Atheism, Theism, And the Burden of Proof

I'm going to say something that should be uncontroversial among people who take pride in being rational: one's beliefs must conform with reasons for belief. Quite simply, this means that rationality itself places a burden of proof on everyone to have reasons for their beliefs. But a strange (and frankly, embarrassing) thing happens to many atheists when they enter into a dispute about the existence of God. Suddenly, atheists who would normally agree with what I wrote above, claim that the burden of proof lies squarely and only with theists. Apparently, according to these atheists, as soon as their belief is in question, the burden is entirely on the other side.

How do these folks support the claim that the theist has the sole burden? Their argument goes something like this:

Premise 1: The burden of proof is always on the claimant
Premise 2: Theists are making the claim that God does or probably does exist
Premise 3: Atheists merely lack belief in God's existence and, as such, are making no claim about it.
Conclusion 1: following from (1) & (2), theists have the burden of proof regarding the existence of God.
Conclusion 2: following from (1) & (3), atheists have no such burden.

This would be a valid and sound argument, and a very dandy one for atheists, except for one problem: the claim that atheists just lack belief in the existence of God is often misleading. It fails to accurately describe what most atheists usually think about the probability of God's existence, namely, that it's unlikely. Here's the rub: these atheists think that God probably doesn't exist, and that's a claim about the existence of God. It therefore follows from Premise 1 that they do indeed, have a burden of proof.

So who has no burden?
The only person with no burden regarding a claim is the person who hasn't had enough of a chance to think about the truth or falsehood of the claim and formulate a belief either way. If you haven't had a chance to really think about whether taking in Syrian refugees right now is a good idea, you could say that you "don't believe" that taking them in is a good idea, just as you could say that you "don't believe" that not taking them in is a good idea. You really don't know what to think. When in the psychological state of not knowing what to think about a claim, you really have no burden because you really are making no claim. Please notice that this position poses no challenge to a claim.

The atheists I'm addressing in this post often make the preposterous announcement that they lack belief in God the way a baby or a dog does. While it's true that babies and dogs haven't thought about the probability of God's existence, and therefore make no claim and assume no burden, I can hardly see why atheists would want to bring agents that lack the cognitive abilities to even weigh in on the matter into the fold. I encourage folks who talk like this to think carefully about claiming that they are like opinion-less infants.

There are only 2 ways to challenge a belief
As an atheist, in order to say that you don't believe in God and have that mean anything, you really have to have thought about it and decided that ascent to the claim would be intellectually wrong. You can fail to accept a claim by reaching one of two conclusions:

1. It's probably false. Believing that a claim is more likely to be false than true is a very good reason to not believe the claim. Arguing that a claim is false is known as making a de facto objection. The idea is that there is a fact of the matter regarding the claim and that fact is that it's false, or at least more likely to be false than true.

2. It's unjustified, or irrational. This is a different sort of objection that has nothing whatsoever to do with the veracity of the claim. Rather the objection is that, whether it's true or false, it's unjustified or irrational to believe. This is what's known as a de jure objection.

Here's an example. Say that I produce a lunch box and tell you that there is a hockey puck in it. You could rightly ask why I believe that. Did I look in it and see a puck? Did a reliable source tell me that there is a puck in it? Did I X-ray it and find a puck? If I answer in the negative to all of these sorts of queries, you would rightly question why I claimed that a puck is in the box in the first place. The objection here is that while there could be anything in the box including a puck, the reasons for believing that there is a puck in the box fail to justify that belief, ie. it's irrational.

So atheists have to decide what type of objection to theistic belief they have, and then they have a burden to defend that position. If an atheist thinks that the probability of God's existence is roughly 50/50, they can still advance the damning de jure objection that theistic belief is irrational, and I have absolutely no problem with that, even though most people (myself included) would probably call such a person an agnostic, rather than an atheist. But what atheists shouldn't do is believe in and make de facto objections to theism and then, when challenged, shift the burden of proof onto theists by retreating to a de jure objection, or even worse, to the preposterous position of claiming to have no belief whatsoever regarding the question of God's existence, like a newborn baby. To anybody looking upon this debate with fair eyes, these two moves look lame and shifty because they are.

The guys and gals who behave in the way I am spotlighting are very real and very strongly committed to their fallacious position. In it's defence, you'll hear them say things like:

"The burden of proof is always on the one making a positive claim."
Since the claim that God probably doesn't exist is a negative claim, they are relieved of their burden, or so they assert. But a little reflection reveals that this just isn't true. Imagine that I say that you should take an umbrella to work tomorrow because it's probably going to rain (a positive claim) and you say that you shouldn't because it probably isn't (a negative claim). Am I really the only one among us who has to have a reason for my particular belief? Would you automatically be rational despite having no reasons whatsoever for believing that it probably won't rain? That's nonsense. And besides, negative claims can always be rephrased as positive claims and it's absurd to think that merely rephrasing the same idea suddenly imposes a burden to support it. Here, watch:

Me: "It's not going to be a dry day tomorrow (negative claim), so you better bring your umbrella"

You: "Oh yes it is (positive claim). I'll leave my umbrella at home, thank-you."

By just rephrasing the claim, your negative claim is now a positive claim. Are we really supposed to believe that this rephrasing has suddenly switched the burden from me onto you?

So much for Modified Premise 1. You've got a claim (positive or negative)? You've got a burden.

"But You Can't Prove a Negative!"
One can prove a negative by finding a logical inconsistency in it. For example, I can prove that married bachelors don't exist because they can't. The logical problem of evil represents an attempt to prove that God doesn't exist because of the logical inconsistency posed by an omnipotent and morally perfect God in the face of evil and suffering in the world. Whether this logical argument is successful is another matter, but you get the idea.

One can also argue a negative evidentially. When evidence of a certain kind is expected given a particular claim, the absence of that evidence makes the claim less likely to be true. In other words, sometimes, absence of evidence really is evidence of absence.

For instance, if, whenever you bake a cake, the kitchen smells of baking, then it's reasonable to conclude that you probably didn't bake a cake whenever the kitchen lacks the scent of baking. There are several excellent evidential arguments against the existence of God (I explain a particularly powerful one here) and I encourage atheists to use them.

"No, you're wrong, and Russell's Teapot settles it"
In 1952, Bertrand Russell, a Nobel prize winner and influential philosopher of the 20th century, wrote a paper entitled “Is there a God?” wherein he outlined why he doesn’t believe. Included in the paper is this famous quote:

"Many orthodox people speak as though it were the business of skeptics to disprove received dogmas rather than of dogmatists to prove them. This is, of course, a mistake. If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes. But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense. If, however, the existence of such a teapot were affirmed in ancient books, taught as the sacred truth every Sunday, and instilled into the minds of children at school, hesitation to believe in its existence would become a mark of eccentricity and entitle the doubter to the attentions of the psychiatrist in an enlightened age or of the Inquisitor in an earlier time."

