Why everyone should be an atheist

We start from scratch, from the perspective that we will give both possibilities, atheistic naturalism and theistic supernaturalism, equal opportunity to be adopted.  We can define supernaturalism as immaterial willful agency and/or immaterial mind, or god.  We know nothing and we are born into a universe.  What would we experience in a universe where we would be properly justified to be theists, and how does that universe compare to our universe?

We need an unbiased criteria to decide.  The bottom line is practical success versus failure, so that is the criteria. Success is whatever works to meet our needs and desires.  We need things like food, health, shelter, we desire things like travel and knowledge.  So what delivers our needs and desires?

The answer could be divine revelation.  By studying the holy texts, adopting the specified beliefs, worshipping, praying, following the rituals, obeying the laws, as revealed to us by deity, we receive food, health, shelter, transportation, and knowledge.  In other words, by practicing methodological supernaturalism we are successful.  Given a choice of what to believe, we follow the available evidences and become theists because the universe evidences supernaturalism.  However, in our universe, agriculture, medicine, housing, and transportation are human built and maintained products of human acquired knowledge, our knowledge is built exclusively on methodological naturalism, and the content of our knowledge is also naturalistic.  Therefore, when we follow the available evidences we become atheists because our universe evidences naturalism.

Some theists will probably object to this argument for atheism by saying it is bad theology.  Should we respect this objection?  If we are committed to holding beliefs that accurately model how the universe works then we should disregard this objection.  Success, not self-referencing ideology, must be our guide because success is the most plausibly unbiased criteria available to us, it is the way that our universe itself communicates to us regarding how our universe works.  Lacking omniscience we lack certainty that our conclusion is correct.  But such unavoidable uncertainty makes no difference.  We are rationally obliged to adopt the conclusion favored by a pervasive and unchallenged track record of success.

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Memorial service in Boston excludes atheists

The memorial service for the victims of the Boston marathon bombings began on April 18 at 11:00 AM ET in the Cathedral of the Holy Cross. Boston Mayor Tom Menino, Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick, and clergy representing different religious denominations across the city took to the podium. President Barack Obama offered the final reflection of the service and Cardinal Sean O'Malley concluded with a closing blessing. The memorial was broadcast nationally on television, the radio, and the Internet. The published "interfaith" program features the seal of the state of Massachusetts. The state sponsored service was mostly conducted by and for theists, with most speakers making obligatory references to their God. A notable exception was Governor Deval Patrick, whose speech was inclusive. It could have been more inclusive.

Celeste Corcoran of Lowell, Massachusetts, who lost both her legs at the knees in one of the bomb blasts and her 18 year-old daughter, Sydney, who suffered severe injuries as a result of being hit by shrapnel, were part of the humanist community in the greater Boston area. According to Greg Epstein, the Humanist Chaplain at Harvard University, both the White House and the staff of the Governor's office who were organizing the event were contacted in advance repeatedly with requests to include the non-theist community in the memorial service. "All they had to do was say one word, or allow one official guest, and they didn't", said Epstein, "...we [the Secular Coalition for America] contacted them [the governor's staff] every hour on the hour".

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Herman Philipse's critique of religious reason

In his book God in the Age of Science? A critique of religious reason, Herman Philipse tackles a question at the core of philosophy of religion: Are there good reasons for thinking that some specific subset of religious beliefs makes sense and is true? In particular, is the defense of bare theism by philosopher Richard Swinburne, which relies on Bayesian estimates of probabilities, successful? This book is too academic, and too expensive, to become a best seller, but the overall argument is easy to follow and understand.

Philipse reaches three conclusions that support atheism. First, traditional notions of gods are self-contradictory and dependent on analogy and metaphor, therefore it is an ill-defined concept. Second, theism lacks predictive power concerning existing evidence, undermining the integrity of Bayesian arguments deployed in its defense. Furthermore, the truth of theism is improbable given the scientific background knowledge concerning the dependence of mental life on brain processes. Third, the empirical arguments against theism outweigh the arguments that support, so insofar as Bayesian cumulative case strategy does work we should conclude that atheism is more probable than theism.

Philipse categorizes arguments for theism according to which of three possible pairs of opposing strategic decisions are utilized. We start with deciding whether theism is a cognitive, and thus a factual, claim. If it is non-cognitive, an approach favored by people such as Wittgenstein, then it isn't asserting anything of substance that merits being taken seriously, so that is a self-defeating strategy for defending theism.

Having selected the cognitive option, we next need to decide whether or not reasons and evidences are needed to justify theism. Alvin Plantinga is cited as an example of someone who defends the notion that no further reasons are needed for (his particular) religious beliefs to be warranted. However, theism, like all other existence beliefs, is reasonable or warranted only when there are good positive reasons to justify the conclusion that the belief is true.

Having concluded that we need good positive reasons to justify theism, our final decision is selecting the methods that provide us with good positive reasons. Either we employ the same methods that we generally rely on when investigating a factual hypothesis of existence, or we don't. If we opt to employ different methods then a public and persuasive validation is lacking, resulting in a credibility problem for theism. The outcome for theism is just as bad when we turn to the reliable methods of skeptical empiricism which refute and disconfirm theism. Page 343 summarizes the conclusion in one sentence: "Either religious believers have not succeeded in providing a meaningful characterization of their god(s), or the existence of this god or these gods is improbable given our scientific and scholarly background knowledge."

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Herman Philipse on conflict between science and religion

The Center for Inquiry of Low Countries held a conference on secularism in May 2008 in the Netherlands. One of the speakers was Herman Philipse. Herman Philipse is a professor of philosophy at Utrecht University. In this video we can see him briefly arguing for the thesis that religion as a source of knowledge is a failure and therefore we should all be atheists. Is there a warfare between science and religion?

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Life ends frequently, but began maybe only once

At this year's Conservative Political Action Conference, Marco Rubio expressed a commonly held view among conservative Republicans that secularists are being inconsistent and ideological, rather than factual, regarding abortion: "The people who are actually closed-minded in American politics are the people who love to preach about the certainty of science with regards to our climate but ignore the absolute fact that science has proven that life begins at conception..." This is completely false, and it is a good example of why secularists tend to think that many of the conservatives religionists in the Republican party are not particularly intelligent and that their leadership, pandering to their base, are not particularly honest. And this is just one of many such examples.

