We’re responding to an imaginary dialogue that explores Soft Theism, which is basically Christianity without the unpleasant baggage. Can jettisoning Christianity’s crazy bits make it acceptable? Read part 1 here.

This is post 14 in this series, and the question is whether humans are equivalent to robots or if a spiritual explanation is necessary.

Humans as moist robots

Atheist: Just because we can be reduced to molecules in motion, that doesn’t take anything away from our experience as human beings.

Soft Theist: I think it does! Philosophically, It totally sabotages the meaning of life, if we are, in essence . . . just molecules.

Cross Examined Blog: Meaning in life for humans is what humans define it as. If you’re alluding to an objective meaning in life—that is, meaning grounded in something outside humans—then show that such a thing exists. (I respond to William Lane Craig’s confusion about this here.)

The brain is an organic computer. Nothing more. It is matter that processes data. We have the impressions we have because of the processes going on inside of our brains. There’s no need for there to be anything more than that in terms of explaining what we experience, and what our brains are capable of. As to the issue of matter having intelligence . . . yes, it does. I don’t see what the problem is.

The problem is . . . that if human beings are organic computers . . . “nothing more” than complex robots, then we are expendable, and replaceable. But human beings are not expendable. When a father loses a child, he doesn’t go to Best Buy to get a new one!

I agree that humans aren’t expendable, but I’d say that other life forms on earth aren’t expendable, either. And this belief that humans aren’t expendable, though deeply felt, is a shared feeling, not an objective fact. There’s no law in the universe or book in God’s library that says this. There’s no external grounding for this feeling or any other moral principles. Human worth is what we define it as, nothing more. But that’s enough.

Humans as computers

At some point we will create computers that have the same sort of intelligence that we have and they will also be . . . simply matter.

Ray Kurzweil wrote about this in The Age of Spiritual Machines (1999). He predicted a time in the near future when technology will be able to do two things. First, we’ll be able to scan a living brain with sufficient resolution to know the state and interconnections of every neuron. And second, we’ll have a brain simulation that can make sense of this data and continue the simulation in real time. From the standpoint of the simulation, “people” would suddenly wake up in the environment created by the computer. That environment might be like the one they’d been experiencing in their carbon-based bodies or be very different, like a permanent virtual reality simulation. These wouldn’t be clumsy mental caricatures but perfect copies. We see this in the TV series Upload (2020).

In writing my response to this question about humans as robots, I’ve used a few references to TV and film. Popular media is a great place to find speculative ideas about the future. If these ideas did not ring true for us, they wouldn’t be plausible in fiction.

Soft Theism denies humans as computers, but a corollary that comes out of this claim, which I think Soft Theism must also defend, is that computers could never duplicate or be equivalent to humans. I found Kurzweil far too optimistic about when computers will be able to mimic authentic human intelligence, but that’s not the point here. Soft Theism must claim that re-creating (or creating) authentic humans as digital simulations would be impossible, not just twenty years in our future but also twenty million. That sounds unlikely.

Oh man! I think you are way wrong. There is a difference between humans and robots. We are not moist robots. We have feelings; robots do not have feelings! We give birth; robots do not give birth!

Oh, I can see robots replicating themselves someday.

Giving birth is a red herring. If we agree that mammals are conscious, the platypus isn’t excluded just because it comes from eggs.

Real emotions?

Aaaahhh, . . . yeaaah but [these robots] still will not have REAL emotions. They are not really alive.

Let’s judge whether these robots have real emotions based on whether they invoke emotions in the experts in human emotions, humans.

Consider the 2008 film WALL-E, a “computer-animated science fiction romantic comedy” (Wikipedia). The primary thread through the film is a romance between two robots. Ask these expert judges if the emotions are believable and if they trigger an authentic emotional response.

You . . . “believe” that humans are more than organic computers, but, you have no evidence.

I think you are severely stunted, philosophically. You’re so conditioned to the mechanistic mindset of science, you cannot think outside of that box.

Am I also stunted sartorially because I can’t appreciate the emperor’s new finery? Let’s first make sure that what you’re pointing to actually exists, whether it be diaphanous clothes or the uniqueness of human emotions.

Are humans more than molecules?

There is nothing irrational about facing up to the fact that we ARE simply a collection of molecules.

Well, yes, of course, physically that’s what we are, but I think it IS irrational to think that is ALL we are, with no spiritual component. Robots have no hearts, no intrinsic identity. . . . If, a thousand years from now, I had an amazing dog robot, I still couldn’t love him the way I would love an imperfect, but REAL . . . dog.

Yes, it would be irrational to overlook the spiritual side of reality if reality actually had a spiritual side. You must show that.

Your reference to a dog brought to mind the mechanical dog in the film Sleeper (1973) that could do little more than wag its tail and say, “Woof, woof. Hello, I’m Rags.” We’ve come a long way with AI (artificial intelligence) in the fifty years since then. I think your lovable AI-driven dog will exist in another fifty years, but you’re saying it won’t in a thousand years. I strongly doubt that.

Robots as sympathetic characters

I think you overestimate the complexity of human emotions or what our real triggers are. Why was the robot in WALL-E a sympathetic character? He had camera-ish eyes and scooper hands, and he moved with tank tracks instead of legs. But those eyes were big, like a baby’s, he made cute sounds, and he paused in admiration or wonder like we would. Would no one call him lovable by the end of the film? Or even five minutes into the film?