Don't you just love that picture? That's the look I envision on his face when he reminds theists in that quote that it is not enough that theistic belief is widespread and that they therefore have a burden of proof. That's not in dispute. What is in dispute is whether the notion that theism is probably false also has a burden, and nowhere does Russell suggest that it does not.

Russell's teapot is meant to prevent theists from employing the fallacy of "shifting the burden of proof" onto atheists, and that is all. Ironically, atheists who think that God probably doesn't exist and then claim that the burden is entirely on theists to argue that he does are as guilty of shifting the burden of proof as the theists that Russell was scolding. A case of the teapot being as black as the kettle, perhaps?

"But ... The Legal Burden of Proof!"
It is true that in criminal cases, the one charging another with breaking the law (ie. the state) has the burden of proof. The defendant has no burden to prove that she is innocent because she is presumed to be (which doesn't mean that she is, of course). At a minimum, all that the defence must do is show that the prosecution's evidence is weak and therefore raise a reasonable doubt about the accused's guilt. Things are this way to prevent the state from abusing its power. Can you imagine if the state could accuse somebody of a crime and punish them unless they could prove themselves innocent? No person would be free of the threat of that kind of tyranny.

It is noteworthy that the verdict in a criminal case is either 'guilty' or 'not guilty'. Courts never reach a verdict of 'innocent' beyond a reasonable doubt and it would be disingenious for the defence to claim that the defendant was innocent if all they argued was that she was not guilty. Why? Because they would not have met their burden for *that* claim. OJ Simpson was found not guilty, but that clearly didn't mean that he was innocent. Similarly, atheists who believe and claim that theism is probably false are disingenuous if all they do is argue that theistic belief is unjustified or that they lack belief the way a baby does. Why? Because they aren't meeting their burden for the claim that theism is probably false, which is what they really believe.

Outside a criminal court, in discussions about the existence of God, or who would make a good President, or whether the minimum wage should be raised, etc. the burden of proof that matters is the "Philosophical Burden of Proof" and it applies equally to both sides of a claim for we don't presume that a claim is true or false. Accordingly, both sides can be guilty of shifting their burden fallaciously when they try to avoid it.

So there is a reason that criminal courts have an asymmetric burden of proof, but they nevertheless do not reach conclusions beyond what is successfully argued for. If atheists want to avoid their burden of arguing that theism is probably false, they too should not reach or hold conclusions beyond what they are prepared to argue for.

"Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Evidence"
This quote from Carl Sagan is true, to be sure,  but it's also a word game that atheists who want to avoid their burden of proof like to use and it's really quite easy for the theist to dismiss. All the theist must do is ask what makes God's existence an 'extraordinary' claim.

The answer can’t simply be that the evidence and arguments in support of God's existence are insufficient. That only permits one to say that belief in God is unjustified, and while the atheists I'm addressing in this post do think that belief in God's existence is unjustified, they also believe much more than that. They also believe that God's existence is unlikely, and that's a claim that they have to be prepared to back up. You see, saying that a claim is extraordinary is just a dramatic way of saying that it's probably false. The low probability of it being true is what makes the claim that it nevertheless is true, extraordinary. Switching in the word "extraordinary" for "unlikely" doesn't magically make the burden of showing God's existence to be unlikely disappear. And so, when the atheist explains why they think that God's existence is "extraordinary", they will then be addressing the burden of that claim.

"I Don't Have a Burden Because I'm Not Trying to Change Anybody's Mind"
There are 2 responses to this. The first is that if you are involved in a discussion about who has the burden of proof, you are necessarily talking about situations where at least two people disagree and are trying to convince the other of their error. The second is that you have a burden to yourself, in order for your beliefs to be rational, to make sure that they are justified.

"I'm Not Making a Claim to Knowledge"
Here's some important news for anybody tempted to use this canard: if your reasoning is evidence-based, you are always dealing with probabilistic beliefs. Whether you know it or not, when you update your beliefs based on new evidence, you're employing Bayesian reasoning, and the result of Bayesian reasoning is always probabilistic. The difference between a hunch, a belief, and knowledge is just a matter of the probability you assign to the truth of the claim. Your evidence-based reasoning doesn't suddenly acquire a burden of proof when the probability you assign to the truth of a claim reaches whatever threshold you have for calling it knowledge. If you have a hunch, you have a burden. If you have a weak belief, you have a burden. If you have a strong belief, you have a burden. If you think that you "know" something, you have a burden. These burdens are not all equally heavy, to be sure, but they are all very real and shouldn't ever be ignored.

"If I Have To Disprove God, then I Have to Disprove Everything"
This is an obvious non-sequitur. It just doesn't follow from the fact that you must have reasons for your beliefs that you're obliged to anticipate every potential claim and disprove it. You just have to have reasons to support what you've come to believe.

"Prove that unicorns that ride rainbows and fart glitter don't exist"
This was an actual response that I received when I merely suggested that atheists who think that theism is probably false carry a burden of proof. This challenge seems to be a combination of "You can't prove a negative" and "If I have to disprove God, then I have to disprove everything" rolled into one. I suspect that the reasoning was that if one isn't capable of meeting this burden, then it's completely unfair to tell any atheists that they have a burden, too. Here was my response:

"Unicorns are large horse-like animals. Humans have pretty much searched all of the possible habitats for large horse-like animals and reliable evidence of the existence of unicorns, including unicorn remains, unaltered photographs, caged unicorns, etc. have never been produced. Since we could very reasonably expect to find such evidence of the existence of unicorns if they actually existed, the fact that we have not is very powerful evidence against the existence of unicorns. Since we have very powerful evidence against the existence of unicorns, we also have very powerful evidence against the existence of unicorns that ride rainbows and fart glitter. The existence of those specific unicorns, with no evidence in the tree of life of any other animals with such capabilities nor any reason why those capabilities would've evolved, is astronomically unlikely. Furthermore, the notion of  a material being riding a rainbow seems incoherent. The extremely low probability of the existence of such unicorns constitutes what I would consider to be proof that they don't exist. As an epistemic fallibilist, I always leave room for the possibility of being wrong, but the matter has been established to my satisfaction: unicorns that ride rainbows and fart glitter don't exist."

There are some folks who claim to be agnostic about God the same way that they are agnostic about unicorns. I hope it's clear that we don't have to be agnostic about unicorns.

