Atheism Requires Justification Too | Graham Oppy

gram opy thanks for being here ah it's a pleasure you have been described by some as at least one of the most formidable atheist philosophers currently in the academy uh you're you're well known for your defense of philosophical atheism why do you think it is important to talk about the philosophy of the existence of a God that you don't think is actually real why do you spend so much of your life so much of your uh professional career talking about it okay so I mean I guess the first thing is it's not just one God I don't think there are any Gods right and so the the target here isn't just some particular version of the Christian God it's gods in general and the reason why it's important is because on the first of all most people are religious and most of the people who are religious believe in at least one God and on the other hand at least historically the position of atheism has not been regarded favorably by many people who are religious and in particular by religious authorities and the struggles there continue in many parts of the world so as you know for example uh there have been atheist bloggers in various countries who've been hacked to death and so on in the last decade so it's not like um the kind of struggles that happened way in the past in places like the UK have disappeared altogether from the planet yeah I mean your your work is is mostly sort of academic philosophy you're talking about arguments and syllogisms and and this kind of thing but am I interpreting you correctly in saying that although that's the area that you work in the motivation for doing so isn't just a sort of Love of you know academic philosophy but something a bit more real world so I think so and I've spent quite a lot of time in the last decade maybe more so in the last five years trying to take my philosophy to a wider public audience uh and maybe initially when I got into philosophy of religion I didn't think that that was the direction that it would go in I was just intrinsically interested in the kind of Highly local debates in the philosophy of religion journals but I've come to think that there's more to what I'm doing than that I think that the most boring question that people often ask in the context of theism and Atheism is how best to Define atheism because there seems to be this large semantic debate about whether atheism is the belief that there is no God or just a lack of belief that there is one sometimes called lack theism and I I have a suspicion that the reason why people like to advocate for the Lac theism definition is to absolve themselves of a burden of proof for their position that that's generally been my assessment that's not to say that it's a it's a sort of illegitimate position to hold but I think to call it atheism sometimes gives the impression it relies upon the idea that most people interpret that term slightly differently to the way they're using it uh but when pushed you can just sort of fall back on saying well I don't have the burden of proof here I know that you've advocated for a definition of atheism that that makes the claim that there are no Gods I was wondering if you could tell us briefly why that's the case but also why it is you think that the Lac theism definition is so popular in sort of colloquial atheist circles so I you don't want to make a fetish out of words so what really matters is the positions that are being adopted but it also matters what the linguistic community that how the linguistic community that you belong to uses the words and in academic philosophy uh it's just the way that the word atheism is used that it's a denial of the existence of God that it's just the claim they are no Gods that's what atheism is uh and then atheists are people who believe that claim and reject its denial so they say there are no gods and it's not the case there are Gods right there are two propositions here that are contradictory and uh in a wellth thought out position you're going to have an attitude towards both of them right so that's now one question then will be what about this position that just says all I do is deny one of these claims I um no all I all I do is not accept one of these claims so I don't accept the claim that there are gods question what what's your attitude to the proposition there are no Gods what's your attitude to that one if you don't have an answer to that question then you just don't have a wellth thought out position at this point and so the the people who call themselves lacist have to give an answer to that question right and there's several ways they can go one way is they can say that they suspend judgment about that one too but then that just sounds to me like position that's intermediate now between atheism and theism you're suspending judgment about two propositions one of which is accepted by the atheists and the other of which is accepted by the theists and so the idea that the position that you're defending now is a atheistic one rather than a theistic one seems kind of odd the other thing that you might do is you might say well uh I reject um both of these claims right but that's going to be just inconsistent sorry I mean sorry we agreed you were suspending judgment about one of them if you reject the other one though now your position starts to look incoherent right because um you're rejecting the claim that there are no Gods seems to commit you to the claim that there are Gods right so that the suspension of judgment position to be coherent has to be suspending judgment about both of those propositions now that's all on the kind of sematic side forget about that uh there's also this question about whether supposing that the position was coherent there would be some dialectical Advantage you would gain by just saying well I suspend judgment about that proposition but um in philosophy when we're thinking about positions that you might take that's a position that requires defense just as much as um advocating for theism or for atheism it's not like in philosophy of religion agnostics um have no obligations to try to defend the position that they're taking on what they're going to have to say is something like this that the um the balance of considerations favors neither atheism nor theism and if you just say the balance of considerations doesn't favor theism you haven't fully articulated a position at that point so that's sorry that was a bit rambly but that's my answer to your question I I'm interested in something you just said about agnosticism and agnostics having to defend their position that is I'm imagining there are well I know that there are different kinds of agnostics that there might be the kind of agnostic that says something like you know I I sort of think there's good evidence either way and I can't make my mind up there might be an agnostic who says I don't think there's any good evidence either way and therefore I sort of remain yeah s sad on the fence uh but also there might be agnostics who sort of say well I haven't really given it much thought I don't know I don't really believe either way I don't really care about the question it seems to me that at least in that last case and possibly even in the second a person isn't in a position of needing to defend their agnosticism it's just a position that they find themselves in for sort of want of argu to push them away from it so I think the first two both are in need of Defense the third one if you just say well look I don't care and I don't want to think about it um that's let's grant that that's a defensible attitude to have but it takes you out of the conversation right though yeah if that's your view you're not going to be in a discussion with atheists and theists well maybe it might be somebody who this could be their first time sort of discovering this or talking about this and we think to I mean it seems strange is what I'm trying to say here it seems strange to say that a position of essentially withholding judgment requires some kind of burden of proof because the the act of withholding a judgment seems to be contrary to that intuition that it's something that needs sustaining and and you know uh propping up with argument and reason so I guess I don't see it that way like suppose that you say I withhold judgment about the shape of the earth I'm going to think that's there's something pretty weird about that because there's a bunch of considerations that speak in favor of holding a particular View and there's really nothing that speaks against it what's the justification for your withholding of judgment here now you might say