R2D2 in Star Wars was even less anthropomorphic. Little more than a cylinder, I’m sure some people found it lovable. It could convey emotions like excitement or despair with a limited range of movements and whistling sounds.

People convinced by artificial: ELIZA and the Turing Test

AI has a long way to go, but it’s already becoming somewhat indistinguishable from humans. ELIZA was a program created by Joseph Weizenbaum in 1966 that mimicked a Rogerian psychologist—the kind who mostly ask questions to explore the patient’s emotions. He said,

I was startled to see how quickly and how very deeply people conversing with [ELIZA] became emotionally involved with the computer and how unequivocally they anthropomorphized it. Once my secretary, who had watched me work on the program for many months and therefore surely knew it to be merely a computer program, started conversing with it. After only a few interchanges with it, she asked me to leave the room.

While people today are more aware of what computers can do and would be more skeptical of an online therapist, AI today is vastly better at holding a conversation and is improving quickly.

The Turing Test is another example of computers pretending to be people. There are many variations of the test, but the general idea is that a human judge converses through a keyboard and screen with two entities, one of which is a person and the other a computer program. The test is run with many different judges, and the program wins if the judges correctly identify the hidden entities no better than chance.

The goal of a Turing-winning program isn’t to be as quick and accurate as possible but as human-like as possible. Today it’s fairly easy to give the program traits that a century ago would have seemed to be quintessentially human such as quick math answers and a deep knowledge in every area of human inquiry. The problem is that being too good would give the program away. Humans make mistakes, defend their bruised egos, type typos, and have other frailties.

If a program that reliably wins a Turing test doesn’t already exist, it can’t be far into the future. But to return to the topic of this post, would such a program think? Is it really intelligent? That’s debatable, but that’s not the point. The point is that it fools humans into thinking it’s human.

Killing a robot

Neither of us feel that killing a human being is the same thing as terminating a robot. The fact that we have that kind of intuitive feeling, is evidence to me that there IS a critical distinction.

Suppose someone had to die, and you had to choose between killing your favorite fictional robot (assume it really existed) and your cranky 80-year-old neighbor whose only interaction with you has been to criticize where you put your trash cans. You’re saying that your intuitions would argue that the neighbor was a human so you’ll terminate your robot without a second thought?

Next time: a little more on whether human brains are equivalent to computers

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Image from Andy Kelly (free-use license)
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We’re responding to an imaginary dialogue that explores Soft Theism, which is basically Christianity without the unpleasant baggage. Can jettisoning Christianity’s crazy bits make it acceptable? Read part 1 here.

This is post 13 in this series, and the topic is the nonphysical world.

Nonphysical causes

Atheist: But to talk about an “immaterial” cause . . . I have to say I have no idea what an “immaterial” cause would be? I don’t see any magical, non-physical causes working in the world.

Soft Theist: I do . . . If I raise my arm . . . that’s my non-physical . . . will, causing that to happen.

I find that incomprehensible. It’s perfectly evident that the raising of my arm is a physical process. And perfectly evident that physical processes can have only physical causes. If we accept the scientific view of the world, then whatever it is that led to the lifting of my arm, must itself be a physical process, which is explicable in terms of neurochemistry. If something non-physical, causes a physical action, we’d have to overthrow the entire body of scientific knowledge!

See, right there, you’re confirming your scientific presupposition. You literally said, “If we accept the scientific view of the world.” You are presuming a scientific, mechanistic, worldview to begin with!

Cross Examined Blog: And you aren’t? You see an interesting rock on the beach and think that God put that there to brighten your day? You have a car accident and think that God is testing or toughening you? Of course not—when natural explanations are at hand, you accept them without a thought. Natural explanations have steamrollered over supernatural explanations in countless situations without a single example of the reverse.

You want to avoid dismissing the supernatural. Okay, let’s consider the supernatural, but don’t pretend that future mysteries won’t likely be resolved with yet more natural explanations.

The spiritual component of reality

And I am denying that premise, that the physical world is all there is. I say reality has BOTH a physical and spiritual component. And the example of raising my arm illustrates a non-physical root cause, having a physical effect. That doesn’t overthrow the laws of physics, it just points to the limits of the explanatory power of physics.

What’s the opposite of physical? Is it “spiritual,” or is it “nonphysical”? Spiritual things like gods and ghosts are very different from commonplace nonphysical things such as courage or enthusiasm. Lifting your arm might have a nonphysical cause—the mental trigger “my leg itches” or “I hear a mosquito”—but that doesn’t make it supernatural.

So far, supernatural explanations have always failed when confronted by evidence. You seem to be hiding behind science’s uncertainty at its frontier. Your justification is “science hasn’t proven me wrong” rather than “here’s the scientific evidence that shows me right.”

Infinite regress of causes

If I decide to raise my arm, you would say that that was caused by the contraction of certain muscles. But what caused those muscles to contract? And, what caused that cause? At some point you run out of physical causes and have to say the first cause, the root cause, the real cause . . . was something immaterial—my free will. I DECIDED to raise my arm. . . .

