Vox Popoli

ANTI-APOLOGETIC 7

 “You have faith your partner loves you.”

In 2007, Dawkins was asked this question in a debate with British philosopher John Lennox (Dawkins, 2007). Dawkins eventually replied it’s “not the right use of the word.” Lennox responded, “Oh, it is.” It’s not.

“You have faith your partner loves you” tends to be an “early game” response, given before faith has been razed. It’s similar to, “You have faith in science,” but not as lofty. It’s a more colloquial way of saying that in everyday events you use faith to navigate reality.

Comparing that for which we have abundant evidence (the actions of a real person) to a faith claim, which by definition is that for which we lack evidence (like the existence of an undetectable creator of the universe), is not analogous.

The idea that my wife probably loves me is not a radical hypothesis. The idea that there is a being who created the universe, inseminated a woman, and gave birth to a son who rose from the dead, is an extraordinary, radical claim. Equating an extraordinary claim with a mundane one, and then suggesting they “both require faith,” is disanalogous.

VD RESPONSE: Whether a claim is mundane or extraordinary is irrelevant. In either case, a claim is either true or it is not true. You may think you know your wife loves you, but you don’t actually know that any more than you know exactly how many days the Virgin Mary was pregnant before giving birth to the Christ Child. There are 1,116,000 divorces in the United States every year. Do you truly think none of those people wrongly believed that their partner loved them?

We all use faith to navigate our daily reality every single day. You say faith is “pretending to know what you don’t know”, but that is simply putting a simplistic spin on what everyone really does, which is act on the basis of a chosen assumption. You choose to act on the assumption that your wife loves you, and while that may not be a radical hypothesis, you may well discover one day that it isn’t true directly from her own lips. There are tens of millions of men and women who can tell you, from bitter experience, that all the “abundant evidence” you cite is totally meaningless with regards to proving that your partner really loves you.

ANTI-APOLOGETIC 8

“My faith is beneficial for me.”

I never allow the conversation to devolve into the merits of faith until my interlocutor has explicitly admitted that faith is an unreliable path to the truth. Almost invariably discussion about the alleged benefits of faith are red herrings, distracting one from the main issue—whether or not faith can reliably help one to arrive at the truth.

In your work as a Street Epistemologist, once you’ve started engaging the faithful in dialectical interventions, you’ll notice conversations about the merits of faith will have no clear demarcation. Someone won’t say, “Okay, you’re correct, faith is a failed epistemology and thus highly unlikely to get one to the truth. However, having faith is of tremendous benefit both to the faithful and to society.”

Conversations about whether or not faith is beneficial should only take place after your interlocutor explicitly states that faith is an unreliable path to truth. Once you ask people to acknowledge this, you’ll almost never enter into a conversation about the benefits of faith.

If you do, however, find yourself in this position, I’d ask how an unreliable reasoning process can benefit someone. I’d also ask how an unreliable and potentially unrevisable faulty process of reasoning can benefit an entire group of people.

One of the problems with the benefit argument is that people can be mistaken about what’s in their own interest. On an individual level, heroin addicts, alcoholics, and people in abusive relationships will, at various times, claim these states of affairs are beneficial. And in the realm of religious faith, people are often mistaken about what’s in their interest—for example, decisions about personal relationships that are not sanctioned by the faith (my grandfather, who converted to Catholicism, was prohibited by the Catholic Church from walking my mother down the aisle at her wedding because my parents were married in an Apostolic Church), refraining from engaging in homosexual relationships, staying in a deeply unhappy and emotionally harmful marriage due to prohibitions on divorce, physically harmful self-flagellation or extreme fasting, etc.

On a macro level, the Taliban believe imprisoning half their population and beating them is not only in their interest but also their duty: The more people who share a faulty process of reasoning the greater the magnification of potential harm. Premodern history is littered with cultures that have navigated themselves to extinction in part due to faith.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, all or virtually all of the studies you’ll hear people cite about the alleged benefits of belief communities have nothing to do with faith, and everything to do with religion, community, social networks, social support, etc.