well look I I'm withholding my judgment because I just know nothing about the topic and then I'm going to say well that's fine but you know that really does remove you from any kind of interesting conversation here's an entry point go go away now if you want to be part of a conversation about this go away and learn some stuff right learn what the relevant considerations are and then rejoin the conversation that's roughly what I want to say I think sure I mean I I I've heard this before I mean I remember somebody once asking me in the context of the burden of proof like if you said you don't believe you had parents and I said well that that's a bit that's a little bit weird what why don't you believe you have parents and you say well what do you mean why don't I believe I have parents it's you're you're the one who has to prove that I do you're the one making the claim it does seem that in certain context if certain evidence exists and is provided then there comes a point at which you have to say what is your reason essentially for rejecting those considerations for rejecting that evidence in in the context of the Flat Earth it's a useful example you say okay maybe you know if you know nothing then withholding judgment is the most appropriate for you and also one that doesn't need defense but if I provide photos and you know scientific considerations and boats disappearing across the Horizon and this kind of thing there comes a point at which if someone keeps saying I just don't buy it I'm just not convinced I just I'm I'm just not convinced by that uh that that it seems sort of I I don't know is it philosophically accurate here to say that they adopt what we would call a burden of proof for their withholding of judgment is that the right terminology to use in that context so I don't like the um any talk about burden of proof because I don't think there are burdens of proof it's just that um there's something going on here where they're not if if they're not even acknowledging that there are considerations here to be weighed then it's not clear that there's much Point pursuing conversation with them anymore once they've acknowledge that there are considerations to be W weighed then if they haven't weighed them again at this point there's no point continuing the conversation the kind of minimum requirement for entry into the conversation is going to be that you've made an attempt at weighing the considerations and you've got some way of something that you can say on behalf of the view that the considerations come out kind of equal is it is it enough for somebody to say uh I'm thinking of someone like Matt Dill Hunty who you know would would host uh I don't think he does it anymore but on an almost weekly basis this Callin TV show where people would call in and give Arguments for the existence of God and and he would constantly just say look I'm just not convinced by what you're saying for whatever reason now you can't accuse him of being someone who hasn't engaged with the arguments who hasn't listened to them and considered them but a lot of the time the argument sort of uh there's not so much an argument to the opposite there's not so much an argument for atheism there's just saying listen I'm listening to this argument and for whatever reason it's just not moving me like it's moved you is is that enough to to sort of fulfill this this burden that you're talking about to say look I withhold judgment because everything I've heard in either direction just just sort of doesn't do it doesn't do it for me in a way that I can't quite explain I just know that it obviously hasn't changed my beliefs so I think from speaking so I'll put my philosopher hat on that's not going to be satisfactory what we would like to do is to dig a bit deeper and be given some reasons um that were that so that you can display the reasons that were operative when you were weighing the relative the relevant considerations so you know how much weight were you attaching to this particular Point how much weight were you attaching to this one why why was it that this one you just sort of were able to just completely dismiss and so on there's something uh I mean of course as a stance you could you can imagine um the equivalent um someone having a television show if there was an audience for it about Flat Earth ISM um and just whatever comes up you say well I'm not moved uh what's the interest in that right there's there's often stuff that you can say about um particular considerations there should be quite a lot that you can say so for example if um so let's imagine that the the host is a theist and um there's somebody who comes on let's say it's Michael Tulie or somebody like that um talking about evil uh responding to Michael by just saying I'm not moved isn't going to cut it right there's a whole lot of considerations here about evil and there should be if you're kind of seriously engaged here there should be stuff that you can say in response of course I'm not saying there's nothing that you could say in response I'm just saying right that's that's just what the engagement should look like um that's not to go back from the earlier point that you could just be not interested in this stuff right that's fine but then if you're not interested you're not interested and you shouldn't be hanging around the conversation yeah if somebody's either an agnostic in and I think your terminology or a lacist that is the kind of atheist that just lacks belief in God and you say well I don't have a burden of proof here you can imagine the conversation that somebody has it might be like well here's the here's the cam cosmological argument everything that begins to exist has a cause the universe begins to exist therefore the universe has a cause and the agnostic lacist might say well I don't see why that cause would need to be God I don't see why it would need to be any specific kind of God therefore I'm not convinced by that argument and I I remain sort of unconvinced what they've done there is provided a reason for their withholding of uh Ascent to the proposition it's it's not a simple as just saying well I'm just not convinced by that you can actually give a reason as to why you're not convinced by that and that's what this this uh t TV show The Atheist Experience consisted in it was sort of responses in of the form of why I'm not convinced by this particular argument that you're that you're putting forward and so a reason is being given um interesting I I I hadn't really thought about it in the context of whether such a reason needs to be given that that a withholding of belief needs to be legitimized in this way it's something that as I say someone asked me about it before in the context of parents but I think it's perhaps a something of a controversial claim to say that withholding of a scent requires justification is that something that you found when talking about this um so I guess I don't think that it's particularly controversial um so but I also haven't discussed it much I don't think um it's not not really a topic that comes up in the philosophical interchanges that is the interchanges between professional philosophers and people take it for granted that sort of part of the project is to try to articulate as clearly as you can the reasons you have for the various claims that you make and if you're making claims about um the it's being permissible or required that you withhold judgment on a particular Point there'll be stuff that you can say to support that just as much as there'll be stuff to say you know you given these considerations you really should be acting this other clim it does seem to me that there is an asymmetry here though I mean if if I told you that sort of in the in the other room next to me there's a a grizzly bear and you sort of just don't really believe me based on your knowledge of what the normal world is like and I started providing considerations and maybe they don't start that sort of uh convincingly I say well I'm hearing a lot of noises coming through the wall and you say well I don't really I don't really buy that I mean for start it's I think it's difficult to pin down if I asked you why do you not find that convincing if I said I'm hearing some noises next door and I think it's a gruly bear and you say well I'm just not convinced that it is one and I say why is that the case it's quite a difficult thing to to understand why your brain is is is not sort of ascending to that proposition and as the evidence gets better and better there comes a point where you start going oh maybe this has got something to it and I think it's