George H Smith, "Atheism: The Case Against God"

[ciphergoth]

I've read all four of the recent books by the "four horsemen", and for the most part none have made me feel "yes, this is the book I want to press into the hands of believers". I would like there to be at least one book that I might be able to recommend, and having heard good things about this 1974 book, I ordered it from Amazon on a whim.

It certainly comes a *lot* closer than any of those four. It has a very dry style; there are no witty personal stories, few anecdotes, and only a smattering of historical background. But all four of the horsemen books seem somewhat scattershot in their approach, except perhaps Dennett, whose book seems like not so much an attack on religion as a hastily-repurposed discussion of religion originally intended for an atheist audience. This book is much more bulldozer than scattershot, and methodically dismantles the "sophisticated" defences of religion I actually hear from believers.

Its bulldozer-like nature may be seen in its chapter structure; first, clarify what atheism is and establish that the burden of proof lies with the theist; then tear down obfuscation as a means to confound rational discussion of the issue; demolish the idea that faith and revelation can supplement reason as guides to the truth (discussing and destroying a variety of attempts to defend the idea of faith). Only then are the traditional arguments for the existence of God, such as the cosmological argument, painstakingly taken apart; and only after that are the negative moral consequences of religion discussed.

There are a few problems. Smith is (or at least was) an Objectivist, and this leads to some sad errors; his defence of the idea of moral facts in Chapter 11 Section 2, for example, is just embarrassing. And it seems a shame to discuss the argument from design without even mentioning evolution; I can see that as a philosopher you want to show that the argument is *inherently* flawed, and of course it is, but it's evolution that robs it of its emotional impact. I still find myself thinking that I may have to write my ultimate book on the subject, but I have quite a few other books I'd have to read first to know if there was a gap in the market, and I can't afford quite that many whims :-)

No argument, no matter how good, can turn the head of someone who is prepared to say in terms that they intend to cling to an idea no matter how much they have to embrace irrationality in order to do so, as many sophisticated believers openly say. But still, when I read the four horsemen books, I felt I knew how believers were going to evade the conclusions they were pushing for, and I would love to know how a serious, philosophically knowledgable believer would go about avoiding the conclusions of this book.



Update: as usual, anonymous comments should be signed to be unscreened.

Comments

[valkyriekaren.livejournal.com]

The problem with the Four Horsemen books is that they deliberately set out to attack the notion of a god or gods. That's immediately going to be a turnoff for most believers.

I personally recommend Carl Sagan's The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, as while it only tangentially tackles the problem of gods and afterlives, it shows how to use the scientific method to see through hokum, dogma, logical fallacies and outright lies. More a case of leading a horse to water than forcing it to drink.

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

I don't think that's a problem with them as such, but I take your point all the same...

[valkyriekaren.livejournal.com]

Well, it's not a problem with them for me, but it's a problem if they're setting out to convert people!

Obfustication is the key problem to be tackled, of course - getting to the root of what a particular believer means when they say 'God' is crucial to being able to engage with them.

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

Actually Smith argues that it isn't only where the debate starts - it's where it ends. He demonstrates very well that no coherent meaning can be applied to the word "god", that every effort of Christian theologians in particular fails, and that this is enough to rule it out with no further consideration of its claims.

[damerell.livejournal.com]

Dennett's very calm and reasoned about it, which leaves _me_ thinking I'd like a bit more fire in his belly, but then I'm not the target audience.

Also I think the target audience for Dawkins' latest is estranged atheists in backwards places like the USA. It's not intended to convince believers, it's intended as a rallying call for unbelievers.

ciphergoth, can I borrow this some time?

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

I'd be delighted, though we are rarely in the same place at the same time...

[skibbley.livejournal.com]

So do you have an idea now of the book-that-should-be-written?

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

My idea changes all the time :-) I'd like to adopt a style which is chatty and uses short words and tries to be as inviting as possible, saving the harsher words for later in the book when hopefully I've already got the reader wondering.

At the moment it starts with a discussion of how easily people fool themselves, going into the empirical evidence; then it goes on to discuss what means we might employ to avoid fooling ourselves. That would leave 'till last specific discussion of the Emperors New Clothes effect, and the importance of not advancing an argument you don't yourself fully understand - eg don't say "We are finite, but God is infinite" unless you can say what you mean. Here I would want to talk about the idea of "getting there from here" - ie that you can start with observations about things on our own planet and our own scale in space and time, and get to eg quasars and electrons through a chain of reasoning that builds up more sophisticated and abstract phenomena.