It could be that the variables in these studies being tested are social cohesion and group reciprocity. Faith would need to be teased out and isolated before any benefits could be shown. To my knowledge, no study has isolated faith as a variable and shown its positive results.

Notice how right here Boghossian even admits that he won’t even try to make a case without having gotten his interlocutor to surrender on the primary point of the discussion. So, this tells us that when dealing with a Street Epistemologist, one should never agree to any of his definitions or agree to concede anything “just for the sake of argument” even if one doesn’t have actually a problem with them. Just like an NFL cornerback chucking a receiver at the line, refusing to go along with Street Epistemologist’s rote routines will disrupt him and throw him off his line of attack. It forces them to improvise, and the more they are forced to actually think and improvise, the more likely it is that they will make the sort of obvious blunder that you can exploit to destroy both their confidence in their arguments as well as their pretense at intellectual credibility.

VD RESPONSE: That is an impressive collection of ignorant statements. First, it is outright hilarious to hear an atheist talking about cultures navigating themselves to extinction given the fact that atheists are much less likely to marry or to have children than people from every faith tradition on the planet, with the possible exception of Catholic priests sworn to celibacy. Even the Taliban are far more evolutionarily fit than you atheists.

Now, wouldn’t you agree that if you could avoid becoming more likely to be infected by an STD, more likely to smoke, more likely to become an alchoholic, more likely to become a drug addict, more likely to be depressed, more likely to commit suicide, and more likely to sexually abuse a child, that be pretty beneficial? It would add years to your life, right?

And that’s just one example of the many benefits of faith. You said yourself that religious faith can lead to “refraining from engaging in homosexual relationships”.

What I find most disappointing, however, is the way that you’ve again shown yourself to be a science denier. You openly admit that there are no shortage of scientific studies that show the benefits of religious faith, but then you turn around and claim, with absolutely no evidence whatsoever, that all of those scientists are incompetent and unable to understand the concept of controlling for various factors. Whatever happened to your claim that “Science is the best way we’ve currently found to explain and understand how the universe works”?

But what is even worse is that as someone who is actively attempting to destroy those religious communities and those social networks of faith-based groups, your criticism of those studies about the benefits of faith communities shows that you are knowingly attempting to harm people. You are knowingly attempting to destroy something that you admit is beneficial to people. Even if you were correct and the primary benefits of faith come from its community aspects, you’re not helping anyone by attacking their faith, you are trying to harm them by cutting them off from the very communities that benefit them!

And you can’t hide behind an excuse that the communities will exist even if the faith that sustains it vanishes either. You said yourself that you don’t believe religious faith has to be replaced by anything. So, whether the scientific benefits happen to stem from religious faith itself or from the faith-based community it inspires, your actions are clearly both harmful and malicious.

ANTI-APOLOGETIC #5

“Science can’t explain quantum mechanics.”

This line is tossed out in conversations when all else has failed in a desperate attempt to fortify the fiefdom of faith. As frequently as I’ve heard this, and asked people exactly what they mean, I’m not even sure how this could be a defense of faith. Quantum mechanics is science, discovered through the tools of science, and is verifiable and testable within science.

The attempt to draw fire away from the discussion may be why I’ve never read this defense of faith in peer-reviewed literature. It also doesn’t fall into one of Harris’s categories. It is not another version of the God of the gaps argument, and is not precisely a deepity.

I think this statement may be a way of saying that we can’t really be certain of anything. On one level, this is a feeble attempt to undermine reason by stating that there are some mysteries even our best and brightest can’t grasp—thus giving the faithful license to pretend to know things they don’t know.

On an even more pedestrian level, I’ve often heard this deployed as a justification for miracles. That is, quantum instability leaks into the visible realm—what Dawkins calls the Middle Kingdom, or what British philosopher J. L. Austin termed the realm of “medium-sized dry goods” (Dawkins, 2005)—and could be responsible for a whole host of bizarre occurrences, like the sea parting or people being spontaneously healed.

