PosnerBlogging: Take One

by Will Wilkinson on December 28, 2004

Posner’s first post over at Leiter’s is full ot good stuff for a philosophoblogger to philosophoblog about. Let’s do it in order. First paragraph:

Brian said I’m an atheist, but the word has two distinct meanings. The first is a person who does not have a sense that there is a God–who, in short, is not a religious person. The second is a person who adheres to the doctrine that there is no God. That is a metaphysical proposition that does not interest me. You cannot convince a religious person that there is no God, because he does not share your premises, for example that only science delivers truths. There is no fruitful debating of God’s existence.

I think someone is an atheist if God (or the properties definitive of God) isn’t in their ontology. That’s it. The difference between someone who goes around insisting that our best theory of the world doesn’t need to quantify over God-properties, and someone whose theory of the world just doesn’t quantify of God-properties doesn’t establish a difference in the meaning of ‘atheist’. The difference between someone who goes around telling anyone who will listen that Jesus is their personal lord and savior and someone who just believes it doesn’t establish a difference in the meaning of ‘Christian’. There are different kinds of atheists and different kinds of Christians, but ‘atheist’ and ‘Christian’ mean just one thing.

Second, the world proves Posner wrong. There is fruitful debating of God’s existence. People can and are debated into and out of belief in God. I am quite sure that one can find foremerly religious people who were convinced that there is no God. Posner may be right that most people stick to their prejudices and won’t accept a good argument to the contrary if it hits them in the face. But his claim is way too strong. My own change in belief had something to do with reasoning, not just some perturbation of animal spirits.

  • McClain
    Wow, I think that 'comment spam' served as an excellent meta-whatever.
  • There is no acceptable test even conceivable that would provide evidence of God's existence, by definition.

    Nonsense. Here's your test:

    "Hey God, if you're there, show yourself to me."

    If he does, there's your proof. (Of course, accounting for fraud, and so forth.)

    Proof of God's nonexistence is of course a different matter, but that's the old "prove a negative" problem. Unfortunately, given the sparseness of evidence like the above, that's about all we have to work with.
  • bob mcmanus
    "A hidden message in pi or e (a la Carl Sagan's Contact) would do it, at least to a very high probability."

    Well, that would prove something had existed in the past, its nature depending on the content of the message, but even it had said "I exist always" we wouldn't have to believe it.

    But you know if we let imaginations run wild, the Big Dude could just open the sky like drapes and shout "Here I am!". Now such an event is not in my ontology, but there are millions of people who expect that exact event to happen... "Left Behind" club. I, as a secular modernist, have spent part of my life trying to view that group as something other than superstitious savages.
  • Anonymous
    "There is no acceptable test even conceivable that would provide evidence of God's existence, by definition."

    A hidden message in pi or e (a la Carl Sagan's Contact) would do it, at least to a very high probability. On the other hand, there is no conceivable test to prove the *non*existence of God, since if God does exist he could always spoil the results of any test in order to hide himself.
  • McClain
    Didn't mean to patronize, Wili - just relating my personal experience, for what it's worth.
    I don't see atheism as merely a juvenile affectation.
    It makes sense enough, as far as it goes, and suits some personality types better than any other belief would.
    There are folks who would serve God better if they didn't believe in Him. (Her. It. Whatev....)
  • Wili Wáchendon
    Matt:
    "I'll grant that some devotional environments are explicitly designed to induce a sort of temporary euphoria, but those are the exceptions, and they don't account for the prevalence of religious identification"

    Many do convert due to some kind of 'spiritual experience', though. John C. Wright a notable recent example http://mostlyfiction.com/authorqa/wright.htm

    McClain:
    Identifying atheism/agnosticism with teen rebellion is breathtakingly patronising. As it happens, I was raised atheist, and never identified as anything else, though it took a little longer for my worldview to become fully naturalistic. YMMV
  • Luka Yovetich
    By the by,

    I agree with you Will that 'atheist' does not have two distinct meanings. Posner is wrong about that. It's just that I think that there are two kinds of atheists.
  • McClain
    Re: "fruitful debating of God's existence...."
    If you're brought up believing in "Santa-God," you might lose that belief after enough talk (and thought.) (And growing up.)
    And you might go on to think and talk about what the Real Reasons are for all that stuff you used to believe "Santa-God" did.
    At that point, you'd be calling yourself an atheist or agnostic. (You'd also probably be in your teens-through-twenties, and into 'progressive/edgy' music, politics, and clothes.)
    Later on, after even more talk and thought, you might, surprisingly enough, find yourself believing in God, just not "Santa-God."
    (Yeah, you might have guessed, this is all from personal experience.)
    So: belief is neither innate nor immutable.
    Talking about such things is far from futile.
    Also, what's more fruitless:
    A - debating God's existence,
    or
    B - debating whether it's fruitless to debate God's existence?
    If 'B' then shouldn't we keep going and debate whether the debate of the debate...ah, you know the rest.
  • Alex B.
    Maestro, I think your "get serious" reply to Bob M. gets it wrong. The obvious response seems to be that an acceptable test need simply be consistent w/ the laws of nature.

