Theism vs. naturalism: where does the evidence point?

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Which worldview explains reality better? The first candidate is Christianity/theism. Opposing that is naturalism, the belief that natural explanations are sufficient to explain the world we see. (To be more precise, I argue that naturalistic explanations of nature are better than supernatural explanations, not that the supernatural necessarily doesn’t exist.)

Each worldview makes predictions about how our world should look. We’ll consider those predictions and compare them against the evidence from reality to see which worldview does the better job.

God’s hiddenness

Theism proposes supernatural deit(ies) that engage with humanity. (Contrast that with deism, in which a deity could’ve started up the universe and then walked away.)

Our example of theism is Christianity, which tells us that God should be obvious: “God’s invisible qualities . . . have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse” (Romans 1:20). It makes the same claim when it says that God is anxious to have a relationship with us, since understanding God’s plan and putting our faith in Jesus is mandatory for us to escape hell.

God should be obvious, and his message to us should be unambiguous. But when we look around, there is no good evidence for God, just as naturalism predicts. (I discuss this Problem of Divine Hiddenness in detail here.)

Fragmentation into sects

Even if humans invent religions, theism predicts that clear evidence for the one correct religion would outshine all the rest. Invented religions might always be background noise in the religious environment, but the correct religion—the only one actually supported by evidence of real god(s)—would quickly spread from its introduction thousands of years ago to become and remain the biggest religion by far. There would be no contest to any unbiased observer which religion was correct (more here).

But it doesn’t work that way. For all of human existence, the majority of people at any moment have always had the bad fortune to not believe in the one correct religion (assuming there is one). Religion is a cultural phenomenon. Christianity is the largest religion at the moment, though it might not be in fifty years when Islam is expected to become number one. Christianity is not the oldest religion, it didn’t become largest until centuries after its founding, and it’s never claimed the majority of the world’s people.

A single, unambiguous message doesn’t exist even within Christianity. There are 45,000 Christian denominations, a number that is growing rapidly.

The Bible itself documents how God’s fundamental properties have evolved.

  • God was initially just a guy who walked in the Garden to chat with Adam and Eve, but later he said, “No one may see my face and live” (Exodus 33:20).
  • God had to send out agents to get intelligence about Sodom and Gomorrah, but ask Christians now, and they’ll say that he’s become omniscient (“New and improved God 2.0—now with 1020 times more omniscience!”).
  • God was initially part of a pantheon, and only later do we get a clear statement of monotheism (Isaiah 43:10, for example).
  • God was initially merely powerful, and he apparently had limitations. Now we hear he’s invulnerable.
  • Like a superhero comic, the God story periodically reboots.

The map of world religions shows that religious belief doesn’t change with evidence like science does. Instead, it’s a cultural trait.

Relationship to science

Theism predicts that sacred texts would be useful in the real world. They wouldn’t be full of just-trust-me-on-this demands. Instead, they would be grounded in the real world so that we could see that their claims were both surprising (far beyond what was known in that society at the time) and reliable. We wouldn’t need faith to accept the supernatural; it would be obvious that this wisdom didn’t come from any human society.

Christianity is again a counterexample. Any scientific statement within the Bible that’s true was known by the culture that produced that part of the Bible, and all other scientific claims within the Bible are false. Mining the Bible to find verses that vaguely anticipate modern scientific discoveries is a popular hobby for some Christian apologists, but science has learned nothing about reality from the Bible.

You’d think that the Bible would at least make room for simple science that would greatly benefit people. For example, how about a recipe for soap plus basic hygiene rules? It would only take a paragraph, but we find nothing. Even Jesus’s healing miracles just reflect the superstitions of the time.

In the competition between science and religion, “God did it” was the answer for famine, plague, drought, disease, and even war in centuries past. Dogma rather than evidence pointed to God, and science has steadily produced reliable answers to replace God for countless scientific puzzles. The reverse has never happened. Shoehorning God into the remaining puzzles makes him a “god of the gaps,” a pitiful rearguard action that makes a joke of the all-powerful Creator of the Universe.

