Monday, October 26, 2009

Unburdened

One of my purposes in starting this blog has been to serve as a counterpoint to some of the atheists you tend to encounter online. You know the ones I'm talking about, I'm sure -- running around insisting religion is stupid and irrational, demanding that religious people prove God exists, and generally proving that fundamentalist Christianity by no means has a monopoly on assholes.

Part of my plan is a series of posts dealing with the serious flaws in standard Internet Atheist arguments. For this inaugural post, we'll talk about the burden of proof.

(Note: When I refer to God with a capital "G", I'm talking about a transcendent, omnipotent, omniscient creator which is also a person. I also intend the term to include sets of persons who have those properties when considered collectively, for example some views on the Hindu pantheon. I use the male singular pronoun to refer to God, because that's the tradition used by most people who believe in such a God. I am well aware that not every religious person believes in a singular, personal, masculine, transcendent divinity, and that any given tradition may reject one or all of those descriptors. No offense is intended or, I hope, taken. Please bear with me for the sake of argument.)

The concept of burden of proof, as used by Internet Atheists, has to do with competing claims about existence. Imagine, for example, that I claim there is such a thing as a three-humped camel. You claim there is no such thing. Obviously, only one of these claims can be true.

If there is such a thing as a three-humped camel, then I can prove it by producing the camel. On the other hand, if there is no such thing as a three-humped camel, the only way to prove it is to examine every camel in the world. Quite a difficult task! So, my claim is easier to test, and the burden of proof thus falls on me. In the absence of evidence for a three-humped camel, it's best to assume there is probably no such thing.

This may seem counterintuitive: the easier claim to prove is the one you assume is false. However, it makes sense if you think about it. Since, if true, my claim is so much easier to prove, the fact that I haven't proven it is suspicious. In general, claims that something exists are easier to prove than claims that it does not: to prove it exists, you just have to produce it, but to prove it does not requires searching the entire universe. Hence the rule of thumb that the burden of proof lies with the person making the positive claim of existence. Closely related is the claim "It's impossible to prove a negative." You can't prove that three-humped camels don't exist, because there's always the possibility that you missed the one camel that does have three humps.

If you stop there, it might seem like the Internet atheists have a point: doesn't the burden of proof rest on the person making the claim that God exists?

Well... not always. Remember, the only reason the burden of proof rests on the person claiming three-humped camels exist is because that is the easier claim to prove. In the case of God... well, how exactly would you go about proving that God exists? People have been trying for centuries, and consistently failed. God is neither logically necessary (there is nothing known about the universe which could not be true if God did not exist) nor empirically detectable. There is no device or experiment that can detect an omnipotent being if it doesn't want to be found, nor is there any way to be sure that an apparent miracle is not actually a perfectly natural phenomenon we simply haven't figured out yet.

What about disproving God? Again, you can't. It's not just a matter of checking every camel in the world -- here we're dealing with a three-humped camel that can look two-humped whenever it wants to. The way God is defined makes it impossible to disprove.

So, both claims are impossible to prove, and thus equally (infinitely) difficult to prove. Neither claim carries the burden of proof.

What does that mean? Well, with the camels, in the absence of evidence either way, it is more rational to disbelieve in the three-humped camel, because there should be evidence of it if it's true. That doesn't apply to God. In the absence of evidence either way, and all other things being equal, it is not more rational to disbelieve in the existence of God, nor is it more rational to believe in the existence of God. Both claims are equally (ir)rational.

16 comments:

  1. Internet Atheists, is it? Is the implication here that they're only atheists when they're on the internet, or that only assholes argue about things on the internet?

    I'll try not to be an asshole!

    You say you're a logical positivist, so I'm guessing here that your irritation stems from the fact that the Internet Atheists are treating the existence of god as a scientific question. However, as you note above, the existence of god does not meet the test of falsifiability, so there is no scientific claim to be made one way or the other.

    I'm willing to run with that. So what further conclusions does it lead to?

    Atheists can just go and do what they were going to do already.

