Another response to Plantinga's EAAN. (Part 3)

I’ve been blogging about Alvin Plantinga’s Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism (EAAN) this month. If you’re a naturalist (like me), this argument challenges the very rationality of all of your beliefs, including your belief in naturalism itself. If you’re a theist (like Plantinga), on the other hand, you can claim that your beliefs, including your belief in God, are rational because God has made us in his image with faculties that track Truth, including the Truth of his existence.

Or can you?

Have you ever thought to yourself, or even claimed that, “the Lord works in mysterious ways”? As crass as this phrase seems, many high brow apologists – even Plantinga himself – have used just this tact to get out of evidential arguments against the existence of God. The idea is that, all things considered, we lowly humans aren’t in a position to know what God would do or permit in any given situation.

For example, so much natural suffering seems pointless (think of children and animals being maimed or orphaned or dying slowly from forest fires, earthquakes, tornadoes, floods, tsunamis, cancer, tuberculosis, and parasitic eye infections  - just to name a few), seriously challenging the theist’s belief in a personal God who is omnipotent and morally perfect. But theists often respond as Plantinga does here:

“From the theistic perspective, there is little to no reason to think that God would have a reason for a particular evil state of affairs only if we had a pretty good idea of what that reason might be. On the theistic conception, our cognitive powers, as opposed to God’s, are a bit slim for that. God might have reasons we cannot so much as understand…”

But then, who’s to say that God doesn’t have reasons that we cannot so much as understand for providing us with faculties that don’t track Truth? Theism entails such an enormous epistemic chasm between us and God that I’m afraid that nobody, not even a genius like Alvin Plantinga (and I do mean that - I really do think that he's a genius), can say that.

It seems that, for all we know, theists are in no better position to think that their faculties track Truth than naturalists are. All we all can do is use the faculties we have to make the best, most honest sense of things that we can. For all we know, God may be testing our powers of rationality and hoping that we'll come to the conclusion that the type of God he has permitted to be portrayed by classical monotheism doesn't, in fact, exist! Back to our faculties and their deliverances, then.

"The lord works in mysterious ways" is an escape clause that in philosophy lingo is known as "skeptical theism". I'm sure that I'll be posting about it in the future because it's not just damning to the idea that we can be confident that God has given us reliable faculties. It's damning to the idea that God doesn't lie to us. Heck, it's damning to the idea that we can know anything about God at all.

A tentative response to Plantinga's EAAN. (Part 2)

About a week ago, I shared Alvin Plantinga’s Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism (EAAN). If its premises are true and the logic is valid, then any beliefs that naturalists like me (people who don’t believe in God or any being like God) have are irrational. (Ouch.)

I want to emphasize that the EAAN is not meant to show that evolution is false. In fact, Plantinga seems to accept that evolution has occurred (though he believes that it has been guided by God). It’s also not meant to show that naturalism is false, just that, for all we know, it’s irrational to believe. In philosophy lingo, the EAAN provides a de jure objection to naturalism, not a de facto objection. Nevertheless, its conclusion is meant to be devastating to those who accept both naturalism and unguided evolution, supposedly plunging us into extreme skepticism: we have good reason to think that the majority of our beliefs, including our belief in naturalism, are not really True.

Notice that I capitalized the word ‘true’ in that last sentence. What do I mean might be the difference between ‘truth’ and ‘Truth’?

Suppose you are, like Neo, living in The Matrix. You would not be privy to the ‘Truth’ – the ultimate Truth – that you are really in a jelly filled vat in an unconscious state connected to machines. No, what you would be privy to, your thoughts about the world you experience - that would represent ‘truth’. For instance, truth might be that you are reading a blog on your computer right now and that you should probably get back to work, or your family, or other more pressing concerns. (Ain't that the truth!)

It seems to me that Plantinga’s EAAN gives naturalists reason to think that they don’t have access to Truth, just as Neo didn't before taking Morpheus' red pill.

Plantinga writes: “It's as likely, given unguided evolution, that we live in a sort of dream world as that we actually know something about ourselves and our world.”

