A response to "Dear Believer, Why Do You Believe" part 2 of 2

Last time, I began a critique of the popular YouTube clip titled, "Dear Believer, Why Do You Believe".  The thing to keep in mind is that the main premise of this video is that no religious person has adequate reasons to believe.  If this premise were true, then the objections raised in this video actually hold some weight.  However, in that case, the objections would essentially be moot: if no religious person has good reasons for their belief, what is the point of raising more objections.

But instead, religious folk, and Christians in particular, have many reasons to believe!  If you follow my blog, you'll find some of those reasons.


As for the rest of my critique of the video, I have identified six common objections to religion in general, and Christianity in particular, and I offered a response to the first three last time.  Here I will go through the three remaining objections raised in this video.

The problem for the atheist who espouses the views in this video is there are not only many adequate reasons to believe in a god in general, and the Christian God in particular, but these reasons are also immensely compelling.  But even if they were only moderately compelling, the existence of such reasons would totally dismantle this video.  In a way, the narrator is underhandedly delivering a stinging insult to religious people worldwide, saying they live in the dark ages.

Objection 4: “Religions are just crutches to help us feel better.”

I wonder if religions aren’t just ancient constructs, in an attempt to explain unexplained phenomenon.  Though irrational in content, they are not irrational in their emergence.  But we no longer live in the dark; science is ablaze in our world, we no longer live in the cave!  We no longer require comforting stories that make us feel safe, comforted or valued.  Isn’t it time our faith matches our discoveries?  Our ideas our new perspective?  Greater awe in reality rather than in fantasy?

This has many problems, first and foremost that atheists may hold their lack of belief in any gods also as a crutch.  If there is no cosmic being, then who am I held accountable to for my immoral actions?  No one.  OK, not every atheist feels this way, but certainly some do.  In the same vein, not every Christian feels like God is a crutch.  Sometimes, I wish God's influence on my life would just go away so I could be autonomous.  I mean, who doesn't like the idea of being their own master?  Who wants to submit to someone in higher authority than themselves?

On the other hand, again, if there are reasons to believe in God, then crutch or not, it is something to consider.

Objection 5: “It's arrogant to think you have the right religion”

Isn’t it time to stop thinking that we are somehow the reason why this universe was made?  That our culture is somehow better than other cultures?  It’s time to learn how the universe really is, even if that deflates our conceits, and forces us to admit we do not have all the answers.  You must confront these fundamental questions.  

I wonder why this is arrogant?  I've posted on this before, but it bears repeating: ideas aren't arrogant.  If you follow the evidence where it leads, how is that arrogant?  Furthermore, taking the position that the narrator does, how is his position not arrogant? Saying believers live in the dark ages?  The narrator surely thinks he's in a position of privileged knowledge.

Objection 6: “It's arrogant to think we occupy a privileged place in the universe.”

Isn’t it time to stop thinking that we are somehow the reason why this universe was made? That our culture is somehow better than other cultures? It’s time to learn how the universe really is, even if that deflates our conceits, and forces us to admit we do not have all the answers.

Last point, but it's beginning to sound repetitive: this would be valid if there were no evidence that we do indeed occupy a privileged place in the universe (in terms of importance).  But there is evidence.  Perhaps there is still debate going on about that, but the scientific data are fairly clear: there are only a handful of places and times in the universe that intelligent life could exist (and maybe only one unique time and place).  If that is what the data say, then again: how is this arrogant?

Conclusion

Every point made in this video seems nice on the surface, especially if you are already indoctrinated to the ways of the new atheists.  Especially if you accept without question the assumption that science and reason are on one side, and faith (which is blind) on the other.  But just for a moment examine your assumption.  If there are good reasons to believe in Jesus as Lord, then nothing this video says makes any sense.  There are no salient points made.

A response to "Dear Believer, Why Do You Believe" part 1 of 2

The popular YouTube clip titled, "Dear Believer, Why Do You Believe" is an attempt to show the fallacy of religion and religious belief. The video is very well done, and has a narrator with a soothing voice calmly raising several objections to religion.  There seems to be real power in this video because the objections keep coming, keep piling up, and if the unwitting believer (or unbeliever) watches, it's really easy to be either bewildered by the objections, if the believer is not ready to answer them, or to say, "Yeah, that's so true!" if you are an unbeliever.