When asked for the age of the universe, a very simple question with a single, straightforward correct answer (13.77 billion years ± 0.059 billion years), Marco Rubio (like Rand Paul and other Republicans seeking a national audience) punted, saying: “I’m not a scientist, man. I can tell you what recorded history says, I can tell you what the Bible says, but I think that’s a dispute amongst theologians”. What the bible says? A dispute among theologians? The age of the universe is an astrophysics question. Seeking the answer from the bible or from theologians is just as illogical and unreasonable as reading the bible, instead of the manufacturer's manuals, for instructions to maintain an aircraft, or hiring theologians instead of pilots to fly an aircraft.

So when does life begin? It may help to clarify this question by first addressing the related question "when does life end?". Life ends frequently, everytime an individual living creature dies. Everytime a bacteria, or an archaea, or a dust mite dies, everytime a single sperm or an unfertilized egg dies, a life ends.

It may seem intuitively logical for some people, given that we all experience our lives as individuals, to think that human life begins as human life ends, with each individual. But this intuition is wrong. Science tells us that life successfully began at least once, at least three billion years ago. Life may also have independently begun elsewhere in the universe, it may have started unsuccessfully multiple times within our solar system, we don't know. What we do know is that since life successfully got started billions of years ago, it has been continuous, and all life on earth may have a single, last common ancestor.

What about the role of conception? Conception is one of multiple requisite milestones in the continuous cycle of human life. Much of life reproduces without a conception event. Presumably Marco Rubio knows this, and he was talking only about human life. But human life evolved from single celled life, and a conception event doesn't change the overall context that all life, including individual human life, participates in the same continuous cycle of life.

So no, we secularists, or we liberals, who favor legalized abortion, are not being inconsistent, are not ideologically ignoring the evidence, are not being hypocritical, are not guilty of a double standard, for refusing to acknowledge the so called "absolute fact that science has proven that life begins at conception". Life is an ongoing, continuous process, it does not begin at conception. There is no scientifically established fact that human life begins at conception. It is the conservatives who keep asserting otherwise in the name of science that are being anti-scientific. They are the ones, after all, who advocate obtaining answers to scientific questions by reading the bible and asking theologians.

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So help me God "history" from nothing

People sometimes ask me who was behind the false claim that George Washington appended "so help me god" to his first presidential inaugural oath. Was it David Barton? The answer is that there were multiple people who shared responsibility for promoting this fiction into a fact. It happened over time with a number of milestones.

It began with four biographies of George Washington. The first biography to be published was written by the Reverend Rufus Wilmot Griswold. Published in 1854, 65 years after the inauguration, it is titled "The republican court; or, American society in the days of Washington". This book mixes historical fact with apocryphal legend until one is indistinguishable from the other. His friends knew Griswold to be a consummate liar and had a saying: "Is that a Griswold or a fact?" As a literary editor he often pirated entire works even while advocating for international copyright law that would have rendered his own actions illegal. He wrote a short biography of Edgar Allan Poe that included letters which he had forged for the purpose of slandering the deceased poet. If there is a dishonest David Barton like character in this tale then it is Griswold.

If Griswold's book was the only book claiming that George Washington said "so help me God" then it is doubtful that many 20th century historians would be asserting this also. Enter Washington Irving, the first American to earn a living from writing popular books of fiction and a popular biography of Christopher Columbus. His final book was a five volume biography of George Washington published in 1857. There are no citations and it doesn't comply with modern standards of scholarship, but it is still read. Of the four George Washington biographies, this is the one that was most influential in promoting the falsehood about George Washington's inaugural. Washington Irving was also the only one of the four authors who was alive during the inauguration, and he may have been in the crowd outside of Federal Hall during the inaugural ceremony. At that time he was six years old. Griswold places him at the corner of New street and Wall street. Washington Irving never claimed to have heard the oath recitation. For his biography he copied someone else's first hand account of the inaugural ceremony with some modifications. One of those modifications was to depict George Washington saying "so help me God" immediately after the oath recitation.

John Frederick Schroeder was an Episcopalian minister whose biography of George Washington, titled Life and Times of Washington, was also published in 1857. He died before the book was published, and Griswold had a hand in completing Schroeder's book. Memoirs of Washington, by Caroline Matilda Kirkland, was also published in 1857. Kirkland mimicked Griswold and wrote, "..., he [Washington] was observed to say audibly, 'I swear!' adding, with closed eyes, as if to collect all his being into the momentous act - 'So help me God!'. Schroeder and Kirkland mingled with Griswold and Irving in the same New York city literary circles. Afterwards, many books and articles continued to claim that George Washington said SHMG.

The next milestone is the civil war. To distinguish themselves from the Unionists whose federal oath of office was godless, the Confederates advertised that Jefferson Davis included those four words when reciting his oath in 1861. The Unionists, not wanting to be outflanked by the Confederates, included this phrase in their revised federal oath of office in 1862. This phrase remains in the federal oath of office to this day.

The third milestone occurred with the assassination of president James Garfield. Chief Justice Waite led Vice President Chester Arthur in reciting the words of the presidential oath. After the oath recitation was completed, the new president, on his own initiative (without prompting from the Chief Justice), added "I will, so help me God", copying the words from the oath he had taken months earlier when being sworn in as Vice President. This was widely publicized in the newspapers.

The fourth milestone was the loudspeaker and the radio. Loudspeakers were introduced in 1921, radios in 1925. After radio became a home appliance, the inaugural oath could be heard by people across the country, whereas before only a few privileged people standing close to where the president stood could overhear the oath. By now, many people had read one of the many accounts of George Washington's first inauguration claiming that he completed his oath recitation with an appeal for divine help. Every Chief Justice during every presidential inaugural since 1933 has, while leading the oath recitation, prompted the president to say "so help me God". This is odd given that these four words are not part of the oath and the president therefore has no obligation to say them.

What appears to be happening is this: Many Americans, possibly a majority, don't know that the constitutional oath for the president is godless (and that the original federal oath of office was also godless). Some people would be upset to learn that the constitution was written to accommodate an atheist being elected president. Some people would be even more upset if they actually witnessed a president elect not saying those four words upon becoming president. To avoid disabusing these people of their false conviction that the oath is monotheistic, or of their prejudice that an oath must be monotheistic to be fully legitimate, the Chief Justice always prompts for these four words while administering the oath to the president elect.

