As much as I love writing systematic philosophical arguments, I like to keep this blog very dialectical too. The best thinking, in my experience, is done through the multiplication of perspectives. One can be self-conscientiously multi-perspectival in one’s solo thinking, and I try to do that as much as possible in order to give as sensitive and nuanced accounts of issues as possible, but there is no replacing the fresh input of other people’s perspectives from their own unique experiences and areas of expertise.
Now as a new feature, to further increase the back and forth between me and you, I want to do a philosophical advice column. I am not a trained psychologist by any means, so I cannot provide professional psychological counseling. But I am a professional philosopher who spends a great deal of time reading, thinking, teaching, and writing about ethics. I am deeply concerned with rational action that maximizes human good and, within my limitations and with no deluded presumptions to any more certainty or authority than the strengths of my arguments have to offer, I like giving people advice.
Sometimes we need advice from people who are not in our personal situation and who do not even know us personally, who can look at our problems from a fresh perspective for us and tell us what they see. While my perspective could never be the only valuable one you should be seeking out, I find people tend to think it unusual enough and thought provoking enough to be of at least some help in their coming to their own conclusions. And, luckily, if ever I am totally off the mark in my speculations and calculations, I have many hundreds of passionate, opinionated, articulate, well-educated, well-lived readers with expertise in any number of potentially relevant areas who will also be on-hand to correct me and help those writing in for help.
As the flood of mail that the sage friend of Camels With Hammers Richard Wade receives from readers attests. There is plenty of need out there for atheists willing to help other atheists figure out how to navigate their ethical, intellectual, and interpersonal lives. I want to help fulfill that role, in case anyone is interested.
Of course, if it turns out no one is, this column will quietly slink into oblivion.
For now if you have any sort of problem that you think some philosophical analysis might shed light on, send me an e-mail at my gmail account “camels with hammers” “@gmail”, etc., and on Fridays, assuming I have questions to answer, I will post the column “Philosophical Advice”. You can ask me anything and I may not get a lot of questions, so don’t be shy! All questions I publish will be posted strictly anonymously. I will change the names of any e-mails signed with real names. If I cannot answer your question myself because I judge it out of my depth, I will let you know, farm out your question to someone who can help me, and/or refer you to any sources I might know of which can be of help.
Finally, there may be an added twist to some of my replies. Sometimes, I feel torn myself about the advice to give, my fictional characters may debate the merits of alternative replies and leave it up to you to decide which is the shrewdest advice.
Top Q
In the beginning of 2011, as part of my quest to make the blog ever more dialectical, I intended to everyday write up a philosophical question for readers to answer. I called it the “TOP Q” which stood for “Today’s Open Philosophical Question”. Believe it or not, just writing good philosophical questions was often as time intensive for me as writing good philosophical answers. And, less surprisingly, the pace of a question a day combined with the relatively small size of my readership made it so that questions did not have enough time to breathe such that they could get enough good comments to justify being a daily feature. The comments I got were often excellent, but they were too few and too sporadic.
But now that there is a larger and steadier traffic coming through Camels With Hammers daily, I want to reintroduce the TOP Q with a new twist that will give each TOP Q more room to breathe and to develop a good dialectic among (hopefully) increasingly committed readers who are part of a (hopefully) increasingly cohesive community here at CWH. The new TOP Q will be a weekly feature, instead of a daily one. The phrase “TOP Q” will henceforth refer to either “Thursday’s Open Philosophical Question” or “Tuesday’s Open Philosophical Question” depending on the day I post it that week. So look out tomorrow for the first new TOP Q in almost exactly a year. I hope to sometimes float a topic in the TOP Q that I want to write on myself and to use your takes on the problem as stimulation for my own thinking and/or, where I already know pretty well what I think in advance, as an indication of where the focus in my eventual writing should be once I have a sense of readers’ general opinions, inclinations, and tensions between each other.
So, in the meantime, as I will be working all day and will not be able to blog much on that account, here are the previous TOP Q’s you might consider taking a crack at today:
Jaime: Okay, so why do you believe that your god is a good explanation for the universe?
Robin: Because everything that exists needs an explanation and the universe is no exception.
Jaime: But then why doesn’t your god need an explanation? Aren’t we just headed for an infinite regress unless you just admit that something doesn’t need an explanation?
Robin: Well, yes, that’s exactly what I believe—that there is something which does not need an explanation, and that is God.
Jaime: But a moment ago you said everything needs an explanation. But now it’s okay that your god doesn’t? You’re just changing the rules for your god.
Robin: No, the point is that something must not need an explanation but must exist of its own accord—but that cannot be anything from within our space-time since it cannot account for itself. So, it must be a being that exists outside our universe, and whatever that being is, is God. Metaphysically speaking, that’s all we can mean by God. All our inferences about God’s nature that don’t come from the Bible must come from the implications of the concept of this metaphysically self-causing being.