Say that Plantinga’s argument succeeds in forcing us to conclude that the world may very well be quite different from the way that it seems to us. We have (i) our model of reality that the faculties provided us by evolution have given us, and then there’s (ii) the way that the world may well actually be. The former (i. truth) is very useful and is getting more so by the minute as those faculties  continue to enhance the degree of our adaptation to reality. If we look closely enough and learn a little neuroscience, this actually seems to be the case. Unlike The Matrix, at least our model is linked to reality because our sense organs (or 'indicators', as Plantinga calls them) really do respond to stimuli from the real world and lead to adaptive behaviour within it. The latter (ii. Truth) is conceptually inaccessible to us, even in principle. 

What should we do about this? As far as I see, there is nothing we can do. Plantinga, like Morpheus, is a wise man, but until he has one of Morpheus' red pills to offer (which I'd like to think I'd take if he did), I have no choice but to CARRY ON (as the posters say), SATISFIED WITH THE tRUTH. I mean, would anybody really fault the citizens of the Matrix for talking about the truth - the only truth available to them?

In more philosophy lingo, Plantinga has argued for an undefeated defeater to the notion that we can know Truth on naturalism and evolution. Fine. I argue that, for purely pragmatic reasons, our faculties are undefeatable at providing us with adaptive truth when properly operating in the environment that designed them by unguided natural selection. We naturalists are used to humility in noting our shared common ancestry with all life, our role within an unimaginable causal web, and our limited place for a short time in the universe. This kind of conclusion fits quite nicely with our others.

I haven't yet decided whether this is the actual position I take with respect to the EAAN. I'm putting it out there for feedback, especially from anybody who knows a thing or two about epistemology. It does seem to suggest that Plantinga’s argument isn’t that devastating for the naturalist who can’t find a way to reject either the premises or the logic of the EAAN; from a purely pragmatic perspective, the whole argument just doesn’t seem to matter, so long as one is prepared to accept a more limited, more humble definition of 'truth'. I hope that this will become even more obvious in my next post where I will show that Plantinga’s belief in Jesus by no means guarantees that his faculties are any more reliable with respect to Truth than on naturalism. Later, I’ll explain why I'm skeptical about the first premise, without which, the EAAN fails utterly.

Why Winnipeg?

This essay was written by an old friend of mine, Jay Sinha, and published in The Winnipeg Free Press this week. It nicely captures some experiences, some frustrations, and some loves every Winnipegger has.

From: http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/local/Why-Winnipeg-260590021.html

SOME emotions can be hard to describe in words. Love is one of them.

You might say "love illuminates me" or "love feels like being on a magical roller-coaster" or maybe even "it makes me nauseous."

Love can conjure up intense feelings, especially if a roller-coaster is involved. My love of Winnipeg, where I grew up, is illuminating. It’s also subtle, not fleeting — there’s no nausea involved — it’s unconditional, and it comforts me to the core because it fortifies my sense of place in this world and life.

My home base is now in Quebec, but I have been back living temporarily in Winnipeg with my wife and son for the past two years. We came to help my mother care for my ailing father. He passed away peacefully last year, and in July we return to Quebec.

I think it’s very cool that our son, Jyoti, has been attending my alma mater, Brock Corydon School. In fact, his wonderful class and teacher inspired this article. The March 22, 2014 edition of the Winnipeg Free Press included an article by Gordon Sinclair Jr. titled Accentuate the positive: Teacher, class have only good things to say about our city.

The article chronicled his visit to the Brock Corydon grades 5-6 class of dynamic, Winnipeg-loving teacher Susan Pereles. For the past four years, her classroom has been an incubator for mini-Winnipeg ambassadors.

Each year, they do a project about positive aspects of Winnipeg. Jyoti is one of the lucky students in Pereles’ Winnipeg love-in class. During Sinclair’s visit, they had a lively discussion about complaints that money spent on the Canadian Museum for Human Rights would be better spent fixing potholes. Jyoti’s wise words quoted in the article made me feel warm inside: "No one is going to come from halfway around the world to look at our roads."

