Human Sovereignty

Here's another discussion I've long been meaning to return to. I point out a simple objection to the Free Will Defense against the Problem of Evil:

No-one thinks it impedes free will problematically when humans -- e.g. the police -- prevent acts of intentional evil. Why would it be any worse for God to do the exact same thing?

It doesn't seem that the mere source (human or divine) of an obstruction should make any difference to whether it impedes the criminal's free will. In response, Brandon acknowledged as much, but pointed the issue in a new direction:

[The FWD] can't work on individual autonomy alone; rather, it requires us to say that not only is individual autonomy a good to be valued, but the autonomy of the human race as a whole is a good to be valued.

Is it, though? Is collective self-determination or 'sovereignty' an intrinsic good so important that it could outweigh all the other goods that could result from the perfect enforcement of individual human rights? At the level of the nation, most of us think not. Indeed, we think it morally incumbent upon outside powers to step in to prevent genocide when they are able, to protect innocent individuals -- even those with the misfortune of living in the wrong 'sovereign' nation, under the wrong rulers. (Humanitarian intervention may be questioned on pragmatic grounds, of course. We're not omniscient, so the interference of fallible human actors may do more harm than good. But the principle seems clear enough.) Is there a difference at the level of the human species as a whole? Brandon offers the following thought experiment:

A powerful and very advanced alien species comes to Earth and begins intervening in human affairs, not by interacting with us as equals, but by, effectively, policing us. Even granted that the policing was entirely benevolent and beneficial, I think a great many people would feel, perhaps in virtue of a fellow-feeling with other humans that they don't share with non-humans, that something precious to human life had been exchanged for that benefit. Some, no doubt, would think the exchange worth it; some would forcefully reject it. I suppose how people would react in general would tend to depend on the precise details of the interference. But, regardless of how exactly the demographics would go, I think the scenario does suggest that we tend to assume that human affairs are human affairs, to be determined by human choices. And that suggests that, to the degree we treat the whole human race as an object of value, we treat as valuable the autonomy of the human race as a whole.

Again, as in the standard humanitarian intervention case, I would be worried on pragmatic (indirect utilitarian) grounds. Alien or foreign powers are not generally known for being 'entirely benevolent and beneficial'. So in practice we should be suspicious, and a preference for self-determination may be for the best. But if we may stipulate that the outcomes here are, in fact, most beneficial for people, then that strikes me as a very desirable state of affairs. I would rather have a perfect police force than a local police force. Wouldn't you?

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Respect and Religious Belief

There's been some recent blog chatter (Brandon offers links) on the question whether to "respect" religious beliefs (in a sense that goes beyond mere tolerance to incorporate some form of esteem). Everyone agrees, of course, that a religious person may be respected on other grounds, despite the odd nutty belief (don't we all have some of those?). And it also seems uncontroversial that false beliefs may be reasonably - and thus respectably - held. So I take it the real question is whether irrational beliefs can be inherently respectable. (Or maybe the question is whether religious belief is generally irrational. I can never quite tell.)

My basic view is that a belief is respectable precisely insofar as the agent is reasonable in believing it. I suspect that most religious beliefs are irrationally held. So I don't respect that. I think most people would do better (qua epistemic agent) to become atheists instead.

Two points bear noting, however: (1) This is not a guaranteed improvement. Better to be a reasonably mistaken deist than an atheist whose views stem from scientism, say. (2) There's nothing particularly unique about religion here. Most people have all sorts of unreasonable beliefs on philosophical matters (relativism, egoism, etc.). So, in principle, there's plenty of disrespect to go around. I guess religious belief is just a peculiarly salient example.

To respond to others' points:

* I'm intrigued by Brandon's suggestion that false belief contents may warrant respect "as beautiful, ingenious, or such". Such aesthetic values might ground respect for a fictional story or a mental state like imagining, which does not aim at truth. But belief aims at truth. So I do not think that these values can make the contents in question respectable as beliefs.

(Aside: some religious people may merely see themselves as engaging in a cultural/"spiritual" practice with no genuine epistemic component at all. They mouth the words of the hymn, as part of their practice, but they do not really believe the content in any ordinary, literal sense. This strikes me as entirely unobjectionable. But it's not what I'm talking about here.)