The fifth milestone was another George Washington biography. George Washington, a Biography, by Douglas Southhall Freeman, was published in multiple volumes from 1948-1957. Volume 6, Ch. Viii, "Inauguration Day is not without Clouds, April 30, 1789", page 192 has a paragraph describing the oath recitation that depicts George Washington completing his oath with the four word appeal for divine help. Unlike the first four biographies, this is a scholarly book written by a highly respected historian. Accordingly, there is a citation to a primary source document, in this case a letter written by Tobias Lear, George Washington's personal secretary, to George Augustine Washington, George Washington's nephew who was at that time managing the affairs of Washington's Mt. Vernon Estate. This letter was in the rare documents vault at Duke University. The first three pages of this letter were published in 1987 in "The Papers of George Washington, Presidential Series," vol 2:154-155. But it was page four of this letter that described the oath recitation and apparently no one had previously tried to verify that this letter actually supported the claim that George Washington appended those four words. Here it is, take a look: Lear's letter of May 3, 1789 to George A. Washington. No SHMG.

More recently, another false historical fact was layered upon the first one. This is the additional claim that every president followed the precedent set by George Washington and likewise appended "so help me God" to their inaugural oath of office. No less than the Senate Historical Office itself, despite our complaints, persisted for years in promoting this whopper falsehood with a video titled "so help me God" on the Joint Congressional Committee on Inaugural Affairs website. David Barton was probably among those endorsing this false "fact".

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Religious practices are rooted in doctrine

In his March 1 article in the Huffington Post titled "Faith Isn't Irrational, But Beliefs May Be", Peter Georgescu, Chairman Emeritus of Young & Rubicam Inc., citing Karen Armstrong's arguments, defends Christianity in particular, and religion more generally, as follows: "Belief in Christ has little to do with intellectual agreement on some ostensibly factual truth about God." Similarly he says "The major Western monotheisms all concerned themselves primarily with practice, the doing of religion, rather than doctrine. " For him "A good Jew observed the Sabbath and remained committed to the Law and the ritual year; and a good Christian embodied the Sermon on the Mount by caring for the marginalized, promoting compassion and peace, and sharing God's love." It should be impossible for intelligent people to buy into this argument for a number of reasons.

First of all, contrary to what Armstrong, or in this case Georgescu, asserts, religion has historically been doctrinal. People throughout history killed each other in wars fought over conflicting religious beliefs because they took the competing factual claims of their religions literally. The book of John, for example, self-claims to be a factual, eyewitness, historical account of real, historical events by one of the actual disciples (21:24 This is the disciple who testifies about these things and has written these things, and we know that his testimony is true). The Quran and the Hebrew Tanakh, like the Christian bible, are preoccupied with asserting factual, historical events, complete with the names of real locations, governments, and people. Throughout history even the most intellectual religionists claimed to extract divinely revealed facts about how the world works from their holy book. For instance, Thomas Aquinas believed that God created the body of the first human, Adam, from the "slime of the Earth" and God created the first female, Eve, immediately thereafter using Adam's rib. Similarly, he believed that God produced the fish and birds from water. Thomas Aquinas cited the book of Genesis as the source for this factual knowledge.

Secondly, the practice of religion is itself rooted in religious factual claims. It is only on the basis of endorsing the particular factual claims of a religion as being true that people can credibly justify a commitment to observing the commandments and the resulting practices of the religion on an ongoing, daily basis. According to Christianity, for example, the historical, factual, resurrection of Jesus Christ opens the way to eternal life and glory for those who believe. Anyone who claims that the resurrection is fictional is contradicting a basic premise of Christianity that is needed to justify the practice of Christianity. The religious practices of Judaism and Islam are similarly justified by, and thus dependent upon, their distinct factual claims.

Atheists don't keep kosher and observe the Sabbath because there is no proper justification for doing so. We recognize the Sermon on the Mount is seriously flawed, giving some bad advice, contradicting itself, a hodgepodge lacking any underlying theme. It characterizes poverty as a virtue and wealth as a vice, asserts that there is an afterlife, calls for lending on request without regard to need or likelihood of repayment, and the like, which are rationally unjustified. A faith that obscures or denies these flaws is a faith in conflict with the empirical evidences regarding what is true and false.

Thirdly, many of the practices of different religions are mutually compatible, while the factual beliefs associated with those practices are often mutually incompatible. Accordingly, if religion was about practice only, and not about beliefs, then it follows that there is a lack of good justification for segregating practices by religion. If religious people frequently combined the practices that originated from different religious beliefs then we would at least have some evidence that the incompatible factual claims unique to each religion don't matter to them. Yet Christians rarely commit to the religious practices of Jews and Muslims, Jews don't commit to the practices of Christians and Muslims, and Muslims don't commit to the practices of Jews and Christians.

Reading arguments like those of Karen Armstrong, and of her fans, that religion has nothing to do with beliefs regarding what is factually true or false is like reading an argument that joining a political party is properly motivated only by that political party's practices, which are devoid of factual content, and that the political party's policy statements and orientations are not rooted in any claims about what is factually true or false. That otherwise intelligent people publicly make such a superficial argument is a testament to how desperate some people are to defend religion and of the weakness of the mindless religious identity that they cling to. Liberal religionists tend to deny that their beliefs are rooted in any facts about how the world works, conservative religionists prefer to buttress their beliefs with facts about how the world works that are counter-evidenced. Underlying this disparity in approach is a single common mistake: They are both failing to take an evidence first approach to justifying their beliefs.

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A philosopher who promotes critical thinking

Here is an audio excerpt of the "Critical Thinking Crash Course" presentation by Dr. Peter Boghossian to the Agnostics and Atheists at Intel on May 11 of last year. Peter Boghossian's blunt criticism of faith based reasoning while working as a professor of philosophy at Portland State University has sometimes been deemed to be too judgmental to comply with academic norms by some of his peers at PSU. But Peter Boghossian recognizes that knowledge cannot be divorced from judgement and he is not deterred. He presses on with his "street epistmology" of trying to encourage critical thinking among his students and any audience that will finance his travel ($1500).