The icing on the cake for Pereles and her class was a thoughtful visit on May 6 from Winnipeg Police Service Chief Devon Clunis. He wanted to meet this class that is focusing on the positive. Pereles later recounted to me Clunis had insisted on keeping his meeting with the class despite an extremely stressful day personally dealing with fallout from the cancellation of a 911 call warning prior to a fatal shooting at a nightclub. He even brought gifts of water bottles for each student and a framed, personalized certificate of appreciation for Pereles. What a powerful example of the positive spirit of Winnipeg and the people who live that spirit every day.

I’ve been happily promoting Winnipeg all my life wherever I go. While attending McGill University in Montreal 22 years ago, I wrote an article titled Dispelling Myths About… Winnipeg for the law faculty student newspaper, the Quid Novi.

It was republished in the University of Manitoba student newspaper the Manitoban, where a friend was an editor at the time and suggested it would be a good fit. Writing that article was a therapeutic exercise for me. My McGill classmates were from all over the place, and when meeting someone new, an obvious question was: "Where are you from?" To my response of "Winnipeg," I regularly received snidely playful attempts at jokes involving stereotypes about winter, cold, snow, mosquitoes, flat prairies. Sound familiar?

I wrote the article to move folks beyond those tepid stereotypes — though I must admit this past winter was, um, rather long and cold — and expose them to some of the true glory of my Winnipeg. There’s not enough space to print the full article, but here’s a taste of how it went: I was born and raised in Winnipeg. Of this fact I am immensely proud. Be assured, I am going to explain to you from whence my pride stems, but first I must ask you a question. This question, though seemingly innocent, has evolved into a rhetorical question that inevitably produces smiles and shivers.

The question: When I say "Winnipeg," what is the first thing that pops into your mind? Let me coincide with your thoughts by presenting a scenario I have experienced time and again in this life. The setting is anywhere but Winnipeg and involves myself (the Winnipegger) meeting a non-Winnipegger (who has never been to Winnipeg): Non-Winnipegger: "So, where do you come from?" Me: "I come from Winnipeg, Man., the gateway to the West and the probable centre of the Universe." Non-Winnipegger: "Winnipeg, hmmm, yeah, it’s really cold there isn’t it?" Or perhaps "Winnipeg!? Wow! How do you manage to survive the winters there?!"

Sometimes even "Winnipeg? Isn’t that where your skin freezes if you go outside in the winter?" Me: "Yes, that would be Winnipeg; of course, true Winnipeggers only worry about frozen skin when they roll around naked in the snow for more than two hours at a time."

AAUUUGH!! Go ahead, admit it. When I said Winnipeg, you shivered instinctively and had a vision of fur-bundled people scurrying between snow houses carved out of an otherwise barren Prairie tundra. That vision is a hogwash, loaded myth that is about to be dispelled...

Part of being a Winnipegger involves being a Manitoban and being a Manitoban is a state of mind. The Manitoba licence plate reads "Friendly Manitoba." This is no myth. Having lived in the province for most of my lifetime, I am somewhat qualified to make sweeping generalizations about the place. As a pedestrian or cyclist, your right-of-way is respected by motorists, sometimes even by taxi drivers.

Bus drivers will offer directions without grimacing, and many may even throw in best wishes to your health during the holiday season. No joke. I was once on a bus where the driver greeted each new person with a jovial "Welcome aboard, Merry Christmas!" and then as we dismounted he would call out "Have a Happy New Year!"

Though some people thought him a little crazy, they left the bus smiling. Manitobans enjoy smiling. They do it sincerely and without provocation. Why, you ask? Why not? What does a frown or a non-expression have over a smile? Nothing, except that it tells the world to bug off. Smiles, on the other hand, breed happiness and optimism and contentment. However, to smile without holding such feelings is an exercise in superficiality.

