William Lane Craig versus Rosenberg

My series on the February 2013 debate between William Lane Craig and Alex Rosenberg:

1. The Leibnizian Cosmological Argument
2. The Kalam Cosmological Argument
3. The Applicability of Mathematics to the Physical World
4. The Fine-Tuning of the Universe for Intelligent Life
5. Intentional States of Consciousness in the World
6. Objective Moral Values and Duties in the World
7. The Historical Facts about Jesus of Nazareth
8. God can be Personally Known and Experienced
9. Arguments Against Naturalism
10. The Argument from Evil
11. Wrap-Up

Introduction

Last month atheist philosopher Alex Rosenberg debated Christian philosopher William Lane Craig over whether faith in God is reasonable (debate begins at around 17:14). I’ve mentioned before the reason why William Lane Craig wins debates, and since this debate is a good example of how not to debate William Lane Craig, I’ll go through some of what Rosenberg did wrong and how he could have done a lot better. First up I’ll go through Craig’s arguments and Rosenberg’s inadequate rebuttals, staring with the Leibnizian cosmological argument (LCA), leaving the other arguments for future blog entries.

The Leibnizian Cosmological Argument

The LCA Craig gave in this debate was this:

1. Every contingent thing has an explanation of its existence.
2. If the universe has an explanation of its existence, that explanation is a transcendent, personal being.
3. The universe is a contingent thing.
4. Therefore, the universe has an explanation of its existence (from 1, 3).
5. Therefore, the explanation of the universe is a transcendent, personal being (from 2, 4).

By “the universe” Craig says the means “all of space-time reality.” Premise 1 is a version of something called the principle of sufficient reason (PSR). Craig believes that a transcendent personal cause is responsible for the universe’s existence. In advancing this argument Craig is also advancing an explanation for why anything at all exists.

What Rosenberg did

Unfortunately Rosenberg doesn’t attack the actual PSR Craig uses in the debate. To quote him at around 43:09:

many of the arguments that Dr. Craig gave tonight and which he has given repeatedly in the past, rest on the first cause argument, an argument that goes back certainly to St. Thomas Aquinas and probably to Aristotle. It rests on, of course, the principle of sufficient reason; the principle that everything that exists must have a cause.

He then goes on to attack this version of the principle of sufficient reason (PSR), a principle that Craig never uses in the entire debate. While this also ties into the kalam cosmological argument (KCA), a version which says “anything that begins to exist has a cause,” I’ll deal with it here since Rosenberg explicitly invokes the term “principle of sufficient reason.”

His “counterexample” to the PSR is that given two physically identical uranium-238 atoms, one of them will emit an alpha particle and the other won’t, and there is no cause for the difference between the two.

Suppose we accept that the uranium-238 atom bringing about an alpha particle is uncaused in the sense that it is indeterministic (identical physical conditions could have produced different outcomes). There are two problems here. First, with respect to the KCA, we still have an (albeit indeterministic) cause for the alpha particle: the uranium-238 atom. Second, with respect to the LCA, there’s an obvious explanation to the alpha particle’s existence: the uranium-238 atom emitted it (even if it did so spontaneously and randomly). Not only did Rosenberg fail to provide a counterexample to the PSR Craig actually used, Rosenberg failed to make any sort of argument against Craig’s actual PSR.

Remarkably, even after Craig said he wasn’t using the PSR Rosenberg described, Rosenberg still seemed to act as if the distorted version of PSR was part of Craig’s view all along (see 1:32:57 onward). The upshot is that Rosenberg never really attacks Craig’s version of the LCA, and Craig can rightfully point out (as he did in 1:26:54) that there has been no response to this argument. Rosenberg’s failure here is egregious enough to be worth repeating: he never responds to this major argument for theism!

What Rosenberg should have done

When discussing the LCA Craig said:

Now there’s only one way I can think of to get a contingent universe from a necessarily existing cause, and that is if the cause is a personal agent who can freely choose to create a contingent reality. It therefore follows that the best explanation of the contingent universe is a transcendent personal being, which is what everybody means by “God.”