quite difficult to actually pay attention to what the difference is in your mind between those two kinds of evidences so I'm not sure you've got quite a lot of information I'll say knowledge about first of all the kinds of animals that are to be found sometimes found indoors the kinds of animals that people keep as pets um because I'm what you said initially was in the room next door so that that there's a a fully grown crocodile or a fully grown elephant or a fully grown grizzly bear in the room next door given that you're in a kind of apartment block on the seventh floor or whatever AR priori that is I shouldn't say completely AR priori but just taking everything I know into account that's pretty unlikely to be true right that's and that's a reasonable presumption to bring to the conversation now you often hear noises through the wall uh and often enough you can't tell what they are but as a hypothesis that it's a bear that's going to be unlikely of course you could there are ways that you could show that actually it's true and it's clearly not impossible that someone's got a a bear um people do all kinds of weird and crazy things but um all of that stuff is going to be on the side of the reasons that you've got for initially thinking that it's unlikely and then it depends what sort of evidence right if there's a little peephole and you can open it up and you can see that there's a bear in the Next Room well that's going to make a lot of difference yeah the reason that a moment ago I I described it as an asymmetry or acted as though I was about to present an asymmetry is because as I'm doing this as I'm presenting this this evidence to you uh increasing in its plausibility that there might be a grizzly bear next door it do of course you're going to be considering those reasons and you're maybe going to be offering some responses well couldn't many other things have made those noises well couldn't there be someone playing a video Behind the hole and fooling you but it seems like we're not engaged in the same thing here it does seem like I'm making a claim I'm defending that claim and you're sort of poking holes in my defenses I understand the idea that there needs to be some justification on some level for your withholding of a sent to my proposition that there's a bear next door but it does seem like there's a meaningful sense in which I have the more proactive task and you have the more defensive task if it's not to be described in terms of I have the burden of proof and you don't how should we Analyze That difference between us so um so I guess it depends so maybe in this case given that that um you've said there's a bear and I'm skeptical uh if we want to push this further um you're going to have to come up with some better evidence than you've provided so far to persuade me and that's fine um if you want to talk about a burden of proof anybody defending a position of any kind is going to have a burden of proof might be um something that will be appropriate to say at this point so it depends what you do whether it's fine for me to just go on being skeptical sure but you walk into the next room and you know if there's a door you open it up and you walk in there and I can see you getting molded by the bear I'm going to be convinced right yeah uh but you know suppose you still said you didn't believe me then that's the kind of situation in which you were talking about someone would would rightfully say well what's your justification for not thinking there's a grizzly bear it's right in front of you and although you have adopted something there it seemed like earlier you were saying this isn't this isn't best described in terms of having a burden of proof these positions still don't feel equal to me it still doesn't feel like you know we're both engaged in this this equal task of both putting forward some kind of proposition or worldview or something it seems like one person's put it forward and one person is considering it and you know whether or not they accept or or reject it there does seem to be some kind of difference between these two people and I guess I'm trying to figure out what that difference is if it isn't that one has the burden of proof and one does not so there's a I think that there's a kind of obligation that everybody has to believe as well as they can you might something like that and that creates um you might think doxastic obligations of various kinds if somebody tells you something uh that may or may not be a reason there may or may not be a reason for you to believe what they say um and the the kind of exchanges where people tell other people things is only one of the ways in which worldviews or you know belief systems whatever you want to call are going to get updated um and it's not like if you tell me something I have an obligation to believe it straight off uh and I suppose um maybe for some other kinds of evidence sometimes you know I see something and I'm inclined to think I can't be seeing that um but the it does seem as though the the the status of testimony is a bit different because there's lots of unreliable informance there are lots of people with vested interests and so on and if the the topic here is okay so um what what are our relative obligations when you're testifying to something and I'm trying to decide whether to believe you or not POS there there that's not a symmetrical situations right um because there's something happening there's a kind of transaction you're saying something to me and I'm trying to work out what to do with what you're telling me so it's I I certainly don't want to insist that that kind of situation is symmetrical between the two of us rightfully or not I mean I think we probably both want to say unrightfully uh that that it's not the case but many people characterize religious arguments as if they they are just sort of ridiculous or just senseless or they just none of them make sense you know that the all these Arguments for God they don't prove God's existence you know unintelligible to me now we're going to say that they're wrong I think but presuming they were right in that analysis imagine that I said there's a bear next door and you said why and I said I think there's a bear next door for a reason that just just had so little plausibility to you that it almost didn't make sense you know I mean I say something like you know I I I see a sort of black mark on the wall and I think it's more likely that the black mark is there because A bear walked through here earlier and pushed something into it or something and I think that raises the probability there's a bear next door now yeah if we're talking about this level of evidence would you say that there is still some kind of burden on the person who says I I just don't believe you I just don't think that that means there's a bear next door that they still have some kind of uh you know requirement for justification for their withholding a sent or or is there a point at which the evidence becomes so poor that they can reasonably say I don't have a a need for providing reasons here so so I mean there there's two things here one is saying something to the other person and the other one is the the Judgment that you're making yourself right so thinking about it from my point of view in this scenario um that there's a mark on the wall a tiny black mark on the wall as evidence that there was a bear present is just kind of a negligible consideration right it just isn't a reason for believing that there was a bear right now whether I want to say that to you depends on whether I want to say that in response really now depends on kind of contextual factors about the conversation that we're having and where because there there are going to be lots of conversations that are just not worth having there are people that um it's not worth investing lots of effort in talking to them and if you are confronted with somebody who's going to make an argument like that you probably just want to extricate yourself from the conversation and go and do something more profitable with your time I think and it don't really it that depends on other things like if it's a family member it's getting a bit trickier we're all familiar with all the ways in which this can be complicated but um there are lots of cases where it's just not worth arguing with somebody because um because of the kinds of things that they're inclined to say now shifting gears slightly if somebody is 100% certain that there is a God then they are a theist if somebody's 100% sure that there is no God or there are no Gods then they're an atheist if somebody's 50/50 