The problem is, this clip is filled with logical fallacies and arguments that are easily shown to be false.  In this blog post, I will go through the main objections to religion raised in this video (which also happen to be commonly used by unbelievers) and show how each one of them fails.

Summary of the video

Much of the video is devoted to the question of why a religious person believes.  The implication is that believers have no good reason to believe.  In fact, you only believe because your parents told you so.  The narrator asks, since there are many religions out there, which cannot all be right, then how would a person choose one religion over any other?  The narrator then claims that this means no religions are indeed correct.

The end of the video pays homage to modern science, saying that "now we know better".  The narrator does not blame ancient peoples for turning to fantasy to comfort themselves, but in this day and age, because of the advent of modern science, we should leave those superstitions behind.  The implication is that, any reasonable and clear thinking person will cut him- or herself free from the fairy-tale of religion and realize the "truth": there is no god.

The irony is that, if you are using reason to help form your basis of belief regarding the big questions, such as, "Who am I?", "Why are we here?", and "Is there a God?", you will soon see that this video has nothing logical to say about it.  In fact, most of the objections against religion raised by this video are self-refuting, a hallmark of poor reasoning.

In this series of this posts, I will go through six objections to religion in general (and Christianity in particular) portrayed by this video.  In each case, I will state the objection as I see it being raised by the video (either implicitly or explicitly), paraphrase (not direct quoting, although I will put it in quote blocks) the relevant parts of the video, and then respond to the objection(s).

Objection 1: “You’re only a Christian because you were born in America to Christian parents.”

Is the faith you practice the dominant one within your culture?  Aren't you suspicious that most people adopt the religion of the society in which they were born? Yet remain convinced they've found the one true faith?  Did you know that most people choose it not for reasons, but because they were born into it?  Can it be just an accident of geography?  Did you know nearly all religious devotees believe what they are taught to believe by their parents?

This is the main thrust of the video: religious people around the world have no reason to believe what they believe.  I actually have no idea whether or not the assertions made by the narrator here are true.  Is it really true that most people don't choose their religion for good reasons, but because their parents told them to?  Maybe so.  But this objection to religion commits two fallacies: (1) it is self-refuting (this is the death knell of any argument), and (2) it commits the genetic fallacy.

It is self-refuting because it cannot withstand its own scrutiny.  The implication is that since religious people only believe because they were born in a culture dominated by their chosen religion, then that religion cannot be true.  But the same can be true of unbelievers of any stripe.  You are only a postmodernist because you were born in late 20th-century/early 21st century America.  Or you are only an unbeliever because you were told so by your parents. Yes, I understand that many unbelievers in America (especially young people) grew up in the church, but since there is a trend of young people leaving the faith, I could just as easily say it's a cultural thing for young people to do (and not based on reasons).  Especially if these young people leaving the faith are spouting the same self-refuting objections found in this video.

This objection also commits the genetic fallacy, which says that because a belief's origin is suspect, the belief cannot be true.  But this is incorrect: just because someone's belief in God stems from their upbringing does not necessarily mean the belief is false.  It could be false, but you would have to bring a valid argument against it to show that, not a fallacious one such as this.

Objection 2: “How do you know you have it right?  Have you checked out all the other religions of the world? And if every member of faith feels just as strongly as you do, what are the odds you’re right?”

There are 2 dozen major religions.  Furthermore, did you know there are more than 45,000 denominations of Christianity alone, each claiming to understand ultimate truth better than the rest?  Each member of every faith is just as devoted and sincere and convicted as you? Did you know they also read infallible texts, have airtight apologetics, have experienced miracles, etc.?  Yet, since every religion is mutually exclusive, they cannot all be right, right?  If every member of every faith feels just as you do, what are the odds you’re right?  

In this little tight block of paraphrased-text from the video, the main common objection is that there are also other believers out there; how do you know they're not right, and you're not wrong?  The problem with this objection is clear: just because there are others out there who don't believe as I do, does not mean that what I believe is wrong.  The veracity of a religion, or of any other point of view, is not a popularity contest, in which a position must certainly be false if there are enough people who hold a different position.  This objection has three major problems with it: (1) it is self-refuting, (2) it is internally inconsistent, and (3) assumes the correct point of view is simply a popularity contest.