A Way Forward
Because the term 'atheist' is vague and fails to identify whether one has de jure or de facto objections to theism of varying strengths, I propose that people just state what they believe regarding the particular God(s) in question, and how strongly they believe it. In his book, The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins rightfully acknowledged that our beliefs are held with varying degrees of confidence and provided a seven-point scale of belief (more on that here). Notice that the only real "default position", which isn't a position at all, but rather, is the psychological state that exists when someone hasn't yet formulated a belief, isn't even on the scale. Once one forms an opinion about the existence of particular God(s), then atheists and theists alike should figure out where on the scale they sit, and then defend that position. An atheist who's only prepared to claim that theism is unjustified should probably identify as a 4 on that scale. Such atheists really don't have a burden to prove that theism is more likely false than true because they're what most people would call agnostic and are therefore making no such claim. If an atheist identifies between 4.1 and 7, then they have a burden to explain why they think that theism is more likely to be false than true, just as a theist who identifies as a 1-3.9 has the opposite burden. There is no special burden of proof that one side has that the other doesn't, and perpetuating this lie creates a toxic situation where both sides try to shift their burden onto the other. I never want to see my fellow atheists trying to shift their burden onto theists by advancing the lie that they're opinion-less infants, or that their only burden is to reject the evidence and arguments in favour of theism. If you think that God's existence is more likely false than true, you obviously have to do all of that plus more. My request is one that no good atheist should ever resist, for all I'm asking is that you defend what you really believe.

If you want to become familiar with arguments, including evidential arguments, against theism, I suggest following Justin Schieber at Real Atheology, and on Twitter and Facebook.

On Disagreement. Part 4

"Who shall decide, when doctors disagree, and soundest casuists doubt, like you & me?"
-Alexander Pope

Before Angioplasty and After

Duncan was 67 years old when he had his first heart attack. Squeezing chest tightness came on Friday evening while watching ‘Wheel of Fortune’ and didn’t go away when the puzzle was solved. His wife called 9-1-1, and though the discomfort eased off a bit when the paramedics gave him a few puffs of nitroglycerine, they insisted on bringing him to the hospital. His EKG showed signs of a heart attack and an emergency angiogram showed that one of his three main heart arteries was abruptly and completely blocked, depriving valuable heart muscle downstream from much needed blood flow. The discomfort in his chest finally went away when the small balloon his cardiologist had positioned at the blockage was deflated, revealing that the clot that had been blocking the artery had broken up, restoring the flow of blood. A second inflation of a balloon was required to place a metal stent in the artery to help keep it open over time.

Duncan was lucky: the clot that formed in his heart artery and blocked it off had only been present for a few hours, so not much heart muscle damage had occurred. Untreated, a large territory of heart muscle would have been damaged, leaving him with impaired pumping function, a large scar, and a significant risk of life threatening heart rhythm problems. But the prompt opening of the blocked vessel had averted all of that. In a heart attack, time is muscle.

But Duncan wasn’t completely out of the woods.

His angiogram also showed that one of the other two main heart arteries had an 80-90% narrowing in it. Unlike the clot that blocked off his artery in a few minutes when the contestant bought a vowel, this narrowing was the result of cholesterol deposits in the artery wall that had been slowly building up over years. Interestingly enough, it hadn’t caused him any obvious problems, though in retrospect, he had had some of that chest discomfort before when playing with his grand children, which he’d attributed to indigestion.

Cardiologist #1 admitted Duncan to the coronary care unit (CCU) and told him that some time the following week, this other narrowing should also be treated with a balloon and stent, and that made good sense to Duncan, so he approved.

On Monday morning, cardiologist #2 took over the care of the CCU patients for that week, and after reviewing Duncan’s chart, informed him that the plan would be to continue treating him with a variety of new (to him) medications that had all been shown in randomized trials to reduce his risk of subsequent heart attacks and death. Only if he had problems with chest pain that these medications couldn’t prevent, would he undergo angioplasty and stenting of the remaining 80-90% narrowing. Cardiologist #2 explained to Duncan that other randomized trials comparing angioplasty to treatment with medication hadn’t shown an improvement in survival or reductions in heart attacks when stable patients with one narrowed artery were examined. Why undergo the small but real risks of having a second angioplasty procedure if no obvious benefit seemed likely? Besides, if the artery continued to cause problems despite medication in the future, it could always be treated with angioplasty then.

Duncan regrettably agreed with the new plan, and as soon as cardiologist #2 left the room, he called his nurse with a few questions.

“Do these doctors know what the hell they’re doing? ... How come the first doc said that I should have an angioplasty and the second doc said that I should just take pills? ... What are these people’s credentials?"

The nurse explained that cardiologist #1 was the director of the hospital’s angioplasty program and was recognized as a researcher and leader in the field both nationally and internationally. Cardiologist #2 was the Chief of the Cardiology Department, and the Director of the CCU. She was a co-author of the National Guidelines for the treatment of heart attack victims. He explained that both had many years experience looking after patients like Duncan, and that it wasn’t uncommon for experienced and thoughtful cardiologists to disagree about the best treatment for a given patient. He advised Duncan to make his decision about whether to undergo angioplasty or medical treatment on the basis of his personal values, not the current state of the evidence. Does he prefer the idea of taking medicine, which is simple to do? Or does he prefer taking fewer medicines without minding too much about the risk of another invasive cardiac procedure?

But Duncan couldn’t accept that advice. He wanted to do what was best, not what he seemed to prefer for other reasons.

Cardiologists #1 & #2 represent the larger cardiology community on the question raised by Duncan’s situation. On the basis of their interpretation of the available evidence and experience, some recommend opening the remaining narrowings during the initial stay after a heart attack, while others, on the basis of their experience and interpretation of the same evidence, recommend treatment with medicine and opening the narrowing only if further problems arise down the road. What should Duncan do? What should Cardiologists #1 & #2 do? What should the Cardiology community do?

Should Cardiologists #1 & #2 just continue offering their advice to every patient like Duncan that they see? Should Duncan just flip a coin? Should he get a third opinion?

Isn't it obvious? It certainly was obvious to Duncan! They don’t know the answer and further evidence is required to sort the problem out. In this case, Duncan was lucky, because the cardiology community had recognized that there was, regarding the question posed by his circumstances, a condition known as clinical equipoise. This means that the community had come to the conclusion that they ought to suspend their belief because they just don't know. In fact, a randomized clinical trial (RCT) was developed and was enrolling patients just like Duncan to either medical treatment or angioplasty of the remaining narrowing and following subjects closely for the next 4 years to determine which strategy better improved survival, reduced heart attacks, and improved quality of life. The experiment aimed to recruit almost 4,000 patients.

Some philosophers disagree with the approach to disagreement that I have been arguing for so far. They conclude that it’s perfectly rational for Cardiologst #1 & #2 to disagree. But if that’s true, then it’s perfectly acceptable for each to continue treating patients as they rationally believe. If, say, Cardiologist #1 is rational to believe that the best treatment for Duncan is angioplasty, then it’s unethical for her to enroll Duncan in the trial and expose him to a 50% chance of not getting the treatment that she rationally believes is best for him, and vice versa for Cardiologist #2. If every member of the cardiology community maintained their belief in this fashion, none of them would be able to ethically enroll patients in the trial, the trial would never be completed, and the question would never be answered. It is only by recognizing and accepting that they don’t know the answer that it becomes ethical for disagreeing doctors to enroll their patients in the trial and make progress. Not only has much progress already been made this way, but time and time again, what “thoughtful and reasonable doctors” thought was the best treatment has been shown to do more harm than good when properly tested.