And have you avoided the infinite regress problem? If a physical result has a spiritual cause (from a ghostly homunculus or a soul), what caused that? You’ll say that supernatural things are eternal, but again you’d be handwaving them into existence.

I think it is absurd to say something physical is the root cause of my raising my arm. The muscle contraction is only the proximate physical cause, not the root cause . . . And, likewise for the universe, I think you cannot keep on going back to never ending, antecedent, PHYSICAL causes.

But where did the physical energy come from, to cause a person’s brain to fire neurons, to raise his arm?

Well, that’s just it. I don’t think science will ever be able to isolate what it was that started that process. I call it . . . free will. The whole process of course is dependent on a physical matrix, yes, but, I think it’s absurd to claim that the root cause of my lifting my arm was actually some PHYSICAL thing my great-great grandfather did many years ago. I raised my arm, from within myself, very simply, because I . . . decided to.

And that’s why I regard consciousness as miraculous; it’s a non-physical entity that is wondrously able to affect the physical world, not breaking the laws of nature, but using the laws of nature.

It doesn’t break the laws of nature? Then how it is miraculous?

Scientific reductionism?

I don’t think scientific reductionism, adequately explains reality. It doesn’t account . . . for intention. If you examine the molecules of ink on a menu, that gives you no useful understanding of what a menu is. You need to understand the intention of a menu, its purpose.

Remember the example of the calculator display before. Just because you can understand the result at a very low level—as electrons from semiconductors making bits of liquid crystal light or dark—doesn’t mean the value shown in the display doesn’t correctly inform a problem at the human level like a spacecraft maneuver or a medicine dosage. Or take cancer—understanding DNA mutation at the quantum level can inform us about a disease at the human level.

You can try to understand a menu at the ink level, and you’re right that this isn’t the most efficient way, but science and evidence inform the high level as well. I see nothing demanding a god.

If one asks, why is this kettle of water boiling? You might say, because the water has reached a certain temperature. I . . . would say, because I’m making a pot of tea. It’s two different realms, the physical world and the world of intentions. And, we need . . . BOTH to get a valid description of reality.

I’ve heard this analogy—there are some mice living in a piano. And the scientist mouse does some exploring and determines that the wonderful sound comes from a vibrating string. But the philosopher mouse does some more exploring and finds the music really comes from . . . an agent, a piano player . . . Similarly, explaining the universe in purely physical terms is not adequate for me; I find positing an ultimate agent, makes better sense of the world than . . . scientific reductionism

Where does love come from?

Love is, essentially, a certain pattern of electrical activity in our brains.

No, it’s not. That’s what it is physically, but not what it is . . . essentially. That’s not what love actually is!

Imagine a stereotypical middle-school nerd boy who’s experiencing romantic attraction for the first time. He may focus on his physiological changes when near his heart’s desire—elevated pulse, sweaty palms, and so on. Things make more sense as he becomes more experienced with romantic relationships. But as you move to higher levels (from chemistry to biology, physiology, neuroscience, and psychology), why imagine the supernatural is necessary anywhere? Yes, we can understand things at a low level or a high level, but what is left for the supernatural to explain?

But we know that if the physical brain is damaged, like in Alzheimer’s cases, then the behavior of a person will be affected. So, the source of behavior is rooted in the physical brain!

Agreed. I’ve written about Phineas Gage, the railroad worker whose personality changed after a severe brain injury.

Does nonphysical mean supernatural?

Yes, of course, it IS rooted in [the brain], but that fact does not refute the spiritual realities that emerge from the brain. Would you say the friendship between you and your best friend . . . is not real!? It IS real, it’s just not a physical entity.

Yes, it’s real. That doesn’t make it supernatural or spiritual.

I don’t see how you can claim that there are “non-physical things.” Just how do you know that “non-physical” things exist? Friendship is a state of neurons and electrical brain activity in your mind. It “exists” as a mental state. It’s not “non-physical”; it results from your brain, which is physical.

If there were no brains to hold this state then there would be no idea of friendship. The same goes for intention. None of these things would exist without physical brains. They exist as brain neurons and electrical states, which are physical. I do not see your justification for claiming that “non-physical” “things” exist.

Carl Sagan presents an analogy. Someone claims there is a dragon in his garage. You look and see no dragon. He claims, well, he’s an invisible one. And ultimately, Sagan concludes, what’s the difference between an invisible, undetectable in any way, dragon . . . and no dragon at all?

Yeah, I see the point. But I would say the difference is, invisible dragons play little role in our lives, but invisible friendships, ARE critical in our lives, at a very deep level. AND, invisible friendships ARE detectable in many . . . non-scientific ways.

(Which reminds me that invisible gods indistinguishable from nonexistent play little role in our lives.)

If I say a mother loves her child, would you say because it’s invisible, therefore, her love doesn’t exist? Would you say all abstract nouns, like honesty, freedom, curiosity . . . that the ideas that those words represent, don’t really exist!? Aren’t you implicitly acknowledging them as real, by giving them names?

Immaterial math 

Aren’t mathematical concepts immaterial, but, absolutely real? Man didn’t create mathematical concepts; they were already there, to be discovered.