For the moment, let’s ignore that “the best explanation of the contingent universe is a transcendent personal being” doesn’t quite follow from “there’s only one way I can think of to get a contingent universe from a necessarily existing cause, and that is if the cause is a personal agent who can freely choose to create a contingent reality.” Craig’s argument from lack of imagination aside, it is simply false that a transcendent personal being who created the contingent universe is what everybody means by God. There’s also omnipotence, omniscience, and moral perfection—all “big three” attributes that are entirely missing from “what everybody means by ‘God.’” Remarkably, Rosenberg doesn’t put forth this objection at all.

That said, the conclusion of the “summarized” LCA is worrisome enough for the atheist. I’ve already attacked the LCA in my Rebutting the Leibnizian Cosmological Argument for God article, but I can summarize here. What Rosenberg should have done is attack the actual PSR that Craig used. Rosenberg could have argued, as I did in my article, that while contingent things that begin to exist require an explanation for their existence, contingent things that exist eternally need no explanation for their existence. As eternal things, they do not require any cause for their existence and their existence could quite plausibly be brute facts. This should be a pretty straightforward response, but Rosenberg messed up by attacking a pointless straw man.

The Kalam Cosmological Argument

The Argument

One of the big marks William Lane Craig has made in philosophy of religion, for good or ill, is his revival of the kalam cosmological argument (KCA) in modern times. There are a number of ways to formulate the argument, but here is one of them:

1. If the universe began to exist, it has a cause.
2. The universe began to exist.
3. Therefore, the universe has a cause (from 1 and 2).

The proponent of the KCA then argues further that the cause of the universe must be (among other things) transcendent and personal. It should be noted that by “the universe” the argument refers to all of connected space-time reality. So if one thinks there was a physical reality prior to the big bang that caused the big bang to occur, that physical reality would also be part of “the universe” as the term is being used in this argument.

Those familiar with the KCA might wonder why I didn’t replace the first premise with “Anything that begins to exist has a cause,” since another well-known form of the argument is this:

1. Anything that begins to exist has a cause.
2. The universe begins to exist.
3. Therefore, the universe has cause.

In this case though I’m using a version of the first premise that doesn’t claim anything more than it needs to for the conclusion to follow. If one believes the universe began to exist, all one really needs to get to the conclusion is “If the universe began to exist, then it has a cause.” The claim that anything that begins to exist has a cause claims more than it needs to for the conclusion to follow.

First Premise

The “anything that begins to exist has a cause” claim is potentially misleading, and to help dispel some possible misunderstanding here I should first explain what a material cause and efficient cause is. A material cause is the stuff from which something is made out of, e.g. when Michelangelo created his famous marble sculpture David, marble is the material cause. The efficient cause is that which makes the effect, or more generally, brings something about. In the case of the David sculpture, the efficient cause is Michelangelo. The “anything that begins to exist has a cause” claim is saying, “It is not the case that something that begins to exist has no efficient cause and no material cause.” Something coming into being with no efficient cause and no material cause is said to come into being out of literally nothing. Theists have claimed that the universe popping into being uncaused out of nothing is absurd.

It might be tempting to object here and say the universe did come into being from nothing, but I would caution against this move. First, it’s completely unnecessary. The universe existing eternally is a viable option. Second, the idea that things don’t come into being from nothing has surprisingly strong support, on par with the best confirmed physical laws that astrophysics relies on (see an argument for that principle in Maverick Christian’s Anything that Begins to Exist Has a Cause article, and keep in mind that even Christians can be right about a few things).

Third, all atheists who would seriously consider the universe popping into being uncaused out of nothing should ask themselves: would we really abandon this principle in any other circumstance when we have no real evidence that it occurred? If I say an apartment popped into being uncaused out of nothing, would you believe me? What if I showed you a video of an apartment popping into being uncaused? Would you believe me then or think I had used some special effects? It would appear intellectually suspicious to immediately abandon our natural skepticism of things popping into being from nothing to avoid a creator of the universe, and as I said before, believing that the universe popped into being from nothing is completely unnecessary. We don’t have to resort to such extreme measures to refute the KCA.

