Debate with Kirk Durston (Campus Crusade for Christ )
Wednesday Jan 25, 2006 in Grant Hall
Does God Exist ?
Adèle Mercier
Dept of Philosophy, Queen’s University
I have posted the following on my website, in response to the many students who requested, after
the debate, a copy of my opening and closing remarks. It contains the opening and closing
statements that I made at the debate, but it has been expanded both to explain and to clarify
certain claims that were made during the debate. Comments are welcome at:
adele.mercier@queensu.ca
TABLE OF CONTENTS
0 -- Preliminaries: What is an Argument? What is a
“Debate”?
1 -- The Meaning of the Question: Does God Exist?
2 -- Fallacy of Equivocation
3 -- God and Objective Moral Values
4 -- Belief in God is Dangerous
5 -- The Fallacy of the Argument from Demographics
6 -- Reasoning and Irrational Prejudice
7 -- The Problem of Evil:
7.1 -- Is God Good?
7.2 -- Circular reasoning in dealing with the
problem of evil
7.3 -- God’s goodness and our moral obligations
7.4 -- The Free Will Defense of God’s tolerance of
evil
8 -- The Denial of Evil
9 -- Intelligent Design:
9.1 -- The appearance of design
9.2 -- The evidence of design
9.3 -- The intelligence of design
10 -- The Cosmological Argument:
10.1 -- Natural processes and the supposed need for
supernatural volitional agency
…
… not yet finished / to be continued … …
11 -- The Argument from Personal Experience
11.1 -- Mr Durston’s false dilemma
11.2 -- The Neurology of “Spiritual” Experience
A Mystical Union, from The Economist
This is Your Brain on God, from Conde
Nast Publications
0 – Preliminaries
What is an argument?
A debate happens when two people of opposite persuasions confront each other to argue out the
pros and cons of each other’s position.
An argument consists of a few proposals or assertions, which we call the premises of the
argument, followed by another proposal or assertion, called the conclusion of the argument,
which the premises are taken to entail or to imply. An argument is valid when and only when the
conclusion does indeed follow logically from the premises. To say that a conclusion follows
logically from premises is exactly to say that if the premises were indeed true, then so would
be the conclusion. Thus an argument can be valid even though it has false premises, as long as
the conclusion would be true if the premises were, contrary to fact, true.
It is very easy to produce a valid argument. Here is one:
So:
Principal Hitchcock is an alien from outer space.
All aliens from outer space speak Esperanto.
Principal Hitchcock speaks Esperanto.
[This premise is false.]
[This premise is false.]
[This is also false, I
suspect.]
This argument is valid because if Principal Hitchcock were an alien from outer space, and if it
were true that all aliens speak Esperanto, then it would be true that Principal Hitchcock speaks
Esperanto. This argument is valid, even though it is not the case that Principal Hitchcock is an
alien and it is not the case that aliens speak Esperanto. It is valid because if it were true, then it
would be true that Principal Hitchcock speaks Esperanto.
This argument is valid. Does that mean you should walk away convinced that Principal
Hitchcock speaks Esperanto? Not at all! You should only come away convinced that Principal
Hitchcock speaks Esperanto if you know that the premises are true. That is, you should only be
convinced of the truth of the conclusion of an argument if the argument is not only valid,
but also sound. That is to say, only if the reasoning from the premises to the conclusion is valid
(ie the conclusion does follow from the premises) and the premises of the argument are all of
them true.
It is extremely easy to produce a valid argument. Here is one:
Therefore:
God exists.
God exists.
This argument is valid because if its premise is true, then so is its conclusion (indeed, since they
are the same!). But this is a very bad argument, even if it is valid. It is a bad argument, because it
is circular. It is what philosophers call “question-begging.” You are saying: “Suppose it’s true
that God exists”, and then on the basis of this supposition, you prove that God exists. But here
you have proved nothing at all. For you already assumed in the premise what you were trying to
prove.
To turn this bad, senseless, useless, silly valid argument into any kind of decent argument, you
must provide reasons independent of the conclusion for believing the premise.
To turn a merely valid argument into a sound one, you must argue from premises already known
to be true. Then and only then should you believe the conclusion.
What is a “debate”?
A debate presupposes adherence to logical standards. And that means a commitment to sound
argument, that is to say, to non-circular, valid reasoning based on true, or at least demonstrably
reasonable, premises.
There can be no debating with anyone who is unwilling to submit their beliefs to rational
scrutiny. Only the reasonable are moved by reasoning.
There are at least two reasons why what happened on Wednesday night was not a debate.
The first is that, in spite of its name, it was not intended as one, witness how it was structured. A
debate requires that the opponents have the time to discuss each argument premise by premise,
reasoning by reasoning. Instead, we got flooded with premises, one after the other, none of them
connected, and then we lost track of the argument through the fog.
I have invited the Campus Crusade for Christ, and Mr Durston, to organize another debate, this
time a real one. Indeed, we should have a series of debates, each on one particular argument, and
then we would have the time to see through the fog. I hope they take me up on my invitation.
The second reason why what happened on Wednesday was not a debate is perhaps because on a
question such as God’s existence, it cannot be a debate. That is because belief in God is not
rational. It is not grounded in reason, but in faith. And faith is the opposite of reason. If you
believe something because you have a reason to believe it, that is not faith, that is understanding.
I believe that Olivier is my son, because I saw my belly grow, because I helped him to be born,
because I understand the process of gestation, etc. I don’t have faith that Olivier is my son; I
know it because I understand these things. If you believe in God because that is the reasonable
belief to have given the evidence, then what you have is not faith in God. Kierkegaard well
understood that faith, real faith, has to have no reason.
Mr Durston, to my mind, deserves a lot of credit for trying to show that belief in God is, after all,
rational. He is out to prove that we have reasons for believing in God. But if Mr Durston were in
good faith, if he were being honest with himself and with us, he would allow us all the time we
need to scrutinize carefully his reasons for believing in God, rather than spinning our heads with
more and more alleged reasons. I challenge Mr Durston to let me look closely at any of his
premises. I can show that each one rests on faith. Each one ultimately relies on no reason at all,
but just blind faith. That is the way with faith. People believe in God because they want to. Not
because of evidence, but in spite of it.
OK, now back to Wednesday night...
1 - The meaning of the question: Does God Exist?
My beloved logic teacher, Don Kalish –who sadly no longer exists except in our hearts and
minds– refused years ago to participate in just such debate because he said that since the word
“God” was a non-denoting expression –since it didn’t refer to anything– he didn’t understand the
question.
So let’s agree on what the question is asking.
The word “God” can mean many things: it can be a name for the Big Bang, or for the Cause of
the Big Bang; it can be another name for Nature, or for Truth, or for Goodness, or for Life
energy, etc.. Well, that’s fine, but I’m going to assume that what is in question in this debate is
not the existence of Nature, or of Truth, or of Goodness, nor even of the Big Bang and the claim
that the earth is 4.5 billion years old (though perhaps that is contentious for some here).
I will assume that we are talking about The Unique Supreme Being who Reigns in Heaven, who
Created the Universe, and who Will Reward the Good and Punish the Bad in the Afterlife. I
would strongly urge you to use another name if that is not what you mean by “God” because it
foments equivocation, and equivocation is a fallacy.
2 - Fallacy of equivocation
A fallacy is a piece of wrong, mistaken, incorrect reasoning. [You don’t understand? Take my
logic class.] Many fallacies are popular, i.e. they are often made, and by many people, but
popularity does not make them any less mistaken. The belief that the earth is flat was once upon
a time extremely popular; its popularity did not make it any less mistaken at the time. The earth
was round even though everyone thought it was flat.
Equivocation is a fallacy, because it involves –applied to our present interests– using a premise
with one meaning of “God” in it, in order to support a conclusion with a different meaning of
“God” in it. Here is a simple fallacy of equivocation:
Therefore:
(1) My boat is near the river bank.
(2) One can get money at a bank.
(3) One can get money near my boat.
An argument is invalid when its premises could be true while its conclusion is false. The above
reasoning is invalid, because it could be true that my boat is near the river bank (suppose I was
anchored on a bank of the Amazone in the jungle), and it could be true that one can get money at
a bank (suppose I have savings at the Bank of Montreal and a card to retrieve it), but it would not
follow from those two truths that there is any money to be gotten near my boat (banks are few
and far between in the Amazonian jungle!, at least the kind that dispense money). Reasoning
from (1) and (2) to (3) is invalid, fallacious, logically incorrect.
The concept of God as The Unique Supreme Good Being who Reigns in Heaven, who Created
the Universe, and who Will Reward the Good and Punish the Bad in the Afterlife, lends itself
easily to equivocation. This is so because the concept is composed of distinct properties which
need not go together.
There could be a Creator of the Universe who dies from all the effort, in which case He would no
longer exist to reign in Heaven.
There could be a Creator of the Universe who can’t or won’t distinguish right from wrong, and
hence who couldn’t or wouldn’t reward the good and punish the bad.
There could be a Creator of the Universe without this Creator creating an everlasting afterlife for
his creations, or a Heaven in which to house them when they die.
The Creator of the Universe could be supremely evil.
There could be a Judge in the afterlife whose job it is to give everyone their just deserts, who was
not himself the Creator of the Universe but rather someone appointed by the Creator of the
Universe to mete out punishments and rewards. (Note that such a judge would not be morally
infallible, for only God is morally infallible. He could make mistakes and punish the good while
rewarding the bad.) But the point is that there is no reason why the Creator of the Universe
would necessarily appoint himself as the Judge of the Good and the Bad.
