Pete Hale Links Me to Alvin Plantinga!

Pete's Hale and Handsome Hand
Don't press that button!
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I don't seem to have a complete photo of my old Ozark friend Pete Hale, who's now a physicist working on some technological device with which he, like Cartoon Network's Mojo Jojo, aims to destroy the universe, so in lieu of a complete Pete, here's Mojo Jojo instead:

Mojo Jojo

Google Images

I'll try to stifle an impulse to veer off on a tangent about another bad chimp, one who goes by the name of Bruno Littlemore and has a connection to Pete by way of Pete's multi-talented son Benjamin, so I'll rather stay the straight course, which today deals with an article Pete read and notified me about:

Interesting interview involving atheism, evolution, BRussell, beer, and refrigerators, at the very least . . .

That long phrase includes an allusion to how BRussell spouts off about a celestial teapot -- which somehow makes me think of Brussels sprouts, oddly enough, for they're not everyone's cup of tea -- but the central point for me actually concerns a beer in the refrigerator, as described by Alvin Plantinga in an interview for the NYT Opinionator site by Gary Gutting on the rationality of theism, an interview in which Plantinga argues:

I'm interested in the fact that beliefs cause (or at least partly cause) actions. For example, my belief that there is a beer in the fridge (together with my desire to have a beer) can cause me to heave myself out of my comfortable armchair and lumber over to the fridge . . . . [H]ere's the important point: It's by virtue of its material, neurophysiological properties that a belief causes the action. It's in virtue of those electrical signals sent via efferent nerves to the relevant muscles, that the belief about the beer in the fridge causes me to go to the fridge. It is not by virtue of the content (there is a beer in the fridge) the belief has . . . . [b]ecause if this belief -- this structure -- had a totally different content (even, say, if it was a belief that there is no beer in the fridge) but had the same neurophysiological properties, it would still have caused that same action of going to the fridge. This means that the content of the belief isn't a cause of the behavior. As far as causing the behavior goes, the content of the belief doesn't matter . . . . Materialism can't be sensibly believed, at least if, like most materialists, you also believe in evolution . . . . Evolution will have resulted in our having beliefs that are adaptive; that is, beliefs that cause adaptive actions. But as we've seen, if materialism is true, the belief does not cause the adaptive action by way of its content: It causes that action by way of its neurophysiological properties. Hence it doesn't matter what the content of the belief is, and it doesn't matter whether that content is true or false. All that's required is that the belief have the right neurophysiological properties. If it's also true, that's fine; but if false, that's equally fine . . . . [Therefore e]volution will select for belief-producing processes that produce beliefs with adaptive neurophysiological properties, but not for belief-producing processes that produce true beliefs. Given materialism and evolution, any particular belief is as likely to be false as true.

Materialism combined with evolution does not guarantee true beliefs and thus is not conducive to the rise of rationality. An intriguing argument! Note that Plantinga dismisses neither evolution nor materialism alone but rather their combination. He also offers an elevated argument from design -- one that does not preclude evolution -- as evidence for the existence of God:

One presently rather popular argument . . . [for God's existence is the] fine-tuning [of the universe]. Scientists tell us that there are many properties our universe displays such that if they were even slightly different from what they are in fact, life, or at least our kind of life, would not be possible. The universe seems to be fine-tuned for life. For example, if the force of the Big Bang had been different by one part in 10 to the 60th, life of our sort would not have been possible. The same goes for the ratio of the gravitational force to the force driving the expansion of the universe: If it had been even slightly different, our kind of life would not have been possible. In fact the universe seems to be fine-tuned, not just for life, but for intelligent life. This fine-tuning is vastly more likely given theism than given atheism.

Fascinating argument -- even if I have heard it before. I urge readers with metaphysical leanings to take a look at this article. Meanwhile, I had to thank Pete:

Well, I want there to be a beer in my fridge, and if I've grasped Plantinga's argument, that beer being there is far more likely if I assume theism, so I believe in God -- but I've just checked, and the beer isn't there, so I can only conclude that the devil took it, and I'm now waiting for a miracle to strengthen my faith . . .