The Second Premise

This is by far the most vulnerable premise, and the one worth attacking. While there are some scientists who think the evidence points to an absolute beginning of the universe (such as Alexander Vilenkin) there are others who disagree (for example, Sean Carrol believes the universe probably did not have a beginning). To be generous though, let us grant for sake of argument that the past is temporally finite and that some sort of first cause or other is needed. Because the past is finite, the first cause would have to be something outside of time. William Lane Craig, for example, believes that God is timeless sans the universe, but after God creates the universe God “enters into” time as a result of creating it.

But why does the first cause have to be a nonphysical personal being instead of some impersonal physical entity? The atheist could believe the physical universe is eternal in the following sense: the physical universe has a finite past but the first cause is some other sort of physical reality that caused the rest of the universe to come into being (perhaps at the moment of the big bang). Since the first cause would have to be timeless, we would have to commit ourselves to some sort of first cause that is radically different from what we temporal creatures have experienced. But there’s no good reason to favor a transcendent magical deity over some sort of physical reality as the first cause, and if forced to choose between the two surely the physical reality hypothesis is the less extravagant view.

William Lane Craig, naturally enough, would disagree about which of the two we should favor. To help avoid straw men I’ll quote from the horse’s mouth:

In fact, I think that it can be plausibly argued that the cause of the universe must be a personal Creator. For how else could a temporal effect arise from an eternal cause? If the cause were simply a mechanically operating set of necessary and sufficient conditions existing from eternity, then why would not the effect also exist from eternity? For example, if the cause of water's being frozen is the temperature's being below zero degrees, then if the temperature were below zero degrees from eternity, then any water present would be frozen from eternity. The only way to have an eternal cause but a temporal effect would seem to be if the cause is a personal agent who freely chooses to create an effect in time. For example, a man sitting from eternity may will to stand up; hence, a temporal effect may arise from an eternally existing agent. Indeed, the agent may will from eternity to create a temporal effect, so that no change in the agent need be conceived.

For the nonce, let’s ignore the possibility that the transcendent personal cause could have been many persons involved instead of a lone Creator. One problem with Craig’s argument is that the examples he is using involve the temporally everlasting sort of eternity rather than timeless eternity. I agree that it makes sense (or at least more sense) to posit a personal cause when dealing with an eternal cause with a temporal effect when the cause in question is temporally everlasting. But that isn’t the question here: the question is about whether a timelessly eternal physical cause (which we may presume is a timelessly eternal “mechanically operating set of necessary and sufficient conditions”) could not create a temporal effect.

A more charitable way to read Craig here is that he was just offering an analogy. Just as a temporally eternal personal cause can do the job whereas a temporally eternal mechanically operating set of necessary and sufficient conditions cannot, so too is a personal cause needed when the causal agency is timelessly eternal. But isn’t it the case that an omnipotent God’s will to create the universe would, when the personal agent is timelessly eternal, constitute a timelessly eternal set of necessary and sufficient conditions to create the universe, and thereby result in a co-eternal effect? Craig might say that a timelessly eternal personal agency can create a temporal effect in a way that’s analogous to the temporally eternal personal agent willing from eternity to create a temporal effect.

But it’s hard to see how the analogy holds. Notice that the mechanism can’t work the same way in the timelessly eternal case as it does in the temporally eternal case. In the temporally eternal case, the personal agent can say to himself throughout most of eternity past, “I will stand up at 7:30 a.m. on February 24, 2013” and as the time grows nearer think, “7:28 a.m., 7:29 a.m., at last, 7:30 a.m. on February 24, 2013! I will stand up now.” But when the personal agent is timelessly eternal, the personal agent can’t just traverse through time and wait for the right moment to occur to produce a temporal effect from an eternal willing of the effect, because time doesn’t even exist in the timelessly eternal state of affairs. The mechanism, if there is one, would have to be quite different. So what is this mechanism and why can’t a timelessly eternal physical cause not do it? The answer is at best unclear, and for this reason (if for no other reason) the KCA fails.

Conclusion

One form of the KCA:

1. If the universe began to exist, it has a cause.
2. The universe began to exist.
3. Therefore, the universe has a cause (from 1 and 2).

