Some people at the turn of the 20th century hoped: “if only the whole of logic and mathematics could be deduced from a limited set of safe premisses, the whole edifice would thereby be made trustworthy.” But now “the ideal itself has lost its appeal and authority.” W. V. O. Quine, for example, says (Gellner’s paraphrase) that “even in logic, our premisses cannot insure us against future surprises and the need to retrace steps” and that we “haggle and weigh advantages, risks, and convenience, rather than move rectilinearly in marble halls along pathways of clear and indubitable truth.” Logic, too, will “retrace steps, make opportunist and revocable choices, use anything that happens to be close to hand,” just like Lévi-Strauss’ prehistoric bricoleur, that opportunist neolithic handyman who ‘makes arrows from any timber that is close to hand’.” (p. 6)
Meanwhile, the philosopher of mathematics Imre Lakatos maintains, in Gellner's paraphrase, that
“definitions follow rather than precede proofs. Objections to proofs can only be raised and understood after the proof has been formulated; the refinement of the proof in the light of the objection leads to a reformulation of the initial concepts, with a view to weathering the objection or modifying the conclusion. The fully refined and powerful definitions of the initial concepts, and hence the axioms formulated through them, are only the fruits of many, many repetitions of this process. The definition, the official premiss, comes one at the end, not at the beginning — and even this end is only an interim one. The process can never be known to be complete, and indeed is unlikely ever to be terminated. Moreover, the order in which these sequences occur — proof, objection, redefinition — is not something contingent and accidental, something that only happens in the rough work and can be left out in the clean copy; it is, on the contrary, essential to and inherent in the very nature of mathematical discovery. The messy, insecure, step-retracing procedure is of the essence of the subject.” (p. 6–7)
Ernest Gellner, Legitimation of Belief Cambridge University Press, 1975.
Democracy is premised on the belief that we can trust ordinary people to make consequential decisions. It’s in some ways an enlightenment ideal premised on another enlightenment ideal: the triumph of reason and the capacities of ordinary people. To buy into it, you have to believe that people will be more loyal to principles and discernment than to leaders and groups, and in that sense, democracy has always been a risky project. If democracy requires independent-minded people who can reason well, autocracy requires the opposite, people who will obey orders about what to think as well as do.
"Why Republicans Keep Falling for Trump’s Lies." Rebecca Solnit. New York Times. Jan. 5, 2022.
Now, credulity does not stand alone. In turn, it is part of an attitude called dogmatism — the belief in and defense of "truth." Those who believe strongly in "truth" will try to find it through the mechanism of belief. We are today a "belief explosion" which throws skepticism to the winds and attaches itself in a credulous manner to mental malpractice and intellectual humbuggery of every kind — to faking it, small and big. Without dogmatism, the Fake Factor could not exist. Because of dogmatism, that ancient enemy, everything goes, or very nearly.
Arthur Herzog. The B.S. Factor: The Theory and Technique of Faking It in America. (1973) Baltimore, Maryland: Penguin Books Inc., 1974. p. 183.
Constant development is the law of life, and a man who always tries to maintain his dogmas in order to appear consistent drives himself into a false position. That is why Emerson said that foolish consistency was the hobgoblin of little minds... * * * A devotee of Truth may not do anything in deference to convention. He must always hold himself open to correction, and whenever he discovers himself to the wrong, he must confess it at all costs and atone for it.
Gandhi. Young India, March 2, 1922 and September 20, 1928. Quoted in Louis Fischer's 1962 book The Essential Gandhi
No ideology can tolerate a full historical consciousness. Only realism can...
Clive James. Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts. (2007) New York: Norton, 2008. p. 44.
Our fearsome gods have only changed their names: they now rhyme with ism.
C. G. Jung. Aspects of the Feminine. (Collected Works.) Translation by R. F. C. Hull. New York: MJF Books, 1982. p. 93.
For an ideology differs from a simple opinion in that it claims to possess either the key to history, or the solution for all the "riddles of the universe," or the intimate knowledge of the hidden universal laws which are supposed to rule nature and man.
Hannah Arendt. The Burden of Our Time. London: Secker and Warburg, 1951. Published in the US as The Origins of Totalitarianism. p 159.