Jaime: Why not just say that the universe itself is eternal and self-explanatory? It’s simpler. That way there’s no need for a superfluous extra super-being with superpowers that cannot be accounted for. We just say the world we know just exists on the most basic level uncaused. Cause and effect relationships are meaningful for interactions by which the universe we know morphs itself into different arrangements of beings but the universe itself is eternal and not the kind of thing that gets caused into being as the effect of other agencies or events. Cause and effect are just confused categories for dealing with the origin of the universe itself in that case. They only apply to particular events within the basic eternal constituent features of the universe itself. Something must mysteriously exist with no further cause, so whatever it is, it’s just fundamental to the universe itself.
Robin: But the universe does not seem to be eternal since it has a beginning. So the eternality must be in something outside the universe.
Jaime: Well, just because we do not know what came before the big bang does not mean that in some sense the universe could not be part of a larger eternal multiverse or an eternal sequence of universes or that the universe cannot be eternally expanding with a big bang and then contracting with a big crunch and reexpanding with a big bang, etc. There are any number of plausible explanations of our universe being eternal or part of a larger eternal arrangement. At least these all involve dealing with the known, rather than positing an implausible super-being that just happens to have complex human traits like personhood in a supposedly simple and uncaused being. Everything we know about personhood is that it arises as a later, complex development. It is the result of natural selection processes and it is a functional operation that arises in beings who are composed of trillions of cells, each of which are made of something like 10^14 atoms! And the atoms are further composed of subatomic particles, etc., etc. To posit a simple, timeless, spaceless, eternally existing being which serves as a placeholder of “cause of the universe” is one thing. It’s a speculation which can be defended and challenged on any number of grounds, much like other speculations about fundamental metaphysics. But then to conceive of it as a person like us? That’s as implausible as saying numbers have personalities or that the most basic rudiments of existence, whatever they are, have personalities. Personalities are based on compositions of those basic building blocks of reality, it’s wholly unlikely they would exist on the most basic level of reality.
Robin: But the concept of a personal God is not incoherent. And neither is the positing of a timeless and spaceless being incoherent either. Numbers, for example, are timeless and spaceless. They are not created at any specific date. One might think propositions are too. Whether or not they are true or not may hinge on circumstances, but their meanings don’t seem to.
Jaime: But the problem is this, you say that your god is timeless and yet that the universe does not always exist. But for the universe to not always exist that means that your timeless god must have not created the universe at one moment and then at another moment created it. In which case, your god would be temporal after all—not creating one moment but then creating the next moment. Then you have a temporal being but you claim your god is timeless.
Robin: Well, no, God does not create at a moment, God is always timelessly performing the action of creating the universe all at once.
Jaime: So the universe is always existing, there with your god? So it has no beginning after all, it is eternal on your account!
Robin: But it is of finite duration. It has a beginning moment and a last moment. It is a finite set of moments, whereas God is timeless and not constrained to a set of finite moments.
Jaime: But it is existing eternally, even if it is limited to a finite number of moments? So you’re saying its temporality—its having moments—is compatible with its being eternal but before you said that its having a beginning and, so, presumably a finite number of moments, required it to not be eternal. But now your god can make the whole set of finite, temporal moments exist eternally. So why not say that some feature of, rather than one outside, the universe (or a multiverse) allows it to be eternal despite its also having a temporal beginning.
Robin: Because that makes no sense, if it has a beginning it starts being at some point in time, so it can’t be eternal.
Jaime: But you just claimed God is eternally creating it and it has a beginning point. So it is possible on your account.
Robin: It’s possible if some other being is causing it to both eternally be but to be limited to a finite set of moments in a way that an independently eternal being is not. But if it were its own cause then either it has to be its own eternal cause making itself exist infinitely and not in a finite number of temporal moments, or it really wasn’t there before its beginning and then the question is how it could have poofed itself into existence and then in any meaningful sense be worth calling eternal and not just, say, everlasting. It makes no sense though to say that it just came from nothing. We have to posit an eternal something or there would still be nothing. So, since the universe has a beginning it is likelier to say that the eternal something is not within the universe but exists independently of it and has no beginning itself.
Jaime: But then your god does not freely choose to create the world. It just always does this as a necessary, eternal expression of itself.
Robin: No, there is no necessity in the concept of the eternal, self-subsisting being that necessitates He also be a world creator. From the fact that He has created a world it is clear he could do it, that it’s within His power. But He didn’t have to.
Jaime: But “He” just eternally always does this.
Robin: Yes. In that sense God is free to create or not. The concept of God, as far as we understand it, is not identical with the concept of the world. Therefore, it is not the essence of God to express itself in the world. They are distinguishable concepts. There are alternate possibilities that involve the principle of being, i.e. God, creating different worlds or no world at all. In that sense, this world must be chalked up to a choice by God—even if that’s a different, non-temporal kind of choosing, distinct from any kind we do as temporal creatures.