“I’m advocating that there are certain processes that will more closely help [people] to align their beliefs with reality; faith is an unreliable process. It will not help you come to reliable conclusions. It will decrease the possibility you come to that,” Boghossian says. He says of his critics: "“Here’s what they don’t understand: Ideas do not require dignity. People require dignity. There’s a difference between attacking an idea and attacking a person. Attacks on faith are not like attacks on race." We need more advocates of critical thinking like Peter Boghossian. Critical thinking requires restraint and discipline, it is about applying constraints. But many people prefer to be free of such constraints and just believe according to their fancy, so it needs to be taught and learned.

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Morality not dependent on behavior being unpredictable

In the monthly WASH bulletin there is another article on free will titled "Free will and Hell" written by he coordinator of the Baltimore chapter. As before, it describes Daniel Dennett's perspectives as he discussed them at John Hopkins University. I will spare the readers a discussion of every one of my disagreements and agreements with that article in detail. Instead I will briefly comment on the start of the third paragraph which follows:

"A concept of free will is necessary for morality because no individual can predict exactly what another will do. Many human actions are based on internal motivations or patterns of neurons that can't be observed. The actions appear random to anyone who doesn't know the person. The behavior is not free in the sense of being undetermined by physical causes, but it is free in the sense of being unpredictable by a casual observer."

We are free provided that we are not compelled to act according to someone else's dictate. This distinction between self-originating action and actions that are intended to comply with a behavioral demand of someone else is important. Even to the extent our behavior may be predictable it is still free provided it is an action that is self-selected. It is not true that we are free because our actions are not predictable.

Anything that is complex can be difficult to predict, not necessarily because it isn't predictable in principle, but because we would need to know about many physical properties and interactions that would require technology that we don't have. Also, the process of measuring things on the small scale can disturb the activity that is being measured. Predictability tends to diminish with time, so even with future technology we may be able to predict a given behavioral choice only a second or less in advance. That future is almost here as neuroscientists have demonstrated that they can translate information obtained from monitoring neurons into behavioral predictions, albeit in restricted contexts and without complete accuracy. But even to the extent that we could reliably predict behaviors, those predicted behaviors would still be free behaviors.

I also disagree that behaviors being unpredictable equates with free will or that either is necessary for morality. Free will is about minds having agency that is free from materialistic cause and effect constraints. Morality is about actions or inactions that harm or constrain people and our environment. They are different concepts and morality is not dependent on behaviors being unpredictable.

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Evidences can go both ways, no exception for gods.

Over a year ago, Michael Shermer, founding publisher of Skeptic magazine and the monthly "Skeptic" columnist for Scientific American, wrote a short article on skeptic blog titled ARE YOU AN ATHEIST OR AGNOSTIC? To his credit, he has openly identified himself as an atheist for many years, although he prefers to label himself as a skeptic. However, his initial argument for atheism is actually a weaker argument for non-theism. Furthermore, he first claims that it is not possible to have positive evidence for atheism and then he contradicts himself by claiming that we have positive evidence for atheism.

Michael Shermer points out that "we act as if there is a God or as if there is no God, so by default we must make a choice, if not intellectually then at least behaviorally." This is true in the sense that we must choose to worship, pray to, or otherwise obey the instructions allegedly provided by, a God. But people can believe that God has not given them instructions, isn't asking or seeking to be worshipped, doesn't respond to prayers, etc. Such people believe in a non-personal God, so they aren't theists. They are deists. Michael Shermer defines such deists as atheists because they live their life as if there is no God. It is more accurate to call them non-theists.

Michael Shermer then emphasizes that it is untenable to assert that a God does not exist. He says, parenthetically, that "you cannot prove a negative." This is false. Sure, it is difficult to "prove" that something doesn't exist, but that doesn't mean that evidence never can speak against an existence claim. We have evidences that flying pigs and talking donkeys do not exist, never have existed, and never will exist. To believe that such creatures exist is unreasonable precisely because they are counter evidenced.

He then says that, as skeptics, we should "not believe a knowledge claim until sufficient evidence is presented." I agree with Michael Shermer here that skepticism is the correct approach. But he is wrong to assert that atheism is tenable only when it "withholds belief in God for lack of evidence." His argument that the only choices are between an untenable certainty that there is no God and a tenable withholding of belief in a God creates a false dichotomy. A tenable third choice is to actively believe that there are no gods on the grounds that the weight of the overall available evidences favors the no God conclusion. Michael Shermer makes bad excuses for refusing to even consider this possibility. It should be obvious that we all actively believe that many existence claims asserted by many different people are false, which is why we call them fictions.

What isn't so obvious is why God existence claims can only have supporting evidences when other existence claims can also have opposing evidences. Michael Shermer surely knows enough about biology, physics, and sociology to know that our universe appears to operate on a strictly materialistic basis, yet apparently he won't admit that this is evidence against an immaterial mind and immaterial, willful agent. Or maybe he is unwilling to acknowledge that evidence against immaterial minds and willful agents is evidence against gods? Does anyone believe in an entirely materialistic God that operates entirely within the laws of physics? No one should because such a naturalistic "God" is completely superfluous.

Note that Michael Shermer could also argue that it is untenable to assert that a God does exist, and that "you cannot prove a positive." Whatever evidence there is for a god, Michael Shermer the skeptic could point out that this same evidence could be interpreted as being produced by aliens with advanced technology who are intent on fooling us. Lots of people get diverted by this misdirected notion that we require proof to properly justify our beliefs (even though in practice these same people hold many beliefs without this unreasonable and impossible "proof" standard). They argue that we cannot prove one way, or the other way, or both ways, and then they insist that we must stop there and withhold judgement. But it makes no sense to stop there without evaluating what, if anything, the evidences say, since evidences can favor one conclusion over others. There is a word for this "there can be no proof, end of story" stance: It is a cop-out.

Michael Shermer concludes his argument by saying: "I do not know that there is no God, but I do not believe in God, and have good reasons to think that the concept of God is socially and psychologically constructed." This then becomes an inducement to read his book titled The Believing Brain in which he presents "extensive evidence to demonstrate quite positively that humans created gods and not vice versa." So Michael Shermer does assert that there are empirical evidences that gods are fictions after all. He isn't merely withholding belief for lack of evidence, he is saying there are positive evidences against. So why didn't he acknowledge from the beginning that the evidences can go either way and there are evidences against?

I think Shermer is an atheist rather than a non-theist. But he isn’t allowing his atheism to shine through. He is hiding his atheism behind his skepticism and a non-theistic ‘I don’t believe’ stance. Maybe he lacks the self-confidence to defend a more assertive “I believe there are no gods” stance. Atheism is 100% defensible on a straightforward weight of the overall evidence foundation.