At some point in that there would need to be a discussion of why you should care - about why it's better not to fool yourself, about how beliefs that seem harmless today can become harmful tomorrow, and that it's not a good idea to get practiced in pulling the wool over your own eyes. I'm not sure exactly how to write this part and I'm giving it quite a bit of thought - there's a connection with whether you really believe what you believe, and whether you allow it to affect your actions, but there's a chicken-and-egg problem in that I don't think I can convince that religion is hooey unless I can convince that it matters, but I don't see how to do the latter without doing the former either.

Anyway, then a discussion of the absolutely central role that obfuscation and confusion play in all defences of religion. After that I'd take a leaf out of the above book and discuss what atheism is and isn't, talk about agnosticism, and set out the complete incoherence of all attempts to discuss a god or gods, basically hammering home over and over again (with quotes) that religion says things that sound like they mean something, that make you feel as if you have been communicated with, without actually getting you anywhere.

There the intellectual case ends (perhaps modulo a short section on example arguments people make for religion and how the preceding section arms you to answer them) , but I'd want to go on to talk about eg the messed-up teachings of Jesus, and conclude that religion is what happens when a school of thought starts to become optimised entirely for memetic success through suppression of criticism - eg since the rewards and punishments happen off stage and no demonstration is needed, there is no reason not to turn the dials up to not eleven but infinity.

There also needs to be something answering the charge that the new atheists are too mean - I'm not sure where that goes.

It's unlikely to ever get beyond the stage of commenting about it on LJ, mind!

[lizw.livejournal.com]

Does it focus mainly on the traditional so-called proofs? I was told on my metaphysics course that those were intended to demonstrate the internal coherence of the theology of the time to people who already believed rather than to provide proofs as we would normally understand the term, and I don't base my faith on any of them (I know exactly what's wrong with each of them.) If there's more to it than that, and especially if it addresses the argument I've made to you about the axiomatic character of my faith, I might have a look at it later in the year and let you know what I think (my existing bookpile is still quite large, and I have some reading goals for the year for which books by white men aren't terribly helpful, which is why I won't make a more definite promise.)

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

Have made a couple of passes over this to try not to sound nasty; let me know how I'm doing...

He focusses mainly on cosmological and design arguments; he considers the question of the truth of religion settled by its incoherence, so the arguments are a sideshow.

This discussion of incoherence is applicable to what you believe. However, I thought of you when reading of course, and no, you're not one of the people whose hands I want to press it into; how could any book address any belief once taken as an axiom? I'm surprised to hear you describe your position as an "argument"; to be honest what I see is a safe place for your beliefs right out of the reach of reason.

If I was trying to convert you, I'd address this with a discussion of the merits of making the prosaic your starting point, but obviously I could only hope to convince because people are not axiomatic deduction devices in real life and so what you think of as an axiom might in practice turn out not to be if a case for different axioms could be established. After all, you didn't believe in God when you were born, so you must have got there somehow.

[lizw.livejournal.com]

Have made a couple of passes over this to try not to sound nasty; let me know how I'm doing..

You're doing just fine, don't worry.

I'm surprised to hear you describe your position as an "argument"; to be honest what I see is a search for a safe place to your beliefs right out of the reach of reason.

It's not an argument for the existence of God, but it's an argument for a belief in God's existence being one rational position amongst others. If I were just searching for a safe place, I think my religious history would have been rather different - it's not as if I haven't been willing to change my religious beliefs in the past, for instance, and I did identify as an atheist for a large chunk of my teenage years. I probably also wouldn't engage with atheists on the subject as much as I do. As far as I can tell, theism really just is the only way I can make satisfactory sense of the world as it appears to me. But inner motivations aren't really something one can demonstrate to third parties, so I think we'll probably just have to agree to differ on that.

[elsmi.livejournal.com]

Interesting factoid I learned recently: if you survey members of different scientific disciplines, you find the lowest rate of religious belief among psychologists. You might think it would be, say, physicists, who know in their bones that there's no logical room for a meaningful god, but apparently that doesn't stop them. OTOH, knowing in your bones that there are alternative explanations for religious impulses and having a framework to understand them -- while logically providing no evidence either way for the existence or non-existence of god -- seems pretty effective at producing non-belief in practice.

If I were trying to convert believers, I might try handing them a book on comparative religions in social contexts. "Here are 10 cultures, and how and why religion works the way it does for each"

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

Or more directly through discussing empirical psychology, which can be pretty mind-blowing. I've just received "Mistakes Were Made" and "Predictably Irrational" from Amazon...