Before I go into those problems, I would like to commend the narrator for holding a position that is often unpopular among unbelievers, at least among the post-modernist types: that every (or nearly so) religion is mutually exclusive.  No, it is clear that not all roads lead to God.  After all, most of the time, the basic claims of a religion are in direct opposition to the basic claims of other religions.  For more, see this post by Eric Chabot in response to "Dear Believer..."

This objection is self-refuting again because it cannot stand up to its own scrutiny.  Atheism is also a set of beliefs that not everyone holds.  There are many out there whose religious beliefs are just as sincere and convicted as the beliefs held by the atheist. And certainly atheism contradicts most if not all religions.  They can't both (atheism and a given religion) be right, right?  So by this argument, atheism is itself subject to this popularity contest, and if that is the case, hands-down it will lose.  No, in order to advance atheism as a "better" choice than a given religion, you actually have to marshal evidence for it, not just say that there are too many religions out there to pick one for certain.

It is also internally inconsistent.  If we are to take the narrator at his word (and I think this is highly suspect), we note that he makes claims such as, "they all have infallible texts, air-tight apologetics, and have experienced miracles".  First, it is certainly untrue that multiple conflicting religions have air-tight apologetics.  Only one at best can have "air-tight" apologetics.  Furthermore, regarding the infallible texts and miracles, if that is true, that argues far more in favor of at least one religion being correct, or at least that the atheistic worldview is incorrect.  After all, on atheism, there are no infallible texts nor miracles experienced.  What the narrator is doing here is, in a backhanded way, saying that all religions claim to have these things, but they really do not.  If that is true, then yes, let's abandon religion.  But this is a bald assertion that needs to be supported by well-reasoned arguments. No such arguments are put forth here.  Instead, I would argue that Christianity in particular does have air-tight apologetics, making it the clear choice over all other religions, including atheism.  And if Christianity does indeed have air-tight apologetics, where does that leave this argument?  It leaves it lacking any apologetic reasoning of its own.

Finally, it is clear that the correct point of view is not the winner of a popularity contest.  Like I mentioned above, if that were true, then Christianity would be the winner.  On this view, the atheist should "reasonably" abandon his faith in atheism and turn towards the God of the bible.  In fact, this objection is at direct odds with his first objection in the video.  If "truth" is voted in, then Christianity would always be the winner, since people (according to the narrator) choose their faith based on what their parents (or some other meme) told them.  How then would a majority-dominant religion (and thereby the "correct" religion by the narrator's point of view implicit in this objection) ever be overturned?  It's correct because it's popular, and then it's passed on to the next generation as the majority religion by meme.  The final irony with this is that the narrator clearly does not believe that the best belief set is chosen by popularity.  If you watch the whole video, he espouses using reason, testing, and logical thinking to test which worldview is correct.  So, in the end, he answers his own question: "How do you know you have it right?"  The answer is: because of logic, reason, and testing the spirits.

Objection 3: “You're an atheist too, just for one less god than I am.”

I've been told my unbelief is guarantee of missing heaven and going to hell, but whose heaven/hell? Should I, just to be safe, accept God? But whose God?  Given so many options, what are the chances?  Might I be better off wagering on no God rather than the wrong God? What if you’re wrong?  What if not Jehovah, but Allah?  Or Wu-tan?  Or some other god on the other side of the planet you've never even heard of? 

Truth is, you already know what it’s like to be an atheist for all gods but your own.  The way you view them (other people) is the same way they view you.  Every devout Hindu, for example, has embraced his faith for the exact same reasons you've embraced yours. Yet you do not find his reasons compelling, nor do you lose sleep at night wondering whether you’ll wake up in his hell.  Given this, is it so hard to see why some of us just take our atheism one God further?

I am often amazed at this line of reasoning, which I have heard several times before.  It seems so inane to me, I am surprised that people still use it.  It's so baseless, yet frequent, that I often wonder whether there is some subtle point here that I am missing.  If so, I would like to have someone explain it to me more fully.  For now, I will simply critique it as it appears in the video.  This objection fails because the definition of atheism is belief in no god, not belief in one to the exclusion of other (possible) gods.  It also fails because there are actually very good reasons to believe in at least some general deity, which of course rules out atheism.

So, how could one who believes in at least one god (a "religious" person) at the same time not believe in any god (an atheist)?  The entire premise of this objection is absurd in the strictest sense of the word.  It is, by definition, contradictory.  However, I think it might be best to give the benefit of the doubt and simply assume the narrator was using a turn-of-phrase to really call into question how a believer knows that he has the "right" god.