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Austin Dacey presents five arguments for atheism

Here is a copy of the opening statement in Austin Dacey's 2004 debate with William Lane Craig at Purdue University. He argues for atheism properly and effectively - by examining the direction of the overall empirical evidences. I encourage people to take the 17 minutes required to watch, and ponder, the arguments. Austin Dacey, who has a PhD in philosophy, makes the following five simple arguments in this video for the conclusion that there is "insufficient evidence for theism and overwhelming evidence for atheism":

* Hiddenness of God
* Success of science
* Mind-brain connection
* Evolution
* Pointless suffering

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Reconciling conflicting manifest and scientific images

Daniel Dennett makes a useful distinction between manifest image and scientific image when discussing free will. Color, sound, touch, and smell, are all manifest images, they allow us to keep track of our environment so we can react appropriately. All these phenomena can be studied by measuring the stuff formed by the bosons and fermions, which are the corresponding scientific images. We don't currently have a complete mapping between the manifest image and the scientific image. The biological processes are complex and we incompletely understand our perceptions. But even if we were to succeed in completely mapping one image to the other in the future, these two images will each retain their special significance.

Yet I disagree with his conclusion that Sam Harris is making a mistake by focusing on the scientific image instead of the manifest image when he argues against free will. The manifest and scientific images of our sense perceptions are compatible, they coexist without any conflict. A scientific image of biology and our universe is in direct conflict with the manifest image of free will as that concept is traditionally understood. Therefore, it logically follows that this free will manifest image is wrong, and Sam Harris is correct to argue accordingly from a scientific image perspective. When the two images conflict, it is the manifest image that should be abandoned, regardless of how counterintuitive this result feels to us.

The real problem here is this: If we insist on retaining the free will phrase to characterize our decision making then we must redefine free will to convey a concept that is substantially different from the concept this phrase was originally intended, and is usually utilized, to convey. Such a redefinition interferes with our ability to clearly communicate the fact that our decisions are probably finalized before we are consciously aware of what decisions we made, as is the case with the rest of the animal kingdom. The concept that human decisions are consciously willed, that the cause and origin of human decisions is our will, which has the unique and magical property of being freely under our absolute control, free from cause and effect materialistic constraints, is the concept captured by the phrase free will. Only humans are commonly thought to have free will. As such, free will represents one of those many "ideologies about manifest image" that Daniel Dennett himself says "are bonkers".

As tempting as it may be to try to reshape this dearly held and well known, but obsolete, concept to mean something new, it would arguably be less confusing to substitute another phrase, such as free choice, when referring to our expression of decisions that reflect our desires. All animals have such free choices. Humans are probably somewhat unique in the sense of our having more capacity for self-recognition of various moral responsibilities associated with these choices. People then tend to conflate our animal free choice with free will. Referring to incompatibilist versus compatibilist free will contributes further to obscuring this distinction. Secularists who prefer this obscurity (because they are more conservative) tend to say we have compatibilist free will. Secularists who prefer more clarity (because they are less conservative) tend to say free will is a myth. Yet both sides appear to be mostly on the same page when it comes to the substance of describing our decision making process, we all follow and respect the empirical evidences and their implications.

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Secularism and Nonreligion journal

Access to this academic journal is free and the articles are interesting. They say that they intend to publish one volume per year, with new articles being added to the current volume throughout the year. The first volume is now completed. So go take a look, Secularism and Nonreligion.

Blurb from their web site:

Secularism and Nonreligion is a new interdisciplinary journal published with the aim of advancing research on various aspects of 'the secular.' The journal is interested in contributions from primarily social scientific disciplines, including: psychology, sociology, political science, women's studies, economics, geography, demography, anthropology, public health, and religious studies. Contributions from history, neuroscience, computer science, biology, philosophy, and medicine will also be considered. Articles published in the journal focus on the secular at one of three levels: the micro or individual level, the meso or institutional level, or the macro or national and international levels. Articles explore all aspects of what it means to be secular at any of the above levels, what the lives of nonreligious individuals are like, and the interactions between secularity and other aspects of the world. Articles also explore the ideology and philosophy of the secular or secularism.

TABLE OF CONTENTS
ARTICLES
Irreligious Socialization? The Adult Religious Preferences of Individuals Raised with No Religion PDF
Stephen M. Merino 1-16
Atheisms Unbound: The Role of the New Media in the Formation of a Secularist Identity PDF
Christopher Smith, Richard Cimino 17-31
Anti-Atheist Bias in the United States: Testing Two Critical Assumptions PDF
Lawton K Swan, Martin Heesacker 32-42
Forms, Frequency, and Correlates of Perceived Anti-Atheist Discrimination PDF
Joseph H. Hammer, Ryan T. Cragun, Karen Hwang, Jesse M. Smith 43-67
Explaining Global Secularity: Existential Security or Education? PDF
Claude M. J. Braun 68-93
BOOK REVIEWS
Why Religion is Natural and Science is Not, by Robert N. McCauley PDF
J. Tuomas Harviainen i-ii
Secularization and Its Discontents, by Rob Warner PDF
Isabella Kasselstrand iii-iv
Doubt, Atheism, and the Nineteenth-Century Russian Intelligentsia, by Victoria Frede PDF
Scott M. Kenworthy v-vi

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The best answer to this question is we don't know.

Mehdi Hasan is political director of the Huffington Post UK and a contributing writer for the New Statesman. The New Statesman published an article on December 19 Why is there something rather than nothing? by Mehdi Hasan in which he argues that his theistic belief in prophets and miracles is properly evidenced. He begins by saying that evidence is not proof, therefore faith is not belief in something without evidence.

One of the recurring problems with this discussion is the introduction of everything or nothing, faith or proof, ignorance or knowledge, and other similar dichotomies that confuse and obscure the real issue, which is belief justification. Our beliefs do not need to be proven, or appear in science textbooks, or qualify as knowledge, to be properly justified. But that doesn't mean that there are no standards at all and every belief is equally, or even properly, justified. Nor does it mean that a belief is properly justified by citing faith. Beliefs are properly justified by evidence, not by faith. Therefore, the word "faith" shouldn't even appear in an argument for a belief.

