Tris Stock over at My Godless Life has started a multi-part refutation of an article by Christian apologist Wayne Jackson. In it he claims that negative atheism is the default position (I agree). Negative atheism stands on the very firm ground that supernaturalists all utterly fail to provide any support for their positions and not accepting their hypotheses is the correct position to take. He also claims to have met very few positive atheists, those who go on to make the assertion that there are no gods. I don't know how many he's met, but I'm one, and I want to argue (again) that I'm right.
I'm a positive atheist, and I know I'm not alone in that. Leaving aside philosophical arguments about the incoherence of the god concept and other such, I rely on a Bayesian analysis.
Simply put, in a Bayesian analysis you way the evidence in the probability that it supports a hypothesis and the probability that it does not support your hypothesis. For example: is there any mayonnaise in my fridge? Without looking in my fridge you can guess that there probably is because your extensive experience with American culture has provided you with evidence for the ubiquity of eggy emulsions of oil and vinegar. So you weigh a lifetime of observational evidence against the two hypotheses: there is mayonnaise or there is not. Sight unseen, the evidence weighs in favor of the presence of mayonnaise.
But then you open the door of the fridge and you see no mayonnaise. This new evidence is added to both hypotheses. It doesn't add strength to the "there is mayo" hypothesis, but it does add strength to the "there is no mayo" hypothesis. You can contend that it weakly adds to "the mayo is in the cupboard" hypothesis, but it's simply not as powerful an argument as the "no mayo" hypothesis.
You can take it further by looking in the cupboards and under the stairs and in the dog, and each place you fail to find mayo takes strength away from the positive hypothesis and piles it onto the negative hypothesis.
Bayesian analyses can be very rigorous, using actual numbers and probabilities, provided you're a good statistician and can actually do that math. Even if you can't, however, you'll see that we're typically intuitive Bayesians, even if the numerous logical fallacies to which we're prone interfere.
Let's apply it to unicorns. A few centuries ago it was possible to be agnostic about unicorns to the extent that "Well, we haven't been all around the world yet". But then biologists started scouring the world and recording every little thing they saw. Everywhere they went that they failed to unicorns piled up evidence in favor of the "no unicorns hypothesis".
The alternative hypothesis is, and has always been, "There are unicorns, but we haven't seen them yet", which became fatuous two centuries ago. Once upon a time the lack of evidence for unicorns applied to both hypotheses equally because the pool of places we'd been and things we'd seen (and communicated to the world about) was small. Now the only way to sustain the "haven't seen them" hypothesis is to claim that unicorns are like squids, living somewhere remote and inaccessible (which no one does) or to claim that they're like rare jungle flowers, living high up trees motionless and even if you do see them it's easy to mistake them for another species of unicorn that's already been recorded.
What about god? They god hypothesis only gets away from this kind of analysis by special pleading. Somehow it's perfectly reasonable to dismiss all other supernatural phenomena because absence of evidence actually is evidence of absence when you would expect evidence, but not the god phenomenon, no sir. That gets my dander up because the only kind of god you could make that claim for would be the deist god and, really, what's the difference between a god that doesn't exist and a god that has all the characteristics of non-existence except the final one1? All other deities I've heard posited are active and interventionist, and the believers all claim to have evidence. Why, once their evidence is proven spurious, would we suddenly accept their claim that their god is beyond evidence? I don't see a need to bend over backwards for them in that way.
The three hypotheses under consideration are T) There is a god and we have evidence, D) There is a god, we just haven't seen him, and A) There is no god. Obviously all atheists have considered and rejected T, because the purported evidence really isn't. Miracles, scriptures, revelations, they all fail as evidence because there are other hypotheses for each of them that better explain the evidence. Also, eve when you consider them all together, they don't count as evidence because each class of purported evidence as a whole has better explanations.
Thus the argument comes down to whether we live in a time where we simply haven't explored enough of the world to know whether our unicorn exists, or if that unicorn doesn't exist.
SETI is a good analogy here. There may be intelligent life elsewhere in the universe that, despite our ongoing exploration, we haven't yet found evidence for. Does that count as evidence against the proposition? Yes, actually. However, the amount of the galaxy we've examined is so small compared to the amount we haven't gotten to yet that agnosticism is still the default position. For the three hypotheses of SETI, we've got nothing going for "other life exists", a very tiny amount for "we're alone" and a whole heaping massive galaxy in the corner of "we haven't explored here yet". The longer we explore, the longer we continue to fail to find evidence, the more we scrape away from the agnostic position and add to the negative position. Of course, all it will take is one piece of evidence to add to the "yep" pile to render the other two moot.
The difference between SETI and the god search is that absolutely no one claims that god is far away. The god hypothesis always, always posits that we don't need to cross the unfathomable depths of space to find their god. It's supposed to be right here. All of a sudden the "we haven't explored here" option loses all its weight, because we have explored there. The whole of human existence has been the exploration of that position, and the signal has always come back null. We're constantly told that we should expect evidence, and we have absolutely none in favor of the position. Therefore, the only conclusion is not merely to reject the position as unproven, but to affirm its opposite: the position is wrong.
1 - Hint: There's no difference. The deist position should be treated as identical to the atheist position. So, I think, should the Spinoza position.
Showing posts with label evidence against god. Show all posts
Showing posts with label evidence against god. Show all posts
Thursday, May 24, 2012
Saturday, February 18, 2012
Dan Barker vs John-Mark Miravalle Pt 2 pt ii
See the first part of part 2 here.
Miravalle's final opening argument is a logical argument and another appeal to infinity. He posits that there is a quality of "being" and a quality of "non-being", that being necessarily exists and non-being necessarily does not, and finally that being must be infinite. I'd call the argument spurious, but clearly a lot of thought has gone into it (most of it not presented here), so I'll just call it wrong.
This is a very Catholic argument. They love to say that things have essences which are in fact separate from the things themselves. For example, every week, thousands of Catholics speak a magic incantation over a cracker and it loses its essential crackerness and becomes the flesh of a Jewish zombie. They then perform engage in ritual cannibalism on the zombie and speak some more incantations. This is known as the magic of transubstantiation. The substance of the cracker is changed, without changing anything about the cracker at all to the substance of the flesh of Yeshua bin Yusef.
In this case Miravalle is arguing, with no evidence whatsoever (after all, this is a "logical" argument) that everything that exists partakes of the quality of being, and everything that doesn't exist partakes of the quality of non-being. As nothing that doesn't exist actually exists, the quality of non-being does not, in fact, exist. Therefore, being is infinite.
Awha? He makes something of a leap there and argues that the quality of being is entirely separate and somehow physical or spatial, and necessarily infinite.
This all goes back to the Aristotelian metaphysics that Catholicism gleefully saddled itself with back in the middle ages when Greek philosophy made it back to Europe after its time in Arabia. Aristotle and Plato differed on many things, but the church took up the notion of Platonic ideals, as they meshed quite well with the Christian notion of the soul.