Jaime: How is it a choice if it’s made eternally and timelessly? All choices we make happen through a process, be it conscious or unconscious. There seems to be a fundamental disanalogy between the notion of a fundamental being principle which is outside the universe conceptually being able to either create or not create different possible worlds and a personal being making such a choice. A personal being is one that goes through a thought process that is temporal to make a choice based on things like desires, emotions, personal relationships to other beings, etc. What you describe could have no substantive similarity to such a being. You’re basically saying that whatever the eternal thing is, it’s not part of the universe and conceptually we cannot assume it needed to either create our universe or any other universe. But even if we grant this being existed, we cannot know (a) that it didn’t generate all universes and not just ours, (b) that something inaccessible to us about it did necessitate it create our universe (or, even, that it necessitated that it create all universes) or (c) that it was personal. In fact, as soon as you say it is timeless, I have to say it is impersonal as all other timeless abstract objects—like, again, numbers. And so metaphors of choice are misleading.
Robin: Well, impersonal forces can make choices. Your computer goes through decision procedures and makes choices all the time.
Jaime: True, but it’s not timeless. It’s the timelessness, that makes both personality and choice impossible. It just eternally would be making one of its eternal choices or eternally expressing a non-choice. But there would never be a moment of alternate possibilities followed by a moment of selection of one over others. And even then it is hard to see in what sense we could assume this being has any choices. All things in our experience are constrained by their natures. Why would not this being which timelessly makes an eternal choice for a world (or worlds) to instantiate not also be expressing an eternal essence the only way it possibly can when it instantiates the world or worlds it does?
Robin: God would be free because He would be outside the causal nexuses of our experience within the world. Determinations only occur within the constraints of nature. But God is beyond nature and not bounded by a nature. He is omnipotent, not finite in power.
Jaime: But the concept of a being with no constraints placed on it by a nature of what it is is incoherent. Either it has a set, whether finite or infinite, of powers, each with coherent natures that have specific means of performing actions or not performing them, or it cannot do anything. A god would have to have a nature that made it what it was and it could not create its own nature too without exercising powers it had through that nature itself.
Robin: Well, God is just the being who exists identically with His nature. He just always exists how he exists. And is not (like humans) just a hypothetical being with a nature that may become instantiated or not. He and His nature eternally are just both there.
Jaime: But then your god has a nature and is subject to its logic. So the logic of your god’s nature is a deeper reality than your god itself. It constitutes and constrains your god.
Robin: But no—God’s nature is not complex. It’s not made of parts. God’s nature is utterly simple, so God and His nature are identical and the most rudimentary being. It’s not like there are further parts of God. God is not made up of numerous powers, each with their own natures, which compose Him as an aggregate being. That would have God made of parts, even if not spatial parts, and that would make no sense. In some way, God must be radically simple such that all his powers are all identical with Him himself.
Jaime: But then you’re saying all your god’s powers are not distinguishable powers but are the same one simple thing. So your god’s love equals his creative power, which equals his destructive power which equals his power of intelligence. Then the powers are incoherent and make no sense.
Robin: But they do. From one respect we can see God’s power as love and from another we can see it as creative force. This is because God’s love is expressed in His creating and God’s creating is the expression of Love.
Jaime: That’s trivial. You can find specific acts that you could attribute to more than one power at once, but that does not make those powers identical in nature. Either you have separate powers, explicable by parts which create them or you don’t have any differentiations. Your god needs parts to make any sense. And those parts have to be spatial since even those activities like “willing” and “loving” and “personhood” and “knowing” which we think of as “non-physical” in all known reality are scientifically seen to emerge only out of essentially bodily components. They cannot exist anywhere in the universe in disembodied form. There is no reason to project such traits into a non-spatial, non-temporal being. These are powers that are rooted in bodily processes. We have these multiple powers because of the multiple processes that our brains can carry out. Some of the powers overlap, probably in no small part because they use some of the same constituent brain parts and processes to function. But they are distinguishable by function and by the uses of at least some different brain features.
Mr. Deity’s captives beloved subjects are unsatisfied for a number of reasons:
I examined arguments that hell is God’s favor to those who just don’t want to be with him in my post Hell as the Absence of God (a fictional dialogue between my characters Jaime and Robin).
Although I think there are ways to imagine immortality which do not conceive of it as a boring waste of time, here and here Mano Singham raises some interesting challenges to the value of what Christians offer as immortality.
The Ruslan Sirota album Brian plugs at the end of the video is here.
So children, after he destroyed almost all of humanity with a giant flood, God gave us the rainbow as a symbol that he would never destroy humanity again and that instead things were going to be ‘FAAABUUULOUUUUSS!!!’