So when Richard Dawkins publicly asked Mehdi Hasan ‘‘You believe that Muhammad went to heaven on a winged horse?”, he was asking a fair question. Certainly he wasn't thereby guilty of claiming "the likes of Descartes, Kierkegaard, Hegel, Rousseau, Leibniz and Locke were all unthinking or irrational idiots". Very intelligent people can profess beliefs that are poorly justified, and religious beliefs in particular have a tendency to have this role. Therefore, we cannot properly justify particular beliefs merely on the grounds of esteeming the intellects of people from the past who held similar beliefs.

Mehdi Hasan then makes three arguments, starting with the cliche "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. I can’t prove God but you can’t disprove him. The only non-faith-based position is that of the agnostic." This notion that the only way to properly anchor a belief in the overall available evidence is to refuse to take a side and remain undecided is mistaken. On the contrary, anyone who takes an evidence first approach to justifying their beliefs is compelled to take sides and prefer one conclusion over competing conclusions whenever the evidence favors that conclusion. Proof in some absolute sense has nothing whatsoever to do with properly justifying beliefs because such proof is impossible (we are not omniscient and omnipresent) and unnecessary. Also, whenever a particular conclusion implies the presence of supporting evidence, and such evidence is absent, the absence of that evidence is itself evidence against that particular conclusion. So, contrary to what Mehdi Hasan asserts, that tired cliche (absence of evidence is not evidence of absence) is sometimes false.

Mehdi Hasan then begins his second argument by citing four examples of statements that "cannot be scientifically tested or proven" yet are reasonable to believe to be true: "1) Your spouse loves you. 2) The Taj Mahal is beautiful. 3) There are conscious minds other than your own. 4) The Nazis were evil." In fact, it is both possible, and wise, to follow the evidence when deciding whether or not your spouse loves you, whether or not other minds are conscious, and whether or not some ideology was evil. Statements about objects being beautiful also have some evidence based content, but such statements about feelings and sentiments are distinct from statements about historical events or existence claims. Atheists are not making the unreasonable claim that all possible statements require evidence to be properly justified when we insist that factual statements about historical events, or about existence claims, or about how the world works, require evidence to be properly justified.

Mehdi Hasan continues his second argument by noting that "science itself is permeated with unproven (and unprovable) theories. Take the so called multiverse hypothesis." Mehdi Hasan asks "How do we 'prove' that these “billions and billions” of universes exist?" A multiverse is not a theory, it is a prediction of scientific theories which are well evidenced and accepted. There are four theoretical categories of multiverse, called levels. Inflation naturally produces the Level I multiverse, and if you add in string theory with a landscape of possible solutions, you get Level II, too. Quantum mechanics in its mathematically simplest ("unitary") form gives you Level III. If theories are scientific then it's legitimate science to work out and discuss all their consequences even if they involve unobservable entities. Evidence need not be direct, indirect evidence is also evidence. The notion that there is no evidence for the prediction that there is a multiverse, and therefore a multiverse is believed merely on faith, is a misunderstanding, which a minority of accommodationist scientists, such as Templeton Foundation prize winner (1995) Paul Davies, have unfortunately promoted.

Mehdi Hasan's third argument is that there is evidence for God, citing the Kalam cosmological argument, the fine- tuning argument, and "the late Antony Flew, the atheist philosopher who embraced God in 2004, did so after coming to the conclusion that 'there had to be an intelligence behind the integrated complexity of the physical universe'." Mehdi Hasan then concludes that God is the best answer to the question “Why is there something rather than nothing?"

However, the Quran, like the Bible, depicts a universe where humans are central to what the universe is all about and why it exists, while the overall empirical evidences much better fits the conclusion that humans are inconsequential and unimportant. We are a primate mammal on a small planet orbiting one of the more than 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars. Given the failed track record of arm chair theologians and philosophers, citing logical puzzles as evidence for a God, let alone for the God of Islam, is not particularly persuasive. No one predicted the theory of relativity and quantum chromodynamics, or the number of stars, from logic alone. A better answer to Mehdi Hasan's question is that the quantum vacuum state is unstable and the multiverse is eternal. Since the multiverse always was, it didn’t have to come from anything. Beyond that, the best answer by far is that we do not know. Existence could be a brute fact that has no further explanation. Some people convince themselves that with this one word, God, they have answers which they actually don't have and don't need.

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The determinism versus indeterminism question

If our universe is deterministic then stopping, rewinding, and then restarting the clock would result in a repeat performance like stopping, rewinding, and replaying a movie. But unlike a movie, we cannot stop and rewind time. A big problem with addressing questions such as this is that it requires technical expertise in physics that most people, including myself, do not have. Nevertheless, it can be useful to try to address a question like this because it is a convenient starting point for disputing related misconceptions.

As pointed out by Gary Berg-Cross in his recent blog post, we shouldn't confuse the multi-factor causal determinism behind complex phenomena, like climate, with "partial determinism". Human behavior has internal determinants, a.k.a. genetics, and external determinants, a.k.a. environment. The mere presence of external determinants doesn't render human behavior "partially determined". So are climate, human behavior, etc., deterministic? In the non-quantum, classical, larger scale realm that we inhabit, our universe appears to be deterministic. Therefore the answer to this question appears to depend primarily on whether or not the small scale, quantum mechanical realm is indeterministic.

It is almost as if quantum mechanics occupies exactly the line that separates determinism from indeterminism, as if it occupies both descriptions simultaneously. Maybe it does. Inconsistent attributes like this are counterintuitive, but under the laws of physics, anything that is permitted to happen arguably does happen, and the results are sometimes counterintuitive. However, just like it is a mistake to confuse complexity with indeterminism, it is also a mistake to confuse probability with indeterminism. Stochastic outcomes like those which characterize quantum mechanics could be compatible with determinism. Some experts describe quantum mechanics as being best characterized by the phrase "determined probabilities".

My non-expert understanding is that Bell's inequalities theorem, which is favored to be true by experimental results, implies that either the principle of locality is false or quantum mechanics is nondeterministic. Furthermore, if locality is false then the laws of special relativity, which have been found to agree with QM to a high degree of accuracy, would be contradicted. Therefore, physicists tend to favor the view that indeterminism is true, which implies that quantum mechanical events are, in some significant sense, uncaused.