Therein lies the secret to the Manitoba state of mind. To smile with sincerity, one must be content with life. If Winnipeggers, being Manitobans, are smiling all the time, they must be content with life... To experience Winnipeg fully is to revel in diversity.

Born of the fur trade and western settlement in the mid-19th century, Winnipeg is now home to over 650,000 people originating from all corners of the planet. The city is a patchwork of ethnic communities that are Canadian while being distinctly French, Ukranian, Italian, Vietnamese, Portugese, Chilean, Polish, Indian, Chinese, Ethiopian… Proof of this can be found in the fact that Winnipeg boasts the highest per capita ratio of restaurants in North America. There is even a Mennonite restaurant called D’8 Schtove that serves divine plumimoos...

Winnipeg is relatively flat, but it is not barren; it is very green. There are parks galore and more golf courses and elm trees (180,000, elm trees that is) than any other major urban centre in North America. Those who are turned off by the flatness of Winnipeg have obviously never experienced a shimmering, red-gold Prairie sun setting over fields of mustard seed for as far as the eye can see. There’s beauty and power in that sort of space...

What more can I say? Actually lots, but I think I’ve told you enough to show you why Winnipeggers smile on a regular basis. Their lives are laid-back and isolated from the hustle and bustle of larger centres, yet filled with the stimulation and variety of the world.

Not bad for a place that’s known for being cold. It’s a fact that cold myths die hard, so if this one is not dead, I hope at least it’s been dispelled to a warmer clime. Some of the details have changed over the past 20 years, and obviously there is oodles more to add now...

FortWhyte Alive, Althea Guiboche (the Bannock Lady), the rights museum, the Jets, the Goldeyes, the murals, new festivals, restaurants, parks, visual artists, writers, musicians... but the hearty spirit is the same. À la prochaine, Winnipeg, mon amour.

Winnipegger Jay Sinha is co-owner of LifeWithoutPlastic.com

Do I even know anything? Alvin Plantinga's EAAN (Part 1)

"The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist."
-Verbil Kint, The Usual Suspects

Can we have the wool pulled over eyes in an extremely powerful way without having any idea of it? How correct are our ideas, if at all? Can we rely on our brains to provide us with the truth? It sure seems that way to us, but haven’t we been mistaken in important ways before? I believe, for instance, that billions of people alive today and throughout history have been wrong about their theistic beliefs ... but what ground do I have for believing that my world view is right? It seems that I must rely on the products of my cognitive faculties in reaching that conclusion, but what if they aren't reliable?!

Alvin Plantinga, arguably the most important Christian philosopher of our time, believes that naturalists are in no position to know that their beliefs are true, including the belief that naturalism itself is true. I’ll be describing his clever and interesting Evolutonary Argument Against Naturalism (EAAN) in this post and I'll be discussing my responses in the next few weeks. If you are a naturalist, you owe it to yourself to at least think about Plantinga’s argument and spend some time making sure that you have a response that you can sleep well with. If you are a theist, you’ll love how the EAAN can appear to turn the tables on us naturalists.

Naturalism (N) is notoriously difficult to define, but Plantinga defines it as the belief that there is no God, nor any being like him. Fair enough.

Naturalists tend to believe that we have arrived here according to the unguided random processes described by the Theory of Evolution (E) over billions of years. Accordingly, a question that the naturalist must ask is how E could account for faculties that deliver true beliefs.

On naturalism, a belief will be an event or structure in the brain. Here’s how Plantinga puts it:

“[A belief] will be a structure involving many neurons connected in various ways. This structure will respond to input from other structures, from sense organs, and the like; it may also send signals along effector nerves to muscles and glands, thereby causing behavior. Such a structure will have at least 2 kinds of properties: On the one hand, it will have neurophysiologic properties (NP properties) specifying, for example, the number of neurons involved in the structure, the rate of fire in various parts of it, the change of rate of fire in one part in response to a change in rate of fire in another, the way in which it is connected with other structures and with muscles, and so on. But if it is a belief, it will also have a property of a quite different sort, a mental property: It will have a content.”