    The idea of exploring every nook and cranny of the universe should be fine, even if it would be really difficult to marshal the resources. The billions of explorer spaceships need not have infinite fuel or take infinite time (unless the universe is infinite, in which case Bob is in trouble).

    As for a "god detection" machine, there's no reason to believe that such a machine can be built.

    I don't necessarily like the verification criterion of meaning, but I think that's how one of its adherents might reply.
  • Alex B.
    Julian,

    The distinction clarifies two different types of atheism. Weak vs. strong, the way I'm stating it, is about whether someone lacks belief in god or positively believes in god's nonexistence; the distinction deals with belief about existence simpliciter, not belief about the possibility of existence.

    I think it's a useful distinction for a couple of reasons. First, someone who has never thought about the supernatural in any capacity is, I would claim, an atheist because they lack belief in god's existence. Someone who has given the issue deep thought and intellectually decided that god doesn't exist has gone a step further. They have a belief that the "weak" atheist doesn't, namely: "God doesn't exist." The second very similar reason is that I find it helpful to distinguish between agnostics (who lack the belief "god exists") and atheists who outright reject god.

    I think that the distinction really does capture two different worldviews, even though I don't often make it in practice. Usually, I just say 'atheist' to mean anyone who lacks belief in god.
  • bob mcmanus
    "Your comment upstream about the "spiritual experience" being a biochemical function is a diversion"

    I considered her comment to be something of an analogy to autism.
  • As long as we're imagining that we can have faster than light travel and unlimited fuel, I'm going to imagine that I've almost completed building my god-detection machine. Let it run for a few million years and we'll probably know whether or not God exists. Get serious, mcmanus.
  • bob mcmanus
    "Explain to me how you would prove the nonexistence of aliens?"

    A billion FTL scoutships, with unlimited fuel and wormhole capability etc etc would discover no aliens or artifacts in a million years of survey and allow us to assign a probability etc etc. The Vienna rule is about whether a test can be imagined, not about whether a test is practical possible.

    There is no acceptable test even conceivable that would provide evidence of God's existence, by definition. Tho that has not prevented people from pretending.
  • Joanna-
    Your comment upstream about the "spiritual experience" being a biochemical function is a diversion. Very few religious believers ever get a buzz off of worship - it's not what most devotees are in it for. Whether someone adopts a religious ontology or not has little to do with their biological predisposition toward "happy juice" or the lack thereof.

    I'll grant that some devotional environments are explicitly designed to induce a sort of temporary euphoria, but those are the exceptions, and they don't account for the prevalence of religious identification.
  • Explain to me how you would prove the nonexistence of aliens?
  • Luka Yovetich
    monkyboy,

    I think that to accept a theory is to think that it accounts for the facts in some important way.
  • bob mcmanus
    "Unless we're using the word believe differently"

    Duh. Unlike aliens on Triton, the existence(?)of God is not even theoretically a falsifiable proposition. Which, as Posner and Will say, makes it nonsense under most modern ontologies.
  • Luka Yovetich
    Maestro,

    The point is that there are tons of things that we say we don't believe in even though it's logically possible that they exist. We (and probably most agnostics about God) say that we son't believe in Santa Claus, the tooth fairy, elves, goblins, or purple dragons. But it's logically possible that all of these exist.

    So if you're willing to say that you don't believe in them even though they are logically possible, then you should be willing to say that you don't believe in God even though it's logically possible that He exists. (That is, you shouldn't say that you're agnostic if the only positive thing you can say about God existing is that it's logically possible.

    The life on other planets example isn't exactly analogous to the God one , I don't think. B/c I don't think that we have much reason to believe one way or the other that there is other life in the universe. We're not agnostic about it just because it's logically possible. We also don't have lots of reasons to think that it isn't the case. (Whereas with Santa Claus, goblins, etc. we do.)
  • Luka, what's ridiculous about that? It's logically possible that there's intelligent life on other planets, but I can't prove it or disprove it. I can't say whether or not I believe that there is. Unless we're using the word believe differently, I don't see how this is ridiculous or different from not believing in God.
  • Luka Yovetich
    Julian,

    I agree that many people who call themselves 'agnostic' merely think that it's logically possible that God exists and that since they can't prove that He doesn't exist they can't say that they believe that he doesn't. And that IS ridiculous.

