Illuminati); that you are mind controlled by the White Mice… These sound more ridiculous to us, but that is a cultural artefact. The Soul Hypothesis and the White Mice Hypothesis have an equal basis in evidence.

I daresay that William of Ockham, a Franciscan friar, would disagree with my conclusion; but while I think that his beliefs were most likely pretty absurd, I nevertheless think that his principle of parsimony is a necessary part of a rational worldview.

Occam’s Razor or rationalisation?

When I get involved in discussions or debates questioning this worldview and philosophy of mine, and (this is, alas, a limited subset) when the person I am conversing with is neither stupid nor patently insane, one of the most common and most reasonable objections runs something like this (in spirit; I reformulate rather than paraphrase):

What you say generally makes sense, but because the philosophy ultimately relies on empiricism in determining what’s real and what’s not, it is—as you acknowledge—imperfect, and unless you end up clinging dogmatically to your skeptical beliefs (contrary to your own philosophy) you are bound to change your mind on things as new evidence emerges.

Well, given that, by what right do you reject (for instance) the soul concept so strongly? You may think that there is no evidence, but evidence may come up, and you certainly have no strong counterevidence. Why not just keep an open mind?

…As, of course, I should, but as the saying goes, You should keep an open mind to new ideas, but not so open that your brains fall out. It should be noted and emphasised that when I say There is no such thing as a soul, what I mean is To the best of my knowlege, and according to the best evidence and reasoning available, there is no reason to think that there exists such a thing as a soul. (Whether I am truly as open-minded as I should like to new evidence in the areas where my worldview is heavily invested is, of course, hard to say; but I’m defending the way I try to structure my thinking, not rating how well I measure up to my own ideals.)

Ultimately, I regard this as a quantitative rather than a qualitative distinction. It is not whether I am willing to credit the possibility of some improbable concept or not, but just how large or small a probability I am willing to credit it with. My own tendency and preference is to treat extremely improbable things (souls, færies, ghosts, celestial teapots, alien abductions, gods, Great Green Arkleseizures, effective reiki or homeopathic remedies, etc.) as so improbable that unless better evidence or arguments are presented, I will not bother with the possibilities of their reality at all. I will freely acknowledge that they are non-zero, in the absolute sense, but it’s such a small one (0.00…01%) that it’s not worth bothering with. This is, of course, where I often and easily come off as contentious or even contemptuous, and people whose approaches otherwise look similar to mine may differ in how small a prior probability we should assign these things. (If you want a gentler version, read the late, great Dr. Carl Sagan’s The Demon-haunted World.)

Of course, being but a human, I’m very likely to be wrong about a great many things, some of which may very well be of fundamental importance to my worldview. If we were to line up all the things I consider to be ludicrously improbable, I expect that, due to human fallibility and my own sometimes unfortunate tendency to over-swift rejection of apparently unscientific notions, I will be wrong about a number of them. But I consider the probability of my being wrong on any specific such matter to be very small. In the end it comes down to whether I would rather say Well, maybe to everything I come across, or whether I’m willing to say Yes and No and be prepared to eat my hat when the day comes when I turn out to be wrong. I’m willing to do the latter (against which occasion I cleverly do not wear a hat). To me, there’s no other sensible way to proceed. If I accept the soul hypothesis as likely enough that I shouldn’t reject it utterly out of hand, I cannot remain intellectually honest and consistent without accepting any number of other such claims—UFOs, homeopathy, reiki, unlucky black cats, astrology, and all the rest.
I would rather be forceful and intellectually honest and consistent, and occasionally be wrong, than either waffling about every incredible claim anyone cares to make, or arbitrarily accepting improbabilities based solely on their cultural or social acceptability.

---

¹ Some people hold that hunches and intuition are as good guides to truth as is scientific inquiry; to which, apart from obvious retorts (Would you rather travel on an airplane built according to scientific principles, or on one based on intuited ærodynamics?) I would like to reply that whenever a hunch is opposed to reason, I have a hunch that reason is right; so hunches cancel out and we’re left to trust to reason².