Ideology functions as a machine to destroy information, even at the price of making assertions in clear contradiction of the evidence.
Jean-Francois Revel, La Connaissance Inutile, p. 153. Quoted in Clive James. Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts. (2007) New York: Norton, 2008. p. 605.
Categorizing is necessary for humans, but it becomes pathological when the category is seen as definitive, preventing people from considering the fuzziness of boundaries, let alone revising their categories. Contagion was the culprit. If you selected one hundred independent-minded journalists capable of seeing factors in isolation from one another, you would get one hundred different opinions. But the process of having these people report in lockstep caused the dimensionality of the opinion set to shrink considerably — they converged on opinions and used the same items as causes.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb. The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. New York: Random House, 2007. p. 15.
But can it be avoided?
One suspects that philosophy of mind has not in fact been performing the task, which Professor Hampshire recommends, of sorting and classifying fundamental moral issues; it has rather been imposing upon us a particular value judgment in the guise of a theory of human nature. Whether philosophy can ever do anything else is a question we shall have to consider.
Iris Murdoch. "The Idea of Perfection" in The Sovereignty of Good. New York: Schocken Books, 1971. p. 2.
Ray Comfort is an evangelical Christian minister who worked in New Zealand and Australia before coming to the United States. He has been an open-air preacher, a prolific author, a blogger on atheism and the star of a viral web video on creationism featuring a banana.
His book God Doesn't Believe in Atheists: Proof That the Atheist Doesn't Exist (1993) was supposedly a response to atheism, but it was a straw man — atheism as imagined by a Christian — because it did not cite atheist thinkers. A later attempt, You Can Lead an Atheist to Evidence, But You Can't Make Him Think: Answers to Questions from Angry Skeptics (2009), was another riff the same theme. It has a slight improvement over the 1993 book insofar as it was formatted as a Q&A with real questions that real atheists (supposedly) had posed to Comfort on his blog. These questions were short, unscholarly, and vague, allowing Comfort ample room to misinterpret them.
Here are a few main themes of these two books, both of which failed to convince me of God's existence.
Trope 1: True atheism requires omniscience
What is Comfort's "proof that the atheist doesn't exist?" It is only the disappointing and silly claim that true atheism in "the strict sense" fo the term — the certainty that there is no God, according to his definition — would require omniscience. People who "insist upon disbelief in God," he advises, must emphasize their own "limited knowledge" and must phrase their statement as "I believe that there is no God." (God Doesn't Believe in Atheists, p. 15)
A juvenile gambit. If he defines the term "atheism" as knowledge of God's nonexistence, he must make the parallel definition for "theism." Of course, no one knows whether God exists, and if that's the standard for theism or the lack thereof, no one can be atheist nor theist — right? Since everyone must admit that our own "limited knowledge" leads us to mere "belief," then — if atheism and theism require higher levels of knowledge, none of us are atheists or theists.
Of course, Comfort doesn't really define the term "atheism" as claiming knowledge of God's nonexistence. How do I know he does not? Because the very title of his 1993 book, God Doesn't Believe in Atheists, is a joke that only makes sense if you recognize that atheists are people who don't believe in God. If he (or others) really interpreted "atheism" as a claim to knowledge, the joke would have had to be "God Doesn't Know That Atheists Don't Exist." (See, for example, how I played on this theme in the title of this blog post.)
Comfort is deliberately, temporarily misdefining the term "atheism," without making the parallel change to the definition of "theism," to pretend to "win" this particular point. I put "win" in scare-quotes because no one started this argument with him. It's a non-problem. He is making it up.
If he is claiming more specifically that it is impossible ever to deny anything, what to make, then, of his own repeated denials of evolution? "It doesn't matter how many thousands of years pass," he asserts confidently, "elephants don't have [i.e. give birth to] giraffes, nor do monkeys have men." (God Doesn't Believe in Atheists, p. 71) How does he envision himself escaping the snarky retort that, because he isn't omniscient and didn't witness the birth of every animal that ever lived, he cannot deny evolution? How does he avoid the charge that — to riff off his book title — God doesn't believe in creationists?!