At best, apologists can say, “Well, science hasn’t answered this question,” unconcerned that Christianity hasn’t answered any question. Yes, science does have unanswered questions on its to-do list—that’s how science works. These aren’t questions that theologians have pointed out but are mostly obtuse questions that only science could raise.

Life

Theism predicts that life is designed and that life is the purpose of the universe.

Neither is true. A Rube Goldberg machine and a Swiss watch are both complicated but in different ways. Cells are complicated, but they’re more like the redundant and inefficient Rube Goldberg machine than the elegant watch. Designer-less evolution is sufficient to explain why life looks the way it does.

DNA is often cited as being so software-like that it must have come from a mind, but I disagree. The sloppiness in DNA alone is enough to defeat the Design Hypothesis (the argument that life must’ve been designed).

The theist will say that software invariably comes from minds, but they forget that minds invariably come from brains. If invariability is important to them, they must show us the brain that houses God’s mind.

And, no, software doesn’t invariably come from minds. Software can be evolved in a computer where it is randomly changed and tested for fitness, analogous to what happens in the real world to DNA.

The theist must look at the hundreds of billions of galaxies in the universe, each with hundreds of billions of stars, and say that all of that exists because of the humans on one planet in an insignificant backwater of one galaxy. Naturalism gets it right when it predicts no design and sees life as just something that happens now and then.

We’ll conclude this worldview comparison next time with a look at morality, the mind vs. the soul, and more. Go here.

We can’t observe quarks or black holes,
but we should see their effects.
We do.
We can’t observe the Christian God,
but we should see his effects.
We don’t.
— Victor Stenger,
“Faith in Anything is Unreasonable”

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 11/17/16.)

Image from Image Catalog, public domain

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Irresponsible use of the awesome power of prayer

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Christian parents teach their children to pray, but is that wise?

The claims made for prayer in the Bible are hard to overestimate. Jesus said, “Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you” (Matthew 7:7). Jesus said, “Whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours” (Mark 11:24). Jesus said, “He who believes in me will also do the works that I do; and greater works than these will he do” (John 14:12).

Having the all-powerful creator of the universe just a prayer away is a lot of power. It’s an inconceivable amount of power. And we’re going to trust that to children?!

God intervenes

Christians will say that there’s no cause for concern because God will make sure to only grant safe wishes, but that’s not what the Bible says. The verses above, in context, don’t have such a limitation. Little Tommy could pray for his rival on the football team to get sick so he can start in the next game. He could pray that Susie returns his affections. He could pray that his math teacher dies so he doesn’t have to take that test on Friday.

One Christian response is to say that prayer can come with caveats. For example, in James 4:3, we are cautioned that we won’t receive when we “ask with wrong motives,” and little Tommy’s motives are pretty selfish.

Skeptics have a couple of responses. First: what part of, “Ask and it will be given to you” do you not understand?

Second: at best this admits that the Bible is contradictory—prayer has constraints in one place but no constraints in another. Ordinary, fallible Christians are left putting the pieces together, trying to make sense out of the contradiction (or discarding it as manmade mythology).

Purposes of prayer

Another Christian response is to say that prayer has lots of purposes—confessing sins, thanking God for the good things in life, reassuring God that he’s fantastic, and so on. But this is a smokescreen, and the prayer of petition remains the primary kind of prayer in the Bible.

Let’s admit that prayer can be beneficial in the same way that meditation can, but when you’re praying for someone else, meditation is not the point. The idea behind person A praying for person B isn’t for person A to feel better, it’s for a specific good thing to happen to person B.

Prayer as described by Jesus is powerful medicine, though there are different kinds of medicine. A bottle of sleeping pills left in the kitchen where small children could find it is reckless . . . unless it’s homeopathic medicine, which is just pretend medicine. And that’s the key insight—that prayer is like homeopathic medicine.

Prayer can be given to children with the confidence that it can’t be used for bad requests because it can’t be used for good requests, either. It’s just pretend.

The recommended age
to use a Ouija board is 8 years old.
So . . . you need to be 21 to drink alcohol
but only 8 to summon demons?
— seen on the internet

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 11/9/16.)