For the sake of argument, lets say that our universe is indeterministic at the small, quantum world scale. Under this scenario, when we rewind and restart the clock, the radioactive decay events would repeat with the same predisposition, as reflected in the same half-life probabilities as before, but the individual events would occur at different times than they occurred the first time around. It would arguably be the case that our universe could then be best described as partially deterministic, or partially indeterministic, or mixed. The small scale indeterminism would sometimes change larger scale events and our replayed universe would eventually take a noticeably different course from the original universe. This would be true even if the larger scale events are themselves strictly deterministic. But is there a line that clearly delineates the quantum mechanical and classical realms, and if not then does some of the small scale indeterminism carry over into the larger scales? Strict determinism may be a very accurate and useful approximation while technically being a fiction if taken literally.

Although we may not yet have sufficient evidence to assert with confidence that the aforementioned indeterministic scenario is true, we can answer another question that is often associated with the determinism question: Do we have free will? My answer is that we most likely (almost certainly) don't have free will, regardless of whether the universe is deterministic.

Many people appear to think that the question of the existence of free will is of central importance. I disagree. Our lack of free will arguably undermines the role of nondeterrent retribution in achieving justice. But beyond that it has little, if any, significance. We don't need free will. Our having free will wouldn't clearly be advantageous, and even if it would be advantageous, we are what we are and accurately acknowledging what we are doesn't change what we are. In that sense I agree with Daniel Dennett. But I am unwilling to go so far as to continue utilizing the term "free will" by creating a new category and labeling it "compatibilistic free will" while relabeling the original free will concept as "libertarian free will". Free will is rooted in a mind-body dualism, where the mind is understood to be at least partially extraphysical and nonmaterial, and as such implies not just indeterminism but also supernaturalism. Without the indeterminism, libertarianism, and dualism there is no free will and it is at best confusing, at worst misleading, to retain that label while dispensing with the concept.

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Is nature by itself sufficient evidence for god?

In his February 29, 2012 Huffington Post article Why I Am an Accommodationist, Robert J. Asher, a paleontologist specializing in mammals who is currently Curator of Vertebrates in the Cambridge University Museum of Zoology, seeks to reconcile theism with the available evidence and demonstrate that theism and the evidence have a cooperative relationship. His tactic is to assert that god doesn't leave behind any evidence. Instead, god acts through nature. Therefore, nature is itself the only evidence we have for god. Nature is the proximate cause mechanism while god is the ultimate cause agency.

Having started by conceding that no evidence for a god exists beyond nature itself, Robert Asher has already lost his argument that he is properly justified in believing that a god exists. Going from observing that nature exists straight to therefore god exists is far too big a leap. We cannot jump that far without begging the question. After all, nature doesn't feature any immaterial, immortal, willful, agents that operate outside of time and location constraints. Best fit with the overall empirical evidence is the only proper justification we have for believing something exists. By positing a new ontology (immaterial, willful, agent) that is outside of the framework of any ontology that is found within nature, Robert Asher is arguing from an ideology first perspective. Nature exists therefore god exists is not a viable argument for god (from an evidence first perspective) because all of the evidence we have from nature is that willful agents are inherently materialistic (catabolic, anabolic), temporary, and finite.

A second problem with Robert Asher's argument is that nature has no demonstrated need for a supernatural, or even a nonnatural, ultimate cause. We need a proper motive, rooted in the available empirical evidences, for asserting a cause of a particular sort is needed. If nature is self-contained, if everything in nature has only natural, non-ultimate causes, then why believe that a supernatural god is an ultimate cause? Natural, non-ultimate causes are the only type of causes known to exist. We have not encountered evidence of a supernatural cause, let alone of a cause that has the special quality of being "ultimate". So we have no proper basis for assuming that there is a supernatural, or an ultimate, cause.

Theists such as Robert Asher appear to have a tendency to think that the naturalistic framework which is evidenced is insufficient, to the point of being impossible, for ever providing a needed explanation for our universe. They then tend to claim that only a non-evidenced and counter-evidenced supernaturalistic framework is sufficient, to the point of being necessary, to provide a needed explanation for the universe. But that is a reversal of the correct sequence for determining what is true. We shouldn't start with an insistence that we must claim to have an explanation, right now, prior to our having the supporting evidence. Instead, we should start with the evidence and go only where the evidence takes us. Otherwise we are fooling ourselves into thinking we know more than we do. We can manage fine without falsely claiming to have ultimate explanations that we don't have, so why this insistence on believing that a god exists?

Furthermore, we need to put aside mere human intuitions regarding what is plausible, implausible, possible, and impossible because our intuitions here have consistently been wrong. Most of modern knowledge is nonintuitive, There is essentially nothing in science textbooks that matches what people believed on intuition alone. What we know about how the universe works we discovered only by following the empirical evidence, often reaching conclusions that, without the supporting evidence, would be nonintuitive or counterintuitive. Instead, it is those assertions that are outside the framework of the laws of physics which are the more implausible and the more likely to be impossible relative to competing assertions which reside inside this framework. Theism is outside this framework and it is rooted in human intuition, which are two big strikes against theism.

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Does the universe has a purpose?

A major disagreement between theists and atheists is the proper answer to this question: Does the universe have a purpose? When we approach this question from an empirical evidence first perspective, the proper answer must be no. Here is an entertaining 2 minute video recently produced by Neil deGrasse Tyson that answers this question from an empirical evidence first perspective. He places some emphasis on his not being "sure". Given that we are not omniscient it should be obvious that we cannot know with absolute certainty so prefixing and suffixing every strongly evidenced answer with "I am not sure" renders that phrase useless while attaching that phrase inconsistently to only some strongly evidenced answers makes it misleading. We all must be at least a little agnostic because we all are limited in our access to information. But he is clear in this video that there is a single best answer from the available evidence to this question.

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Send a short note to the White House

Go to the White House comments web page and send them this brief message:

Before President Obama takes his oath of office, please instruct Chief Justice Roberts not to append an extralegal monotheistic codicil as he did during the previous presidential inauguration. A person taking an oath of office can speak freely after the legal oath recitation ends and should not be directed what to say by the person giving the oath. It is unseemly for the person leading a government oath to spatchcock a religious phrase.

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Is "god of the gaps" a terrible slogan?

Graham Veale is a theology graduate of Queen’s University Belfast and Head of Religious Education at City of Armagh High School. He argues that Christianity is true on his website Saints and Sceptics. In an article titled "God of the Gaps: Five Problems with a Terrible Slogan" he tries to argue that it is difficult to take seriously the "McAtheist" complaint "that 'goddidit' is a lazy man’s approach to explaining phenomena".