I think this is debated. Society invented the rules of matrix multiplication (to give one example) because it was a useful shorthand. If it hadn’t been useful, it would’ve been defined in a better way or discarded. Vectors, tensors, manifolds, sets, the ∇ operator, and much more were invented for our convenience.

It was true that F = ma was true before Newton’s second law of motion was written, but the equivalence F = ma and the statement of the law are different. Newton applied existing mathematical ideas but also invented new notation and ideas as necessary (for calculus, for example).

I’m not saying that proves God, but I’m responding to your contention that I have no reason to think that non-physical things exist.

The law of averages? Non-physical, but real.

Time? Non-physical. but real.

[You believe in reason, right? Isn’t reason . . . non-physical, but real?]

Does nonphysical mean spiritual?

There are physical things and nonphysical things. But the nonphysical is more than spiritual things; let’s call the remainder abstract. That which is not physical isn’t automatically spiritual. For example, courage and envy aren’t physical, but they’re not spiritual, either. They’re abstract.

Is this the rock on which our conversation has foundered? You seem to be insisting on two categories here, not three.

I think we are chemicals and electricity, and everything is reducible to that.

I disagree, I think chemicals and electricity are a necessary substrate for everything, but we are NOT REDUCIBLE to that. A scientific explanation of why a car works is valuable, but a scientific explanation of what a kiss is . . . is worthless. I think the true essence of our lives is not molecules, but, emotions.

You’ve convinced me—some things are low level (quantum physics) and others are high level (love). This still doesn’t require a god.

Next time: Are human brains computers?

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Image from Bureau of Land Management (license CC BY 2.0)
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We’re responding to an imaginary dialogue that explores Soft Theism, which is basically Christianity without the unpleasant baggage. Can jettisoning Christianity’s crazy bits make it acceptable? Read part 1 here.

This is post 12 in this series, and today’s topic is Soft Theism’s strongest argument, the First Cause argument.

Is human speculation futile?

Atheist: What’s your strongest argument for God?

Soft Theist: The First Cause argument . . .

A universe popping into existence out of nothing . . . the Big Bang . . . or . . . coming from an infinite never-ending regress of purely physical causes, seems less plausible to me, than a universe coming from some ultimate immaterial intelligence.

Cross Examined Blog: You’re just an ape looking up at the night sky. Science has taken you far from where your ancestors were just centuries ago, and it’s taught you about the Big Bang, evolution, and other mysteries. You intend to go farther than what science has taught you, but how?

You’re standing on the shoulders of giants, but you don’t bring any new equipment like the Large Hadron Collider or the Hubble Space Telescope. Your only tool is common sense, an intuition shaped by millions of years of living in a middle world, logarithmically halfway between the size of our galaxy (about twenty orders of magnitude bigger than us) and the size of a quark (about twenty orders of magnitude smaller). That common sense is worthless at the frontier of science. You want to test your mettle, and bravo for that, but shouldn’t you be more humble?

And consider your demand for an explanation of the Big Bang. That sounds a bit like asking what’s south of the South Pole. Most scientific questions are answered in terms of other things. And now you want to go to the most fundamental particles, fields, and properties—what everything else is built on—and ask where they come from. But is that question even properly formed? Theoretical physicist Jeremy Bernstein responded to the challenge of explaining the laws of the universe: “Explain in terms of what?”

The questions at the beginning

God, in theory, answers the question of where did the first thing come from? And I call that reasonable conjecture. . . . You call it making stuff up, or sticking magic in.

Reasonable? What good is it when it just replaces scientific questions with theological ones? Let’s stay in the science domain. Science has a track record, while religion has failed every time it’s been tested. Why hold your breath that today will be Religion’s lucky day?

Well, it’s not a valid argument to say that because we can’t explain it yet, therefore there must be a giant Invisible Person behind it all. The honest answer to the origins of the universe is that . . . we don’t know. Positing a God out of thin air without evidence is not justified!

Maybe our universe is just one of many universes. For all we know, there could be an eternal fluctuating quantum void, capable of generating universes from zero point energy, or some other explanation suggested by theories in physics.

But . . . that would not solve the infinite regress problem! Because, where, then, did the multiverse come from?

And “God did it” does solve the infinite regress problem?! No, it just brings up more questions, like where did God come from? What are his properties? And so on. Before you say it, “But God is by definition uncaused and eternal” counts for nothing. That doesn’t define anything into existence any more than “unicorns have one horn” does.

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To me, explaining the universe by discovering, “other matter,” or “other laws of physics,” only kicks the can down the road. I see science as explaining the physical world, every step of the way, all the way back to the beginning, but, once at the beginning . . . I think science can do no more, and a force outside of nature is needed to explain . . . nature, itself . . . to explain the emergence of matter from nothing, and, intelligence from matter. Now, I readily admit I don’t KNOW this; it’s only what seems most logical to me.

So science has won every battle, but for the most fundamental questions you want to discard this source of every reliable explanation and look to religion? Religion has loads of answers, but there’s no reason to accept any of them, both because they’ve never been right before and because religions can’t even agree which of their many contradictory explanations are the right ones. And if, as seems likely, science uncovers more questions as it answers what’s on its plate today, it’ll be you kicking the can down the road. We didn’t need God to answer the last batch of questions, you’ll tell us, but now we have some real puzzlers. Surely now “God did it” is the only possible answer.