    Non-specific theists obviously can never encounter any evidence for the existence of god, but what might it mean to believe in the existence of an omnipotent person who you can never contact or know anything about objectively? I guess we are limited to using inductive reason to see what would be good for human beings to do based on the unfalsifiable existence of such an omnipotent being.

    Theists of a more specific bent seem to be a bit more at sea, since some of the time at least they are in fact making falsifiable claims about the existence of god. I know that as an atheist I get a little irritated when such people tell me that they have some kind of received knowledge about what god might want of them or me.

    Please allow me to suggest that some Internet Atheists are not assholes, but rather that a good discussion on the subject usually becomes shouting or big ol' paragraphs that will admit no analysis, and so the whole thing breeds boredom or aggravation soon enough.

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  2. Of course most atheists on the Internet are not assholes. By "Internet atheist" I mean atheists who are suffering from GIFT.

    "I know that as an atheist I get a little irritated when such people tell me that they have some kind of received knowledge about what god might want of them or me."

    How exactly would you go about falsifying such a claim? If the operations of God are indistinguishable from the absence of God by any test, then divine revelation is indistinguishable from imagination, conscience, etc. It's unfalsifiable, and in fact equivalent to any other ethical claim (which is to say, normative, not positive).

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  3. Wait...so if a claim is falsifiable but unlikely presume it's false until evidence is forthcoming, but if the claim is unfalsifiable it gets an immediate 50% probability (we should grant it equal standing with rejection of the claim)?

    Goodness, why would anyone ever want to make a falsifiable claim? I have super powers, I just don't wanna show you. So now the claim that I'm a superhero is just as reasonable as the claim that I'm a normal human being. It is also just as reasonable to believe in the historicity of the Harry Potter books as to disbelieve. The wizards use their magic to hide from us Muggles, therefore: unfalsifiable.

    I think the very fact that religion needs this sort of defense is strong evidence against it. If Christians were going around raising the dead and drinking Drain-O straight from the bottle without harm, they wouldn't feel any need to hide behind philosophical jiggery pokery. Even if we ignore the doctrine of omnipresence (there's nowhere God isn't, so how can we miss him?), there's the fact that God is supposed to be, at a minimum, powerful.

    Find me a Christian who will say, "Oh yes, I believe that God is entirely powerless, so much so that his existence is indistinguishable from his non-existence, even in principle. But I still worship him and place my hope in him." I don't doubt you can find believers who will retreat into the bushes of unfalsifiability when pressed, but that's just guerrilla warfare. Once the debate is over they'll go back to telling their friends about how wonderfully God has acted in their lives, crediting all sorts of good things to him, or believing that you're bound for Hell, or whatever.

    That the truth of a claim is inherently indistinguishable from its own falsity should not be an advantage with regard to burden of proof or the legitimacy the claim is granted in society.

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  4. Furthermore, you're letting theists get away with a shell game regarding the definition of "God."

    "God rules the motions of the heavens, turning the crystal spheres on which the heavenly bodies are mounted by His sovereign power. He causes storms and sunshine, drought and plenty, lightning is His weapon, and He is sending the Black Death as a punishment for our sins! He is responsible for the miracles of the Saints and their relics, and this right here is a piece of the True Cross!"

    Then science comes along and demonstrates that there are no crystal spheres, the heavenly bodies move according to natural physical principles, weather is caused by natural principles, lightning is electricity and a brothel with a lightning rod is safer than a church without one, and so on.

    Instead of admitting that that hypothesis of God has been falsified, the theist just packages the word "God" with a different, unfalsifiable meaning while acting as if that's what they've claimed all along. "God is the Ground of Being, and I believe in Him because He provides my life with a mythopoetic sense of meaning, purpose, and values, and I find community with the fellowship of His worshipers."

    The label ("God") is the same, but the thing being labeled is completely different. Until it isn't--i.e., when they're at Lourdes lining up for a vial of magically-healing holy water, or assuming that God has blessed their crystal pendant with the power to attract wealth, or whatever. The word "God" is a blank screen on which the believer may project anything at will, adding vagueness to unfalsifiability.