Trope 2: Atheists are already theists
Now and then, Comfort says the burden of proof is not on the theist, since — according to him — atheists somehow secretly already believe in God. "We don't have to prove God to the professing atheist. This is because he intuitively knows that he exists." (You Can Lead an Atheist to Evidence, p. 9) Of course, if Comfort were to properly acknowledge his own epistemic limitations, he wouldn't try to claim what any atheist, much less all atheists, intuit and what proof they require, and he would admit the burden of proof inherent in his own position.
Atheists are really already theists deep inside their hearts? Comfort asserts that, but he doesn't provide any proof. He has not provided "Proof That the Atheist Doesn't Exist" (the subtitle of his 1993 book).
Trope 3: Every building has a builder
"Every building has a builder." This is Comfort's recurring argument for why living beings must have had a Creator. Of course, as has been acknowledged by theologians for thousands of years, this principle implies an infinite regress of creators.
If everything needs a creator, who created God?
No one, says Comfort, because God created time and nothing could have been created before time.
But this merely exchanges one problem for another:
If everything needs time to be created, how was time created?
Another, more subtle issue:
If it's impossible to create God, why assume that God is an uncreated being?
Why not go with another option: God doesn't exist at all?
Trope 4: Your conscience tells you God exists...or does it?
Here's a hideously embarrassing contradiction in You Can Lead an Atheist to Evidence. Comfort says the conscience, rather than the intellect, testifies to God's existence and therefore the atheist's motivation for rejecting God "is moral. It's not intellectual." (p. 8) Then he says the conscience has nothing to contribute whatsoever on this issue because "atheism is not a moral issue. It's an intellectual issue." (p. 35) On one of his central theses in a bestselling book, he blatantly contradicts himself.
(He does not seem to be sensitive to contradictions in general. In responding to an objection that the creation stories in Genesis 1 and 2 contradict each other, he simply responds that they do not. Actually, they do, on the issue of whether plants were created before or after the first human.)
He is also unclear on whether atheists are intelligent and ethical. He acknowledges that studies have revealed that atheists and Christians are roughly the same on these two counts, and furthermore that people do not necessarily change their ways when they convert to Christianity, yet he insists on calling atheists "foolish" and "immoral."
In some places, he says an atheist has a working conscience and should recognize that it is God-given. But elsewhere, he implies that a person's conscience doesn't function properly unless they recognize God, and that a typical atheist feels constrained only by "the bounds of a civil law he's ever expanding to accommodate his sinful desires." (You Can Lead an Atheist to Evidence, p. 17) This is false, of course, and a smear. I have a conscience; I merely have an atheistic theory about what it is, what it does, and where it came from. Even if I am mistaken in my atheistic understanding of how I am wired for morality, and even if the true explanation is a theistic one, I am nevertheless capable of decent behavior, which is far more important than whether my limited knowledge has grasped the correct explanation for the origins of my behavior, and it is a point on which Comfort doesn't give me full credit.
Trope 5: The threat of Hell
If I believed in God and Hell, Hell would be a barrier toward my relationship with God. I, personally, don't wish other people to suffer harsh punishment for minor infractions. Why should God desire and enforce this?
Comfort superficially explains that God is different because He is perfect and has more exacting standards. Of course, this does not answer the question. If I fundamentally disagree with a moral standard, increasing nitpicking about the standard and intensifying punishment for violations does not make me say, Oh, well, now I see that the moral standard was perfect all along. Instead, it makes the problem worse.
That which is not a perfection in a human is not obviously a perfection in God.
Trope 6: Always wear your parachute
The parachute allegory is a cornerstone of these books. Comfort describes himself as being in the position of knowing a plane is going to crash and warning the other passengers to put on their parachutes. Many passengers — so he characterizes them — do not listen due to their pride, laziness, or disbelief. Why not, he suggests, just put on the parachute, which is faith in Christ, because it is harmless and it will save you from infinite suffering in Hell if it turns out there is such a Hell?