In the latter case, the response to this is that quantum weirdness does not lend itself to a specific faith tradition. That is, if somehow what was happening in the quantum realm seeped into the Middle Kingdom and caused unexplained phenomena (and there is no evidence it has) this wouldn’t be relegated to a single faith tradition. Quantum weirdness didn’t cause only the alleged miracles in the Koran (or the Bible)—but if someone claimed to know this is how the phenomena manifested, I’d ask how they knew this and to produce the evidence. (For practice, you can also argue that quantum states do manifest, but only in [insert any faith tradition other than your interlocutor’s].)

In the former case, I’m not sure how a lack of understanding about subatomic particles translates into the need for faith. Because we don’t yet and might never entirely understand how the universe is ordered and operates in the realm of the very, very small, this does not translate into needing to use an unreliable epistemology.

VD RESPONSE: How quickly you forget your own definitions! You have been droning on and on about how bad faith is, and how faith is pretending to know what you don’t know, and now that it is pointed out that you don’t understand quantum mechanics or know how the universe is ordered and operates at the finest level of detail, suddenly you abandon all that? Suddenly you can’t figure out how a lack of knowledge about subatomic particles relates to pretending to know something you don’t about the universe?

The existence of quantum mechanics completely undermines your entire epistemology. It undermines your entire pretense that your materialism is any more meaningful, any more indicative of true objective reality, than the pagan who believes the universe is resting on the back of a giant turtle.

Your epistemology is entirely rooted upon the basic assumption that what we can see, touch, feel, and measure is all there is. Quantum mechanics upends that assumption, and thereby delegitimizes the materialist metric by which you have been attempting to pass judgment on the supernatural.

As for how the quantum world potentially relates to various faith traditions, I would direct your attention to a televised lecture by Bryan Cox, the British pop physicist, called A Night with the Stars. At minute 36 of the lecture, Cox explained that the Pauli Exclusion principle is a universal phenomenon and that by heating up a diamond by rubbing it, all the electrons in the entire universe would immediately adjust their energy states so that none of them would precisely match any of those in the diamond.

Now, I don’t know if this is true or not. You don’t know if it is true or not. The electron state of a diamond-sized object orbiting a star in the proto-galaxy UDFy-33436598 is not the sort of thing we can readily observe. But the fact is that the idea of a Creator God, and any other number of observed supernatural concepts, is considerably less ridiculous to nearly everyone than magic universe-transforming trans-galactic diamonds that operate at speeds much faster than light. Quantum mechanics may not lend itself to proving any faith tradition, but it does tend to destroy the effectiveness of conventional Newtonian science as a basis for ridiculing the various faith traditions.

A citation of quantum mechanics is not so much a defense of faith as it is people pointing out to you that you have the very sort of faith in things you cannot prove and things you do not know that you decry in others. As we can easily observe in your next anti-apologetic.

ANTI-APOLOGETIC #6

“You have faith in science.”

This is usually a “late game” line, offered after faith has been demolished and exposed as fraudulent. People say this because they want to show some parity in belief: they have faith in X and you have faith in Y. You both have faith, but in different things. I’ve also found that people make this statement because they’re afraid of being seen as stupid or ignorant, so they want to leave the conversation and save face.

Science is the antithesis of faith. Science is a process that contains multiple and redundant checks, balances, and safeguards against human bias. Science has a built-in corrective mechanism—hypothesis testing—that weeds out false claims.

Claims that come about as a result of a scientific process are held as tentatively true by scientists—unlike claims of faith that are held as eternally true. Related to this, claims that come about as the result of a scientific process are falsifiable, that is, there is a way to show the claims are false. This is not the case with most faith claims. For example, there’s no way to falsify the claim that the Norse god Loki was able to assume other forms.

Scientists also try to prove claims false (falsification), unlike faith leaders who unequivocally state that their faith claims are true. Related to the bizarre notion that there’s a vast conspiracy among scientists to suppress certain lines of research, if a scientist can demonstrate that a popular scientific claim is false, she can become famous, get tenure, publish her results, earn more money, and become respected by her peers. Moreover, the more prominent the defeated hypothesis, the greater the reward. If a preacher states that the claims of his faith tradition are false, he’s excommunicated, defrocked, or otherwise forced to abandon his position.