There could be any number of such beings, in any combination you can imagine.
In some of his arguments, Kirk Durston uses the word “God” as a name of the Cause of SpaceTime, that is, as a name for the Creator of the Universe. (I will postpone until further a
discussion of this view, which is called the Cosmological Argument).
In others of his arguments, Mr Durston uses the word “God” as a name of the Good Judge who
reigns in Heaven. Like some people, Mr Durston thinks that a world with God, and with people
who believe in God, is much better than a world without God, or without people who believe in
God. On this view, God serves as what we could call the Moral Police: many people, like Mr
Durston, think belief in God is necessary to make people be good, and that without faith in God,
people would turn to evil. They believe this because they believe, like Mr Durston, that if there is
no God, then there are no objective moral values.
Now, theists like Mr Durston are guilty of the fallacy of equivocation here:
Call the Creator of the Universe “God” if you will. (I, myself, would prefer “Bill” or “Phil”, but
that’s just me.) Mr Durston’s argument that purports to prove the existence of such a Creator of
the Universe relies on the claims that
(1) space-time has a beginning
(2) every beginning has a cause
Therefore
(3) space-time has a cause
and he calls this cause “God”. I will discuss this argument later, but note that nothing at all here
involves goodness and objective values and moral policing. For all that is being said here, the
cause of space-time, a.k.a. God, could just as well not survive the effort, or be supremely evil
and reward the bad and punish the good, or simply not care at all what happens to it once he
creates it. Mr Durston commits the fallacy of equivocation when he thinks that cosmological
arguments (about the cause of the Universe) have anything to say about objective moral values.
There is no connection at all between the two. Space and time have nothing to say about what’s
Good and what’s Evil, and there is no reason to think that their cause would.
The existence of a Creator of the Universe has no bearing on moral values. None.
3 - God and Objective Moral Values
Now, should we give grace to the Originator of the Universe for our being here? Wouldn’t it be
the polite thing to do? And should we worship such a Creator?
Well, before we answer these questions, it is important to realize that any argument from the
Origin of the Universe is compatible with infinitely many beings being that Creator. All it takes
is an eternal being with volition and power. How many such beings could there be? As I said:
infinitely many. I challenge Mr Durston to prove that there can be only one. The limits are only
the limits of our imagination. For all we know, the Creator of the Universe could be An Eternal
Turtle, or the Flying Spaghetti Monster (check out www.venganza.com ), or The Supremely Evil
Being.
For another thing, we certainly don’t worship the other causes of our being here. Mr Durston
himself argues that every event in past history is a necessary condition of our existence. “If
Churchill’s mother had moved during his conception, Churchill would never have existed, and
neither would we,” he says, rightly. But since that’s true, it’s also true that if Hitler had not been
born and caused a terrible war, your grandparents would not have been listening to the radio
when they did, and so your parents would not have been conceived much less born, and so
neither would you exist. If we should worship the Creator of the Universe and thank him, her, or
it, for bringing us into existence, then we should just as much thank and worship any other
necessary cause of our existence. By the theist’s logic, we must then thank Hitler’s parents for
bringing about his existence. We must thank Hitler for starting a terrible war. We must thank
everyone who could have prevented this war but didn’t, for their inaction. For otherwise, we
wouldn’t be here.
Now of course, this is absurd. But my point is precisely that if it is absurd to thank and worship
Hitler for causing our existence, it is just as absurd to thank and worship God for doing the same.
There is no reason to thank or worship God unless he, she,or it, is a good God. And to get
objective moral values out of God, as Mr Durston wishes to do, what Mr Durston has to prove is
the existence of a God who knows the difference between Good and Evil, and who cares enough
about it to police it. But Mr Durston has not at all done that.
Now, if you are the sort of person who needs to believe that there is a God in order to act
morally, then I certainly encourage you to keep this belief. But the view that God is necessary as
Moral Police is the product of nothing else but a bad education and a weak imagination. The
view that there are no objective values without God is false: It is false in principle, and it is
false in practice.
It is false in principle, for at least two reasons:
First, because a good person is someone who acts morally whether or not there is a God. A
person who refrains from doing harm out of fear of Judgment Day is acting out of selfish selfinterest, because he doesn’t want to be punished, not out of goodness. Indeed, the more
convinced you are that there is no God, and the more you act morally notwithstanding, the more
you prove your goodness as a person. It is far more moral to do good for its own sake than in
order to suck up to God.
Second, the claim that there are no objective values without God is itself incoherent. If God
creates objective moral values, that is to say, if the objective moral values are whatever God says
they are, then they can just as well be evil as good values, depending on whether God is evil or
good. If values are created by God, then an evil God can stipulate that killing your neighbour is
good, and that feeding your children is bad. Of course, this is not the sort of God that Mr Durston
wants. This God would be more immoral than most humans. What Mr Durston wants is a Good
God, that is, a God who decrees only good objective values. In other words, it is not that the
values are good because God says they are; it is rather that God is good because he chooses
only good values. God is good only because he chooses the Good. That means that goodness is
logically –not temporally but logically– prior to God.
Let me repeat this important point –so important indeed that Socrates was put to death partly
because he made just this point (he was accused of worshiping false Gods because he put
Goodness above God): A God is a good God because he has good values; a God with evil values
is an evil God. From which it follows that God does not create, decide or stipulate what is good
and what is evil. Good and evil values logically come first. Therefore, it is false that God is
required for the existence of a distinction between Good and Evil.
It is false not only in principle that God is needed for there to be a difference between Good and
Evil, but also in practice.
It is false in practice, for at least two reasons:
First, it is evident if there exists a single atheist who knows the difference between good and bad.
Well, I am an atheist, and I dare say, I know the difference between good and bad as well as any
theist, and sometimes better (as when Christians kill abortion providers –that’s wrong!– or when
Christians condemn women who get abortions, and homosexuals who live out their lives as such
–Christ condemned condemnation of others).
Of course, Mr Durston’s reply here is that people who do such wrongs are not Christians after
all. That is a question of semantics: whom do we want to call “a Christian”? Those who believe
in Christ? or those who most act like him? I don’t care either way. But if Mr Durston is right,
there are in reality practically no Christians. And –since it is only atheists who believe in good
for its own sake– most of the real Christians are atheists.
People of all cultures and all walks of life who are of good faith, by which I mean people who
are honest with themselves and not self-deceived, all agree about the clear cases of good and
evil. (Barring the criminally insane), even people who do evil things recognize that what they are
doing is evil. This is evidenced by the fact of hypocrisy. One is hypocritical about what one does
only when one knows that one should not be doing it. Hypocrisy is the homage that vice pays to
virtue. The fact that there are so many hypocrites shows how widespread our understanding of
good and evil really is. (It also shows, by the way, that belief in God does nothing to make
people do good rather than evil, witness the large numbers of hypocrites found among believers.)
I say “about the clear cases,” because there are many gray areas between good and evil. The gray
cases are not debatable in the abstract, but only in particular cases. I would bet anything that
people of good faith who understood all the relevant particulars of particular cases would agree
on even the gray cases, at least when there is an objective answer to be had. (Like in any other
area, there is no guarantee that every possible question has an objective answer. To think it must
is another instance of infantile thinking.)
Second, like me, Mr Durston believes there to be objective values. Unlike me, Mr Durston thinks
these are dictates of God. A lot of good that will do him, because then he has to explain to us
how and why he thinks he knows which values are the ones that God dictates. Unless he can
convince us that he has a direct line to God that we atheists can’t have, his belief in God does not
help in figuring out which of the objective values are those that God has chosen. God is silent on
which objective values he espouses.
If God is Good, then Mr Durston can derive the objective values chosen by God from what it
means to be Good. But then he is in exactly the same position as atheists, as we derive moral
values directly from what it means to be Good.
And if God is evil, then atheists, who derive objective moral values directly from what it means
to be Good rather than from God, will only have better values than those of theists who follow
the dictates of an evil God.
Let me illustrate:
How do I, as an atheist, and Mr Durston, as a Christian, both know that, say, boiling babies in
hot oil is wrong. It does not say so in the Bible (I will return below to the question of scriptures.)
How does he know? Well, he knows, or he claims to know, that God is good. If he’s right, then
he knows that a good God would want to maximize good and minimize evil. How does he know
that? Because that’s what it means to be good. And then he knows that hot oil would cause
babies to feel pain, that pain hurts, and that hurting is not good, and so you should not boil babies
in hot oil.
And how do I know that it’s wrong to boil babies in hot oil? Well, like Mr Durston, I believe that
to be good is to want to maximize good and minimize evil. Why do I believe that? Because that’s
what it means to be good. And then I know that hot oil would cause babies to feel pain, that pain
hurts, and that hurting is not good, and so you should not boil babies in hot oil.
What’s the difference between Mr Durston and myself? Exactly this:
Mr Durston knows that it’s wrong to boil babies in hot oil only provided that he’s right that God
exists and is good. His knowledge of this moral fact is conditional upon his knowledge of facts
about God. His belief in this moral fact is justified all and only to the extent that he is justified in
believing facts about God. Remember that. Remember it, because in just a few minutes, when it
suits his purpose to do so, Mr Durston will tell us that we cannot have knowledge of facts about
God. Just you wait.