Saturday Amy Poehler and Seth Meyers asked for a little reality from the conservatives and Congresspeople who are attacking contraception and women’s reproductive rights more broadly:
It turns out that Obama’s alleged “war on the Catholic Church” (and on religion itself) was begun by George W. Bush:
In December 2000, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission ruled that companies that provided prescription drugs to their employees but didn’t provide birth control were in violation of Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which prevents discrimination on the basis of sex. That opinion, which the George W. Bush administration did nothing to alter or withdraw when it took office the next month, is still in effect today—and because it relies on Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, it applies to all employers with 15 or more employees. Employers that don’t offer prescription coverage or don’t offer insurance at all are exempt, because they treat men and women equally—but under the EEOC’s interpretation of the law, you can’t offer other preventative care coverage without offering birth control coverage, too.
“It was, we thought at the time, a fairly straightforward application of Title VII principles,” a top former EEOC official who was involved in the decision told Mother Jones. “All of these plans covered Viagra immediately, without thinking, and they were still declining to cover prescription contraceptives. It’s a little bit jaw-dropping to see what is going on now…There was some press at the time but we issued guidances that were far, far more controversial.”
He has more to say about it today, on the 70th anniversary of Executive Order 9066. His goal is to raise money for a show about the internment, called Allegiance.
Last night James Croft attended a lecture by famous Christian apologist (and Oxford Professor of Mathematics), John Lennox. James was struck by the especial susceptibility of the American audience to emotional appeals, which led them to give a charming but intellectually shallow, evasive, and unoriginal defense of belief a standing ovation:
This shows us something about the importance of Pathos and Ethos, about how much they affect audiences. And, I have to say, in my experience, how very open American audiences are to emotional appeals and to the likability of a speaker. Don’t get me wrong – I love this characteristic. As a speaker myself it is wonderful to have an emotional demonstrative audience. But it is striking to note how, in comparison to British audiences, Americans seem to get into stuff more. They audibly emote with sighs and swaying and facial expressions throughout stories, they laugh more at jokes – they are very generous with their emotions. And this is something for atheist speakers to consider – we can use this to our advantage.
But Lennox wasn’t all flash and no substance. He did have one powerful argument up his sleeve that seems to have had a life-changing effect on James:
The Argument from the Bible in the Briefcase
Many years ago, John Lennox was doing the Lord’s work, spreading the Gospel in Russia when he encountered a man on a train. They started to talk about God. Lennox was overcome with the sense that he should give the man a Bible – whence came this strange compulsion he knew not. He remembered that, but two weeks previously, he had been given a bible, in Russian, by someone else. He wondered if, by some strange and serendipitous alignment of circumstances, that Bible might still be in the briefcase where he had put it those two weeks prior.
He reached into the briefcase and, heart palpitating, his spirit fixed on the Lord, grasped the spine of a book. He pulled it from the bag, hand shaking, knees knocking, soul hoping.
Yay, verily, it was indeed the very same Bible, still in Russian, that he had himself placed there weeks ago!
Handing it to his interlocutor they were both overcome by the power of the Spirit of God – for surely it could only have been He, in his vast might, who ensured that the Bible had not been spirited from where it had previously been placed. The gentleman was so overcome by the presence of the Bible in its anointed place that he almost had a heart attack! Surely, God works in mysterious ways.
Praise Jesus!
It was at this point that I converted to Christianity. I asked afterward if Lennox had the very same briefcase in which the bible had been kept safe by God, that I might touch the Holy Relic, but sadly he had brought a different book bag that day. Perhaps The Briefcase is enshrined in a chapel on a high mountaintop, where it receives pilgrimages from newly-converted Russians daily.
This reminds me of my brother’s “Argument From The $20 He Had Thrown On The Floor”. It went something like this:
When Rebecca Hensler’s infant son died in 2009, she received numerous condolences from friends, colleagues and even total strangers she met online.
She knew their intentions were good, but their words weren’t always helpful. And in the rawness of her grief, Hensler found some of them downright hurtful.
Hensler is an atheist, so when people described her three-month-old son Jude as being an angel, or part of God’s plan, or “in a better place” than in his mother’s arms, the pain sometimes overwhelmed her.
“(Atheists) don’t think we are going to get to hold our children again,” Hensler told a group of about 30 members of the East Bay Atheists, a monthly gathering of nontheists, where her descriptions of people’s visions of her son as an angel drew a few gasps.
“We are facing an absolute loss, so when someone projects onto that the idea that we are going to be able to hold our children again or communicate with them, it is essentially dismissing the magnitude of that loss.”
As the atheist community grows and matures, one thing people are looking for is a way to process grief and sorrow without the trappings — or support — of religious ritual and belief.
Read more (including remarks from Greta Christina).
Libby Anne details some of the anxieties she and others felt growing up as true believers in the rapture:
I was very afraid the rapture might occur and I might be left behind. One morning when I was ten or twelve I woke up and couldn’t find anyone in the house. Before I realized that my mom and siblings had simply gone outside to enjoy the beautiful morning, I completely freaked, convinced that the rapture had occurred and I had been left behind. That fear was real and palpable.