Science is a method of advancing our understanding. It is a process we can use to bring us closer to the truth and to weed out false claims. Science is the best way we’ve currently found to explain and understand how the universe works. It should be jettisoned if something better (more explanatory, more predictive, more parsimonious, etc.) comes along (Schick & Vaughn, 2008).

VD RESPONSE: Your attempted defense only succeeds in proving the charge is true. Let me remind you that you defined faith as “pretending to know what you don’t know”. And while you say that “all faith is blind”, yours is observably blinder than most. Even if the religious faithful are pretending to know something they can’t know to be true, you are pretending to know something we all know to be false. You make fun of people who believe in fairies in the garden, then promptly proclaim your belief in white-coated fairies working in the lab.

The science you describe doesn’t exist. It has never existed. It is the Platonic Form of an ideal Science that exists nowhere but in your imagination and the overheated imaginations of the scientific faithful. Science, as it is actually practiced by scientists on this planet, does not contain “multiple and redundant checks, balances, and safeguards against human bias.” As it is actually practiced, one could make much stronger case for Accounting. You don’t only have faith in science, you have a badly misplaced faith in it.

The fact is that the vast majority of published and peer-reviewed papers are never checked, not even once. The fact is that most published and peer-reviewed papers are littered with basic mathematical and statistical errors that are never discovered because most scientists are mathematically and statistically incompetent. The fact is that modern science is a corrupt big business and most scientists are intellectual mercenaries whose compensation and continued employment depends entirely upon producing results that are in line with their employer’s expectations.

Your declarations are manifestly untrue. Scientists don’t try to prove claims false. They do precisely the opposite. Not only have a statistically significant percentage of published and peer-reviewed papers been confirmed to contain FABRICATED data, but the former editor of the British Medical Journal, Richard Smith has declared: “Most scientific studies are wrong, and they are wrong because scientists
are interested in funding and careers rather than truth.”

I strongly suggest you read the paper, published in PLOS Medicine, entitled “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False” to better understand how fundamentally misplaced your naive faith in science is. What you are claiming to be “the best way we’ve currently found to explain and understand how the universe works” observably doesn’t even work as well as a coin toss, and that’s before we even get to Quantum Mechanics, String Theory, Global Warming, Evolution by Natural Selection, and a whole host of other “scientific facts” that are no more currently falsifiable than Loki’s purported shape-shifting

ANTI-APOLOGETIC #4

“My faith is true for me” is rarely heard among more sophisticated believers and almost never heard among fundamentalists.

It is very difficult to explain why this claim is fallacious because often the type of person who makes this statement does not have the intellectual or educational wherewithal to understand more thoughtful, substantive responses. (The exceptions are the youthful solipsists, the postmodernists, and the epistemological and cognitive relativists.)

The statement, “My faith is true for me,” means the faith-based beliefs one holds are true for the speaker and not necessarily for other people. The utterer of this statement is not making claims about faith beliefs being universally true—that is, true for all people.

Here’s my response: does your faith tradition include statements of fact about the world? For example, humans are thetans trapped on Earth in physical bodies, Jesus walked on water, the ability to fly can result from fasting (Jacobsen, 2011), or the Garden of Eden is in Jackson County, Missouri.

If your faith tradition includes no empirical statements, then it’s unclear what your faith tradition entails. However, if your faith tradition makes empirical claims (and all faith claims that fall within the domain of religion make empirical claims), then what you’re saying is that your belief is true for you, regardless of how the world actually is. Since the world is the way it is regardless of our beliefs or of the epistemology we use to know the world, “my faith is true for me” is a nonsensical statement. One can have faith that if one jumps out of a twenty-story window one will polymorph into an eagle and fly to safety. This doesn’t make it the case.

What one is really saying when one states, “My faith is true for me,” is, “I prefer my delusions, and I wish to remain with them in spite of the evidence.”

Once more, we see Boghossian making an appeal to his personal incredulity. And the fact that some people may not understand “more thoughtful substantive responses” explaining why the statement is fallacious does not mean that it is difficult to explain why it is fallacious. After all, Boggie correctly notes that the youthful solipsists, the postmodernists, and the epistemological and cognitive relativists all have the intellectual wherewithal to understand any such explanation, and yet Boghossian does not provide one.