Image from Nancy Big Crow (license CC BY 2.0)

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The Kalam Argument: infinite regress and more

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The Kalam Cosmological Argument (KCA) is a modern variant of the old “But Someone had to be there to start it all off, right?” argument. It has a common sense appeal, but it falls apart under inspection.

This is the final installment of a critique of a Christian defense of the KCA (part 1). We’ll look at “Your explanation requires another explanation,” “God has no ‘but what created God?’ infinite regress” and a few more.

Here is the Kalam Cosmological Argument (KCA):

1: Whatever begins to exist had a cause

2: The universe began to exist

3: Therefore, the universe had a cause

Below, the skeptical argument is shown in bold and the Christian response in italics.

8. Even if the universe has a beginning, there are possibilities besides God.

If you’re thinking of aliens or the multiverse, that just pushes the problem back a step.

What is it with this obsession for an immediate answer? Can’t we just say, “I don’t know”? That approach has done well for science because it puts the spotlight on interesting questions, which then tend to get answered.

Of course, it’s clear why apologists demand an answer right now. They know that science regularly replaces supernatural explanation with evidence-based explanations. Their time window is brief, and they want to score some points for “God did it!” before their question du jour is answered. Then they’ll move on to another unanswered scientific question and hope that everyone forgets that last one.

As one example of a non-God beginning of our universe, maybe it’s a computer simulation like the Matrix. Perhaps such a simulation will for advanced civilizations be no more difficult than a homework assignment. And there are plenty of theories with natural causes. We’re beyond “I don’t know” but haven’t advanced to “here’s the overwhelming scientific consensus” yet.

Let’s return to the Christian challenge that any explanation for the universe—aliens created it, or there’s a multiverse—just creates another thing that must itself be answered. These would indeed demand an explanation, but why imagine that God is it? God has never been the answer to anything. If God is the explanation, show that he exists first and then infer that he created the universe/multiverse. The Christian god who loves us and desires a relationship would be obvious, and the obtuse KCA wouldn’t be the way to find him. Every clue points to naturalism as the explanation for this and other unknown puzzles.

When religion begins to answer interesting questions like these, let me know. Until then, the idea that religion will provide the answers to questions it could never dream up is ridiculous.

9. Popular-level science teaches the universe had a beginning, but someone says the real science shows it doesn’t.

“We aren’t given any argument as to why it’s really the case that a potentially successful model for the beginning of the universe shows no finite beginning. We’re simply to take someone’s word for it, when we actually have physicists and scientists admitting these theories don’t work.”

There’s not much to respond to here, but I include it for completeness. I’ll just note that cosmologist Sean Carroll’s list of proposed models for the universe (there are many) includes a beginning-less universe (more).

10. The KCA relies entirely on current science, and science can change.

“First, simply because some claim remains open to change does not mean that claim cannot be accepted as true. . . . Of course we can claim it is true!”

I reject the phrasing of your statement, but you’re welcome to use science as the basis for an argument that concludes God exists. KCA isn’t a sound argument, as I’ve shown before, but have at it.

“Second, the KCA does not rely entirely on science. In fact, the second premise (“the universe began to exist”) can be defended solely on rational argumentation.”

I think we’ve found your problem: thinking that “rational argumentation” (do you mean “common sense”?) is reliable at the frontiers of physics (see claim #3 above). The origin of the universe is within the domain of quantum mechanics, remember? You check your common sense at the door.

Quantum mechanics has already defeated the first premise, “whatever begins to exist had a cause” (see claim #1 above).

11. Your first cause falls to the infinite regress problem. If God is your first cause, what created God?

God didn’t begin to exist. The First Cause must logically precede all else. There simply can’t be, by definition, anything that came before.

Be cautious when a definition brings something into existence. Like the Ontological Argument, which just thinks God into existence, that may be too good to be true.

You didn’t say this, but let me just add the caution that apologists shouldn’t respond to a scientific question with a theological claim. “My religion says that God was uncreated” is no answer in the real world.