* Many people seem to think that others' beliefs should not be rationally challenged. It's "nasty" to be critical, or some such. On the contrary, I think that our public culture is deplorably uncritical.

Having said that, I'm more sympathetic to Bad Jim's comment that respect is "something we owe to the boundaries of social intercourse". In our personal lives, some disagreements may be better left unaired. It would be obnoxious to constantly disrupt one's social interactions by bringing up irrelevant disagreements. But that's quite consistent with thinking that there is an appropriate time and place for hashing out such disagreements.

* I instantly lose respect for anyone who confuses this criticality with 'militancy'.

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The Logical Problem(s) of Evil

Many theists seem to treat the 'logical' problem of evil as refutable simply by establishing that God's existence is compatible with (some possible instance of) evil. They then infer that the only real challenge is from the 'evidential' problem of evil, which even if it works merely shows there is some (pro tanto, defeasible) evidence against God's existence. So, nothing too threatening.

But this is poor reasoning. The mere fact that God's existence is compatible with some possible evils does not establish that we have only probabilistic evidence against his existence. For, obviously enough, it does not entail that God's existence is compatible with the particular evils we actually observe. Indeed, I think there's a very strong case to be made that God's existence is logically incompatible with the particular evils we observe.

Since my conclusion is that God's existence is impossible, not merely improbable, it would seem misleading to call this an 'evidential' argument from evil. It is properly considered a logical argument from evil. But it certainly isn't refuted by yelping, "free will! free will!" So it's a mistake for theists to claim that the logical argument from evil has been refuted. (At best, all they've refuted is the most simple, straw-man version of the argument.)

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Merry Christmas!

A puzzling thing about America is that some people seem to think that Christmas is an exclusively Christian holiday, such that anyone who celebrates it is ipso facto celebrating the religion. So we hear "Happy Holidays" and similarly bland, neutral greetings. It's very boring. I heartily recommend that you join the rest of the Western world and treat Christmas as a cultural celebration that anyone can partake in.

Stephen Law has a nice post that highlights the value of community rituals and traditions. He concludes:

Christmas is a celebration of peace and love, and a time to think of others, especially those less fortunate. It is a time at which we come together, at which we feel solidarity and empathy with the rest of humanity. But of course these are values and aspirations that can be shared by non-Christians too. Much of the true meaning of Christmas is open to everyone, whatever their religious beliefs.

I'm suspicious of the idea that there's any one "true meaning" for a cultural tradition like Christmas. It's presumably going to mean different things to different people, and I don't see that anyone has the authority to impose their preferred conception on anyone else. Cultural significance and shared meaning are socially constructed in the strongest sense: it's up to us to make of them what we will. If you imbue the holiday with great religious significance, that's fine. If you don't -- if you just cherish the opportunity to spend time with loved ones, and to participate in tree-decoration, gift-giving, and other fun rituals passed along through the generations -- that's fine too. The meaning(s) of Christmas emerge, bottom-up, from how we choose to conceive of it. To think otherwise is the same fallacy as thinking that dictionaries fix what words mean (and don't get me started on grammar rulebooks!). There is no such top-down authority. "Prescriptivists" might like to boss others around, but we're not obliged to listen to the petty authoritarians.

I leave you with the greatest Xmas song ever:

Have yourself a merry merry Christmas
Have yourself a good time
But remember the kids who got nothin'
While you're drinkin' down your wine

And remember, you can still join the UNICEF Facebook Chain, here.

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Atheists at the Gates!

Oh noes! (HT)

The archbishop said "atheistic fundamentalism" was a new phenomenon.

He said it advocated that religion in general and Christianity in particular have no substance, and that some view the faith as "superstitious nonsense".

Shocking, isn't it! Because nobody ever criticized religion before, I'm sure. And only "fundamentalists" are ever critical of others' beliefs. "Some view the faith as 'superstitious nonsense'" - imagine that! Nice people know they're not supposed to think - let alone mention - that the emperor has no clothes. It wouldn't be respectful, you see. Well then, I'm sure his outfit is just splendid. Otherwise he'd feel bad, so it must be true.

