The Lack of Reason for God, Chapter 1
Sep. 17th, 2014 04:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
blimixThis is part of a series examining the the logic of Timothy Keller's book The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism.
Standard disclaimer: This, despite being a public post, is not an invitation for a religion debate with strangers. Been there, done that, still jaded.
Last week: In the introduction, Keller examined why skeptical people might turn to religion.
Chapter 1
(Page numbers are from the hardcover version of the book.)
Keller takes on people who have a problem with the exclusivity of Christianity's claim to be the One True Religion. I have no problem with this claim itself: No philosophy could regard those that disagree with it as valid, yet still remain consistent. The fact that this exclusivity leads to intolerance (of people and religions), violence, and (worst of all) evangelism is still, I feel, a worthy cause for criticism.
I'm not sure how far to take this criticism in the case of war. War is always fought in the name of religion, but typically, the religion is a tool used by power-hungry sociopaths to get people to fight their wars. How much blame belongs to the religion, then? And how much when the church is the instigator? Is it splitting hairs too finely, to not blame the religion then?
p. 5. Keller writes, "One way to deal with the divisiveness of religion has been to control or even forbid it with a heavy hand. There have been several massive efforts to do this in the twentieth century. Soviet Russia, Communist China, the Khmer Rouge, and (in a different way) Nazi Germany were all determined to tightly control religious practice in an effort to stop it from dividing society or eroding the power of the state."
None of these is an example of any attempt to "deal with the divisiveness of religion". They are examples of governments that secured their power through murder and terror on a large scale. Keller's attempt to link nonreligious pacifist causes with crimes against humanity is simply outrageous. I shall spare my readers the tirade that this deserves.
He then quotes Alister McGrath: "The 20th century gave rise to one of the greatest and most distressing paradoxes of human history: That the greatest intolerance and violence of that century were practiced by those who believed that religion caused intolerance and violence."
Good grief. Is there any evidence for this claim at all?
If you're going to start pointing fingers about violence, how about the atrocious war crimes committed by the U.S.A. in Viet Nam, Cuba, Iraq, and all over Central and South America? Aren't we the ones who have God on our side?
War and oppression aren't created by, or a reaction against, a belief in God. War and oppression are a means for ruthless people to accrue power and money at the cost of human lives. (Aside from some wars of independence, that is.)
pp. 8-9. Keller reacts to people who think that every religion has some truth, and that no one religion has the whole truth. "How could you possibly know that no religion can see the whole truth unless you yourself have the superior, comprehensive knowledge of spiritual reality you just claimed that none of the religions have?" While I see little value in making a statement as vague (and possibly overgenerous) as the original one, Keller has failed to refute it. A person need only have access to *some* truth missed by any given religion, rather than all truth, in order to rationally make this claim.
pp. 9-11. Keller reacts to the idea that, because people's religious beliefs are overwhelmingly determined by the circumstances of their births ("If you were born in Morocco, you wouldn't even be a Christian, but rather a Muslim."), people are not justified in declaring the truth of their particular religion. He states (or rather parrots two other authors in stating) that this very objection is invalid for the same reason: "You can't say, 'All claims about religions are historically conditioned except the one I am making right now.' If you insist that no one can determine which beliefs are right and wrong, why should we believe what you are saying?" Note that the original objection was nothing like the stunningly over-generalized idea that nobody can tell what's true and what's false. In two sentences, he first slightly distorts and then greatly distorts the objection into a form that he can trivially counter. (This is the "straw man" argument: To misrepresent your opponent's position as weaker than it is, in order to more easily refute it. We shall see more of this later.) The first distortion was craftier than the second one: He changed "religious belief" to "claims about religions," a change innocuous enough to slip past an unwary reader. In this context, however, "religious belief" clearly refers to beliefs inherited from one's religion. "Claims about religions" are a different beast entirely, and include such statements as, "Author L. Ron Hubbard invented, for profit, a corporate religion which became a dangerous and powerful cult." Or, "The biographical details of the life of Jesus Christ were copied from the life of the Roman emperor Titus Flavius." Whether or not you agree with these, they clearly are not, and cannot honestly be confused with, beliefs acquired as a result of religious upbringing.