Graham Veale starts his attempt at refuting "McAtheist" with the observation that "we cannot be confident that every puzzle has a scientific answer". So lets set the record straight on this major misconception about atheism once and for all. Atheists have no problem with the fact that humans are not omniscient and omnipresent. On the contrary, atheists are well aware that we will forever never know everything that has happened in the past, nor what will happen in the future, nor the present. Since our access to information is forever and permanently limited by temporal-spatial constraints we will always be unable to answer every puzzle. How does this fact refute the observation that "goddidit" is a lazy approach to explaining phenomena? Graham Veale doesn't say.

Graham Veale then begins his second argument thusly: "There are persistent gaps that have never been filled in, and might never be filled in, by naturalistic science." OK, that is reasonable, and atheists agree with this. But why does this count as a second argument different from the first argument and how does this contribute to refuting the characterization of "goddidit" as a lazy approach to explaining phenomena? Graham Veale cites consciousness as an example of "persistent gaps" that he thinks are beyond the reach of naturalistic explanations. In the not so distant past religious believers like Mr. Veale would have the said the same about disease or the diversity of life forms. Throughout history religionists have persistently underestimated the reach of naturalistic explanations. He apparently is not aware that progress is being made in understanding consciousness. That none of this progress in acquiring such understandings have ever been made with the non-scientific methods of religious worship and divine revelation is one-sidedly ignored by Mr. Veale.

The argument he labels as three, but is really number two, begins as: "It is obviously false that theists invoke God to explain every phenomenon." Correct. Atheists are aware of the fact that theists have a tendency to be inconsistently selective in identifying God as the cause of their own good fortune but not their own misfortune. Graham Veale then cites the large amount of effort that theologians have put into debating for centuries the problem of evil. Again, he is correct that many believers have been active and assertive in defending and promoting their beliefs. However, the fact that laziness is not a general trait that characterizes believers does not contribute to refuting the criticism that "goddidit" is a lazy approach to explaining phenomena.

Graham Veale finally attempts to address the evidence with the argument he labels as his fourth: "However, if there is some evidence that does not fit neatly with theism, then there is an abundance of evidence which theism can account for." He then cites as two evidences favoring Christianity, or at least theism, "our finely-tuned universe and the living world around us." However, both phenomena are themselves strictly naturalistic. To get to supernaturalism from such naturalistic phenomena, religionists make an intuitive appeal to probability. Mr. Veale states it this way "Each is extremely unlikely to have happened by chance." But is that true? What are the probabilities here?

Given the billion of years, the size of our planet, the amount of energy and water available, the tendency of carbon and other elements to interact to form organic compounds, the ability of some organic molecules to auto-catalyze their own replication, the ability of reproducing organisms to change over time, the tremendous size of our universe, why should the living world around us be deemed too unlikely to have formed this one time? Given that our universe could be residing in a huge multi-verse, ditto for "fine-tuning". Furthermore, cosmologists don't currently know how many different combinations of the possible different values of all of the constants would produce viable universes containing living worlds over the entire multi-variate landscape.

Graham Veale then cites as argument five that if the “God-of-the-Gaps” criticism of theism is taken seriously then atheism becomes unfalsifiable. However, neither theism nor atheism can be decisively falsified, they are both in the same boat here. The question with all such competing beliefs about how the world works is overall weight of the evidence, not proof or falsification in some impossible to achieve sense. Again, humans are not omniscient and omnipresent. We are capable of obtaining, accumulating, and evaluating empirical evidences. We know that this empirical method for justifying our beliefs about how the world works has been uniquely successfull. The criticism that "goddidit" is a lazy approach to explanation neither interferes with, nor contradicts, our ability to obtain, accumulate, and evaluate the empirical evidences.

Graham Veale fails to demonstrate that the "goddidit" catch-all is a valid explanation for anything or that arguments for theism based on filling the gaps in our knowledge with a god have any merit.

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The real problem with theism

Paul Wallace has a PhD in experimental nuclear physics from Duke University, is a former university professor in physics and astronomy, a former NASA researcher, and is a Christian hospital chaplain, who recently wrote an article that was published in the Huffington Post under the title "The Real Problem With Atheism". Within his article is a concise summary of his argument in the following two sentences: "It [science] wears blinders and refuses to acknowledge whole classes of questions that are important to people everywhere, questions of good and evil, and of human weakness, and of meaning. And it seems that New Atheism, in its wholesale dependence upon science as a philosophy, imports science's blinders -- bound as they are to its optimism -- into its overall worldview." Paul Wallace also claims that atheists do not "take note of", and "roll jauntily past", the poverty-stricken, those desperate for a job, drug addicts, and mothers who just lost a child to social services. So do we all need to be Christians, or at least theists, in order to acknowledge these important classes of questions and address the problems of those among us who are experiencing difficulties?

Atheists appear to be generally competent at recognizing the impacts of behaviors and actions on themselves and others. Atheists appear to be generally competent at distinguishing the positive from negative impacts. Atheists appear to be generally competent at recognizing that people have shortcomings. Atheists appear to be generally competent at finding meaning. Atheists appear to generally participate in, and contribute to, various efforts to reduce poverty, increase employment, treat addictions, and support parents whose children were taken from their custody. Contrary to what Paul Wallace asserts in his article, there is no convincing evidence that atheists are deficient overall, relative to Christians or theists generally, in acknowledging good and evil, human weakness, or meaning, or with assisting others in need.

In addition to the aspersions on the competencies and character of atheists lacking veracity, there is also a problem with Paul Wallace's argument being illogical because his conclusion that Christianity is true doesn't follow from his premises. If we accept his argument that atheists are lacking in those competencies, and in their character, then it still doesn't logically follow that Christianity, any other religion, or theism is true. The bottom line here is always the same, and it cannot be stated too often or be overemphasized. The only way to properly justify Christianity, any other religion, or theism is to show that the empirical evidences overall favor the supernatural world-views of Christianity, any other religion, or theism over the natural worldview of atheism. That many Christians, religionists, and theists either avoid altogether even attempting to make such an argument, as is the case here, or don't come close to succeeding when they do attempt to make such arguments, is the real problem with Christianity, all religions and theism.

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