Mayan Doomsday

Did you know that the Mayan calendar ends at December 21, 2012 and that the Mayans predicted the world would end that day?

Of course you didn’t. Not only did the Mayans not predict doomsday on that date, but the Mayan calendar doesn’t end that day either. To introduce a bit of Mayan terminology, a b’ak’tun is a cycle of time that is about 394 years, and a piktun is a cycle of time equal to 20 b’ak’tuns (so most scholars think). What happens is that the 13th b’ak’tun (a cycle of time that is about 394 years), and we simply begin the 14th b’ak’tun. Moreover, even if 1 piktun was only 13 b’ak’tuns, there is the kalabtun, which is equal to 20 piktuns, and there are even higher orders (cycles) than that. The Mayan calendar doesn’t even come close to ending in 2012.

That we’re the end of a big cycle on the Mayan calendar is noteworthy, but if the Mayans would be a live today, they’d be celebrating it with a party, kind of like we’d celebrate the beginning of a new century or millennium. And just as the turn of the millennium didn’t end our calendar, so too does December 2012 not end the Mayan calendar.

Some lessons from this

To attack the ignorant claim that the world is going to end December 21, 2012 because of the Mayan prophecy and the Mayan calendar ending, one could have refused to do any research and just say, “That’s nonsense” or “The Mayans could not possibly know when the world would end.” Such responses may be true claims, but you’re better off doing a bit of research than speaking from your armchair. In this case, research showed that there was no such prophecy and that the Mayan calendar didn’t end anywhere near 2012.

The same “do your homework” advice applies to atheism versus theism debates. Studies show that on average atheists have higher IQs than theists, but one can have a high IQ and make foolish statements via carelessness and inadequate research. To cite a specific example, consider The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins. Atheist philosopher Michael Ruse said the book made him embarrassed to be an atheist, and rightfully so. Many examples of Dawkins doing bad philosophy could be cited, but consider this from page 108:

I’ve forgotten the details, but I once piqued a gathering of theologians and philosophers by adapting the ontological argument to prove that pigs can fly. They felt the need to resort to Modal Logic to prove that I was wrong.

What Dawkins doesn’t seem to realize here (but would have if he had done the necessary research) is that the ontological argument for God is a use of modal logic. Saying that these theists resorted to modal logic to defend the ontological argument is akin to saying astronomers resort to looking through telescopes. I’m not saying that there isn’t a good refutation of the ontological argument (see my own refutation of the ontological argument), but if you’re going to attack it, at least have the intellectual decency to do the research so that you don’t make a fool of yourself.

The God Delusion makes a lot of bad arguments for the correct position. What’s notable about this is that Dawkins is obviously extremely intelligent; the man earned doctorate from Oxford. Yet a lack of adequate research made him an embarrassment to many philosophically sophisticated atheists. Unfortunately, a lot of atheists aren’t philosophically sophisticated, and don’t realize the blunders that Dawkins has made.

As the Dawkins case illustrates, even atheists make mistakes in regards to the atheism/theism debate; maybe not as often as theists, but they do make them. So it’s also worth noting that just because someone’s argument for theism is unsound, doesn’t mean that every objection against it will be a good one. In my next blog entry I’ll use an example to illustrate this, as well as illustrate the value and importance of learning logic.

The Moral Argument and William Lane Craig (part 3)

This entry is part 3 on a series of the moral argument and William Lane Craig. The entries in the series:

1. The Moral Argument and William Lane Craig (part 1)
2. The Moral Argument and William Lane Craig (part 2)—Addressing the first premise of the moral argument.
3. The Moral Argument and William Lane Craig (part 3)—Addressing the second premise of the moral argument

The Moral Argument

William Lane Craig’s moral argument:

1. If God does not exist, then objective moral values and duties do not exist.
2. Objective moral values and duties do exist.
3. Therefore, God exists.

In this entry I’ll address premise 2 of the above moral argument.