The first premise strikes me as reasonable. We have a natural skepticism for things popping into being uncaused out of nothing. For example, the typical atheist would disbelieve me if I said I saw an apartment popping into being uncaused out of nothing. Even if I provided a video of the event, the atheist would likely believe I had used special effects. It would seem intellectually suspicious if we abandoned such natural skepticism to avoid a creator of the universe, and fortunately such a maneuver is not needed to refute the KCA. The rational atheist can attack the second premise instead.

While there are some scientists who think the universe had a beginning, there are other scientists who don’t. Even if we grant that the universe has a finite past, the cause need not be a transcendent magical deity—a physical cause would work too. Indeed, when forced to choose between transcendent magical deity and some sort of physical reality as the first cause, the physical reality hypothesis is the less extravagant view. Craig has (at best) made an argument from a bad analogy that when it comes to eternal causal agencies, only a personal cause could create a temporal effect. It is at best unclear why this would be the case, and without any good reason to think this, the most reasonable view (if we had to posit a first cause) is the less extravagant physical cause.

The Presumption of Atheism

While different people can use “the presumption of atheism” to mean different things, in this article I’m going to use it to refer to the idea that atheism is the correct default position to have on the issue of whether gods exist. There are basically two ways to argue for this. One way is to define atheism broadly enough to include agnosticism, and then argue that agnosticism is the best default position. Another approach, and the one I’ll go for here, is to define atheism as the doctrine that there is no deity and argue that the actual default position should be the non-agnostic sort of atheism.

One Approach

One approach to the presumption of atheism is say that the nonexistence of any given entity is the default position. For example, why do we not believe in fairies, gnomes, leprechauns etc.? Is it because we have overwhelming evidence for their nonexistence? No. The average person on the street will disbelieve in these entities but when pressed she probably won’t be able to cite any evidence against them. Yet such average people are rational to disbelieve in those entities because believing in something’s nonexistence is the default position.

As attractive as this principle may seem, counterexamples abound. Suppose for example Bill ponders the idea of life existing on other worlds, but he has no evidence for or against the idea. The most reasonable position for Bill here is clearly agnosticism about life on other worlds.

A Better Approach

Still, aren’t we rational in believing that fairies and leprechauns do not exist? Why should we disbelieve the existence of fairies whereas Bill should be agnostic about the existence of life on other worlds? One relevant factor in the case of leprechauns and fairies is that they have a kind of substantial deviation from the types of things we know exist, whereas this isn’t true in the case of life on other worlds (e.g. we already know of one planet with life on it).

Yet whether a thing’s existence does constitute such a substantial deviation will depend on the world one lives in. To illustrate, suppose we lived in a world where we knew intelligent beings with supernatural powers exist. Humans regularly interact with fairies, leprechauns, and a few other supernatural species. Suppose also that in this world you have no evidence for or against the existence of deities, where we define “deity” to be an intelligent being whose powers supernaturally transcend human abilities and whom some humans worship. It seems that in this situation agnosticism about the existence of deities is reasonable, since in this scenario a deity would not substantially deviate from the sorts of things we know exist (e.g. we already know that there are intelligent beings with supernatural powers).

In the real world of course, fairies, leprechauns, and the like are all outside our domain of known entities. In the real world, invisible nonphysical deities with supernatural powers constitute a substantial deviation from the types of things we know exist. If for example I tell you that while I was walking in a city I saw a deity shoot lighting from his fingers, you would disbelieve me and rightfully so. But if you would disbelieve that a deity did that even when I said I saw it happen, how much more should you also disbelieve that deity’s existence when I make no claim to witness him? The case for the presumption of atheism becomes clear.

One Good Objection

I don’t know whether this objection to my argument for the presumption of atheism is successful, but it’s worth considering. One objection is whether this argument really counts as a reason for atheist presumption or an actual argument for atheism. To illustrate, J.L. Mackie put forth what is now known as the Argument from Queerness against objective values (a term that includes objective moral values, e.g. an action being objectively evil). In chapter 1 of his Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong, he writes, “If there were objective values, then they would be entities or qualities or relations of a very strange sort, utterly different from anything else in the universe.” This was an argument against the existence of objective values, and one could say that my argument for the presumption of atheism is similarly an Argument from Queerness for atheism (and thus an Argument from Queerness against the existence of gods). I’m not sure to what degree that is true, but as I said it is worth considering.