    But I think there are some people who say they are agnostic and truly think that it's just as likely that God exists as it is that He doesn't. And these people belong in a different (sub)category than the people mentioned above.
  • Luka Yovetich
    Will,

    I'm not sure that there isn't an interesting point in here somewhere that has to do with people's attitudes towards propositions. Insofar as we're talking about whether there are different kinds of atheism (in some sense) I think we should be talking about the different probabilities that people assign to the proposition that God exists. (Assigning a probablity to a proposition is an example of having an attitude towards one, right?)

    The case that I'm imagining does not necessarily include a person who has never considered whether not there is a God. I'm thinking of two people. One who assigns a .9 probability to the proposition that God exists (p) and another who assigns a .5 to p. The first person is clearly an atheist b/c he is very confident in p. It's not quite so clear what to call the second. He thinks, after considering all of the major philosophical arguments, that it's just as likely that p as it is that not p.

    I want to call this guy an atheist. He does not have a positive belief in God. He is without a belief in God. Yet we cannot say of him that he believes that God does not exist.

    It seems fairly clear to me that if he's an atheist, he's a different kind of atheist than the guy who believes that God does not exist.

    Now, I'm not sure I understand how or if your point about quantifying god-making properties is relevantly related to this point. But I stand firm in my position that there is an interesting distinction to be made here.
  • Jonathan Swift said, "You can't reason someone out of what they were
    never reasoned into."
  • bob mcmanus
    No I think Posner is correct. There are people who think Wittgenstein's picture-theorey is correct, and those who think the picture-theorey is mistaken, and there are those who say "Who's Wittgenstein?" The last are not by default Witthenstein-disbelievers, nor are they agnostics.

    When you say the word "atheism" (or "agnosticism") has a meaning, you have entered a metaphysical discourse.
  • bob mcmanus
    "weak atheists or agnostics mean something like: "Well, it's *logically* possible that there's a God"

    The problem with this whole line is that we are not dealing with a rational or logical or empirical question. We are dealing with a spiritual or emotional question. Was it possible for Jesus to turn water into wine? No tricks here, no semantics or explanations, just a wave of the hand and Perrier becomes Boones Farm. Can a rationalist or empiricist even begin to discuss this? The transcendant is by definition a discontinuity, a rupture, an absolute and qualitative break with rational systems. Its logical possibility is zero. Yet millions of smart people say it exists.
  • monkyboy
    It's true there are many people who change their religious beliefs, but how many do so as the result of a rational argument? Not many.

    Take the secular theories of The Big Bang and Evolution. You can take them for what they are, theories, the best stories so far about the data that has been discovered about the origin of, well, life, the universe, etc. But they are just that, stories, as unprovable as the existance of god.

    Scientific people believe the theories, but accept and consider arguments against them. Secular zealots, on the other hand, mistakenly take them as facts and fight any school from teaching anything different.

    God and Evolution can easily be accepted as theories. To believe them as facts, though, takes something beyond reason...I think that is what Posner is saying.
  • What are the "godmaking properties" then? Would a Deist be an atheist because he believes God has no effect on the here and now? How about any of the Christian sects that believes God no longer performs miracles?

    But more importantly for the moment - What if there really is a bear in your office?
  • Julian Sanchez
    I'm not sure what Alex thinks is usefully clarified by the distinction. Most often, people I encounter describing themselves as either weak atheists or agnostics mean something like: "Well, it's *logically* possible that there's a God, and I can't prove there isn't, so I'll call myself this." I suppose for some people, the God hypothesis is one they might actively employ when thinking about what explains various things in the world, or be something they grapple with regularly, then "agnostic" or "weak atheist" might be a useful distinguishing term. But if we're just talking about someone who concedes that it's logically possible, that nobody can disprove it for certain? By that standard I'm both a God-agnostic and a Santa Claus-agnostic, but I don't see what the distinction adds, since both my practice and my way of thinking about the world remain pretty much the same.
  • Joanna
    Monkyboy-
    You and Posner forget that millions of people change their premises all the time. If that didn't occur so rampantly, evangelism wouldn't be so lucrative and successful.

    Bob-
    I read recently about a scientific study that discovered that feelings of spirituality and transcendence are caused by a stimulation of a happy-juice part of your brain and a shutting down of the time/space identification part (sorry i can't remember the specifics). Some people have a more active mechanism than others. Sounds like yours is virtually non-existent. This is not to say spirituality is a mere chemical reaction; just recognize that it's a very real, tangible experience for gazillions of religious/spiritual people and the biology is one explanation of your bafflement.
  • monkyboy
    There is a distinction between someone who just thinks about robbing a bank and someone who actually does it.