The article's tagline tells us: "The Archbishop of Wales, Dr Barry Morgan, has described a rise in 'fundamentalism' as one of the great problems facing the world." I'm curious. Let's hear more:

In his Christmas message, the archbishop said: "Any kind of fundamentalism, be it Biblical, atheistic or Islamic, is dangerous."

Islamic fundamentalists fly planes into buildings. Christian fundamentalists blow up abortion clinics. But most frightening of all is the atheistic variant:

He said it led to situations such as councils calling Christmas "Winterval", schools refusing to put on nativity plays and crosses removed from chapels.

Dangerous stuff.

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Biased Accommodations

As a society we tend to be much more accommodating of some commitments (e.g. religious or familial) than others (hobbies, etc.). Is this fair? Infinite Injury offers an example from UC Berkeley:

The clear sense these rules convey is that the instructor is expected to bend their rules if they might create difficulty or hardship for someone who wishes to respect a religious obligation but that a student who is going to be absent for some other extra-curricular activity undertakes a greater obligation if they want to miss class. Now one might justify such a policy on the grounds that some athletes or musicians are going to be out of town on a large number of dates or that religion is more important to people. However, it would be easy to give every student a certain number of absences they can exercise using the easier standard and there are many students who are more casual about the religious observances they ask to be excused for then athletes are about their games...

The things that we [non-believers] may really really care about get no accommodation while just someone has a ridiculous belief about some historical event we have to bend over to accommodate them. Now I fully understand that the potential for religious discrimination is great but if we weren’t implicitly endorsing religion as something more important than say a rocketry hobby we would use some fully neutral policy that gave everyone the chance to do what they really cared about.

That seems exactly right to me. For a more controversial example, then, consider the view that we ("society", i.e. employers and institutions) ought to make a special effort to accommodate those who choose to raise children. I'm sympathetic to this view. But is it biased? Why is the choice to raise children more worthy of accommodation than the choice to write a novel or compose a symphony in one's spare time? Perhaps we ought to be more accommodating in general, not singling out 'family support' as a uniquely worthy form of support. Fairer, perhaps, to enable individuals to pursue whatever projects are most important to them -- and for many this will happen to be childrearing, but for others it may not.

What is the best argument for singling out childcare? (I would look for consequentialist considerations, e.g. the impact that parenting has on the next generation. But let's bracket that for now.) Feminists sometimes claim that lack of support for women who want to both work and raise children is sexist. But it isn't entirely clear why this is so. (We can't always get everything we want. That's an annoying fact of life, not necessarily a sign of oppression.) Back to II:

The arguments given about the problems for women with babies in academia all focused on the extra time and energy women put into childcare. Now if women put more effort into children simply because they find raising children more rewarding (relative to men) the fact more women than men drop out to raise children is actually the desired outcome. It’s what would result from perfectly fair mutually beneficial trades. On the other hand if you think that the extra effort women put into childrearing isn’t the result of fair deals then the target should be on encouraging women to put less effort into childrearing, not making the unfair division of labor slightly less bad for women.

And a thought-provoking analogy:

Men are underrepresented in K-12 teaching. The reason most men abandon teaching is the difficulty of taking a high paying job in business and being a teacher. Therefore we should provide special benefits and accommodations to let men teach while still working as businessmen in the day. Obviously this argument is fallacious. If people are leaving some profession because they’ve found a better offer they don’t deserve special treatment as a result and it should only be fixed if luring them back provides a good value. Thus whether or not this is a leak we should be plugging is an empirical economic question and it’s only in the face of real data on marginal costs and productivities that we can answer whether or not we should address the ‘problem’.

Perhaps childrearing and religion are presupposed as normal components of the good life, and so it is thought that they should not be subject to trade-offs in the manner of our (other) chosen values. Writing a novel is a choice you make, and a somewhat peculiar one at that; having kids, on the other hand, is simply par for the course in a 'normal' life. This difference in normality may be thought to underwrite the special obligation to accommodate the one choice more than the other. But why should normality matter?

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Does Nobody Know What "Militant" Means?

The stupidest thing I've read today (ta Luke):

I have been chided in the past for referring to the "militant" atheism of Dawkins and his like. But the desire for one's creed to spread, in order to make the world a better place, surely merits the label.