Justifying Premise 2

Recall from part 1 of this series what the group #1 atheist believes: that objective moral values and duties do not exist seems to be true given that God does not exist and the rest of the information we have. The “God does not exist” part seems important here, because the sort of God that William Lane Craig seems to have in mind (e.g. Craig doubtlessly believes his God is perfectly good independently of human opinion) entails the existence of objective moral values and duties, such that if God exists then so do objective moral values and duties. Yet with that, Craig will have a difficult time arguing his case for premise 2 before group #1 atheists in a way that doesn’t beg the question in favor of theism. Since group #1 atheists accept the first premise but deny the second, how does Craig argue for the second premise?

The short answer is that he doesn’t, not really. In his oral debates, where he sometimes modifies the first premise to “If God does not exist, then objective moral values do not exist,” he usually appeals to a “deep down we all know it” sort of approach (see 16:48 William Lane Craig’s 2009 debate with Ronald DeSousa where Craig argues for the second premise). In page 179 of Reasonable Faith (3rd Edition) Craig says:

Premise (2) of the moral argument asserts that, in fact, objective moral values and duties do exist. The way in which moral theorists test competing ethical theories is by assessing how well they cohere with our moral experience. I take it that in moral experience we do apprehend a realm of objective moral values and duties, just as in sensory experience we apprehend a realm of objectively existing physical objects.

William Lane Craig appeals to the intuitive moral experience of objective morality that people already have. The problem is, atheists who reject objective morality don’t have this kind of experience. It’s a bit like arguing that God exists because people personally experience God; you won’t believe you’ve personally experienced God unless you already believe that God exists.

The Evolution Objection

So much for an argument for the second premise. What about objections to it? One objection William Lane Craig deals with is that sociobiological evolution undermines our warrant for the second premise. In philosophy, warrant is something that makes true belief knowledge, e.g. one’s warrant for her belief might be some kind of evidence for it. Belief in objective morality, e.g. that it is objectively morally wrong to steal and murder, has survival value for our species even if objective morality is illusory. Sociobiological evolution selects for survival value, not necessarily for truth. If a false belief has survival value, it might well be selected. With sociobiological evolution being what it is, we have a plausible account of why people “experience” the alleged objective reality of moral values and duties, and this account doesn’t require moral objectivism. In responding to the evolution objection, here’s William Lane Craig on page 180 of Reasonable Faith:

If there is no God, then our moral experience is, plausibly, illusory. I said as much in my defense of premise (1). But why think that naturalism is true? To undermine the warrant which our moral experience gives to our moral beliefs, much more must be done than hold out possibility that naturalism may be true. For if theism is true, then our moral experience, even conditioned by biology and society, is probably not wholly illusory but is reliable to some degree.

One problem here: it’s the theist’s job to convince the atheist that premise 2 is true. Naturalism and evolution are (for many atheists) a plausible worldview. An atheist can effectively say, “I don’t have any reason to believe in objective morality; your appeal to intuitions won’t cut it because in my view moral intuitions aren’t to be trusted due to my view of evolution.” Even if evolution won’t be enough to rationally convince the theist as Craig seems to think, that’s somewhat beside the point. When convincing someone you want to appeal to agreed upon facts. When the theist appeals to intuitions as an allegedly reliable source of information on objective morality’s existence, this appeal is a bad one because the atheist believes intuitions are an unreliable guide to objective morality’s existence. And with sociobiological evolution, we have a plausible account of why people would have moral intuitions whereby such moral intuitions would have survival value whether objective morality existed or not. So why not choose the simpler worldview in which objective morality doesn’t exist?

William Lane Craig’s second response to the evolution objection:

Second, the objection is self-defeating because on naturalism, all our beliefs, not just our moral beliefs, have been selected for survival value, not truth, and are therefore unwarranted.

This is apples and oranges. Belief in objective morality, e.g. that it is objectively morally wrong to steal and murder, has survival value completely independently of whether objective morality exists. In contrast, forming true beliefs about the physical world is much more likely to have superior survival value. If you think falling from a great height will injure you, you are less likely to be injured; if you think falling from a great height will not injure you, you are more likely to be injured. Believing that certain plants are good to eat will help you survive if that belief is true; believing that a poisonous plant is good to eat will hurt your chances of survival. Even when denying the existence of the supernatural, it’s quite plausible for evolution to give us sense organs and brains that are fairly reliable at giving us true beliefs about the physical world. That sort of thing does help us survive, after all.