    If my neighbor believes in god, it doesn't effect me. If he comes to my door every day armed with religious pamphlets and tries to convert me, it does.

    I think Posner has it right.
  • Alex B.
    Agreed on both points. There is fruitful debate for those who care about such things and take pleasure in discussing them.

    On the question of definition, I accept the distinction between negative and positive atheism. Negative atheism (or 'weak atheism') is lack of belief in god's existence. Positive atheism (or 'strong atheism') is a positive belief that god doesn't exist. I think it makes sense to make this distinction, insofar as I've found these two views to be actually quite distinct in practice.

    Sorry Will, but I don't find the counterexample of the no-bear-in-my-office-ist convincing. A proposition about whether or not there is a bear in your office at some moment is pretty different from a general belief about whether a god exists. Distinguishing weak and strong atheism is helpful, I think, because it clarifies views that many people hold on a difficult and complex topic. If your no-bear-in-my-office philosophical theory reached widespread contention and it become helpful to distinguish between weak and strong forms, then, yes, you went from weak to strong.
  • But I shouldn't confuse the issue. It's not about one's attitude toward a proposition, exactly; it's whether one's theory of the world quantifies over certain properties (the "godmaking" properties). I think there are hundreds of millions of people who would sincerely assert "There is a God," and who thus believe that they believe that there is a God. But they are simply mistaken about what they believe, and they do not in fact believe that there is a God because they are not in fact ontologically committed to any of the godmaking properties.

    Note: I'm not saying that many many people don't believe in God. They do. I'm just saying that not everybody who bvelieve they do really do.
  • No. I don't think the distinction has cash value. I guess you could say there is something interesting in the difference between someone who attaches a .1 probability to P, and thus a .9 probability to not-P and someone who has never considered P. But I couldn't tell you what it is that's interesting about it.
  • Luka Yovetich
    Will,

    I think that some people want to call agnosticism a weak atheism.

    A person that feels she has equal reason to believe in the existence of God and the non-existence of God can be said to not believe in God, in some sense. But this type of belief definitely seems relevantly different from the strong atheist's. The strong atheist, like me, thinks that he has more reason to believe that God does not exist than to believe that He does.

    Don't you think that distinction is relevant?
  • Actually, Will, that is a significant change, or is in some instances. Never even considering an idea, and explicitly thinking about and rejecting an idea are very different. Does the difference affect how you live your life? In most cases, no, but so what?
  • Brock, I've never really understood the weak/strong distinction. Suppose that two seconds ago, I hadn't thought about whether or not there is a bear in my office . . . and now I just did. Did I suddenly move from a weak to a strong no-bear-in-my-office-ist simply because I explicitly formulated something that I was already presupposing?
  • Julian Sanchez
    jk-
    I don't know, just about everybody I know is an atheist, but I'm pretty sure that very few of them were raised that way. Which means most of them changed their minds at some point, presumably for some set of reasons. Of course, another question is whether it's the result of argument; I do suspect that most people will either figure it out on their own, without the need to be debated into it, so to speak, or they won't, and the latter group won't be as likely to be swayed by debates.
  • bob mcmanus
    I am in Posner's first category, I think. As far as I can remember, I have never had a religious feeling, and not only "God" but Platonism, idealism, Kant's ding-in-sich, Nietzsche's Eternal Recurrence, Shirley MacLaine channeling Gilgamesh, the "bright light at the end of the tunnel" and any other kind of transcendentalism is not only unattractive, but utterly incomprehensible. I literally do not know what the heck they are talking about.

    Seems to me there is a qualitative difference in being able to approach such concepts, and then rejecting them on the merits. Although it may not be a rational difference.
  • Regardless of the debating issue, I do see a real distinction between what are classically defined as strong and weak forms of atheism. One (strong) implies a belief (that there is in fact no God), while the other implies no belief either way.
  • I once believed in God, and then debated with reasonable people and chose the side of reason. Since it drastically increased the quality of my life, I'd definitely consider it "fruitful." But yea, it's hard to pull off, because one of the sides of the debate has to get to the point of being genuinely willing to accept a new ontology, be it Logic or Faith. And that's probably pretty uncommon. Just wanted to add my anecdotal statement that it does happen.
  • jk
    I agree that his claim that there is "no fruitful debating of God's existence" is too strong. However, I would say that although there is probably a lot of debating of God's existence, the amount of such debating which proves to be fruitful (by fruitful, I assume he means changing one's mind about the topic)is probably so deminimus as to be almost non-existent, although it appears that you may be an exception to this rule.

    In Posner's response to the comments, he says "I think that whether or not God is dead for one depends on upbringing and temperament, but not on arguments." I agree whole-heartedly.
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