So you’re telling us that God didn’t have a cause . . . just because? That’s magic, and I need evidence. Why does God not need a cause if everything else does? Why is God eternal, but nothing else is? How did God create something out of nothing? How can he create the universe when he was outside of time—doesn’t deciding and acting require time?

The most charitable view is that you’ve resolved “What caused the universe?” with God, but you now have these new questions about God. You’ve simply repackaged the question, not answered it.

And if God can exist eternally, maybe that’s true for the universe (or the multiverse).

Wrapup

The author concludes:

Each objection has been dealt with by providing an answer. This means that each Christian, and each person, is rationally justified in accepting the KCA. If that is true, then it seems that the KCA’s truth implies God—not just any God, but the God of the Bible!

Nope. My original post is intact. I leveled five attacks on the first premise and three on the second. None of those were addressed in this article. No, rational people are not justified in accepting the Kalam Kosmological Argument.

You’ve probably seen the famous Sidney Harris cartoon where one scientist points to an involved equation on the blackboard and says to his colleague, “I think you should be more explicit here in step two,” where step two says, “Then a miracle occurs.” God is the step two—the implausible savior of Christians’ apologetic arguments.

The universe that we observe
has precisely the properties we should expect
if there is, at bottom,
no design, no purpose,
no evil, and no good,
nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.
— Richard Dawkins

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I feel like I’m diagonally parked
in a parallel universe.
— seen on the internet

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 11/7/16.)

Image from NASA, public domain

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The Kalam Argument: How does God create before time?

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Life as a Christian apologist must be hard. They have to deliver weak arguments with enthusiasm, and the Kalam Cosmological Argument (KCA) is one of the most prominent weak arguments.

Here it is:

1: Whatever begins to exist had a cause

2: The universe began to exist

3: Therefore, the universe had a cause

This is #2 in a three-part series responding to a Christian defense of the KCA (part 1 here).

Here are three more responses to skeptical attacks on the KCA. The skeptical argument is shown in bold and the Christian response in italics.

5. The first cause is logically incoherent because it existed “before” time.

This isn’t an objection to either premise.

Oh, but it is; it’s an objection to premise 1. It questions whether there can be a cause of any sort given that time didn’t exist before the universe did.

The First Cause didn’t precede the universe, because it acted in the first moment—that is, the First Cause and the first moment were simultaneous. “So what we have is a timeless, unchanging (because it is timeless) First Cause whose first act is bringing the world into existence.”

This is metaphysical bullshit. The simple solution is to drop the idea of any cause (First or otherwise) for the universe. The God hypothesis is jammed in as the answer despite its not fitting into this puzzle at all. The naturalistic explanation doesn’t need a cause of the universe, and the KCA vanishes without one.

How could a god outside of time decide anything, such as that the universe should be created? “Timeless and unchanging” means frozen and inert. No conclusions, no changing of his mind, no initiation of any creative act.

“What could cause the universe if there were no time beforehand?” is like “How could a frozen and inert god do anything, like create a universe?” And they’re both neatly dismissed by hypothesizing no cause for the universe, as allowed by quantum mechanics. God becomes a solution looking for a problem. Apologists spend more effort keeping the God card relevant than using it to show that it explains things better than naturalistic solutions.

Cosmologist Sean M. Carroll debated Craig on cosmology (more on that debate here), and Carroll ticked off several models of the universe with no place for a First Cause such as a universe with a beginning but no cause and one that is eternal without a beginning.

And let me step back to marvel that this godly First Cause is advanced by apologists with no evidence whatsoever. Carroll noted that cosmology textbooks don’t rely on “transcendent cause” or “First Cause” or God, they use differential equations!

Even trying to put the Cosmological Argument in the best possible light, it doesn’t solve the infinite regress. You’ve still got God infinitely old who existed infinitely long before the Big Bang. How does he traverse that time? And while we’re puzzling over Christianity’s unexplained mysteries, how does a noncorporeal being affect our world? Do we just call it magic and move on? And if God created the universe, that must’ve been to improve things, but how is that possible since everything was perfect already?