Doctors should be accurate with their patients, and that often means being humble about the community's state of knowledge and their own. They should recognize the limits of their personal assessments based on experience. They should tell patients when there is significant reasonable disagreement, and how confident they are of their advice and why. They should fairly often be saying things like “probably”, “possibly” “we really don’t know”, “our best guess at the moment is”, etc., and patients shouldn't get upset with their doctors when they honestly just don't know.

Cardiologists #1&2 should both tell Duncan that they really don't know what should be done about his remaining 80-90% artery narrowing. They should be free to tell Duncan that each has a hunch about what course of action would be best, but that that's all that they have: a hunch. And this is how the rest of us should behave when faced with the reasonable disagreement of our epistemic peers. Admitting that there is a problem with our belief- a problem big enough to justify suspending a previously held belief-  is the first step towards making sure that our beliefs and the strengths with which we hold them accurately map onto reality.

Notice that Cardiologists #1 & #2 should suspend their belief whether or not a randomized trial addressing the question exists, for the existence of the trial in no way affects their inadequate justification. They should suspend belief before the trial exists, while it is being planned, and until the results are published and shown to warrant one approach over the other.

Next time, I'll be looking at a few objections to the approach to peer disagreement that I have been advocating. Have you got any? Do you disagree?

On Disagreement. Part 3

So far in this series, I’ve considered two straightforward instances of disagreement and argued that in each instance, the rational thing to do because of the disagreement is suspend belief (see here and here). Today, I’d like to summarize what I think are the circumstances where disagreement requires suspension of belief.

Quite simply, one should suspend belief whenever, as far as one can know (from an epistemic perspective), the probability that the belief is true is roughly equal to the probability that it is false.

Not all disagreement presents such a situation. For example, Dr. Rik Willems is an expert in the treatment of slow heart rhythm disorders with cardiac pacemakers. If a first-year medical student on her first clinical cardiology rotation thinks that a patient should have a pacemaker implanted, and Dr. Willems disagrees, the probability that Dr. Willems is right is considerably greater than the probability that the medical student is. After all, medical students are supposed to get their plans for patients vetted by attending physicians, not the other way around!

Dr. Willems and the medical student are not epistemic peers. That is, they are not in equally good positions to make judgments upon pacemaker therapy. This is not to say that just because Dr. Willems is in a superior position to make such judgments, that his opinion must be right. The rational thing for him and the student to do is explain to each other the reasons for their opinions. Maybe Dr. Willems has contracted viral encephalitis and evidence of his cognitive dysfunction will be disclosed in the conversation. More likely, however, the medical student has missed an important detail of the patient’s situation, or misinterpreted the available evidence addressing pacing in that situation. This conversation comprises a process known as “full disclosure”; it represents the best possible attempt for disagreeing parties to consider and share the reasons for their own belief and the reasons for the opposing belief. In many such instances, the reasons on one side of the disagreement will really be better and the disagreement will be resolved. We can all, medical students included, learn a great deal this way, even though not all disagreements end so educationally and amicably.

The disagreeing clocks left little to no room for consideration of which time reading was more likely to be correct. Electronic quartz clocks these days are all remarkably accurate, so these two machines are “epistemic peers”. Maybe one had suffered a power loss that the other had not. Maybe somebody spilled a Coke into the one on the night table and caused a malfunction. Or maybe steam and humidity from the adjacent shower caused a malfunction in the bathroom clock. Since the clocks can’t speak and arrive at full disclosure, it seems quite clear that the weight that one must put on the reading of each clock is about equal, and so one must suspend belief about what the time actually is.

The disagreement about the dress also leaves little to no room for consideration of which opinion is more likely to be correct. If just two individuals disagreed, they’d have at least a few things to discuss. Is one looking at the monitor from a particular angle, or in a room with a particular reflection that is affecting her perception? Is one color blind? Is one deceiving the other? But since the disagreement occurred on a global scale, all of these possibilities even out among the two disagreeing camps. Upon becoming aware of the scale of the disagreement, one really is left with no good reason to think that one perception is more likely to be correct than the other, and the rational thing to do is suspend belief. Since the weight of one perception is, as far as anyone can tell, equal to the weight of the other, the circumstances are not unlike considering a coin flip, and this is true even when both parties are disagreeing on the very private evidence of perception.

Why can’t the parties agree to disagree? For the simple reason that both parties have, in the genuine opposition of the other, a good reason to believe that their own perception is, as far as either can tell, the wrong one. Had the opposing belief resided in your own mind – a situation people sometimes find themselves in when they are torn between 2 equally strong but opposing beliefs – you’d be perfectly agnostic. The fact that the opposing belief resides in another mind is, as far as either can tell, arbitrary, and therefore not sufficient to render one belief more likely to be true.

So there we have it.  If epistemic peers disagree after full disclosure, and there remains no good reason independent of the disagreement itself to consider one belief more likely to be correct than the other, the rational thing to do is to suspend belief and try to find other information that will settle the question. If further deciding information is unavailable, either in principle or in practice, then the question will have to just remain open, and cognizers will just have to remain agnostic, at least until such new reasons are available. 

If you think about that for a moment, you should realize that if you accept it, you're going to have to suspend belief about a whole lot of things. This approach to disagreement leads to a significant amount of skepticism, though not, at least as far as I can see, the kind of sweeping philosophical skepticism that is intellectually crippling. We can still believe, for example, that a computer screen is in front of us, that Kennedy was assassinated in the sixties, that OJ was probably guilty (even if that belief isn't beyond all reasonable doubt) and that the gene is the unit of inheritance. But what should minimum wage be? What should be done about income inequality, anthropogenic global warming, and ISIS? Is Allah or Jesus God? These kinds of questions would seem to require the humble approach of agnosticism, and further argumentation, experimentation, and evidence. Sometimes, we are forced to act despite being agnostic, but notice that there's nothing wrong with taking a "best guess" when that's all that is available.

In part 4, I’ll apply this reasoning to a case of disagreement in the Cardiology community and explain how it is being addressed. Chime in now with your own disagreement and you just might find me addressing it in part 5, when I will consider some criticisms of approaching disagreement in the logical fashion I have been describing.

On Disagreement. Part 2

Here's a pretty dull picture of a dress with gold and white stripes, right? As you probably know, this past February, a tumblr user posted this photo and it went viral. Why? Because of disagreement.

If, like me, you saw gold/white stripes, then you were rational to believe that the stripes actually are gold/white. But what are you rational to believe when you realize that a huge population of people disagree with you? While looking at the same picture, they see black and blue stripes. How does your awareness of that disagreement influence the rationality of your original belief?

It turns out that the dress in the photo has been identified, so evidence that will settle the question exists. However, while one is aware of the genuine disagreement and before one is aware of what that definitive evidence shows, we can and should ask the following questions:

- Are those who see gold/white stripes rational in continuing to believe that the stripes are gold/white?