Hmm. Isn't that desire shared by such well-known "militants" as MLK, Gandhi and, oh, I don't know, Jesus?

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Literalism and Automatic Interpretation

Some interesting remarks from Jason Kuznicki:

Fundamentalism is an interpretive strategy. Fundamentalism is not a divine command; it is a human decision about how to read a text, and it should be made to prove itself against all of the other equally human approaches to reading. No one has a magical hermeneutic key descended from Heaven, and there is no reason whatsoever to believe from the outset that fundamentalist readings are any closer to God than any other. The fundamentalist interprets his text just like anyone else does. The only difference is that he claims not to interpret, and the sacredness of the text causes many people to believe what would in any other context be an obvious imposture.

It is tempting to claim that a literal interpretation is somehow the most 'natural', or the 'default' option. But I think this is simply because it comes most easily to us literal-minded folk. Some past cultures were, I gather, not nearly so literal-minded. I vaguely recall reading an ancient Roman historical text, calmly relating the role that the gods and sea monsters played in the day's events. Even if my memory misleads me, we can certainly imagine a culture where their talk is infused with mythological references, which have more poetic than literal significance. (They may treat religion as a cultural practice, rather than a collection of metaphysical beliefs, and so be puzzled if an outsider were to ask them if they thought it was "really true?" They didn't take themselves to be making such assertions.)

The point is this: given our cultural background, we tend to automatically interpret text literally. (There are some exceptions, e.g. idiomatic expressions.) It may not even occur to us to interpret it any other way - or if it does, it may seem forced or artificial. But this is a wholly contingent fact about us. We could have been different. In the imagined culture, one automatically interprets text poetically. It may not even occur to them to interpret it any other way. No more than we are tempted to think that a man needs a wheelchair upon making a purchase that "cost him an arm and a leg."

Does that sound right? I've heard of similar views in aesthetics, i.e. that there is no natural distinction between "realistic" vs. "abstract" art or representation. There are only signs that are more or less conventionally familiar. The more familiar ones are recognized automatically, and so no conscious interpretive effort is required, which misleads us into thinking that there is no interpretation involved at all. Contingent ease is thus mistaken for essential naturalness. There's surely something right about this, though the leap to full-blown interpretive relativism seems a bit suspicious. Any thoughts?

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New Atheism as a Positive View

Ophelia Benson rebuts some silly complaints from Michael Shermer, including the bizarre suggestion that New Atheism is a mere "anti-movement", and ought to "champion science and reason." (!?)

This reminds me of the odd arguments from Macht and Chris that New Atheists are "contradicting themselves" by arguing for a positive worldview/culture/values that they allegedly deny is a worldview/etc. But again, most New Atheists are quite self-conscious promoters of what they see as Enlightenment culture, values of rational inquiry, and so forth. So it's very odd to see people suggesting the opposite.

Now, it's very obvious that New Atheism is a positive view, so I don't think Shermer has any excuse whatsoever. But for the others - denying that New Atheists believe theirs is a positive view - I think their confusion arises from misinterpreting the rhetoric of normality. New Atheists like to suggest that "atheism is the default view", for example. Chris interpreted this as a descriptive claim, refuted by the cultural contingency of Enlightenment values. But of course that isn't what's meant at all. It's a normative claim -- basically an affirmation of Occam's Razor -- not the sort of thing that can be refuted by mere anthropology.

Similarly, Macht wrote:

A major theme of the new atheists is that as various cultures modernize, they inevitably get rid of out-dated traditions and religions. "Modernization" is like a chicken nugget factory, where whole chickens go in and all that comes out is the crisp, juicy nuggets - free of all the feathers, beaks, bones and innards (mostly). It doesn't matter what kind of chicken goes in - an old one, a young one, a fat one, a chicken with two heads, perhaps even a rat or two. What matters is that there is this factory and it can take in a wide variety of chicken and chicken-like things and strip them of all the unnecessary and hard to swallow parts.

But this conflates two claims:
(1) that reason is universal, i.e. all inquirers will ultimately converge as they become more rational ("modern"); and
(2) that this process is wholly negative, involving only subtraction.