As a side note, there is to be found, in examining the general form of Keller's attempted refutation, a certain intellectual delight that readers of Raymond Smullyan's logic puzzles will find familiar. What if the straw man representation of the objection had been fair? We could sum up Keller's logic in this way: "In statement X, you use a certain reasoning to demonstrate that one cannot know the truth value of statements of type Y. Statement X happens to be of type Y. I now use the logic of statement X to show that we cannot justify belief in statement X." At first glance, this almost looks legitimate.* But if, as we conclude, we are not justified in believing in the logic of statement X, then we are not justified in using the logic of statement X to disprove anything, including statement X! Upon this second glance, the original disproof falls apart, leaving statement X intact and threatening to plunge us into an Epimenides-style paradox. (That is, the sort of cyclic paradox you get from the statement, "This statement is false.") We may be temped to escape the looming logical vortex by declaring statement X to be true but unprovable, or unprovably false, or (least romantically) disprovable by some logic that does not rely on statement X**.
* Aside from the facts that X and Y are no longer defined, and that we are conflating truth values and logical validity.
** "Pragmatism. Is that all you have to offer?" - Guildenstern
p. 12. Keller quotes Mark Lilla, a professor who values skepticism but doesn't know why: "Doubt, like faith, has to be learned. It is a skill. But the curious thing about skepticism is that its adherents, ancient and modern, have so often been proselytizers. In reading them, I've often wanted to ask: 'Why do you care?' Their skepticism offers no good answer to that question. And I don't have one for myself."
First off, the ones whose works you're reading have often been proselytizers (hence their writing it down for you to read). That in no way means that skeptics in general are proselytizers. Most of the skeptics I know are pretty quiet about it, as they know firsthand how badly religious people can react to any sort of challenge. (Many of them take the very existence of skeptics as a challenge, which I think reveals a deep insecurity in their faith.)
Second, when you read a book and ask it a question, the lack of an answer doesn't mean that the author didn't know the answer. It means that you're talking to an inanimate object, and should at the very least look around to make sure nobody noticed. But here's an answer: We care because decisions that people make based on true beliefs tend to have better outcomes than decisions people make based on false beliefs. (And in case you need it said explicitly, skepticism (careful and skillful consideration without jumping to premature conclusions) is a demonstrably better vehicle for determining truth than religious indoctrination is.)
pp. 13-16. Keller spends quite a while attacking the idea that public policy should not be influenced by religion, by asserting that all beliefs are ultimately equivalent to religious beliefs. In the process, he has to severely strain the concept of the word "religious" to be so broad as to be meaningless. If he honestly thought that the word was this vague, there would be no point in his ever using it, and he certainly would not have written a book promoting it.
p. 16. Keller authors a hypothetical debate, in which Ms. A makes badly justified claims in favor of deliberately starving poor people, while Ms. B disagrees, but cannot support her disagreement except by invoking a belief in human worth which she ultimately cannot justify. Keller claims that Ms. B represents the secular objectivity striven for by the likes of John Rawls, and that because her position depends on an unprovable belief, "Her public policy proposals are ultimately based on a religious stance." (That's right, he referred to a private, secular belief as "religious".)
This egregious straw man makes me want to find a stronger term: Something that one could knock down even more easily, like "leaf pile man," or "dandelion seeds man". The idea that Ms. B speaks for anybody is insulting. There are plenty of great arguments, both moral and practical, in favor of helping the poor. Ms. B fails to present them, which makes her position look unsupported by reason, and therefore based on faith. The inability of this figment of Keller's imagination to justify moral behavior in no way implies that morality cannot be justified. (In fact, it can, without recourse to religious faith. I expect we'll find an opportunity to visit that subject later, when it is more topical.)
pp. 18-19. Keller tries to put forth Christianity as a great power for peace and harmony. He does this by mentioning some properties of the religion that could possibly be, but aren't, used as grounds for respect. (e.g., "The Biblical doctrine of the universal image of God, therefore, leads Christians to expect non-believers will be better than any of their mistaken beliefs could make them.") By far the strangest of these is the acknowledgment of the Christian teaching that belief in Jesus, rather than moral behavior, is what earns a place in heaven. He asserts, "Christians, then, should expect to find nonbelievers who are much nicer, kinder, wiser, and better than they are."