About my manner of giving thanks, Pete replied:

Ha! Yeah, absolutely. I think my only hope is to cling to smarmy old agnosticism and move on . . .

Well, that's a decision to remain in ignorance, so I still choose theism because I really want to know that my belief in a beer in my fridge is a true belief about a real beer in my fridge (though not a bottomless beer) within a universe designed for life to its fullest.

Go for the gusto, I say!

Muhammad Musa Al-Sharif: "Atheists, Christians, and Fornicators Are Responsible for Human Rights Treaties"

Muhammad Musa Al-Sharif

(Image from Memri)

Finally, an issue upon which atheists, Christians, and fornicators can agree: human rights. According, anyway, to Saudi Arabian Muslim cleric Muhammad Musa Al-Sharif, who informs us:

"We are committed to international treaties as long as they do not violate Islamic law. If they violate Islamic law, we should throw them out, because they are not worth the ink they were written with. With all due respect, the international treaties are worthless."

Worthless? Why would that be? The unvarnished truth from Mr. Muhammad Musa Al-Sharif:

"Who is responsible for the human rights and international treaties? The atheists, the Christians, and the fornicators, with all due respect."

Muslims, atheists, and Christians are, I suppose, mutually exclusive groups, but none of these exclude actual fornicators, who can always be found everywhere. Mr. Muhammad Musa Al-Sharif, however, is referring to 'fornicators' who exist only in his mind, where they multiply their numbers and conspire with 'atheists' and 'Christians' also present there to foment for thoughts of human rights and against thoughts of sharia.

But the conspiracy is even bigger than Mr. Muhammad Musa Al-Sharif imagines, for some 'thoughts' remain hidden even to himself, specifically, the 'Jews' of his mind who stand behind the scenes manipulating the 'fornicators', 'atheists', and 'Christians' . . . all in the interest of human rights.

With all due respect, Mr. Muhammad Musa Al-Sharif, you haven't yet figured out the entire conspiracy, so try to introspect just a little bit more.

Atheist pro deo?

Matthew Parris

(Times Online)

Not precisely pro deo, though self-proclaimed atheist Matthew Parris, writing for the Times Online last December, does state that "As an atheist, I truly believe Africa needs God," for what he really means is that he has come to believe that Christianity is having a beneficial influence in Africa. Actually, as someone who lived in Africa as a youth some 45 years ago, he had long already noticed a positive effect, albeit with reservations:

It's a pity, I would say, that salvation is part of the package, but Christians black and white, working in Africa, do heal the sick, do teach people to read and write; and only the severest kind of secularist could see a mission hospital or school and say the world would be better without it. I would allow that if faith was needed to motivate missionaries to help, then, fine: but what counted was the help, not the faith.

A more recent trip to Africa subtly shifted his views, for he tells us that his former position was inadequate:

But this doesn't fit the facts. Faith does more than support the missionary; it is also transferred to his flock. This is the effect that matters so immensely, and which I cannot help observing.

Actually, he says that he first noticed this at age 24, when he traveled by land across Africa:

Whenever we entered a territory worked by [Christian] missionaries, we had to acknowledge that something changed in the faces of the people we passed and spoke to: something in their eyes, the way they approached you direct, man-to-man, without looking down or away. They had not become more deferential towards strangers -- in some ways less so -- but more open.

His more recent trip, several decades later, reaffirmed that earlier impression and added to it, for he noticed something about the NGOs whom he met:

I noticed that a handful of the most impressive African members of the Pump Aid team (largely from Zimbabwe) were, privately, strong Christians. "Privately" because the charity is entirely secular and I never heard any of its team so much as mention religion while working in the villages. But I picked up the Christian references in our conversations. One, I saw, was studying a devotional textbook in the car. One, on Sunday, went off to church at dawn for a two-hour service.

It would suit me to believe that their honesty, diligence and optimism in their work was unconnected with personal faith. Their work was secular, but surely affected by what they were. What they were was, in turn, influenced by a conception of man's place in the Universe that Christianity had taught.