New Atheists advance claim #1. But nobody believes the absurd #2. Rationality is not achieved via lobotomy. When we talk about "getting rid of irrationality", we do not mean this as a purely negative process. Part of what it is to dispel an illusion - in the fullest sense - is to develop your awareness of what's real. To overcome a bias, you replace it with a balanced perspective. Etc. So although New Atheists sometimes talk about their rational ideals as a kind of "baseline", they do not mean that it is our actual starting point, requiring no positive effort. Of course not. They mean it is a normative baseline, or basic standard, such that once we overcome all our mistakes we will be rationally compelled to end up there. The truth is sitting there waiting for us, there for the taking. That's not to say that we can just sit tight and have it fall into our lap.

In short: the chicken factory adds some crucial spices that would otherwise be missing. And that's precisely what we like about it.

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Stephen Law on Faith Schools

[Quote] If you believe that such authority-based religious education is acceptable, then let me leave you with a question. Suppose authoritarian political schools started opening up around the country. A conservative school opens in Sydney, followed by a communist school in Melbourne. These schools select on the basis of parents’ political beliefs. Portraits of political leaders beam serenely down from classroom walls. Each day begins with the collective singing of a political anthem. Pupils are expected to defer, more or less unquestioningly, to their school’s political authority and its revered political texts. Rarely are children exposed to alternative political points of view, except, perhaps, in a caricatured form, so they can be sweepingly dismissed.

What would be the public’s reaction to such schools? Outrage. These schools would be accused of stunting children - of forcing their minds into politically pre-approved moulds.

My question is: if such authoritarian political schools are utterly beyond the pale, why are so many of us prepared to tolerate their religious equivalents?

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Authority

Some people seem to believe in a very strange kind of authority: one that can pull normativity out of a hat (or decide which of two incommensurable values is the greater). I don't get it.

I can understand what we might call "guiding authority", which derives from the utility of the rule of law, but that is clearly a very different matter. We grant guiding authority to legal institutions because we are too biased and ignorant to enforce justice ourselves through vigilante action. But this is a contingent matter; perfected super-humans would have no need of such guides. Note in particular that the kind of authority in play here is merely epistemic, rather than metaphysical. We need the authorities to help us find the truth; not to create it!

Contrast this with the pure authority that Pruss calls for on Right Reason. There are no objective grounds for deciding between vocations, so - he argues - if we want there to be a "right answer" for us to discern here, we require the pure authority of God to decide a vocation for us.

I find the notion absolutely ludicrous. Note that he's not claiming that an omniscient God could guide us towards the independently best option. Rather, the suggestion seems to be that God has the pure authority to just make up the normative fact of which option is best. Other theists seem to share this bizarre view. They hold that a pure authority can just decide stuff for no reason, and these arbitrary decisions would actually matter! The mere act of authoritative command suffices to create reasons ex nihilo.

Am I wrong in thinking that this view is absolutely insane? Can anyone defend it, or at least make it a bit more comprehensible to me...?

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What's So Great About Faith?

Dialogue snippet from many films/TV shows:

Skeptic: "Doesn't it bother you that there's no real evidence that God even exists?"

Christian: "Not at all. If God gave us proof, there'd be no room left for faith!"

That line's always a conversation-stopper, for some reason. I'd like to see the conversation continue, though, as the claim raises an obvious question: what's so great about "faith"? I'd have thought it a good thing to have one's beliefs properly confirmed. To have sufficient grounds for your beliefs seems like an improvement over having insufficient grounds, right? So why does the TV-Christian imply that such a transition would be a bad thing?

I guess the idea is that uncertainty enables trust to be expressed, tested, and confirmed. If you're accused of some misdeed, immediate proof of innocence would rob you of the chance to see who really trusts you. But there are two major flaws with this analogy:

(1) The need for virtue is contingent on imperfect conditions. Hume points out that generosity would be unnecessary in conditions of abundance. Likewise, trust is pointless for one (like God) who can always dispel uncertainty and reveal the truth. If virtue is an instrument for good, it would seem awfully backward to value the instrument more than the perfection it aims to attain!