- Are those who see black/blue stripes rational in continuing to believe that the stripes are black/blue?

- Or should both camps suspend belief and conclude that there is something fishy about this situation - something that's preventing either group from rationally forming a belief about the actual colors of the stripes?

It seems to me that just as the disagreeing clocks in my previous post prevent rational belief regarding the actual time, so does the disagreement that captivated the world-wide-web prevent rational belief regarding the actual colors of the stripes on the dress. Until further evidence is available to settle the question, anybody who insists that the dress stripes actually are as they appear to them in the face of that disagreement is just special pleading.

The definition of arrogance is displaying a sense of superiority, self-importance, or entitlement. Without a reason for one group to think that their perception of the dress colors is more likely to be correct than the other, any member of each group who is aware of the genuine disagreement that exists, yet who insists that the colors actually are as they appear, is being arrogant. The humble thing to do here is the epistemically right thing to do, and that is to recognize that one simply can't rationally believe that the dress colors are as they appear. Not, at least, until further evidence settles the issue. The rational thing to do here is to remain agnostic on the question, despite the deliverance of your senses.

Let me explain. Assent to a belief is only rational when it is more likely that the belief is true than false. Since there is no reason to think that one group is more likely than the other to have true beliefs about the dress stripes, the principle of insufficient reason (also known as the principle of indifference) suggests that the probability that either group is correct is no better than 0.5 (after all, both groups could be wrong). Accordingly, the genuine disagreement in this case prevents rational belief. Again, the rational thing to do is to remain agnostic about the dress. One could humbly say that one's best guess is that the colors are as they appear to them, but one would not be rational to say that they believe that the dress colors actually are as they appear.

What if someone perceiving the colors as white/gold were to think to themselves something like this: "Maybe those people seeing black/blue stripes have something wrong with their visual systems? Maybe they are falling prey to an illusion? Accordingly, I can rationally continue to believe that I'm right and they are wrong." Would this kind of argumentation provide a good reason for rationally maintaining the belief that the dress colors actually are white/gold?

Well, if those seeing black/blue stripes are falling prey to a visual illusion, then those seeing white/gold stripes are rational to continue to hold their belief that the stripes are white/gold, but the disagreement calls that very conditional into question! Assuming that the other group is the one falling prey to a visual illusion is a classic case of begging the question (also known as circular reasoning). To avoid this fallacy, one would have to not be assuming that the other group is likely to be wrong; that is, one would need to have reason(s) independent of the disagreement itself to believe that the other group is likely to be wrong.

I've now considered two instances of disagreement: (a) quartz clocks displaying different times, and (b) two large groups of people disagreeing about the colors of a dress in a photo. In both instances, there was no good reason to think that one clock, or one group, was more likely to be correct than the other, and in both instances, assent to belief was irrational, or so I have argued.

Next time, I'll try to summarize what I think are the logical principles involved in considering how disagreement should affect the rationality of one's belief(s). This is the time to chime in if you think that I've made some mistake in my reasoning so far. This is your time to disagree.

By the way, here's a picture of the actual dress in the photo:

And here's a link to a great discussion of the explanation for this disagreement by Canadian experimental psychologist and cognitive scientist, Dr. Stephen Pinker.

On Disagreement. Part 1

Suppose you’ve just completed an over 20-hour series of flights to an exotic location. You’re exhausted. When you get to your hotel, you close the curtains tight, curl up in a cool, crisply made bed, and finally fall into a delicious sleep. After what seems like an eternity, when you stir again, you crack open one eye and see that the bedside alarm clock reads 07:00 am. Refreshed and remembering that you have a busy day ahead, you pop out of bed, planning your day.

When you reach the bathroom to take a shower though, something strange catches your eye. The clock on the bathroom wall says 09:45 am.

Hmmm.

Up until you walked into the bathroom, it was quite reasonable (ie. rational) for you to believe that it was 7 am. What’s it now rational for you to believe upon seeing the virtually simultaneous reading of 09:45 am on the second clock?

I don’t give a flying fruit what the actual time is, and I don’t mean for a second to suggest that if the scenario I just posed were to actually happen in real life, one ought to go back to bed and deliberate at length about the question I asked. There’s no doubt that you can just pick up the phone and ask the front desk what time it is, or check your smart phone that synchronizes automatically over WiFi. 

Boring. 

I care about what it’s rational to believe before sorting the problem out. Why? Because many disagreements that we regularly face are not so easily resolved and it is precisely those that are the most interesting and challenging disagreements to handle. For example:  “I thought we should pay down our mortgage, but my sister said it’s better to save for retirement.” “I really think I should marry him but my parents think otherwise.” “My cardiologist thinks I should put off having my valve replacement surgery, but the cardiac surgeon said that the operation is called for now.” I suggest that there might be something for us to learn from simple cases of disagreement that we might - no, we should - apply to the more complicated and important disagreements with which life is brimming.

So please stop and consider for a moment what impact the disagreement between the two clocks has on what one can rationally believe. Remember, you were rational to believe that it was 7 am right up until you saw the second clock. Should you (a) continue to believe that it’s 7 am, concluding that the second clock must be wrong? Should you (b) believe that it’s 9:45 and conclude that the first clock must be wrong? Should you (c) think that it’s probably half way between the two times (8:22:30)?  Should you (d) believe that you have no idea at all what time it is? Should you (e) believe that it’s probably morning?

You probably felt compelled to seek out further information as you contemplated the situation I posed, and that should be a good indication that (a) and (b) are not reasonable. After all, there’s no reason to think that one clock is more likely to be correct than the other. Perhaps it’s reasonable to believe that it’s morning, but notice that had the second clock read 7 pm, you’d be completely lost and you’d have to conclude with (d).

It seems obvious to me – a fact of rationality itself – that the awareness of the disagreement of the second clock must dramatically reduced the confidence that one rationally had in initially believing that it was 7 am. 

In Part 2, we’ll explore some more complicated disagreements, but this is an important time to chime in if you think that my conclusion is mistaken. I’ll repeat it one more time: the instant you become aware of the significant and mutually exclusive disagreement of the second clock, you have a very good reason to drop your belief that it’s 7 am. You suddenly have a very good reason to doubt that you can tell anything reasonable about the time, except that maybe, it’s morning, and that'll just have to do until you gather information that will settle the question. I think that if you agree with me here, you’ll have to admit that disagreement ought to have a much greater impact upon the confidence we have in our beliefs than it seems to have. Join me in the rest of this series on disagreement to see if I’m right, or if you disagree!

What doctors and anti-vaxxers have in common: Part 2

When I openly pose the post-vaccine fever scenario, most people consider it more likely than not that the vaccine caused the fever. That is, most people think the chance that the vaccine caused the fever is > 50%. Almost every medical student in a group of 20 that I was teaching a few weeks ago thought that. After all, fever is a well-recognized side effect of vaccine injections and your child was perfectly fine until a few days after the injection. Who wouldn’t reasonably conclude that the vaccine likely caused the fever?