Sometimes one of my siblings would change in the morning or later in the day and just leave a pile of clothes on the floor rather than putting them in the dirty clothes. Sometimes I would come upon just such a pile of clothes and take fright, fearing that maybe my sibling had been raptured and I had been left.
The Bible says there will be no marrying in heaven, and no having children. Given that I was being raised to see being a wife and mother as my highest calling, and given that I was a bit of a little romantic, the idea that I might be raptured before marrying and having children, and thus never marry or have children, frightened me.
You know what’s weird? Because of the imminent nature of the rapture, I never pictured myself in old age. I didn’t think I would live that long. I only hoped to live long enough to marry and have a passel of children, and I felt that even that was pushing it.
I have refrained as much as possible from publicly addressing John W. Loftus’s relentless recent attempts to pick a fight with Freethought Blogs or all his crying persecution every time anyone from Freethought Blogs has the temerity to so much as respond to his unprovoked attacks. But now he just crossed a line by charging that Natalie Reed is here as a special favor because of our concern for diversity and not because of any qualifications to be here.
Gov. Chris Christie has followed through on his promise to reject a bill allowing same-sex marriage in New Jersey by quickly vetoing the measure Friday.
“I am adhering to what I’ve said since this bill was first introduced — an issue of this magnitude and importance, which requires a constitutional amendment, should be left to the people of New Jersey to decide,” Christie said in a statement. “I continue to encourage the Legislature to trust the people of New Jersey and seek their input by allowing our citizens to vote on a question that represents a profoundly significant societal change. This is the only path to amend our State Constitution and the best way to resolve the issue of same-sex marriage in our state.”
Just another craven and disingenuous politician whose name is going to be infamous in just a few short decades for his pandering to bigots today. No one in the future will believe his attempt to be cute and make this about democratic principles when it’s about basic civil rights.
And let no one get away with calling this weasel a “straight talker” ever again, please.
The financial crisis in Italy has made indulging religious economic privilege intolerable. 130,000 people signed a petition as part of making this happen:
Prime Minister Mario Monti has announced the Vatican must pay taxes on non-religious property, from which it previously enjoyed an exemption.
The annual cost could be up to 720m euros ($945m; £598m) according to municipal government bodies.
Italy’s Catholic Church has 110,000 properties, worth about 9bn euros.
It includes shopping centres and a range of residential property.
In December, the government reintroduced a tax paid by anyone who owns land or property in Italy – which the Church does not pay.
Your Thoughts?
________________
UPDATE: I changed the title from its original to make it clearer, on advice from a comment below.
This one really hurts. The 1986 Mets are a big part of my psyche. I was 8 years old and it was my first year following baseball. That team was filled with colorful characters having colorful adventures as they dominated the National League in the regular season and then staged dramatic comeback after dramatic comeback throughout the playoffs and World Series—culminating with possibly the single most celebrated come from behind win in Series history. Every game was so epic. Every win and every loss was so memorable.
That team is so fundamental to my understanding of baseball that they are essentially the Platonic Form of The Baseball Team in my mind and heart. Gary Carter is the Form of the Clean Up Hitter and the Form of the Catcher. He was also the veteran, the leader, the missing piece, the new hope, and the big acquisition who led off the 1985 season with an inspiring game-winning homerun in his first game as a Met. He personally epitomized more than anyone else the 1986 team’s infectious fire and enthusiasm and pure love of play. I can’t ever watch footage of Kid without fondly remembering being a kid and assuming that life was just a series of come from behind wins and World Series championships. I can’t watch Gary Carter as an adult without being vividly struck by how uniquely he modeled what it looks like for an adult to do grueling and rewarding work with the energy and ecstasy ofa kid.
Robin: Jaime, what bothers me about your atheism is that it’s so dogmatic. You claim to know there is no God. That’s so arrogant.
Jaime: Yes, I claim to know there are no gods. But I don’t claim it dogmatically or arrogantly. I claim it based upon the fact that the evidence is overwhelmingly against the proposition that there are any gods.
Robin: But you can’t know there is no God. To know that there was no God you’d have to have complete certainty. But to know with certainty that there was no God anywhere in all existence, you would have to know all there was to know about all existence. But to know everything that there is about all existence you would have to be omniscient. But if you were omniscient you would be God! So the only way you can say you know God does not exist is if you were God! So, it is impossible for anyone to truly say they know God does not exist since that person would be God and would exist!!!!1!
