Tuesday, June 10, 2008

  • Regime Change In Heaven

    God's thunderbolts pose an existential threat to mankind. Military intervention has become unavoidable.

    By Robert Ritchie, originally published in guardian.co.uk.
     
     
     
    Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. I apologise for getting you out of bed so early. At 0500 hours this morning the combined armed forces of mankind across the globe launched a massive and sustained land, sea and air attack on the Kingdom of Heaven. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. There will be time for questions later.

    As you are all aware, the world's governments have been concerned about the true nature and ultimate purpose of God for some years now. A being that proclaims Himself omnipotent clearly had to be watched closely - we would have been failing in our duty to protect our citizens had we not done so.

    Evidence of God's power is overwhelming. Indeed He has said nothing to deny it. He has brought famine on numerous occasions. He has inflicted plagues in the form of Aids, Sars and H5N1. Not a single year has passed without war raging in some corner of the globe, often with His explicit blessing on one side or the other and sometimes on both.

    Tsunamis, floods and hurricanes are three more devastating weapons in the deadly armoury He has not only developed but appears all too willing to use. Faced with these already terrifying powers, we tasked the world's intelligence services to establish when - not if, ladies and gentlemen, but when - He will have the capability to launch genuine weapons of mass destruction. I refer, of course, to thunderbolts from heaven.

    Ladies and gentlemen, it is my grave duty to inform you that all intelligence conclusively points to the fact that God already possesses such a capability and could launch it at a moment's notice. Please, please. Be calm. Not wishing to alarm the people unnecessarily, we have of course, up until this moment in time, kept this intelligence within the confines of the highest reaches of government.

    Behind the scenes we have been attempting to negotiate with God. Indeed, up until as recently as March of 2007 representatives of your governments were trying to open lines of communication. We made it clear we were happy to talk either directly to God or to his Angels. These approaches, I am sure you understand, largely took the form of silent prayer. Unfortunately I have to report that our efforts proved fruitless. The evidence of His presence is all around us, so He claims, yet when we want to talk to Him He is nowhere to be found. Apparently God did not want to listen. Though, of course, being omniscient, He didn't actually need to listen to be aware of our intentions. Either that or He was in hiding. Which seems unlikely, given that He also claims to be omnipresent.

    As the world is aware, all nations are united behind the necessity of tackling the problem of God's might before it is too late. This, despite the fact that until recently many nations, for various reasons, have preferred not to confront Him. Some have claimed that notwithstanding His terrible wrath and well-documented history of visiting vengeance upon mankind, He is a force for good in the world. Some countries - in fact, at the latest count, at least half the nations of the world - have at some time even claimed to be His Chosen People.

    Yet despite countless appeals to Him, not only over the last few years, but over many centuries, to bring peace to the world, He has blatantly failed to deliver us from evil. We now know that He even harbours terrorists. At least, if they do not come from heaven, we know that heaven is where they go afterwards, as they are only too willing to admit.

    Ladies and gentlemen, we have waited long enough. We have given God every chance, but our patience is at an end. I put it to you, can a being who chooses to be known under the guise of a number of different aliases ever be trusted? The time has come for regime change in heaven. (interruption) I'm sorry? Excuse me a moment.

    Ladies and gentlemen, I have just been informed that our mission has been successful. The forces of the people are now in control of all key targets. Overcoming determined resistance ... (interruption) ... Excuse me, little resistance ... (interruption) ... I'm sorry, apparently no resistance at all, our forces battled ... (interruption) er, strolled into ... what appears to be a deserted realm.

    (To aide: "What, no angels? No seraphim, no cherubim? No hosts of heavenly choirs? No ... souls of the eternally blessed? I was hoping to meet my mother again ..." Aide: "There's no evidence of anything, Mr President.")

    (Speaker takes sip of water.)

    Ladies and gentlemen, I give you victory. Today marks the triumph of mankind. Heaven has fallen.

    And may God save us all.
     

Friday, June 06, 2008

  • Does science make belief in God obsolete?

     
    An essay response to the above question, written by Steven Pinker, originally posted at The Templeton Foundation.
     
     
     
    Yes,  if  by...
    "science" we mean the entire enterprise of secular reason and knowledge (including history and philosophy), not just people with test tubes and white lab coats.

    Traditionally, a belief in God was attractive because it promised to explain the deepest puzzles about origins. Where did the world come from? What is the basis of life? How can the mind arise from the body? Why should anyone be moral?

    Yet over the millennia, there has been an inexorable trend: the deeper we probe these questions, and the more we learn about the world in which we live, the less reason there is to believe in God.

    Start with the origin of the world. Today no honest and informed person can maintain that the universe came into being a few thousand years ago and assumed its current form in six days (to say nothing of absurdities like day and night existing before the sun was created). Nor is there a more abstract role for God to play as the ultimate first cause. This trick simply replaces the puzzle of "Where did the universe come from?" with the equivalent puzzle "Where did God come from?"

    What about the fantastic diversity of life and its ubiquitous signs of design? At one time it was understandable to appeal to a divine designer to explain it all. No longer. Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace showed how the complexity of life could arise from the physical process of natural selection among replicators, and then Watson and Crick showed how replication itself could be understood in physical terms. Notwithstanding creationist propaganda, the evidence for evolution is overwhelming, including our DNA, the fossil record, the distribution of life on earth, and our own anatomy and physiology (such as the goose bumps that try to fluff up long-vanished fur).

    For many people the human soul feels like a divine spark within us. But neuroscience has shown that our intelligence and emotions consist of intricate patterns of activity in the trillions of connections in our brain. True, scholars disagree on how to explain the existence of inner experience—some say it's a pseudo-problem, others believe it's just an open scientific problem, while still others think that it shows a limitation of human cognition (like our inability to visualize four-dimensional space-time). But even here, relabeling the problem with the word "soul" adds nothing to our understanding.

    People used to think that biology could not explain why we have a conscience. But the human moral sense can be studied like any other mental faculty, such as thirst, color vision, or fear of heights. Evolutionary psychology and cognitive neuroscience are showing how our moral intuitions work, why they evolved, and how they are implemented within the brain.

    This leaves morality itself—the benchmarks that allow us to criticize and improve our moral intuitions. It is true that science in the narrow sense cannot show what is right or wrong. But neither can appeals to God. It's not just that the traditional Judeo-Christian God endorsed genocide, slavery, rape, and the death penalty for trivial insults. It's that morality cannot be grounded in divine decree, not even in principle. Why did God deem some acts moral and others immoral? If he had no reason but divine whim, why should we take his commandments seriously? If he did have reasons, then why not appeal to those reasons directly?

    Those reasons are not to be found in empirical science, but they are to be found in the nature of rationality as it is exercised by any intelligent social species. The essence of morality is the interchangeability of perspectives: the fact that as soon as I appeal to you to treat me in a certain way (to help me when I am in need, or not to hurt me for no reason), I have to be willing to apply the same standards to how I treat you, if I want you to take me seriously. That is the only policy that is logically consistent and leaves both of us better off. And God plays no role in it.

    For all these reasons, it's no coincidence that Western democracies have experienced three sweeping trends during the past few centuries: barbaric practices (such as slavery, sadistic criminal punishment, and the mistreatment of children) have decreased significantly; scientific and scholarly understanding has increased exponentially; and belief in God has waned. Science, in the broadest sense, is making belief in God obsolete, and we are the better for it.
     

Thursday, March 27, 2008

  • What Barack Obama Could Not (and Should Not) Say

     
    By Sam Harris.  Taken from his page at The Huffington Post.
     
     
     
    Barack Obama delivered a truly brilliant and inspiring speech this week. There were a few things, however, that he did not and could not (and, indeed, should not) say:

    He did not say that the mess he is in has as much to do with religion as with racism--and, indeed, religion is the reason why our political discourse in this country is so scandalously stupid. As Christopher Hitchens observed in Slate months ago, one glance at the website of the Trinity United Church of Christ should have convinced anyone that Obama's connection to Reverend Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. would be a problem at some point in this campaign. Why couldn't Obama just cut his ties to his church and move on?

    Well, among other inexpediencies, this might have put his faith in Jesus in question. After all, Reverend Wright was the man who brought him to the "foot of the cross." Might the Senator from Illinois be unsure whether the Creator of the universe brought forth his only Son from the womb of a Galilean virgin, taught him the carpenter's trade, and then had him crucified for our benefit? Few suspicions could be more damaging in American politics today.

    The stultifying effect of religion is everywhere to be seen in the 2008 Presidential campaign. The faith of the candidates has been a constant concern in the Republican contest, of course--where John McCain, lacking the expected aura of born-again bamboozlement, has been struggling to entice some proper religious maniacs to his cause. He now finds himself in the compassionate embrace of Pastor John Hagee, a man who claims to know that a global war will soon precipitate the Rapture and the Second Coming of Jesus Christ (problem solved). Prior to McCain's ascendancy, we saw Governor Mitt Romney driven from the field by a Creationist yokel and his sectarian hordes. And this, despite the fact that the governor had been wearing consecrated Mormon underpants all the while, whose powers of protection are as yet unrecognized by Evangelicals.

    Like every candidate, Obama must appeal to millions of voters who believe that without religion, most of us would spend our days raping and killing our neighbors and stealing their pornography. Examples of well-behaved and comparatively atheistic societies like Sweden, Finland, Norway, and Denmark--which surpass us in terrestrial virtues like education, health, public generosity, per capita aid to the developing world, and low rates of violent crime and infant mortality--are of no interest to our electorate whatsoever. It is, of course, good to know that people like Reverend Wright occasionally do help the poor, feed the hungry, and care for the sick. But wouldn't it be better to do these things for reasons that are not manifestly delusional? Can we care for one another without believing that Jesus Christ rose from the dead and is now listening to our thoughts?

