The default position

It’s 2020! What on Earth are we supposed to do with this information? Well, I for one intend to use it as a year-long reminder to see things clearly, and voice my thoughts. Let’s call this 20/20 speech. That should totally be a thing. I’ll get us started..

Towards the end of last year I discovered a series of YouTube channels dedicated to ‘Street Epistemology’. This is something worth being a fan of. The idea is to engage with random members of the pedestrian public and investigate ‘truth claims’; how they know what they know. To do this, interviewers ask participants to pick a topic – something they believe with conviction – and scrutinise how sure they can be about it. In a pure Socratic fashion this isn’t about agreeing or disagreeing with the claim. It’s not a debate (though I’m feverishly partial to those as well). It’s about shaking the tree – uncovering the methods people use to arrive at a particular belief, and asking “Is this belief reasonable?”

The topics discussed range from gender identity, to holy books, to ghosts, to the effectiveness of vaccines. Still, by far the most frequent and popular conversations are concerned with the existence or nonexistence of God. Three hundred years on from the enlightenment and the big G-O-D is still a philosophical hot potato! The logic people use to justify their position is always fascinating, which means the question keeps on giving! Naturally, once you’ve sunk into an epistemological mindset you can’t help but direct the same line of questioning at yourself; “What makes me think health supplements don’t really work?”, “How confident am I that ‘positive thinking’ can improve my life?” and for the sake of this blog, as 2020 kicks the chair out from beneath 2019’s feet, “Where do I stand on God?”

“At the heart of science is an essential balance between two seemingly contradictory attitudes – an openness to new ideas, no matter how bizarre or counter-intuitive they may be, and the most ruthless skeptical scrutiny of all ideas, old and new. This is how deep truths are winnowed from deep nonsense.”

– Carl Sagan

Quick confession; my thoughts on the almighty are largely geared towards the God of Christianity. He’s the one I bump into most often as I come from a Christian family. But really, my reasoning applies to any proposed supernatural intelligence. To address the question of whether God exists, it’s traditional to unpack a few ambiguous key terms. When I say ‘reasonable’ I mean; with good justification for accepting a claim without being absolutely certain. An argument is ‘justified’ if it is valid and logically sound – backed-up with supporting evidence. To say I ‘believe’ something simply means that I have become convinced that the claim is true, not that it necessarily IS true. Finally, to be regarded as ‘knowledge’, a claim must be believed and justified, which you’ll notice makes knowledge a kind of belief. And another thing, absolute certainty is not required for something to pass as knowledge. There is no good reason to think that absolute certainty can ever be achieved, in any ultimate sense, about anything!

With that out of the way, why bother? If certainty is irrelevant to the issue of God (or anything else) why debate it? The short answer is; because we rarely wait until we have certainty, or even knowledge, before we act. Most of the time our actions are based on our beliefs, and those actions have consequences. No matter who we are, we should all be in the business of trying to believe as many reasonable things and as few unjustifiable things as possible. Surely we can all agree on that?

“There’s a difference between not knowing something because the circle hasn’t expanded large enough to encompass it, and declaring it is in principle unknowable. The history of ‘what it is to know stuff’ does not support the contention that there are things that are unknowable”

– Neil deGrasse Tyson

A core value of mine – and serial new years resolution – is to keep an accurate impression of the world in my head. At least as accurate as possible. For sure I missed the mark again last year, but to claim our perceptions reflect reality in any defensible way, our beliefs have to be reasonable. I’ll give you an example. Think of a bowl of snakes (don’t think about why). Logically, there is either an even or an odd number of snakes in the bowl. If you told me that you knew for a fact there was an even number, I’d wonder how you could be sure? Without tipping them out and counting, dividing the weight of the entire bowl by the weight of one snake, or making some other empirical measurement, there is no reasonable way somebody could form a rock-solid opinion about it. Pointing this out doesn’t mean I believe there’s an odd number of snakes; I simply don’t know how many there are, and have no information to ground a belief one way or the other. I am agnostic about it. This is my position on the subject of a creator God. I call myself an ‘agnostic’ atheist not because I believe there is NO God, but because I have no reason to believe that there IS one.

In my opinion, not believing should be the default position until a claim is proven one way or the other. Otherwise we’d believe all kinds of competing theories simultaneously. Once you’re comfortable with uncertainty, ‘reason’ may be the only way to discriminate between incompatible un-provable things. Many people will argue that belief in their God is reasonable, and here we come to an interesting complication; a person can become convinced for good or bad reasons. What passes for incontestable evidence in one person’s eyes can be poppycock to someone else! It goes without saying, if the quality of evidence for God’s existence met everyone’s standard, having been found to be valid and logically sound, it would be a big deal! If such a universally satisfying proof emerged it would be global news, and change the face of philosophical and scientific inquiry forever!

This hasn’t happened. Ever. Instead, pro-God arguments tend to be refuted or rebutted pretty consistently. Theologians then rework their ideas to avoid unpopular bits, and re-present them in an endless cycle of creative thinking. The oversight in all this is that it attempts to guide evidence towards a favoured conclusion, when the evidence itself should be your guide! At the extreme end of the belief scale, when God is believed to have revealed himself personally to someone (who could not possibly be mistaken), that’s usually where the conversation ends. Such an oracle has set the acceptance criteria for their own claim and instigated a circular argument. Stalemate. Game over.

“This cycle has been repeated so many times and for so long, that I think there’s actually a good argument to be made that there are no gods – especially as none of them have stepped in to correct this bumbling cycle of inadequate defenses.”