² Unless you belong to that school of thought that claims that there is no such thing as objective reality; that all reality is subjective. I have a vast dislike for such solipsism, but I suppose I can’t deny you your subjective reality; in my reality, however, things are objective and that school of thought has no value or standing.

Science and epistemology

…Or, if you prefer, science as epistemology…

A while back, someone told me that I treated science as a god replacement—in fact, two people who more or less know me had apparently been talking about me in those terms. I’m still trying to figure out whether that’s a good thing or not, apart from the blind faith connotations inherent in the religious terms (to my ears, at least).

The key is, of course, to nail down exactly what one means by science. I do not think that any scientific fact should ever be held as gospel—many are solid beyond the shadow of a doubt, but new facts, new lights, may cast new shadows. Obviously, I do not wish to deify any scientist. There are many scientists whose minds and accomplishments I admire (and while some, like Sir Isaac Newton, were awful human beings, others, like Charles Darwin, seem to have been very good people morally as well as intellectually), but they are or were human and fallible. Not only am I unconcerned by ad hominem arguments (Newton's being a right bastard doesn’t detract from his intellectual achievements, or make his theory of universal gravitation any less useful); I also am not bothered by any scientist being shown to have been wrong on any particular point.
This may not always be obvious in conversation and debate, of course. I’m rather fond of putting it so: When I am convinced that something is sufficiently probable that the margin of error, though never zero, is negligible for practical purposes—e.g. I am so convinced of the truths of gravity, electromagnetism, evolution, etc. that I see no reason to take the null hypotheses into consideration—I choose to say that I know it is so, because it is shorter, more forceful, and more pithy than I am convinced that the probability of it being so is so high as to render the null hypothesis negligibly small for practical considerations, even though the latter more accurately describes the stance I try to take.

There is also the lamentable fact that I’m stubborn and like to argue and have an all-too-human tendency to take a position with overtones of fiendish advocacy: If you take a position that I disagree with, I may for the sake of argument (perhaps unconsciously) take an opposite position more extreme than I truly credit.

That aside, what’s left is not scientific fact, nor scientific practitioners, but science itself. Thus, either people who look at me and cry God replacement! misunderstand me and think that I deify scientists or scientific facts (which may be my fault as easily as it may be theirs), or it is science itself that is the issue at stake. It may well be the latter. But science is not a set of facts, or of people, though it needs these things: Science is a method and process of discovering truth based on logic, empirical observation, mathematics, statistics, probability, and naturalism. (This is not to say that science is by definition incapable of discovering supernatural phenomena—if any exist, they will be found precisely where science finds anomalies that cannot be accounted for under the assumption that these rules all hold.) It is the only method we have for discovering the real truth of the universe to any degree superior to our own brains, which, for all that they are marvellous pattern-recognising deduction machines, are also prone to finding false patterns, pareidolia, conflating correlation with causation, and many other errors that we should expect from an animal that pays a much more dire prize for false negatives than for false positives, and whose heuristics have limited powers.

I asked someone recently in a rather pointed way whether she felt that intuition was as good a guide to truth as scientific inquiry. She replied (you’re going to think I’m crazy, but…) that she does, because scientific models are always constrained by prevailing cultural and intellectual paradigms. In some areas of research, this may have a point, but I think it misses the main point entirely, because this is precisely what science is meant to avoid. If you can point out a way in which a study—any study—has a risk of being less than objective due to such biases, you have not poked a hole in the scientific method in general, but rather identified another bias for high-quality scientific inquiry to correct for—along with logical fallacies like conflating correlation with causation, confirmation bias, observer effects, the Hawthorne effect, regressions to the mean, placebo effects in medicine, and myriad other cognitive quirks that we have to isolate.
But the highest goal of science is to find objective truth, and I don’t care what you say—unless you subscribe to solipsism (in which case I won’t even bother with you), there are objectively verifiable and falsifiable tests. To paraphrase Richard Dawkins, aeroplanes built to scientific specifications fly, while (cargo-cult) aeroplanes built to religious specifications do not. Differentiating between flying and not flying is not subject to cultural bias, and nor are other good scientific facts—and the hard sciences abound with them. (Our differences in opinion may have been conflated artificially due to my background in the natural science and this conversation partner’s background in humanities and softer sciences—the observer’s bias is much more likely to influence observations of people’s behaviour than observations of the behaviour of atoms, I should think.)