    Yes we can.

    Happily, Obama did a fine job of distancing himself from Reverend Wright's divisive views on racism in America, along with his fatuous "chickens come home to roost" assessment of our war against Islamic terrorism. But he did not (and should not) acknowledge that the worst parts of Reverend Wright's sermons, as with most sermons, are his appeals to the empty hopes and baseless fears of his parishioners--people who could surely find better ways of advancing their interests in this world, if only they could banish the fiction of a world to come.

    Obama did not say that religion's effect on our society, and on the black community especially, has been destructive--and where it has seemed constructive it has generally taken the place of better things. Religion unites, motivates, and consoles beleaguered people not with knowledge, but with superstition and false promises. Surely there is a better way to bring people together in the 21st century. The truth is, despite the toothsomeness of his campaign slogan, we are not yet the people we have been waiting for. And if we don't start talking sense to our children, they won't be the ones we are waiting for either.

    Obama was surely wise not to mention that Christianity was, without question, the great enabler of slavery in this country. The Confederate soldiers who eagerly laid down their lives at three times the rate of Union men, for the pleasure of keeping blacks in bondage and using them as farm equipment, did so with the conscious understanding that they were doing the Lord's work. After Reconstruction, religion united Southern whites in their racist hatred and the black community in its squalor--inuring men and women on both sides to injustice far more efficiently than it inspired them to overcome it.

    The problem of religious fatalism, ignorance, and false hope, while plain to see in most religious contexts, is now especially obvious in the black community. The popularity of "prosperity gospel" is perhaps the most galling example: where unctuous crooks like T.D. Jakes and Creflo Dollar persuade undereducated and underprivileged men and women to pray for wealth, while tithing what little wealth they have to their corrupt and swollen ministries. Men like Jakes and Dollar, whatever occasional good they may do, are unconscionable predators and curators of human ignorance. Is it too soon to say this in American politics? Yes it is.

    Despite all that he does not and cannot say, Obama's candidacy is genuinely thrilling: his heart is clearly in the right place; he is an order of magnitude more intelligent than the current occupant of the Oval Office; and he still stands a decent chance of becoming the next President of the United States. His election in November really would be a triumph of hope.

    But Obama's candidacy is also depressing, for it demonstrates that even a person of the greatest candor and eloquence must still claim to believe the unbelievable in order to have a political career in this country. We may be ready for the audacity of hope. Will we ever be ready for the audacity of reason?
     

Saturday, December 22, 2007

  • The War Prayer

     
    Originally written by     Mark Twain in the very early 1900's.  Taken from WikiSource.
     
     
     
    It was a time of great and exalting excitement. The country was up in arms, the war was on, in every breast burned the holy fire of patriotism; the drums were beating, the bands playing, the toy pistols popping, the bunched firecrackers hissing and spluttering; on every hand and far down the receding and fading spread of roofs and balconies a fluttering wilderness of flags flashed in the sun; daily the young volunteers marched down the wide avenue gay and fine in their new uniforms, the proud fathers and mothers and sisters and sweethearts cheering them with voices choked with happy emotion as they swung by; nightly the packed mass meetings listened, panting, to patriot oratory which stirred the deepest deeps of their hearts, and which they interrupted at briefest intervals with cyclones of applause, the tears running down their cheeks the while; in the churches the pastors preached devotion to flag and country, and invoked the God of Battles beseeching His aid in our good cause in outpourings of fervid eloquence which moved every listener. It was indeed a glad and gracious time, and the half dozen rash spirits that ventured to disapprove of the war and cast a doubt upon its righteousness straightway got such a stern and angry warning that for their personal safety's sake they quickly shrank out of sight and offended no more in that way.

    Sunday morning came -- next day the battalions would leave for the front; the church was filled; the volunteers were there, their young faces alight with martial dreams -- visions of the stern advance, the gathering momentum, the rushing charge, the flashing sabers, the flight of the foe, the tumult, the enveloping smoke, the fierce pursuit, the surrender! Then home from the war, bronzed heroes, welcomed, adored, submerged in golden seas of glory! With the volunteers sat their dear ones, proud, happy, and envied by the neighbors and friends who had no sons and brothers to send forth to the field of honor, there to win for the flag, or, failing, die the noblest of noble deaths. The service proceeded; a war chapter from the Old Testament was read; the first prayer was said; it was followed by an organ burst that shook the building, and with one impulse the house rose, with glowing eyes and beating hearts, and poured out that tremendous invocation:

    "God the all-terrible! Thou who ordainest! Thunder thy clarion and lightning thy sword!"

    Then came the "long" prayer. None could remember the like of it for passionate pleading and moving and beautiful language. The burden of its supplication was, that an ever-merciful and benignant Father of us all would watch over our noble young soldiers, and aid, comfort, and encourage them in their patriotic work; bless them, shield them in the day of battle and the hour of peril, bear them in His mighty hand, make them strong and confident, invincible in the bloody onset; help them to crush the foe, grant to them and to their flag and country imperishable honor and glory...

    An aged stranger entered and moved with slow and noiseless step up the main aisle, his eyes fixed upon the minister, his long body clothed in a robe that reached to his feet, his head bare, his white hair descending in a frothy cataract to his shoulders, his seamy face unnaturally pale, pale even to ghastliness. With all eyes following him and wondering, he made his silent way; without pausing, he ascended to the preacher's side and stood there waiting. With shut lids the preacher, unconscious of his presence, continued with his moving prayer, and at last finished it with the words, uttered in fervent appeal, "Bless our arms, grant us the victory, O Lord our God, Father and Protector of our land and flag!"

    The stranger touched his arm, motioned him to step aside -- which the startled minister did -- and took his place. During some moments he surveyed the spellbound audience with solemn eyes, in which burned an uncanny light; then in a deep voice he said:

    "I come from the Throne -- bearing a message from Almighty God!" The words smote the house with a shock; if the stranger perceived it he gave no attention. "He has heard the prayer of His servant your shepherd, and will grant it if such shall be your desire after I, His messenger, shall have explained to you its import -- that is to say, its full import. For it is like unto many of the prayers of men, in that it asks for more than he who utters it is aware of -- except he pause and think.

    "God's servant and yours has prayed his prayer. Has he paused and taken thought? Is it one prayer? No, it is two -- one uttered, the other not. Both have reached the ear of Him Who heareth all supplications, the spoken and the unspoken. Ponder this -- keep it in mind. If you would beseech a blessing upon yourself, beware! lest without intent you invoke a curse upon a neighbor at the same time. If you pray for the blessing of rain upon your crop which needs it, by that act you are possibly praying for a curse upon some neighbor's crop which may not need rain and can be injured by it.

    "You have heard your servant's prayer -- the uttered part of it. I am commissioned of God to put into words the other part of it -- that part which the pastor -- and also you in your hearts -- fervently prayed silently. And ignorantly and unthinkingly? God grant that it was so! You heard these words: 'Grant us the victory, O Lord our God!' That is sufficient. the whole of the uttered prayer is compact into those pregnant words. Elaborations were not necessary. When you have prayed for victory you have prayed for many unmentioned results which follow victory -- must follow it, cannot help but follow it. Upon the listening spirit of God fell also the unspoken part of the prayer. He commandeth me to put it into words. Listen!

    "O Lord our Father, our young patriots, idols of our hearts, go forth to battle -- be Thou near them! With them -- in spirit -- we also go forth from the sweet peace of our beloved firesides to smite the foe. O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames of summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring Thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it -- for our sakes who adore Thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimage, make heavy their steps, water their way with their tears, stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet! We ask it, in the spirit of love, of Him Who is the Source of Love, and Who is the ever-faithful refuge and friend of all that are sore beset and seek His aid with humble and contrite hearts. Amen.

    (After a pause.) "Ye have prayed it; if ye still desire it, speak! The messenger of the Most High waits!"

    It was believed afterward that the man was a lunatic, because there was no sense in what he said.
     

Monday, November 12, 2007

  • Religious Life and Critical Thought

     
    Below are excerpts from a slightly longer article titled "Do Religious Life and Critical Thought Need Each Other? A Reply to William Reinsmith."  It was written by Richard Carrier in 1996 and originally printed in Inquiry: Critical Thinking Across the Disciplines, published by the IfCT.
     


    In simplistic terms for the sake of example, the core thesis of the Buddhist religion is the belief that all is suffering, our immaterial souls are trapped forever in an illusion, and the only way to escape the illusion of suffering is through a particular path to enlightenment, which varies with each sect of Buddhism, but which usually involves not just meditation but adherence to various behaviors and attitudes (largely of a moral nature). In comparison, the core thesis of the Christian religion is the belief that we all have immortal souls which are damned by the sin of Adam and we will be condemned not merely to misery and sin in this world, but to an eternity of it in an afterlife, and the only way to escape this damnation is through believing that Jesus was the son of God and washed away our sin by dying on the cross. Beyond that, Christian sects vary with respect to the exact entry requirements for heaven (including specific moral standards which must be lived up to) but they all tend to agree that true and heartfelt belief in this central thesis will not only lead to a life of happiness and goodness in this world, but to an eternity of it in some kind of afterlife.

    To deny either of these claims is to deny the whole validity of these respective religions. Indeed, even to suggest that these claims are irrelevant or of merely secondary importance is to deny the whole validity of these religions, since everything they teach only makes sense in reference to these ultimate claims about the true nature of human existence. To the extent that anything they teach does make sense without these claims, it can already be found adequately defended by secular rather than religious thought, which disagreeably renders all religions as superfluous and unnecessary. This is the cause of all real controversy between critical thought and religion.