Notice that by focusing responses on 1-49%, I set the question up to give you a better chance at being correct than they were but still, nobody got the question right. Don't worry. You are in good company. For now, just remember the feeling you had when you made your choice.

Back in the 80’s, investigators were concerned that combining mumps, measles, and rubella vaccines into one (MMR) might increase the risk of side effects, so some doctors in Finland did an ingenious study to determine what was not just temporally associated with vaccine injection, but caused by vaccine injection.

They studied 581 pairs of twins and randomly gave the MMR injection to one of the twins and a placebo injection to the other. Then, so as to not deprive the children that got a placebo injection of the vaccine's proven benefits, three weeks later, they gave each twin the opposite of what they had earlier received. Parents, who were blinded (they didn’t know when the kids were getting the placebo or the MMR injection), were instructed to vigilantly check for fever and a variety of other potential side effects after each injection.

In the first 6 days after placebo injection, 17% of children had a fever. That’s the background frequency of fever in vaccine-age children, and it's pretty high, huh? On the other hand, in the first 6 days after MMR injection, 17.2% of children got a fever. The difference - 0.2% - is what can be causally attributed to the active ingredients in the vaccine.

Conclusion: >99% of fevers that occur in the first week after MMR injection have nothing to do with the vaccine at all. 

However, we are very likely to erroneously attribute the fever to the vaccine. We do this because we have a powerful intuition that leads us to identify a causal relationship when 2 events that could possibly be causally related follow each other in time. We are mistaking what is merely possible for what is probable. Unfortunately, children develop mysterious illnesses like MS, autism, epilepsy, hepatitis, arthritis, etc. with regular frequency. Sometimes, those illnesses will appear fairly soon after getting a vaccination, and that’s when that intuition of ours can do some serious damage. That same intuition does damage when mysterious conditions like these disappear -as they often spontaneously do- after interventions that have no effect on the disease like prayer, acupuncture, chiropractic neck manipulations, homeopathic remedies, etc. Only randomized controlled trials can sort this stuff out.

Imagine once again your son who got a fever early after the MMR injection, only now, he is a healthy 18-year-old man who was spared the ravages of mumps, measles, and rubella. At any point in his upbringing, would you have ever had cause to stop and be thankful for the vaccine? How could you? You’d have had no way of knowing whether your child would have contracted one of these illness had he not been vaccinated!

See what’s happening here? The way that we experience life offers us no way to identify the situation where a vaccine prevents a horrible illness or death. On the other hand, we have a tendency to erroneously attribute adverse events to vaccines when they follow each other in time. Remember how you felt about your child's fever after MMR vaccine? Parents considering whether to vaccinate their children can anticipate the regret that they will experience if their child does develop an illness like autism afterwards, but they cannot anticipate the relief that they cannot experience when their child is spared a vaccine-preventable illness. Anti-vaxxers are much more likely to anticipate the former type of regret than the latter because they tend to overestimate the risks of vaccines and underestimate their benefits. Our intuitions erroneously set vaccines up to be unattractive. 

And so it is with physicians and oral anticoagulants (OAC’s). Bleeding events are fairly common. Whenever somebody experiences a bleeding event on an OAC, they and the doctors tasked with treating the bleeding blame the OAC. The reality is that most bleeding events that happen while on an OAC would have happened otherwise: just as only 0.2% of fevers early after the MMR injection were caused by it, only 0.2-0.3% of bleeds /yr are caused by the OAC. But physicians can anticipate the regret that they will experience when they prescribe an OAC to a person with atrial fibrillation (AF) who then develops a bleeding event. The finger of blame will point to the OAC and the physician who prescribed it. Unfortunately, nobody ever returns to the prescribing physician to pat them on the back and thank them for the stroke that they and the OAC prevented because, just like the case of mumps that your son avoided, there is no way to recognize a stroke that would otherwise have happened. Doctors' intuitions erroneously set OACs up to be unattractive.

Just as there is evidence that anti-vaxxers overestimate the risk of vaccines, so is there evidence that physicians overestimate the risks of OACs, exaggerating  their anticipated regret over prescribing one.

Our ancestors evolved on an African Savannah with no pressures to select for intuitions that address the types of complicated primary prevention questions posed by vaccination and OAC use in AF. It seems that we did evolve intuitions that lead us to readily identify patterns and infer causal relations where there often isn't one. On the whole, this rudimentary heuristic has done well to protect us from certain kinds of dangers, but, as Sam Harris has written, “we have flown the perch built for us by evolution”. If we are to make advances with complex questions, we simply have to recognize when our intuitions lead us astray, and they regularly do, whether we are specialized physicians or lay people. None of us are spared the consequences of irrationality. It is a struggle we all must recognize and participate in.

If you are faced with complex decisions like vaccinating or taking an OAC, I hope that you are most heavily weighing the evidence from RCTs. If you aren't, then I hope that you are seeking the involvement of people who are. Otherwise, you're just being irrational.

What doctors and anti-vaxxers have in common: Part 1

A few years ago, a Canadian neurologist reviewed the case of every patient admitted to 12 Ontario hospitals  with a stroke between 2003 and 2007. He only studied patients with a heart rhythm disorder called atrial fibrillation (AF) because AF is known to cause blood clots inside the heart that can get pumped out and block a brain artery causing strokes. There is an abundance of clear evidence: people who suffer from AF can dramatically reduce their risk of stroke by taking oral anticoagulants (OACs) that prevent intracardiac clots from forming. These medications are to be avoided in people with bleeding problems, but otherwise, the majority of people with AF ought to take one.

Gladstone discovered something shocking: after excluding patients with bleeding risks, only 40% of people with AF who suffered a stroke were on an OAC when all of them ought to have been, and three quarters of them were under-treated. The data was even more staggering for patients with AF who were admitted with their second stroke – a situation where it ought to be blatantly obvious that an OAC is needed: only 57% of people were being treated and two thirds of them were undertreated. Overall, only about 15% of patients with AF were appropriately treated with an OAC. The conclusion was sobering: if these patients had been appropriately treated, the majority of these strokes could have been prevented.

Of course, part of the responsibility for not being on OACs rests with patients who decide not to take one, but this is one study among many that indicate that physicians around the world routinely under-prescribe OACs to people with AF. Is it because AF is rare and doctors just don’t know about the opportunity to prevent strokes by prescribing OACs? Consider that AF is the most common arrhythmia in adults and that you and everybody you know and love has a 1 in 4 chance of developing it at some point in life. Plus, it’s responsible for 20% of all strokes. Is it because the risks and benefits are unclear? Absolutely not: as I mentioned earlier, over 10 randomized trials done around the world by different investigators involving thousands of patients have all shown the same consistent results: at the cost of a small (0.3%/yr)increase in the risk of bleeding, OACs reduce the risk of stroke by around 65%.

So why are doctors not doing the obvious and prescribing these drugs?