Another thing to point out here is that Craig’s rebuttal to the evolution objection makes the mistake of conjoining naturalism with evolution. While many atheists are naturalists, not all of them are.

The Moral Argument and William Lane Craig (part 2)

This entry is part 2 on a series of the moral argument and William Lane Craig. The entries in the series:

1. The Moral Argument and William Lane Craig (part 1)
2. The Moral Argument and William Lane Craig (part 2)—Addressing the first premise of the moral argument.
3. The Moral Argument and William Lane Craig (part 3)—Addressing the second premise of the moral argument

The Moral Argument

William Lane Craig’s moral argument:

1. If God does not exist, then objective moral values and duties do not exist.
2. Objective moral values and duties do exist.
3. Therefore, God exists.

In this entry I’ll address premise 1 of the above moral argument.

Justifying Premise 1

Both in his oral debates (where he sometimes modifies the first premise to be “If God does not exist, then objective moral values do not exist”) and in his writings, William Lane Craig’s defense of the first premise is very weak. To illustrate the weakness in his oral debates, see 15:07 of William Lane Craig’s 2009 debate with Ronald DeSousa where he argues for the first premise of the moral argument. He mentions that many atheists agree with theists on the first premise (true, but irrelevant; there are also many atheists who disagree with Craig on the first premise) and quotes an atheist to prove such agreement exists. At 16:42 of the DeSousa debate, he claims, without any real justification, that “on the atheistic view, there’s nothing really wrong with your raping someone.” The closest he comes to such justification is at 16:15 where he says he doesn’t see any reason to think that in the absence of God the morality evolved by humans is objective. But “I don’t see any reason to believe p, therefore p is false” is an argument from ignorance, not a real justification.

William Lane Craig often does a better job in his writings, but not by a whole lot. In page 173 of Reasonable Faith (3rd Edition), Craig says:

If theism is false, why think that human beings have objective moral value? After all, on the naturalistic view, there’s nothing special about human beings. They’re just accidental byproducts of nature which have evolved relatively recently on an infinitesimal speck of dust called the planet Earth, lost somewhere in a hostile and mindless universe, and which are doomed to perish individually and collectively in a relatively short time.

First thing to note is that Craig makes the mistake of conjoining atheism with naturalism (disbelief in the supernatural). While many atheists are naturalists, not all are. Second, why think on naturalism that there’s nothing special about human beings? Even if our existence came about by accident and even if within a few million years or so our race is destined to perish, none of that is really relevant. What’s special about human beings is that we are an intelligent, sentient, and self-aware species capable of making free choices; surely that is enough. Suppose for example we came across an alien species that like us is intelligent, sentient, etc.; perhaps something akin to the Vulcans in Star Trek. Wouldn’t we say that they have moral value too even though they aren’t human?

Moral Properties and Supervenience

The closest thing Craig gets to addressing this sort of thing (i.e. the properties of our species conferring moral value upon us) in Reasonable Faith is where he talks about moral properties supervening upon natural states of affairs. In philosophy, A-properties supervene on B-properties when B-properties determine A-properties, e.g. some philosophers believe that brain states determine mental states, and thus believe that mental states supervene on brain states. On page 177 of Reasonable Faith, he asks, “Why think that on an atheistic view of the world the curious, non-physical property of moral goodness would supervene on a human female’s nursing her infant?” The atheist can give the same reason as the theist for this and for accepting the second premise. What is that reason? On page 179 Craig has this to say in support of premise 2:

Premise (2) of the moral argument asserts that, in fact, objective moral values and duties do exist. The way in which moral theorists test competing ethical theories is by assessing how well they cohere with our moral experience. I take it that in moral experience we do apprehend a realm of objective moral values and duties, just as in sensory experience we apprehend a realm of objectively existing physical objects….As Sorely emphasized, there is no more reason to deny the objective reality of moral values than the objective reality of the physical world.

To explain why she believes in objective moral values and duties, an atheist moral objectivist, like the theist, could appeal to moral experience and the absence of any adequate reason to deny moral objectivism. The atheist, like the theist, can cite her own moral experience as why she believes humans and their infants have objective moral value and why the property of goodness supervenes on a mother caring for her baby. On page 177 Craig goes on to say:

Why, given naturalism, would the strange, non-physical property of moral badness supervene on a man’s leaving a shop carrying certain items for which he has not left the currency demanded by the shop owner? I see no reason to think that a full specification of all the natural properties of a situation would determine or fix any moral properties of that situation.