There are lots of weird ideas at the frontier of science inaccessible through a layperson’s insight. Maybe some energy is negative, and the sum of all energy in the universe adds up to zero (the zero-energy universe hypothesis). Maybe our universe had a beginning but no cause. Maybe it’s eternal without a beginning.

We’re all probably familiar with the fundamental ideas that our universe didn’t expand into an existing space but that it is its own space and that time began with the universe. These ideas sound ridiculous, but that’s where the evidence points. We’re semi-comfortable with them only because we’ve known about them for years. If science makes new fundamental discoveries about time, space, and the universe—how they work and where they came from—it’s not likely that they’ll coddle our common sense either. When there’s a clash between evidence and common sense, common sense loses.

Cosmology has shrunk the palette of options to little more than quantum particles and the laws of physics, and you want to throw in the most complicated, least evidenced thing possible, a supernatural Creator? How does that help?

Why couldn’t the universe have come from some other uncaused force than God?

Well, if it did, then THAT force would be God.

An unintelligent force as “God”? Has that option been in your definition of God all along?

What to do when you don’t know?

You claim you are not employing confirmation bias, yet you start with the assumption that the universe must have been “created” by a powerful intelligence, because you can’t comprehend any other way. You’ve given no indication that you’ve ever seriously tried to understand any astrophysical hypotheses . . . theories . . . which predict very accurately the formation of the universe, galaxies, and planets. You’ve shown the very epitome of the confirmation bias that you deny.

Arggh! You’re not getting my perspective. I’m not denying anything about science, except that it does not have ultimate explanatory power. Science explains everything in nature, but it does not explain the existence and sustenance . . . of nature itself.

I think you’re making the category mistake atheists always make. You think that once you have A, B, C, and D figured out, you no longer need an agent, or force to make that process work. You’re confusing mechanism for agency. You’re focusing on HOW something works and calling it WHY it works. But the real WHY it works, the ultimate why it works, is a force that makes the whole thing work. Again, you’re right that the laws of nature explain things, but . . . what explains the laws of nature? We don’t know. I posit God.

You don’t know so therefore you do know? If you don’t know, just leave it at that.

Science will be very hesitant to posit a supernatural agent to explain anything. If we have A, B, C, and D figured out, what’s the point of the God hypothesis? To use Julia Sweeney’s metaphor, God is sitting on his suitcase by the front door. Let him go.

But it’s wholly unreasonable to hold that ‘we don’t know, therefore God’.

Not to me. It seems very reasonable to me. . . . Oh . . . I think we’re just exasperating each other.

Well, I’m sorry if this conversation exasperates you, but I’m actually enjoying it. I find it quite unusual to engage a believer who doesn’t resort to coarse insults, and threats, as soon as his worldview is challenged.

Oh OK, OK, good. Uhh . . . I’ve come across a couple of analogies that help clarify the idea of God as a First Cause. If you look at the universe as a set of trillions of interlocking gears all turning simultaneously, each making another turn, each being turned by another  . . . that doesn’t make sense, unless you posit at least one gear as the power source that causes all that turning.

Analogies to the First Cause argument

Or another analogy . . . if you look at the universe as a great chain of many links, each link held up in the air by the link above it . . . without a first link of a different nature, then the whole chain is held up by . . . nothing. You need a first link to hold up the great chain, a first cause that is not dependent of yet another link.

You’re trying to explain the origin of the Big Bang with “a suspended chain must have a topmost link” or “all those gears must have one to drive them.” But you’re not resolving the problem, just illustrating it. What suspends the topmost link? What drives the thing that powers all the gears?

While these analogies are easy to understand, they’ll be useful only after you’ve shown that there was an intelligent First Cause. Until then, your analogy only points to an empty place that has yet to be filled with evidence.

And why think that the origin of the Big Bang will be explainable with analogies this familiar? Imagine for example an easy-to-understand, accurate, middle-world analogy to quantum entanglement. Or quantum superposition. Or virtual particles popping into existence. Wrestle with these problems and imagine that the analogy for the origin of everything might be even more difficult. Said another way, if it’s easy, it’s likely wrong. This analogy will be from not-the-middle-world, and we’re stuck with middle-world minds.

But sticking God in is just unwarranted magical thinking.

I think . . . not sticking God in, is even less warranted. I . . . am postulating an immaterial cause, whereas you are postulating . . . no cause at all. Or you’re postulating an endless regress of physical causes. I think God makes more sense.

We can agree that it’s a puzzle. Where we disagree is that you want to resolve the impasse right now. My bold proposal is that when we don’t know, we say, “We don’t know.”

Next time: Exploring the nonphysical

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Image from NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (license CC BY 2.0)
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We’re responding to an imaginary dialogue that explores Soft Theism, which is basically Christianity without the baggage. Can jettisoning Christianity’s crazy bits make it acceptable? Read part 1 here.

This is post 11 in this series, where an advocate for Soft Theism lays out the ideas about the afterlife and we find a good metaphor for Soft Atheism.

Afterlife

Atheist: Does your belief in the probability of a God mean you also believe in the probability of an afterlife?

Soft Theist: Yeah. I think the two go together.

Cross Examined Blog: Why does a God have to create an afterlife? God can’t create the logically impossible, so how do you know that such a place is even possible?