As will become clear from my recommended response, it’s not hard to understand why Boghossian doesn’t want to explain why the statement is fallacious. Nevertheless, because I am not a relativist, I would not recommend relying upon this particular defense of faith except as a rhetorical feint that is a prelude to an attack on unwarranted atheist morality claims.

VD RESPONSE: My claim that my faith is true for me is no different than your claim that your morality is true for you. Do you believe that some actions are good and others are evil? Do you believe that some actions are objectively desirable and others are objectively undesirable? If one believes in an objective moral Law that is universally applicable to everyone, then one must necessarily believe in a Lawgiver.

However, since you reject the existence of the Lawgiver, we know you also reject the existence of an objective universal moral law. Therefore the limits of your moral claims extend no farther than you. What you’re saying is that your moral beliefs are true for you, regardless of what the moral law actually is. You’re saying that you prefer to act however you momentarily desire, regardless of the morality of your actions.

This is why even atheists believe other atheists are less trustworthy than believers. And the bloody history of atheist rule has shown that people whose moral reality is subjective are far more dangerous to the world than people whose perception of reality is subjective. The subjective believer may be delusional and dangerous to himself, but the subjective moralist is not only delusional, he is dangerous to everyone else.

ANTI-APOLOGETIC #16

Defense: “Atheism and secular humanism are as much a religion—and require as much faith—as any religion. Atheists and secular humanists love to equivocate on religious issues—claiming they are not religious and are free of religious bias—but they are no less religious or faithful than anyone else. They are not aware of their own faith and are blind to their biases. There is a saying: ‘There are no nonreligious people, only false Gods.’”

Response: “Confusing atheism with secular humanism demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding as to what the terms mean. Secular humanism is a philosophy and a set of ideals; atheism is simply the lack of belief in a God or Gods. There is no dogma attached to nonbelief in a divine Shiva the Destroyer. And, as to the saying—it’s silly. To assert that people are incapable of letting go of belief in mythological fairytales without attaching themselves to some other form of worship is narrow-minded, condescending, pessimistic, and without evidential merit.”

VD RESPONSE: How can you possibly think that is an adequate response? You are providing an example of the very evidence you claim does not exist! You are responding to a charge of atheist equivocation by blatantly equivocating! The claim was that atheism and secular humanism were religions that required faith… and your response is to say that atheism is not secular humanism? That is a complete non sequitur.

As a Street Epistemologist, you are an atheist who is actively selling secular humanism, a specific “humanistic vision” as Peter Boghossian describes it, and yet the moment you’re called on what you are doing, which is religious proselytizing, you retreat to pretending that your atheism is totally unrelated to your secular humanism.  And describing secular humanism as “a philosophy and a set of ideals” doesn’t mean that secular humanism isn’t a religion. Quite to the contrary, by describing it that way you have admitted that it is “a specific fundamental set of beliefs and practices generally agreed upon by a number of persons”. That is the literal dictionary definition of a religion!

You are not merely religious, you are a religious fanatic. You’re the secular humanist version of the crazy guy raving about the End of Days in the park.

As for atheism, it is merely a specific belief that is a subset of the secular humanist religion. Your position is no more reasonable than a Southern Baptist who doesn’t believe in infant baptism claiming that his lack of belief in infant baptism means he isn’t a theist. That sounds absurd, but it is no less absurd than your attempt to delink atheism from secular humanism.

Anti-Apologetic #3

“I don’t have enough faith to be an atheist.”

I have personally heard this objection innumerous times—mostly from those who are more fundamentalist in their orientation. My suspicion is that people who have genuine doubts about their faith but want to demonstrate or voice strong verbal support for their faith (not necessarily to others but for themselves) make this statement.

This defense is problematic for several reasons. First, what amount of “faith” is required for someone’s nonbelief in the Norse god Thor? Or, are most people Thor atheists? Does nonbelief in Thor require effort? Do people need to congregate and sing songs together to reinforce their nonbelief in Thor? Anyone who says, “I don’t have enough faith to be an atheist,” doesn’t understand what the word “atheist” means, or is simply insincere.