Evolution will have ensured that our behavior is adaptive; if a tiger is around, it will have selected for NP properties that lead us to run away or hide. That protective behaviour increases one's chance of living another day and passing one's genes (that code for adaptive behaviour producing mechanisms, among other things) on to the next generation. But notice that it's the behaviour that is adaptive, not necessarily the belief that motivates the behaviour. If the belief content associated with adaptive NP properties is true, great, but if it’s false, that’s equally fine, so long as it leads to adaptive behaviour.

For example, Norm the Neanderthal sees a sabre tooth tiger and it occurs to him that he may be the tiger’s next meal, so he runs away and lives to tell the tale. On the other hand, Harry the Homo sapien sees a tiger and thinks that the tiger wants to scratch his back and the best way to do that is to run away. That seemingly bizarre belief content still gets him in the right place to survive; it just doesn’t matter whether it's true or false, or so argues Plantinga.

If that’s true, then the probability that a given belief is true or false is going to be roughly 0.5 at best (because truth just doesn’t matter). If someone has 100 independent beliefs, the probability that most of them, say, 75% of them, are true is going to be less than one in a million.

On naturalism and unguided evolution, therefore, the probability that our faculties will be reliable is low. It follows that we no longer have any reason to think that our faculties are reliable. If we cannot trust our faculties or the beliefs they produce, we can’t trust the belief that naturalism is true. It would be irrational for anybody who accepts Plantinga's reasoning here to continue to believe in the truth of naturalism itself; that belief, combined with E, is self-defeating.

Please note, the conclusion of the EAAN is not that naturalism is false (a de facto objection), but rather that it’s irrational to continue to believe it (a de jure objection) or anything else for that matter. Naturalism could be true, or it could be false, but since our faculties are unreliable, we just have no way of knowing either way. The EAAN concludes that we have no way of knowing anything, plunging us into the quagmire of extreme skepticism.

Here's how Plantinga clearly spells it out:

(1) On unguided evolution, the probability that our cognitive faculties will be reliable is low
(2) One who accepts unguided evolution and agrees that (1) is true, must conclude that one's cognitive faculties are unreliable.
(3) If one's cognitive faculties are unreliable, then one is in no position to believe any product of one's cognitive faculties, including the belief in unguided evolution
(4) Therefore, the belief in unguided evolution is self-defeating, and can't be rationally accepted.

Plantinga rejects naturalism: he’s a Christian theist. From his perspective, God has guided E by creating environments that select for genetic mutations that he has caused and which have made us in his image. Since God has reliable faculties, he has given us reliable faculties as well. Like magic, the skepticism that results from the combination of naturalism with E is wiped away by combining E with supernaturalism.

The greatest trick evolution ever pulled was convincing naturalists that their beliefs are true 
-Alvin Plantinga

"Keaton once said: "I don't believe in God, but I'm afraid of him" -Verbil Kint, TUS

I don't believe in God either. Maybe I should be afraid of Alvin Plantinga.

KEEP CALM and AVOID DEEPITIES

I recently had a nice discussion with some friends about the challenges of identifying as Catholic given numerous problems that flow from standard Catholic doctrine combined with the hypocrisy and scandal within the organization. In that friendly conversation, I came up against not one, but two deepities. These beguiling but ultimately fallacious phrases are commonly encountered, especially, it seems, when matters theological are discussed. Read on if you don’t want to be fooled by them.  

Let’s  begin with an example of a deepity I know you’ve heard before. Ready for a deep thought sans Jack Handey? Here it is:

“Love … is just a word”.

Does that sound somewhat interesting or even a little shocking to you? Does it make you question whether you ought to deflate your ideas about the importance of love? (Even just a bit?)

Here’s the thing: this sentence can be read in two ways. On one reading, it seems to say something profoundly counter-intuitive: while we normally think of love as being so important to our lives, it’s actually “just” a word. On the second reading, it is trivially true that the word ‘love’ is a word. The word ‘mucous’ is a word, too. So what? The amazing thing is that somehow, the obvious truth of the second reading seems to rub off on the first, making it seem true; love is just a word, isn’t it? Sorry, that’s actually false. You can’t find love in the dictionary because love is not a word. ‘Love’ is, but love is an emotion, a condition, a feeling.

