Freedom of religion and belief site

I see that, as of today, this still has not been updated beyond the submissions received as of 9 January 2009. I've heard around the traps that the project ended up receiving an enormous number (as in 1500, or something) of submissions, though I imagine that a lot of them were only a page, from what we've seen so far.

Formally graduating on 26 March

I'll be formally graduating (in absentia) on 26 March 2009 - this is now confirmed on Monash University's graduations page. So I'll soon be out of that limbo where I sort of have my PhD in philosophy ... but not strictly speaking because I haven't yet graduated. That'll be nice.

New issue of JET taking shape

Over the next few days we'll be publishing another two articles in The Journal of Evolution and Technology: a piece by Austin Corbett on the complex Ghost in the Shell mythos; and an article by Nietzsche scholar Stefan Lorenz Sorgner on the relationship between Nietzsche and transhumanism.

I'll report further as these are published. With some other promising material under discussion, issue 20(1) will be both strong and diverse.

We've almost caught up with ourselves at JET! While we're still not as timely in reviewing articles as we'd like to be, and we apologise to one or two people who may be feeling a bit frustrated by now, we're gradually getting this under control. Importantly, we're very close to clearing our backlog of work, which will make things much easier, and we're normally publishing material as soon as it's ready ... as opposed to waiting until an entire issue is ready to be published at once.

I'll take another opportunity to urge interested authors to have a good look at our website - http://jetpress.org/ - and consider JET as a possible home for your best work on the human or posthuman future.

My name is NOT "Russel Blackford"

Publishers take note. My name is "Russell Blackford". That's "Russell" spelled in the ordinary way with two L's.

For the third time in the past year or so, I've just had a publication of some importance - and that I would otherwise have taken pride in - ruined when the publisher, for some totally unknown reason, decided to spell my name as "Russel Blackford" ... despite my name being spelled correctly on all the correspondence, the copy, etc. I have no idea how this happens, but I'm fed up with it. I'm not going to name the culprits, but PLEASE, from now on, all publishers, spell my goddamn name correctly.

I do not want my hard work thrown away. I don't want it attributed to some other person who does not exist; I do want my work to be discoverable if somebody googles for my name; I do want my name to come up correctly if somebody searches on terms relevant to the subject matter; I don't want confusion about my identity (or whether there may be two people with similar names, or whatever people are thinking by now).

It's just not that difficult. It's not as if it's a rare spelling or that unusual a first name. Is it asking too much for professional people in the publishing industry to get such an important and easy thing right?

Gig reminder - "Voices of Disbelief"

Reminder to self (and anyone else): I'll be speaking tomorrow night at the Unitarian Hall in Grey Street, East Melbourne, on the topic "Voices of Disbelief". This gig is for the Atheist Society, and is a first opportunity to do some public promotion of 50 Voices of Disbelief: Why We Are Atheists. It's also an opportunity to do a bit more, such as asking why such books are currently needed and whether they just preach to the choir.

Come along if interested.

Atheists and agnostics

Often, in discussions of atheism on the internet, an issue arises about the distinction between atheism and agnosticism. Sometimes it takes the form of an atheist pressing someone who prefers to call herself "an agnostic" to accept the label of "atheist". Personally, I think that people should label themselves how they wish, or avoid labels if they want (and can). Still, this issue arises very commonly: I won't even start to provide links to prove it; you'll have to take my word for it, if you haven't had the same experience. So, maybe it's worth trying to get the distinction clear.

First, it seems that there is an overlap between atheism and agnosticism. As I understand it, an agnostic is someone who claims to lack knowledge (as to the existence of God - though the expression is sometimes extended by analogy as in "I'm agnostic about whether Obama made a good choice for Secretary of State").

Theists can't also be agnostic, or if I'm wrong and there is some overlap between theism and agnosticism it certainly cannot be typical. Many theists do claim to have knowledge, even if they also claim that knowledge can be based on something like a leap of faith or the hearing of an inner voice, or the possession of a supposedly innate conviction. They may be wrong about all this - I believe that they are - but they do claim to have knowledge of the existence of their god of choice. Putting it another way, they believe that their belief in the existence of this being is appropriately justified.

