"Atheists Lack Belief in God" is a Deepity

Many atheists are fond of saying that they "lack belief in God". Unfortunately, this is a vague phrase that can be read in two ways. It's widely accepted and has been the source of much confusion because it is what Daniel Dennett has coined, a deepity. I have written about deepities before here and here.

A deepity is a phrase that balances precariously between two interpretations. On one reading, the phrase is true, but trivially so. On the second reading, the phrase would be profound if it were true, but that second interpretation is actually false. Somehow, the truth of the first reading seems to rub off on the second one, making it seem profound and true.

Here's Dennett's explanation:

 
Let's face it, most atheists think that God's existence is more likely false than true. What else could it possibly mean when they quote their wise sage, Carl Sagan, and tell believers that "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence"? To say that they lack belief is, in that case, trivially true. It's trivially true because failure of ascent to the claim "theism is more likely true than false" is entailed by (even mildly) holding the opposite belief.

But the phrase "atheists lack belief in God" can be also be interpreted as follows: atheists have no opinion on whether theism is true or false. Now if that's true, then there's a very profound implication that atheist's seem to love: they have no burden of proof.

Oooooh.

Deep.

Unfortunately, for atheists, it's false*.

Deepities are beguiling, but fallacious. Atheists, who normally take great pride in avoiding fallacies of reasoning, would do well to avoid this deepity and do something that should come easily to those who so strongly endorse rationality: they should take on the burden to defend exactly what they believe.

Philosopher Dan Dennett

*Folks for whom the latter interpretation is true include those who haven't thought about it enough, like a baby, but who in their right mind would call such a person an atheist? Isn't the term supposed to pack even a little bit of a punch? People commonly known as agnostics also have no burden to support the notion that God's existence is more likely false than true, but they do have a burden of rejoinder.

Of Mice and (Scientific) Men

A friend of mine shared some thoughtful comments in response to my last blog, where I tried to advance the case that when scientists behave immorally while doing science, their immoral behaviour can't be "in the name of science". This charge is incoherent and therefore misleading. The commenter was unconvinced. I’m grateful for those comments because they show that I didn’t do a good enough job of clarifying my argument. I’ll try to do that today.

Contrary to those comments, I don’t think that a problem for my case arose out of a focus on Mengele specifically and not on more ambiguous cases of immorality in science. The problem, I think, lies in the ambiguity of the phrase “in the name of”, so I’m going to try to make my case again without using it at all.

In my introductory paragraph, I framed the question at hand, and that question was not whether scientists can behave immorally while doing science. I fully conceded that. The question was whether science can cause scientists to behave immorally while doing science. Remember that this question arose in response to a tu quoque that not infrequently pops up whenever faith-based religion is criticized for causing immoral behaviour. That tu quoque entails the claim that science causes immoral behaviour, too. Moreover, the question of causality is the important one if we are interested in curbing that immoral behavior by criticizing or condemning the underlying cause. Accordingly, I’m going to try to make the case that it is incoherent to claim that science causes scientists to behave immorally while doing science. (On the other hand, the coherence and truth of the claim that faith-based religions can - and regularly do - cause people to behave immorally during their practice is not even contested.)

Consider a cancer researcher who is experimenting on and therefore killing mice. Such a program is indisputably a "legitimate" scientific enterprise even though the researcher knows full well that mice will be harmed by the process*.

What determines whether a researcher thinks that killing mice is acceptable is how that researcher values the lives of mice versus the lives of the people her research efforts hope to ultimately help. Science has nothing to do with that consideration. Science doesn’t inform the researcher that she should value human life, or a cure for cancer, or the lives of mice, or how to weigh the whole shebang. She brings her values into a moral consideration upon which science is silent. It’s a moral consideration because morality is about the well-being of conscious creatures, and it is precisely the well-being of mice and men that is in question. If a researcher is prepared to sacrifice the lives of mice, then the scientific method advises on ways to obtain reliable, true information from the experiments. That is all.

If the lives of mice are not well valued, we should not be surprised that the lives of mice will be lost whether they are the victims of scientific experimentation or of mouse traps behind the furniture. If we find it morally abhorrent that mice are dying, criticizing science won’t save their lives, but addressing why the well-being of mice is undervalued by mouse-killers may.

Perhaps scientific projects like this one are morally abhorrent and the low value we place on the lives of mice is an example of speciesism run amok. All that my argument requires is that you recognize that the scientific method has nothing to say on that matter.

Now imagine a society that values the lives of mice on par with those of humans, and that a mouse researcher is identified, captured, and tried for "crimes against conscious creatures". In her defence, she claims that her work was done "in the name of science". I hope that it's now obvious that this is a lame excuse to try to deflect blame and place it squarely on something greater than herself and something that is otherwise held in high esteem: the scientific method. The problem is that it doesn't make sense. She failed to properly value the lives of mice, and the scientific method played no role in that consideration.

Perhaps she's a psychopath who lacks the empathy required to value mouse life. Perhaps she hates mice because they spread a disease that claimed the lives of her parents when she was an impressionable child. Or perhaps she was raised in a religious tradition that included an ancient scripture saying, "For I am the Lord, your God, and I am holy. You shall regard every mouse after its kind an abomination and do with them as you wish." Whatever her reasons, they can't have anything to do with the scientific method.

I rest my case.

So why is the notion that the Nazi researchers acted "in the name of science" seemingly widespread and appealing despite being incoherent and misleading? Because it's a deepity.

A deepity is a phrase that balances precariously between two interpretations. On one reading, the phrase is true, but trivially so. On the second reading, the phrase would be profound if it were true, but that second interpretation is actually false. Somehow, the truth of the first reading seems to rub off on the second one, making it seem profound and true. Deepities are common and beguiling, but fallacious.

It's trivially true that the Nazi researchers did some things that were motivated by science and could, in that sense, have been done "in the name of science". But those things are standard scientific moves like choosing objective outcome measures, repeating experiments to understand the influence of normal biologic variability on outcomes, etc. But when people hear that the Nazis acted "in the name of science", the second interpretation that takes hold of the imagination is that the heinous evils they committed during their experiments were motivated by science. That would be profound if it were true, but alas, it is false. Somehow, the truth of the first interpretation rubs off on the second one, making it seem profound and true. As I've shown, though, that second reading is incoherent and misleading.

A Hitler Youth Book Burning

Unlike science, people do get their values and morals from religion and religious apologists tell us that they damn well should. It should be no surprise then, that the Nazi devaluation of Jewish life had its roots in centuries strong Christian influences. Nazism was its own crazy religion following its own charismatic prophet ("dear leader") and which spread through the systematic cultivation of fear and the suppression of free speech, skepticism, and reason. If we want to prevent the next Holocaust, one thing we can do is maintain a critical stance on the many faces of dogma and the methods people employ for its dissemination, protection, and exaltation.

Once again, I'd like to thank my thoughtful commenter for the opportunity to clarify my thoughts. I hope that this does indeed clear things up.

*Notice that the legitimacy of mouse based scientific research actually refers to the moral legitimacy of experimenting on mice. The scientific legitimacy is assumed.

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.