Maybe Craig doesn’t see such a reason, but it’s easy for the naturalist to think of one. The full specification of all natural properties allows us to be aware of intelligence, sentience, etc. so that all the relevant stuff for objective morality is present. Also, recall that one can be an atheist without being a naturalist.

As for why moral properties supervene on certain natural states of affairs, the naturalist can say that this is a brute fact, something that is true but has no further explanation for its truth. Unless we are to have an infinite regress of explanations for why a certain human action is morally wrong, we’ll need to come to some sort of stopping point anyway, and even the theist must come down to brute facts. For example, if the theist says that moral obligations supervene on God’s ought-to-be-obeyed commands, one can ask “Why does God have an ought-to-be-obeyed quality?” The theist would probably just answer “He just does” and leave that as his stopping point. Why not cut out the middle man and just use the state of affairs (e.g. a man stealing merchandise) as a stopping point? It’s simpler and there appears to be no reason to appeal to a deity here.

Up next: looking at the second premise of the moral argument.

The Moral Argument and William Lane Craig

This entry is part 1 on a series of the moral argument and William Lane Craig. The entries in the series:

1. The Moral Argument and William Lane Craig (part 1)
2. The Moral Argument and William Lane Craig (part 2)—Addressing the first premise of the moral argument.
3. The Moral Argument and William Lane Craig (part 3)—Addressing the second premise of the moral argument

The Moral Argument

William Lane Craig, perhaps the most notorious living Christian apologist in atheist circles, has a moral argument goes something like this:

1. If God does not exist, then objective moral values and duties do not exist.
2. Objective moral values and duties do exist.
3. Therefore, God exists.

One thing this argument has going for it is that it is deductively valid, i.e. the conclusion follows logically and necessarily from the premises. In William Lane Craig’s moral argument, moral values have to do with what is good and bad (e.g. kindness is good), and moral duties have to do with stuff we morally ought and ought not do, i.e. right and wrong behavior.

What Does “Objective” Mean?

What does Craig mean by “objective” here? In page 173 of Reasonable Faith (3rd edition), Craig says that, “To say that there are objective moral values is to say that something is good or evil independently of whether any human being believes it to be so.” One might object saying that the correct definition of “objective” means “mind-independent” and not just independent of human opinion. With that objection, there are two things to consider.

First, in the context of the moral argument, this sort of meaning for the word “objective” isn’t unique to William Lane Craig. A glance at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s entry on the moral argument speaks of moral properties being “objective in the sense that they hold or not regardless of human opinion.”

Second, we need to be careful about getting sidetracked; we should keep in mind that even if William Lane Craig is using the wrong word to communicate the meaning of his premises, that really doesn’t do anything with whether we should believe the truth of the premises. Even if we insisted that using the word “objective” in the wrong way doomed the argument to failure somehow, William Lane Craig could easily adapt by changing the wording of his premises:

1. If God does not exist, then moral values and duties that hold independently of human opinion do not exist.
2. Moral values and duties that hold independently of human opinion do exist.
3. Therefore, God exists.

So to really refute the moral argument we need a more substantive objection; we need to pick a premise and attack its truth, not its wording.

Attacking a Premise

With William Lane Craig’s moral argument being deductively valid, the conclusion being false means that one of the premises is false. So the logical thing for the atheist to do then is to pick a premise and attack it. With that we have a problem though, because when it comes to the moral argument there are at least two groups of atheists:

Group #1: Some atheists believe that given atheism and the rest of the information we have, it is unlikely that objective moral values and duties exist. These atheists would thus agree that premise 1 is probably true, i.e. that even if objective moral values and duties could have existed on atheism, it’s likely that objective moral values and duties do not exist in the real godless world. An atheist might see it this way: theism + our background knowledge about this world = objective moral values and duties probably exist (on theism, God is presumably good independently of human opinion), whereas atheism + our background knowledge about this world = objective moral values and duties probably do not exist. Thus if God does not exist, objective moral values and duties probably don’t exist either, and thus premise 1 is probably true. At any rate, group #1 atheists reject premise 2 but agree with premise 1.