It is not so for me. My knowledge that it’s wrong to boil babies in hot oil is not conditional on
my understanding anything about any mysterious entity. I don’t have to know, believe or even
suspect that God is good, or even to believe that he exists. All I require, is understanding what it
means to be Good. All I require is precisely the same understanding that Mr Durston requires if
he is to understand his own belief that God is good.
This is not a trivial issue. That God’s silence on the matter of moral values does not advance the
cause of moral objectivity is amply witnessed by the innumerable ways in which belief in God
has in the past, as well as in the present, positively caused people to do evil.
Nobel Prize Winner Physicist Steven Weinberg:
“Religion is an insult to human dignity. Without it, you’d have good people doing good things,
and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, it takes religion.”
4 - Belief in God is dangerous
I used to think that belief in God was just a quaint and harmless self-indulgence. But the growing
and lethal polarization of religions has changed my mind. I now believe that faith in God is
positively dangerous. It is dangerous because it teaches people to be stupid.
(a) It demands a positive suspension of one’s critical faculties:
– there is not a shred of anything that in any other context one would allow as evidence
that any God exists, much less a unique one, much less one whose properties
(goodness, omnipresence, omniscience) we would claim to have any knowledge
of.
(b) It teaches you to be satisfied with answers that are not answers at all:
– what our best science does not (yet?) account for is allegedly “explained” by something
even more unaccounted for –a mysterious entity that we not only do not understand, but
which we voluntarily take to be not understandable by us. This “explanation” tells us
absolutely nothing about the HOW –“God works in mysterious ways”– while claiming,
completely gratuitously since we can’t understand God, to enlighten us about the WHAT
–procreation is the justification for sex, abortion is always wrong, homosexuality is a sin;
etc.
(c) It discourages independent thought, and encourages one to not-think:
– it is shocking to find intelligent Queen’s students, among the most educated people in
the world, believing that the universe was created in six days (OK, 6,000 days, since 1
day for God is 1,000 days for us), and believing that dinosaurs and dogs co-existed on
earth!
(d) It treats belief for belief’s sake as a positive virtue:
– faith is irrational, that’s the point of it; to even think that you have a reason for
believing diminishes your faith, for then you have a claim to understand, not to believe;
but it is dangerous to believe things for no reason at all. That is the essence of prejudice.
(e) It sanctions unshakeable, unreasonable convictions in one’s own righteousness,
and it nurtures intolerance to the point of murder:
– belief in God is de facto a cause of the murder of parents, children, friends & lovers
(killings of abortion providers; suicide bombings; honour killings; etc.)
No other single belief in the history of humanity has caused as much violence and inhumanity,
and it is easy to see why. If you believe that P, and without proof or reason, that your certainty is
guaranteed by a supreme all-perfect being, then you have no reason to question P, to tolerate that
others doubt P, to compromise over P, etc. Since your certainty that P is true is grounded in no
proof or reason, you have no way of convincing rational people of the truth of P. So belief in
God makes irrational people intolerant of rational people, just the opposite of what should be the
case.
5 - The fallacy of the argument from demographics
Mr Durston calls “an urban legend” the suggestion that religion is accountable for many of the
world’s atrocities. He tallies up the numbers of people murdered from the Crusades, the Spanish
Inquisition and witch hunts to a grand total of 264,000 (as if these represented the only
religiously inspired killings, or even the only Christianity-inspired killings!...), and compares
them favourably to the numbers of people killed by “communist atheistic” regimes, which he
claims to have calculated to be 110,000,000 people.
Here, Mr Durston commits the classical post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy (literally, “it happened
after ___ so it happened because of ___”). There are a huge number of reasons why communists
might kill people. when the communists were atheists and so it happened because the
communists were atheists”.
Maybe the communists killed that many people not because they were atheists, nor because they
were communists, but for some other reason. Perhaps because they were under attack from
Christian regimes who wanted to kill them because they were atheists or because they were
communists. Perhaps the communists killed more people than the Christians (if that’s true)
because they had more people available to be killed than did the Christians. Had there existed as
many people during the Crusades as during Communism, even more people might have been
killed by the Christians. Perhaps Communism has finished killing people and the only ones who
will continue killing people are the Christians. It is frankly ridiculous to base such claims on the
contingencies of demographics.
On top of that, the argument is fallacious: religion is no less dangerous an idea for not being
the most dangerous idea around! Mr Durston’s argument mimicks one which would argue in
favour of murderers since car accidents kill more people anyway.
Because religious thinking starts from irrational beliefs, it leads predictably to irrational action. It
is my contention that people of reason have a duty to debunk irrationality wherever it is found.
6 - Reasoning and Irrational Prejudice
Telltale signs of irrational prejudice are always available in the ways people use to support them.
Without exception, all religious arguments I have ever heard possess at least one of the following
properties:
(a) the arguments are grossly preposterous:
– they attempt to explain the improbable by the even more improbable (our existence
is such a big coincidence that we have to explain it by appeal to the utterly mysterious, an
eternal supreme being, omnipotent and all good but incapable of preventing evil);
(b) the arguments grossly overgenerate:
– to the extent that they work at all to support the existence of one God, they support the
existence of infinitely many. Indeed, to the extent that they work at all, they would
support just as well the existence of the Supreme Turtle, of Russell’s teapot circling
round the sun, of the Flying Spaghetti Monster (check out www.venganza.com), of the
creation of the universe by the Number Two, as they would support the existence of God;
(c) the arguments are viciously circular:
– every single one of the arguments conclude that God exists from premises that could
only be true if God did exist. These arguments are what philosophers call questionbegging: they rely on precisely what they wish to prove in order to prove it. As a result,
such arguments prove nothing at all.
(d) the arguments are either self-deceived or else given in bad faith:
– this is attested to by the unwillingness of theists to apply their own reasoning to their
own arguments.
I will illustrate each of these properties of theistic arguments, by dealing first with the replies to
the Problem of Evil, and then with the argument for Intelligent Design (ID).
I take my arguments to lead to the following conclusions:
(1) not just that God does not exist, but that God could not exist:
– God is like a round square; an object with contradictory properties, hence an impossible
object. So like a round square, he cannot exist.
(2) all arguments for the existence of God lead to the conclusion that if there is one God, there
are infinitely many, and plenty of unbelievably fanciful other beings besides;
(3) whether or not any Gods exist, it is irrational for us to believe it.
“We are all atheists. It is just that I disbelieve in one more God than you. When you understand
why you don’t believe in others’ Gods, you will understand why I don’t believe in yours.”
7 - The Problem of Evil
7.1 – Is God Good?
I turn now to the Problem of Evil and some attempted refutations.
The Problem of Evil is the problem of reconciling the existence of a Supreme Being with the
existence of evil in the world.
If God is worthy of worship, he has to be good (an evil God may be feared, but not worshiped, at
least not by good people). To be good is to will the good. If God created the universe, then the
universe is how God wanted it to be. We find evil in the world. Bad things happen. These bad
things must be how God wanted it to be, since otherwise they would not happen. Since God
willed there to be evil, then he isn’t good. So God is not worthy of worship.
I illustrate with an ordinary occurrence: a house burns down and little baby is painfully burned to
death.
Could we describe as “good” someone who had the power to save this baby but who refused to
do so? God is powerful enough to have created the universe. Surely, he has the power to save
such a child. He could make it rain hard. He could have given a headache to the arsonist, or made
him break his leg. He could have prevented the electrical wires from sparking a fire. He could
have performed a miracle and saved the baby while letting the house burn down. He is a
supreme, omniscient being. There are infinitely many ideas he could have come up with to save
the baby. Yet in innumerable such instances, God has not intervened to save the baby. (Think of
every innocent child, woman and man who has ever died in any natural disaster.)
So, let us ask the question: Is such a God “good”?
Are there any reasonable excuses for his behaviour?
It will not do to claim that the baby will go to Heaven. Either necessary for the baby to suffer or
it was not.
If it was not necessary, then it was wrong for God to allow it. Sending the baby to Heaven does
not change the fact that it was not necessary for the baby to suffer. God could have sent the baby
directly to Heaven without letting him painfully burn to death.
If it was necessary for the baby to suffer, the fact that the baby will go to heaven still does not
explain why it was necessary. So we are still left without explanation or excuse for God’s
inaction.
(a) The non-samaritan bystander
Consider a bystander who had nothing to do with starting the fire that burned the baby to death
nor with the rape and beating of the little girl, but who refused to help even though he could have
saved the baby or the girl with no harm to himself. Certainly, we would have no reason to call
such a bystander “good.” On the contrary, we would condemn as immoral someone who could
easily have helped but didn’t –just as surely as we would condemn as immoral, perhaps even as a
murderer, someone standing on a bridge watching a person drown, who could have saved the
person by simply tossing the life-saver that is right there next to him but who won’t.
But if a mere mortal human would not be considered good under these circumstances, what
possible reason would we have for continuing to assert the goodness of an all-powerful god?
(b) God’s (non-)Omnipotence
It won’t do to assert that God may not be all-powerful and thus not able to prevent evil. We
are not asking him to do the impossible, even though that is exactly what theists claim he can do
everytime they cite a miracle. He can create the entire universe and yet he can’t do what the fire
department can do, that is rescue a baby from a burning building?! He can do miracles, yet he
can’t drop a nail on the street that would flatten Bernardo’s tires, thus preventing him for
executing his kidnapping, torture and murder?! Come on!! Imagine the guy on the bridge, now
in court to explain why he failed to throw in the life-saver: “Well, I’m not omnipotent, you
know.” How far would that take him, do you think?