Jaime: That is absurd. First of all, theoretically an omniscient being could be possible without it being a god (or your specific god, even). An omniscient being would not have to be the Christian god at all and it would not necessarily have any of the other attributes of “the god of the philosophers” that philosophical theists believe in. But second of all, knowledge does not require absolute certainty. We all justifiably think we know plenty of things that we do not know with absolute certainty. I know my address. I could be wrong about what it is if my memory happens to falter or, more extremely, if somehow I am being deceived by the Matrix. But that does not matter. There is no evidence I’m in the Matrix being deceived. It’s not at all the most probable explanation of my experience or my memory. My best inference is that I know my address. I see it all the time, I get my mail there, my friends who I give it to all arrive at my door. I know this. And countless other facts. So, I can know things even if theoretically they can possibly be wrong.
Robin: But you can’t know there is no God the way you know your address!
Jaime: Well, no, it’s a different kind of knowledge, but it’s still knowledge. It is an inference to an overwhelmingly likely metaphysical explanation.
Robin: But it’s not “overwhelmingly likely”. How could you even judge such a thing?
Jaime: By many means. Would you mind if we just take one and focus on it without deviating to side topics?
Robin: Sure. Give me your best supposed proof there is no God and I’ll refute it in detail.
Jaime: I don’t know if it’s the best proof but it’s one of the most central. As far as I can tell the concepts of the Christian god and the philosophers’ god are both incoherent. Specifically, their overlapping idea of a timeless being that performs actions is fatally contradictory. Such a being cannot be made intelligible and, as unintelligible, cannot be thought to be in any way even a plausible candidate for existence, let alone a likely one.
Robin: Well, I admit that there are some mysteries we have to face when we think about God’s timelessness. But God is not impossible.
Jaime: Appeals to mystery are special pleading. Either the concept is internally rationally coherent and therefore understandable and, so, meets the minimum criterion for being rationally considerable at all, or by failing to meet such standards, it is one we can dismiss as meaningless at best or impossible at worst. If I show you contradictions in the concept and you just say “that’s not a contradiction, it’s a mystery”, then you’re asking me to just accept a contradictory concept for no better reason than you are used to believing in it and have a religious investment in believing in it. Any non-religious concept that made no rational sense, you would readily join me in saying was nonsense that one could know was either false or meaningless. Asking me to ignore the impossibilities connected to your concept of god is asking me to suspend normal standards of rationality. I don’t have to do that for you. I can say, I know that since there is no good reason so to suspend the standards of rationality, that there is good reason to think that any concept those standards rule out (including your god) is false (or meaningless).
Robin: Okay, okay. But I still don’t think you can know that we can know all there is or know that there are not aspects of reality which exceed even our finite minds’ best abilities to grasp.
Jaime: There very well seem to be many aspects of reality which even in principle exceed our grasp but (a) rational scrupulousness requires that we must be silent about such things and not claim to know them as you claim to know your god and (b) whatever realities exceed our knowledge cannot contradict what we do know, but must be compatible with it.
Robin: Okay, first of all—I don’t claim to know there is a god, I admit I have faith. I am honest about that, unlike you making knowledge claims where you really only have faith too.
Jaime: Hold it—you cannot have this both ways. You worship this god, you live your life around your beliefs about this god and what you think it wants you to do, and you try to get me to believe in and obey this god. You claim all the time to know this god intimately, to have a personal relationship with it, and to know its will. To claim that you don’t act like a person who thinks they know is disingenuous. You’re not living in a humble middle ground like the kind of agnostic who refrains from believing, consistent with their belief they cannot know enough either way to commit to belief or disbelief. You constantly talk and act just as someone would only if they truly thought that they knew there was a god. I mean, how can you say you have a deep and intimate personal relationship with someone one minute and then turn around and the next minute say you’re not claiming to know that person even exists! What kind of an intimate personal relationship is that? Finally, I don’t have faith beliefs here. I admit it’s always possible I’m wrong, but I make my judgments based on my assessment of the preponderance of the evidence. Even if I misjudge the strength of the evidence or make mistakes in my argumentation, etc., unlike you I am unwilling to deliberately commit to believing against (or beyond) what I think the evidence indicates. I am open to changing my mind if you can dissuade me with evidence and logical arguments. That alone makes me not a “faith believer”. A faith believer in principle refuses such changes of mind.
Robin: Regardless of whether you think you’re only believing proportioned to evidence, you’re not. The evidence can never be as conclusive as you think. For example, to address your second claim before—the one about how the reality we cannot know must not be able to contradict what we do know… You cannot know that. There could be an apparent contradiction from our limited perspective that is resolved by a third factor that is unfathomable to us but which is nonetheless true. Assuming that an apparent contradiction in our understanding of the nature of God (from our limited human understanding!) makes God impossible assumes we know everything about what is possible or impossible. That’s arrogant! We have no idea about so much! There could be a way that any paradoxes you might raise are resolved even if no human can resolve them. You cannot claim to know that there are not ways to resolve them! These are mysteries!