The key features of a deepity are contained in that example. On one reading of a deepity, a statement is true, but trivially so. The second reading seems to say something profound but is actually false. The truth of the first reading somehow makes the false but profound reading seem true, so the phrase is attention-getting, makes you go, “Ooooh , how interesting, how cool, how deep”. But you’ve been fooled. It’s actually banal and false.

Here are some other examples: “Whatever will be will be”, “Everything happens for a reason”, “You learn about nothing in philosophy”, & “Beauty is only skin deep”.

Back to the conversation I had with my Catholic friends: the first deepity that came up was one you’ve probably heard before. Get ready to be moved:

“God … is love”.

Sounds profound, doesn’t it, as though God has somehow been explained or defined? “Ooooh. Deep.” But ‘God’ can be redefined to be anything we want. Trivial. My son might say, “’God’ is peanut butter”. He might then ask for a God and jam sandwich for lunch.

I wonder if people use this deepity and similar ones like “God is the universe” or “God is nature” because redefining the word ‘God’ as words that signify things that exist (like love, nature, and the universe) makes it seem as if God exists, too.

Here’s the rub: the universe is the universe, nature is nature, and love is love, and none of that tells me anything about what one thinks God actually is. We already have these words and they already have their uses. If ‘God’ is just synonymous with ‘love’, it doesn’t help me one iota to be able to tell my wife that I God her. What is needed is a definition for God such that it’s possible to see if the concept maps onto reality in some way. 

If you’re using the word God, it seems to me that you have to be talking about some kind of intelligent mind that is either disembodied or exists in some other dimension and that is responsible in some way for the universe. Those are necessary, (though not sufficient) to define what one (everyone?) means by God, so if those concepts aren’t part of what you mean by God - and they are no part of what anybody means by ‘love’ - then not only do I have no idea what you’re talking about, I doubt that you have any idea what you’re talking about. Notice that it is another thing entirely to say that God is loving. At least that makes sense because 'loving' is an adjective that one might use to describe the intelligent agent known as God in which one might believe. But if you believe in God because you think that God is love, I’m sorry to inform you that you don’t believe in God, you just believe in love. This deepity just creates confusion.

The second deepity I encountered seemed more interesting to me, or at least I hadn’t heard it before. See if you can spot why it’s a deepity. Here it is:

“No one will ever argue God into or out of existence!”

First reading:  arguments don’t make things exist or stop existing. True, but trivially so. I can argue that I need scrambled eggs for breakfast but that won’t make them suddenly exist on the table in front of me, and I can argue that nuclear weapons should be disposed of, but that won’t make them cease to exist. Trivial.

Perhaps the idea that is meant to be conveyed is that arguments will never eliminate belief in God from humanity, but that’s trivially true, too. After all, despite piles of independent photographic evidence, there are still people who believe that theEarth is flat. This is simply to say that irrational people will always exist. Who’d doubt that (and who'd want to be counted among their numbers)?

The idea that I think is meant to be conveyed is that arguments can’t change people’s beliefs about the existence of God, and while that would be profound if true, it’s obviously false, and I (among countless others) am living proof that it is. The person who can no longer reconcile a single occasion of pointless natural suffering on Earth (let alone the constant onslaught of it) with the idea that all is planned and managed by an omnipotent and morally perfect agent is succumbing to the evidential argument from evil. Countless agnostics and atheists will point to some version of the problem of evil, for example, in their otherwise painful and unwanted deconversion from theism.

To claim that evidence and argument would not change one’s mind under any circumstances – that they can’t - is to claim to be irrational. It's a conversation stopper. 