Parris offers his theory for how Christianity works its liberating effect and encourages a disciplined individualism:

Anxiety -- fear of evil spirits, of ancestors, of nature and the wild, of a tribal hierarchy, of quite everyday things -- strikes deep into the whole structure of rural African thought. Every man has his place and, call it fear or respect, a great weight grinds down the individual spirit, stunting curiosity. People won't take the initiative, won't take things into their own hands or on their own shoulders.

How can I, as someone with a foot in both camps, explain? When the philosophical tourist moves from one world view to another he finds -- at the very moment of passing into the new -- that he loses the language to describe the landscape to the old. But let me try an example: the answer given by Sir Edmund Hillary to the question: Why climb the mountain? "Because it's there," he said.

To the rural African mind, this is an explanation of why one would not climb the mountain. It's . . . well, there. Just there. Why interfere? Nothing to be done about it, or with it. Hillary's further explanation -- that nobody else had climbed it -- would stand as a second reason for passivity.

Christianity, post-Reformation and post-Luther, with its teaching of a direct, personal, two-way link between the individual and God, unmediated by the collective, and unsubordinate to any other human being, smashes straight through the philosphical/spiritual framework I've just described. It offers something to hold on to to those anxious to cast off a crushing tribal groupthink. That is why and how it liberates.

I take it that Parris is a Protestant atheist (as he elsewhere in fact admits), and he seems to be theorizing about a rural Africa of the past, perhaps of his childhood. Moreover, he overemphasizes the individualist aspect of Christianity, for even Protestantism insists that the believer belongs to the body of Christ, which is the church -- a more abstract concept of the church than in Catholicism, of course, and not to be fully identified with any particular denomination, but a corporate dimension nonetheless.

I do therefore wonder -- and I'm merely wondering, mind you -- just how beneficial for Africans are such churches as the "Mountain of Fire and Miracles Ministry" . . . though possibly even a gospel of wealth has its liberating aspects, from a sociological perspective, at any rate.

Contra-Theism Argument: 'Crackpot' Analogy?

Yes, Virginia, there is a teapot . . .

. . . sighted somewhere over Utah.

(Orbiting Teapot Image from Wikipedia)

A long-time commentor here who goes by the cybername "Sonagi" posted an interesting remark on my recent "Fundamentalism" blog entry, and I'll post my response to one of her points concerning Richard Dawkins, which I first quote:

"Dawkins addresses the argument that we cannot know for sure that God does not exist through an analogy. Suppose someone told you that there was a teapot orbiting the Sun. There is no way to disprove this since even the strongest telescopes could not detect such a small object. However, there is no evidence to support the existence of a teapot, either. Likewise, he asserts that there is no evidence of the existence of God, apart from compilations of ancient texts written by numerous authors."

Now for my brief response:

Dawkins's argument here (which I believe he's borrowed from Bertrand Russell) seems rather weak to me. God wouldn't be just another object in the universe; he's supposed to be the ground of all existence, the noncontingent guarantor of all contingent things. How would one find evidence of the sort that Dawkins demands, for the analogy presupposes a scientific kind of empiricism?

Please note that I'm limiting myself to this one point and stating that I don't find this teapot analogy especially helpful. It might have some force against belief in a god who supposedly lives on Mount Olympus, for one could go there and look, and one might express skepticism to then be told that this god is invisible and therefore escapes empirical verification by the eyes. Since such a god supposedly lives in this world, and specifically upon Mount Olympus, then one is justified in expecting some positive empirical evidence for that 'fact'.

But God as the noncontingent guarantor of all contingent things . . . hardly comparable to a teapot in my opinion.

A coffee pot, on the other hand, might present sufficient grounds for argument.

Dark Night of the Nontheistic Soul?

Mother Theresa

Saint, Skeptic, or Both?

(Image from Wikipedia)

The recently publicized letters of Mother Theresa, which reveal her expressing grave doubts about the existence of God, have thrown a spanner into the works and days of some folks, I guess. Other individuals, both theist and atheist, have taken them in easy stride.