Group #2: Some atheists believe objective moral values and duties do exist in the real godless world. Such atheists thus agree with premise 2 but disagree with premise 1.

There are of course other possible sorts of atheists (e.g. those who are uncertain about which premise is false) but the existence of groups #1 and #2 means I can’t just pick a premise to attack and expect to make all atheists happy. In this series on critiquing William Lane Craig’s moral argument, I’ll take group #1’s side in one blog entry, and take group #2’s side in another blog entry. After I criticize Craig’s justification for both premises I’ll let you the reader decide which if any atheist group is right.

Coming up next: looking at the first premise of the moral argument.

The Free Will Theodicy Attacking Itself

Introduction

The free will theodicy is an attempt to help save theism from the problem of evil and says that the reason why God allows evil is because he’s given us humans free will and that at least some of this evil can be justifiably allowed as a cost of freedom. The free will theodicy can come it various ranges when it rebuts the argument from evil, from trying to explain all evil that occurs to only a small portion of it. However, allowing certain evils to occur on the grounds that human freedom is morally valuable has the potential to be self-stultifying.

A Good Point

I actually think the free will theodicy has some merit; people should be allowed to have some control of their own lives, and there are many things that are bad for people that we don’t outlaw (such as choosing to watch bad television over reading) because we respect people’s freedom to make bad choices, albeit to a limited extent. We tend to outlaw bad choices when they infringe upon the rights of another individual, e.g. punching people in the face without their consent.

A Major Problem

The free will theodicy fails spectacularly when one person uses their freedom to severely infringe upon the freedoms of another. We live in a world where somebody can punch me in the face even if I don’t want him too. In that situation, someone punching me in the face overrides my freedom to not get punched in the face. So consider these two conflicting freedoms: a stronger opponent wants to use his freedom to punch me in the face, whereas I the much weaker individual want to use my freedom to not get punched in the face. Only one of these two freedoms can be satisfied. A major problem with the free will theodicy is that it fails to explain why God seemingly chooses to favor the wrong freedom. Simply saying “human freedom is good” does nothing to address the problem of why God would choose to favor e.g. someone’s freedom to punch me in the face over my freedom to not be punched in the face. Why would the violent man’s freedom be more important than my own?

To illustrate further, suppose we find a man beating an innocent woman without her consent. The man is violating the woman’s freedom not to beaten, and in that situation we would stop the man’s violence, precisely because we respect the woman’s freedom not to be beaten and we realize such freedom is a good thing to have. It would be ridiculous to favor the violent man’s freedom to beat the woman over the woman’s freedom to not be beaten, and yet the free will theodicy would have us believe that this is what God often does. I think most theists deep down realize that “God allows it to happen because it’s good to value human freedom in that way” is ridiculous, because even theists would not consider the violent man’s freedom to be more important than the woman’s freedom not to get beaten, and in recognizing this theists would stop the violent man if they could. But given that this is the correct freedom to favor, why doesn’t God do so? Why on earth would God favor the violent man’s freedom over the woman’s freedom?

Conclusion

While the atheist can agree with the theist that it’s good for each individual to have at least some freedom, the free will theodicy depicting God as allowing people to have freedom to negate other people’s freedom seems to be a case of a theodicy attacking itself. In the scenario where a man beats a woman without her consent, it would be morally irrational to favor the man’s freedom to beat an innocent woman over the woman’s freedom to not be beaten. Why not consider the woman’s freedom to not be beaten more important than the man’s freedom to beat her? Clearly we recognize it’s correct to value the woman’s freedom over the man’s here, but given that, why wouldn’t God do the same? In this case it’s clearly nonsensical for a loving and compassionate God to—in the name of freedom—allow the man to oppress the freedom of the woman, because a loving and compassionate God who truly valued human freedom would value the woman’s freedom not to be beaten over the man’s freedom to beat her. A free will theodicy that says otherwise shoots itself in the foot because it fails to recognize the value of freedom it claims to champion.