It is possible to consider the concept of 'woodiness' as something separate from actual wooden things. Wood is a fibrous material of a certain stiffness, a certain ability to be shaped and carved, a certain resilience, but a certain pliancy, and this varies from wood to wood, and also depends upon the thickness and treatment of the wood. But does woodiness exist separately from actual wooden objects in any real sense? Is there some aether in which you'll find the notion of parabolas existing independently of the equations they represent, and the paper we draw them on? We can consider the notion of the color red and understand that it is an assigned quality, something our mind perceives without true external reality, a symbol that the brain has attached to a certain wavelength, or combination of wavelengths, of light.
But do any of these abstract concepts have an external reality? If they do, then Miravalle's argument may begin to have a leg to stand on, because if being, as a quality, exists separately from the objects that exist once they are imbued with that quality, then we can begin to consider the qualities that the quality possesses.
At that point his argument leaves the purely logical realm, because it posits the existence of this realm of the platonic ideals, and further attributes facts, qualities, and indeed very real being to these notions, as if the fact of assertion is all the proof necessary that the thing asserted has a factual reality.
The best argument against Plato's Theory of Forms was advanced by Plato himself, as well as Aristotle (though Plato was doing it in order to rebut the argument so as to strengthen his theory). It's known as the Third Man Argument. A man is a man, and he partakes of the form of a man, but part of the form of the man is partaking of the form of the man, so there is another form, that being partaking of the form of a man that is also part of the form of a man, but this means that partaking of that form is also part of the form... Essentially, the Platonic ideals are self-contradictory. In this case, everything partakes of the essence of being, including the essence of being itself.
However, where the Theory of Forms breaks down, Miravalle runs with it and posits that the essence of being is necessarily infinite, which may be why he somehow gives it a physical reality. But his argument is incomplete and full of holes, because he argues that the essence of being exists and all extant things partake of it, but that non-being cannot exist because only non-existent things could partake of it, and they don't exist, which means the essence of non-being must not exist for them to partake of. But even in the absence of a thing partaking of a form (say a room devoid of chairs) that wouldn't mean that a form didn't exist for something to potentially, eventually, partake of it. In fact, even though the form of non-being is a form that cannot be taken by any thing, that doesn't mean that the ideal notion, the Form of non-existence doesn't itself exist in the Platonic theory. In this way, the Platonic Theory of Forms may defeat even Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem. Even members that can't be a member of the set can be a member of the set.
In any event, I cannot accept his notion of forms (the essence of being in this place) that exist separately from the things that partake of those forms, because the qualities of physical objects only exist as they are embodied by physical objects. And even temporarily granting the forms, there is no reason to accept that they have some sort of physical reality in themselves, rather than an ideal, non-physical reality. And even granting some separate universe, there's no reason to grant the form of Being some sort of infinite physical presence because there's no reason not to grant the form of non-Being the same physical reality as the form of Being. And then his final step is perhaps his most egregious failure.
There's no reason to say that this essence of being is god, and particularly not the Christian god.
As a final parting shot, Miravalle delivers a half-formed transcendental apologetic: that just as morality and being descend from god, so too does logic descend from god and therefore the atheist cannot argue against the existence of god because doing so requires the use of logic which requires admitting that god exists. Fortunately, the statement is poorly fleshed out, not well-developed, and I wouldn't have noticed it if I hadn't learned a bit about transcendental apologetics. I hope Barker doesn't respond to it, but as he's a reformed Pentacostalist preacher, I've no idea what his debate style is like. I also hope he doesn't fall into the trap of trying to respond to Miravalle's arguments, weak as they are, but rather correctly identifies that each of them is, in its own way, a restatement of the Kalam Cosmological argument, points out the ultimate weakness of that argument, and dismisses all three.
Next: Barker's turn at the podium.
Miravalle's final opening argument is a logical argument and another appeal to infinity. He posits that there is a quality of "being" and a quality of "non-being", that being necessarily exists and non-being necessarily does not, and finally that being must be infinite. I'd call the argument spurious, but clearly a lot of thought has gone into it (most of it not presented here), so I'll just call it wrong.
This is a very Catholic argument. They love to say that things have essences which are in fact separate from the things themselves. For example, every week, thousands of Catholics speak a magic incantation over a cracker and it loses its essential crackerness and becomes the flesh of a Jewish zombie. They then perform engage in ritual cannibalism on the zombie and speak some more incantations. This is known as the magic of transubstantiation. The substance of the cracker is changed, without changing anything about the cracker at all to the substance of the flesh of Yeshua bin Yusef.
In this case Miravalle is arguing, with no evidence whatsoever (after all, this is a "logical" argument) that everything that exists partakes of the quality of being, and everything that doesn't exist partakes of the quality of non-being. As nothing that doesn't exist actually exists, the quality of non-being does not, in fact, exist. Therefore, being is infinite.
Awha? He makes something of a leap there and argues that the quality of being is entirely separate and somehow physical or spatial, and necessarily infinite.
This all goes back to the Aristotelian metaphysics that Catholicism gleefully saddled itself with back in the middle ages when Greek philosophy made it back to Europe after its time in Arabia. Aristotle and Plato differed on many things, but the church took up the notion of Platonic ideals, as they meshed quite well with the Christian notion of the soul.
It is possible to consider the concept of 'woodiness' as something separate from actual wooden things. Wood is a fibrous material of a certain stiffness, a certain ability to be shaped and carved, a certain resilience, but a certain pliancy, and this varies from wood to wood, and also depends upon the thickness and treatment of the wood. But does woodiness exist separately from actual wooden objects in any real sense? Is there some aether in which you'll find the notion of parabolas existing independently of the equations they represent, and the paper we draw them on? We can consider the notion of the color red and understand that it is an assigned quality, something our mind perceives without true external reality, a symbol that the brain has attached to a certain wavelength, or combination of wavelengths, of light.
But do any of these abstract concepts have an external reality? If they do, then Miravalle's argument may begin to have a leg to stand on, because if being, as a quality, exists separately from the objects that exist once they are imbued with that quality, then we can begin to consider the qualities that the quality possesses.
At that point his argument leaves the purely logical realm, because it posits the existence of this realm of the platonic ideals, and further attributes facts, qualities, and indeed very real being to these notions, as if the fact of assertion is all the proof necessary that the thing asserted has a factual reality.
The best argument against Plato's Theory of Forms was advanced by Plato himself, as well as Aristotle (though Plato was doing it in order to rebut the argument so as to strengthen his theory). It's known as the Third Man Argument. A man is a man, and he partakes of the form of a man, but part of the form of the man is partaking of the form of the man, so there is another form, that being partaking of the form of a man that is also part of the form of a man, but this means that partaking of that form is also part of the form... Essentially, the Platonic ideals are self-contradictory. In this case, everything partakes of the essence of being, including the essence of being itself.