Essentially, this is a version of Pascal's Wager. Pascal's Wager has been refuted elsewhere. It's easy to do. There are two basic ways to refute it, as I see it, because it requires you to make two assumptions. First of all, that the infinite joy of Heaven and the infinite suffering of Hell are real possibilities. If you say that the afterlife cannot possibly be infinite, now you are in a mathematical position to weigh your finite experience in this life against the finite afterlife that you may reap as a consequence. Secondly, that the Christian God (who can help us with this afterlife) is the only possible god. This is an even easier rebuttal. If any gods are possible, we should review various options. There is no reason to entertain the Christian god as a viable possibility while excluding the possibility of the gods of other religions. And then we have to consider that, even if there is an infinitely long heaven and an infinitely long hell, we have no idea which god is going to save us.
To continue the parachute allegory, and to put my own spin on it, from the point of view of my admittedly limited knowledge:
The parachute is ripped and will not save us. The plane is not crashing.
This January 2022 blog post is based on an old article I wrote that was published in Positive Atheism, June 2009: "God Doesn't Believe in Atheists: A response to the books of Ray Comfort." The publication went offline.
John Blanchard's Does God Believe in Atheists? (2000) is available as a 650-page book (a 2014 revised PDF is available free at christianstudylibrary.org). Or, if you prefer, you can get what I assume are the same arguments in the format of an audiocassette with a run-time of just under one hour.
I listened to the audiocassette. Blanchard delivered the lecture as a church sermon at which he was selling his book at half-price. His church audience was not apparent until the middle of the second side, when he informed these Christians that the fact that they were sitting in a church should suggest to them that Jesus is actually real. (No word on why Jews sit in synagogues and Hindus sit in temples.)
Cassette Side 1
Blanchard argues against the idea that the universe is “just here” and that humans are the result of a cosmic accident.
The Big Bang isn’t even really a theory, he says, because it can’t be empirically tested. (Well, I guess that means that creationism isn’t a theory either.)
He says no one any longer believes the “steady-state” theory that the universe has always been here, because scientists now know that matter is always changing. (Then how about a non-steady-state theory that the universe has always been here and has always been changing? He doesn’t propose this possibility.)
Might the universe have self-created? He dismisses that as nonsense. (Why?)
The only option left is that a “self-existent” God created the universe. (So, God can be self-existent, but not the universe. Why, he doesn't say.)
Of course, the God who created the universe is, he says, the God who is defined in Christian scripture. (No reason to assume that.)
After going on for some length about the extreme odds against the universe appearing by accident, he concludes it's easier to believe that life is purposefully made than to believe that life is an accident. It takes more faith, he says, to believe it was an accident. (In doing so, he is inadvertently disparaging faith, because he is saying that one needs faith to believe nonsense.)
Evolutionary theory, he says, claims — to the contrary — that life is the result of pure chance. (It does not. The theory of natural selection observes that some living beings are better equipped to survive than others, and thus their survival is not purely a roll of the dice, but rather it has to do with their physical and mental traits and how they interact with other living beings and with their habitat and ecosystem.)
“How can we jump from atoms to ethics, and from molecules to morality?” he asks, thereby implying it's impossible to start with pure matter and end up with ideas. (Well, one might ask him the same question in reverse: How do you start with a purely immaterial God and get matter?)
Regarding ethics, he continues, “Why are we in tune with some kind of law that we never brought into being?” (This simply assumes, rather than argues, that morality is not a product of human biology and psychology.)
He notes that some features of human morality seem to be universal, though they haven't been transmitted through writing. (But plenty of things aren't consciously created by humans, and that does not mean they were given by God. Another option is that they are unconscious behaviors or biological functions.)
Cassette Side 2
Next, Blanchard mainly preaches about the Bible, which, he declares,
“has the highest standard of morality in the world. Simply put, we can trust the Bible implicitly in everything it says about everything of which it speaks. And its main subject is not a principle but a person. From the beginning of Genesis to the end of Revelation, the central subject of Scripture is, of course, Jesus of Nazareth.”
Every other word of this is wrong. The Bible commands offensive wars of attrition, institutes the death penalty for ritual infractions, and regulates slavery. People make livings interpreting the Bible precisely because it is not “the highest standard of morality” without some serious work to make an interpretive framework through which we can discard the half that appalls the common moral sense. The Bible was written from the point of view of particular peoples and does not represent objective viewpoints, much less is it the final word on history, so it cannot be trusted on “everything.” And the character of Jesus does not appear until the New Testament; he is not the central theme of Genesis, which was written hundreds of years before Jesus supposedly lived. Only a Christian interpretive framework would find a way to locate Jesus in the Garden of Eden. Whatever artistic license the author intends by this hyperbole, it crosses over into simple inaccuracy.