What's the anti-OAC body count at today?

In my next blog entry, I’ll explain the situation, but first, I want you to consider the following common scenario: 

You have a young child who has been perfectly well until he receives a combined vaccine injection for mumps, measles, and rubella (MMR). Around 3-6 days after the shot, your son develops some irritability and he feels hot; his temperature is 38.9 degrees C. You give him some acetaminophen and in an hour, he defervesces and perks up. How likely do you think it is that the vaccine injection caused his fever?

(A) > 50%
(B) 31-50%
(C) 21-30%
(D) 11-20%
(E) 1-10%
(F) < 1%?

Don't Google it. Close your eyes and visualize the situation and try to be as honest as you can. You and your spouse are probably going to bring this very question up when the fever develops. What are you going to say? Tell us by anonymously voting in the poll on the right. (Poll now down.)

(Go to Part 2, and the answer)

Is God Like a Cosmic Teapot?

In 1952, Bertrand Russell, a Nobel prize winner and influential philosopher of the 20^th century, wrote a paper entitled “Is there a God?” wherein he outlined why he doesn’t believe. Included in the paper is this famous quote:

“Many orthodox people speak as though it were the business of skeptics to disprove received dogmas rather than of dogmatists to prove them. This is, of course, a mistake. If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes. But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense. If, however, the existence of such a teapot were affirmed in ancient books, taught as the sacred truth every Sunday, and instilled into the minds of children at school, hesitation to believe in its existence would become a mark of eccentricity and entitle the doubter to the attentions of the psychiatrist in an enlightened age or of the Inquisitor in an earlier time. It is customary to suppose that, if a belief is widespread, there must be something reasonable about it. I do not think this view can be held by anyone who has studied history. … you must concede that nine-tenths of the beliefs of nine-tenths of mankind are totally irrational. … I cannot, therefore, think it presumptuous to doubt something which has long been held to be true, especially when this opinion has only prevailed in certain geographical regions, as is the case with all theological opinions.”

Russell is reminding believers in God that they have a burden of proof. He explicitly reminds them that the widespread acceptance of a belief does not fulfill that burden.  Many atheists believe that Russell was also implicitly reminding theists that the burden of proof for an unfalsifiable claim (remember how careful he was to point out that the teapot is undetectable?) is on the claimant, for - think about it - if the claim is unfalsifiable, how could and why should one try to prove that it is false? I don't completely agree with this adage, but more on that later on.

Fast forward to this month, when Gary Gutting published a NY Times interview entitled “Is Atheism Irrational?” In it, Alvin Plantinga argues that atheists should, at best, consider themselves merely agnostic since he guesses that they merely make a case for not believing in God’s existence rather than a case denying God’s actual existence. Here’s a quote:

“In the British newspaper The Independent, the scientist Richard Dawkins was recently asked the following question: “If you died and arrived at the gates of heaven, what would you say to God to justify your lifelong atheism?” His response: “I’d quote Bertrand Russell: ‘Not enough evidence, God! Not enough evidence!’” But lack of evidence, if indeed evidence is lacking, is no grounds for atheism. No one thinks there is good evidence for the proposition that there are an even number of stars; but also, no one thinks the right conclusion to draw is that there are an uneven number of stars. The right conclusion would instead be agnosticism.

In the same way, the failure of the theistic arguments, if indeed they do fail, might conceivably be good grounds for agnosticism, but not for atheism. Atheism, like even-star-ism, would presumably be the sort of belief you can hold rationally only if you have strong arguments or evidence.”

Ok, so both Russell and Plantinga are reminding the other side of their burden to make their case.   The theist has a burden to show that God exists, and the atheist has a burden to show that God doesn’t exist.

Both analogies chosen by these men are like the question of God’s existence in that they can’t be proven either way – the teapot is undetectable, and the precise number of stars is unknowable. So far so good. But how should one approach existential claims that are not provable? Should one just give up, and claim that it is an unanswerable 50/50 proposition and move on? It seems that that is the conclusion that Plantinga is suggesting that atheists should be stopping at, so it’s no surprise that he uses even-star-ism as his analogy. After all, the probability that the number of stars is even or odd is 50/50. But is that true for all un-provable existential claims, and, more importantly, regarding the claim that the classical God exists?

Firstly, let me point out that even if the question of God’s existence was an un-provable 50/50 proposition, the agnostic would still have quite a damning complaint about it, namely, that belief in the existence of God is irrational. In this sense, some atheists say that they lack belief in God, and they think that you should too, for belief in God is unjustified. If theism means belief in the classical God, then a-theism is simply to lack that belief just as asymptomatic means lacking in symptoms. Plantinga, though, takes atheism to mean the denial of God’s existence.

I hope that you’re beginning to see that the problem here has to do with the failure of the term ‘atheism’ to properly identify one’s complaint with theistic belief. It is important to distinguish de jure objections (the complaint that a belief suffers some epistemic defect independently of its truth or falsity) from de facto objections (the complaint that the belief is false). The former is to say that even if it may be true that God exists, theists are irrational or unjustified in doing so. The latter is to claim that God does not exist. If an un-provable existential claim is a 50/50 proposition, as even-star-ism is, then one simply can’t get past agnosticism. But are all unprovable existential claims really 50/50 propositions, and, more importantly for this discussion, is the question of God’s existence a 50/50 proposition as Plantinga seems to want us to believe?

I think that the answer to both questions is clearly ‘no’. Consider the proposition that the number of stars is X where X is a whole number between one sextillion and one septillion. While we aren’t in any sort of position to say with certainty that any X is true or false, the probability that any X is the correct number is surely much, much lower than 50/50. One would be entirely justified in not just proposing that X-star-ism is irrational, but that such a belief is very probably false. So it seems that in addition to making a de jure objection to an un-provable existential claim, one can also make a de facto objection of varying strength by making a case that the claim is, nevertheless, unlikely: the more unlikely, the stronger the de facto objection. A consequence of this is that whenever the probability of an existential claim - even an unfalsifiable or unverifiable one - can be judged, there is a burden to make that case, so it would seem that the burden isn't only on the claimant. If you think a claim is improbable, you have a burden, too. So much for that adage.

Is Russell correct in thinking that the existence of his celestial teapot is rather more like the question of God’s existence than the question of even-star-ism? Plantinga points out that there is plenty of evidence against belief in Russell’s teapot: “For example, as far as we know, the only way a teapot could have gotten into orbit around the sun would be if some country with sufficiently developed space-shot capabilities had shot this pot into orbit. No country with such capabilities is sufficiently frivolous to waste its resources by trying to send a teapot into orbit. Furthermore, if some country had done so, it would have been all over the news; we would certainly have heard about it. But we haven’t. And so on. There is plenty of evidence against teapotism.”