(c) God as a Utilitarian
A act-utilitarian is someone who is concerned only with maximizing the overall happiness of the
greatest number of people, even where that means sacrificing some individual’s life in order to
increase the well-being of the majority. An act-utilitarian, for instance, would knowingly
sentence an innocent person to torture or death, if doing so would prevent a riot that would
otherwise break out and cause more death. Mr Durston believes that God is an act-utilitarian.
Mr Durston writes that:
“If we are concerned about whether or not God was justified in permitting a given evil, we must
concern ourselves not only with the negative intrinsic value of the evil itself, but also with the
intrinsic values of all the consequences of that evil that will be actualized to the end of history.”
[p.68 Gratuitous evil]
Mr Durston continues:
“If permitting the rape, beating and murder of a five-year-old girl resulted in the prevention of
over 300 similar events over the next 125 years, then that information would certainly be
relevant in evaluating whether or not God was justified in permitting that instance of evil.”
That is to say, God has allowed the baby’s painful death by burning, and the rape, beating and
murder of the five-year-old because it will have positive results in the long run. He could have
had a little boy with a sling-shot misfire and hit the rapist and murderer in the head before he got
to the little girl. But no, God sacrificed the little girl for the sake of future little girls who would
otherwise have been raped, beaten and murdered, or for the sake of some other evil greater sure
to happen had God intervened to prevent this rapist from hurting this little girl, or to prevent this
baby from burning in this fire.
Now, just how does Mr Durston know, or why does he believe, that allowing this evil to happen –
allowing this baby to burn painfully to death and allowing this little girl to be tortured and
killed– will result in avoiding greater evil in the future? Why does he believe that, had God
intervened to save the baby or the little girl, more evil would eventually happen as a result? Mr
Durston does not know the future. Why does he believe that this instance of evil precluded worse
evil in the future?
Well, Mr Durston claims to know that by allowing this evil, a future worse evil was prevented,
because he claims to know that otherwise God would not have permitted it. Had the baby burned
for nothing, or had the little girl’s torture not prevented greater evil from happening later, God
would have intervened to prevent it.
But how does Mr Durston know that? How does he know that God would not have permitted it
unless there was a good reason? How does he know that God is not a sadist? Perhaps, for all we
know, God allows it to happen because he enjoys seeing children be raped and murdered. No!
Mr Durston knows that God would not have permitted evil unless it was necessary, why?
Because God is good.
Let’s pause a minute to examine this completely circular reasoning.
7.2 -- Circular reasoning in dealing with the problem of evil
We started with an event, the painful burning of a baby to death, or the rape, beating and
murder of a little girl, which is evil.
We asked: “Why do you believe that God is good, since he lets evil happen?”
Act-utilitarian Mr Durston answered: “He is good to let this happen because it guarantees less
evil in the future.”
Suppose we agree to be act-utilitarians (act-utilitarianism is widely regarded as a noxious, unjust
view that treats some persons merely as means for the interests of other persons, but never mind).
So we agree with Mr Durston’s answer: God is good even if he allows evil as long as future
greater evil will be averted.
But now we ask: “OK, but will future greater evil be averted? Why do you believe that?”
And Mr Durston’s only reply is: “Because I believe that God is good.”
But wait a second! What we started with was the question: “Why do you believe that God is
good, since he lets evil happen?”
And after this tortuous reasoning, Mr Durston’s answer is: “Because I believe that God is good.”
In other words, Mr Durston believes that God is good, despite appearances that God is not,
because he believes that God is good.
That is to say: Mr Durston believes it because he believes it. That is no reason at all.
7.3 – God’s goodness and our moral obligations
Mr Durston believes that without God, there are no objective moral values. He believes that faith
in God is required to reign in “mankind’s inherently evil tendencies” [“Just How Many People Has Religion
Killed?”, p.1]
Mr Durston is wrong. Terribly wrong. For if what he says is true, if God is good and if God’s
tolerance of present evil testifies to lessened evil in the future, then the conclusion that follows
logically about our moral obligations is very far from what Mr Durston expects. It is in fact
horrible.
Let me show you that Mr Durston’s views lead to very different conclusions than those he would
wish to accept. If Mr Durston is sincere in his views, then he is committed to the absurd
conclusion that we all have a moral obligation to try to do as much evil as possible.
If we are warranted in believing that because God is good, God would not have permitted the
baby’s painful death or the five-year-old’s rape and murder unless it would yield more goodness
in the future than it would had God intervened to prevent them, then we are warranted in
believing that every successful act of arson, rape, murder or any other evil must in the end have
been for the good, for otherwise God would not have allowed it to happen.
Since the arson, rape and murder in the end served the greater good, they were therefore the right
thing to do. If Mr Durston is right, then if we are good people, and we thereby wish to use
our presence in the world to increase the amount of goodness in the world, then we should
deliberately set houses on fire to try to burn babies to death. We should try to kill innocent
people, and try to rape, beat and murder children as much as we possibly can. If Mr
Durston is right, we should do so in full confidence that God will only allow us to succeed if our
evil acts will increase overall goodness in the future. That is to say, God will only allow us to
succeed if what seem to be evil acts of rape and murder really are good acts of rape and murder.
And God, being good, will intervene to prevent us from succeeding if that is not the case, that is,
if our seemingly evil acts really are evil. So either way, we can do no harm: if our acts are truly
evil, God will not allow them to happen; and if we succeed in burning babies and raping children
and killing innocents, then we can rest happy in the knowledge that we had a duty to do it,
because otherwise God would not have permitted it.
Moreover, every rapist and murderer can rejoice that, by his actions, he has thereby made the
world better. Thank you, Paul Bernardo! You have saved the world from greater evil. God only
knows how much.
The form of my preceding argument is called a reductio ad absurdum –a reduction to the absurd.
It is a classical form of reasoning, often employed in mathematics. I have accepted Durston’s
premises for the sake of argument: “Suppose what you say is true.” Then I have shown that valid
reasoning from such premises leads to an absurd conclusion: “If what you say is true, then this
absurd conclusion is also true.” If Durston is right about what he is assuming, then we have
the moral obligation to attempt to do evil. That is absurd, not only in itself, but especially
given Durston’s own reasons for thinking we need belief in God, namely, that without it, we
would not know good from bad and might be tempted to do evil.
Durston’s argument reduces to an absurdity, because he is contradicting himself: On the one
hand, he thinks we need belief in God to refrain from doing evil; but on the other hand, his own
views lead to the contrary. That is, the logical consequence of Durston’s views is the warranted
belief that, since God is good, then if we are good people who wish to increase the total good, we
have a duty to do evil.
A reductio ad absurdum argument proves that the premises that were assumed for the sake of
argument cannot be true. So either it cannot be true that God exists, or it cannot be true that he is
good.
7.4 – The Free Will Defense of God’s Tolerance of Evil
Theists at this point claim that humans have been granted free will, so that their actions are their
own fault.
But the free will defense does not work, for many reasons.
(a) An Evil God
The various excuses that theists give for why God allows evil are woefully inadequate. In
particular, they overgenerate dramatically. Every excuse we can provide to justify our belief
that God is good offers us a completely parallel excuse to justify a belief that God is evil.
For example, the occurrence of evil in the world can just as well be explained if God is evil, and
hence wishes to mazimize the amount of evil in the world. So he allows us free will so that we
can freely choose to do evil things, because doing evil things freely is more truly evil than doing
evil things because you are forced to do them.
Or perhaps God enjoys natural disasters because they bring out the worst in people (witness
stampedes to leave burning buildings, riots for food during natural disasters, etc).
The point is that any excuse to make the world consistent with a good God can be paralleled by
an excuse to make the world consistent with an evil God. This is so because the world is a
mixture of good and bad.
(b) Natural Evil
The existence of natural evil poses yet further problems for the free will defense. Many bad
things happen that cannot be attributed to the misuse of any human’s free will. No human is to
blame for the movement of techtonic plates that causes earthquakes, nor for any ensuing
tsunami; no human is to blame for lightning that causes forest fires; no human is to blame for
volcanic eruptions. Yet these cause much needless death and suffering.
Some theists will even go so far as to assign blame to humans for the occurrence of natural
disasters. Muslims will say that God is punishing Christians for not being Muslims. Christians
will say that God is punishing Muslims for not being Christians. Others will say that God is
punishing atheists. Of course, this is all quackery. Natural disasters strike the good just as much
as the bad.
Yet such events cause great harm. Innocent children are hurt, and die. Innocent children are
orphaned. Their lives are shattered. Their having freedom of the will has nothing to do with it.
How does having free will help when you are being crushed by a collapsing building during an
earthquake? Burned to death in a forest fire? Overtaken by a tsunami and drowned?
Theists also forget that humans are not the only ones harmed during natural disasters. Animals
also burn to death in forest fires and volcanic eruptions. Animals also drown in tsunamis. They
don’t have free will, they can’t choose to do evil. They are not going to be rewarded by an
eternity in Heaven. So why does God allow animals to suffer?
This is one point at which theists resort to what I call an “argument by desperation.” Since the
occurrence of evil challenges the existence of a good God, they just bite the bullet and deny the
occurrence of evil.
8 – The Denial of Evil
As an argument of last resort, theists will deny that what seems like evil really is evil. They will
deny that what seems to hurt really does. This argument is hard to take seriously.