And let’s face it—ultimately, you have to reduce reality to a set of objective truths unless you want to descend into solipsism. What I wish I had said (but thought of too late) might be something like this: Intuition cannot be trusted because it cannot be tested. You have a feeling that something is true; well, I have a feeling that it isn’t. Only objective testing can settle it; otherwise there are no facts, but only opinions. I might also point out that I have a feeling that your idea that intuition is as good as science is dead wrong…

This, then, is what I think: Any scientific fact I hold up may be wrong (though some are fantastically unlikely to be so). Every scientist who ever lived, and every scientist who will ever live, is and will be fallible. But the scientific method is the only viable way of ascertaining truth beyond personal experience, and personal experience can be notoriously misleading; and any valid criticism of the scientific method as currently practiced will never tear it down, but only—at most—show how our current practice can improve.

I am open to challenges on this point.

I also feel—and this may well be controversial—that any field of inquiry that is irrevocably biased by cultural norms, etc., is not strictly scientific at all: I will not call it pseudo-science, but perhaps almost-science (or soft science…). This is not to take anything away from its practitioners: Strict science is ultimately the most accurate method for finding truth, but it is not therefore always the most practical (c.f. the old hypothetical example of the folly of having children empirically test their parents’ claims that the river teems with crocodiles). If your model purports anything beyond strict physical measurements, it has strayed from the field of hard science where this sort of reliability is possible.

Let's argue like a creationist!

I'd really like to see in the comments of this post all of my commenters arguing for atheism using only the types of arguments creationists use to prove their points

I'll start.

"Theists know there is no god, they are just pretending there is one so that they can blame someone else when they make mistakes"

Ready, okay let's go!!

Ray a Day Guest Post: Augustine79

Here is a guest post by Augustine79, our resident ethical Catholic!

In Ray Comfort’s book, You can lead and Atheist to Evidence but You Can’t Make Him Think, he proposes that Christian theology purports that human moral action does not lead one to salvation. In other words, God does not care about right living with a pure conscience, as long as a human being believes in Christ. My intention here is to expose, to the best of my ability, accurate Christian teaching that flows from human reason, from scripture, and sacred tradition.

Logically, if God is just then it would follow that the deeds of His creation would be taken into account depending on upon whether their actions are immoral or moral. Otherwise, humanity would have absolutely no intrinsic value and goodness, insofar as it can be known either through reason or divine Revelation, would mean nothing.

Before I refute Ray’s uncompassionate, heart-wrenching view of God, here is the actual excerpt I will be contesting:

“All manmade religions still offer sacrifices. That’s the altar upon which they are built – the sacrifice of prayer, of giving money, of giving time, doing good works, of doing penance, of fasting, etc. They have to sacrifice, because they still have guilt, because the conscience demands a continual sacrifice. Not so with Christianity. The guilt is removed because the sacrifice was accepted. Completely. And our guilt is dismissed through simple repentance and faith in Jesus.”