– Matt Dillahunty

Not all leaps of faith are equal. You can leap from a solid rock, or from a rotten branch. We can use philosophy to assess how firm our footing is before taking an intellectual risk. Or at least we should! Currently, there are several long-standing arguments in support of a deistic God – an agency that created the universe. This may have been done deliberately or otherwise, but a deity never interferes with mortal affairs. That’s the distinction, as I understand it. A deistic God sets the cosmic ball rolling before stepping aside, never to intervene in the unfolding of history. If you ask me, deistic arguments aren’t half as persuasive, elegant, or comprehensive as more testable alternatives arising from scientific enquiry. Still, they can’t be falsified, so I’m happy to admit that I don’t know. And neither do you! That’s what makes existence such an enduring and alluring mystery.

Without testable predictions even the most reasonable ‘creation stories’ boil down to ‘just-so stories’ that don’t progress our understanding of anything. However, if you find yourself convinced by one of them – if you feel confident that a supernatural being really did jump-start the universe we live in – there is still a very long way to go before you can defend a theistic God, particular to any one faith. Between ‘deism’ and ‘theism’ lies an unbridgeable gulf that logic and reason are unfit to straddle. Legendary social critic Christopher Hitchens argued that even if we grant an ‘ultimate prime mover’, believers would still have to prove; that such a being knows who we are, that it cares about us personally, that it minds what we do, that it answers our prayers, that it has our best interests at heart, and that it is any kind of moral authority worth obeying – a packed itinerary of dubious leaps of faith. I call myself an agnostic ‘atheist’ because no thinker in history has been able to shift from the deistic position to a theistic one in any intellectually satisfying way.

That so much of the world can be precisely explained and empirically verified, without any detectable supernatural meddling, is another good reason to suppose no theistic God exists. But how might we combat epistemologically vapid claims, like personal revelation, which lack concrete evidence? One option is to try fighting holy fire with holy fire. It’s damning to find over 1000 denominations of Christianity alone, offering conflicting interpretations of God’s infallible word! The jury is still out on pretty much every detail. Combining all these Christian flavours with the myriad other religions on offer – not to mention all the lines that have been discontinued – gives us a bewilderingly long and varied menu of mutually unpalatable gods. Instead, keep in mind that while not all gods can be true, all of them can be false!

Religion was our species’s first attempt to discover truth. For the longest time it was the only tool we had to comprehend the world around us. Gods made sense of the celestial spheres and seasons so we didn’t have to. Before we discovered microorganisms, curses and evil spirits were the obvious cause of disease. Back then, our childish, ignorant, terrified species could hardly be blamed for inventing superstitious explanations, especially as they inspired our first stab at philosophy, morality, healthcare, and government. Lots of good came from it. Even so, because it was our first attempt, it was our worst! Today, we have far more robust and instructive explanations for all these things. And the knowledge has been hard won! Humanity suffered for eons to sweep those mysteries away, yet many still willingly entertain systems of belief that regard critical thinking as a mortal sin.

Science is often attacked for being progressive; for revising its position as new data emerges, and changing over time. This is kryptonite to religious dogma as science does not – and should not – maintain a rigid mindset impervious to scrutiny and learning. I’ve heard science described as a ‘religion of naturalism’, but this is a mistake. Rather than dismissing supernatural forces outright, it’s more intellectually honest to say that science recognises its investigative limits. Since nothing supernatural can be scientifically verified, we are stuck exploring natural causes. This is inconvenient because, to me, the existence of a supernatural God might be more plausible if any evidence for the supernatural could be found.

Many theists will leap onto their tables at this point, evangelising the plain truth of supernatural causation! Supporting anecdotes, like divine guidance and instruction, are never accompanied by tests or predictions which can be investigated. Any indirect correlational evidence between natural and supernatural phenomena would be useful, as long as it was consistent, reliable, repeatable, and falsifiable. Only then could believers construct a reasonable case, and faith would not have to be so blind.

“The sea, the stars, the night wind in waste places, mean more to me than even the human beings I love best, and I am conscious that human affection is to me at bottom an attempt to escape from the vain search for God”

– Bertrand Russell

One final thought; trying to marry Christian beliefs with anthropological history paints a very dark picture. For the first few tens of thousands of years, the human race may have boasted an average life expectancy of around thirty years. Infant mortality would have been sky-high during the infancy of our species. Bacterial and viral disease would have been devastating and terrifying as there was little hope of prevention or remedy. Our earlier ancestors must have been periodically annihilated in droves! Natural disasters and harsh environmental changes would have taken their toll, but nothing could compare to the threat of a violent death by other tribes. Perpetual war defined and consumed the first human societies, erupting over land, females, food, water, shelter, and revenge – anything its possible to fight over!

Assuming our race to be a flippantly conservative 100,000 years old, theists would have to believe that for around 95,000 years or more – 95% of our time on this planet – heaven passively watched our relentless hardship, refusing to help. Why such prolonged indifference? Only about 3 to 4,000 years ago, in an impoverished part of the Middle East, did God finally offer us a shot at redemption. He chose to do this using mass murder, human sacrifice, and plagues – As if there were no better way to make us behave ourselves. Considering God’s grand intervention was not staged at a time or place where many people could reason, read, or investigate scientifically, it’s no surprise that proof remains so elusive.

God predicted this, of course. An intelligent creator, having set people in a world where evidence is so crucial to the formation of knowledge, would be well aware of our inability to investigate supernatural events. If He really expected us to take Him seriously, wouldn’t God have taken measures to alleviate such inductive limitations? With the debate still unresolved after millennia of careful, painstaking deliberation by generations of educated, enlightened, highly intelligent thinkers, it’s not unreasonable to maintain the default position that no gods exist.