they sort of have a epistemological balance here we say they're an agnostic what I wanted to ask you is what are the bounds of agnosticism here like if somebody says you know I'm sort of I don't really know I've considered the evidence it's not swaying me massively but I'm slightly more inclined towards theism sort of 5 10% or something how far do you think that that uh uncertainty has to swing towards a 100 or zero to say that that person is a theist or an atheist rather than an agnostic so we have it's sort of familiar that there are two different ways of talking about beliefs um or maybe actually we're talking about two different things but let's for now let's think that there's one thing that we're talking about in two different ways so one thing is belief is an All or Nothing matter right so there are three grades here you believe for any proposition that you've considered either you believe it or you disbelieve it or you suspend judgment with respect to it now on that view it can still be that you um that you that there are kind of variations of belief so I kind of weakly Believe it or strongly believe it or whatever but still the the basic division is is there are these three things uh different way of thinking about things is you have credences for proposition so every proposition gets uh a value between zero and one um zero for complete rejection one for certainty that it's true so zero for certainty that it's false and 50/50 for being right in the middle about whether it's true or false and notoriously it's very hard to map these two things onto one another right there is no need way most people think of mapping the kind of All or Nothing conception of belief onto the credence conception of belief so given that there isn't any neat way of doing the mapping there's no really neat way of answering your question suppose that someone's Credence is a a range between 40 and 60 what are they um well maybe in that case they're they're an agnostic it maybe if you've got a kind of symmetrical in interval around 50 that's enough to make you an agnostic what if they're 4061 well now we just don't have an answer to that right um there's that that just doesn't map on to the the the kind of Nate atheist theist agnostic um Prime so I'm sorry that's not that's not a very satisfactory answer because it rejects your question rather than giving you a straight answer to it but I think that that's the right thing to say do you think there's any wisdom in the suggestion of people like Jordan Peterson that what you believe is better revealed by the way that you behave rather than what you report when asked so there's a interesting discussions going on in philosophy at the moment about whether there's a common source for your behavior and that your non nonverbal behavior and your verbal Behavior or whether they actually have different sources right we so we're quite used in philosophy because we've done it for a long time thinking that beliefs are involved in both so that if you believe something and you're being sincere in other conditions uh satisfied then what you say has the content of your belief and we also think that um the standard sort of functionalist story beliefs and desires are the source of action if you believe there's beer in the fridge and you're thirsty you go to the fridge and open the door to get out the beer right now maybe those two things the um what you say and and what you do actually have different sources and calling them both beliefs is kind of muddling things together uh supposing that that's not the case suppose that there's a kind of single thing here a single state that's both the source for your assertions and for your behaviors it's not clear why you would think that one of them was a better indicator of what you believe than the other right people can lie but they can also deceive you with their behavior equally well and so it's not clear why you want to say that one is clearly a better indicator of what their beliefs are on the assumptions that we need to put into the story to start with I think it's because at least for someone like Peterson he's not talking so much about deceiving other people but deceiving self that is if you actually think to yourself you know I I don't believe that there's any food in the fridge I believe there's just no chance that there's there's some food in the fridge but then you find yourself maybe out of you know desperate starvation going to check anyway you go and have a look and you think to yourself well if I really believed there was no food in the fridge then I wouldn't go and check and it does seem to me like the the what it is that reveals what the person truly thinks there or what they sort of truly believe is how they behave rather than if you ask them and they said I don't believe there's any food in there because they're going to check and that that seems a bit more sort of one directional than trying to deceive there in terms of kind of standard decision Theory though there's a kind of different explanation here their Credence for whether there's beer in the fridge isn't zero it's close to zero and if you raise the stakes high enough then they're going to go on check because it's worth doing right so once once they're thirsty enough right you the the it it's not like there needs to be any inconsistency here it just depends on what we how how we're going to interpret what they're doing or what they're saying well maybe you've just identified the inconsistency maybe they tell you I believe there's a 0% chance that there's food in the fridge and you say something like no one has a 0% Credence in this thing well maybe maybe they don't quite understand what you're saying but they say no I think there's just a 0% chance and that's what they believe and then when they go and check the fridge you say to them see you were wrong that isn't what you believe what you told me you believe is actually not what you believe and you were mistaken about your own sort of mental state there so maybe but maybe um the the first thing that you said they didn't really understand what they were committing themselves to when they said that there's zero chance and the kind of charitable way to interpret them is they thought that there was kind of Epsilon chance where Epsilon is pretty small but there are certain circumstances where you're going to act on a belief that's so tiny that you might have thought for practical purposes it was Zero but then the circumstances turned out to be um such that actually we could see that it wasn't really zero it wasn't that they thought that there was absolutely for example there was nothing that could make them change their mind about this right because if it really is probability zero there no amount of evidence can shift you from there right well what if what if the door just Falls open and you can see that there's a whole lot of beer in the fridge uh if you're Credence zero that's not going to shift you right yeah you Epsilon but if it's Credence Epsilon it will right so you were just making a mistake when you said that the probability was Zer but could the same mistake be being made when people are talking about their belief in in God or Gods because to take it back to what we were talking about a moment ago you know somebody might say look you know I'm kind of 50/50 maybe 6040 on God's existence then you observe their behavior and you find that they're sort of hedging their bets by going to church and then maybe in the morning they feel sort of compelled to pray in a way that they can't quite describe and you know they have they nearly get hit by a and they find themselves just immediately saying you know Lord forgive me for my sins because they think they're about to die little things like this little behaviors that come through and you sit them down and you say you know I know you said you're sort of on the fence here but your behavior seem to suggest that you might be giving a little bit more to this theism thing than you're giving to the atheism thing and in that way it's really the behaviors that we should be looking at rather than you know the the answers to questions in determining whether someone's an agnostic or more theist or atheist leaning so so you could be right about a case like that I suppose um and there's and there there's lots of different states that people can be in and people who are in a kind of undecided state so I mean there are different kinds of agnostics there are the people who are just sort of um convinced agnostics and they're sort of settled in that position and it's going to it's nothing really is going to