Most of the audience who reads this passage would be quite bewildered by these clearly contradictory statement to Christian living. The Bible explicitly states that good works are organically linked to faith as a part of the equation of infused salvation. Ray subscribes to Sola Fide, or faith alone; bringing one to salvation. Ray, and many fundamentalists hold this view based on Romans 4. However, St. Paul never used this term, and furthermore exposed that justification by faith is something you have you do as well as believe. The only place in the Bible where ‘faith alone’ is used is in the Epistle of James. This passage also proves that salvation involves right action. ““What does it profit, my brethren, if someone says he has faith but does not have works? Can such faith save him? …You see then that a man is justified by works, and not by faith only…? For as the body without the spirit is dead, so faith without works is dead also.” (James 2:14, 24, 26)

In addition to this, the sacrament of Baptism is known in scripture and tradition to remove original sin. However, Ray would view this as a human work, therefore no grace would be infused within the individual. It is arrogant for Ray to assume that he is saved for eternity based solely on belief, and moral works are superfluous.

Here are excerpts from catholic.com providing scriptural and traditional evidence that this notion supported by most fundamentalist protestants is one hundred percent plain wrong.

“Scripture teaches that one’s final salvation depends on the state of the soul at death. As Jesus himself tells us, "He who endures to the end will be saved" (Matt. 24:13; cf. 25:31–46). One who dies in the state of friendship with God (the state of grace) will go to heaven. The one who dies in a state of enmity and rebellion against God (the state of mortal sin) will go to hell.

For many Fundamentalists and Evangelicals it makes no difference—as far as salvation is concerned—how you live or end your life. You can heed the altar call at church, announce that you’ve accepted Jesus as your personal Savior, and, so long as you really believe it, you’re set. From that point on there is nothing you can do, no sin you can commit, no matter how heinous, that will forfeit your salvation. You can’t undo your salvation, even if you wanted to.”

“Regarding the issue of whether Christians have an "absolute" assurance of salvation, regardless of their actions, consider this warning Paul gave: "See then the kindness and the severity of God: severity toward those who have fallen, but God’s kindness to you, provided you continue in his kindness; otherwise you too will be cut off" (Rom. 11:22; see also Heb. 10:26–29, 2 Pet. 2:20–21).”

“One can be confident of one’s present salvation. This is one of the chief reasons why God gave us the sacraments—to provide visible assurances that he is invisibly providing us with his grace. And one can be confident that one has not thrown away that grace by simply examining one’s life and seeing whether one has committed mortal sin. Indeed, the tests that John sets forth in his first epistle to help us know whether we are abiding in grace are, in essence, tests of whether we are dwelling in grave sin. For example, "By this it may be seen who are the children of God, and who are the children of the devil: whoever does not do right is not of God, nor he who does not love his brother" (1 John 3:10), "If any one says, ‘I love God,’ and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen, cannot love God whom he has not seen" (1 John 4:20), "For this is the love of God, that we keep his commandments. And his commandments are not burdensome" (1 John 5:3).”

“Likewise, by looking at the course of one’s life in grace and the resolution of one’s heart to keep following God, one can also have an assurance of future salvation. It is this Paul speaks of when he writes to the Philippians and says, "And I am sure that he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ" (Phil. 1:6). This is not a promise for all Christians, or even necessarily all in the church at Philippi, but it is a confidence that the Philippian Christians in general would make it. The basis of this is their spiritual performance to date, and Paul feels a need to explain to them that there is a basis for his confidence in them. Thus he says, immediately, "It is right for me to feel thus about you all, because I hold you in my heart, for you are all partakers with me of grace, both in my imprisonment and in the defense and confirmation of the gospel" (1:7). The fact that the Philippians performed spiritually by assisting Paul in his imprisonment and ministry showed that their hearts were with God and that it could be expected that they, at least in general, would persevere and remain with God.”

It is important for theists and atheists/skeptics alike to know this simply because most people receive incorrect information regarding Christian doctrine, and are consequently turned off from organized religion altogether. Its astounding and appalling that Ray dismisses sacrifices that are inherently part of Christian living. Prayer, fasting, charity, and putting yourselves before others are all integral to the Christian faith. Christianity is not only about saving yourself, but spreading peace throughout our world through humble servitude. St. Augustine stressed in his grandiose work, The City of God, that Christians are on this earth to improve upon the temporal world by serving the interests of society in general through the enhancement of social ethics and morality.