Right. Show me one Christian who thinks that non-Christians are morally superior to Christians. Just one.
I didn't think so.
Shortly, he adds, "Most religions and philosophies of life assume that one's spiritual status depends on your religious attainments. This naturally leads adherents to feel superior to those who don't believe and behave as they do. The Christian gospel, in any case, should not have that effect."
You might notice that, here and above, Keller is careful to say "should" rather than "does". He clearly knows that what he posits is not the case: Christians are part of an elite "saved" club, just like every other Chosen group. They certainly don't think themselves morally inferior. To try to present Christianity as a force for good on the sole basis of strongly suggested, false ideas is extremely disingenuous. (I almost said, "shockingly disingenuous," but that would not have been true.)
As an aside, concentration on salvation to the exclusion of good works is the purview of evangelical Christianity, rather than Christianity as a whole. This is a strange mistake for someone trying to set himself up as an authority.
p. 19. "It is common to say that 'fundamentalism' leads to violence, yet as we have seen, all of us have fundamental, unprovable faith-commitments that we think are superior to those of others."
Here, Keller blatantly disregards the meaning of "fundamentalism" in order to dismiss a serious concern: Fundamentalist Christianity can, for all practical purposes, be defined by its hatred, intolerance, and violence. I cannot fathom how he thought he would slip this past anyone at all, let alone his Christian readers.
p. 20. Keller asserts that ancient Christians were more benevolent, tolerant, and liberal than their surrounding societies, and attributes that to the humbling belief that Jesus died for them. (I find both ideas dubious, but that's beside the point.) He uses this to support his idea that Christianity is a force for good, despite making no attempt to carry his assertion forward to present day Christians.
Next week: The argument from evil.
The whole series.
Standard disclaimer: This, despite being a public post, is not an invitation for a religion debate with strangers. Been there, done that, still jaded.
Last week: In the introduction, Keller examined why skeptical people might turn to religion.
(Page numbers are from the hardcover version of the book.)
Keller takes on people who have a problem with the exclusivity of Christianity's claim to be the One True Religion. I have no problem with this claim itself: No philosophy could regard those that disagree with it as valid, yet still remain consistent. The fact that this exclusivity leads to intolerance (of people and religions), violence, and (worst of all) evangelism is still, I feel, a worthy cause for criticism.
I'm not sure how far to take this criticism in the case of war. War is always fought in the name of religion, but typically, the religion is a tool used by power-hungry sociopaths to get people to fight their wars. How much blame belongs to the religion, then? And how much when the church is the instigator? Is it splitting hairs too finely, to not blame the religion then?
p. 5. Keller writes, "One way to deal with the divisiveness of religion has been to control or even forbid it with a heavy hand. There have been several massive efforts to do this in the twentieth century. Soviet Russia, Communist China, the Khmer Rouge, and (in a different way) Nazi Germany were all determined to tightly control religious practice in an effort to stop it from dividing society or eroding the power of the state."
None of these is an example of any attempt to "deal with the divisiveness of religion". They are examples of governments that secured their power through murder and terror on a large scale. Keller's attempt to link nonreligious pacifist causes with crimes against humanity is simply outrageous. I shall spare my readers the tirade that this deserves.
He then quotes Alister McGrath: "The 20th century gave rise to one of the greatest and most distressing paradoxes of human history: That the greatest intolerance and violence of that century were practiced by those who believed that religion caused intolerance and violence."
Good grief. Is there any evidence for this claim at all?
If you're going to start pointing fingers about violence, how about the atrocious war crimes committed by the U.S.A. in Viet Nam, Cuba, Iraq, and all over Central and South America? Aren't we the ones who have God on our side?