budge them from their agnosticism and then there are people whose agnosticism is quite brittle and they can easily be shifted one way or the other um and if you're in that kind of position uh or if if you well let's consider somebody who is in that kind of position it might well turn out that after a while the they're if they're not paying too close attention to their kind kind of own state where they might think of themselves as still an agnostic but they've actually kind of budged a fairway one way or the other and I do the the I mean to go back to the beginning of this part of the conversation there interesting questions about self- knowledge and self deception um that um clearly relevant here um so some some people had thought that you just can't be mistaken about what you believe you have this kind of special access to it um whereas there are lots of people in the last 20 or 30 years who've explored the idea that actually you can be mistaken about what you believe and you don't have um necessarily have special access to it in particular you can say things and it turns out that you're wrong as in you report that you believe something but actually you don't uh there's a whole lot of stuff to unpack in that area which I I guess is clearly relevant to the position that you are attributing to Peterson I'm wondering if we can have uh an example or two of the kind of things that uh it suggest that a person can be mistaken about when it comes to their own beliefs I mean of course the intuitive position is that if you believe something then of course you're going to be aware that you believe it you're going to know that you believe it because it's your own belief it's your own head that that you know you have direct mental access to so what's an example of somebody who might believe that they believe something but be wrong right so the one case that comes to mind um so George Ray has this very well-known paper in which he argues that religious Believers are all self-deceived they think that they believe certain kinds of things but they don't and the way that you can tell that they don't is by looking at their behavior right so um so the kind of example that he will give is they think that when you die you go off to this magical Resort and yet people are desperately unhappy about the fact that their um relatives have gone off for this glorious holiday what gives now I'm not supporting that as a good argument I'm just saying that's a you know a kind of illustration of the case where sure um and something that Peterson might take to support you know the position that he was arguing for you look at their behavior and that shows that they really don't believe the things that they claim that they believe because interesting I mean Peterson usually argues in the opposite direction he says you know people say they're an atheist it's like you you think uh and sort of lists off the ways that people behave you know they sort of have a moral code and they have a value High hierarchy and all of this they're acting as if God exists but here's a a good example of the exact reverse which is yeah people say that there's an afterlife and that there's a soul that outlives the human body so why is it that people get so drastically upset when uh someone they love manages to shuffle off this Mortal coil I think that's uh that'd be an interesting question to ask him uh but I'm interested what you think about this this view about self-deception and whether you think it's possible to be deceived about your own beliefs so so I think it depends a bit on the The Stance you take on the other question about whether belief is a unified category or whether there are different sources for um things that we say and things that we um do right if you think that there's kind of different categories here then of course they can be then doesn't seem so hard to understand how they can be mismatches between what you affirm and what you do right um but if beliefs a unified category and you think that we kind of have this immediate access to our beliefs it's much harder to see how you could be mistaken about your beliefs in that case it's seems like on that kind of classical picture it's just going to turn out that you're for whatever reason you're lying about what you believe not that you're deceived about it it does seem that some people can be uh seemingly deluded I'm imagining an example of like a grieving parent I'm sure this is this has come up as a famous example and I won't be able to attribute it to the right person because I can't remember who came up with the idea but um I'm imagining you know a parent whose child has died in a shipwreck or something you know the ship's gone under the water and they've discovered absolutely no survivors and it was in the middle of you know the Atlantic Ocean yeah and so they know that you know the their child's dead realistically but they just sort of can't bring themselves to to accept it so they'll sort of go around they'll they they'll um they'll talk about them as if they're still alive they won't use the past tense and if somebody suggests that they're probably dead and they need to move on they'll get angry and they'll say you don't know that there's no way to prove it kind of thing but at some point maybe they just sort of snap out of it they break someone gets through to them and they and they sort of let out a big sigh and go yeah okay yeah I I you know it's like it's in there somewhere but there's some kind of psychological barrier that that has that causes a kind of conflict within someone's own head right so lots of our believing is not very good right and that that you might think of that as just a case right um there may also be such a thing as kind of motivated believing as well I mean your believing may be affected by your desires um you can think of that as an example perhaps in some cases at least of kind of not believing very well and you could use that to explain what's going on in this case I assume um it's um you know if we were better at believing uh perhaps there'd be a lot less disagreement about things than there is right I mean there's a kind of I mean one one one thing that you could try to say here is well you know we've all got quite different evidence we're all kind of pretty good at believing it's just that we believe according to the evidence that we've got and we've all got different evidence a different way of going will be to say just we're not very good at responding to the evidence that we've got not that good at believing yeah okay shifting gears once again uh you you wrote a book called atheism the basics and uh the there's a quote or a list of quotes at the beginning of one of the chapters of that book including the following quote from Richard Dawkins we are all atheists about most of the gods that Humanity has ever believed in some of us just go one God further you have a relatively negative assessment of this quote in the book and I wondered if you could uh rehearse to us the reasons why that's the case this is quite a popular way of framing what atheism is in sort of social media circles for example they say look everyone knows what it's like to be an atheist you don't believe in a whole Pantheon of gods and with respect to the way that you're an atheist with respect to those Gods I'm an atheist with respect to yours so I can't remember what I said about this quote in the book um it's there there's various things to say one would be that uh it's quite common and so in my debate book with Kenny Pierce he runs this line um it's quite common for theist to say well actually what's going on when people claim to be worshiping a different God from the one that I worship is that they're actually worshiping the same God they've just got some mistaken beliefs about at God right now that would be one way of responding to Dawkin because it's not that you're thinking that um that you're an atheist about their gods they believe in the same God that you do they've just got mistaken beliefs about it right and so if if Pier was right then the dorkin thing just wouldn't get off the ground yeah it would be like saying that you don't believe I don't know you're talking about like the White House in Washington DC and you know you think it's got an oval office in it but you're not sure and somebody else says no there's not an oval office there's a rectangular office and you say that they don't believe in the same White House as you they believe in a different White House they believe in the same White House you just have different ideas about you know its properties or or the way that it present