    All critical thought is by nature adversarial. A "positive" role belongs instead to creative thought. While the role of creative thought is to create ideas and possibilities, the role of critical thought is to debunk them, and it is only by these two processes working together that we arrive at knowledge and truth. Critical thought can be viewed in much the same way as natural selection: it does in a sense "create" by eliminating the "weak" and leaving the "strong". Thus, critical thought's role as a debunking device is essential and indispensable, and it must play a part in every act of knowing. But it does not eliminate ideas and possibilities until none are left. Nihilism is as irrational as blind faith, and as self limiting as naivety. Rather, critical thought eliminates until all that remains is the consistent, the probable, the tenable, the reliable, the useful--in other words, knowledge.

    ...[Critical] thought is perpetually at odds with everything, even ordinary and mundane thoughts and ideas, and critical thinkers not only accept this, but cherish the fact. This is not to say that we disbelieve everything; rather, it is to say that any honest critical thinker occasionally attacks everything with critical thought, even what they take for granted or believe to be certain or irrefutable. Needless to say, much of what we believe survives the assaults of critical thought by virtue of its being most probably true, but we nevertheless sick the dogs of critical thought upon even these beliefs, and rightly consider it a virtue to do so. We never know when we might uncover a mistake or an unwarranted assumption, or when new information may change what we now think to be true. But critical thinkers know that this is the only way to learn.

    ...[What] makes something uniquely "religious" is human religious or spiritual experience, not the institutions of religion (ideological or physical). This is because the most important institutions of religion are based on spiritual experiences, both in the sense of having originated with them and in the sense of being proven or justified by them. In contrast, those institutions which do not have any similar and certain foundations in religious experience belong more properly in the cultural or social domain, and are called "religious" merely because they are associated with those aspects which are genuinely religious in nature and origin.

    However, religious experience is something most if not all of us can agree is a fact: it unquestionably exists, regardless of whether we agree with the conclusions people draw from it. ...Yet this is what religion is ultimately all about: the conclusions people draw from their religious experiences. While it is based on religious experience, only when certain conclusions are arrived at and acted upon does a religion exist - and only then does critical thought really have something to question. ...What academics most frequently and ardently deny are the conclusions people draw from their spiritual experiences, and any examination of religious debates will reveal this fact. Few people of note question the existence of spiritual experiences...  ...[And what allows us to identify] critical thought as "adversarial" to religion is the application of critical thought to the conclusions drawn from spiritual experience, such as the core tenets of Buddhism and Christianity summarized above, and this is where the real problem lies.

    (Thus many may be surprised to read the following words of Carl Sagan: "Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality. When we recognize our place in an immensity of light years and in the passage of ages, when we grasp the intricacy, beauty, and subtlety of life, then that soaring feeling, that sense of elation and humility combined, is surely spiritual" (from his article "Does Truth Matter?" printed in Skeptical Inquirer). This is not an uncommon type of sentiment among academics, revealing that spirituality is not exclusive to what we normally, and incorrectly, regard as "religious" life, nor does the term always entail something supernatural.)

    This is where critical thought must begin in this domain: we must recognize that experiences which we classify as spiritual or religious exist as a subset of ordinary psychological experiences, and not as something separate and different from them. This is not because we are obliged to assume that there is nothing supernatural or special which corresponds to spiritual experiences. Rather, it is because before we can make any such conclusion at all we are obliged to see that there is no inherent way to distinguish ordinary psychological events from spiritual events. Because they originate within the same domain (i.e. our mental life), the possibility always remains that they are merely different aspects of the same thing, and thus may not correspond to anything outside of our own, private mental existence. In particular, spiritual experiences may represent glimpses of ourselves more than of anything beyond us or common to others, and this and other possibilities must be eliminated before we can assume it is ever the reverse.

    [An example of the important contrast between investigating the worth or goal of a claim, and whether the claim is actually true in the first place,] might be explaining how critical thought can be used to find eternal truths in biblical scripture, while ignoring the more important question as to whether what one finds through this process is actually true (or eternal), or even whether the bible is the proper place to be looking for such things.

    Walpola Rahula is cited as first stating that meditation can cleanse the mind of "lustful desires, hatred, ill will, worries and restlessness." This is a straightforward empirical claim, open to scientific investigation. In fact, I happen to believe this claim is well supported by the evidence, and therefore most likely true (I doubt many would contest it). This is also true for the rest of Rahula's claims with the exception of the last two: that through meditation one can obtain "the highest wisdom which sees the nature of things as they are, and realizes the Ultimate Truth." First, I am extremely skeptical that meditation of this kind can produce any special faculty of perception with regard to "things" other than through reexamining our otherwise ordinary perceptions of them. At the very least, it begs the question as to how such a claim is capable of being tested (and thus known to be true). Second, the very concept of "Ultimate Truth" begs a definition. It is not clear how we could know that meditation would lead to more certain truth than other forms of cognition, or what exactly would make that truth "Ultimate."

    A solution to these problems can be found in the understanding of spiritual experience as a psychological phenomenon. If seeing "the nature of things as they are" is merely seeing the nature of our perceptions as they are (where "perceptions" includes emotions, memories, and thoughts, about both things and ourselves), then this becomes a testable claim, and it would entail no contradiction to classify this as a purely psychological phenomenon. Likewise, if seeing the "Ultimate Truth" means nothing more than seeing the truth about our own perceptions of ourselves (and of other things), then this, too, appears less "mystical" in nature and can safely be folded under the purview of psychology. If, however, there is anything more implied in either of these claims, they must be defined in such a way that they can be tested before they can have any intelligible meaning, and then they must actually be tested before we can regard them as true or false. [It can be difficult to see how this might be done for] more controversial, and arguably more important, religious claims (such as the core tenets of Buddhism and Christianity summarized above). Nevertheless....[in the above example] what is ordinarily given special status as a "spiritual" rather than an ordinarily psychological experience can be shown to be psychological and not peculiarly spiritual at all--unless we wish to define "spiritual experience" as a particular kind of psychological experience, which is what I propose.

    Religious claims often seem to be believed in more for their personal worth in [supplying an "ultimate meaning for life," rather] than for their logical or empirical merit.  ....[The] one thing which appears definitive of a spiritual experience is whether it is interpreted or can be interpreted in such a way as to be relevant in some sense to an "ultimate meaning to life." This means that the test for a truly spiritual belief is whether it accomplishes the goal of answering our need for meaning (and how well it does so), and this matters more than whether that belief is consistent, proven, or true

    This would explain [why some observe that people who hold firm religious beliefs are not only resistant to critique, but often impervious to it.] This kind of behavior, which seems inexplicably irrational, is revealed to be quite explicable (though perhaps still irrational) when we recognize that the religiously devout are often interested in things more important to them than the truth (such as an ultimate meaning to life). Since the personal, emotional benefits provided by spiritual beliefs do not depend on those beliefs being true, their truth becomes (in practice) irrelevant. Thus, while Buddhism and Christianity each provide a supernatural explanation for our ills, and an equally supernatural solution, within all this lies a purely practical belief system which not only provides an ultimate meaning to life, but attempts to produce a greater balance of peace and happiness by providing both a moral standard and a reason to live up to it. But all of these benefits are gained merely by the claims being believed, and not by their actually being true, which is quite unlike scientific claims or technological inventions, where benefits are usually gained only when we believe in theories which are true (and definite hazards are often created by believing in false ones). I am not even arguing here that all religious claims are false. Everything I have said so far would apply to all religions regardless of whether the claims of any religion were true or false.

    [Recognizing that religion seems founded on the need for "ultimate meaning,"] it becomes more obvious how people can become so emotionally attached to their religion, and why criticizing their religion can so quickly be regarded as a personal or blasphemous attack, or be pathologically ignored or avoided altogether.

    ([It might be implied that the "need for ultimate meaning in life" is the same thing as "the longing for a connection to a transcendent principle,"] but no logical case can be made for this. Nor do I think it would be proper to claim that this is a second foundation point for religion, since it appears to be offered merely as a means to the end of finding ultimate meaning, and it is inherently ambiguous and logically troublesome--just to begin with, it is not clear what a "transcendent principle" is or how anyone can be connected with it (or even know anything about it) if it is in fact "transcendent".)

    This must impress upon us the need to remember the proper role of critical thought: not to merely refute, but to refute with the end in mind of leaving exposed the most consistent, probable, tenable, reliable, or useful. Its role is to eliminate, but to eliminate falsehood and ambiguity in order to arrive at the truth. Thus, in the domain of religion, the role of critical thought is not to destroy all meaning, but to find true meaning by eliminating falsehood and nonsense. It may be tempting to assume that, since having any meaning to life appears more important than whether it is a valid one, we should not bother applying critical thought to this question at all. However, I argue that this is unwise. Not only may having a false source of meaning lead us to a life of conflict and unhappiness (from anger, disappointment, or fear), but it may leave us otherwise happy and at peace while bringing conflict and unhappiness to others (examples range from Islamic suicide bombers to the conservative Christian treatment of homosexuals). Even more importantly, however, it is hazardous to get into the habit of not genuinely caring whether we are wrong.

    Thus, religious life needs critical thought--because it is unwise to solve our problems with false beliefs even when there appears to be no direct harm in doing so; and critical thought needs religion--because religion consists of beliefs which provide us with an indispensable meaning to life (which, I should add, also serves as a meaning for our values, without which we could not rightly be called human). However, we must remember that "religion" is here used in a sense which can actually include "atheistic" belief systems such as Secular Humanism, Marxism, or Objectivism, since an ultimate meaning to life can conceivably be found without reference to anything supernatural, and actually has been by numerous groups of people.