The denial of evil always rests on the premise that God works in mysterious ways. This is the
view that since we don’t understand God, we misinterpret certain things as evil which are not
really evil.
Well, this just won’t do.
If what we are experiencing is not really evil, if it doesn’t really hurt, then why does God create
us in such a way that it seems to us to be evil, and it seems to us to hurt. Because it sure feels like
pain. If the fire is really just tickling the baby, why does it seem to the baby like agony? God is
cruel to make it feel to us like pain even though it really isn’t. A cruel God is an evil God by
another name.
The same theists who are harshly judgmental and condemnatory about finite, limited humans
who do what, it turns out, only seems to be evil, have a bottomless cup of excuses for an
almighty God who does exactly the same. So now the theist will appeal again to the premise that
God works in mysterious ways: maybe it just seems like God is cruel, but he really isn’t.
But now we’ve got him cornered. For it is still cruel of God to make it seem to us as if he were
cruel, even if he’s not really being cruel. It is cruel and deceitful, and neither is compatible with
goodness.
Perhaps God cannot control the sensations of our bodies, for some reason. He can create the
universe, but he can’t create human bodies who don’t feel pain when they are being “tickled” by
fire.
But this doesn’t help at all. Even if for some incredible reason God cannot interfere with our
bodily sensations, surely he can interfere with our thoughts. And it is still evil of him to have
created us with no understanding of how or why what seems like pain really is not pain, and
what seems like evil is not really evil.
The fact is that there is plenty of evidence of evil that cannot be attributed to any evil actions of
humans. If these are the product of any will, or indeed if they are just natural consequences of
creation, then they are the product of God’s will.
All the evidence points to a God evil enough to tolerate evil. But none of this moves a theist.
Why not? Because a theist has decided that God is good, despite the evidence. This is an
irrational decision, not grounded in observation. The theist’s God is good because the theist
wants him, needs him to be good, to justify his own irrational belief.
The theist is caught in viciously circular –and muddled– reasoning. It looks something like this:
I believe in an all-perfect God.
If God were evil, he would not be all-perfect.
So God is good.
But the evidence says otherwise.
So the evidence must be wrong.
Why? Because if the evidence were right, God would not be good.
But God is good.
Why? Because if God weren’t good, he would not be all-perfect.
But I believe in an all-perfect God.
And if God were evil, he would not be all-perfect.
So God is good.
But the evidence says otherwise.
So the evidence must be wrong.
Why? Because if the evidence were right, God would not be good.
But God is good.
Why? Because ...
A circular argument like this boils down to:
Why?:
I believe in an all-perfect God, so God is good.
Because if God weren’t good, he wouldn’t be all-perfect.
But I believe he is all-perfect.
You can run a completely analogous argument on Santa Claus:
I believe in Santa Claus, so Santa Claus exists.
Why?: Because if Santa Claus didn’t exist, I wouldn’t believe in Santa Claus.
But I believe in Santa Claus.
And just as for Santa Claus, such an argument proves the existence of nothing at all.
9 – Intelligent Design: More Irrational Thinking
The ID argument has this form:
(1) there is the appearance of design
(2) appearance of design is evidence of design
(3) design implies intelligence
Therefore
(4) An intelligent designer exists
Now, remember that only the conclusion of an argument that is both valid and sound should be
found convincing. An argument is sound when and only when it is the case both that the
reasoning involved is valid (that is, correct), and that each of the premises are true.
So, let’s see. Are the premises (1), (2), (3) of this argument true?
9.1 – The appearance of design
(1) Is there appearance of design?
This is supposed to be an empirical premise, but as it is stated, it is not. The way the premise is
expressed is already question-begging (i.e. it already presupposes what you are supposed to be
proving). For “to design” is a factive verb that presupposes an agent, that is, a designer. So by
calling the empirical evidence, evidence of design, you are already claiming that there is a
designer. It’s no wonder that the argument then yields this conclusion. This is straightforward
question-begging.
The less tendencious way of expressing the very same facts is to say that we observe a
remarkable complexity in nature (a complexity that is very design-like), that inspires wonder in
us. That’s exactly what we observe, and nothing more: Complexity in nature; wonder in us.
9.2 – The evidence of design
(2) Is the appearance of design evidence of design?
(a)
Seeming to be X is no evidence of being X:
Looking like gold is not the same as being gold.
Feeling yourself to be Jesus Christ is not the same as being Jesus Christ.
Why couldn’t things that appear designed to us be undesigned? Indeed, since we are creatures
with limited faculties and limited understanding –deficiencies that theists are constantly
reminding us of when it suits their purpose to do so– we should altogether expect to make
mistakes between appearance and reality.
Why, designs appear in clouds! Designs appear in Rorschach tests that we know to have been
randomly generated! How many times have you found driftwood that looks like something?
We know that humans are capable of suffering from all sorts of delusions (hallucinations, selfdeception, superstitions, wishful thinking, mental illness...). So equally we know that thinking
one is having an experience of X is not the same thing as having an experience of X.
(b)
When we find artefacts in a jungle, we know that they were designed by humans. That’s
because we know that only humans make artefacts, and in particular, that artefacts do not spring
up from nature. Indeed, that’s precisely how we distinguish artefacts from natural objects.
But when we find nature in a jungle, we don’t know that it was designed by God. We would
know that the appearance of design is evidence of design only if we knew that God exists and
that only God can design nature. But that is precisely the conclusion we are trying to establish
with this premise (2).
That is to say: premise (2) itself is true only if God exists. So it is wholly question-begging to
use this premise in support of the conclusion that God exists.
(c)
Why believe that complexities (or appearances of design) must be designed?
It’s only true that the complexities must be designed if no complexities can be self-designing.
It’s only true that appearances of design must be evidence of design if there could be no
appearance of design without design.
But this is precisely what naturalists claim to be false.
Nature can be self-designing. We have an understanding of how this can happen, which is
sustained by our best theory about how it did happen:
Imperceptible chance changes on the simple, yield imperceptible increases in complexity; if the
changes have survival value given the environment, the complex survives, otherwise not; then
some more imperceptible chance changes on the imperceptible increases in complexity yield
again imperceptible increases in complexity; if the changes have survival value given the
environment, the complex survives, otherwise not; until 4.5 billion years later, there is the
complexity that we see.
Not only that, but we have an understanding of the mechanics of how this can happen, which is
also sustained by our best theory about how it did happen: in every form of organic
reproduction, there is a copying of genetic material. As in every form of copying, no copy is ever
an exact duplicate of that which it has copied. Change happens. Changes which increase an
organism’s chance of survival and reproduction given its environment become established in the
gene pool of subsequent generations; changes which decrease an organism’s chance of survival
and reproduction given its environment eventually become marginal in the gene pool or die out.
Durston thinks that if evolution were true, we would of necessity find fossils of transitional
forms (transitions between species, for instance). But the above explains precisely why you
ought not expect to find transitional forms: what we call “the transitional forms” are precisely
those forms that have died out, since otherwise we would not be calling them “transitional
forms”; had they survived as species, we would be calling them by their survival name, the name
of the species.
It is far more probable, in the world as we know it, that imperceptible changes due to the
vagaries of chance and of infidel copying should happen, than that a supreme and all-perfect
being exist. And in principle, it is a fact about being and atrophy that happenstance and
imperfection should be more probable than perfection and eternity.
9.3 – The intelligence of design
(3) Does design imply intelligence?
Well, design does not imply intelligence if nature can be self-designing (unless of course you
want to attribute intelligence to nature, but in that case nature is its own intelligent designer).
Moreover, the occurrence of design can imply intelligence only on the condition that such an
intelligence exist to be implied. (Otherwise, there is nothing to imply.) In other words, what this
premise is really saying is that an intelligent designer must exist if design must imply
intelligence. That’s true, but once again, such circular reasoning teaches us nothing.
(a) All sorts of great inventions are due to mistakes and random accidents. Tarte Tatin and crème
brulée started their existence as forgotten desserts that were left to burn, and they turned out even
more delicious than the desserts they were designed to be.
(b) Are all the designs found in nature intelligent ones? Certainly, prima facie NO. For instance,
it has always struck me as pretty stupid that we are designed with our genital organs right next to
where we defecate; or that we are designed to eat and to wipe our asses with the same
appendages. Our eyes haved blind spots, our teeth are too big for our mouths (so we have to have
our wisdom teeth removed), our backs are too long for our bones, we give birth to big babies via
narrow canals, etc.
So, that our design is indeed the product of intelligence is itself circular. Or as philosophers say:
it begs the question.
If that is not sufficiently evident, then it will be in the next fallacious strategy.
Here the typical tactic is to dismiss the evidence of imperfect creation, by claiming that the
intelligence of our design, like numerous other things relating to God, escapes our limited
understanding. What seems like unintelligent design really is intelligent design, it’s just that we
lack the information to understand the mysterious ways of God. This is the appeal to mystery.
But the appeal to mystery doesn’t help. It too is circular.
A mystery is a relation: A relation between a certain knower who aims to understand, and a
certain something that is not understood. Mystery is not a property of that something in and of
itself. Presumably God, at least, understands his own ways. Nothing is intrinsically mysterious.
What we are trying to understand is how unintelligent design really is intelligent once you
understand it, and how evil really is not evil once you understand it. What the appeal to mystery
does is nothing other than tell us:
If you understood what there is to understand, you would understand why P seems like not-P.
In other words, if you understood, you would understand.