However, where the Theory of Forms breaks down, Miravalle runs with it and posits that the essence of being is necessarily infinite, which may be why he somehow gives it a physical reality. But his argument is incomplete and full of holes, because he argues that the essence of being exists and all extant things partake of it, but that non-being cannot exist because only non-existent things could partake of it, and they don't exist, which means the essence of non-being must not exist for them to partake of. But even in the absence of a thing partaking of a form (say a room devoid of chairs) that wouldn't mean that a form didn't exist for something to potentially, eventually, partake of it. In fact, even though the form of non-being is a form that cannot be taken by any thing, that doesn't mean that the ideal notion, the Form of non-existence doesn't itself exist in the Platonic theory. In this way, the Platonic Theory of Forms may defeat even Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem. Even members that can't be a member of the set can be a member of the set.
In any event, I cannot accept his notion of forms (the essence of being in this place) that exist separately from the things that partake of those forms, because the qualities of physical objects only exist as they are embodied by physical objects. And even temporarily granting the forms, there is no reason to accept that they have some sort of physical reality in themselves, rather than an ideal, non-physical reality. And even granting some separate universe, there's no reason to grant the form of Being some sort of infinite physical presence because there's no reason not to grant the form of non-Being the same physical reality as the form of Being. And then his final step is perhaps his most egregious failure.
There's no reason to say that this essence of being is god, and particularly not the Christian god.
As a final parting shot, Miravalle delivers a half-formed transcendental apologetic: that just as morality and being descend from god, so too does logic descend from god and therefore the atheist cannot argue against the existence of god because doing so requires the use of logic which requires admitting that god exists. Fortunately, the statement is poorly fleshed out, not well-developed, and I wouldn't have noticed it if I hadn't learned a bit about transcendental apologetics. I hope Barker doesn't respond to it, but as he's a reformed Pentacostalist preacher, I've no idea what his debate style is like. I also hope he doesn't fall into the trap of trying to respond to Miravalle's arguments, weak as they are, but rather correctly identifies that each of them is, in its own way, a restatement of the Kalam Cosmological argument, points out the ultimate weakness of that argument, and dismisses all three.
Next: Barker's turn at the podium.
Friday, February 17, 2012
Dan Barker vs John-Mark Miravalle Pt 2
Here's part one.
Miravalle's second argument is the "moral" argument. That is to say, we all appear to have innate moral convictions, but that those necessarily come from god.
He briefly props up a straw man of "we get morals through observation" but knocks it down with "but we see people do bad things, therefore we don't get our morals from the world around us". He doesn't, however, notice that this also knocks down his thesis, that our morals are innate. I've argued elsewhere that morals are innate, but not from god. To put it briefly: they've evolved as a mechanism to foster cooperation so that each of us benefits as the group benefits. Evil is, in this model, either an alternative approach (psychopathy as a method only feasible for a small minority of the population) or when two groups come into conflict (when morality is based upon defining an in-group, some people will necessarily be defined as out-group and not receive the benefits of moral cooperation).
He also tries to argue that morality can't be in some way naturally innate because it's not innately selfish. He differentiates personal preferences from morality (appropriate) but claims that an empathic drive cannot be in any way innate. This is wrong because it has been empirically shown that, except among psychopaths, empathy is innate; there's a whole chunk of brain that's given over to considering the needs and desires of others.
He argues that moral outrage is entirely separate and different from disappointment over unfulfilled desires. I believe the implication he's striving for is that our personal desires, being small and petty and selfish, evoke a small, petty response whereas our moral convictions are a larger striving for the numinous and evoke a larger response. The difference between finding out there aren't any cookies left is obviously different from the torture of a child, and it's obviously a difference of kind rather than degree, but it certainly doesn't imply that it's somehow an external, imposed response. Say I step out of my house, lock my door, and turn to see a dog ambling in circles with a hesitant, lopsided, shambling walk. I'm going to quietly freak out about the possibility of being attacked by a rabid dog and attempt to quickly, quietly get back inside. Contrast that with stepping barefoot in a pile of dog shit on my way to get the mail. The disgust and fear responses are as different from one another as they are from hunger or sexual desire, yet all are wholly natural. There is nothing in his argument that actually distinguishes moral outrage from a natural, biological impetus.
His third quick-counter (part of the structure of debates is to set up and knock down possible arguments by your opponent) is that morality is cultural. Cultural relativism is a favorite opponent of apologists, because they hate hate hate relativism. If morality is not absolute, how can it really be a thing? He specifically links it to progress (I believe he's being very smart there, playing to the audience, gathered by an atheist/agnostic organization), saying that progress is meaningless in the absence of an external absolute against which to measure it. He's entirely incorrect; there's no external metric against which to measure technology, and yet my cell phone is clearly a superior and more sophisticated device than ENIAC.
He thus claims to have eliminated all other possible sources of morality, and that the alternative is therefore god. He then proceeds to try and make the argument from logic.
Next, Part 2 Part ii.
Miravalle's second argument is the "moral" argument. That is to say, we all appear to have innate moral convictions, but that those necessarily come from god.
He briefly props up a straw man of "we get morals through observation" but knocks it down with "but we see people do bad things, therefore we don't get our morals from the world around us". He doesn't, however, notice that this also knocks down his thesis, that our morals are innate. I've argued elsewhere that morals are innate, but not from god. To put it briefly: they've evolved as a mechanism to foster cooperation so that each of us benefits as the group benefits. Evil is, in this model, either an alternative approach (psychopathy as a method only feasible for a small minority of the population) or when two groups come into conflict (when morality is based upon defining an in-group, some people will necessarily be defined as out-group and not receive the benefits of moral cooperation).
He also tries to argue that morality can't be in some way naturally innate because it's not innately selfish. He differentiates personal preferences from morality (appropriate) but claims that an empathic drive cannot be in any way innate. This is wrong because it has been empirically shown that, except among psychopaths, empathy is innate; there's a whole chunk of brain that's given over to considering the needs and desires of others.
He argues that moral outrage is entirely separate and different from disappointment over unfulfilled desires. I believe the implication he's striving for is that our personal desires, being small and petty and selfish, evoke a small, petty response whereas our moral convictions are a larger striving for the numinous and evoke a larger response. The difference between finding out there aren't any cookies left is obviously different from the torture of a child, and it's obviously a difference of kind rather than degree, but it certainly doesn't imply that it's somehow an external, imposed response. Say I step out of my house, lock my door, and turn to see a dog ambling in circles with a hesitant, lopsided, shambling walk. I'm going to quietly freak out about the possibility of being attacked by a rabid dog and attempt to quickly, quietly get back inside. Contrast that with stepping barefoot in a pile of dog shit on my way to get the mail. The disgust and fear responses are as different from one another as they are from hunger or sexual desire, yet all are wholly natural. There is nothing in his argument that actually distinguishes moral outrage from a natural, biological impetus.
