Some Good Arguments
I recently read 'Irreligion - A Mathematician Explains Why the Arguments for God Just Don't Add Up' by John Allen Paulos. There's nothing new as such in there, I mean the arguments against the arguments for the existence of God are as old as each other in most cases. There are some good slants on these arguments though, and if you're looking for a book that presents all of the major (anti) arguments in one place (and a nice short book at that) then this is the one for you. So here's some points that struck home with me.
Is the complexity of our universe explained by an even more complex Creator?
"I remember the girlfriend of a college roommate who had misunderstood something she’d read on mnemonic devices. To memorise a telephone number, for example, she might have recalled that her best friend had two children, her dentist had five, her camp roommate three, her neighbour on one side had three dogs, the one on the other side had seven cats, her older brother had eight children if you counted those of his wives, and she herself was one of four children. The telephone number must be 253-3784. Her mnemonics were convoluted, inventive, amusing, unrelated to any other structure, and always very much longer than what they were designed to help her remember. They also seem to make the same mistake creationists make when they ‘explain’ complexity by invoking greater complexity."
Can our species predilection to 'believe' in a creator tell us more about what we are(n't) than it can anything else?
"At the very least ... [a] conception of God suggests a rather overweening sense of self and its importance. My own feeling derives in part from the realization, mentioned in the preface, that I had when I was ten years old and wrestling with my brother on the floor of my family’s house in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. In an important sense, I mused, there was no essential difference between me and not-me; everything was composed of atoms and molecules, and though their patterns differed, the rug below our heads and the brains inside them were made of the same stuff.
This preadolescent reverie grew into an awareness that the notion of self may be a sort of conceptual chimera. Doubt that God exists is almost banal in comparison to the more radical doubt that we exist, at least as anything more than nominal, marginally integrated entities having convenient labels like "Myrtle" and "Oscar." This is, of course, Humes idea—and Buddhas as well—that the self is an ever-changing collection of beliefs, perceptions, and attitudes, it is not an essential and persistent entity."
I'm reading this at the moment which delves a lot further into the concept mentioned above, I hope to post more on that soon (promises, promises...). I may have to change the title of this blog afterwards ;-)
Does the significance of the universe (to us at least) necessarily imply an equally (or more) significant reason to exist?
"...Consider the assassination of John F. Kennedy, a heartrending event for many. Because of its momentous nature, people searched for a suitably momentous reason for the assassination. Lee Harvey Oswald was an unprepossessing nobody who seemed ill suited for the job of giant-slayer. There had to be something more, and maybe there was, but one added reason for the intense fascination with other possibilities was the charming superstition that significant consequences must necessarily be the result of significant perpetrators. Similar remarks apply to the death of Princess Diana."
Are there things about us as people which make it hard for us to be open minded once we've accepted a certain belief or point of view?
"...another cognitive foible relevant to religious belief is the so-called confirmation bias, a psychological tendency to seek confirmation rather than disconfirmation of any hypothesis we've adopted, however tentatively. People notice more readily and search more diligently for whatever might confirm their beliefs,and they don't notice as readily and certainly don't look as hard for what disconfirms them. The prosecution of the unwarranted (to describe it blandly) Iraq war is a textbook example of this absurdly willful myopia and the staggering enormity of the consequences to which it can lead. Francis Bacon was aware of this bias in the seventeenth century when he wrote, "The human understanding when it has once adopted an opinion ... draws all things else to support and agree with it. And though there be a greater number and weight of instances to be found on the other side, yet these it either neglects and despises."
Considerably newer results in brain imaging have even located where in the brain confirmation bias seems to reside. The obstinate blindness to contrary facts that confirmation bias induces in some religious people always reminds me of the little ditty by William Hughes Mearns:
As I was sitting in my chair
I knew the bottom wasn't there
Nor legs nor back, but I just sat,
Ignoring little things like that"
And finally an excellent argument against those who would claim that religion has a place even despite it's false claims because it teaches people to be good:
"Still, people do often vigorously insist that religious beliefs are necessary to ensure moral behavior. Though the claim is quite clearly false of people in general, there is a sense in which it might be true if one has been brought up in a very religious environment. A classic experiment on the so-called overjustification effect by the psychologists David Greene, Betty Sternberg, and Mark Lepper is relevant. They exposed fourth and fifth-grade students to a variety of intriguing mathematical games and measured the time the children played them. They found that the children seemed to possess a good deal of intrinsic interest in the games. The games were fun. After a few days however the psychologists began to reward the children for playing; those playing them more had a better chance of wining the prizes offered. The prizes did increase the time the children played the games, but when the prizes were stopped, the children lost almost all interest in the games and rarely played them. The extrinsic rewards had undercut the children's intrinsic interest. Likewise, religious injunctions and rewards promised to children for being good might, if repudiated in later life, drastically reduce the time people spend playing the "being good" game. This is another reason not to base ethics on religious teachings."