But you don’t understand, because it is a mystery, that is, because it is not understood by you.
In other words, you don’t understand it because it is not understood by you.
Such circularity is simply obfuscatory [that means it’s just blowing smoke in our eyes].
Once the smoke has settled, what the ID argument really looks like is this:
(1) There is complexity in nature which inspires wonder in us.
[This is true.]
(2) If it seems designed to us then it really is designed.
[This is false.]
(3) (You don’t understand it because you don’t understand it, but)
even if it doesn’t seem intelligently designed it really is intelligently designed.
dubious and obfuscatory.]
[This is
:. So there is an intelligent designer.
When you distill the argument to its bare bones, it boils down to:
Whether there seems to be an intelligent designer or not, there is an intelligent designer.
:. Therefore, there is an intelligent designer.
We establish nothing whatsoever from such circular reasoning.
And to illustrate what I have referred to as bad faith reasoning... Even if the reasoning were
sound (though it isn’t), it would not yield the conclusion desired. For if it is true that all
intelligent designs require an intelligent designer to design them, then, since the intelligent
designer is itself intelligently designed, it must be equally true that the intelligent designer itself
requires an intelligent designer to design it. And if that is the case, then yet another intelligent
designer must be postulated to design that intelligent designer, and ... it’s turtles all the way
down.
If the intelligent designer (God) itself does not have to have been designed by an intelligent
designer, then there can be intelligent design without a designer.
10 – The Cosmological Argument:
10.1 – Natural processes and the supposed need for supernatural volitional agency
Coming soon...
11 – The Argument from Personal Experience
11.1 – Mr Durston’s false dilemma
Mr Durston has had experiences which he interprets as experiences of God. Whether or not
these experiences are experiences of God is of course precisely what is under contention. If God
does not exist, then whatever experiences Mr Durston experiences as experiences of God are not,
indeed cannot be, experiences of God.
Mr Durston offers us a false dilemma in the face of his experience: Either we must think that he
is insane, or that he is lying.
If those are indeed the only options, then my faith that Mr Durston would not be shamelessly
lying to a crowd of 900 people would leave me no choice but to conclude that he does suffer
from some form of insanity. After all, we would unhesitatingly label someone insane who firmly
believed that there was a teapot circling round the sun. And as we have shown, there are the
same and completely parallel reasons to believe that there is a teapot circling round the sun (or
microscopic pink elephants flying all around, or round squares alive on Mars, or any number of
fanciful entities everywhere) than there is to believe that an almighty god exists.
Now, insanity is a serious charge. I would prefer to think that Mr Durston suffers from a
comforting delusion. Many of us are prone to delusions: delusions of grandeur, self-deceptions
about our own motives, various degrees of paranoia, wishful thinking… Just think that every
newspaper devotes a full quarter page to horoscopes! Some people think some people have been
abducted by UFOs (and usually anally probed!). And how old were you when you stopped not
stepping on cracks in the sidewalks? Low-level insanity is ubiquitous in the human species.
But Mr Durston’s claim here is pure sophistry. He’s essentially saying: “If you disagree with me,
then you are committed to the most extreme view about me.” We are all familiar with this sort of
fallacy. Let’s call it the Fallacy of Deflection by Exaggeration: As you are about to leave the
kitchen, I ask you to clean up the apple peels that you have just left on the counter. To deflect the
implicit (small, local, instantaneous, minute, insignificant) criticism (just that you are leaving
peels to rot on the counter today now right this minute), you react with: “Oh, so you think I’m a
lazy do-nothin’ who never does anything worthwhile and never so much as helps to do anything
other than dirty the house…”, thereby inflating the criticism implicit in my remark to such an
extent that it could not possibly apply to you. This is exactly the fallacy performed by the AMS
student government when I criticized Queen’s students present at the Aberdeen Riot for being
“worthy of the Hitler youth” for their passive support of street violence: “Mercier claims the
Aberdeen party was akin to the Holocaust! We only burned a car, we did not exterminate
6,000,000 Jews!” -- Right. You “only” burned a car.
So the dilemma, either insane or lying, is a false one. What really is the case is that Mr Durston
is simply mistaken. He is interpreting –misinterpreting—a neurological experience as an
experience of God. When you come out of a hot tub and roll around in snow, the snow feels
burning hot. Of course, the snow is not hot, it is cold. It is your interpretation of the experience
that is being tricked.
11.2 – The Neurology of “Spiritual” Experience
Read the following two articles…
A mystical union
Mar 4th 2004
From The Economist print edition
A small band of pioneers is exploring the neurology of
religious experience
Bridgeman
THE renowned French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot once scribbled some notes while under
the influence of the psychedelic drug mescaline. Colleagues were puzzled because among the
scribbles was the incongruous statement, written in English, “I love you Jennifer”. Still more
puzzling was the question: who was Jennifer? That was not the name of his wife nor of anyone
else they thought he knew. Despite the mystery, Dr Charcot's colleagues never thought to
question the scientific value of the experiment.
The same cannot be said of Mario Beauregard, a brain-imager from the University of Montreal,
who has also experimented with mescaline. But that is because Dr Beauregard is interested in
one particular, and far more contentious, aspect of the mescaline experience—the capacity of the
drug to inspire feelings of spirituality or closeness to God. It was experiments of the type carried
out by Charcot that opened up the possibility of investigating spirituality in a scientific manner,
by showing that it could be manipulated. Dr Beauregard is following up on these by trying to
discover where in the brain religious experience is actually experienced.
In the first of what he hopes will be a series of experiments, Dr Beauregard and his doctoral
student Vincent Paquette are recording electrical activity in the brains of seven Carmelite nuns
through electrodes attached to their scalps. Their aim is to identify the brain processes underlying
the Unio Mystica—the Christian notion of mystical union with God. The nuns (the researchers
hope to recruit 15 in all) will also have their brains scanned using positron-emission tomography
and functional magnetic-resonance imaging, the most powerful brain-imaging tools available.
The study has met with scepticism from both subjects and scientists. Dr Beauregard had first to
convince the nuns that he was not trying to prove or disprove the existence of God. Scientific
critics, meanwhile, have accused him of being too reductionist—of pretending to pinpoint the
soul in the brain in the same way that the Victorians played phrenology as a parlour game by
feeling the contours of each others' skulls to find a bulge of secretiveness or a missing patch of
generosity.
Dr Beauregard does not, in fact, believe there is a neurological “God centre”. Rather, his
preliminary data implicate a network of brain regions in the Unio Mystica, including those
associated with emotion processing and the spatial representation of self. But that leads to
another criticism, which he may find harder to rebut. This is that he is not really measuring a
mystical experience at all—merely an intense emotional one.
This is because the nuns are, so to speak, faking it. They believe that the Unio Mystica is a gift of
God and cannot be summoned at will. Most of them have only experienced it once or twice,
typically in their 20s. To get around this, Dr Beauregard has drawn on previous experiments he
carried out with actors, which showed that remembering an intense emotional experience
activates the same brain networks as actually having that experience. In effect, he has asked the
nuns to method act, and they are happy to comply.
God and the gaps
Andrew Newberg, a radiologist at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia,
who has scanned the brains of Buddhists and Franciscan nuns in meditation or at prayer, is
familiar with such criticism. He says that, because religious experience is not readily accessible,
unusually high standards of experimental rigour are demanded of this kind of research. “We have
frequently argued that many aspects of spiritual experiences are built upon the brain machinery
that is used for other purposes such as emotions,” he says. “Very careful research will need to be
done to delineate these issues.”
But that is not a reason for shying away from them, says Olaf Blanke of the University Hospital
of Geneva, Switzerland, whose paper in the February edition of Brain describes how the brain
generates out-of-body experiences. He points out that plenty of research has been done into
another kind of bodily illusion, phantom limbs. This has identified the brain mechanisms
responsible, and even suggested treatments for these disabling “appendages”. The same cannot
be said of out-of-body experiences, which can also be disturbing, but occupy a neglected position
between neurobiology and mysticism.
Having subjected six brain-damaged patients to a battery of neuro-imaging techniques, Dr
Blanke's group concludes that damage at the junction of two lobes of the brain—the temporal
and parietal—causes a breakdown of a person's perception of his own body. The boundary
between personal and extrapersonal space becomes blurred, and he sees his body occupying
positions that do not coincide with the position he feels it to be in.
Some patients give this a mystical interpretation, some do not. What is interesting is that several
of the patients suffered from temporal-lobe epilepsy. An association between this kind of
epilepsy and religiosity is well-documented, notably in a classic series of neurological papers
written by Norman Geschwind in the 1960s and 1970s. Dr Blanke argues that all the lobes of the
brain play a part in something as complex as religious experience, but that the temporo-parietal
junction is a prime node of that network.
The parietal lobe is thought to be responsible for orienting a person in time and space, and Dr
Newberg also found a change in parietal activation at the height of the meditative experience,
when his volunteers reported sensing a greater interconnectedness of things. At the end of each
recording session, Dr Beauregard asks the nuns to complete a questionnaire which gauges not
only feelings of love and closeness to God, but also distortions of time and space. “The more
intense the experience, the more intense the disorganisation from a spatio-temporal point of
view,” he says. Typically, time slows down, and the self appears to dissolve into some larger
entity that the nuns describe as God.
Whether the Unio Mystica has anything in common with out-of-body experiences, or even
phantom limbs, remains to be seen—though all are certainly mediated by the brain. According to
Dr Blanke, this is only just starting to become an accepted topic of research in neuroscience.