Who Goes to Heaven and Hell?

There are serious intellectual problems with the ideas of heaven and hell, e.g. who goes where. Some religious worldviews have a more difficult with time it than others, and for sake of specificity, I’ll pick on Christianity (and certain flavors thereof), since that’s a familiar religion and a politically correct target as of late. In the Christian faith, Jesus died for humanity’s sins such that anyone who believed in Jesus and accepted his sacrifice would have eternal life in heaven (though there might be additional criteria depending on the flavor of Christianity).

Theories and Problems

Theory: Only those who believe in Jesus and accept him into their heart (whatever that means) go to heaven; the rest rot in hell.

Problem: When pressed, I think you’ll find that most Christians don’t really believe this even if they say they do. Just ask them the following questions. What about a few years before Jesus was born? If you say that some other set of criteria held pre-Jesus, why wouldn’t the same criteria apply post-Jesus to those who have never heard of him? Such questions are so devastating that I think even most Christians will acknowledge this refutes that theory.

Theory: God providentially ordered the world so that anybody who would have responded positively to Jesus got to hear the message of Jesus. Thus all those who don’t hear the message of Jesus rot in hell because they would have rejected Jesus anyway.

Problem: Once again, there’s a refutation so devastating it will convince even Christians. Just ask these people who claim to adhere to this theory the following questions. What about miscarriages and babies who die in infancy? Are you willing to tell the mothers of these children that these children are going to hell, since God has providentially ordered the world so that anyone who didn’t hear the message of Jesus would spend eternity in hell? Even most Christians will realize that a perfectly good God doing that is highly implausible.

Theory: God providentially ordered the world so that anybody who would have responded positively to Jesus got to hear the message of Jesus, except for children who all got to heaven. Thus all those who don’t hear the message of Jesus rot in hell because they would have rejected Jesus anyway, except for children.

Problem: This sounds like a tactic based more on emotion (who wants to say to mothers that their baby who died is going to hell?) than one based on reason. If God is so merciful to children, why doesn’t he show the same mercy when they grow to be adults? Do these people somehow lose their worth to be saved? Moreover, hearing the message of Jesus isn’t enough; some people when they hear it just don’t believe. As an analogy, suppose you are cancer victim, and I offer a cure for cancer but you mistakenly believe the alleged cure is harmful and I deliberately withhold enormous quantities of evidence that the cure is harmless and real. If you were to die of cancer, could I really be held blameless by saying, “Well, I told that person I had the cure” when I deliberately withheld evidence? Similarly, most people don’t become Christians almost certainly would become Christians if they knew Christianity was true. So it’s not enough just to respond positively to the message of Jesus; these people also need to be the sort who would believe it.

Theory: God providentially ordered the world so that anybody who doesn’t become a Christian would not have become a Christian no matter how much evidence they received, except for children. Thus, all non-Christians still rot in hell, except for Christians.

Problem: There’s still the question of why God doesn’t show the same mercy to adults as well as children regarding those who have never heard of Jesus, but let’s ignore that. The fact remains that the majority of humans throughout history, even in the post-Jesus world, do not become Christians. Are we really to believe that most people would reject God’s gift of eternal life to him once they were aware of this offer? Granted, there might be extreme cases where some people might do this, e.g. a hardened serial killer who hates God and refuses to be in heaven with him, but would most people do this? The situation gets worse upon the view that God is the locus of moral value (as Christian apologist William Lane Craig believes), the source of moral goodness itself to which humans can find fulfillment in. Isn’t it highly implausible that the majority of the human race would reject this once they knew that God was like this? On top of that, there’s the question of why God doesn’t make this knowledge of himself obvious to everyone (perhaps by inundating people with an overwhelming feeling of his presence), and we get an argument from hiddenness (why does God hide himself?), though such an argument is somewhat beyond the scope of this article.

Theory: Everyone goes to heaven.