Derren Brown's "Tricks of the Mind" is also interesting like that - he's famous as a conjuror, but he was an evangelical Christian and is now a fairly outspoken atheist and skeptic, and IIRC he talks about how he started to understand how people fool themselves through practicing conjuring, and that he couldn't help but notice the same traits in religion.

[pavlos.livejournal.com]

I owe you a proper article on this, but here's the condensed version.

Myth is not a naive theory intending to explain the universe. It is a brilliantly successful technology for changing it. Myth functions within the human brain, where the experience and interpretation of the world takes place, and modifies it. Myth is a psychoactive technology, like wine.

Like most other memes in the human mind, myth is both symbiotic and parasitic. The people who host it actively (and defensibly) wish to retain it for its positive psychological effects. It's also parasitic, and open to abuse like a drug, leading to self-destructive or aggressive behaviour. That is why, typically people who don't host myths, or host them in a safe compartmentalized way, whish to eradicate them from others.

One who assumes that myth is a delusion is presumptuous and biased. Sure, some lesser superstitions may be true errors of reasoning, but the big ones, like religion or ideology, are psychoactive devices deliberately hosted by a person. Wanting to remove them is an imposition, such as wanting to make a drinker or smoker quit. Attempting to debunk myth is a form of harassment, such as reaching out and spoiling someone's drink or smoke. It just isn't the way to make people quit.

In my opinion, the important battle is to establish tolerance between the myth-users and non-users. It has to be couched in those terms and there's good evidence that myth-users would cooperate, such as many examples of rational physicists, businesspeople, etc. who are also religious. Ground rules are needed to curb the desire of myth-users to impose the myth as universal, as well as the tendency of non-users to banish it. Myth should be a private freedom to indulge in responsibly, like any drug.

Beyond that, to the extent that non-users believe that myth-users would be better off rid of their myths, the process of conversion should be memetic and the goal of conversion should be psychological welfare. In other words, non-users should understand the network of memes that myth-users host and offer alternative memes in an order that they might be accepted and gradually replace the mythical memes, hopefully resulting in a happier mind. This process is (and should be) similar to the conversion process used by bona-fide myth-users.

Of the four horsemen, although Dawkins and Hitchens are eloquent and sometimes entertaining, it should be clear from the above that I find their approach wholly misguided and ineffective. In the case of Dawkins, given his previous intellectual achievement I'd simply call his recent work "dumb", and Hitchens strikes me as somewhat irresponsible. Dennet is much more productive in his approach, although sadly he's not as engaging a speaker or writer. I'm closest to Dennet's thinking as far as I know, but haven't read the field very widely.

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

I'm afraid you may have to write the uncondensed version - you seem to be saying that religion should be treated very differently from other mistakes, but I don't see why yet.

[pavlos.livejournal.com]

I'm proposing it should be treated as a psychoactive drug, alcohol being the best example in our culture. People indulge in it more or less deliberately, although it can also be addictive. They do so because it changes their perception of the world in a way that they find more pleasant or comfortable.

The world is pretty harsh, and drugs as well as mysticism can embellish it with imaginary structures or niches, making it less scary (to those who like that sort of thing - for others mysticism or drugs are scary). Also, rationality doesn't offer any strong sense of purpose, and does lead superficially to some poor choices like extreme sadism or hedonism. We all create some kind of myth as to what we want to be, and religions, as well as other belief systems such as ideologies, offer material for that.

So, I think that the correct approach to faith is not that religious people are simply mistaken or gullible (though that category exists and need help) but rather that they are using a psychoactive drug called religion to cope with the world. Others use alcohol, modern fantasy, elaborate forms of sex. These are all mechanisms to cope with the harshness of reality.

We definitely need a society that deals with the conflict and destruction that these alternative myths or drugs would cause if their adherents were allowed to indulge to an unhealthy degree, or force them on others. Myths, particularly, benefit from being treated as fact by society, and that kind of encroachment must be stopped. Basically I'm saying use myths or drugs tolerantly and responsibly.

Beyond that you'd be perfectly right to say that some people would be better off with different myths or drugs, or with reduced dependency on either. If you wish to convert religious people to atheism for this reason, I think what you're doing is similar to making a drinker quit. You have to properly understand the psychological need fulfilled by the drug, and offer a different lifestyle that the other person will accept and take in. I doubt that an all out attack on religion will be any more effective or well-received than an all out attack on recreational drugs, by the people you seek to help.