itself in in it in its most sort of uh some perhaps in it's one of its most culturally important uh aspect perhaps that is you know the famous Oval Office but it's the same White House that we're talking about here right so so that's why um at least some the are going to be quite unmoved by the thing that in fact annoyed by the thing that Dawkins says right um on the other hand if you think about um ancient pantheons like the Greek pantheon or whatever where there any polytheistic Pantheon will do now you can't say well maybe you can still say um actually they're worshiping the same God but it's it's just that they've gone very wildly wrong in their believing because they think that there's all these different gods which are actually I suppose we have to think of them as different manifestations of the one God just misperceived uh but um Theus I think will often take a different line which is to say that they what people are talking about um they call them Gods but they they've got nothing to do with god with the capital G right I mean they've got these mistaken beliefs but they're not misperceptions of God with a capital G they're something else they're kind of I don't know [Music] um uh names for natural powers for example so you know gods of thunder and so on right and uh that's not really got anything to do with Christianity or Islam or Judaism or Hinduism or whatever um so that would be a different line again if you take that view your reasons for thinking that there aren't really nature Gods um sort of has no bearing on the question whether your God with a capital G exists it's just a kind of different kind of consideration so that's something else that some theists are going to say here I think I can I can quote what you said at the end of that chapter that I mentioned seeing as you you can't remember what you wrote uh and and that's fair enough I think it was some five years ago now that that that book was published uh this was the the closing sentence of that chapter you said I do not join with Dawkins in saying that we are all atheists relative to most of the gods that Humanity has ever believed in I would no sooner say that we are all vegans relative to those meals to which we sit down that contain no animal products atheists believe that there are no Gods end of story very um sort of dramatically put at the end there I think yeah and okay I I'm I'm that seems to be a slightly different approach to the one that you just took yeah yeah do you have an idea of sort of what you were getting at with a sentence like that so so what's so how's the analogy with veganism supposed to work right um it doesn't there's there's no sense in which you're a vegan just because you occasionally have a meal in which there's no meat and dairy products that just doesn't make you a vegan because to be a vegan is to be in a sort of um continuing state where you don't have um meat and animal products no sorry you don't have animal products of any kind so equally um it's not right to say that you're kind of an atheist with respect to these other gods that's to Mis understand the way that the word atheist writes I mean it's the way that the word atheist works it's true maybe that you don't believe in those gods and it may be true that um theists don't believe in those gods either right taking the second of the roots that I argued for but that doesn't mean that there's some sense in which theist atheist with respect to those Gods any more than um someone who's an omnivore is vegan with respect to certain meals that's just to misunderstand how the words vegan and atheist to use that was what I was thinking yeah now I understand what you're saying I think however I do think that that there is a way in which this can be made sense of right it would be strange for somebody to say I'm a vegan with respect to this meal but it's not an incoherent concept I mean if I were to say something like well you know I was I was vegan at lunch today you'd know what I meant and maybe if I were trying to convince you that it was really easy to go vegan what I might say to you is something like well consider the fact that you know what did you have for breakfast this morning and you say oh I had I had some oats with oat milk and I say well you see that was a vegan meal so you know the way that you were vegan at breakfast this morning I just do that with every single one of my meals and and that's all it is and you go oh yeah fair enough now that makes sense it was easy enough at breakfast this morning so maybe I could just do that every meal now as an explanatory tool somebody could be doing the same thing when they say look okay you're like ah what does this atheism thing mean and I say well you know you you don't believe that Islam is true do you and they say no and I say well that's just how I feel about Christianity it's sort of an explanatory tool and there is a sense in which I can say I'm vegan with regards to this particular meal in a way that I think I maybe can say that I'm an atheist with regard to these particular Gods so you could certainly say look you've had PL you've had meals where animal products were not involved you've had meals that were exclusively plant-based you can certainly say that um that what whether um so it depends what you were trying to explain or trying trying to get this person to think right because for most people the stumbling block for being a vegan isn't that occasionally you sit down to an entirely plant-based meal is that you're going to be doing that for every meal right and so it's not clear um why pointing to the fact that you occasionally have a meal that's entirely plant-based what work that's going to do in in um trying to persuade someone that they could be a vegan right yeah and the stumbling block for the theist talking to the atheist is not that there are going to be some conceptions of God that don't exist but having to believe that there is no God to ground the nature of reality and so it would be a slightly more powerful claim but I I think I guess I interpret it a little bit more poetically what Richard Dawkins is saying and perhaps this is part of the problem with analytic philosophy is that we don't have room for a bit of sort of Beauty in our terms of phrase and that if somebody says I'm an atheist with regards to thousands of God uh Gods they probably don't mean in the academic sense of the term atheism that they think there are no gods in relation to Zeus and Thor they're sort of saying you know how it feels to not believe in something and that's how I feel about your God it felt a sort of like a bit more of a a poetic statement than than an analytical one so I think that's fine but I don't think that theists kind of misund understand the atheistic position in this way they know perfectly well that what the atheist thinks is that there aren't any gods and in particular that means they don't think that there's the god that the whoever the particular theist is believes in now you just talked about sort of uh a mistake that you don't think theists make uh I'm interested broadly speaking being an atheist and having spent some time thinking about this kind of stuff what do you think is the biggest mistake that theists generally make given the falsity as you see it of their worldview I doubt that there's a biggest mistake um I it's not clear to me that it's even right to talk about mistake here it seems to me that it's kind of reasonably rationally permissible to be a theist for all kinds of reasons um one thing that really shouldn't be underestimated in any discussion of this kind is the extent to which our beliefs are based in the testimony of other people that we trust and if you've got lots of I mean so so imagine someone living in a relatively isolated Community with a very influential church is probably perfectly and and no encouragement to think that things are different elsewhere perfectly reasonable for them to be theists members of the church right that's what I think so I'm not inclined to think that there's got to be mistakes uh I do think that and so I'm kind of this is part of what animates my philosophical work that it's a mistake to think that there are compelling reasons that should compel everybody to be a theist right so when people start talk talking about proofs um I just think no that's there's no proofs here right yeah I think a really that's a really important uh clarification that you've you've just made and it motivates me to slightly rephrase my question uh I think you know what I'm what I'm getting at but you're right that it should maybe be phrased as something like what