    So atheists, scientists, etc. are supposed to grant their beliefs epistemological equality with the null hypothesis (no evidence for their claims = presumption of falsity until evidence is forthcoming). But the believers claim certainty. They know God exists, and many of them are equally certain that their God will punish us for not believing as they do.

    Since we have to assume that it's equally likely that they're right as that they're wrong (they get 50% probability as a gift), but they're confident they've got 100%, it sure seems like the odds are in their favor, doesn't it? *Invokes Pascal's Wager* I think it's about time we repented of our sins and accepted Jesus Christ as our personal Lord and Savior. Right?

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  6. @KevinC: You have completely misread what I wrote. "I have super-powers" is easily proven, you just have to display them. Therefore, the burden of proof rests on your claim that you have super-powers. Whether or not you're willing to show them is immaterial; if you choose not to prove your claim then rational people are justified in disbelieving it.

    In Christianity, at least, the conception of God as the ground of all being and the warning against making empirically testable claims based on religious beliefs both originate with Augustine, who predates the scientific revolution by about a thousand years. So you can't really say that was a response to science finding out they're wrong.

    You are also assuming that the people lining up at Lourdes or whatever are individually the same people arguing for the transcendent conception of God. I see no evidence this is the case. There's at least five billion religious people in the world; of course their opinions, approaches, and level of superstition vary.

    All beliefs for which evidence is impossible have equal epistemological value, yes. So, the belief that there is no God is no more rational than the belief that there is one. This does not mean that all religious and all scientific claims are of equal epistemological value. Scientific claims, by definition, have supporting evidence and are falsifiable. Most religious claims do not. Hence, a rational person should believe the claim that life developed by random mutation and natural selection over hundreds of millions of years, rather than the claim that it happened in a single act of God 6,000 years ago.

    (Previous version of this comment replaced due to a sense-altering typo.)

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  7. Froborr: How do you then respond to those who mention Occam's razor? God, while perhaps impossible to demonstrate empirically, is certainly a more complex claim than no God.

    Also, you note that "There is no device or experiment that can detect an omnipotent being if it doesn't want to be found, nor is there any way to be sure that an apparent miracle is not actually a perfectly natural phenomenon we simply haven't figured out yet."

    That's certainly a little bit reductive. Some laws seem physically inviolate. If they were tomorrow to be violated (say one particular rock floats in the air) in a way that suggests deliberate communication with humanity (say rocks float in the air spelling out the Shma) the notion that it was being done with intent by a being of great power would be far more reasonable than "well we haven't yet discovered the law of no gravity on thursdays."

    In other words, any divine being with interest in us knowing about It specifically becomes to me a provable assertion--or at least one for which such a being could provide strong, persuasive evidence--and thus one with the burden of proof upon it.

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  8. sorry, was too eager with the second half of my last comment. But "God is just hiding from us" strikes me as problematic. "That guy has superpowers," might be a better example. How do you propose that we get him to demonstrate them?

    Or, in other words, it IS possible to write unverifiable statements. Must acceptance of any of them not be subject to a burden of proof?

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  9. The problem is that we're not dealing with an unverifiable claim. We're dealing with *two* competing unfalsifiable, unverifiable claims, and being asked to pick one. That's what makes this a special case, the fact that *both* claims are unfalsifiable.

    The problem with your floating rocks example is that, while it does strongly suggest that a being of great power is communicating with us, it doesn't imply that that being is God. It could be an alien prankster taking advantage of advanced technology based on principles we haven't discovered yet. Not even an omnipotent being can prove it's omnipotent. The best it can do is demonstrate that it can do anything we imagine; hardly the same thing.

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  10. But how does the pair of claims "that guy has superpowers that he will never, ever demonstrate, regardless of the conditions we impose" and "that guy lacks superpowers of any kind" differ? They're both unverifiable, in that neither side of the argument claims to be able to rush off and provide evidence, whatsoever. But it seems to me foolish to say, well then, these claims have equal weight. We have other epistemological tools, such as Occam's razor.