While you’re providing evidence for the afterlife, don’t forget to argue for souls (or whatever form we’re in after death). And is the afterlife binary, with a Good Place and a Bad Place?

And what would the nature of this afterlife be like? Seems to me it would be pretty boring. And would raise all sorts of questions . . . like at what age would you exist? Your early 20’s, or when you died at 90? Who would you hang out with? Your first wife who died, or your second wife? All kinds of problems.

Christians also made a big deal out of bodily resurrection vs. a spiritual resurrection.

Right, right. But, I think the very first thing you have to assume, in contemplating an afterlife, is that it has to be different from the life we know . . . without the restrictions we experience now. We wouldn’t get bored, or be physical, or be a specific age, and so on.

Again, this sounds like theological sci-fi. Your hypothesis is an interesting one, but is it anything more than one dude’s musings?

The real purpose of the afterlife

I would characterize my concept of an afterlife only by the general term—”ultimate justice”—where everybody gets whatever they deserve . . . however that plays out. We have no idea. An afterlife might be an existence characterized by the full expression of things we cherish most in this life—love . . . justice . . . enlightenment . . . The cloud of unknowing finally . . . clearing.

It’s like you’re inventing the properties in a Dungeons & Dragons world. You’ve got a character sheet for each creature, and you must assign their properties—intelligence, fighting ability, spell casting, strength, armor, weapons, and so on. Moving on to the traits of the Afterlife, you’ve decided that one of its purposes is correcting the moral balance that was skewed in life.

Okay, but why? Why is that obviously something to be redressed in the Afterlife, and how will that happen, specifically? Is it hellfire and pitchforks, or is it mental anguish? Here’s an idea: once you enter the Afterlife, you get great wisdom, and you clearly see how imperfect you lived your life. Here’s a better idea: give humans that great wisdom in life, where they can make use of it. Everyone would have the free will to do evil, but with that great wisdom, no one would want to.

There you go—no more need for ultimate justice. In fact, no more need for the afterlife.

You’ll probably say that you’re simply doing the best you can with the facts we know about reality. For example, given that life on earth is sort of good and sort of bad, what does that tell us about the being that must’ve made us? And so on.

The problem here is that this assumes a deity. Better would be to grant yourself permission to conclude that there is no supernatural and no gods.

Is life absurd?

I think believing in an afterlife comes from the evolutionary fact that we’re the first form of life smart enough to understand we WILL die. So, our instinct to survive nurtures the fond idea that we can survive physical death. Sounds like wishful thinking to me. Pure speculation.

It IS speculation. But it makes more sense to me than the absurdity of life, with no ultimate meaning, no ultimate resolution. For my part, the existence of partial love and justice here on earth, points to the existence of ultimate love and justice, in an afterlife.

Philosophy has given “the absurd” a particular meaning: “the conflict between the human tendency to seek inherent value and meaning in life and the human inability to find any in a purposeless, meaningless or chaotic and irrational universe.”

Right—there’s no reason to imagine inherent meaning in life, so this futile quest for meaning is absurd by this definition. Is this what you mean? And what are you saying in response—that it’s obvious that life does have objective meaning, so therefore life is no longer absurd?

That’s not what I see. We each find our own meaning. Lamenting the lack of objective meaning doesn’t do us much good. (I examine Craig’s position on life’s absurdity here.)

You also mentioned partial love and justice on earth pointing to ultimate versions in the afterlife. This is C.S. Lewis’s Argument from Desire, which we’ve touched on earlier in this conversation.

The homeopathic interpretation of Soft Theism

Commenter Michael Murray brought up the excellent idea of a homeopathic God in response to the second post in this series, and I’d like to riff on that for a moment. I think it provides good insight into what Soft Theism is and isn’t good for.

Consider the origins of homeopathy. Practitioners observed that some concoctions would cause bad symptoms if given to people—rash, nausea, diarrhea, and so on. They were poisons. But if a certain dose caused a bad symptom in a patient, what if you instead gave a tenth that dose? Then the symptoms would be much less! The idea of dilution was homeopathy’s insight, which I suppose wasn’t bad for the late 1700s. The more dilution, the better, and modern homeopathic quackery is often labeled “30C,” which means that the original poison was diluted by a factor of one hundred (C is the Roman numeral for hundred), thirty times.

Since all they can do is reduce the poison they give, homeopaths can only bring the bad component of the treatment down to zero. They have nothing to offer on the good side, like penicillin, insulin, or aspirin.

This is the problem with Soft Theism. Compared to Christianity, it has discarded Yahweh, the Bible, and church tradition with the goal of reducing the bad component to zero. But where’s the good side? Not Soft Atheism’s explanation of life, the universe, and everything, because that is given without evidence. The best this homeopathic philosophy can be is benign.

I’ll grant that that’s a lot better than the toxic forms of Christianity, but, like homeopathy, it’s best to stay home and save your time and money.

Next time: Soft Theism’s strongest argument

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Image from Joe Dyer (license CC BY 2.0)
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We’re responding to an imaginary dialogue that explores Soft Theism, which is basically Christianity without the baggage. Can jettisoning Christianity’s crazy bits make it acceptable? Read part 1 here.