    (I have ignored one aspect of spiritual experience which may also be substantially important. The actual feelings such experiences produce may contribute a useful and necessary quality to human life. Indeed, I believe they do. However, this benefit can actually be gained solely from the experiences, without any conclusions of an objective nature being drawn from them...)

    Determining whether the supernatural claims of the various religions are true is identical to determining whether a scientific theory is true, except perhaps in the difficulty or impossibility of testing them. However, since these claims are regarded as indispensable because they provide meaning to life, few will even regard them as theories capable of refutation. On the other hand, once we know that meaning can be found without such claims, we no longer need them, and thus can criticize them with an open mind.

    There is a second conclusion to be drawn... [Because] the definition of objective reality is that which is at least in principle verifiable by all observers, "mystical states" (i.e. spiritual experiences) provide no knowledge of objective reality (because their observations are not independently verifiable). Thus, even if they happen to contain objective truths, no means exist to identify which aspects of these experiences, if any, actually do contain objective truths. Thus, they are largely useless as a means of acquiring knowledge about the world all observers share in common.

    (Even those aspects of spiritual experience which may be found in common with all observers do not necessarily entail special perception of objective truths, since they can be produced by factors shared by human minds and bodies and thus still be purely internal. Likewise, although theories about objective reality can arise from spiritual experience, this is true of all states of consciousness, and such theories are no different than any others: they must still be tested logically and empirically before they can be assigned any knowledge value.)

    This should first caution us against using phrases like "absolutely authoritative" which may lead us to think we can deny things like our own mortality or the existence of the dog across the street, based on spiritual experiences alone. On the other hand, it should alert us to pay attention to the value of spiritual experiences as a window into ourselves. If we get carried away with unjustified assumptions about the "objective truth" of our most subjective experiences, we may totally ignore their value in examining and understanding ourselves and our perceptions of the world. Again we can see how religious life needs critical thought--to tell us what we may justifiably regard as objective knowledge of a shared world; and critical thought needs religious life--to provide us with a direct and unique means of examining ourselves and our perceptions of the world.


    Richard Carrier is a prolific writer, and like most everybody else, maintains his own blog.
     

Thursday, October 25, 2007

  • What the Republican Revolution has wrought

     
    It's the I Got Mine You Get Your Own party, marching under a Christian banner.
    By Garrison Keillor.  Published on October 24, 2007.



    There is a natural division of labor in politics: The Republicans fuss about the sanctity of marriage and getting God back in the schools and the Democrats about healthcare and the $8 billion that vanished in Iraq, and so far the Republicans are doing a better job. God is in the schools, the same as He is in Nebraska or even in Dallas, and marriage looks to be doing OK, since the White House is not in charge of it. Meanwhile, the Pentagon and the Justice Department are investigating fraud in Iraq, one grain of sand at a time, and we are likely to have answers in a decade or two.


    I suppose that $8 billion is not so much considering that the war will cost $200 billion this year alone, and yet one is curious to know why the G-men can't find out where it went, at a time when the Current Occupant is so very concerned about keeping medical benefits away from undeserving children. Hundreds of millions paid to the gunslingers of Blackwater, but an American family with a seriously ill child has to tap-dance backward through a gantlet of government forms to prove they really, really, really are desperate.

    As the old adage says, the little thieves get hung and the big thieves get richer and richer. When it comes to larceny, it pays to be ambitious.

    If you were looking for a political platform, God and marriage would be a good bet, sort of like promising to make the sun rise. A part-time job with time left over to supervise the moon and the stars. It is so much more satisfying than the dreary business of investigating what happened to those suitcases full of bricks of $100 bills in Iraq during the Bremer years and tracking down the good Republicans who served over there -- the young folks with no prior experience in accounting or finance who were put in charge of the stock exchange and the national budget.

    I heard a man on the radio the other day who was baying about Sen. Clinton's healthcare plan and at one point, in shock and dismay, he said, "This is taking away from those who have and giving to those who do not -- in other words, socialism." He sounded truly offended. And this is what the Republican Revolution has brought us to: No longer is there a consensus on taxation according to ability to pay. No longer agreement that it is in the self-interest of the well-off to promote a stable society by securing the safety net. It's the I Got Mine You Get Your Own party, marching under a Christian banner. But Republicans are starting to realize that if you claim to govern by divine inspiration, the voters will hold you to a higher standard. You can't throw $8 billion down a rathole and expect us all to forget about this.

    Don't get me wrong. Marriage is a good thing. But as for the sanctity of it, you shouldn't look too closely. Every marriage has its profane moments, especially when children get mixed up in it, which so often happens.

    There is yelling and weeping involved and door slamming and a great deal of bad poetry ("My life is a vortex of darkness because/ You never loved me,/ No, I was only/ An object of your wrath,/ Bad daddy") and all due to the horrors of parenting.

    The childless couples I know seem smooth and easy together, working their old comedy routines, and the fruitful couples seem distracted as if expecting a phone call from the county jail. Childless couples don't go through this. They don't have to yell upstairs and say, "If I don't see you doing your homework in five minutes, I am going to yell and shriek and do such irrational things that they will put me into residential treatment and you will have to fix your own meals and do your own laundry."

    The child has created a shrine to herself on Facebook and has a list of a thousand friends but not much is actually taking place underneath that hairdo. Just like with the Current Occupant, who represents them very well. He is a relaxed, easygoing, self-accepting guy whose old retainers love him for his self-effacing modesty, a wonderful trait, but when you are incompetent, it is not so wonderful as, say, a little more intelligence might be. He is heading for the short bus of history where Earl Butz and Spiro Agnew ride. Where are his parents? Why don't they yell at him?
     

Monday, October 08, 2007

  • Religion as a Black Market for Irrationality

     
    By Sam Harris.  From his page on The Washington Post.



    Christopher Hitchens has written, with characteristic candor and eloquence, that "[r]eligion is violent, irrational, intolerant, allied to racism and tribalism and bigotry, invested in ignorance and hostile to free inquiry, contemptuous of women and coercive toward children." This ten-fold indictment needs little support from me, as evidence of its truth has been crashing down upon us for centuries. However, I’ve been asked to provide such superfluities by the editors of this page. There is nothing like racing to the aid of a man who needs none.

    Each of my essays for On Faith has highlighted one or another facet of Hitchens’ jewel of blasphemy. I recently argued that religion is “contemptuous of women” at some length. Here, I offer further thoughts on how religion is “irrational” and “invested in ignorance”.

    ***

    Reason is a compulsion, not a choice. Just as one cannot intentionally startle oneself, one cannot knowingly believe a proposition on bad evidence. If you doubt this, imagine hearing the following account of a failed New Year’s resolution:

    “This year, I vowed to be more rational, but by the end of January, I found that I had fallen back into my old ways, believing things for bad reasons. Currently, I believe that smoking is harmless, that my dead brother will return to life in the near future, and that I am destined to marry Angelina Jolie, just because these beliefs make me feel good and give my life meaning.”

    This is not how our minds work. To believe a proposition, we must also believe that we believe it because it is true. While lapses in rationality can often be detected in retrospect, they always occur in the dark, outside of consciousness. In every present moment, a belief entails the concurrent conviction that we are not just fooling ourselves.

    This constraint upon our thinking has always been a problem for religion. Being stocked stem to stern with incredible ideas, the world’s religions have had to find some way to circumvent reason, without repudiating it. The recommended maneuver is generally called “faith,” and it actually appears to work. Faith enables a person to fool himself into thinking that he is maintaining his standards of reasonableness, while forsaking them. There is a powerful incentive to not notice that one is engaged in this subterfuge, of course, because to notice it is to fail at it. As is well known, such cognitive gymnastics can be greatly facilitated by the presence of others, similarly engaged. Sometimes, it takes a village to lie to oneself.

    In support of this noble enterprise, every religion has created a black market for irrationality, where people of like minds can trade transparently bad reasons in support of their religious beliefs, without the threat of criticism. You, too, can enter this economy of false knowledge and self-deception. The following method has worked for billions, and it will work for you:

    How to Believe in God
    Six Easy Steps

    1. First, you must want to believe in God.
    2. Next, understand that believing in God in the absence of evidence is especially noble.
    3. Then, realize that the human ability to believe in God in the absence of evidence might itself constitute evidence for the existence of God.
    4. Now consider any need for further evidence (both in yourself and in others) to be a form of temptation, spiritually unhealthy, or a corruption of the intellect.
    5. Refer to steps 2-4 as acts of “faith.”
    6. Return to 2.

    As should be clear, this is a kind of perpetual motion machine of wishful thinking—and it leads, of necessity, to reduced self-awareness and diminished contact with reality. But it is reputed to have many benefits, and once you get it up and running you will be in fine company. In fact, from the looks of it, you will never be lonely again.

    Enjoy!


    “On Faith” panelist Sam Harris is the author of the best-selling books Letter to a Christian Nation (2006) and The End of Faith (2005), which won the 2005 PEN Award for Nonfiction. Harris is a graduate in philosophy from Stanford University, has studied both Eastern and Western religious traditions, and is now completing a doctorate in neuroscience.
     

Friday, August 17, 2007

  • Freedom of Thought and the Forces Against It

    By J. B. Bury.  From the the introductory chapter of A History of Freedom of Thought, originally published in 1914.  Taken from Project Gutenberg.
     