His third quick-counter (part of the structure of debates is to set up and knock down possible arguments by your opponent) is that morality is cultural. Cultural relativism is a favorite opponent of apologists, because they hate hate hate relativism. If morality is not absolute, how can it really be a thing? He specifically links it to progress (I believe he's being very smart there, playing to the audience, gathered by an atheist/agnostic organization), saying that progress is meaningless in the absence of an external absolute against which to measure it. He's entirely incorrect; there's no external metric against which to measure technology, and yet my cell phone is clearly a superior and more sophisticated device than ENIAC.
He thus claims to have eliminated all other possible sources of morality, and that the alternative is therefore god. He then proceeds to try and make the argument from logic.
Next, Part 2 Part ii.
Dan Barker vs John-Mark Miravalle Pt 1 of 8
I'm watching the YouTube videos of ReasonFest 2011, because some of the blogs I follow have been pimping ReasonFest 2012 and there aren't any videos up for that yet. The first thing I'm watching is a debate on the existence of god between Dan Barker (former Pentacostalist preacher, now atheist) and John-Mark Miravalle (Catholic apologist).
Miravalle opens with a sophisticated sounding argument based on "essential" vs. "non-essential" features of objects. I say it sounds sophisticated because it really boils down to an argument for infinite regression and the need to remove that infinity. It's the Kalam Cosmological argument that happens to rely upon the supposedly non-essential feature known as "existence".
Flaw the first: All the flaws of the Kalam Cosmological argument. It's an argument from first cause and I don't think a sophisticated thinker should rely on it. We know of acausal events, we know of self-causing events, we can and have developed models for the universe that have no need of a god. The KC argument is no longer a self-evidently true proposition. In fact, it never was; it merely held the field because there were no alternatives.
Flaw the sceond: The specific example he gives of an object with the non-essential quality of existence is a triangle he drew on a piece of paper. The essential quality: it has three sides, and asking why it has three sides brings you back to the definition of a triangle. The non-essential quality: it's blue, asking why it's blue brings you through regress to him and his blue marker. Then he takes us by analogy to the non-essential quality of existence. The triangle exists because he drew it, he exists because of his parents, and so on and so forth through a chain of causation terminated by the arbitrary assumption of the Christian god.
However, this is a problem of arguing from the specific to the general. That particular triangle exists because he drew it, but he would have us infer from there that all triangles exist only because they were created. Indeed, the concept of triangleness was created. Indeed, all things were created. He argues, without justification, that all of existence is a non-essential quality bestowed upon everything by a being/object that for which existence is an essential quality (analogy: a magnet that bestows magnetism down a chain of magnetically held objects).
In other words, he uses an object he created to argue that all objects are so created, and he does so without justification. "I drew a triangle, therefore someone created everything we see." He's attempting to argue that the fact of creation is proof of creation, but it's a smokescreen. What he's really saying is that the fact of existence is proof of creation and there's no connection between the two. He's trying to pull an infinitely long chain out of a hat and then say that it's not infinitely long because there's a god* at the other end.
Flaw the third: This is just another way of asking "Why is there something rather than nothing?" to which I believe the proper reply is "Why, in the face of all this something, do you persist in expecting nothing?" Our observation of the universe should lead us to expect that something does exist; the universe is manifestly self-organizing. From nothingness, somethingness continuously springs. The vacuum of emptiest space seethes with spontaneously manifesting particles. If a perfect nothing were ever to appear, we should expect a universe to happen, not for the nothingness to remain.
Next, on to the second part of the video.
* A lot of people have pointed out that none of these logical, metaphysical, etc arguments in fact argue for the Christian god, notwithstanding there many flaws, but just for some vague concept of godness that most people don't even attribute to or accept as the Christian god.
Miravalle opens with a sophisticated sounding argument based on "essential" vs. "non-essential" features of objects. I say it sounds sophisticated because it really boils down to an argument for infinite regression and the need to remove that infinity. It's the Kalam Cosmological argument that happens to rely upon the supposedly non-essential feature known as "existence".
Flaw the first: All the flaws of the Kalam Cosmological argument. It's an argument from first cause and I don't think a sophisticated thinker should rely on it. We know of acausal events, we know of self-causing events, we can and have developed models for the universe that have no need of a god. The KC argument is no longer a self-evidently true proposition. In fact, it never was; it merely held the field because there were no alternatives.
Flaw the sceond: The specific example he gives of an object with the non-essential quality of existence is a triangle he drew on a piece of paper. The essential quality: it has three sides, and asking why it has three sides brings you back to the definition of a triangle. The non-essential quality: it's blue, asking why it's blue brings you through regress to him and his blue marker. Then he takes us by analogy to the non-essential quality of existence. The triangle exists because he drew it, he exists because of his parents, and so on and so forth through a chain of causation terminated by the arbitrary assumption of the Christian god.
However, this is a problem of arguing from the specific to the general. That particular triangle exists because he drew it, but he would have us infer from there that all triangles exist only because they were created. Indeed, the concept of triangleness was created. Indeed, all things were created. He argues, without justification, that all of existence is a non-essential quality bestowed upon everything by a being/object that for which existence is an essential quality (analogy: a magnet that bestows magnetism down a chain of magnetically held objects).
In other words, he uses an object he created to argue that all objects are so created, and he does so without justification. "I drew a triangle, therefore someone created everything we see." He's attempting to argue that the fact of creation is proof of creation, but it's a smokescreen. What he's really saying is that the fact of existence is proof of creation and there's no connection between the two. He's trying to pull an infinitely long chain out of a hat and then say that it's not infinitely long because there's a god* at the other end.
Flaw the third: This is just another way of asking "Why is there something rather than nothing?" to which I believe the proper reply is "Why, in the face of all this something, do you persist in expecting nothing?" Our observation of the universe should lead us to expect that something does exist; the universe is manifestly self-organizing. From nothingness, somethingness continuously springs. The vacuum of emptiest space seethes with spontaneously manifesting particles. If a perfect nothing were ever to appear, we should expect a universe to happen, not for the nothingness to remain.
Next, on to the second part of the video.
* A lot of people have pointed out that none of these logical, metaphysical, etc arguments in fact argue for the Christian god, notwithstanding there many flaws, but just for some vague concept of godness that most people don't even attribute to or accept as the Christian god.
Monday, December 19, 2011
What Does It Take? (God Proof III)
What would it take to get me to accept the god hypothesis? Theists often accuse atheists of being as dogmatic as they are for rejecting all of their purported evidence, for being bound to refuse to believe, for being religiously faithful to our unbelief. So what evidence would convince me? Allow me to reason by analogy. What would it take to disprove evolution? What would it take to get me to stop believing in that scientific theory? Popular mythology has it that JBS Haldane once growled "rabbits in the Precambrian". That is, if fossil rabbits were found in Precambrian strata, that would disprove evolution, because a derived form cannot precede that from which it is derived. More complex forms do not precede less complex forms. Such a counterintuitive datum would require extraordinary explanation.