(2) The analogy is a non-starter in any case. The question of God's existence is logically prior to whether he's trustworthy. We're not assessing God himself, but rather an abstract proposition - the question whether there's anyone there for us to assess. (This conflation also underlies the silly claim that "atheists hate God.") Granted, there's a loose sense in which one can 'trust' that a proposition is true -- let's call this "de dicto trust" -- but that's a completely different matter from trusting in a person, de re.

So even if we grant that de re trust in God's goodness has intrinsic value, it still doesn't follow that there's anything good about de dicto faith in the unsupported proposition that God exists. Theists should much prefer to have solid proof supersede their blind (de dicto) "faith".

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Identifying your 'God'

Sometimes people argue about whether, say, Christians and Muslims worship the same God. (Islamophobes employ genetic arguments to suggest that Allah is "really" a Pagan moon god, for example. Because everyone knows the Christian religion was not at all influenced by its pagan precursors.) Anyway, there seems a remarkably simple way to settle the matter. Simply ask a Muslim whether, if it turned out that Christianity were true (the deity became incarnate as Jesus, etc.), this deity would still be 'Allah'.*

We can similarly ask a Christian whether, in the possible world described by Muslims, the deity is still 'God'. They might give a different answer, which would be curious, but given that trans-world identity is merely conventional, the disagreement doesn't really matter. The real question, in either case, is whether one's concept of 'God' is compatible with the state of affairs hypothesized by another. Different people's answers needn't be symmetrical, as different people might have different 'God'-concepts, associated with more or less restrictive identity conditions. Having said all that, unless there's some reason to prefer a more or less restricted concept here, the whole dispute seems a bit pointless and arbitrary anyway...

* = Jack similarly recommends this methodology:

"for those of you who believe in God, if it turned out that there was a deity but that he was a jokester and far from omnibenevolent, would He be the one that you believed in or not?"

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The Idea of God - who needs the reality?

Clayton makes a nice point:

According to Anselm, I'm a fool. I believe God exists only in the imagination. But even Anselm grants that God does exist in my imagination and that I have a grasp of what things would have been like had there been a God. Had there been a God, for example, God would have been very displeased with Hitler and commanded him to stop.

More generally, it's daft to think that God's existence is necessary to ground normative ideals, because the whole point of ideals is that they float free from the mess of our actual reality. The question of how things should be does not fundamentally depend on how things in fact are. Ideal standards can be grounded in counterfactuals, e.g. facts about what an ideal spectator would recommend; whether such an ideal spectator actually exists in the here and now is, quite simply, irrelevant. (This is a familiar point: one may ask, "What would Jesus do?" without requiring that Jesus actually be in that situation.)

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Radical Skepticism vs. Anything Goes

Surely this post's title is a false dilemma. Nevertheless, it seems to be a popular defense of religious belief, to say that "atheism is a faith position too", e.g. because we need to assume that our senses are a reliable guide to reality [HT: OB], or because objective morality is no less "mysterious" than God, etc. This strikes me as not so much an argument as a negotiation: "Your beliefs are unjustified too, so I won't say anything if you don't!" Let's all just lower our epistemic standards and be one big irrational family.

Or let's not.

Not all axioms are created equal. Some assumptions are more reasonable than others. Given our commitment to making sense of the world as best we can, we are rationally obliged to believe in the preconditions of our success, i.e. that our basic methods of inquiry (science and reason) are on the right track. This is an entirely reasonable assumption to make, and in no way does it legitimize making further - arbitrary - assumptions in addition.

This becomes even clearer if we reject the foundationalist model of justification in favour of coherentism. One's maximally coherent belief-set would contain the claim that one's senses are generally reliable. It would not (atheists argue) contain the claims made by pop theism. They just don't fit together so well with everything else we (take ourselves to) know about the world.

If it's really the case that we have no good reason to believe something, then we shouldn't believe it. So it would be irresponsible to accept the theist's cease-fire; their reasoned criticisms should instead be welcomed! But, I would argue, we actually do have good reasons to believe in those other things (e.g. morality, the external world) in the alleged analogy. On the other hand, we don't have such good reasons to believe in pop theism. So, I think we should simply reject the analogies.

Granted, even atheists must make some assumptions. But, again, some assumptions are more reasonable than others. It's not always obvious what we should (most reasonably) believe. It's not always easy to avoid falling off into either extreme of complacent skepticism or complacent relativism. But of course this challenge calls for more, rather than less, critical epistemic discernment. Don't throw up your hands -- think!