War and oppression aren't created by, or a reaction against, a belief in God. War and oppression are a means for ruthless people to accrue power and money at the cost of human lives. (Aside from some wars of independence, that is.)
pp. 8-9. Keller reacts to people who think that every religion has some truth, and that no one religion has the whole truth. "How could you possibly know that no religion can see the whole truth unless you yourself have the superior, comprehensive knowledge of spiritual reality you just claimed that none of the religions have?" While I see little value in making a statement as vague (and possibly overgenerous) as the original one, Keller has failed to refute it. A person need only have access to *some* truth missed by any given religion, rather than all truth, in order to rationally make this claim.
pp. 9-11. Keller reacts to the idea that, because people's religious beliefs are overwhelmingly determined by the circumstances of their births ("If you were born in Morocco, you wouldn't even be a Christian, but rather a Muslim."), people are not justified in declaring the truth of their particular religion. He states (or rather parrots two other authors in stating) that this very objection is invalid for the same reason: "You can't say, 'All claims about religions are historically conditioned except the one I am making right now.' If you insist that no one can determine which beliefs are right and wrong, why should we believe what you are saying?" Note that the original objection was nothing like the stunningly over-generalized idea that nobody can tell what's true and what's false. In two sentences, he first slightly distorts and then greatly distorts the objection into a form that he can trivially counter. (This is the "straw man" argument: To misrepresent your opponent's position as weaker than it is, in order to more easily refute it. We shall see more of this later.) The first distortion was craftier than the second one: He changed "religious belief" to "claims about religions," a change innocuous enough to slip past an unwary reader. In this context, however, "religious belief" clearly refers to beliefs inherited from one's religion. "Claims about religions" are a different beast entirely, and include such statements as, "Author L. Ron Hubbard invented, for profit, a corporate religion which became a dangerous and powerful cult." Or, "The biographical details of the life of Jesus Christ were copied from the life of the Roman emperor Titus Flavius." Whether or not you agree with these, they clearly are not, and cannot honestly be confused with, beliefs acquired as a result of religious upbringing.
As a side note, there is to be found, in examining the general form of Keller's attempted refutation, a certain intellectual delight that readers of Raymond Smullyan's logic puzzles will find familiar. What if the straw man representation of the objection had been fair? We could sum up Keller's logic in this way: "In statement X, you use a certain reasoning to demonstrate that one cannot know the truth value of statements of type Y. Statement X happens to be of type Y. I now use the logic of statement X to show that we cannot justify belief in statement X." At first glance, this almost looks legitimate.* But if, as we conclude, we are not justified in believing in the logic of statement X, then we are not justified in using the logic of statement X to disprove anything, including statement X! Upon this second glance, the original disproof falls apart, leaving statement X intact and threatening to plunge us into an Epimenides-style paradox. (That is, the sort of cyclic paradox you get from the statement, "This statement is false.") We may be temped to escape the looming logical vortex by declaring statement X to be true but unprovable, or unprovably false, or (least romantically) disprovable by some logic that does not rely on statement X**.
* Aside from the facts that X and Y are no longer defined, and that we are conflating truth values and logical validity.
** "Pragmatism. Is that all you have to offer?" - Guildenstern
p. 12. Keller quotes Mark Lilla, a professor who values skepticism but doesn't know why: "Doubt, like faith, has to be learned. It is a skill. But the curious thing about skepticism is that its adherents, ancient and modern, have so often been proselytizers. In reading them, I've often wanted to ask: 'Why do you care?' Their skepticism offers no good answer to that question. And I don't have one for myself."
First off, the ones whose works you're reading have often been proselytizers (hence their writing it down for you to read). That in no way means that skeptics in general are proselytizers. Most of the skeptics I know are pretty quiet about it, as they know firsthand how badly religious people can react to any sort of challenge. (Many of them take the very existence of skeptics as a challenge, which I think reveals a deep insecurity in their faith.)