Conclusions
Side 1 ends with the claim that the planet can meet all basic human needs. (No, not if there are 7 billion of us living industrialized lifestyles — see the concept of an ecological footprint.) He then makes the analogy that, if we have spiritual needs, then surely God can fulfill them. (No, that would be the fallacy of wish fulfillment.)
Side 2 ends with various claims such as:
Jesus performed miracles without being physically present;
he felt everything that humans feel, except that he never sinned, so he never felt guilt or shame;
God gave humans the faculty of thought so we can find God; but also, we’ll find God if we seek God with our hearts.
No, none of it makes sense.
Why do I care?
I wouldn't spend much time picking on things that people say in defense of their faith. I give people polite leeway to believe what they believe, especially if they're not picking on atheists. This author, however, in his promotional lecture, spent all of Side 1 complaining that atheism is irrational and claiming he had a better alternative. I do consider it my responsibility as an atheist to occasionally listen to Christian apologetics just to be aware of the basic arguments. In this case, I listened, but no viable alternative to atheism was provided, at least not on the audiocassette (2002). Maybe it's provided in the full book (2000, revised 2014), but did the lecture persuade me to read the book? No.
Background of this small essay, i.e., why you are reading it here now
I listened to the 1-hour audiocassette lecture in 2011. Since it had the same title as the 650-page book, I treated the abridged audio as an alternate version of the book, and I posted my comments about it to Goodreads under this book title. I didn't leave the book a starred rating, so as not to affect its collective starred rating, and I did specify I was responding to the abridged audio and not to the full print version. This generated a few negative comments from people who were mad at me for — in their view — reviewing a book that I admitted to not having read.
I disagree with this characterization of the book and of my activity. Audiobooks are books; abridged books are books; abridged audiobooks are books. If a one-hour recorded lecture is not meant to be considered a valid version of the longer print book, then the author or publisher should not give them the same title, as that causes confusion, the responsibility for which falls on them. Finally, I don't believe there is a One True Answer for how people ought to use the Goodreads website; it's social media, and we make it up as we go along. Goodreads may have hoped people would use their website in a particular way, but people who use the site may come up with creative interpretations and we are not necessarily wrong when we do so.
Nonetheless, I no longer wish to receive sporadic comments questioning the validity of why I posted comments about an abridged audio on the product webpage of the longer book ten years ago. I mean, the planet is burning, can we worry about bigger things please. But also, to the extent that I allow myself to be trolled, I admit to being peeved that I have logged over 1750 full-length books that I've read and yet internet strangers are repeatedly needling me about my intellectual capacities because of the single instance of an abridged audiobook among them. (Never mind that I, not they, am the one who bothered to engage the author's argument.) From their perspective, it makes sense that they comment on this post, since it is the post that they saw; but from my perspective, I wonder why this post is high-engagement and rarely does anyone interact with my other 1750 posts. It is a headscratcher. Thus, I have moved the old essay from Goodreads to this webpage. I have rephrased and reformatted the essay for clarity.
May I also add that it is common for people to complain that an online comment is not the correct length — it needs to be shorter to hold their attention, or it needs to be longer for me to prove my intellectual capacity to them upon their demand. That's in the same bucket with people who claim I should not have posted the essay in an internet field labeled "review" because my essay is, for one reason or another, not a proper "review." Or, if the field is labeled "comment," I shouldn't write a full-fledged review, but rather a shorter "comment," because that would be the proper use of the field. People have assumptions about the "proper" use of fields on the internet. (It's almost as if the proper use of the internet were ordained by God.) When they cannot or will not engage with the substance of what I wrote, they sometimes pick an argument with my choice of website, or my choice of labeled field on that website, or the length of what I wrote. But actually, that's not their concern. The reason they criticize the way I wrote what I wrote (be it essay, review, comment, or what have you) is that they don't agree with my point at all and they would like me to stop making it. Until they provide a counterargument, of course, I'm left with my own argument. Thus, my argument here has not changed since 2011, as no one has yet bothered to rebut it.