As for atheists, I work with the concept that an atheist is someone who has no belief that God or gods exist. Such a person may also say that they do not have knowledge that these beings don't exist. They believe there's no justification for a confident claim either way. There's no inconsistency between being an atheist and also being an agnostic in those senses.

Still, some atheists make stronger claims. To do so, it is not necessary to claim anything as strong as certainty. You can have an appropriately justified belief that falls well short of certainty. It seems to me that you can have an appropriately justified belief that at least some gods don't exist, and at the same time you can have the belief that your belief is justified, so you express it with confidence. E.g., I have what I consider an appropriately justified belief that Zeus does not exist - there is plenty of evidence that Zeus is man-made, essentially a fictional character. For example, the existence of this being is not required to explain lightning and rain, no such being has ever been reliably encountered on Mount Olympus or anywhere else, the stories relating to Zeus are implausible beyond their cultural setting (why is the lifestyle of this being such an ancient Greek one?), and so on. Attempts to save the existence of Zeus from such criticisms would appear ad hoc and even desperate, despite the fact that it is logically possible that a being something like this exists somewhere in the Universe.

In short, I confidently deny Zeus's existence. I think I have appropriate justification for denying that any such being exists. The same applies to all the gods of pagan mythology.

I also confidently deny the existence of anything remotely like the God described in the Old Testament, and on pretty similar grounds to my denial of the existence of Zeus (though the grounds won't always be the same - e.g., on some conceptions of the Old Testament God, he is supposed to have caused events that we can confidently say never happened, such as Noah's flood).

Likewise, though for more philosophical reasons, I confidently deny the existence of the God(s) described in various popular accounts of Christianity. I also deny the existence of the more abstract God of the orthodox Abrahamic tradition of philosophical theology, insofar as this being is supposed to be all-powerful, all-knowing, and also loving and providential. Here, my justification may not be as strong, but the evidence is so strongly against the existence of this being that confidence of its non-existence strikes me as justified. Attempts to get around problems such as the traditional Problem of Evil, the hiddenness of this god, and so on, strike me as ad hoc and desperate. When I throw up my hands and say Unbelievable!, I think this is a rational response.

I'm less sure what to say about the gods of deism and pantheism. I don't believe they exist, so I am an atheist about them in at least that weak sense. It also strikes me that the grounds for claiming they exist are rather weak, and there's an appearance of wishful thinking, or of heuristic bias in favour of seeking ultimate explanations that are couched in terms of agency. Still, I would feel less confident about denying the existence of such beings. When we reach the far ends of explanation for various phenomena, we may think that positing, say, a deist God is just ad hoc, an unnecessary science stopper. On the other hand, we just don't know enough about the ultimate answers to philosophical questions to rule out the existence of the deist God (or, I suppose, the pantheist one).

On balance, I am actually prepared to deny the existence of the deist and pantheist gods, but with a lower level of confidence because I have a lower level of justification for concluding that these beings don't existence. They probably don't, but I could not put a level of probability on it.

None of this worries me too much, because even if I'm wrong and it turns out that such a being exists it can't make any difference to how I live my life. The deist and pantheist gods do not have opinions about, for example, who I've slept with, whether it was a good idea to eat pork and drink wine, and so on. Nor would their existence affect the merit of any of the work I've done as a writer, a philosopher, and so on. Nor would it restore the authority of any popes or priests, whose authority depends on the truth of the actual religions they profess.

If the deist or pantheist god turns out to exist after all, I can live with it. Insofar as some Christians these days are really just deists or pantheists, I don't see why I should try to "convert" them to my atheist position on the deist and pantheist gods. It doesn't really matter that much.

The gods that matter are the ones that want to interfere in our lives, the ones whose bidding is carried out by all the presbyters and pulpiteers. I'm talking, in particular, about the Old Testament Yahweh or Jehovah, the Trinitarian godhead of orthodox Christianity, the deities of orthodox theologians and popular preachers, and about Allah, as depicted in the Koran. We can confidently deny the existence of all those gods, and the authority of anyone who claims to be expert in what those gods think about what we should do and how we should live.

Whoa, we just had an earthquake!

Literally!