     
     
    It is a common saying that thought is free.  A man can never be hindered from thinking whatever he chooses so long as he conceals what he thinks.  The working of his mind is limited only by the bounds of his experience and the power of his imagination.  But this natural liberty of private thinking is of little value.  It is unsatisfactory and even painful to the thinker himself, if he is not permitted to communicate his thoughts to others, and it is obviously of no value to his neighbours.  Moreover it is extremely difficult to hide thoughts that have any power over the mind.  If a man’s thinking leads him to call in question ideas and customs which regulate the behaviour of those about him, to reject beliefs which they hold, to see better ways of life than those they follow, it is almost impossible for him, if he is convinced of the truth of his own reasoning, not to betray by silence, chance words, or general attitude that he is different from them and does not share their opinions.  Some have preferred, like Socrates, some would prefer to-day, to face death rather than conceal their thoughts.  Thus freedom of thought, in any valuable sense, includes freedom of speech.

    At present, in the most civilized countries, freedom of speech is taken as a matter of course and seems a perfectly simple thing.  We are so accustomed to it that we look on it as a natural right.  But this right has been acquired only in quite recent times, and the way to its attainment has lain through lakes of blood.  It has taken centuries to persuade the most enlightened peoples that liberty to publish one’s opinions and to discuss all questions is a good and not a bad thing.  Human societies (there are some brilliant exceptions) have been generally opposed to freedom of thought, or, in other words, to new ideas, and it is easy to see why.

    The average brain is naturally lazy and tends to take the line of least resistance.  The mental world of the ordinary man consists of beliefs which he has accepted without questioning and to which he is firmly attached; he is instinctively hostile to anything which would upset the established order of this familiar world.  A new idea, inconsistent with some of the beliefs which he holds, means the necessity of rearranging his mind; and this process is laborious, requiring a painful expenditure of brain-energy.  To him and his fellows, who form the vast majority, new ideas, and opinions which cast doubt on established beliefs and institutions, seem evil because they are disagreeable.

    The repugnance due to mere mental laziness is increased by a positive feeling of fear.  The conservative instinct hardens into the conservative doctrine that the foundations of society are endangered by any alterations in the structure.  It is only recently that men have been abandoning the belief that the welfare of a state depends on rigid stability and on the preservation of its traditions and institutions unchanged.  Wherever that belief prevails, novel opinions are felt to be dangerous as well as annoying, and any one who asks inconvenient questions about the why and the wherefore of accepted principles is considered a pestilent person.

    The conservative instinct, and the conservative doctrine which is its consequence, are strengthened by superstition.  If the social structure, including the whole body of customs and opinions, is associated intimately with religious belief and is supposed to be under divine patronage, criticism of the social order savours of impiety, while criticism of the religious belief is a direct challenge to the wrath of supernatural powers.

    The psychological motives which produce a conservative spirit hostile to new ideas are reinforced by the active opposition of certain powerful sections of the community, such as a class, a caste, or a priesthood, whose interests are bound up with the maintenance of the established order and the ideas on which it rests.

    Let us suppose, for instance, that a people believes that solar eclipses are signs employed by their Deity for the special purpose of communicating useful information to them, and that a clever man discovers the true cause of eclipses.  His compatriots in the first place dislike his discovery because they find it very difficult to reconcile with their other ideas; in the second place, it disturbs them, because it upsets an arrangement which they consider highly advantageous to their community; finally, it frightens them, as an offence to their Divinity.  The priests, one of whose functions is to interpret the divine signs, are alarmed and enraged at a doctrine which menaces their power.

    In prehistoric days, these motives, operating strongly, must have made change slow in communities which progressed, and hindered some communities from progressing at all.  But they have continued to operate more or less throughout history, obstructing knowledge and progress.  We can observe them at work to-day even in the most advanced societies, where they have no longer the power to arrest development or repress the publication of revolutionary opinions.  We still meet people who consider a new idea an annoyance and probably a danger.  Of those to whom socialism is repugnant, how many are there who have never examined the arguments for and against it, but turn away in disgust simply because the notion disturbs their mental universe and implies a drastic criticism on the order of things to which they are accustomed?  And how many are there who would refuse to consider any proposals for altering our imperfect matrimonial institutions, because such an idea offends a mass of prejudice associated with religious sanctions?  They may be right or not, but if they are, it is not their fault.  They are actuated by the same motives which were a bar to progress in primitive societies.  The existence of people of this mentality, reared in an atmosphere of freedom, side by side with others who are always looking out for new ideas and regretting that there are not more about, enables us to realize how, when public opinion was formed by the views of such men, thought was fettered and the impediments to knowledge enormous.

    Although the liberty to publish one’s opinions on any subject without regard to authority or the prejudices of one’s neighbours is now a well-established principle, I imagine that only the minority of those who would be ready to fight to the death rather than surrender it could defend it on rational grounds.  We are apt to take for granted that freedom of speech is a natural and inalienable birthright of man, and perhaps to think that this is a sufficient answer to all that can be said on the other side.  But it is difficult to see how such a right can be established.

    If a man has any "natural rights," the right to preserve his life and the right to reproduce his kind are certainly such.  Yet human societies impose upon their members restrictions in the exercise of both these rights.  A starving man is prohibited from taking food which belongs to somebody else.  Promiscuous reproduction is restricted by various laws or customs.  It is admitted that society is justified in restricting these elementary rights, because without such restrictions an ordered society could not exist.  If then we concede that the expression of opinion is a right of the same kind, it is impossible to contend that on this ground it can claim immunity from interference or that society acts unjustly in regulating it.  But the concession is too large.  For whereas in the other cases the limitations affect the conduct of every one, restrictions on freedom of opinion affect only the comparatively small number who have any opinions, revolutionary or unconventional, to express.  The truth is that no valid argument can be founded on the conception of natural rights, because it involves an untenable theory of the relations between society and its members.

    On the other hand, those who have the responsibility of governing a society can argue that it is as incumbent on them to prohibit the circulation of pernicious opinions as to prohibit any anti-social actions.  They can argue that a man may do far more harm by propagating anti-social doctrines than by stealing his neighbour’s horse or making love to his neighbour’s wife.  They are responsible for the welfare of the State, and if they are convinced that an opinion is dangerous, by menacing the political, religious, or moral assumptions on which the society is based, it is their duty to protect society against it, as against any other danger.

    The true answer to this argument for limiting freedom of thought will appear in due course.  It was far from obvious.  A long time was needed to arrive at the conclusion that coercion of opinion is a mistake, and only a part of the world is yet convinced.  That conclusion, so far as I can judge, is the most important ever reached by men.  It was the issue of a continuous struggle between authority and reason—the subject of this volume.  The word authority requires some comment.

    If you ask somebody how he knows something, he may say, "I have it on good authority," or, "I read it in a book," or, "It is a matter of common knowledge," or, "I learned it at school."  Any of these replies means that he has accepted information from others, trusting in their knowledge, without verifying their statements or thinking the matter out for himself.  And the greater part of most men’s knowledge and beliefs is of this kind, taken without verification from their parents, teachers, acquaintances, books, newspapers.  When an English boy learns French, he takes the conjugations and the meanings of the words on the authority of his teacher or his grammar.  The fact that in a certain place, marked on the map, there is a populous city called Calcutta, is for mostpeople a fact accepted on authority.  So is the existence of Napoleon or Julius Caesar.  Familiar astronomical facts are known only in the same way, except by those who have studied astronomy.  It is obvious that every one’s knowledge would be very limited indeed, if we were not justified in accepting facts on the authority of others.

    But we are justified only under one condition.  The facts which we can safely accept must be capable of demonstration or verification.  The examples I have given belong to this class.  The boy can verify when he goes to France or is able to read a French book that the facts which he took on authority are true.  I am confronted every day with evidence which proves to me that, if I took the trouble, I could verify the existence of Calcutta for myself.  I cannot convince myself in this way of the existence of Napoleon, but if I have doubts about it, a simple process of reasoning shows me that there are hosts of facts which are incompatible with his non-existence.  I have no doubt that the earth is some 93 millions of miles distant from the sun, because all astronomers agree that it has been demonstrated, and their agreement is only explicable on the supposition that this has been demonstrated and that, if I took the trouble to work out the calculation, I should reach the same result.

    But all our mental furniture is not of this kind.  The thoughts of the average man consist not only of facts open to verification, but also of many beliefs and opinions which he has accepted on authority and cannot verify or prove.  Belief in the Trinity depends on the authority of the Church and is clearly of a different order from belief in the existence of Calcutta.  We cannot go behind the authority and verify or prove it.  If we accept it, we do so because we have such implicit faith in the authority that we credit its assertions though incapable of proof.

    The distinction may seem so obvious as to be hardly worth making.  But it is important to be quite clear about it.  The primitive man who had learned from his elders that there were bears in the hills and likewise evil spirits, soon verified the former statement by seeing a bear, but if he did not happen to meet an evil spirit, it did not occur to him, unless he was a prodigy, that there was a distinction between the two statements; he would rather have argued, if he argued at all, that as his tribesmen were right about the bears they were sure to be right also about the spirits.  In the Middle Ages a man who believed on authority that there is a city called Constantinople and that comets are portents signifying divine wrath, would not distinguish the nature of the evidence in the two cases.  You may still sometimes hear arguments amounting to this: since I believe in Calcutta on authority, am I not entitled to believe in the Devil on authority?

    Now people at all times have been commanded or expected or invited to accept on authority alone—the authority, for instance, of public opinion, or a Church, or a sacred book—doctrines which are not proved or are not capable of proof.  Most beliefs about nature and man, which were not founded on scientific observation, have served directly or indirectly religious and social interests, and hence they have been protected by force against the criticisms of persons who have the inconvenient habit of using their reason.  Nobody minds if his neighbour disbelieves a demonstrable fact.  If a sceptic denies that Napoleon existed, or that water is composed of oxygen and hydrogen, he causes amusement or ridicule.  But if he denies doctrines which cannot be demonstrated, such as the existence of a personal God or the immortality of the soul, he incurs serious disapprobation and at one time he might have been put to death.  Our mediaeval friend would have only been called a fool if he doubted the existence of Constantinople, but if he had questioned the significance of comets he might have got into trouble.  It is possible that if he had been so mad as to deny the existence of Jerusalem he would not have escaped with ridicule, for Jerusalem is mentioned in the Bible.