In religious circles, believing despite a lack (or in spite) of good evidence and argument (to the contrary), ie. faith, is celebrated and deepities such as this one are part of that dance. Such faith, we are told, is a virtue. But let’s see this claim for what it really says: irrationality is a virtue. I have a feeling that my old friend who shared this amusing deepity with me would reject that claim. I have a feeling that any sane person would, for believing despite a lack (or in spite) of good evidence and/or argument (to the contrary) is the definition of a delusion. In his classic novel, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig wrote, “When one person suffers from a delusion, it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion it is called a Religion.” 

If I'm wrong, and this deepity isn't a deepity at all because both readings are true, then it would seem that Pirsig was right.

Got any deepities that you’d like to share? I’d love to hear about them in the comments section below.

Why there's nothing wrong with fundamentalism.

'Fundamentalism' is defined in two ways:

(1) strict adherence to the basic principles of any subject or discipline

or, as it's more commonly used:

(2) strict adherence to the basic principles of a religious doctrine sourced in the literal interpretation of inerrant scripture, often Islamic or Christian.

Ask yourself, has anybody ever complimented another for being a fundamentalist? It seems to me that when the word is used, it virtually always has a negative connotation suggesting inflexibility and intolerance of other viewpoints, as though that's always bad.

Surely intolerance of intolerance is good and worthy of inflexibility. Here’s a short list of other things of which we should be intolerant: hypocrisy, polio, bigotry, child abuse, nuclear proliferation, unfriendly AI, symptomatic bradycardia, and intellectual dishonesty.

I don't intend for this post to serve as a launching platform for a discussion of the virtues and potential exceptions to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), but suffice it to say that I strongly support its articles. If one were to say that I am a therefore a fundamentalist about that, then I’d be guilty as charged. This document is nothing if not a list of things of which to to be intolerant. Dissent is to be discouraged, not merely tolerated. Countries can impose sanctions upon other countries that violate the UDHR to try to change the unacceptable behavior. Newspaper editorials might publish cartoons that mock or ridicule the offensive government.

Intolerant? Inflexible? Good for the UDHR, I say. Good for the people who, in response to the smoky crematoria of Nazi Germany, made it happen, and good for the people who enforce it and try to obtain its global acceptance.

This is good fundamentalism. Why? Because the fundamentals of the UDHR are good.

Now, consider another example of fundamentalism from the imagination of Sam Harris. Someone else strictly adheres to the sacred scripture of his small Pacific island tribe that states, “Every third shall walk in darkness”. And so every third born child in the community has both eyes ritualistically removed shortly after birth. One third of the population is blind and celebrated for having been chosen by birth order for this special rite of passage. As they age, it is these children alone who are eligible to become the spiritual leaders of the community.

Why is this kind of fundamentalism wrong? I hope the answer is obvious: what’s wrong with this particular fundamentalism is the fundamentals of this particular religion. Similarly, what’s wrong with Islamic, Jewish, or Christian fundamentalism is, let's face it, certain fundamentals of Islam, Judaism, and Christianity. Since the sacred texts aren't going to change, it's critically important to change the way problematic passages are interpreted - a task that's probably best performed by moderates (people who find ways to take the literal interpretation of the problematic fundamental passages less seriously).

Of course, many non-religious ideologies also get fundamental principles wrong. In a free society, all should be open to criticism and even, when appropriate, ridicule. Reason, evidence, satire, & ridicule, all play important roles in changing incorrect and/or otherwise problematic but malleable beliefs and desires. Ridicule and mockery played an important part in the decline of the Ku Klux Klan, for example.

Here’s something to watch for: those criticized for endorsing bad principles often retort that the criticizer is an intolerant and inflexible fundamentalist. This is an all too common tu quoque that gets dragged out when religious principles are criticized. Don’t do it, and don’t fall for it. The issue isn’t whether one is a fundamentalist: there are things to be inflexibly intolerant of. It’s whether one's fundamental principles are good or bad. So if you disagree with someone, figure out precisely what principle you think they are endorsing that you disagree with and criticize that instead of calling them a fundamentalist. Because at the end of the day, there’s nothing necessarilly wrong with fundamentalism itself.