This is precisely why tetrannuative* fundamentalists have desperately sought things like that, have desperately sought little niggling things that would prove a chunk of the theory false. If something like the crocoduck were to show up, it wouldn't be proof of evolution, as the farcical Kirk Cameron claims, but rather proof of creation. Such a hippogriff or chimera would completely explode evolution.
Is that what it would take? No. I declare myself totally intransigent. I won't stop believing in evolution, because a century and a half of being pounded against the anvil of disbelief has not caused evolution to birth such a chimera. Mermaids and hippogriffs and all the rest have been frauds, some more creative than others. At this point, evolution is a theory so firmly grounded that to concede something might overturn it is as idiotic as conceding something might overturn gravity or physics.
Again, someone who hasn't read Asimov's "Relativity of Wrong" might be tempted to claim that physics was overturned. No it wasn't. Physics was supplemented. Updated. Improved. Aristotle's intuitive and non-scientific mechanics were indeed overturned by Newton's scientific and calculus-based mechanics, but Einstein supplemented Newton, he did not supplant. Newton's mechanics were not incorrect, they were incomplete. If something appears which challenges the current evolutionary model, it will not prove it wrong, but incomplete. It will supplement rather than supplant. Darwin's theory, crude and incomplete as it was, has not been overturned in more than 150 years despite rigorous scientific testing because, to the limits of that testing, it is entirely correct.
So what will it take to get me to accept the god hypothesis? Nothing I can imagine will convince me to do so. Alternative explanations will always be better because they always have been better, not least because the god hypothesis isn't even an explanation. In the infamous words of Pauli** "Das ist nicht nur nicht richtig, es ist nicht einmal falsch!". "Not only is it not right, it is not even wrong!" The god hypothesis in most of its forms is wildly unscientific and flies in the face of all evidence. The most reduced forms are scientific (though very unsatisfying to believers. Seriously, who wants to be a deist?) but still wholly lacking in evidence and still face challenges from better supported hypotheses.
Perhaps a theist will surprise me and come up with a new argument, some new kind of apparent evidence. This would be a surprise because it's typically not a creative endeavor, relying instead on retreads from centuries in the past. However, new evidence always has to be considered and I always will. However, the evidence so far suggests that any new evidence will fall in one of the previous categories and will be at best evidence of nothing, or at worst more evidence for a stochastic universe with no god at all. The god hypothesis has always been an answer in search of a question, and science has been the rather kid coming in and saying, "Nope. That question's mine, too."
Does this make me different from a dogmatic theist? Absolutely. The theist refuses to look at evidence, claims it's a lie made by the devil to trick you (sometimes it's a test by god). I look at the evidence and realize it's irrelevant, fraudulent, or simply not even evidence of anything at all. I will always look at new evidence with as much open-mindedness as I can muster. I hope, however, you can forgive me for being a bit cynical. After all, how much open-mindedness could you bring to bear for a flying carpet, a magic crystal, or a fully functional Ouija board?
* Four years old. As in they close their eyes and plug their ears and scream until the thing they don't like goes away.
** I'm not claiming Pauli was an atheist, but he did leave the church in 1929.
This is precisely why tetrannuative* fundamentalists have desperately sought things like that, have desperately sought little niggling things that would prove a chunk of the theory false. If something like the crocoduck were to show up, it wouldn't be proof of evolution, as the farcical Kirk Cameron claims, but rather proof of creation. Such a hippogriff or chimera would completely explode evolution.
Is that what it would take? No. I declare myself totally intransigent. I won't stop believing in evolution, because a century and a half of being pounded against the anvil of disbelief has not caused evolution to birth such a chimera. Mermaids and hippogriffs and all the rest have been frauds, some more creative than others. At this point, evolution is a theory so firmly grounded that to concede something might overturn it is as idiotic as conceding something might overturn gravity or physics.
Again, someone who hasn't read Asimov's "Relativity of Wrong" might be tempted to claim that physics was overturned. No it wasn't. Physics was supplemented. Updated. Improved. Aristotle's intuitive and non-scientific mechanics were indeed overturned by Newton's scientific and calculus-based mechanics, but Einstein supplemented Newton, he did not supplant. Newton's mechanics were not incorrect, they were incomplete. If something appears which challenges the current evolutionary model, it will not prove it wrong, but incomplete. It will supplement rather than supplant. Darwin's theory, crude and incomplete as it was, has not been overturned in more than 150 years despite rigorous scientific testing because, to the limits of that testing, it is entirely correct.
So what will it take to get me to accept the god hypothesis? Nothing I can imagine will convince me to do so. Alternative explanations will always be better because they always have been better, not least because the god hypothesis isn't even an explanation. In the infamous words of Pauli** "Das ist nicht nur nicht richtig, es ist nicht einmal falsch!". "Not only is it not right, it is not even wrong!" The god hypothesis in most of its forms is wildly unscientific and flies in the face of all evidence. The most reduced forms are scientific (though very unsatisfying to believers. Seriously, who wants to be a deist?) but still wholly lacking in evidence and still face challenges from better supported hypotheses.
Perhaps a theist will surprise me and come up with a new argument, some new kind of apparent evidence. This would be a surprise because it's typically not a creative endeavor, relying instead on retreads from centuries in the past. However, new evidence always has to be considered and I always will. However, the evidence so far suggests that any new evidence will fall in one of the previous categories and will be at best evidence of nothing, or at worst more evidence for a stochastic universe with no god at all. The god hypothesis has always been an answer in search of a question, and science has been the rather kid coming in and saying, "Nope. That question's mine, too."
Does this make me different from a dogmatic theist? Absolutely. The theist refuses to look at evidence, claims it's a lie made by the devil to trick you (sometimes it's a test by god). I look at the evidence and realize it's irrelevant, fraudulent, or simply not even evidence of anything at all. I will always look at new evidence with as much open-mindedness as I can muster. I hope, however, you can forgive me for being a bit cynical. After all, how much open-mindedness could you bring to bear for a flying carpet, a magic crystal, or a fully functional Ouija board?
* Four years old. As in they close their eyes and plug their ears and scream until the thing they don't like goes away.
** I'm not claiming Pauli was an atheist, but he did leave the church in 1929.
Absence is Absence (God Proof Part II)
Read part one, here.
I've said before that absence of evidence is evidence of absence, but I want to expand on that a bit.