I've only skimmed the response in Newsweek by Christopher Hitchens, who never much cared for Mother Theresa when she was still drawing breath and who made a documentary about her back then called Hell's Angel, and I only bothered to skim his certainties on her doubts because I needed the background for some musings of mine.

Hitchens claims that the letters show that Mother Theresa recognized the absurdity of Catholic dogma and despaired over this.

My friend, the Maverick Philosopher Bill Vallicella, posted a response to Hitchens, arguing that "her dark night of the soul was not a crisis of faith, where faith is construed as intellectual assent to certain dogmas, but an experiencing of the divine withdrawal, an experiencing of God as deus absconditus." Bill further suggests that Hitchens lacks a 'spiritual organ' for understanding religious individuals like Mother Theresa.

Bill's 'frenemy' Malcolm Pollack, of Waka Waka Waka -- that's a wacky name for a blog partly dedicated to giving theistic religion a few whacks -- responds to Bill by arguing that Bill doesn't understand that many nonbelievers such as Hitchens do not lack spiritual sensitivity, and he says this about himself in a blog entry titled "Sweet Soul Music":

Where he [i.e., Bill Vallicella] goes wrong, however, is in the further assumption that nontheists lack the capacity for spiritual or mystical experience. I for one have been pulled all my life by the sense that there is in Man a hidden potential for an enlightened inner understanding, for a higher awareness of our deep connection to the Cosmos, for a transcendent consciousness of the numinous beauty and harmony that unites all and everything. To this end I have thoughout my adult life sought this understanding, this awakening, along many different paths, in the belief that behind the veil of ordinary perception, and beyond the sleep of inattention in which we pass our lives, there is a unitary Truth that, with the right sort of conscious effort, it is within our power to apprehend. Because I do think that this truth is not fragmentary, not relative, but One, I imagine that there are many roads to this summit: science, philosophy, music, art, literature, and mathematics, to name just a few. And there are other avenues as well: esoteric and exoteric systems of inner development — some of which I have worked at for many years, and which have offered me priceless glimpses of what is possible for us all.

In turn, I wondered what Malcolm meant by "transcendent" and thus asked him. He replied:

Thanks for asking; I can see how that word might cause some confusion.

I have experiential reason to believe that our customary state of consciousness is fragmentary and narrow in scope, and that with the right sort of effort it can transcend these limitations. It is the difference, roughly, between sleeping and waking.

His reply suggests that he is a more spiritual individual than I, for I've had no 'mystical' experiences (other than a 'miracle' once with a television set), and I suppose that I could inquire further about his experiences, but I was already thinking about a different issue that Malcolm's original post had resurrected in my mind, so I posted a follow-up comment on that:

Thanks, Malcolm. I guess that I understand, roughly, what you mean.

Much of the tone and language of your 5th paragraph sounds 'religious', and I assume that this was intentional. Would you say that yours is a nontheistic, cosmic religion like Buddhism? Buddhism without the accretions picked up over the centuries, I mean.

From your critique of theism, I gather that you're bothered by evil in both its forms, i.e., personal and natural. Does evil pose a problem for what you describe as "the numinous beauty and harmony that unites all and everything." I'm not being snarky, understand. Rather, I think that some of the classic problems confronted by traditional theism -- as understood in the West, anyway, where God is supposed to be omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent -- also emerge in nontheistic traditions. Same pattern, different terms.

For instance, I once heard a neopagan 'worshipper' of the 'goddess' that she called "Mother Nature" voice worried thoughts about Mother Nature's cruelty in sending earthquakes, among other things. Earthquakes bothered this neopagan because they weren't something remotely attributable to human causes, unlike hugely ferocious storms such as hurricanes, which might plausibly be blamed on the moral evil of putatively global warming caused by the 'sin' of industrial civilization.

I'm not suggesting that you're a neopagan, of course. I'm just providing an example of a systemic problem that crops up in many religions and wondering if it poses any difficulty in your own personal religious views.

I'll be interested in reading Malcolm's thoughts on this, and when they appear, you can also read them over at his place.