Maybe I should just stop it...

For anyone wondering, the young theist from earlier posts has not gotten back to me since my last message (which was sent over a month ago and is quoted in my earlier blog post). However, recently I have been trying to start correspondences with many different theists to see the kinds of explanations I get from them. Often I am just trying half-heartedly, as it seems pointless. After this latest one, I really feel like maybe I should just stop - I am not getting the answers I want and these conversations are just depressing me.

He started out sounding fairly intelligent. Very few grammatical mistakes, good grammar, and laid out his case fairly concisely. Things went downhill quickly from there, though. After explaining a strong piece of evidence for the common ancestory of humans and other apes, the telomere-telomere fusion of chromosome 2, this theist responded:

It's a common cop-out that evolutionists make, to try to psycho-analyze God. They claim that we have to understand the mind of the designer before they will admit that design exists. [....]

You have answered the way that every evolutionist I've spoken with does...you didn't answer my question and give me a piece of EMPIRICAL evidence proving evolution true. Empirical evidence is not "why else would it be this way." Empirical evidence is "this observable fact proves that it cannot be any other way." It's funny how many evolutionists don't understand the difference between scientific proof and assumption. They somehow think there is a difference between creationism and evolution, without realizing that both are belief systems. If there was empirical evidence for evolution, the theory of evolution would be the law of evolution. If there were empirical evidence for God, belief in God would be replaced with the scientific law of God, and I could show it to you. But faith is required.

It also appears you're assuming yourself greater than God, if you are laying down the terms by which you will accept him (insisting to know why the numbers of chromosomes are the way they are before you will believe). If God is real, then he is greater than us, and we must capitulate to him, not vice versa.

Err... Okay, so no matter how much the evidence points towards evolution, since a god could in theory have made things that way and we can't know the mind of god, there can't be any evidence for evolution! Amazing... This is worse than the person who claims dinosaur fossils were put there by god to trick the unfaithful, because this guy won't even give a possible explanation.

He then went on (after claiming I refused to tell him my objections to god, though I had tried to as best as I could explain why I thought god was unlikely) to say this:

If evolution is true, then you and I are just accidentally-glorified globs of dust, and there is no objective reason for one glob of dust to care what any glob of dust believes about its origin. The fact that you and other evolutionists strongly argue the evolutionary viewpoint proves that at least something in an evolutionist doesn't believe that evolution is true. It would be inconsistent with an evolutionary worldview for an evolutionary-believing glob of dust to care so strongly about whether the ideas of a creationist-believing glob of dust were "right" or "wrong", when the very concept of "right" and "wrong" is contrivance made up in the minds of globs of dust. Once the globs of dust die, they lose their memory, and have no recollection of whether they were "right" or "wrong" about what they believed. So why even discuss it, if evolution were actually true? If evolution is true, why fight so strongly against intelligent design in the school systems? If we globs of dust blow ourselves to kingdom come with nuclear weapons, so what? Our existence was an unintentional accident in the first place, and therefore has no objective value worth preserving. These are the necessary correlaries of evolutionary theory, yet I have never encountered a person who truly believes these correlaries, or who fully acts in a manner consistent with them.

*facepalm*

By the way, if any theists are reading this and think they are being represented unfairly by their fellow believers, feel free to speak up, either in the comments or in an email to me.

The Limits of Argumentation

Yesterday I was putting together a bunch of arguments against theism and rebuttals to common theist arguments for use by a friend in a debate. When I was done, I started considering the arguments and I just felt empty. Somehow, all of the arguments on either side just seem to completely miss the mark.

I doubt that many (if any) people believe in a god because of Pascal's Wager. Why, then, is it such a common argument? It seems to me it is a nice way of rationalizing belief. On the flip side, how many people disbelieve because of the problem of evil? Perhaps a fair number of people have deconverted from their religion because of it, but I don't think this even comes close to being an explanation as to why atheists, in general, don't believe.

I, as an atheist, find gods hard to believe in because they don't see a way for a god to coherently sit in the universe. An omnipotent, omniscient being that cares about humans seems absurd - it would have to be extremely complex to be all the things theists claim it is, and it seems far too anthropocentric to believe the creator of the universe (which we inhabit a fraction of a tiny speck of) cares specifically about us. This makes the claim that a god exists an extremely extraordinary one. The fact is, we would need really good evidence for this claim. This seems to be a fairly common way of thinking with atheists.

Let's take the other perspective now. I think at the base of much of theism is this idea that mind is a fundamental property (like mass or volume). It can't be broken down, and some things just have mind. I think when looked at this way, the god hypothesis becomes pretty appealing - gods don't have to be complex, they are just really big (or infinite) minds. Since mind is a fundamental property (according to this idea), it doesn't seem strange that there would be a giant mind - perhaps mind is just the most fundamental of essences. Of course a really big mind would care specifically about us, because we have minds too! Suddenly the god claim doesn't seem like such a huge claim. The god hypothesis seems to explain so much, so it seems adopting it makes the most coherent sense out of the universe - not only does it explain the big questions of how the universe began and why we exist, but things like free will, morality, death, etc. all are easily explained (again, according to this view). Of course, we should keep in mind there are also social factors and psychological biases that affect beliefs in the supernatural as well (and are very likely the causes of the theist worldview in the first place), but they aren't my subject here.

I think these are more or less the positions of most atheists and theists when they meet each other in a debate. They then carry on debating about evidence, but it would take a huge amount of evidence for the theist to convince any atheist, and the atheist would have to undermine a theist's understanding of many different concepts (morality, free will, etc) which have become integral to the theist's understanding of the universe. It frequently happens that people (atheists and theists) are amazed that people with views differing with theirs will be unwilling to change their views in the face of what seems to them to be a perfect argument.

Debating is good - maybe you will get someone watching thinking, or maybe you'll convince some fence-sitters (plus, debating is fun!). But as Daniel Dennett has said, the idea that you can disprove god's existence in order to convince everyone there is no god is a quixotic notion. I think a much better way of getting people to reject faith is to provide natural explanations which undermine theists' view of the world. Dennett himself has tried this by calling for a natural explanation for the origins of religious belief itself. Owen Flanagan does a very good job in The Problem of the Soul of trying to explain why people shouldn't be worried about a naturalistic explanation of the mind - we can still have all the good stuff people think the soul gives us, but without the metaphysical weirdness of the soul.

I think that education - particularly in cultural studies, history, psychology, cognitive science, critical thinking and biology - are all much more effective in undermining the average theist's position than argumentation could ever be.

Thoughts?