Once I decided to make a sandwich. As is my wont, I mused quietly to myself whilst I pulled items off of shelves and out of the fridge. I grabbed my bread, my turkey, my cheese, my mustard, and where the fuck is my mayonnaise? My mayo's gone! I just bought some at the grocery store yesterday! I checked the fridge again. No mayo. I checked a third time, carefully perusing the mostly empty shelves. No mayo. For about five seconds, I briefly considered the possibility that someone had broken into my apartment for the sole purpose of stealing my mayonnaise; a brief checked showed me that, yes, my TV and video games and whatnot were still there so that notion was beyond absurd. I turned and looked again and, it's a miracle! My mayo was sitting on the counter next to the mustard. I'd already gotten it out of the fridge and hadn't really noticed because when I talk to myself I tend to not pay attention to what I'm doing. This is how I've occasionally gotten lost on the way to the bathroom or driven to the wrong campus on my way to work.
No one, on hearing that story, would find it reasonable to ask, "But how did you know the mayonnaise wasn't in the refrigerator? Just because light failed to reflect off of a jar of mayonnaise and impinge on the cones and rods on the back of your eye doesn't mean that there wasn't any mayo in the fridge! Absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence, after all!" Unless, of course, they were philosophy majors. Twenty-year-old jackasses love to say things like that, mostly because they don't know how ignorant they are.
But the absence of evidence for something can be evidence against it. When you're talking about the abstruse realm of particle physics, in which you have to accelerate things nearly to the speed of light and smash them against each other and pick up the pieces (a method unfairly compared to hitting a watch with a hammer to learn how it's put together), not finding a particle doesn't mean it doesn't exist; unless you designed your experiment such that it would be unreasonable for it not to show up. When you're talking about a jar of mayo, arguing that just because you didn't see it doesn't mean it wasn't there is just fatuous. I didn't see it in the fridge because it was on the counter.
So, what about god? I've already discussed why I dismiss the purported evidence (miracles, scripture, revelation) in favor of the god hypothesis. Most everyone who says they don't believe in god state that they lack belief because they haven't seen any evidence. It bothers me that they then go on to refuse to say the believe there is no god (the two aren't equivalent positions) because they claim science can't talk about god. Then why the hell don't you believe? Agnosticism because of a lack of evidence is a scientific position; it's the default scientific position. Why, then, do I go on from there to say that I believe there is no god? What is my evidence in the other direction? I feel that the god hypothesis, if true, would have a measurable impact on observable reality and the lack of that evidence is a compelling argument against the hypothesis.
For example, scripture. I've already stated that if there were a deity, there wouldn't be many mutually exclusive scriptures. There would be one, it would be definitely accurate and demonstrable true. It wouldn't contradict itself and there would be no pretenders purporting to give an alternative truth. A deity so moved as to provide a scripture would also be able to censor false competitors. The celestial dictatorship would have no trouble silencing opposition or critics.
Revelation, miracles, and scriptures, in the face of a true god hypothesis, would be so evidently and clearly true that there wouldn't be the need for the fatuous notion of faith. It wouldn't be received truth but perceived truth. I reject the god hypothesis as firmly as I reject the invisible jar of mayonnaise and as I immediately rejected the notion that someone had broken in and stolen my mayonnaise; the lack of evidence was obviously evidence against the hypothesis. I don't believe, at all, because when the universe is presented with the question, "Is there a god?" the response is a deafening silence.
Next: What would it take for me to believe?
I've said before that absence of evidence is evidence of absence, but I want to expand on that a bit.
Once I decided to make a sandwich. As is my wont, I mused quietly to myself whilst I pulled items off of shelves and out of the fridge. I grabbed my bread, my turkey, my cheese, my mustard, and where the fuck is my mayonnaise? My mayo's gone! I just bought some at the grocery store yesterday! I checked the fridge again. No mayo. I checked a third time, carefully perusing the mostly empty shelves. No mayo. For about five seconds, I briefly considered the possibility that someone had broken into my apartment for the sole purpose of stealing my mayonnaise; a brief checked showed me that, yes, my TV and video games and whatnot were still there so that notion was beyond absurd. I turned and looked again and, it's a miracle! My mayo was sitting on the counter next to the mustard. I'd already gotten it out of the fridge and hadn't really noticed because when I talk to myself I tend to not pay attention to what I'm doing. This is how I've occasionally gotten lost on the way to the bathroom or driven to the wrong campus on my way to work.
No one, on hearing that story, would find it reasonable to ask, "But how did you know the mayonnaise wasn't in the refrigerator? Just because light failed to reflect off of a jar of mayonnaise and impinge on the cones and rods on the back of your eye doesn't mean that there wasn't any mayo in the fridge! Absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence, after all!" Unless, of course, they were philosophy majors. Twenty-year-old jackasses love to say things like that, mostly because they don't know how ignorant they are.
But the absence of evidence for something can be evidence against it. When you're talking about the abstruse realm of particle physics, in which you have to accelerate things nearly to the speed of light and smash them against each other and pick up the pieces (a method unfairly compared to hitting a watch with a hammer to learn how it's put together), not finding a particle doesn't mean it doesn't exist; unless you designed your experiment such that it would be unreasonable for it not to show up. When you're talking about a jar of mayo, arguing that just because you didn't see it doesn't mean it wasn't there is just fatuous. I didn't see it in the fridge because it was on the counter.
So, what about god? I've already discussed why I dismiss the purported evidence (miracles, scripture, revelation) in favor of the god hypothesis. Most everyone who says they don't believe in god state that they lack belief because they haven't seen any evidence. It bothers me that they then go on to refuse to say the believe there is no god (the two aren't equivalent positions) because they claim science can't talk about god. Then why the hell don't you believe? Agnosticism because of a lack of evidence is a scientific position; it's the default scientific position. Why, then, do I go on from there to say that I believe there is no god? What is my evidence in the other direction? I feel that the god hypothesis, if true, would have a measurable impact on observable reality and the lack of that evidence is a compelling argument against the hypothesis.
For example, scripture. I've already stated that if there were a deity, there wouldn't be many mutually exclusive scriptures. There would be one, it would be definitely accurate and demonstrable true. It wouldn't contradict itself and there would be no pretenders purporting to give an alternative truth. A deity so moved as to provide a scripture would also be able to censor false competitors. The celestial dictatorship would have no trouble silencing opposition or critics.
Revelation, miracles, and scriptures, in the face of a true god hypothesis, would be so evidently and clearly true that there wouldn't be the need for the fatuous notion of faith. It wouldn't be received truth but perceived truth. I reject the god hypothesis as firmly as I reject the invisible jar of mayonnaise and as I immediately rejected the notion that someone had broken in and stolen my mayonnaise; the lack of evidence was obviously evidence against the hypothesis. I don't believe, at all, because when the universe is presented with the question, "Is there a god?" the response is a deafening silence.
Next: What would it take for me to believe?
Sunday, December 18, 2011
Is There Proof for God?
A friend asked me what I would view as evidence for God and it's a question I have to take seriously. I view the God hypothesis as falling within the realm of science. I don't view much of anything as falling outside the realm of science; she brought up the example of love as an unprovable, which I contend it isn't. Just because something cannot be perceived directly doesn't mean it doesn't leave evidence behind. I can't see UV light, but I can still get a sunburn. I can't see my friend's love, but I can see him doing lots of really stupid things and generally acting like a soppy asshole saying things like, "Don't you just love love, man?"