Perhaps its acceptance will depend ultimately on how the knowledge is used. Dr Beauregard may
have done himself a disservice by arguing that mystical union should not be reserved for the
spiritual few, but should be made available to everyone, for the benefit of society. Perhaps, like
Charcot, he should stick to describing it, however incongruous the result may be.
This Is Your Brain on God
Michael Persinger has a vision - the Almighty isn't dead, he's an energy field. And
your mind is an electromagnetic map to your soul.
By Jack Hitt
Over a scratchy speaker, a researcher announces, "Jack, one of your electrodes is loose,
we're coming in." The 500-pound steel door of the experimental chamber opens with a
heavy whoosh; two technicians wearing white lab coats march in. They remove the PingPong-ball halves taped over my eyes and carefully lift a yellow motorcycle helmet that's
been retrofitted with electromagnetic field-emitting solenoids on the sides, aimed directly at
my temples. Above the left hemisphere of my 42-year-old male brain, they locate the
dangling electrode, needed to measure and track my brain waves. The researchers slather
more conducting cream into the graying wisps of my red hair and press the securing tape
hard into my scalp.
After restoring everything to its proper working position, the techies exit, and I'm left sitting
inside the utterly silent, utterly black vault. A few commands are typed into a computer
outside the chamber, and selected electromagnetic fields begin gently thrumming my
brain's temporal lobes. The fields are no more intense than what you'd get as by-product
from an ordinary blow-dryer, but what's coming is anything but ordinary. My lobes are
about to be bathed with precise wavelength patterns that are supposed to affect my mind in
a stunning way, artificially inducing the sensation that I am seeing God.
I'm taking part in a vanguard experiment on the physical sources of spiritual consciousness,
the current work-in-progress of Michael Persinger, a neuropsychologist at Canada's
Laurentian University in Sudbury, Ontario. His theory is that the sensation described as
"having a religious experience" is merely a side effect of our bicameral brain's feverish
activities. Simplified considerably, the idea goes like so: When the right hemisphere of the
brain, the seat of emotion, is stimulated in the cerebral region presumed to control notions
of self, and then the left hemisphere, the seat of language, is called upon to make sense of
this nonexistent entity, the mind generates a "sensed presence."
Persinger has tickled the temporal lobes of more than 900 people before me and has
concluded, among other things, that different subjects label this ghostly perception with the
names that their cultures have trained them to use - Elijah, Jesus, the Virgin Mary,
Mohammed, the Sky Spirit. Some subjects have emerged with Freudian interpretations describing the presence as one's grandfather, for instance - while others, agnostics with
more than a passing faith in UFOs, tell something that sounds more like a standard alienabduction story.
It may seem sacrilegious and presumptuous to reduce God to a few ornery synapses, but
modern neuroscience isn't shy about defining our most sacred notions - love, joy, altruism,
pity - as nothing more than static from our impressively large cerebrums. Persinger goes
one step further. His work practically constitutes a Grand Unified Theory of the
Otherworldly: He believes cerebral fritzing is responsible for almost anything one might
describe as paranormal - aliens, heavenly apparitions, past-life sensations, near-death
experiences, awareness of the soul, you name it.
To those of us who prefer a little mystery in our lives, it all sounds like a letdown. And as I
settle in for my mind trip, I'm starting to get apprehensive. I'm a lapsed Episcopalian
clinging to only a hazy sense of the divine, but I don't especially like the idea that whatever
vestigial faith I have in the Almighty's existence might get clinically lobotomized by
Persinger's demo. Do I really want God to be rendered as explicable and predictable as an
endorphin rush after a 3-mile run?
Persinger's research forays are at the very frontier of the roiling field of neuroscience, the
biochemical approach to the study of the brain. Much of what we hear about the discipline is
anatomical stuff, involving the mapping of the brain's many folds and networks, performed
by reading PET scans, observing blood flows, or deducing connections from stroke and
accident victims who've suffered serious brain damage. But cognitive neuroscience is also a
grab bag of more theoretical pursuits that can range from general consciousness studies to
finding the neural basis for all kinds of sensations.
As the work piles up, many things that we hold to be unique aspects of the "self" are
reduced to mere tics of cranial function. Take laughter. According to Vilayanur
Ramachandran, professor of neuroscience at UC San Diego, laughter is just the brain's way
of signaling that a fearful circumstance is not really so worrisome. At a conference earlier
this year, he posited that the classic banana-peel pratfall is funny only when the victim gets
up, and that we laugh to alert "other members of [our] kin that, 'Look, there has been a
false alarm here; don't waste your resources rushing to help.'" He calls laughter "nature's
OK signal."
Of course, this type of deromanticizing has been going on for a while - Persinger's brain
manipulations have crude antecedents in the 1950s, the roaring decade for behaviorism.
Back then, Yale physiologist Jose Delgado earned national renown by implanting electrodes
into the brains of live animals and attaching them to a "stimoceiver" under the skull. In a
technique called ESB - electronic stimulation of the brain - Delgado sent radio signals
through the electrodes to control the animal. In one demonstration in the early 1960s, he
used his electronic gizmo to halt a charging bull.
Delgado's relatively coarse stunts were a long way from Persinger's quest for the God spot,
but Persinger is not the first to theorize that the Creator exists only in the complex
landscape of the human noggin. In his controversial 1976 book, The Origin of Consciousness
in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, Julian Jaynes, a Princeton psychologist, argued
that the brain activity of ancient people - those living roughly 3,500 years ago, prior to early
evidence of consciousness such as logic, reason, and ethics - would have resembled that of
modern schizophrenics. Jaynes maintained that, like schizophrenics, the ancients heard
voices, summoned up visions, and lacked the sense of metaphor and individual identity that
characterizes a more advanced mind. He said that some of these ancestral synaptic
leftovers are buried deep in the modern brain, which would explain many of our present-day
sensations of God or spirituality.
Among practicing neuroscientists, there is no overarching consensus on whether such
notions are correct. Persinger is certainly out on a frontier where theory meets the boldest
sort of speculation, but there's nothing inherently bizarre about his methods or the
questions he's asking. William Calvin, a professor of behavioral sciences at the University of
Washington in Seattle, says that Persinger's line of inquiry is no more mysterious than
another pursuit that intrigues neuroscientists: trying to understand the sensations of déjà
vu or its opposite, jamais vu - the feeling, during a familiar routine, that we're doing it for
the first time. Maybe these feelings, like God, are just more fritzing in the electricity arcing
about our brains.
As the researchers fit my helmet, I ask: Has anyone ever freaked out in the chair? Persinger
smiles slightly and describes when a subject suffered an "adverse experience" and
succumbed to an "interpretation that the room was hexed." When I ask if, say, the subject
ripped all this equipment from his flesh and ran screaming from the dungeon, Persinger
curtly replies: "Yes, his heart rate did go up and he did want to leave and of course he could
because that is part of the protocol."
One more time: Has anyone freaked out in the chair? "His EKG was showing that he moved
very, very quickly and dramatically," Persinger offers, "and that he was struggling to take
off the electrodes."
Technically speaking, what's about to happen is simple. Using his fixed wavelength patterns
of electromagnetic fields, Persinger aims to inspire a feeling of a sensed presence - he
claims he can also zap you with euphoria, anxiety, fear, even sexual stirring. Each of these
electromagnetic patterns is represented by columns of numbers - thousands of them,
ranging from 0 to 255 - that denote the increments of output for the computer generating
the EM bursts.
Some of the bursts - which Persinger more precisely calls "a series of complex repetitive
patterns whose frequency is modified variably over time" - have generated their intended
effects with great regularity, the way aspirin causes pain relief. Persinger has started
naming them and is creating a sort of EM pharmacological dictionary. The pattern that
stimulates a sensed presence is called the Thomas Pulse, named for Persinger's colleague
Alex Thomas, who developed it. There's another one called Burst X, which reproduces what
Persinger describes as a sensation of "relaxation and pleasantness."
A new one, the Linda Genetic Pulse, is named for my psychometrist, Linda St-Pierre.
Persinger says St-Pierre is conducting a massive study on rats to determine the ways in
which lengthy exposures to particular electromagnetic pulses can "affect gene expression."
After spending a little time with Persinger, you get accustomed to the fact that his most
polite phrases demand pursuit. Affect gene expression? It sounds so simple, but what he's
really talking about is stringing together a number of different electromagnetic fields to
prompt a complicated chemical reaction on the genetic level - for example, directing the
body's natural self-healing instincts.
"We want to enhance what the brain does to help heal the body," Persinger explains.
"Among more sensitive individuals, tests show that their skin will turn red if they believe a
hot nickel has been placed on their hand. That's a powerful psychosomatic effect of the
brain on the body. Suppose we could make it more precise?"
Persinger envisions a series of EM patterns that work the way drugs do. Just as you take an
antibiotic and it has a predictable result, you might be exposed to precise EM patterns that
would signal the brain to carry out comparable effects.
I am being withdrawn from my body and set adrift in an infinite
existential emptiness.
Soon enough, it's time for the good professor to wish me well and lob this last caveat: "If,
for whatever reason, you become frightened or want to end the experiment, just speak into
your lapel microphone."