In that case, the narrator is trying to argue that all religions have the same evidential basis: zero.  If that is the case, then he is right starting from Objection 1: we have no reason for choosing our own set of beliefs except that they have been thrust on us.  So then, how can we possibly look down on others in the world that also believe for no reason?

However, this objection falls flat on its face because it only holds water if there are no good reasons for belief in a particular god.  But it actually gets worse for the atheist: not only are there good reasons to believe in the God of the bible in particular, but there are also good reasons to believe in at least some personal, transcendent, omnipotent, omnibenevolent, omniscient god in general, including the cosmological, moral, teleological and arguments, as well as the argument from reason.  These would clearly rule out atheism as a foundation for belief, but not the major monotheistic religions of the world.

On Jerry Coyne's free will stance, part 2

Before I go on, there are two things that I need to clarify from last time.  First, when I said that psychology and neuroscience were soft sciences, I wasn't dissing them.  I was just pointing out that these fields are not very quantitative.  This is not due to any deficiencies of psychologists or neuroscientists, it's just a fact of how complex these sciences are.  They are not as quantitative and well-defined as physics, which is well-described by a set of differential equations, and where the errorbars on measurements are very small, and where the agreement between quantitative measurements and mathematical models is high.  This is unheard of in biology, much less psychology and neuroscience.  So my point was how could any experiment in these fields of science disprove a long-standing law of logic?

Second, I realize now that I made it sound like Dr. Coyne's entire stance on free will is a result of these experiments on psychology and neuroscience.  Upon further reflection, I realize that is not necessarily the case. More likely, Dr. Coyne is simply an atheist, and believes that we do not have anything about us that is immaterial.  That is, we are our bodies, and we have no soul, no spirit, no "mind", etc., and thus have no free will.  According to this worldview, we are determined by our chemistry.  But now that we have these experimental results from psychology and neuroscience that Dr. Coyne is referring to, he believes this worldview has just been validated.  However, like I said before, these experiments are extremely unlikely to have validated a self-contradiction.

Which brings us back to the original question: exactly how is Dr. Coyne's stance on free will self-contradictory?

The short answer is that if no one has free will, then Dr. Coyne did not arrive at his own conclusion based on his choice.  His brain chemistry made him think we have no free will (and also made him an atheist).

The long answer is this.  If we really have no free will, and everything we do is determined by chemistry, then nothing I believe is actually based on fact or reason.  No decision I make, whether it is to accept Jesus Christ as my Lord and savior, or to eat a dark chocolate-covered peppermint Jo-Jo tonight for dessert, was based on reflection, careful thought, and reason.  So, this begs the question, did Dr. Coyne arrive at his stance on free will based on scientific evidence and his own reasoning, as he claims?

Ironically, if his worldview is correct, then no, he did not.  His brain chemistry simply dictated it.  In other words, he may be correct, but it's only because of luck.  Or perhaps, as the evolutionary biologist would have it, I just have the genes that make me believe in God, while Dr. Coyne has the genes to make him an atheist (that is of course a gross oversimplification of evolutionism's stance, but it works well enough for our discussion).

Of course, if this is true, that means that Dr. Coyne has zero evidence to back up his claim, even if he is right.  He can try all he wants, but maybe he's actually not being rational about the evidence.  Maybe he just has the brain chemistry that makes him believe that his evidence that we have no free will is rational.

This worldview then leads to a series of complete absurdities.  How can I sit here and try to convince you of anything, when what I am typing doesn't even have any meaning (because I did not arrive at my own thoughts rationally; they just came from physics)?

The big question this always leads us back to is, if belief in God is false, then why do so many people believe in a god of one form or another?  Why do so many people insist we have a spiritual component?  I've written on this before, but it bears repeating because it is so germane to this topic of free will and determinism.  The answer coming from the evolutionism camp is that at some point in the past, believing (falsely) in a god gave us some sort of fitness advantage (perhaps comforting us in our time of need?), and the fact that so many people still do today is simply a holdover from our evolutionary history.

This claim (besides having zero scientific evidence) is self-contradictory in the same way that Dr. Coyne's is.  If sometimes we have false beliefs because of evolution, how can we be sure that any of our beliefs are true? How can we trust any of our reasoning capabilities?  Maybe Dr. Coyne just got the genes that told him to be an atheistic evolutionist?