is the sort of what is the most common error you think people make when considering Arguments for and against the existence of God assuming they're in a position to hear lots of arguments they're in a library and they have a motivation to to seek out Arguments for and against and they're a theist at the end of their investigations do you think that what's the most sort of common uh misfiring of of reason that happens so I guess if I think that there's a misfiring it's it happens on both sides it's not just um theists um atheist will make a similar kind of mistake it's to think that an argument shows you know that an argument's of proof that will be the mistake or that the argument's stronger than it is than it actually is that the the the the kind of rational persuasive powers of the arguments are always lesser than their proponents suppose and I know that they come that that would be that would be a way of describing it was that was kind of the burden of the book I wrote arguing about Gods was to argue for essentially that position yeah I know that sort of actually committing to theism will tend to be based on a cumulative case from lots of different arguments put together but within that pool of arguments that people tend to cite as part of their reasons for being a theist what do you find is the most common one that persuades people that's not to say the best I know I I've heard you ask before people are interested in what do you think is the best argument for God's existence I'm interested in what you think is the best not in terms of its philosophical consistency or or philosophical uh plausibility but rather the Practical uh success that it has in actually changing people's minds what do you think most commonly achieves that so so I would think that um telling people about your religious experiences it's going to be most likely to persuade them that your position is right that that um I expect right so the I'm because you're asking me really about what's the most effective way to prze for a religion and I'm going to guess that it's going to be by um talking about your experiences and the experiences of other people who've you've been in conversation with and the kind of benefits of living a life life where you have these kinds of experiences that would I think let's say that we were restricting our scope here only to philosophical arguments that bear on the truth or falsity of theism what do you think comes up most commonly and has the most persuasive Force within a sort of academic discussion about the existence of God um so I think it's probably true historically uh that there's been some variation over time um which argument or style of argument or form of argument plays this role uh I think that there have been periods maybe we're currently in a period where cosmological arguments have been viewed as kind of pretty strong there have been other periods where design arguments again we might be in such a period where design arguments have been viewed by many theists as pretty compelling and there have also been periods where moral arguments of one kind or another have been thought to be the kind of the best arguments and I'm thinking that probably amongst those three categories you I to the extent that there are theists who think that they are compelling arguments they're going to think they're in one of those three categories hardly anybody thinks that ontological arguments are compelling uh um and uh arguments from Miracles scripture and religious experience and things like that considered as arguments tend not to be viewed as particularly compelling either I think so that would be my assessment that leaves a lot of different kinds of arguments because there's very different ways of um very different kinds of design arguments and there's very different kinds of cosmological arguments as well so I mean just to within the field of cosmological arguments there are Toms who think that a certain style of [Music] um uh causal argument uh that that adverts to per se causation is very strong whereas if you're William Lane Craig you probably don't believe in that kind of causation but you think that there's a kind of past causal Chain Argument cam cosmological argument that's pretty strong and so on so so in other words it depends yeah so obviously it depends yes so asking you about your own uh perception of the plausibility of arguments because that's the only thing you can sort of confidently speak on in this regard uh a slightly I guess more trivial question but one that I'm interested in is what you think are the most or is the most overrated and also the most underrated argument for the existence of God that is arguments that are popularly put forward and and cited as good reasons but you think are terrible and ones that don't get enough attention but you think are actually quite quite powerful perhaps so so do you mean for or either for or against I I I'm interested in both but uh you know let's say let's say four let's say four theism what do you think is a an overrated and an underrated it's unfair to press you to think of the most off the top of your head but just something that you think is overrated or underrated well I mean I guess you can probably anticipate what I'm going to say right because uh I don't think that there is there are any successful arguments on either side so um it's not like um on either side of what do youan for God or against God you don't think there are any successful arguments against God no so such as order compel any rational person to be persuaded of the conclusion sure what no I mean that was the burden of um arguing about Gods again was to just go through all the arguments on each side and say well you know they don't they're not Successful by that kind of standard I guess I'm asking about your your own view in that you may think that there's no argument either way that should compel any rational person to be a theist or an atheist but there must be something that compels you to be an atheist so but it's not it's okay so then we could end up at Cross purposes um because of the elasticity of use of the word argument so I'm thinking of an argument as a set of premises in a conclusion I'm thinking of a case as something like here's a bunch of reasons that you have to weigh right and so in my book the best argument against God I suggest here's a way of weighing the reasons that bear on the existence of God that might make you come down on the side of thinking that there's no God but note that it's it's enormously complicated and highly contentious whether you have to settle on that particular judgment or not and that's it's what you don't get in that book is a list of okay here's the set of premises that either entail or support the claim that God exists it's using that more elastic everyday sense of argument where it's the just making a case setting up weighing a bunch of reasons and settling on something well for the listener who's unfamiliar with your position and indeed your work could you give us like a thumbnail sketch of the considerations that lead you to propose that there are no gods despite the fact that you don't think these reasons are enough to compel you know any rational person to to agree with you okay so uh I think that pick pick my favorite naturalistic worldview and compare it with the any theistic worldview it doesn't matter where we go um it will turn out that uh the naturalistic worldview is simpler and it will turn out that there if so long as we think about sort of partitioning the relevant data in a non-er manded way there's no data that more strongly favors the theistic view than the naturalistic view so um because there's because it's at least break even on the data the Simplicity the relative Simplicity of the naturalistic view means that's the view that you should opt for now there's lots of things that are contestable in this you might actually think that the judgment about relative Simplicity is wrong or you might think that there's some bits of the data that actually strongly favorite theism over naturalism and we can argue about all this stuff and I have at length with various people including in the debate book with Kenny Pier um I don't think that the judgment's compulsory but I do think that you can see that there's um that that you can see that there's quite a lot going for it right what does it mean for a position or an explanation or a worldview to be simpler than another one right so the way that I think about this I'm thinking about I mean technically I'm thinking of the world views' theories in the in the kind of a way that's familiar from