Is the complexity of our universe explained by an even more complex Creator?
"I remember the girlfriend of a college roommate who had misunderstood something she’d read on mnemonic devices. To memorise a telephone number, for example, she might have recalled that her best friend had two children, her dentist had five, her camp roommate three, her neighbour on one side had three dogs, the one on the other side had seven cats, her older brother had eight children if you counted those of his wives, and she herself was one of four children. The telephone number must be 253-3784. Her mnemonics were convoluted, inventive, amusing, unrelated to any other structure, and always very much longer than what they were designed to help her remember. They also seem to make the same mistake creationists make when they ‘explain’ complexity by invoking greater complexity."
Can our species predilection to 'believe' in a creator tell us more about what we are(n't) than it can anything else?
"At the very least ... [a] conception of God suggests a rather overweening sense of self and its importance. My own feeling derives in part from the realization, mentioned in the preface, that I had when I was ten years old and wrestling with my brother on the floor of my family’s house in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. In an important sense, I mused, there was no essential difference between me and not-me; everything was composed of atoms and molecules, and though their patterns differed, the rug below our heads and the brains inside them were made of the same stuff.
This preadolescent reverie grew into an awareness that the notion of self may be a sort of conceptual chimera. Doubt that God exists is almost banal in comparison to the more radical doubt that we exist, at least as anything more than nominal, marginally integrated entities having convenient labels like "Myrtle" and "Oscar." This is, of course, Humes idea—and Buddhas as well—that the self is an ever-changing collection of beliefs, perceptions, and attitudes, it is not an essential and persistent entity."
I'm reading this at the moment which delves a lot further into the concept mentioned above, I hope to post more on that soon (promises, promises...). I may have to change the title of this blog afterwards ;-)
Does the significance of the universe (to us at least) necessarily imply an equally (or more) significant reason to exist?
"...Consider the assassination of John F. Kennedy, a heartrending event for many. Because of its momentous nature, people searched for a suitably momentous reason for the assassination. Lee Harvey Oswald was an unprepossessing nobody who seemed ill suited for the job of giant-slayer. There had to be something more, and maybe there was, but one added reason for the intense fascination with other possibilities was the charming superstition that significant consequences must necessarily be the result of significant perpetrators. Similar remarks apply to the death of Princess Diana."
Are there things about us as people which make it hard for us to be open minded once we've accepted a certain belief or point of view?
"...another cognitive foible relevant to religious belief is the so-called confirmation bias, a psychological tendency to seek confirmation rather than disconfirmation of any hypothesis we've adopted, however tentatively. People notice more readily and search more diligently for whatever might confirm their beliefs,and they don't notice as readily and certainly don't look as hard for what disconfirms them. The prosecution of the unwarranted (to describe it blandly) Iraq war is a textbook example of this absurdly willful myopia and the staggering enormity of the consequences to which it can lead. Francis Bacon was aware of this bias in the seventeenth century when he wrote, "The human understanding when it has once adopted an opinion ... draws all things else to support and agree with it. And though there be a greater number and weight of instances to be found on the other side, yet these it either neglects and despises."
Considerably newer results in brain imaging have even located where in the brain confirmation bias seems to reside. The obstinate blindness to contrary facts that confirmation bias induces in some religious people always reminds me of the little ditty by William Hughes Mearns:
As I was sitting in my chair
I knew the bottom wasn't there
Nor legs nor back, but I just sat,
Ignoring little things like that"
And finally an excellent argument against those who would claim that religion has a place even despite it's false claims because it teaches people to be good:
"Still, people do often vigorously insist that religious beliefs are necessary to ensure moral behavior. Though the claim is quite clearly false of people in general, there is a sense in which it might be true if one has been brought up in a very religious environment. A classic experiment on the so-called overjustification effect by the psychologists David Greene, Betty Sternberg, and Mark Lepper is relevant. They exposed fourth and fifth-grade students to a variety of intriguing mathematical games and measured the time the children played them. They found that the children seemed to possess a good deal of intrinsic interest in the games. The games were fun. After a few days however the psychologists began to reward the children for playing; those playing them more had a better chance of wining the prizes offered. The prizes did increase the time the children played the games, but when the prizes were stopped, the children lost almost all interest in the games and rarely played them. The extrinsic rewards had undercut the children's intrinsic interest. Likewise, religious injunctions and rewards promised to children for being good might, if repudiated in later life, drastically reduce the time people spend playing the "being good" game. This is another reason not to base ethics on religious teachings."
posted by John Doran-Armstrong at 10:42 AM
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