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Divine Double Standards

Another problem with the "free will" theodicy is that it rests on a double standard. No-one thinks it impedes free will problematically when humans -- e.g. the police -- prevent acts of intentional evil. Why would it be any worse for God to do the exact same thing?

To take another example, we think it would be wrong for Bob to fail to save the drowning child. So why is it okay for God to do nothing? Again, this seems a plain double standard.

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The Problem of Unfreedom

I've never understood how anyone could be at all convinced by the "free will" defence against the problem of evil. It seems obvious that any cosmic designer did a shockingly poor job of designing us to be free agents. There are all sorts of barriers to human choice and free action that no perfect being could tolerate. Let's call this "the problem of unfreedom".

Here's the problem: humans are not ideally free agents. Due to our imperfect biological design, we suffer a variety of internal maladies -- from cravings and addiction to mental illness and simple irrationality -- that impede the rational exercise of our will. Our brains are far from optimally designed for rational decision-making. If God existed, he would free us from the bondage of addiction, bias and other mental defects.

Note that we had no choice over our own design -- our initial desires and predispositions. When we are moved by built-in desires that we wish we didn't have, this is a violation of our autonomy as free agents. Yet we are limited in our ability to shape our own desires. We can't change our innate dispositions through sheer force of will. A perfect God would have given us this ability -- to simply purge ourselves of violent, selfish, or lazy inclinations. Our bad design is not our fault, after all. The bad decisions and behaviour caused by this bad design are, likewise, not wholly our own responsibility. If humans had been created with the values of autonomy, self-creation and responsibility in mind, we would be very different creatures.

Again, every flaw we have was built into us (at least as a disposition ready to manifest itself upon exposure to the wrong environmental influences). Why would a perfect being do that to you? Even assuming that we have free choice within certain bounds, those "bounds" are not the ones that any remotely benevolent designer would have set. Clearly, we are not "designer babies".

One day, I hope, biotechnology will advance to the point where we can improve these flaws ourselves. But the very fact that we need to "play God" indicates that the job is vacant.

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The Atheism Wars

There's a lot of mud-slinging at present between two atheist camps: those who support the Dawkins/Dennett/Harris approach of aggressively criticising religion, and those who think we should be more accommodating. Aside from that rough characterization, I'm not entirely sure what's in dispute here. Here are two possibilities:

1. Religious belief is irrational. (More precisely: given what we now know about the universe, it is generally epistemically unreasonable to believe the truth-claims made by any of the world's major religions. The epistemically responsible agent has every reason to reject pop theism.)

2. We, as public actors, should criticize irrationality -- in general, and in its specific instances -- and seek to promote epistemic virtues (e.g. believing things based on good reasons and evidence) in society.

Personally, I think that both these claims are true. I assume that makes me an "aggressive atheist". To any accommodationists out there, which of the two claims do you reject, and why?

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"Fundamentalist" Atheists

Oh please, not more of this sillyness:

"Atheists like the Richard Dawkins of this world are just as fundamentalist as the people setting off bombs on the tube, the hardline settlers on the West Bank and the anti-gay bigots of the Church of England. Most of them would regard each other as destined to fry in hell.

"You have a triangle with fundamentalist secularists in one corner, fundamentalist faith people in another, and then the intelligent, thinking liberals of Anglicanism, Roman Catholicism, baptism, methodism, other faiths - and, indeed, thinking atheists - in the other corner." says Slee [the Dean of Southwark].

The people who bandy about these insults never seem to bother addressing Dawkins' standard response (HT B&W):

"Fundamentalist" usually means, "goes by the book." And so, a religious fundamentalist goes back to the fundamentals of The Bible or The Koran and says, "nothing can change." Of course, that's not the case with any scientist, and certainly not with me. So, I'm not a fundamentalist in that sense.

Similarly for accusations of "dogmatism". Almost any atheist will grant that their non-belief is provisional, and open to change if contrary evidence were to appear. Sadly, too many reporters and religious commentators seem incapable of distinguishing dogmatism from confident (but evidence-responsive) belief.