William Lane Craig's Failed Defense: Suffering Helps People Know God

One defense William Lane Crag gives against the problem of evil is that a world suffused with suffering somehow helps people come to know and love God. One might think a world suffused with suffering would have the opposite effect; after all, a popular reason why some people become atheists is the argument from evil. Still, one can find multiple places where Craig makes the aforementioned theodicy. In William Lane Craig’s second rebuttal with his debate against Stephen Law:

Particularly, when we keep in mind the Christian concept of God and the Christian purpose of suffering—it is not to produce happiness in this life—it is rather to provide a context in which people may freely respond to God and his offer of eternal life and forgiveness and come to know him. And it may be that only in a world that is suffused with suffering of a natural and moral sort that the maximum number of people would freely come to know God and his eternal life.

Another tidbit from William Lane Craig:

Much of the suffering in the world may be utterly pointless, utterly unnecessary, if you think that the goal of life is human happiness. But it may not be unnecessary if God’s goal is to build His kingdom and to draw men and women freely into an eternal relationship with Himself. In fact, we saw, when you read contemporary books on missiology, that it is precisely in those nations of the world that are suffering the greatest deprivation and war and famine and poverty that the growth in the rates of evangelical Christianity is the highest, whereas, in the indulgent Western world (Western Europe and North America), the growth rates are almost flat by comparison. I think it is not at all improbable that it is only in a world suffused with natural and moral evil that the optimal number of persons would come freely to know God and His salvation.

One reason this defense fails is that there’s no reason to think that an omnipotent God couldn’t replace this morally questionable approach with a better way for people to come to know and love him. On Craig’s Christian worldview, God loves us deeply to the point of incarnating himself into a human (Jesus) and dying a painful death for us. So if Craig’s worldview were right, one better way for God to have us come to know and love him seems clear: flood people with knowledge of what God is, God’s love, and what he’s done for them. Christians like William Lane Craig believe God is the locus of moral value, something akin to morality incarnate (we ought to love morality above all else, hence we ought to love God). Having everyone know what God is, the depths of his love and his willingness to incarnate himself into a human being to die for us would certainly be much more effective in drawing people to him than inflicting suffering upon the population—not to mention letting people know of the happiness that they would receive from knowing and loving God (especially in heaven).

Moreover, if suffering great “deprivation and war and famine and poverty” really lead to a greater good of knowing God, we should welcome such suffering, not fight against it. Perhaps deep down Christians tend to know this is bunk, for many such Christians establish charities to fight against these very things.

Joe Biden and Abortion

Maverick Christian’s article on abortion last month (last month as of this writing) criticized the moral coherency of Joe Biden’s position about believing human life begins at conception while favoring the legalization of abortion. We can make some sense of Joe Biden’s claim from reading a bit of Judith Jarvis Thomson’s famous article A Defense of Abortion. In the article, Thomson audaciously claims that even if abortion kills an innocent human life, abortion is still morally permissible. An excerpt:

You wake up in the morning and find yourself back to back in bed with an unconscious violinist. A famous unconscious violinist. He has been found to have a fatal kidney ailment, and the Society of Music Lovers has canvassed all the available medical records and found that you alone have the right blood type to help. They have therefore kidnapped you, and last night the violinist's circulatory system was plugged into yours, so that your kidneys can be used to extract poisons from his blood as well as your own. The director of the hospital now tells you, “Look, we're sorry the Society of Music Lovers did this to you--we would never have permitted it if we had known. But still, they did it, and the violinist is now plugged into you. To unplug you would be to kill him. But never mind, it's only for nine months. By then he will have recovered from his ailment, and can safely be unplugged from you.” Is it morally incumbent on you to accede to this situation? No doubt it would be very nice of you if you did, a great kindness. But do you have to accede to it? What if it were not nine months, but nine years? Or longer still? What if the director of the hospital says. “Tough luck. I agree. but now you've got to stay in bed, with the violinist plugged into you, for the rest of your life. Because remember this. All persons have a right to life, and violinists are persons. Granted you have a right to decide what happens in and to your body, but a person's right to life outweighs your right to decide what happens in and to your body. So you cannot ever be unplugged from him.”

Thomson argues that you are not morally obligated to remain unplugged, and so the unborn child’s right to life is insufficient reason for abortion to be unethical. In examining Thomson’s argument it becomes understandable how someone could think human life begins at conception while still being in favor of a woman’s right to choose.