This is post 10 in this series, and the topics are Jesus and the problem of morality.

Jesus

Atheist: And what about Jesus? You still give Jesus a lot of respect, right?

Soft Theist: No. No. No. I respect his courage, but I do not respect his persona, or his message. I think he was a misguided religious extremist, who constantly overstated . . . You cannot present yourself as the all-compassionate one, and at the same time threaten people with Hell if you they don’t accept your theology.

People are so culturally indoctrinated to think of Jesus an ideal, good and wise, man. Same as people in the Muslim world are taught to think of Muhammad as embodying the highest ideals. But, I think both men . . . were religious extremists, if you study what they actually taught . . . objectively.

Cross Examined Blog: But you don’t accept the supernatural claims made about Jesus. It’s good to hear that you reject the wise and loving Jesus stereotype, but how much of the Jesus story do you accept? If you reject the supernatural claims, then is Jesus 100% legend, or do you think there was a real (though mortal) Jesus at the beginning?

Christians’ morality argument fails

Do you think the existence of morality is evidence for God?

I think the morality argument never gets anywhere.

Great to hear. I agree that it fails (more here).

Christians will say—If we’re just a bunch of chemicals, then there’s no such thing as morality. But we know morality DOES exist. We know . . . torturing babies for fun, is, objectively . . . immoral. There IS a cosmic moral order, an objective standard that exists, and, points to God. [Christian apologist William Lane] Craig says that without God, morality would be subjective, and we’d be lost in CULTURAL RELATIVISM

Craig must first show that objective morality exists and that we can reliably access it. He never does because he can’t. But that’s not a problem, because objective morality isn’t necessary to explain morality as it exists within human culture. Look it up and you’ll see that “morality” is defined without the word “objective.”

Religious and moral relativism

. . . But then—here’s where I think Craig’s argument fails—the reality is, that even WITH God, we are lost in . . . RELIGIOUS RELATIVISM, because, WHICH God is the right God!? The Christian God, the Muslim God, David Koresh’s God? Believers are not exempt from the problem of subjectivity. A theistic worldview guarantees nothing. ISIS thinks it’s operating under the . . . objective morality of its God.

You’re right that if God exists, he’s doing nothing to stop the continued fragmentation of Christianity into thousands of denominations. Worse, we’ve had two world wars and the Holocaust on his watch. Woody Allen said, “If God exists, I hope he has a good excuse.”

We also have moral relativism. Take any moral issue, and you will find Christians on opposing sides. Either objective morality doesn’t exist, or we humans can’t reliably access it. Either way, the moral argument fails.

And the Bible is full of outmoded moral attitudes on slavery, genocide, polygamy, and more with God’s moral stance looking very antiquated.

I said to a Christian that morality should be based on reason, and he responded by saying one person’s “reason” will differ from another’s. And I said right, but so will one person’s religion differ from another’s. That’s why I say the argument gets nowhere. The human condition is that we simply don’t have an unequivocal authority.

Well, Christians think they do and that their authority talks to them, but your point about religious relativism defeats that. There are now 45,000 denominations within Christianity.

[Michael] Shermer points out that even if there is no ultimate authority, no Archimedean point, shouldn’t lying and murdering, be wrong anyway? Isn’t it obvious?

Yeah. Yeah. Actually, I think Shermer has the right solution for identifying objective morality—use science, meaning social science and statistics, to determine ideas that result in the greatest well-being of society, without violating any individual rights. That would constitute objective morality.

We may have two different definitions of objective morality here. Craig defines it as “moral values that are valid and binding whether anybody believes in them or not.” But your definition of objective morality appears to be morality grounded in objective facts. To take a Sam Harris example of such a fact, women allowed to choose their own clothes thrive better than those forced to wear burkas.

Atheists’ morality

I think . . . evolution and the value of reciprocal altruism is a solid explanation for the existence of morality.

Yeah, I think that’s largely a good explanation, but, as Craig says, if morality is an evolutionary adaptation, then any deeper meaning is illusory, and morality is simply a human consensus. We might have a social contract not to rape, but that does not mean it’s really wrong; it’s just an agreement.

I disagree. Morality is a lot more than an agreement. Here is Penn Jillette:

The question I get asked by religious people all the time is, without God, what’s to stop me from raping all I want? And my answer is: I do rape all I want. And the amount I want is zero. And I do murder all I want, and the amount I want is zero.

The fact that these people think that if they didn’t have this person watching over them that they would go on killing, raping rampages is the most self-damning thing I can imagine.

Where does Penn’s rejection of rape and murder come from? From his own makeup, which was shaped by evolution. This also applies to those of us who aren’t sociopaths. Yes, we are shaped by society (and vice versa), but there’s also our innate sense of moral right and wrong.

Now, on a personal level, aside from any intellectual argument, and, aside from any reciprocal altruism, I do intuitively feel a profound sense of . . . cosmic morality, that I think comes from God.

Next time: Afterlife and homeopathic religion

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Image from Joseph Vasquez (license CC BY 2.0)
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We’re responding to an imaginary dialogue that explores Soft Theism, which is basically Christianity without the baggage. Can jettisoning Christianity’s crazy bits make it acceptable? Read part 1 here.

This is post 9 in this series, and the topic is the problem of poor design in nature.