Maybe this is really the Kalam Kosmological Argument, just a bit of fun that’s not to be taken seriously.

6. If some metaphysical truth is not well-established, one is unjustified in saying it is true.

Does “not well established” mean that philosophical truth is discovered by a poll? And how can new truth bubble to the surface if no one accepts it until a majority do?

When metaphysicians have a track record like scientists where they give us reliable new knowledge, then yes, polls would be useful. We laypeople could rely on them to know where they’ve reached a solid consensus, and we could treat that as provisional truth. But metaphysics has no such track record. (I argue that laypeople must accept the scientific consensus here.)

As for his concern about “a new idea is fine as long as it’s not new,” we must separate the experts from laypeople. In an evidence-guided meritocracy with a high bar for entry like science, the experts can dream up, advocate, and accept whatever they feel the evidence demands. While we lay outsiders can critique, we have no standing for accepting anything but the consensus (where it exists).

That describes science, not philosophy or metaphysics.

7. There could be other deities besides the Christian God.

This doesn’t object to either premise of the KCA. Let’s be clear that the KCA is used as natural theology (understanding God through nature), never revealed theology (understanding God from his personal revelations).

Nevertheless, the properties of the cause of the universe—timeless, spaceless, changeless, powerful, creator—do sound like the Christian god.

“Imagine, if you will, a timeless, spaceless, all-powerful Creator of the universe. Sounds like God, doesn’t it?” Well, it sounds like what Christians today think of God, but consider God before he hit the big time—back in the Old Testament when he was still doing vaudeville.

  • He had to personally investigate Sodom and Gomorrah to see if the gossip he’d heard was correct (Genesis 18:21),
  • he regretted having made mankind (Gen. 6:6),
  • he spoke to Moses “face to face, as one speaks to a friend” (Exodus 33:11),
  • he was beaten by the Moabite god Chemosh and couldn’t defeat tribes with iron chariots (more),
  • and he was just one of many gods in a pantheon.

He was more super than the rest of us, but certainly not the omni-everything god of today. God has evolved.

The final four arguments: The Kalam Argument: infinite regress and more

Astronomer Pierre-Simon Laplace presented his
5-volume work on the solar system to Napoleon.
Napoleon wanted to know why it contained
no mention of the Creator.
Laplace replied, “I had no need of that hypothesis.”

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 11/2/16.)

Image from NASA, public domain

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One small Christian conclusion has sweeping political consequences

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It starts small. Pro-life voters say that a fetus is a baby. When it’s eight months old and is viable on its own, it’s a baby. When it’s five months old and the mother can first feel the fetus moving, it’s a baby. When it’s three months old, with tiny eyes and fingers, it’s a baby.

When it’s a single fertilized human egg cell at day one, just 100 microns across, it’s not much of a baby, but who can begrudge a couple calling it whatever they want?

So let’s say it’s a “baby” right back to day one—that’s a popular Christian conclusion. Babies must be protected. Everyone has a right to safety, and babies are vulnerable and deserve particular attention. Our natural instincts to protect cute big-eyed things come into play—who could complain about that?

The simplest moral logic would demand that these babies be protected, and it isn’t surprising that millions of American voters are single issue voters, declaring that it’s a baby right back to day one. Does the conservative candidate say that they’re going to fight to protect those lives and the liberal candidate not? With Supreme Court appointments in play for the future president, that makes it easy—you vote for the conservative even if you must hold your nose to do so.

Where does it end?

That first step is like a drop of rain falling at the crest of a mountain range that is carried downhill by a stream and then a river. If it falls a little this way, it flows westward. A little that way, and it flows eastward. A small change makes a big difference.

And the small change in our example of pregnancy is that definition of “baby.” You say that it’s a “baby” on day one, and you flow inevitably to cute, then vulnerable, then protective instincts, then society must protect it, then government must protect it, … and then voting for Donald Trump.