    In the Middle Ages a large field was covered by beliefs which authority claimed to impose as true, and reason was warned off the ground.  But reason cannot recognize arbitrary prohibitions or barriers, without being untrue to herself.  The universe of experience is her province, and as its parts are all linked together and interdependent, it is impossible for her to recognize any territory on which she may not tread, or to surrender any of her rights to an authority whose credentials she has not examined and approved.

    The uncompromising assertion by reason of her absolute rights throughout the whole domain of thought is termed rationalism, and the slight stigma which is still attached to the word reflects the bitterness of the struggle between reason and the forces arrayed against her.  The term is limited to the field of theology, because it was in that field that the self-assertion of reason was most violently and pertinaciously opposed.  In the same way free thought, the refusal of thought to be controlled by any authority but its own, has a definitely theological reference.  Throughout the conflict, authority has had great advantages.  At any time the people who really care about reason have been a small minority, and probably will be so for a long time to come.  Reason’s only weapon has been argument.  Authority has employed physical and moral violence, legal coercion and social displeasure.  Sometimes she has attempted to use the sword of her adversary, thereby wounding herself.  Indeed the weakest point in the strategical position of authority was that her champions, being human, could not help making use of reasoning processes and the result was that they were divided among themselves.  This gave reason her chance.  Operating, as it were, in the enemy’s camp and professedly in the enemy’s cause, she was preparing her own victory.

    It may be objected that there is a legitimate domain for authority, consisting of doctrines which lie outside human experience and therefore cannot be proved or verified, but at the same time cannot be disproved.  Of course, any number of propositions can be invented which cannot be disproved, and it is open to any one who possesses exuberant faith to believe them; but no one will maintain that they all deserve credence so long as their falsehood is not demonstrated.  And if only some deserve credence, who, except reason, is to decide which?  If the reply is, Authority, we are confronted by the difficulty that many beliefs backed by authority have been finally disproved and are universally abandoned.  Yet some people speak as if we were not justified in rejecting a theological doctrine unless we can prove it false.  But the burden of proof does not lie upon the rejecter.  I remember a conversation in which, when some disrespectful remark was made about hell, a loyal friend of that establishment said triumphantly, "But, absurd as it may seem, you cannot disprove it."  If you were told that in a certain planet revolving round Sirius there is a race of donkeys who talk the English language and spend their time in discussing eugenics, you could not disprove the statement, but would it, on that account, have any claim to be believed?  Some minds would be prepared to accept it, if it were reiterated often enough, through the potent force of suggestion.  This force, exercised largely by emphatic repetition (the theoretical basis, as has been observed, of the modern practice of advertising), has played a great part in establishing authoritative opinions and propagating religious creeds.  Reason fortunately is able to avail herself of the same help.
     

Wednesday, August 01, 2007

  • The Validity of Belief in a Personal God

    By C. D. Broad.  Originally published in the Hibbert Journal in 1925.  Reprinted in C. D. Broad, Religion, Philosophy and Psychical Research in 1953.  Transcribed into hypertext by Andrew Chrucky in August of 1998.  Taken from Digital Text International.



        In order to discuss the question whether there is any ground for believing in the existence of a personal God it is necessary to begin by defining our terms. For the word 'personal' and the word 'God' are both highly ambiguous. I will begin with the word 'personal'.

        The natural interpretation of the phrase 'a personal God' would be 'a God who is a person'. But, if this were the only meaning that could be attached to the phrase, we should have to say that orthodox Christians deny the existence of a personal God. For the Christian God is the Trinity; and the Trinity is not a person, though its members are persons. Now it would be extremely inconvenient to define the phrase 'personal God' in such a way that we should have to hold that all orthodox Christians deny the existence of a personal God. And, as we have seen, this inconvenient result would follow if we defined a 'personal God' to mean 'a God who is a person'. We must therefore adopt a some what wider definition of 'personal'. Now we notice that, whilst the Trinity is denied to be a person, it is asserted to be a complex unity composed of three intimately related constituents, each of which is a person. And I think that we should deny that a man believed in a personal God unless he believed that God either is a person or is a complex whole composed of nothing but interrelated persons. I therefore suggest that the phrase 'a personal God' means 'a God which either is a person or is a whole composed of nothing but interrelated persons'. This definition is certainly wide enough, whilst the first suggested definition was certainly too narrow. It might perhaps be objected that the proposed definition is now too wide. Would any and every God which is composed of nothing but interrelated persons be counted as a personal God? Or must the relations be of a specially intimate kind before we can apply the adjective 'personal' to a whole composed of nothing but persons? It is admitted that, according to the Christian doctrine of the Trinity, the relations between the constituent persons are extremely intimate; so much so that there is a constant danger of making statements about the Trinity which are true only of its constituents, and of making statements about its constituents which are true only of the Trinity as a whole. But I think that this question really arises rather under the definition of 'God' than under the definition of 'personal'. It is quite certain that we should not apply the name 'God' to any and every whole composed of interrelated persons; we should apply this name only if the relations were peculiarly intimate. I shall assume, therefore, that any whole composed of nothing but persons may be called 'personal' provided that the relations between the constituent persons are intimate enough for this whole to be called a 'God'.

        We have not, however, finished with the definition of the adjective 'personal'. We have said that 'a personal God' means 'a God which either is a person or is a whole composed of nothing but interrelated persons'. But what do we mean by a 'person'? I do not know that we can define the term; but, by considering examples of what we should call 'persons' and by contrasting them with examples of what we should refuse to call 'persons', we can see pretty well what is involved in being a person. We call a sane grown man a 'person'. We refuse to call any inanimate object, such as a chair, a 'person'. We also refuse to call a cat or a dog or a horse a 'person', though we admit that they have feelings, impulses, instincts, habits, etc. And I think that it would be felt to be a strained and metaphorical use of language to call a very young baby a 'person'. If we reflect on these examples I think we shall see that we apply the name 'person' literally to a substance if, and only if, it fulfils the following conditions:

    1. It must think, feel, will, etc.
    2. Its various contemporary states must have that peculiar kind of unity which we express by saying that they 'together make up a single total state of mind'.
    3. Its successive total states must have that peculiar kind of unity with each other which we express by saying that they are 'so many different stages in the history of a single mind'.
    4. These two kinds of unity must be recognized by itself, and not only by some external observer, i.e. it must not only be in fact a mind, but must also know that it is a mind. And this knowledge must be, in part at least, immediate and not merely inferential; though its knowledge of many details about itself may, of course, be inferential and not immediate.

    It may be the case that every substance which has the kind and degree of internal unity necessary for being a mind also knows immediately that it is a mind. Still, it is one thing to have this kind and degree of unity, and it is another thing to know immediately that one has it; and it seems logically possible that the former might happen without the latter. In that case we should not, I think, refer to this mind as a 'person'. It is therefore necessary explicitly to introduce this fourth condition.

        If we accept this as an adequate description of 'being a person' there are certain further remarks to be made.

        (1) There are, presumably, different degrees of personality. These differences may arise in two different ways, which must be distinguished in theory even if in fact they be causally connected so that variations in one respect causally determine variations in the other respect.

    1. A mind will be more fully personal the more completely its contemporary states are united with each other to form a single total state, and the more completely its successive total states are united with each other to form the history of a single mind. In every human mind there are conflicting desires, inconsistent beliefs, and contemporary mental processes which have very little connection with each other. And the history of every human mind is broken by gaps of dreamless sleep, fainting fits, drunkenness, and so on.
    2. A mind will be more fully personal the more fully and immediately it recognizes such unity as it in fact possesses. We have all forgotten a great many states which have in fact been experienced by us, and we cannot recall them at will. And, on the other hand, we are liable to 'remember' events that never happened, and to believe falsely that they formed parts of our mental history.

    Now, since these defects are present in different degrees in different human minds, though they are present in some degree in all human minds, we can form the conception of a mind which is much more completely a person than any human being is; just as we can form the conception of a perfect gas or a frictionless fluid from our experiences of more or less imperfect gases and more or less viscous fluids. An ideal person would be a mind which is as fully unified as possible; which has no inconsistent beliefs, or conflicting desires, or mutually indifferent mental processes; which never sleeps or faints; and so on. And it must be as fully and immediately aware of this unity as possible. It must not forget anything that has belonged to it, though it is not necessary to suppose that it is always actually remembering everything that has ever happened to it. It is enough to suppose that it could remember any of these events whenever it wanted to. There seems to be no logical objection to the concept of an ideal person, if this be all that is meant by the phrase.