Well ... it was only a little tremor, and I doubt that there was any damage done anywhere, but Melbourne had a small earth tremor about a quarter of an hour ago. It was a bit freaky sitting here watching everything shaking for what was probably only a few seconds but seemed to go on for quite a long time.

No news on the net about it yet, but I gather there was just something on ABC Radio.

Edit: Here's one story, though a bit misleading in its form as I write: we felt the tremor here, as south as you can go in Melbourne - it wasn't just the north and north-east.

Further edit: Here's some better information.

165 and counting

About this time last night I created a Facebook group for Voices of Disbelief. As of a couple of minutes ago, we'd already reached 165 members. Hooray for us. Now let's see how high we can go.

Thanks to Roy N. for the great image. This isn't the cover, which has yet to be designed, but it's excellent for the Facebook group.

Edit: as of 23 March, we are approaching 600 members!

The irrationality of the "true faith-head"

I'll start by explaining how even "true faith-heads" can be sort of rational.

If two people start with totally different fundamental assumptions, one will never convince the other. I mean truly fundamental assumptions, such as assumptions about what even counts as evidence. Because of this, the most extreme religious dogmatist, no matter how stubborn, may not suffer any psychiatric illness or make any egregious error of deductive reasoning.

Note that the situation of such people relative to others is not symmetrical. In our everyday lives, we have standards of evidence that most people - religious or otherwise - accept. E.g. the fact that I can see no hippopotamus in my study when I look around is good evidence that there is no such hippopotamus in my study. If my lovely Significant Other pops in here in a minute, I can ask her if she sees one, but she'll think I've lost my mind (or, more likely, that I'm asking her as part of a philosophical thought experiment). Outside of religion, we have no trouble reaching consensus on most everyday issues because we use common standards of evidence and possess similar powers of observation.

Science typically deals with things that can't be observed directly with our unaugmented senses - often because these things are very small or very far away or no longer in existence. We have traces and indirect clues, but no one has ever observed, say, a brachiosaurus, only certain fossilised bones (and even the interpretation of them as fossilised bones requires a body of theory). But science uses methods that are continuous with our usual methods for inquiring rationally into the world around us. Over the past four hundred years, science has been able to tell us much about the world beyond observation by our unaugmented senses. It delivers reliable knowledge by using such methods as scientific instruments, highly precise modelling, conducting experiments that control for extraneous variables, using convergence of results from many lines of inquiry. Most of these are methods that we use in everyday life, but outside of science we don't always need to be so rigorous because everyday questions can often be resolved just by observing.

Applying ordinary kinds of reasoning from everyday life and from scientific inquiry, we can answer many questions. People who disagree can be brought to change their minds if the evidence is provided to them. Over time, science tends to converge on answers and to develop well-corroborated theoretical knowledge that is unlikely ever to be overturned, such as the knowledge that life on Earth evolved over hundreds of millions of years. That doesn't mean that the scientific image of the world is ever complete; there's always new stuff to find out. Still, there are many things that we can now be confident about - the approximate age of the Earth, the evolutionary explanation for the diversity of life and the apparent purposiveness of adaptations such as the eyes, the descent of Homo sapiens from earlier primates, and so on.

The people who can't be argued out of their position are those who have certain substantive beliefs about the world that go psychologically deeper than their commitment to ordinary standards of evidence. This certainly includes some religious people - the so-called true faith-heads. If someone believes doctrine X in that way, and is then confronted with good evidence (by ordinary standards) for ~X, she has many options including the option of claiming that ordinary standards of evidence are wrong or inapplicable. Someone like that can enjoy a hermetically-sealed worldview. No argument based on evidence can ever penetrate it. 

But notice that this person need never be irrational in the sense of refusing to apply the basic rules of deductive logic, or in the sense of refusing to apply ordinary standards of evidence in her everyday non-religious life. Nor need she be suffering anything like a psychiatric illness. Still, there's a sense in which irrationality is present.