When the door closes and I feel nothing but the weight of the helmet on my head and the
Ping-Pong balls on my eyes, I start giving serious thought to what it might be like to "see"
God, artificially produced or not. Nietzsche's last sane moment occurred when he saw a
carter beating a horse. He beat the carter, hugged the horse while sobbing uncontrollably,
and was then carried away. I can imagine that. I see myself having a powerful vision of
Jesus, and coming out of the booth wet with tears of humility, wailing for mercy from my
personal savior.
Instead, after I adjust to the darkness and the cosmic susurrus of absolute silence, I drift
almost at once into a warm bath of oblivion. Something is definitely happening. During the
35-minute experiment, I feel a distinct sense of being withdrawn from the envelope of my
body and set adrift in an infinite existential emptiness, a deep sensation of waking slumber.
The machines outside the chamber report an uninterrupted alertness on my part. (If the
researchers see the easily recognized EEG pattern of sleep, they wake you over the
speakers.) Occasionally, I surface to an alpha state where I sort of know where I am, but
not quite. This feeling is cool - like being reinserted into my body. Then there's a separation
again, of body and soul, and - almost by my will - I happily allow myself to drift back to the
surprisingly bearable lightness of oblivion.
In this floating state, several ancient childhood memories are jarred loose. Suddenly, I am
sitting with Scott Allen on the rug in his Colonial Street house in Charleston, South Carolina,
circa 1965, singing along to "Moon River" and clearly hearing, for the first time since then,
Scott's infectiously frenzied laughter. I reexperience the time I spent the night with Doug
Appleby and the discomfort I felt at being in a house that was so punctiliously clean.
(Doug's dad was a doctor.) I also remember seeing Joanna Jacobs' small and perfect
breasts, unholstered beneath the linen gauze of her hippie blouse, circa 1971.
If I had to pin down when I felt this dreamy state before - of being in the presence of
something divine - it would be in the euphoric, romantic hope that animated my adolescent
efforts at meditation. I'm not sure what it says about me that the neural sensation designed
to prompt visions of God set loose my ancient feelings about girls. But then, I'm not the first
person to conflate God with late-night thoughts of getting laid - read more about it in Saint
Augustine, Saint John of the Cross, or Deepak Chopra.
So: Something took place. Still, when the helmet comes off and they shove a questionnaire
in my hand, I feel like a failure. One question: Did the red bulb on the wall grow larger or
smaller? There was a red bulb on the wall? I hadn't noticed. Many other questions suggest
that there were other experiences I should have had, but to be honest, I didn't.
In fact, as transcendental experiences go, on a scale of 1 to 10, Persinger's helmet falls
somewhere around, oh, 4. Even though I did have a fairly convincing out-of-body
experience, I'm disappointed relative to the great expectations and anxieties I had going in.
It may be that all the preliminary talk about visions just set my rational left hemisphere into
highly skeptical overdrive. Setting me up like that - you will experience the presence of God
- might have been a mistake. When I bring this up later with Persinger, he tells me that the
machine's effects differ among people, depending on their "lability" - Persinger jargon
meaning sensitivity or vulnerability.
"Also, you were in a comfortable laboratory," he points out. "You knew nothing could
happen to you. What if the same intense experience occurred at 3 in the morning in a
bedroom all by yourself? Or you suddenly stalled on an abandoned road at night when you
saw a peculiar light and then had that experience? What label would you have placed on it
then?"
Point taken. I'd probably be calling Art Bell once a week, alerting the world to the alien
invasion.
But then, Persinger continued, being labile is itself a fluctuating condition. There are interior
factors that can exacerbate it - stress, fear, injury - and exterior sources that might provoke
odd but brief disturbances in the usually stable electromagnetic fields around us. Persinger
theorizes, for example, that just prior to earthquakes there are deformations in the natural
EM field caused by the intense pressure change in the tectonic plates below. He has
published a paper called "The Tectonic Strain Theory as an Explanation for UFO
Phenomena," in which he maintains that around the time of an earthquake, changes in the
EM field could spark mysterious lights in the sky. A labile observer, in Persinger's view,
could easily mistake the luminous display for an alien visit.
As we sit in his office, Persinger argues that other environmental disturbances - ranging
from solar flares and meteor showers to oil drilling - probably correlate with visionary
claims, including mass religious conversions, ghost lights, and haunted houses. He says that
if a region routinely experiences mild earthquakes or other causes of change in the
electromagnetic fields, this may explain why the spot becomes known as sacred ground.
That would include the Hopi tribe's hallowed lands, Delphi, Mount Fuji, the Black Hills,
Lourdes, and the peaks of the Andes, not to mention most of California.
From time to time, a sensed presence can also occur among crowds, Persinger says,
thereby giving the divine vision the true legitimacy of a common experience, and making it
practically undeniable.
"One classic example was the apparition of Mary over the Coptic Church in Zeitoun, Egypt,
in the 1960s," he continues. "This phenomenon lasted off and on for several years. It was
seen by thousands of people, and the appearance seemed to precede the disturbances that
occurred during the building of the Aswan High Dam. I have multiple examples of reservoirs
being built or lakes being filled, and reports of luminous displays and UFO flaps. But Zeitoun
was impressive."
Persinger says there were balls of light that moved around the cross atop the church. "They
were influenced by the cross, of course. It looked like a circle with a triangle on the bottom.
If you had an imagination, it looked like a person. Upside down, by the way, it was the
classical UFO pattern. It's curious that this happened during a marked increase in hostilities
between Egyptians and Israelis, and both interpreted the phenomenon as proof that they
would be successful. It's just so classical of human beings. Take an anomalous event, and
one group will interpret it one way, and another group another."
Might it surprise anyone to learn, in view of Persinger's theories, that when Joseph Smith
was visited by the angel Moroni before founding Mormonism, and when Charles Taze Russell
started the Jehovah's Witnesses, powerful Leonid meteor showers were occurring?
Taken together, Persinger's ideas and published studies go awfully far - he's claiming to
identify the primum mobile underlying all the supernatural stories we've developed over the
last few thousand years. You might think Christians would be upset that this professor in
Sudbury is trying to do with physics what Nietzsche did with metaphysics - kill off God. Or
you might think that devout ufologists would denounce him for putting neuroscience on the
side of the skeptics.
"Actually, it's more a mind-set that gets disturbed than a particular belief," offers Persinger.
"Some Christians say, 'Well, God invented the brain, so of course this is how it would
happen.' UFO types say, 'This is good. Now we can tell the fake UFO sightings from the real
ones.'"
Oh, I have no doubt. I mean, who among all the churchgoers and alien fiends will let some
distant egghead with a souped-up motorcycle helmet spoil their fun? It goes without saying
that the human capacity to rationalize around Persinger's theory is far greater than all the
replicated studies science could produce. The real tradition Persinger falls into is that of
trying to explain away mystical experience. Jaynes thought visitations from God were mere
aural detritus from the Stone Age. And just recently, another study suggested that sleep
paralysis might account for visions of God and alien abduction.
Who knows? Perhaps mystical visions are in fact nothing more than a bit of squelchy
feedback in the temporal lobes. But that's such a preposterously small part of what most
people think of when they think of God, it seems insanely grandiose to suggest that anyone
has explained away "God." It's almost ironic. Every so often during one of America's little
creation-science tempests, some humorless rationalist like Stephen Jay Gould steps forward
to say that theology is an inadequate foundation for the study of science. Noted. And vice
versa.
But Persinger's ideas are harder to shake off than that. When I return to America, I am
greeted by the news that massive intersections of power lines do not, in fact, cause cancer.
For years scientists had advanced the power line-cancer connection, based on the results of
Robert Liburdy's benchmark 1992 study. But a tip to the federal Office of Research Integrity
initiated an investigation of Liburdy's work; it found that his data had been falsified.
Persinger's experiments and resulting theories suggest some new ideas about our waning
20th century, which began with Thomas Edison convincing the world to cocoon itself inside
electrically wired shelters, throbbing with pulses of electromagnetic fields. Granted, those
fields are quite weak, arguably too tiny to affect our physical bodies in ways Liburdy had
suggested. But what about Persinger's notion that such fields may be tinkering with our
consciousness?
Is it a coincidence that this century - known as the age of anxiety, a time rife with various
hysterias, the era that gave birth to existentialism - is also when we stepped inside an
electromagnetic bubble and decided to live there? We have never quite comprehended that
we walk about in a sea of mild electromagnetism just as we do air. It is part of our
atmosphere, part of the containing bath our consciousness swims in. Now we are altering it,
heightening it, condensing it. The bubble is being increasingly shored up with newer, more
complicated fields: computers, pagers, cell phones. Every day, entrepreneurs invent more
novel ways to seduce us into staying inside this web. The Internet is well named.
Naturally, many people would presume that such a change must be a malignant force when
directed at the delicate gossamer of consciousness. Yet evolution is a tricky business.
Accidental changes often turn out to be lifesaving preparations for some other condition that
could never have been predicted.
A few might see a world of possibility in Persinger's theories. His booth has helped us
discover and confirm our true predicament. "Seeing God" is really just a soothing
euphemism for the fleeting awareness of ourselves alone in the universe: a look in that
existential mirror. The "sensed presence" - now easily generated by a machine pumping our
brains with electromagnetic spirituality - is nothing but our exquisite and singular self, at
one with the true solitude of our condition, deeply anxious. We're itching to get out of here,
to escape this tired old environment with its frayed carpets, blasted furniture, and shabby
old God. Time to move on and discover true divinity all over again.
Jack Hitt is the author of Off the Road: A Modern-Day Walk Down the Pilgrim's Route Into
Spain.
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