    Re: floating rocks
    Yeah, I think you've succinctly demonstrated the problem with "omnipotence" as a notion in general. It would be definitionally impossible to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt omnipotence, regardless of how much an omnipotent entity wanted to. (Which itself casts an interesting light on the boundaries of omnipotence, no?) But I think it's a bit of a shell game to say that because we can never be certain, evidence can never be provided. We could never be sure floaty-rock-guy was actually God. But we could be damn sure that someone God-ish was trying to chat us up, using incredible powers. No such person currently exists. But I recognize that I got overeager, and led away from the point of your article, and I'm willing to drop this line of discussion.

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  11. I guess, to reduce my argument to a single paragraph: you claim that once you construct a claim such that it and its negation are equally unprovable, any view on that claim is equally valid. While I don't see the immediate problem with that, it makes me wildly uncomfortable. Is it really equally reasonable to believe that "there exists a [Ludicrous object a] completely undetectable by any means in [proverbially silly location b]" and the converse? I think your argument may merely demonstrate the meaninglessness of an entity defined to be impossible to interact with.

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  12. Froborr? I was looking forward to your response to my last comment.

    Of course, if real world commitments have gotten in the way, my apologies.

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  13. Erl: "Is it really equally reasonable to believe that "there exists a [Ludicrous object a] completely undetectable by any means in [proverbially silly location b]" and the converse?"

    Not necessarily. I'll explore this in more depth later, but here's the short version: The definition of rational behavior is "Acting in a manner which, according to the best available information, appears likeliest to produce preferred outcomes."

    It is always rational to believe statements that appear likely to be true and disbelieve statements likely to be false, because doing the converse increases your likelihood of choosing a course of action that produces non-optimal results.

    However, with a statement like "God exists", which has zero likelihood of being true AND zero likelihood of being false, the rational thing to do is believe it or not according to whether that belief produces a preferred outcome. In my case, believing the statement does not produce a preferred outcome -- but for someone with different preferences, it might.

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  14. And yes, my argument implies that there is no singular, universal set of rational beliefs. Everyone has their own set of rational beliefs, although there is a strong overlap between the sets.

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  15. *If you stop there, it might seem like the Internet atheists have a point: doesn't the burden of proof rest on the person making the claim that God exists?*

    Yes.

    *Well... not always.*

    Yes, always.

    *In the case of God... well, how exactly would you go about proving that God exists?*

    Yes, how?

    *People have been trying for centuries, and consistently failed.*

    Yes. They have.

    *God is neither logically necessary (there is nothing known about the universe which could not be true if God did not exist) nor empirically detectable.*

    I'm so glad we agree.

    *...nor is there any way to be sure that an apparent miracle is not actually a perfectly natural phenomenon we simply haven't figured out yet.*

    Of course there is: Miracles do not happen. Ever. All that exists is the natural world and natural phenomenon.

    *What about disproving God? Again, you can't.*

    Of course I can. The existence of suffering disproves god.

    *The way God is defined makes it impossible to disprove.*

    Clever, that.

    *Neither claim carries the burden of proof.*

    Yes it does. People who claim something exists have to prove it.

    *That doesn't apply to God.*

    Yes, it does.

    *...it is not more rational to disbelieve in the existence of God , nor is it more rational to believe in the existence of God. Both claims are equally (ir)rational. **

    Yes it is. Try that sentence by swapping out "God" for "leprechauns" or "yetis" and you'll see why.

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  16. Yeah, no I just can't see my way to ever respecting the sentiment behind this. Because religion does not consist of a 3"x5" card with the words "God exists" on it. There are quite a few specific claims made and they're made with huge, usually murderous passion behind them. Sorry, but if the ground of being and creator of the universe leaves behind ZERO evidence of his presence, then

    A.) I have no reason whatsoever to worship him

    and

    B.) Why the fuck has anyone ever been murdered in his name?

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