Second, when you read a book and ask it a question, the lack of an answer doesn't mean that the author didn't know the answer. It means that you're talking to an inanimate object, and should at the very least look around to make sure nobody noticed. But here's an answer: We care because decisions that people make based on true beliefs tend to have better outcomes than decisions people make based on false beliefs. (And in case you need it said explicitly, skepticism (careful and skillful consideration without jumping to premature conclusions) is a demonstrably better vehicle for determining truth than religious indoctrination is.)
pp. 13-16. Keller spends quite a while attacking the idea that public policy should not be influenced by religion, by asserting that all beliefs are ultimately equivalent to religious beliefs. In the process, he has to severely strain the concept of the word "religious" to be so broad as to be meaningless. If he honestly thought that the word was this vague, there would be no point in his ever using it, and he certainly would not have written a book promoting it.
p. 16. Keller authors a hypothetical debate, in which Ms. A makes badly justified claims in favor of deliberately starving poor people, while Ms. B disagrees, but cannot support her disagreement except by invoking a belief in human worth which she ultimately cannot justify. Keller claims that Ms. B represents the secular objectivity striven for by the likes of John Rawls, and that because her position depends on an unprovable belief, "Her public policy proposals are ultimately based on a religious stance." (That's right, he referred to a private, secular belief as "religious".)
This egregious straw man makes me want to find a stronger term: Something that one could knock down even more easily, like "leaf pile man," or "dandelion seeds man". The idea that Ms. B speaks for anybody is insulting. There are plenty of great arguments, both moral and practical, in favor of helping the poor. Ms. B fails to present them, which makes her position look unsupported by reason, and therefore based on faith. The inability of this figment of Keller's imagination to justify moral behavior in no way implies that morality cannot be justified. (In fact, it can, without recourse to religious faith. I expect we'll find an opportunity to visit that subject later, when it is more topical.)
pp. 18-19. Keller tries to put forth Christianity as a great power for peace and harmony. He does this by mentioning some properties of the religion that could possibly be, but aren't, used as grounds for respect. (e.g., "The Biblical doctrine of the universal image of God, therefore, leads Christians to expect non-believers will be better than any of their mistaken beliefs could make them.") By far the strangest of these is the acknowledgment of the Christian teaching that belief in Jesus, rather than moral behavior, is what earns a place in heaven. He asserts, "Christians, then, should expect to find nonbelievers who are much nicer, kinder, wiser, and better than they are."
Right. Show me one Christian who thinks that non-Christians are morally superior to Christians. Just one.
I didn't think so.
Shortly, he adds, "Most religions and philosophies of life assume that one's spiritual status depends on your religious attainments. This naturally leads adherents to feel superior to those who don't believe and behave as they do. The Christian gospel, in any case, should not have that effect."
You might notice that, here and above, Keller is careful to say "should" rather than "does". He clearly knows that what he posits is not the case: Christians are part of an elite "saved" club, just like every other Chosen group. They certainly don't think themselves morally inferior. To try to present Christianity as a force for good on the sole basis of strongly suggested, false ideas is extremely disingenuous. (I almost said, "shockingly disingenuous," but that would not have been true.)
As an aside, concentration on salvation to the exclusion of good works is the purview of evangelical Christianity, rather than Christianity as a whole. This is a strange mistake for someone trying to set himself up as an authority.
p. 19. "It is common to say that 'fundamentalism' leads to violence, yet as we have seen, all of us have fundamental, unprovable faith-commitments that we think are superior to those of others."
Here, Keller blatantly disregards the meaning of "fundamentalism" in order to dismiss a serious concern: Fundamentalist Christianity can, for all practical purposes, be defined by its hatred, intolerance, and violence. I cannot fathom how he thought he would slip this past anyone at all, let alone his Christian readers.
p. 20. Keller asserts that ancient Christians were more benevolent, tolerant, and liberal than their surrounding societies, and attributes that to the humbling belief that Jesus died for them. (I find both ideas dubious, but that's beside the point.) He uses this to support his idea that Christianity is a force for good, despite making no attempt to carry his assertion forward to present day Christians.
Next week: The argument from evil.
The whole series.