Note that one might have a very high degree of belief in some proposition, without thereby being at all dogmatic. I'm extremely confident that unicorns do not exist. But I'm not an "no-unicorns dogmatist", because new evidence could always change my mind. That's how rationality works. You align your degree of belief with your assessment of the evidence. The evidence (that I'm aware of) is stacked against gods and unicorns, so I don't believe in either. If my evidence changes, then so will my beliefs. Simple.

Probably what the critics are really meaning to get at is the idea that some atheists are outspoken and "evangelical", and hope to persuade others to their point of view. But isn't free inquiry and public debate a good thing? (Of course there are some contexts where criticising others' views would be inappropriate. But not all. There is a place for robust theological, no less than political, public debate.)

It's entirely possible for reasonable, "thinking atheists" to be strongly opposed to religion. Some may be opposed to religion because they think it is socially pernicious, propping up morally unjustifiable positions (e.g. anti-gay bigotry). Others may be principled evidentialists, and hold that one ought to believe what the evidence supports. They then oppose religion for the same reason they do astrology -- it's unsupported nonsense, and people are being unreasonable when they believe that stuff. Either basis for hostility seems perfectly reasonable to me.

At the end of the day, people who denounce "militant atheists" are promoting a double-standard, insulating religious beliefs from criticism when no-one would dream of offering other beliefs such protection. Over to Dawkins:

The world is made safe for people like [the 'God Hates Fags' crowd] and Osama Bin Laden because we've all been brainwashed to respect religious faith and not to criticize it with the same vigor we criticize political and other sorts of opinions that we disagree with.

If you can say, "such and such a view is part of my religion," everybody tiptoes away with great respect. "Oh, it's part of your religion," then of course, you must go ahead. In a way, we've been asking for trouble by moderate people persuading us to give to all religion a respect, which it has never done anything to deserve.

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Religion and Deliberation

The upcoming Carnival of Citizens sports a "Church and State" theme. There's a lot that could be said here, but for this post I want to look at how religion fits with a deliberative conception of democracy.

The right policy is that which the general public would converge upon, following informed ideal deliberation. In reality, that ideal remains out of reach; but we do the best we can. As a deliberative democrat, I hold that we should promote informed deliberation among citizens, in hopes that the best-justified positions will ultimately carry the day.

Receptivity is a key value here: it's vital to note that public debate is not merely another instrument of power, manipulating others to do as you want. Rather, it is seen as a co-operative, rational enterprise. We all have the shared goal of promoting justice and the good. We may have divergent ideas about what exactly this involves. But, recognizing our own fallibility, we remain open to the possibility of changing our minds, if faced with stronger opposing arguments. In short, deliberative democracy is about civic respect, or the commitment to an inclusive and collaborative politics: working together to discern the right action, rather than unilaterally forcing my views on others.

So, where does religion fit into all this? I guess that depends on the nature of the religion, and the way one tries to bring it into politics. If one's religion is based on public reason, then I see no problem in principle. For example, if you think that God's hand is evident in nature, and his perfect character transparent to reason, then you may try to bring me to see this. If there are good reasons to think that scripture provides an accurate moral guide, then you can share those reasons with me. We might argue about the correct interpretation, or even about whether the purported Holy Book is a relevant guide at all, but those are issues to be settled through deliberation; the answers are not "given", or something we can know prior to inquiry. They are entirely appropriate for public debate.

On the other hand, the more dogmatic forms of religion have no place here, for they are inconsistent with civic respect. For example, if you are certain that the truth has been revealed to your group alone, and that all others are irredeemably blind to it, then you will be incapable of meaningful deliberation with them. The dogmatist is not receptive to alternative possibilities, and may see no point in collaborating with "morally degenerate" infidels. He has no respect for their civic autonomy -- their ability to reason about what sort of society ours should be, or how we should live together. To the dogmatist, sure of his own infallibility, people who disagree are merely obstacles to achieving what he already knows is "right".

There's nothing essentially religious about such attitudes, of course. Dogmatism comes in all stripes. But religion can be especially conducive to it, and the risk is heightened if a religious group happen to form a majority. They may seek simply to impose their private reasons ("faith") on the broader public, without any adequate justification. But that's not democracy. It's civil war.

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