        (2) There are certain judgments which we make only about persons, and certain emotions which we feel only towards what we take to be persons. We should not literally ascribe moral goodness or badness to anything which we did not believe to be a person. No one seriously talks of a virtuous baby, or regards a cat as being morally responsible for its actions. And no one can strictly feel the emotions of love or gratitude to anything which he does not at the time regard as a person. It is true, I think, that a man may quite literally love his cat or dog, though he would admit, if questioned, that it is not a person. But an intelligent domestic animal probably has, in fact, the rudiments of personality, and, whether it has or not, its master almost certainly treats it in practice as a person whatever his theoretical beliefs on the subject may be. Again, it is certainly possible to feel emotions which are analogous to love and to gratitude towards certain wholes composed of interrelated persons, though we should admit that these wholes are not themselves persons. E.g. there is an emotion which we call 'love' for a public school, a college, or a country. And there is an emotion which we call 'gratitude' towards these institutions for the benefits which we believe them to have bestowed on us. But, in the first place, it is plain that we tend in practice to personify such a group of persons, although we know that it is not really a person. We tend, e.g. to substitute for Trinity College, which is a Society and not a person, a kind of idealized man who combines all the best qualities of all the nicest Trinity men that we have known. And, if we literally love certain actual Trinity men, we shall tend to feel an analogous emotion at the thought of this idealized Trinity man who represents Trinity College to us. Moreover, I think it is plain that, although some of the emotions which we feel towards certain groups of interrelated persons are analogous to love and to gratitude, they are not strictly the same emotions as love and gratitude. Love, in the strict sense, can be felt only towards something which we believe to be capable of loving us in return; it is always accompanied by a desire to be loved in return, and in the absence of such a response it tends at length to fade away. But we know perfectly well that a college or a public school cannot literally love us, though some of its members may do so. Yet this does not prevent us from feeling for it the emotion which I have described. Hence this emotion cannot be the same as love, in the strict sense. I conclude, then, that we cannot strictly love anything unless we believe it to be a person at the time when we are feeling the emotion.

        I have now, I hope, made clear what is meant by 'being a person', and have stated some important additional facts about this characteristic. The next point to be considered is what is meant by being a 'God'. I think it is quite certain that the word 'God' is extremely ambiguous, and that it has commonly been used in at least three different, though connected, senses. I distinguish these as the popular sense, the theological sense, and the philosophical sense. In the popular sense of the word 'God' a God is ipso facto a person. This person is supposed to be analogous to a human being, but to be much more powerful. It is supposed to be able to do things of a different kind from those which human beings can do, and I think that it is generally conceived as not subject to death and as exercising an important influence on the weal or woe of human beings. This is all that is involved in the notion of a God in the popular sense. It is not supposed to be necessarily unique; it is not supposed to be infinitely powerful or perfectly wise, but merely to be a great deal more powerful and a great deal wiser than any living human being. And it is not supposed of necessity to have created men or to have created the material world, nor is the continued existence of nature and of men supposed necessarily to be dependent on the continued support of a God in this sense. Lastly, a God, in the popular sense, need not be morally superior to the best human beings, though he must be wiser than the wisest and stronger than the strongest human beings. Jehovah and Apollo are Gods in the popular sense; but Jehovah inculcated a high moral tone by precept rather than by example; and Apollo, in view of his relations with Cassandra and with Hyacinthus, might have had difficulty in obtaining the College testimonial for deacon's orders, which has never been held to require a superhuman level of moral achievement.

        The word 'God', in the theological sense, has in one respect a wider meaning, and in other respects a narrower meaning, than the same word when used in the popular sense. A God, in the theological sense, need not be a person. According to orthodox Christian theology nothing can strictly be called 'God' except the Trinity as a whole. And the Trinity is certainly not a person. It is true that the Athanasian Creed says that the Father is God, and the Son is God, and the Holy Ghost is God; but it immediately adds that nevertheless there are not three Gods, but one God. If these statements are to be rendered consistent it is plain that the word 'God' must be used in different senses in the two. Nor is there the least difficulty in seeing what these senses are. The creed means that there is only one being that can with strict theological correctness be called 'God', viz. the Trinity as a whole. But each of the three persons can be called 'God' in a looser sense, because they are divine persons and essential constituents of the Trinity, which is God in the strict sense. Thus we might say loosely: 'The King is the sovereign of England, and the House of Lords is the sovereign of England, and the House of Commons is the sovereign of England.' But we should immediately add, in order to ward off possible errors, 'Of course, strictly speaking, there is only one sovereign of England, viz. the whole composed of King, Lords, and Commons in their proper constitutional relations to each other'. In the popular sense of 'God' each person of the Trinity is a God, and the Trinity as a whole is not a God; but, in the theological sense of the word, the persons are not Gods, whilst the whole composed of them is a God, and is the only God that there is.

        The theological sense of the word 'God' is thus wider than the popular sense, in so far as the former can be applied either to a person or to certain wholes composed of interrelated persons, whilst the latter can be applied only to a person. In all other respects, however, the theological conception of God is narrower and more rigid than the popular conception.

    1. Theologians push all the attributes of God to extremes. A God, in the theological sense, must be not merely very wise and very strong; he must be perfectly wise, and capable of doing anything which does not involve some internal logical inconsistency.
    2. It is an essential part of the theological conception of God that he shall be morally perfect.
    3. It is also part of the theological conception of God that he shall be unique. By this I mean that theologians are not content to hold that there happens to be only one thing answering to the definition of 'God', just as there happens to be only one thing answering to the description of 'the brother of Romulus'. They hold that, from the nature of the case, there could only be one God, just as, from the nature of the case, there could only be one individual answering to the description 'the most virtuous undergraduate in Trinity College'. I think that this is one reason why theologians refuse to call the persons of the Trinity 'Gods', and confine the name 'God' to the Trinity as a whole. For, in all other respects but uniqueness, the persons of the Trinity would seem to be 'Gods' in the strict theological sense.
    4. Finally, it is, I think, part of the theological conception of God that he cannot be identified with the universe. There has to be some asymmetrical relation between God and the rest of the universe, so that there is a sense in which we can say that the latter is existentially dependent on the former whilst the former is not existentially dependent on the latter.

        I will make a few explanatory comments on the theological conception of God before passing to the philosophical conception.

    (1) I do not know how far the statements of theologians about the omniscience, omnipotence, and moral perfection of God are to be taken literally. It may be that this pushing of God's attributes to extremes is only intended as a compliment; and that when God is said to be perfectly wise, and good, and powerful, these phrases are to be regarded as analogous to 'Your Serene Transparency' when applied to German princes or 'His Most Religious Majesty' when applied to Charles II. Persons who used the latter phrases plainly did not intend to deny that German princes are opaque to light, or that Charles II was sometimes inclined to be a little careless about the higher spiritual values. And it may be that theologians do not intend their statements about God's attributes to be interpreted too literally. On that hypothesis the theological conception of God may not really differ so much from the popular conception as it seems to do.

    (2) We must clearly understand that not any and every group of interrelated persons would be regarded as a God even in the theological sense. It is necessary that the persons should be of a certain kind, and that their relations should have a certain high degree of intimacy. I think that the component persons must be such that each would be a God in the popular sense. And I think that the relations must be so intimate that none of the persons could exist apart from each other and outside the whole which they together form. We can see the necessity of both these conditions by taking cases where one is fulfilled and the other fails. The society of Olympus was a whole composed of interrelated persons, each of which was a God in the popular sense. But no one ever thought of regarding this whole as a God. And the reason is that the relations were not intimate enough. Zeus could have existed without Hera, and Hera could have existed without Zeus. Again, on Dr. McTaggart's view, the universe is a whole composed of persons so intimately related that none could have existed without the rest and apart from this whole. But no one would call the universe, as conceived by McTaggart, a 'God'. For its components are ourselves and other persons like us. And we are not Gods.

        I pass now to the philosophical sense of the word 'God'. This is very much wider in either the theological or the popular sense of the word. A 'God', in the philosophical sense, need not be a person or a whole composed of nothing but interrelated persons. It therefore need not be wise or good, for these epithets apply only to persons. The name 'God' has been applied by certain philosophers to the Universe as a whole. Thus Hegel calls the Absolute 'God', and Spinoza talks of 'God or Nature' as synonymous terms like Augustus and Octavius. I think, however, that even in philosophy the name 'God' would be applied to the Universe only on the supposition that the Universe has a much more intimate internal unity than it appears to have at first sight, and that this unity is of a special kind. I think that all philosophers who have asserted the existence of God have held one of three views about the internal structure of the Universe:

    (1) That there is a certain part of the Universe which is not existentially dependent on any thing else, and that all the rest of the Universe is existentially dependent on this part of it. This substance is then called 'God', whatever its other characteristics may be. This is the doctrine which is known as Deism. It is held by those philosophers who talk of God as 'the great First Cause'.

    (2) That there are certain characteristics of the Universe from which all its other characteristics necessarily follow. In that case the name 'God' will often be applied by philosophers to the Universe in virtue of its having this peculiar internal structure. Thus Spinoza distinguishes between Natura Naturans and Natura Naturata. Natura Naturans is the Universe, regarded as having certain fundamental characteristics from which all the rest follow. And Natura Naturata is the Universe, regarded as having all the characteristics which follow from these fundamental ones and as having no others. The Universe in its completeness is thus Natura Naturans and Natura Naturata; and Spinoza calls it 'God' in virtue of its having this kind of internal structure. This doctrine is one form of Pantheism.

    (3) That many of the features which seem to characterize the Universe or parts of it do not really belong to it, but are distorted and partly illusory appearances of characteristics which really do belong to it; in particular, that the Universe is in reality purely mental (i.e. that it is a mind or a society of minds), and that matter, space, and motion are distorted appearances of this mind and its states or of these minds and their mutual relations. The name 'God' is then often applied by philosophers to the Universe as it really is on this view, as distinct from the Universe as it appears to be. This, I suppose, is why Hegel called the Universe 'God'.