I propose that both of these (the argument from determinism and the argument from the evolutionary origin of belief in a god) are self-defeaters for naturalism.

On Jerry Coyne's free will stance, part 1

Since Dr. Coyne's article on free will appeared in USA today, I am sure many of people (Christian or otherwise) have written about it.  So naturally, I'll have to throw in my two cents about it.

In this article, Dr. Coyne argues that we do not have free will.  Because we are biological organisms, we are subject to the laws of physics, and thus everything that we do is pre-determined by our molecular make-up and the interactions that we have with the world around us.  We "chose" to eat dessert tonight because of some chemical reaction that occurred in our brain, not because it was really a choice that we made.

Dr. Coyne further grounds his point of view in the fields of psychology and neuroscience, saying that researchers are finding out that "the experience of will itself could be an illusion that evolution has given us". In other words, every time you make a choice, you just think you're making a choice. It is an illusion.

He goes on to talk about what the philosophical repercussions are for us, once we all realize that we do not have free will.  These repercussions include becoming kinder people, since we now know we cannot judge others (eg, criminals really had no choice but to commit those crimes), abandoning our Christian faith (since we really don't put our faith in Jesus Christ; we just had to do it because of our brain chemistry), and "realizing the great wonder and mystery of our evolved brains".

The astute reader will, at this point, realize that Dr. Coyne's stance on free will is entirely self-defeating. Meaning, if his position is correct, then it creates a contradiction within itself.  Or, to put it another way, if Dr. Coyne is right, he's right for the wrong reasons; he's only lucky, and he did not arrive at his conclusion based on his scientific or rational approach.

I promise to defend my statement in a later post, but for now let me just rant.  Dr. Coyne is a respected evolutionary biologist at the University of Chicago.  He has a very popular blog called "why evolution is true" and is a prominent speaker and writer.  This is evident in the fact that one of his opinion articles can get published in the USA today.  So my two big questions are (1) why does such a brilliant, esteemed person not realize how philosophically bankrupt his position is, and (2) why does the USA today and other media outlets swallow (hook, line, and sinker as it were) the opinion of someone like Dr. Coyne in a field outside of his own expertise just because he is a professor at a prestigious university?

In regards to question 1, I find it very interesting that he even claims to be in touch with philosophy.  In his article, he says:

The debate about free will, long the purview of philosophers alone, has been given new life by scientists, especially neuroscientists studying how the brain works. And what they're finding supports the idea that free will is a complete illusion.

The issue of whether we have of free will is not an arcane academic debate about philosophy, but a critical question whose answer affects us in many ways: how we assign moral responsibility, how we punish criminals, how we feel about our religion, and, most important, how we see ourselves — as autonomous or automatons.

That just blows my mind.  In essence, he is saying that no matter what debates or critical thinking has happened in the past in philosophy, the incredibly non-quantitative and soft fields of psychology and neuroscience have proven that we don't have free will?  How in the world does a neuroscience experiment prove that logic doesn't work? What I mean is, if the conclusions of the neuroscientists are correct, then they are completely self-contradictory (as I stated above but have not defended; again, please be patient until next time).  Therefore, to adopt the stance that Dr. Coyne is, based on the results of these soft sciences, you must abandon the laws of logic (the very foundations of philosophy and all of reason for that matter)! Very curious indeed.

In regards to question 2, well, I guess this is just another case of what we've been seeing all over the place from the new atheist movement.  Richard Dawkins, with his non-sequitur arguments, Steven Hawking with his grand pronouncements about metaphysics, etc.  It's really difficult to go up against these giants who have very little argument to stand on, but who can completely change the minds of many just based on their credentials alone.  Credentials, I might add, that do not have anything to do with the subject on which they are speaking.  (Yes, I am a hypocrite.  I am not trained in logic or philosophy either.)

But it really just underscores something that has become more and more clear to me as I take a close look at the new atheist movement.  There is absolutely no substance to their arguments.  It is almost all -- to put it less-than-politely -- drivel.  (And by the way, I am not the only one to realize this.  Take a look here.)  Classical philosophers such as Hume and Kant were the real giants in their fields.  If you really want to argue against Christianity, take a look not at the bold pronouncements that biologists make about philosophy and theology, you need to look at the philosophers themselves!  (Again, a hypocrite am I, since I have not bothered to read these either.)

So, in my next post, I do promise to actually defend my take on Dr. Coyne's free will stance.