Problem: The idea that everyone ultimately goes to heaven is called universalism. There are different flavors of universalism, one being that some people do go to hell, but only for a finite period of time, kind of like prison. Another variety is that everyone goes to heaven as soon as they die, with no period of hell in between. One problem with universalism is akin to the argument from hiddenness: why didn’t God tell us everyone would (eventually) make it into heaven, instead of having people agonize about spending eternity in hell? While there are some Christians, such as Keith DeRose, who argue the Bible teaches universalism, even if such Christians are correct surely the Bible could have taught it more clearly, as evidenced by an extremely large proportion (and I suspect the majority) of Biblically knowledgeable Christians who reject universalism and argue that the Bible teaches against it.

General Problems

One other point about universalism: C.S. Lewis makes an excellent (and somewhat famous) point in chapter 8 of The Problem of Pain where he says, “I would pay any price to be able to say truthfully ‘All will be saved.’ But my reason retorts ‘Without their will, or with it?’” It seems highly likely that some people (albeit perhaps not very many) would not want to be saved, in which case universalism is false, but then why did God create those souls to begin with? Why, if he knew a soul was going to be damned before he placed it into the body (of an infant or conceptus) create a different soul instead? This of course is general problem of for all doctrines who suppose that some people go to hell.

And if God were capable of creating only those souls who would choose to accept him, why not do this early on? Why not create a heaven for all in the first place? Wouldn’t a perfectly good God do that?

One generic point that applies to universalism and all other doctrines of hell is this: why didn’t God make the criteria for going to heaven and hell clearer? Such a matter has huge importance to our existence, and given the high cost of eternal torment, wouldn’t a perfectly good God tell us what the reality of the situation is here?

Conclusion

Numerous points have been made in this article about the problem of who goes to hell and who goes to heaven, but I can summarize:

1. On the view that children automatically go to heaven if they die (which sounds suspiciously emotionally based—who wants to say to mothers that their dead baby went to hell?), why doesn’t God show the same mercy to adults?
2. On the view that only Christians go to heaven and that God providentially ordered the world so that any who don’t become Christians would not have become ones no matter what the evidence (with an exception for children perhaps), isn’t it implausible that most people, if they knew that Christianity was true, would reject God’s gift of eternal life to them?
3. Why should there be hell in the first place? Why, if God knew a soul was going to be damned before he placed it into the body (of an infant or conceptus) create a different soul instead, one that he knew would go to heaven if he were to create it? What’s the point of creating a soul if God knows that the soul would be damned no matter what evidence he or she would face?
4. Going off of part 4, given that this is within the ability of an omnipotent and omniscient God, why didn’t he create only those souls who would freely accept him and create a heaven for everyone in the first place? Wouldn’t a perfectly good God do this instead of creating the doomed-to-damnation souls for no other apparent ultimate end then to have somebody suffer in an eternal torture chamber?

Thus, there appear to be serious intellectual problems with the ideas of heaven and hell.

2012 Year in Review

It’s only been about four months since I started this blog (the first entry was August 29, 2012), but a review of what’s been done so far with the Maverick Atheism Blog seemed like a good idea anyway.

The Argument from Evil

One of the best arguments for atheism is the argument from evil.

• The Argument from Evil (in a nutshell)—A brief but convincing argument from evil against theism. Related articles:
  • The Free Will Theodicy Attacking Itself—Showing how the free will theodicy against the problem of evil shoots itself in the foot.
  • William Lane Craig's Failed Defense: Suffering Helps People Know God—One of William Lane Craig’s defenses against the problem of evil is that suffering helps people know God; I argue such a defense fails.

Rebutting Arguments for Theism

I’ve also attacked arguments for God this year:

• The Ontological Argument—A devastating critique of this major argument for theism.
• The Moral Argument and William Lane Craig—The moral argument is a popular argument for theism, and here I critique a version of it popularized by William Lane Craig.
• Rebutting the Leibnizian Cosmological Argument—The Leibnizian cosmological argument (LCA) is another well-known argument for theism, and again I attack a version popularized by William Lane Craig.

I was hesitant to put the last one on the list because I also responded to the Maverick Christian article on the Leibnizian cosmological argument. Maverick Christian in turn responded to my article, and I haven’t written a counter-response to that yet; looks like that’ll happen next year.