Most atheists are open to evidence that God exists if ordinary evidence is supplied. In fact, there'd probably be no atheists around in Western countries if diluvian geology had turned out to be correct - i.e., if dating methods pointed to an age of the Earth of 6000 years, and if the fossil record and the facts about rock formation turned out to be consistent with a mass extinction in Noah's flood and the formation of the rocks and the fossil record at the time. Even now, there is probably evidence that could (in principle) come in to persuade an atheist to change her mind, though the historical record of the religionists is so dreadful that it will now take something remarkably compelling.

True faith-heads, by contrast, are immune to evidence. Since they are committed to certain substantive theological claims more deeply than they are to ordinary standards of evidence, they will even develop revised evidentiary standards if that is the only way out. In between, they'll clutch at all sorts of propositions that seem unhinged by ordinary standards. E.g., we see YEC Christians committed to a 6000-year-old Earth who will admit that the Earth looks 4 to 5 billion years old (using various dating methods)... but of course, God had His reasons for making it look that way when He created it 6000 years ago. One such person is currently arguing the toss about this over on Richard Dawkins' site. I can't disprove what he is claiming, but when it's viewed from outside it's plainly unacceptable.

There's no arguing with such people. All you can do is point out how they think and why that kind of thinking should not be given any credibility or respect by anyone who isn't already infected with it. You can also point out how arbitrary the deep assumptions that these people make really are and how baroque their worldview eventually becomes when they are pressed. But, in the end, they either see how unsatisfactory the entire picture is or they don't. No single argument can penetrate their sealed-off view of the world.

How many religious folk are true faith-heads in this sense? Well, I suspect it's a kind of sliding scale. It seems to me that it would be very difficult for a sincere and inquiring person to hang on to some religious doctrines unless they go very deep in her set of beliefs. It may take a lot of true faith-headedness to stand up for Young Earth Creationism in the face of all the scientific evidence. But I suspect that a fair amount is required even for belief in a loving and providential (and all-powerful, all-knowing) God. There is always a way out, to seal off such beliefs from ordinary standards of evidence, but if those standards are accepted it is not believable that such a being would have allowed the millions of years (and enormous amounts of misery in the animal world) needed to evolve us, or would have made its own presence in the world so un-apparent, or would have intervened at such a late stage in human history.

Now, one can argue that God must have had a reason for these things. E.g., maybe God is so un-apparent because He values belief in his existence by those who believe despite the lack of evidence. Maybe those who believe in God are just those whom God has spoken to personally. Why not speak personally to everyone then? Well, maybe only some are receptive to the message (and God would know who they are). Why not make everyone receptive to the message, if you happen to be God? Well maybe you have a choice, if you happen to be human, whether or not you're receptive. Why not make all of us so that, given such a choice, we'll want to be receptive? Well, free will doesn't work like that...

By now we're moving toward a baroque and implausible idea of free will, what it means to choose to be receptive to a message from God Himself, and so on, but for the dogmatist, there's always room to move. 

Some people are beyond arguments based on ordinary standards of evidence, and they cannot be reached. The most we can hope is that they will eventually work out that the entire edifice looks wildly implausible from outside, and that that's a good reason to reject it in toto, especially if they realise that the deep assumptions they have been making were shaped by culture and are really rather arbitrary. If they don't ever get to that point - one that involves seeing through the effect of their own socialisation - we can merely point out to others that there's no reason to give any special respect to the beliefs of these people. There's no reason to adopt those beliefs yourself unless you already share the assumptions of the faith-heads. The hermetic sealing keeps ideas in as well as out.

Again, the sort of irrationality involved need not include making a clear mistake of logic or being unable to navigate safely around the world. It needn't include hearing voices or anything of that sort. Nonetheless, it involves distorting your thinking by giving an unjustified place to certain arbitrary assumptions that other people would not (and should not) make on the basis of ordinary standards of evidence. Those assumptions are used as premises, in effect, rather than drawn as conclusions from everyday observation or well-corroborated scientific theory. This is not ordinary irrationality, and yet there's a point in calling it irrational.

Voices of Disbelief page

I've just updated my page for what I should now call 50 Voices of Disbelief. This page is still rather basic, but I'll continue to update it as we go, and perhaps it will ultimately take a more whiz-bang form. At the moment, it just consolidates the basic information about the book, but it was badly in need of updating from the rudimentary form that it took about this time last year.