Inefficient “design”

Atheist: So you think the universe was designed by God? With all this pointless inefficiency, and suffering? More than 99% of all species that have lived, have gone extinct!

Soft Theist: Well, in terms of efficiency, if God is all-powerful, using billions of years and billions of galaxies to get us here, is not a problem. I know some Christians who think atheists are incredibly . . . naïve . . . for expecting the universe “to be formulated in a way that makes perfect sense to us.”

Cross Examined Blog: Atheists don’t expect that—at least this one doesn’t. What they expect is that, if a perfect God created the universe, that it look like it. Instead, we see natural explanations being sufficient to explain what we see. If God can do efficient and elegant as easily as sloppy and enigmatic, wouldn’t you expect the former?

But we don’t see efficient and elegant. Most of the earth is inhospitable to humans (let alone the universe). The 93,000,000,000-light-year-wide universe obviously wasn’t designed for a single species on a 0.0000000013-light-year-wide dust speck. And life looks like it was designed by a bungler (or by evolution).

Is that proof? Of course not. But proof isn’t what we’re after. We’re simply evaluating the clues and tallying them on either side of the God hypothesis.

(I expand on this argument here.)

And [Christian apologist William Lane] Craig makes the point that God may be more like an artist than an engineer. Efficiency is a value only to someone with limited resources. So, I don’t see inefficiency as a big obstacle to positing a God.

Is God perfect? Then why would he deliberately be inefficient? Humans are inefficient because they have no alternative, but a perfect God could create any way he wanted.

However, in term of unnecessary suffering, there, I think you’re right, that is a problem. That IS a strong point against a supposedly loving God. That’s the Problem of Evil of course, and we should discuss that later.

Agreed—the Problem of Evil also counts against God.

Evidence of design

I do think the argument that a design requires a designer, is pretty solid.

First let’s figure out if there’s evidence of a design. DNA alone argues that animals aren’t designed. DNA contains pseudogenes, endogenous retroviruses, vestigial structures, coding for atavisms, and far more DNA base pairs than necessary. No designer would deliberately put all that in the code for his lifeforms. (I expand on this here.)

And if you insist on seeing design, there’s plenty that’s clumsy or cruel—chronic pain that serves no purpose, parasites, the recurrent laryngeal nerve, and more. Sloppy results look exactly like what we’d expect from evolution, not a perfect Creator. (More.)

But Darwin showed how evolution and adaptive advantages and environmental filtration, advanced life. There was no purposeful intelligent designer behind that.

I disagree. I think physics itself, evolution itself, constitute God’s design. No matter how poorly the world seems to be designed, it DID end up with intelligence.

I like what Paul Davies writes—he’s a physicist—quote, “That the universe has organized its own self-awareness—is for me powerful evidence that there is ‘something going on’ behind it all. The impression of design is overwhelming. Science may explain all the processes whereby the universe evolves its own destiny, but that still leaves room for there to be a meaning behind existence.”

Biologist Richard Dawkins agrees that life on earth appears designed: “The living results of natural selection overwhelmingly impress us with the appearance of design as if by a master watchmaker.” But, as mentioned above, junk in DNA shows the other side of the coin.

Davies talks about meaning. Is there objective meaning—that is, meaning grounded outside humanity? The only meaning I see is that which we create. There’s no justification for objective meaning.

But why would God give us an appendix? Explaining that by . . . blind variation, and environmental filtration is so much more reasonable to me . . . than, positing a God.

Yeah, inefficient evolution gave us an appendix. And I’m saying . . . that God is behind . . . intentionally inefficient evolution.

Despite the fact that that’s not where the evidence points? You’re far too quick to accept a supernatural explanation.

Evolution is a natural process, and it’s sufficient to explain why life is the way it is.

Mechanism vs. agent: evidence for God?

Dawkins said in a debate that when you drop a stone, it falls, due to gravity. “You wouldn’t dream of saying, oh there must be a God pushing it down.” But . . . I thought the Christian had a good response here. He said that “God is an explanation at the level of an agent, not a mechanism.”

In other words, God created the . . . mechanism of gravity, which makes the stone fall. And that’s essentially the subtle difference I expressed earlier, that atheists never see—the distinction between how something works (the mechanism), and why it should work (the agent or force behind the mechanism).

I think, the inefficient design of the universe IS an argument against God, but the fact that it works is an argument for God.

First, show that you’re actually pointing to something. Your unease about what’s behind it all isn’t much of an argument for an ultimate being.

Yes, life on earth works, sort of, but in this do we see the hand of an omniscient creator? Charles Darwin said, “What a book a Devil’s Chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering low & horridly cruel works of nature!” He pointed to a wasp that lays its eggs in caterpillars so that the larvae can eat the still-living caterpillar, and he gave this as a reason to reject the idea of a beneficent creator. Insect larvae can invade animal brains, ants can be zombified by a fungus, the tusks of a pig can curve back and penetrate its head, and the Guinea worm is just one of the many parasites that plague humans.

Why drag God’s good name through the mud when you can just point to evolution?

Next time: Jesus and the problem of morality

See also:

• 5 Ways the Design Argument Fails
• Nice Try: the Christian Design Checklist

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Image from Zyada (license CC BY 2.0)
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