Second, one possible reason this defense has gained such traction is the starting point. The faithful start with defaulting to God; in other words, the faithful look at the world around them and say, “God.” I happen to be on a plane now, and when I look around I see clouds, seats, people, my laptop, but I don’t see an invisible, unifying metaphysical and supernatural element. I see objects. It is unclear to me why one’s default would be God.

Borrowing from a term first used by pastor and French theologian John Calvin, contemporary American Christian apologist Alvin Plantinga tries to answer questions of defaulting to God with the Sensus Divinitatis or “God sensor” (Plantinga, 2000). Basically, Plantinga’s answer is that some people have a built-in sense of the divine—something within them senses God in the same way that we have eyes that sense things in the visual realm.

One of the main problems with the God sensor argument is that just as some people allegedly claim to sense God, other people can allegedly claim to sense other imagined entities. This common rebuttal is referred to as “the Great Pumpkin” objection. In American cartoonist Charles M. Schulz’s comic strip Peanuts, Linus believes there’s a Great Pumpkin who arises from the pumpkin patch to reward well-behaved children. If the theist can claim that her sensation of God is immediate, why can’t anyone who genuinely feels an imagined entity claim that entity is real? (This argument can become very complicated, and as a general rule I’d suggest avoiding it whenever possible. Focus instead on the fact that one’s confidence in a sensation does not map onto its accuracy—just because people feel in their hearts the Emperor of Japan is divine, does not make the Emperor of Japan divine.)

When responding to, “I don’t have enough faith to be an atheist,” I begin by clearly defining the words “faith” and “atheist.” I can’t imagine how these two definitions could align so as to make this statement sensible.

VD RESPONSE: An appeal to your own lack of imagination is not only a fundamental logical fallacy, but is so hapless and inept a response that I would be embarrassed for you if I didn’t think you were an intellectually dishonest jerk who is willing to say anything in order to tear others down.

Also, you’re wrong. Let’s look at your own definitions of “faith” and “atheist”. You defined faith, improperly, as “pretending to know something you don’t”. As for atheist, you say: “Atheist,” as I use the term, means, “There’s insufficient evidence to warrant belief in a divine, supernatural creator of the universe.”

The two definitions don’t align because your definition of atheist doesn’t even conform to the grammatical rules of the English language. “Atheist” doesn’t mean “there’s insufficient evidence to believe” anything. It’s not a statement, it’s a freaking noun! An “atheist’ is a type of person, specifically, a person who does not believe in the existence of God, gods, or the supernatural, who “offers a humanistic vision”, to quote Peter Boghossian, and in most cases, also subscribes to rational materialism and scientific determinism.

And given that the possibility that God always existed cannot be ruled out, as per Mr. Boghossian’s Anti-Apologetic #1, it should be obvious that every atheist who claims God does not exist is someone who is pretending to know something he does not know. Which, according to your own definition, is someone who has faith.

Very few theists have the sort of faith required to engage in that pretense, to say nothing of the vast quantities required to pretend to know that the universe always existed, life came from non-life, science is the only means of obtaining reliable evidence, and global warming requires a global government.

ANTI-APOLOGETIC #15

Defense: “You’re just talking about blind faith. My faith is not blind.”

Response: “There is no need to modify the word ‘faith’ with the word ‘blind.’ All faith is blind. All faith is belief on the basis of insufficient evidence. That’s what makes it faith. If one had evidence, one wouldn’t need faith, one would merely present the evidence.”

VD RESPONSE: Your thinking is too simplistic. Faith is no more a binary matter than science is. I also notice that you’re changing the definition of faith again: before you said faith was “pretending to know what you don’t know”. You are also contradicting yourself here. What distinguishes “sufficient” evidence from “insufficient” evidence? What is the magical binary line that separates one form of evidence from the other?

Even “insufficient evidence” is still evidence, by definition, so your assertion that if one had evidence, one wouldn’t need faith is obviously false since you declare that faith necessarily requires a form of evidence upon which the belief is based.