Jaime: But there is no genuine mystery! A genuine mystery is when there is some known phenomenon that demonstrably exists but which has no clear or decisive explanation for how it exists. When everyone (or everyone competent to understand in the cases of more complicated phenomena) can grasp that something does exist even without knowing how or why, then there is a real mystery to solve. We know there is this thing or this set of things relating in some way, etc., and yet no one can give an account of how or why. When that happens, we cannot just dismiss our confusion as most likely a mental mistake on our part. We have to admit that there is something we do not know how to reduce to simpler, better known, explanatory terms. But when you propose without evidence the existence of a fantastical being, the concept of which is self-contradictory in numerous respects, and I point out those contradictions, you cannot say it is simply a mystery “how this being exists despite these apparent paradoxes”. That assumes there is some independent and clear reason to accept the existence of the being even though we cannot understand how or why it is real. But without any independent evidence for your god, we do not need to puzzle how or why it can be but rather we can simply infer, based on the contradictions in the concept, that it does not exist at all. It is not a mysterious concept, it’s a badly formed one which is completely unlikely to refer to any true reality. That’s totally different from a true mystery—i.e., a well recognized, rationally coherent, and verified reality which all competent knowers agree exists, but which nonetheless relevant experts have no solid account for.
Here are four common sense assumptions about giving and taking offense that I think are fundamentally mistaken and which atheists need to argue against:
“You have every right to be offended, but you don’t have the right to censor others just because you’re offended.”
“You cannot blame people for getting offended by satire since satirists aim to offend people.”
“We liberal secular atheists cannot blame religious people for getting offended by satires of their religions unless we are going to say we cannot be offended by satires which are racist, anti-semitic, homophobic, misogynistic, or otherwise upsetting to us.”
“What is offensive to a given person is just a matter of feelings or taste and you cannot judge other people’s feelings or taste.”
So what is wrong with these views? What does it mean to rightly take offense or incorrectly take offense?
Morally Rightly Taking Offense
Taking offense is not just a matter of taste or arbitrary feeling. It is not the same thing as being annoyed or irritated or flat out disliking something in any other non-specific way.
Rather, offense purports to be (and should therefore be judged as properly felt only when it really is) a fitting moral emotional reaction to being illegitimately personally disrespected in ways that are abusive, harassing, defaming, coercive, or otherwise undermining of your (or another’s) basic dignity, moral rights, and/or legal rights. A proper and virtuous sense of dignity does not allow oneself or one’s genuine rights to be trampled upon. A proper concern for the rights of others does not allow them to have their rights trampled either. One should feel offended when such indignities are truly inflicted.
The right feeling of offense is both (a) a proper cognitive recognition of the truth that one has been wrongly slighted and (b) in many cases a helpful part of the psychological process that motivates us to take actions which justly rectify such slights.
Last November atheists attending Skepticon IV were morally and legally right to be offended when they discovered that they were illegally barred from a gelato shop on account of their atheism. Their offended reaction, and that of atheists online, was a way to properly and truthfully feel the indignity done to them as the injustice that it was. And we were right to be motivated to take action to protest both the ban and the bigoted attitudes of the gelato shop owner which led to it in the first place. His actions and his attitudes were both objectively offensive. Offense was the right emotional and cognitive response both in terms of properly appreciating the wrongness of the discrimination against us atheists and in terms of motivating our assertion of our rights, and warning others who would take them lightly that we would make a big deal of it if they did.
Morally Wrongly Taking Offense
But in cases when someone has not been illegitimately disrespected, it is oversensitive and arrogant to take offense. In those cases, you do not have a moral right to feel offended. In fact, I would say morally you are obligated not to feel offended in such cases, but instead to feel appreciation for the limits of your rights to immunity from criticism. It is a misperception of the truth about values to feel offense when you have not been treated inappropriately.
Of course you (correctly) have the legal right to feel offense even in many cases in which it is not morally appropriate, but you should not have the right to legislate that others respect your illegitimate feelings of offense by demanding that they never offend you in those ways. And both socially and legally, no one should be coerced to refrain from actions that do not legitimately offend others.
And people should even have legal rights to be actually morally offensive in some ways. Not all forms of disrespect should be policed through law but only those which threaten other people’s full, free, genuine, uncoerced participation in their society according to their own consciences.
When you regularly feel unjustly disrespected in cases where you have not in fact been treated poorly, then your oversensitivity and arrogance are more than just immediate feeling responses, but blameworthy character dispositions (to the extent that they are in your power to change). And when you are justifiably offended morally, but not in ways that should be made illegal, if you try to use the arm of the law or other coercive institutional measures to avenge yourself on your violators you become troublingly authoritarian and intolerably hostile to healthy freedom of expression.
If you take offense illicitly, when you are not morally or rationally warranted to do so, and you then do something immoral or illegal in your unjustified anger, then you are culpable for your character which leads to your behavior, as much as for your actions. Then those whom you have wronged have an interest in determining whether the oversensitivity and arrogance which led to your action were just impulsive feelings which you regret having let control you or whether those traits are vices, i.e., character dispositions which can be expected to lead to more immoral and illegal actions in the future.