[pavlos.livejournal.com]

To elaborate some more, I don't think that errors in reasoning are a cornerstone of religion in the present day. Sure, there are some: Creationism, the belief that the earth and humans are important, the illusion of the soul, fantasies regarding the start and end of life, prayer as a placebo, ascribing "evil" where "indifferent" or "unfortunate" are accurate, and so on.

These are definitely traps of reasoning that people fall into, one could do well to debunk them. One could also do well do debunk lesser superstitions such as horoscopes or divination, as well as to expose the practices of purely cynical exploitative organizations, such as the scientology. These definitely should be treated as mistakes or scams.

But if you ask me what kind of beliefs are the cornerstone of Christian religion, I think they are mostly political ones: Patriarchy, submission to a group, righteous intolerance, unquestioned obedience to authority, a culture of adulation (what Hitchens calls "the wish to be a serf"), surrendering of privacy, or an understanding of morals as externally imposed rather than emergent.

These aren't errors, or at least they aren't straightforward logical potholes that people fall into. They are framing issues, where people see the world though a certain set of religious-authoritarian frames, we think this is kind of unfortunate for them and dangerous for others, and we'd like them to swap them for humanist-tolerant frames.

All I'm trying to say here is it isn't just a simple mistake where you show them the right frames and they go "aha!". Well, some might do, but mostly it's a memetic process. You have to point out the bad frames to make them visible, offer the superior alternatives, and hope that by doing this time after time some success will result.

[seph-hazard.livejournal.com]

Oh my God, I am too stupid for all this! It is however a pleasure and a joy to watch lizw arguing with you here. She says all the things that I would say if my brain were also the size of a planet.

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

What, really? You agree with her argument? I'm surprised.

[seph-hazard.livejournal.com]

A lot of it. Not all. Also I like that she knows enough about what she's talking about to be able to say "actually you have no idea what you're talking about". I wish I could do that. I can't with philosophy or this branch of theology, and people don't have many heated debates about Shakespeare or pre-Raphelite art round these parts... [grin]

...actually I can do it with the Bible, too, but that's almost never useful in such situations!

[zwol.livejournal.com]

This is a bit late, but there are two things that don't seem to be addressed by the argument in the book (as you summarize it) and haven't come up in the comments as far as I can see.

First, I'm uncomfortable with requiring logical consistency in definitions on this topic, because I'm personally familiar with two independent lines of theological reasoning (Taoism and Jewish kabbalism) that claim that as finite beings, any definition we can put forward for "god" is necessarily incomplete and inconsistent. How much does the book's argument depend on the notion that we need to be able to define this term in a logically consistent manner, and why does he take this position in the first place?

Second, and this might not be addressed in the book at all, but I would like to raise the issue of direct subjective experience of the supernatural (not necessarily of "god"). A lot of modern philosophical debate of atheism .vs. theism (from both sides, AFAICT) takes it as an axiom that this just doesn't happen, but I think if you asked a random sample of "ordinary" believers you would get a substantial number of them saying yes, I have personally experienced something for which my only available explanation is supernatural. [This is not to say that there might not be a wholly natural explanation available to e.g. someone with more knowledge of the workings of the brain; only that a supernatural explanation is the only one the questionee's got.]

I raise this because it seems to me that as long as argument from the atheistic side dismisses all such experience in terms like "well, of course there is a natural explanation, you're just not edumacated enough to know it, and we're not going to consider it any further" they're not going to get anywhere. In fact, I would imagine that that would be a hurl-book-with-great-force moment for anyone who's had such an experience.

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

You should clearly read this book - it is exactly the book I'd recommend for both these questions, this is just the sort of thing it discusses at length.

[zwol.livejournal.com]

I'll try to find it, but that is very much not what I understood you to be saying. In particular, you said (not in the main text, I guess):

He demonstrates very well that no coherent meaning can be applied to the word "god"...and that this is enough to rule it out with no further consideration.

I understand that to mean Smith takes as axiomatic that there can be no useful discussion of any concept of divinity unless it has a fully consistent meaning. But Taoism (for instance) takes as axiomatic that there is no such thing. These are irreconcilable axioms, so either that's an inaccurate representation of his argument or his argument cannot be applied to that type of theological tradition.

[babysimon]

In fact, I would imagine that that would be a hurl-book-with-great-force moment for anyone who's had such an experience.

I have had such an experience, and I'm an atheist...

[zwol.livejournal.com]

What philosophical stance do you take toward that experience?