So, what would I view as evidence for the existence of a deity or other supernatural element? At this point: Nothing. There is no evidence for anything supernatural, that hypothesis has been rigorously tested for the last 200 thousand years by every human agent produced on this planet and the result has always been an astounding null. Every single supposedly supernatural phenomenon has been proven to have a natural causative agent, to in fact not have occurred, or to be a fraud practiced upon a credulous public.
First, why do I dismiss all the supposed evidence? As I understand, most supernatural claims come in three forms: anecdotes and miracles, revelation, and scripture.
I separate out anecdotes because I'm referring to things akin to cryptozoology. That is to say, big foot and the creature of Loch Ness. I lump these in with the supernatural because they have all the same foundations in personal experience and credulity and because skepticism deals with them in the same way. Amazing creatures still wait to be found and studied; living fossils are encountered all the time and extreme and distant environments are full of wonderful and surprising things that we don't know about because they're really damn hard to get to. Loch Ness and the mountains of the Pacific Northwest are neither distant nor extreme. To give one example: the Loch Ness monster and similar aquatic sightings is best attributed not to an illusive large animal, but to common smaller animals. Otters and other aquatic mammals behave in fashions that cause an optical illusion of a single large creature. The effect is said to be arresting and almost impossible to dismiss from a distance (basically, they like to play follow the leader). These and other types of things (when not fraudulent) are best ascribed to honest but mistaken reports of less fantastical phenomena. In other words, there is no yeti, no alien abductions, and no Nessie.
Miracles are of a category with the anecdotes of cryptozoology. When they're not outright frauds for deliberate profit, or a portion of the brain going hyperactive and seeing things that aren't there, like the face on Mars, they're either easily proven to be accidents and natural phenomena or completely impossible to track down. For example, the healing power of Lourdes is 67 (according to the Catholic Church) out of more than 200 million, and none of those are self-evidently miraculous, like the regrowth of a severed limb. As with most miracles, it's always in the realm of the nebulous, the distant, and the (at best) unimpeachable. In the face of better explanations (many diseases go into remission), frauds, and simple absence, why believe any miracle has occurred?
Perhaps you feel yourself to have been witness to or beneficiary of a miracle. Perhaps something astonishingly unlikely happened that you witnessed. This is not a miracle. Everything is coincidental. Any two things that happen at the same time, any two incidents, are co-incident. Some may appear to have connection, as when you are thinking of your grandmother as she calls; but you forget the thousands of people you think of who don't call. Everything is unlikely. A pin falling on any particular spot in a square meter of space is unlikely, it is one in five hundred thousand. And yet, it will land somewhere. No matter how unlikely, unlikely things happen. They are not miracles. Only if something is genuinely impossible could you call it miraculous. Even then... it probably isn't. What is not yet explained need not be called inexplicable. Not yet having an explanation doesn't mean it won't be explained in the future.
As an aside, part of what spurred this is a rash of other blogs considering this question. What it boils down to is this: if you witnessed a miracle, who's to say it's your god doing it? Even if A two hundred foot tall statue of Yeshua Bin Yusef appeared, floating two feet off the ground, what makes you think it's Yahweh rather than space aliens? Or Loki tricking everyone because that's what he does? Or Coyote just having fun with the pale-faced devils? In other words, it's bad enough that miracles either simply can't be tracked down or have better explanations such as fraud, but they aren't even proof of anything. A miracle doesn't explain anything. "Miracle" is as much a non-explanation as the god hypothesis. It enshrines ignorance in protective "DO NOT TOUCH" bubble. An explanation fits all the available data and makes predictions for the future. Miracle just says "Something happened and I don't know why." So does the god hypothesis. And what predictions can these non-explanations make? That tomorrow something else might happen that you will also fail to understand? That may be true, but it certainly doesn't enlighten.
Revelation might appear to be harder to dismiss. After all, can one prove that a supernatural entity didn't put voices in someone's head (a non-psychotic someone)? I think the argument can be made. Pop someone in a machine and scan his brain while asking him about morality. Ask him about the morality of others and a part of his brain lights up. Ask him about his own morality and a different part of his brain lights up. Ask him about the morality of his god and the same part of his brain lights up. A cynic is unsurprised to learn that a person claims his god's morality matches his own. The cynic is less surprised to learn that it's neurological in nature. It's not just god's morality, either, everything about god may be egocentric. And it's not just the penitent's relationship with his deity, but the very basis for believing an experience is numinous, since science has identified "the god spot", AKA the part of the brain that lights up during revelation. It's located in the temporal lobe, which is responsible for, among other things, processing speech and vision. In other words, you think you're hearing and seeing things that aren't there. Why ascribe this to a deity who happens to match your own opinions point for point when you can instead ascribe it to a misfiring of a portion of your brain and then an attribution of your own feelings to a wholly internal experience?
Scripture is perhaps the most pathetic of all possible evidence because it's the only so-called evidence that's actually evident. They contain factual errors and contradictions and the most horrific barbarity. If they were actually inspired by something more than human, you wouldn't expect errors or contradictions. If they were actually morally superior, you wouldn't expect barbarity. You would expect a morally superior being to say that rape is bad. The Christian bible, for example, never condemns rape. It condemns vandalism in the form of sex with someone else's property (daughter, wife), but not rape, because the Chrsitian bible never considers her consent an issue. After all, property can't consent, nor can it withhold consent; consent belongs to her owner, whether that be father or husband or eldest living male relative. That's why spousal rape wasn't legally a thing until the last decade or so. Now it is, because we're morally superior to the Christian bible. Rape, slavery, genocide, these are all things not merely condoned by the Christian bible, but all three were encouraged by the Christian bible against conquered peoples. Well, not "people". As far as the Christian bible and other holy texts are concerned, foreigners, heathens, and apostates are like women: not human, but property (at best) or dead (at worst).
The argument that a supposed miracle could be, rather than a sign from your deity, a trick from someone else could equally apply to these texts. While this diminishes some of the strength of the argument that the texts are wholly human creations, it also weakens the argument that any is divinely inspired or created. However, if you're arguing not for generic multiple supernatural entities with superior knowledge (from which true morality rises) but rather for a single entity, the multiplicity of holy texts is particularly damning. If there were one entity capable of inspiring a holy document, there would be only one document. When it comes to a cosmic dictatorship, there can be no more effective censor. One god, one book. No god, many books.
In the end, the holy texts are at best not evidence at all or evidence of maltheism (being the work of a trickster). Miracles are either nothing at all (being the unfortunate result of human predilection for seeing patterns), another bit of maltheism, or evidence of nothing in particular because, being a non-explanation, it cannot be connected to anything in particular. And again revelation is again no evidence at all or et cetera.