But maybe you don’t need to start with that. Let’s make a small change. What if you said that as a newborn in your arms at the hospital, that’s a baby. The five-month-old fetus that begins to kick? It’s not really a baby if it hasn’t developed enough to be viable on its own. The three-month-old fetus with eyes and fingers? That’s even less of a baby—it’s just two inches long, not very baby-like, and nowhere near able to live on its own.

Reconsider those definitions

On the left is a three-month-old fetus. Think that that’s an adorable baby that must be protected by law? Guess again. On the right is a five-week-old embryo that’s less than half-an-inch long and looks like that thing from the Alien movies.

You see the progression. When you go back in time from a trillion-cell newborn to a single cell, it becomes less of a baby at each step as you regress along that spectrum. When you go from a newborn with arms and legs, eyes and ears, brain and nervous system, heart and circulatory system, and all the rest back to where there isn’t even a single cell of any of these, it becomes not a baby at all. (More here.)

Gestational development is a spectrum. It’s a baby when it’s done; it’s not a baby when it starts.

A pregnant woman can call her fetus anything she wants. The problem is when someone wants to impose their own definition of “baby” onto the rest of the country by law. You say the cell is a baby? You say you’d never have an abortion? That’s fine, just don’t force that on the rest of us. And consider the political consequences when you demand that a single cell is a “baby.”

I do not believe that just because
you’re opposed to abortion
that that makes you pro-life.
In fact, I think in many cases,
your morality is deeply lacking . . .
if all you want is a child born but not a child fed,
not a child educated, not a child housed.
And why would I think that you don’t?
Because you don’t want any tax money to go there.
That’s not pro-life. That’s pro-birth.
We need a much broader conversation
on what the morality of pro-life is.
— Sister Joan Chittister

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 10/28/16.)

Image from Phil Warren (license CC BY 2.0)

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How to Say, “I Told You So”

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It seems to always be election season, and that pushes many of us into heated political conversations. Or maybe the arguments are about public policy (how to address climate change or infrastructure improvements). Or science education (evolution or sex ed in schools). Or religion (end times or church scandals).

Suppose you jump into such an argument. Will you get anywhere? What most frustrates me is not being able to say “I told you so” after the evidence is in. When things play out like I said they would—whether ten days have passed or ten years—I never even get the minimal satisfaction of hearing my antagonist admit that they were wrong. They adapt to (or ignore) the new data without going through that unpleasant I-was-wrong phase.

It’s not about me. It’s not about how smart I am for being correct. I’d just like for my antagonist to learn something, creating a small hope that our argument was worthwhile, and they will be less likely to make this kind of mistake again.

Let me add two hopefully obvious clarifications. First, sometimes the antagonist does indeed admit their error (it’s just that this is rare). Second, this goes both ways, and it might be me eating the humble pie and learning the lesson.

I’m guessing you’ve been in similar situations.

Commit to a public declaration

So how can we improve our chances of eventual satisfaction? Let’s say that the topic is rabbit overpopulation, and your antagonist is in favor of the upcoming ballot initiative to use mutant weasels to control the rabbit problem.

You list the problems with this approach but your friend disagrees. Then the initiative passes, the weasels are released, and the environmental catastrophe (and untouched rabbit population) plays out like you predicted. When you confront your friend with this, he agrees that it was a disastrous project (or maybe not) but denies specifics of both his prior position and your prediction.

The answer is for you to write a shared Public Declaration. This is a short statement summarizing the facts that clearly states what one of you think will or won’t happen and the time frame. It should be unambiguous so that an objective third party could determine who was right. (Of course, you could both be partly right. Or partly wrong.)

Let’s go back to the rabbit overpopulation argument and imagine that it ended with your writing this:

Sigmund Freud and I disagree on the best approach to the rabbit overpopulation problem. Sigmund advocates the mutant weasels proposal in Initiative 7 on the November, 2021 ballot. I think it will be a terrible idea.

Prediction: I predict that the weasels will (1) have little impact on the rabbit population and (2) have the side effect of endangering the populations of other animals like birds. This is the position of the Natural Resources Defense Council, which has come out against Initiative 7. Their “Weasels Primeval” white paper goes into more specifics, and it represents my position.