        I think we may say that no philosopher asserts the existence of God unless he holds one of these three views about the nature of the Universe. On the other hand, many philosophers who do hold one of these three views would refuse to assert the existence of God, on the ground that the word has much more definite implications in theology and in ordinary life and that the use of it in the philosophic sense is misleading. E.g., the Universe, as Dr. McTaggart believed it to be, is a God in the third philosophic sense of the term. But McTaggart always refused to call it 'God' and blamed Hegel for doing so, on the ground that the phrase 'The Absolute' completely conveys his meaning whilst the word 'God' inevitably has associations and arouses emotions which are not justified by what he believed to be the facts. Here I agree with him. I think that we ought to confine the word 'God' to the theological and the popular senses of it; and that, unless we have reason to believe in the existence of a God or Gods in one of these senses, we ought not to say that we believe in the existence of God at all. Now, in these senses of the word, a God is necessarily a personal God. It is either a divine person, or it is a whole composed of nothing but divine persons so intimately related that none of them could exist apart from the rest and outside this whole. And I have defined what I mean by a 'person' and what I mean by 'divine'. The question then is: What reason, if any, have we to believe in the existence of divine persons? For it is plain that we can have no reason to believe in wholes composed of nothing but divine persons related in certain ways unless we have reason to believe in divine persons. And we might have reason to believe in the existence of divine persons whilst we had no means of deciding whether there was one or a dozen, and no means of deciding whether they stood in such and such relations to each other or not.

        A man who believes in the existence of a divine person might try to justify his belief in one of three ways:

    1. He might claim to know directly that such a being exists; or
    2. he might claim to be able to prove the existence of such a being, or to make it very probable, by argument; or
    3. he might believe it on the authority of others.

    I will consider these three alleged grounds in turn.

        (1) A claim to direct knowledge of God's existence might take two different forms:

    1. A man might find the proposition 'God exists' self-evident, as most men find the proposition 2+2=4. Or
    2. he might claim to know that God exists because he has in some supersensible way perceived God; just as most people claim to know that their chairs and tables exist because they have perceived these objects with their senses.

    It is quite certain that most people who believe in the existence of God do not pretend that their belief can be justified in either of these ways. Very few people would claim that they find the proposition that God exists self-evident; and still fewer people would claim to have themselves perceived God. But such claims have been made; and there is no way of positively refuting them. But there are reasons which ought to make the claimants themselves extremely doubtful, and which ought to make us still more doubtful, about accepting their claims at their face value. It is notorious that propositions may seem self-evident although they are not true. For propositions which are inconsistent with each other, and which therefore cannot both be true, have seemed to be self-evident to different people. During the war it seemed self-evident to most Englishmen that Germans are morally inferior to the English; and it seemed equally self-evident to most Germans that Englishmen are morally inferior to Germans. One of these propositions must have been false, and probably both of them were. It may be said that in this case both parties were blinded by patriotic emotion; but it might equally be suggested that those persons who find the existence of God self-evident are blinded by religious emotion. If it appears self-evident to some people that there is a perfectly wise, good, and powerful being, it appears equally self-evident to many other people that the existence of such a being is inconsistent with the amount and kind of evil which exists in the world. Lastly, we know what sort of propositions have appeared to be self-evident to nearly everyone and have never been in any danger of being refuted. They are always propositions which assert that one quality is necessarily accompanied by a certain other quality; they are never propositions which assert that there exists an object which has such and such qualities. Now the proposition that God exists is of the latter kind, and not of the former; it is therefore most unlikely that it is really self-evident in the sense which it is self-evident that 2+2=4.

        Let us now consider the claim to know directly that God exists because one has perceived him in some supersensible way. Perception may roughly be defined as being in direct cognitive contact with an existent something which manifests certain qualities to the percipient, and is instinctively regarded by him as a part or an appearance of a more extended and more enduring object which has certain other qualities that are not manifested to the percipient at the moment. E.g., when I say that I see a penny, I am in direct cognitive contact with something which manifests the qualities of brownness and approximately circular shape; and I instinctively regard this as a part or an appearance of something which is permanent, which has an inside as well as an outside, and which has qualities like hardness and coldness that are not at present being manifested to me. If this belief be mistaken, I am not perceiving what would commonly be called a 'penny'. Now it is notorious that in ordinary sense-perception we are often deluded and sometimes wildly deluded. A simple example is mistaking a mere mirror-image for a physical object, and a still more striking example is perceiving snakes or pink rats when one is suffering from delirium tremens. It is quite certain, then, that there are delusive sense-perceptions. Now, in the case of sense-perception there are several tests which we can use to tell whether a perception is delusive or not. We can check one sense by another, e.g., sight by touch. We can appeal to the testimony of others and find out whether they see anything that corresponds to what we see. Finally, we can make inferences from what we think we perceive, and find whether they are verified. We can say: 'If there are really rats running about my bed my dog will be excited, bread and cheese will disappear, and so on.' And then we can see whether anything of the kind happens. Now it does not seem to be possible to test the alleged supersensible perception which some people claim to have of God by any of these means. Very few people have had the experiences at all; they are very difficult to describe, and therefore to compare; and it is very hard to point to any verifiable consequences which would follow if, and only if, these perceptions were not delusive. And, so far as I can see, nothing comparable to supporting the testimony of one sense by that of another is here possible. This does not, of course, prove that such supersensible perceptions are delusive; but it does show that we have no means of telling whether they are or are not. And, as we already know that many perceptions are delusive, this is a serious matter. As Hobbes says: 'When a man tells me that God spoke to him in a dream all that I can be sure of is that he dreamed that God spoke to him.'

        Even if we waive this objection, and take at their face value the statements of people who say that they have perceived God, they give no support whatever to the existence of a single perfectly wise, good, and powerful being, on whom all the rest of the Universe depends. They would tend rather to support the view that there is a bewildering variety of Gods in the popular sense, many of whom possess the oddest personal peculiarities.

        (2) I pass now to arguments for the existence of God. These may be divided into deductive and inductive arguments. There are two of the former. One professes to prove from the definition of God that such a being must exist. This argument, if it were valid, would have the advantage of proving the existence of an unique individual possessed of all possible perfections, i.e. of God, in the theological sense. But it is universally admitted by philosophers and theologians that the argument is logically fallacious. It is called the Ontological Argument.

        The second deductive argument starts from the premise that no thing or event in nature exists of intrinsic necessity. Such necessity as we find within nature is purely relative and hypothetical. We can say that, given A, B necessarily follows. But we cannot say that A's existence or B's existence is intrinsically necessary if A and B be things or events in nature. It is then argued that, since nature as a whole has this contingent character, its existence must depend on something else whose existence is intrinsically necessary. This something is called 'God'. The argument is known as the Cosmological Argument. It is not so obviously fallacious as the Ontological Argument, and it has been accepted by some very able theologians and philosophers, such as St. Thomas Aquinas and Locke. Nevertheless, I agree with Kant and Hume that it is fallacious. Fortunately it is not necessary for me to prove this here, because the argument is irrelevant for our present purpose. For it is certain that, even if it be valid, it has no tendency to prove the existence of a personal God. At best it would prove the existence of God only in one of the three philosophical senses of that term, and not in the theological or the popular sense.

        We may therefore dismiss the deductive arguments and consider the inductive ones. These start with certain admitted facts about nature and man, and argue back to the existence of God as the hypothesis which best explains these facts. Of course, the conclusions of such arguments could never be more than highly probable. But I do not think that this is a serious objection. We could quite reasonably say that the existence of God was 'proved' if it could be rendered as probable as the existence of Julius Caesar. Such arguments may be classified according to their premises.

    1. They may start from certain facts about inorganic nature and living organisms.
    2. They may start from the fact that nature contains minds which are capable of distinguishing good and evil and of guiding their actions by ideals.
    3. They may start from the fact that certain minds have, in addition, specifically religious emotions and other experiences.

    A complete inductive argument would presumably use all these facts as premises.

        (a) The first set of facts forms the basis of the famous Design Argument. This has been so thoroughly discussed by Hume in his Dialogues on Natural Religion that there is little left to say about it. I will content myself with the following remarks:

    (i) We must distinguish between the adaptation of inorganic nature to life in general, and the peculiarities of organisms as such. Let us begin with the former. It is certain that the condition of inorganic nature on the earth is, and has long been, extremely well adapted to the existence and growth of living organisms. So far as we know, the conditions under which organisms can exist are very peculiar, so that it is antecedently improbable that they should be fulfilled. Hence it is argued that they must have been deliberately brought about by a mind which wanted organisms to exist and flourish. This, I think, is a fallacious argument. It seems certain that the fulfillment of these conditions is really very local and temporary. They are probably not fulfilled now in the greater part of the Universe; they certainly were not fulfilled formerly on the earth, and they almost certainly will cease to be fulfilled there in the distant future. Now it is not antecedently improbable that even very peculiar conditions shall be fulfilled for a comparatively short time in a comparatively small region of a universe which is indefinitely extended in both Space and Time.

    (ii) The position about organisms themselves is as follows. An organism is an extremely intricate system which appears, even to the most superficial view, to be extraordinarily well adapted to preserve itself in face of varying conditions and to produce things like itself. And the more minutely we examine it the more accurately true do we find this to be. Now the only other things that we know of which have the least analogy to this are artificial machines. We know that these have been designed by minds, and we have not the least reason to think that they could have existed unless there had been minds which designed them and arranged their parts in such a way as to carry out these designs. Of course organisms are now produced by other organisms, just as typewriters are produced by other machines. But in the history of any artificial machine we eventually come back to a mind which had designs and arranged matter in such a way as to carry them out. We may assume, by analogy, that if we went far enough back in the history of organisms we should come on a mind which designed them and arranged matter accordingly. This mind was certainly not human, and it must certainly have been of superhuman wisdom and power to produce such results. It may therefore fairly be called 'God'.

        I may say at once that I consider this to be an extremely strong argument if we grant two assump