So there is at best absolutely no evidence for the god hypothesis. Next up, Absence of Evidence is Evidence of Absence.
So, what would I view as evidence for the existence of a deity or other supernatural element? At this point: Nothing. There is no evidence for anything supernatural, that hypothesis has been rigorously tested for the last 200 thousand years by every human agent produced on this planet and the result has always been an astounding null. Every single supposedly supernatural phenomenon has been proven to have a natural causative agent, to in fact not have occurred, or to be a fraud practiced upon a credulous public.
First, why do I dismiss all the supposed evidence? As I understand, most supernatural claims come in three forms: anecdotes and miracles, revelation, and scripture.
I separate out anecdotes because I'm referring to things akin to cryptozoology. That is to say, big foot and the creature of Loch Ness. I lump these in with the supernatural because they have all the same foundations in personal experience and credulity and because skepticism deals with them in the same way. Amazing creatures still wait to be found and studied; living fossils are encountered all the time and extreme and distant environments are full of wonderful and surprising things that we don't know about because they're really damn hard to get to. Loch Ness and the mountains of the Pacific Northwest are neither distant nor extreme. To give one example: the Loch Ness monster and similar aquatic sightings is best attributed not to an illusive large animal, but to common smaller animals. Otters and other aquatic mammals behave in fashions that cause an optical illusion of a single large creature. The effect is said to be arresting and almost impossible to dismiss from a distance (basically, they like to play follow the leader). These and other types of things (when not fraudulent) are best ascribed to honest but mistaken reports of less fantastical phenomena. In other words, there is no yeti, no alien abductions, and no Nessie.
Miracles are of a category with the anecdotes of cryptozoology. When they're not outright frauds for deliberate profit, or a portion of the brain going hyperactive and seeing things that aren't there, like the face on Mars, they're either easily proven to be accidents and natural phenomena or completely impossible to track down. For example, the healing power of Lourdes is 67 (according to the Catholic Church) out of more than 200 million, and none of those are self-evidently miraculous, like the regrowth of a severed limb. As with most miracles, it's always in the realm of the nebulous, the distant, and the (at best) unimpeachable. In the face of better explanations (many diseases go into remission), frauds, and simple absence, why believe any miracle has occurred?
Perhaps you feel yourself to have been witness to or beneficiary of a miracle. Perhaps something astonishingly unlikely happened that you witnessed. This is not a miracle. Everything is coincidental. Any two things that happen at the same time, any two incidents, are co-incident. Some may appear to have connection, as when you are thinking of your grandmother as she calls; but you forget the thousands of people you think of who don't call. Everything is unlikely. A pin falling on any particular spot in a square meter of space is unlikely, it is one in five hundred thousand. And yet, it will land somewhere. No matter how unlikely, unlikely things happen. They are not miracles. Only if something is genuinely impossible could you call it miraculous. Even then... it probably isn't. What is not yet explained need not be called inexplicable. Not yet having an explanation doesn't mean it won't be explained in the future.
As an aside, part of what spurred this is a rash of other blogs considering this question. What it boils down to is this: if you witnessed a miracle, who's to say it's your god doing it? Even if A two hundred foot tall statue of Yeshua Bin Yusef appeared, floating two feet off the ground, what makes you think it's Yahweh rather than space aliens? Or Loki tricking everyone because that's what he does? Or Coyote just having fun with the pale-faced devils? In other words, it's bad enough that miracles either simply can't be tracked down or have better explanations such as fraud, but they aren't even proof of anything. A miracle doesn't explain anything. "Miracle" is as much a non-explanation as the god hypothesis. It enshrines ignorance in protective "DO NOT TOUCH" bubble. An explanation fits all the available data and makes predictions for the future. Miracle just says "Something happened and I don't know why." So does the god hypothesis. And what predictions can these non-explanations make? That tomorrow something else might happen that you will also fail to understand? That may be true, but it certainly doesn't enlighten.
Revelation might appear to be harder to dismiss. After all, can one prove that a supernatural entity didn't put voices in someone's head (a non-psychotic someone)? I think the argument can be made. Pop someone in a machine and scan his brain while asking him about morality. Ask him about the morality of others and a part of his brain lights up. Ask him about his own morality and a different part of his brain lights up. Ask him about the morality of his god and the same part of his brain lights up. A cynic is unsurprised to learn that a person claims his god's morality matches his own. The cynic is less surprised to learn that it's neurological in nature. It's not just god's morality, either, everything about god may be egocentric. And it's not just the penitent's relationship with his deity, but the very basis for believing an experience is numinous, since science has identified "the god spot", AKA the part of the brain that lights up during revelation. It's located in the temporal lobe, which is responsible for, among other things, processing speech and vision. In other words, you think you're hearing and seeing things that aren't there. Why ascribe this to a deity who happens to match your own opinions point for point when you can instead ascribe it to a misfiring of a portion of your brain and then an attribution of your own feelings to a wholly internal experience?
Scripture is perhaps the most pathetic of all possible evidence because it's the only so-called evidence that's actually evident. They contain factual errors and contradictions and the most horrific barbarity. If they were actually inspired by something more than human, you wouldn't expect errors or contradictions. If they were actually morally superior, you wouldn't expect barbarity. You would expect a morally superior being to say that rape is bad. The Christian bible, for example, never condemns rape. It condemns vandalism in the form of sex with someone else's property (daughter, wife), but not rape, because the Chrsitian bible never considers her consent an issue. After all, property can't consent, nor can it withhold consent; consent belongs to her owner, whether that be father or husband or eldest living male relative. That's why spousal rape wasn't legally a thing until the last decade or so. Now it is, because we're morally superior to the Christian bible. Rape, slavery, genocide, these are all things not merely condoned by the Christian bible, but all three were encouraged by the Christian bible against conquered peoples. Well, not "people". As far as the Christian bible and other holy texts are concerned, foreigners, heathens, and apostates are like women: not human, but property (at best) or dead (at worst).
The argument that a supposed miracle could be, rather than a sign from your deity, a trick from someone else could equally apply to these texts. While this diminishes some of the strength of the argument that the texts are wholly human creations, it also weakens the argument that any is divinely inspired or created. However, if you're arguing not for generic multiple supernatural entities with superior knowledge (from which true morality rises) but rather for a single entity, the multiplicity of holy texts is particularly damning. If there were one entity capable of inspiring a holy document, there would be only one document. When it comes to a cosmic dictatorship, there can be no more effective censor. One god, one book. No god, many books.
In the end, the holy texts are at best not evidence at all or evidence of maltheism (being the work of a trickster). Miracles are either nothing at all (being the unfortunate result of human predilection for seeing patterns), another bit of maltheism, or evidence of nothing in particular because, being a non-explanation, it cannot be connected to anything in particular. And again revelation is again no evidence at all or et cetera.
So there is at best absolutely no evidence for the god hypothesis. Next up, Absence of Evidence is Evidence of Absence.
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