Test: If the proposal is implemented, check with the NRDC one year afterwards to see if things turned out as predicted.

(signed) Friedrich Nietzsche

What does this do?

Here’s what’s good about this statement.

  • It’s specific about the claim: you referred to Initiative 7 on the November ballot, and your prediction is specific. There’s no need to also summarize your opponent’s position because he simply thinks that you’re wrong.
  • It’s clear on the time frame: judgment day is “one year after the proposal has been implemented.”
  • It defines an objective test: use the NRDC’s analysis after the proposal has had time to work. This could be a weakness of this public declaration if the NRDC is seen as biased. Another option might be to predict an editorial confirming your position. It works as long as your opponent agrees on the test. It’s tempting to imagine that “everyone” on this future date will just know who was right, but the lack of a clear test with specific measurements would weaken such a statement.
  • It’s a shared statement. This project works best when you work on it and sign it together. It shouldn’t matter which party writes it.
  • Recording your position for posterity is satisfying, which might give more closure than just walking away frustrated and angry.

Be as specific as possible. Things that are clear and obvious in your mind now could be forgotten by the time the prediction must be evaluated. (Contrast this with the vague and unspecific claims made by biblical prophecies.) Imagine the future judgment day and give yourself a clear and unambiguous statement to work with.

Rapoport’s Rule

By writing the statement together, each party should be proud, rather than reluctant, to sign and agree to it. If the writing of the statement is difficult, that’s a clue that you don’t understand each other’s positions correctly. If you thoroughly understand your opponent’s position, you should be able to painlessly state it.

This is an important aside, because arguing against not-your-opponent’s-argument is a common and usually inadvertent waste of time. The solution is for you to correctly state their position, and vice versa. This has been formalized as Rapoport’s Rule of debate, the most important step of which is to state your opponent’s position to their complete satisfaction.

Note how this sidesteps the frequent debate impasse of, “No, it isn’t!” and “Yes, it is!” When you state your opponent’s position, you are no longer equals. They are the final judge of their position, and if they say you got it wrong, then you got it wrong. Get more information and try again. Arguments dissolve away once the combatants realize they have been arguing past each other, and the sooner you attempt to restate your opponent’s position, the better.

Let’s assume that misunderstandings have been resolved, there still is an important difference of opinion, and you’ve written your summary of the issues.

How can someone forget so important a position?

While you’re arguing with someone, the argument and your position are very, very clear in your mind. (Again, let’s assume you’re beyond the mutual restatement of positions.)

While the declaration could prevent your antagonist from lying about their former position once it’s been proven wrong, I think simple forgetfulness is the bigger issue. The Challenger memory experiment makes clear the difference between vivid and accurate memories—just because you have a clear memory of a past incident doesn’t mean that memory is correct.

Implementation

The idea could play out in different ways. This could be as casual as notes on the back of a napkin or drinks coaster. It could wind up on a Facebook post (use a consistent phrase, like “public declaration,” so that you can search for it on judgment day). Or maybe there’s a single site, PublicDeclarations.com, that could give a simple template for those who want to boldly plant their flag.

This could work for several kinds of claims.

  • If-then claims such as, “If same-sex marriage is legalized in the U.S., then X will happen” or “If Joe Biden is elected, then X will happen.”
  • An even simpler claim is, “X will happen,” such as the predictions about the end of the world by John Hagee, Hal Lindsey, and Harold Camping. Another example: “Biologists will realize that evolution doesn’t explain life.” (More on fundamentalists’ decades-long claim that evolution will collapse any day now here.)

Since arguments usually distill down to a simple “Yes, it will” versus “No, it won’t” dichotomy, public declarations could have wide applicability.

What do you think?

We survive by virtue of people extending themselves,
welcoming the young, showing sympathy for the suffering,
taking pleasure in each other’s good fortune.
We are here for a brief time.
We would like our stay to mean something.
Do the right thing.
Travel light.
Be sweet.
– Garrison Keillor

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 10/17/16.)

Image from Jonathan Baker-Bates (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Image credit:, flickr, CC

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