philosophy of science so you've got a set of sentences and they're closed under logical consequence um that's what a theory is what does what does that mean set sentences that close under logical consequence so so it means that you start with your set of sentences and anything that follows logically from them so you you might say my theory is the following and you list a few sentences um your theory commits you to anything that follows logically from all of those sentences and so I'm thinking that the theory itself is closed it's it's not just the things you said but anything that follows logically from them so we've got these now in order to do the kind of compare the two theories say an an atheistic Theory and a naturalistic theory and a theistic theory for um Simplicity imagine that we can aati the theory so we can find an kind of the most compact set of sentences such that the closure on them is the what you got from closing on the sentences that you started with CU it's not necessarily going to be the case that your the set of sentences that you started with is the kind of nicest way of presenting your theory right um then we'll focus on the axioms um one thing about theoretical Simplicity is just the axioms which has the simpler atiz where the Simplicity depends on um the complexity of the principles involved basically the complexity of the sentences involved um another thing is going to be how many Prim itive um terms you need to frame the theory and a third thing is going to be what are you committed to what kinds of things how many different kinds of things are you committed to by your theory so we've got three different dimensions of Simplicity and on all of these Dimensions according to me the naturalist is going to do better than the theist because the theist has to have what's in the naturalistic theory to have an adequate account because I'm just as supposing that the naturalistic theory says there's the natural world and all this stuff in it and that's it whereas the theist has to say yeah there's the natural world and all this stuff you know but there's also God and angels and whatever else after life and lots of other stuff that the naturalist doesn't believe in and that's going to make the theory more complicated on all of the three dimensions is that always sorry go I I sorry I don't mean to to cut you off there um I I was I was just going to ask if that's always the case in that I I'm thinking about a conversation where somebody thinks that God is the necessary grounding of you know all contingent things or or the the hierarchal causal chain and the naturalist says well I I believe that there's a necessary thing as well I just think that that's the universe or it's a fundamental law of physics or something like this in that situation it doesn't seem like they're positing more things it just seems like they're positing different things so I'm supposing that your theory has to be complete so you have to get every truth about um everything that's true about causal reality you have to has to follow from your premises so saying that it's a ground like you you say to me here's my theory God's the ground of everything and I say What's the value of the fine-tuning constant derive it and you say I can't do that I've got to put that in as an extra postulate in my theory right so I'm ass uming you've done that you've put in everything that you need then it will turn out that naturalism is simpler right because compress the scientific theory as much as you can and then you're going to have to have claims in your theory that said God wants this to be the case God wants that to be the case there's no there's no way of compressing science further by postulating God if you could then science would be committed to God right because and it clearly isn't is that true of like like uh if somebody's reason for saying that God exists is because they think something necessary has to exist and they say that that's God yeah and somebody else says well I think there's something necessary but it's not God it's the universe yeah why is that uh a simpler view or what does it sort of contain less assumptions Because unless the theist is saying there's only God there's got to be more in their Theory they've got to get out the universe as well right but presumably not not a necessary or maybe like not a necessarily existing Universe no so they won't think that there's a necessarily existing universe but in point of commitments right we will have a universe and the theist will have God and the naturalists won't and then there'll be this property of necessity that on the one hand is attributed to the universe and on the other hand is attributed to God so You' still got complexity on the the side right yeah because my my objection was going to be balancing up it it seemed like You' sort of got God and the universe and on the other hand you just have the universe and I wanted to say look uh but balancing up the necessary Universe with the non-necessary universe maybe they shouldn't be given equal measure but I guess the necessity is moved from the universe to the God right uh so you're going to be positing more things so so yes so according to me you've still got more stuff in your theory if you're the the than if you're the naturalist so so that's the on the one side that's the Simplicity side on the other side the the is there evidence that favors one rather than the other um that's just a long story you have to consider every piece of of course alleged evidence and consider how it falls so for example why is there something rather than nothing what both theories are going to say because they had to be there's this necessary thing right and so it's a draw on for for that alleged bit of evidence um and and and we could go on I and and so on and so forth yes um I I think that's a that's that's kind of a discussion for another time I I've I've enjoyed speaking to you we we've sort of spoken for over an hour now about atheism and about reasons for atheism and burden without really talking about any of the actual arguments involved which I think has been which I think has been fascinated one fascinating one final question that I did have for you uh in regards to what we were just talking about that I think is necessary to round it off is to say why is it that if a theory is simpler than another then all other things being equal that's the one we should choose to go with right so so this is a good question right it's a very widespread idea in science that when you're choosing between theories you choose the one that does best at balancing two considerations minimizing your commitments and maximizing explanation you can think of this as a kind of more accurate statement of essentially what you said was a kind of popular statement of oam's Razor this is just a more um accurate statement of it I think uh if somebody said wants to object to this um we can break it into two bits right if one if you've got two theories and they both fit the data equally well but one of them it postulates less the point is going to be you've got no reason given the data to postulate the extra things right so why do it right the reasonable thing is to go with what suffices right um and maybe that's if you don't get that then I'm not sure what else to say that just seems to me to be a kind of rock bottom I I I think that that that makes sense to me as well uh you said that there were two two considerations so I was G so I was going to say something about the try to say something on the other side about the the data so if um you've got two theories that are equal in simplicity so we just agree that they're equal in Simplicity but one of them explains a whole lot more of the data than the other then clearly you should go with the one that explains more of the data right so that was the the other part of motivating the the principle that's what I was going to say seems Seems plausible enough to me uh gr Moy thanks so much for coming on the podcast it was a pleasure if you enjoyed that conversation then thanks I'm glad you can watch more full episodes of the within reason podcast by clicking the link that just appeared on your screen the podcast is also on platforms like Spotify and apple podcasts don't forget to subscribe thank you for watching and I'll see you in the next one

Channel: Alex O'Connor

Views: 91,377

Keywords: Alex O'Connor, cosmic, skeptic, cosmicskeptic, atheism, within reason, podcast, within reason podcast, religion, debate, Alex J O'Connor

Id: 8Qgl0gu1BlQ

Length: 77min 7sec (4627 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 06 2023