Is there also plenty of evidence against theism? As I outlined in my previous blog post, the two distinguished philosophers involved in this interview seem to have a hard time recognizing that there is. But, as far as we know, minds require complex physical nervous systems, while the God hypothesis tells us that minds can exist without one. And as far as we know, minds evolve from bottom up evolution adding function and complexity over time, but the God hypothesis tells us that a disembodied mind exists necessarily, without such a process contributing to its existence. Furthermore, as far as we know, immaterial minds cannot interact in or with the material world (how could they?), yet again, the God hypothesis tells us that disembodied minds regularly do. The evidential problem of evil is strong evidence against the existence of the classical God of monotheism, etc. So, it seems that the God hypothesis has plenty of evidence against it, too, and that theism is rather like teapotism.

But let’s not forget that Plantinga is a Christian theist. Accordingly, it is noteworthy that the Christian God hypothesis is one of many mutually exclusive God hypotheses among which either none or only one can be true. On this basis alone, one would be justified in claiming that Christian theism is at best unlikely; it’s certainly more like X-star-ism than even-star-ism. (The sophisticated reader might recognize that this inconvenient truth represents an undermining internal rationality defeater for Plantinga's argument that the Christian God's existence can be known without having to resort to any evidence or arguments at all.)

Do atheists (philosophers like Russell and non-philosophers like Dawkins) make de facto objections to theism? Of course they do. In fact, in the near future, I’m going to discuss a very strong one – stronger perhaps than even the evidential problem of evil. I actually think that Russell was implicitly making just this sort of argument in the very quote that Plantinga and Russell chose to deride. In the meantime, I submit that the Russell/Dawkins sound bite is too short to express their full thoughts on the matter, which probably are more like “Not enough evidence, God! Not enough evidence for your existence to counter the evidence against it!” Plantinga has made an illustrious strawman here, and it would seem that Gutting has facilitated.

Are Atheist Philosophers Really Irrational?

The NY Times interview begins with Gutting acknowledging a recent PhilPapers survey finding that almost three quarters of philosophers accept or lean towards atheism. Plantinga suggests that is the case because these philosophers find the arguments for God’s existence unsound. He then suggests that atheism is an irrational position to hold on such a basis, for the failure of theistic arguments should only lead to agnosticism (withholding belief either way, I suppose). On that, I tend to agree with Plantinga, but why does he think that that is all that supports the atheism of the majority of philosophers? While Plantinga claims that atheism is a position that requires arguments and evidence of its own, he seems to completely fail to consider that the majority of philosophers may actually be atheists on the basis of specifically atheistic evidence and arguments. Furthermore, what evidence does Plantinga provide to support his belief that atheist philosophers make the erroneous assent to atheism merely on the basis of rejecting theistic evidence and arguments? The answer, I regret to inform you, is absolutely none. This is pure speculation on Plantinga’s part.

While Plantinga admits that none of the theistic arguments is “conclusive”, does he think that the majority of philosophers who reject them are irrational to do so? I’ll let you be the judge of how Plantinga answers that question in this interview, but he does say the following about them elsewhere: “These arguments are not coercive in the sense that every person is obliged to accept their premises on pain of irrationality”

So Plantinga doesn’t think that the majority of philosophers are irrational to reject theistic arguments, but he does think that they are irrational to go beyond agnosticism and accept atheism on that basis … but then he doesn’t provide any evidence to support the idea that they do.

Amazingly, Gutting then shifts the discussion to how some non-philosophers support their atheism. But this can’t possibly address the opening question! Philosophers develop expertise in rational thinking and strive, first and foremost, to be rational. That’s what philosophy is all about. It is startling that the majority of philosophers are atheists so Gutting was right to begin there, for if the widely held atheism of philosophers is irrational, then the rationality of atheism itself would seem to stand little hope. Atheists should shift gears and merely say that they are agnostic. Unfortunately, Gutting utterly fails to actually go there, but he nevertheless manages to leave the reader with the impression that even atheist philosophers are unjustified in getting beyond agnosticism.

What might the evidence and arguments for atheism look like? Plantinga  mentions the unimaginable ubiquity of worldly evil and suffering throughout time as evidence - "maybe the only evidence", he says - against God’s existence. Is it wrong to be astounded by two distinguished philosophy professors with expertise in religious epistemology failing to acknowledge the existence of more atheistic arguments than the evidential problem of evil (POE)?

At least Plantinga recognizes the tremendous weight of the evidential POE when he says, “it makes sense to think that the probability of theism, given the existence of all of the suffering and evil our world contains, is fairly low.” He goes on to say, “But of course there are also arguments for theism. Indeed, there are at least a couple of dozen good theistic arguments. So the atheist would have to try to synthesize and balance the probabilities. This isn’t at all easy to do, but it’s pretty obvious that the result wouldn’t anywhere nearly support straight-out atheism as opposed to agnosticism.”

Really? I suppose that it depends on what one might mean by “fairly low” and “straight out”. If one is rational to think that the probability of theism is “fairly low” on evil/suffering (as Plantinga claims), and one is not irrational in rejecting the theistic arguments (as Plantinga has also claimed elsewhere), then, while I agree that balancing the probabilities after all of these arguments is difficult, it seems to me that one could remain completely rational in continuing to believe that the probability of theism is low, and that would count as atheism if not “straight out” atheism, whatever that is.

Have Gutting and Plantinga so far shown that the majority of philosophers ought to be agnostic on the question of theism, and that they are irrational in their assent to atheism? Of course they haven’t. To do this, they’d have to accurately identify the atheistic evidence and arguments, which are multiple - not just the POE - and they’d have to show that one could not rationally weigh the strength of these arguments against the theistic evidence and arguments and conclude that atheism seems more likely. They have not done this. All we’ve received in this interview is Plantinga’s personal speculation that the majority of philosophers merely reject theistic arguments to erroneously move beyond agnosticism.

Now comes the really amazing part. Despite having just discussed the powerful atheistic force provided by the evidential POE, Gutting asks, “If, then, there isn’t any evidence to support atheism [emphasis mine], why do you think so many philosophers – presumably highly rational people – are atheists?”

Is Gutting so desperate to paint atheism as irrational that he gets a mental block when evidence for atheism is presented? And why doesn’t Plantinga correct Gutting and point out that they just did discuss strong evidence for atheism? Instead, Plantinga speculates that most philosophers accept atheism because, “of the serious limitation of human autonomy posed by theism.” Those philosophers just want to be free! It couldn’t possibly be that they rationally accept atheism because they reject theistic arguments and find atheistic arguments like the evidential POE and others more compelling, could it? Not for these 2 distinguished Christian philosophers from Notre Dame, it would seem.

In case you couldn't tell, I was pretty disappointed with the first two thirds of this interview. Gutting should have gone right for the money, which is Plantinga’s Evidential Argument Against Naturalism (EAAN). The EAAN is a clever argument that I like quite a bit and it could give pause to atheists who accept unguided evolution and think that they’re rational to do so. But before I discuss the EAAN, I’ll comment on where the conversation went next: is God like a celestial teapot?