Still, all in all hasn’t been a bad year (or rather four months) arguing for atheism and thinking independently. I look forward to continuing that tradition next year.

The Importance of Logic

As I said in my last entry, just because an argument is unsound doesn’t mean that every objection will be a good one. Consider the following moral argument popularized by William Lane Craig:

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.

This argument doesn’t work (see my refutation of this moral argument) but on more than one occasion I’ve seen atheists who would say the conclusion (line 3) doesn’t follow from the premises (lines 1 and 2), when anybody with sufficient training in logic (a discipline of philosophy that even science-loving philosophy-haters would like) would have known better. Consider these two relevant rules of logic:

Transposition says that “If A, then B” is logically equivalent to “If not-B, then not-A.” Two statements being logically equivalent means it’s impossible for the two to have different truth-values, so that if one is true then the other must be true, and if one is false then the other must be false. Some examples of transposition in action:

1. If A, then B
2. If not-B, then not-A    (follows from 1 and transposition)
3. If A, then B    (follows from 2 and transposition)

A famous rule of inference called modus ponens goes like this:

1. If A, then B
2. A
3. Therefore, B

We can see the moral argument follows by using the following symbolization key:

• G = God exists
• O = objective moral values and duties exist

And using the rules of logic as follows:

1. If not-G, then not-O
2. O

---

3. If O, then G    (follows from 1 and transposition)
4. G    (follows from 2, 3, and modus ponens)

This isn’t to say that the moral argument I depicted is a good one; see my little series on the moral argument for a good refutation of it. But this does illustrate that just because the argument is unsound doesn’t mean that every atheist attack is a good one, and some critical thinking is advisable when looking at would-be objections to theistic arguments. Some objections to theistic arguments do work, but the same doesn’t necessarily go with every objection peddled on the internet.

Knowing some rules of logic would have prevented certain atheists from claiming that the conclusion doesn’t follow from the premises. I recommend that all atheists (and theists too) get some training in logic. You might think, “I’m an atheist; I already know logic!” Maybe you didn’t make the mistake of thinking the moral argument’s conclusion doesn’t follow from the premises, but consider these two examples borrowed from page 2 of Harry J. Gensler’s Introduction To Logic (2nd edition). Test yourself by trying to correctly answer the following two questions:

1. If you overslept, you’ll be late. You aren’t late. Therefore:
   1. You did oversleep.
   2. You didn’t oversleep
   3. You’re late.
   4. None of these follows.
2. If you overslept, then you’ll be late. You didn’t oversleep. Therefore:
   1. You’re late.
   2. You aren’t late.
   3. You did oversleep.
   4. None of these follows.

If you guessed (b) for the first one and (b) for the second one, then you made a mistake; (b) is right for the first one but wrong for the second one. Choosing (b) for the second one makes the fallacy of denying the antecedent:

1. If A, then B
2. Not-A
3. Therefore, not-B

For example:

1. If I have twelve fingers, then I have at least ten fingers.
2. I do not have twelve fingers.
3. Therefore, I do not have at least ten fingers.

As Gensler says in page 2 of his book, “Untrained logical intuitions are often unreliable.” Even if you didn’t make a mistake with this mini-quiz I gave, learning logic is highly recommended. There just isn’t enough logic happening among theists and even among some atheists. Gensler’s Introduction to Logic is in many ways an excellent book (e.g. in its comprehensiveness, covering inductive logic and paraconsistent logic), but has the disadvantage of giving less standard names to the rules of propositional logic when it introduces those rules; something similar could be said for quantificational logic (it calls “universal instantiation” “drop universal”). Daniel Bonevac’s Deduction: Introductory Symbolic Logic at least mentions the traditional named rules like modus ponens and includes material on counterfactual logic, but overall it is less comprehensive and less readable than Gensler’s Introduction To Logic. Given a choice I’d pick Gensler’s while looking up the traditional names of those logic rules.

If you don’t want to buy a book on logic (though I think reading books is highly recommended for both atheists and theists) there’s Stefan Waner and Steven R. Costenoble’s introduction to logic on the web. In any case, logic is important and I advise all readers to learn it. If it were up to me, logic would be part of K-12 standard education. The world could certainly use more of it.

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.