Why I Didn’t Forgive the Gelato Guy for Being Offended
For me to forgive you fully, I need to see that you regret your wrong action and your wrong feeling, and I need to see that you are willing to introspect about whether your wrong feeling is an actual disposition to feel wrongly which needs to be actively changed lest it harm me again the next time I trust you. If you recognize that your wrong feeling really is a vicious disposition to regularly harm people the way you did, then you need to conscientiously resolve to change before I forgive you. If you don’t request forgiveness for the right thing and resolve to change in the right ways, I am under no obligation to forgive you. In fact, it would be foolish for me to do so.
This was why I supported not forgiving Andy Drennan, the gelato shop owner who discriminated against atheists but only apologized for how he reacted to feeling offended and not for being offended by an atheist satire in the first place. I don’t think he had a moral right to be offended. Irritated? I can understand that. But not offended. And this is an important distinction.
Let me now turn to explain how I apply these general moral considerations about the nature of offense and when it is appropriate and inappropriate to the murkier particulars of this empirical case to make distinctions about what is morally properly offensive, and not, in satire and elsewhere.
Satire
Satirists are regularly willing to piss people off. The nature of satire is to use parody with some degree of mockery to highlight absurdities in ideas, in current events, in institutions, in social conventions, in human behaviors, etc. Satire is a performative way of bringing to light truths about the logical or practical inadequacies of whatever is being satirized. It is a species of art and critical reasoning which has distinct (and often unique) prospects for exposing harsh truths that may not be as well articulated in other modes of expression. In this way it is a valuable tool in the critical search for the truth and the good.
But should people be offended by it? When is it offensive or not to mock people? Where should we draw the line?
Satire vs. Personal Encounters
In non-satirical social encounters, it is offensive to mock people in a malicious or critical spirit. If I want to criticize your ideas, as much as possible I should stick to focusing on the wrongness of your ideas without personal attacks. If I make it insultingly personal, this is a bullying and irrational attempt to manipulate your emotions and coerce your agreement. It’s anti-rational and antithetical to concern for your abilities to think freely and to reason your way to the truth based on evidence, because it attempts to employ non-rational leverage.
When I personally insult you in ways that are not mutually understood to be playful but which have explicit or implicit harms to your psyche, I treat you in a way that undermines your dignity and is immorally disrespectful. You have a moral right to be offended. And if this attack undermines your ability to feel like you can safely exercise your full rights in society to pursue your conception of the good to the maximum, I offend you in ways that might rise to the level of being legally addressable too.
Mocking Groups Legitimately and Illegitimately, for the Sake of Truth
But if I satirize a group’s ideas or behaviors which flow from a group’s debatable ideas and conventions, then I am operating not on the level of personal insult but on the level of criticism of forms and institutions. If I satirize a powerful individual, then I engage in a potentially vital form of dissenting from a potentially coercive influence in society. In these ways, as long as I am not fundamentally malicious and subversive to people’s basic rights or basic dignities, I am merely critical of influential ideas and practices in a way that love of truth and the good justifies.
And if, on an interpersonal level, you and I tease each other in good natured ways that do not harm or have the potential to effectually relegate each other to inferior statuses, then this is harmless play.
On the other hand, when dealing with especially disempowered groups and individuals—on individual, social, and even satirical levels—one must be very careful that one’s mockery does not reinforce actual moral and legal disrespect that the members of that vulnerable group suffer in real life detrimental ways.
But, I do not think I have the right to be offended when, say, South Park ruthlessly satirizes those of us self-assured outspoken intellectual atheists. If I disagree with a particular criticism this may irritate me the way any expression of an idea I think is false irritates me. But it should not be personal even though I am a serious atheist and even though they are satirizing the ardent atheist’s identity, values, and viewpoints. Even as they challenge deep parts of my thought and identity, I should be able to distance myself from these ideas and this identity conceptually, be capable of criticizing or laughing any flaws which are helpfully revealed, and ideally be able to improve my thinking and self-understanding in light of insightful criticisms. Humor can be enlightening in this way. In fact, my personal thinking about atheism and atheistic identity has actually been especially improved by satirists like Matt Stone and Trey Parker.
Between friends and in formal impersonal contexts, joking can be a uniquely valuable way to make important truths about ourselves, our institutions, our ideas, our practices, or our values crystal clear to us. Sometimes we even learn and internalize a harsh truth the least painfully when we are induced to laugh at it than when it is demanded that we accept it as defeat in a logical debate. Our minds can be more stubborn than our senses of humor when it comes time to capitulate to an uncomfortable idea. And satire which is simply wrong as a point of truth can be either laughed off or shrugged off depending on how funny or not it is on its own terms.
We should take truth-based criticisms and satirizations of both ideas and ourselves at arms’ length insofar as they are not morally or legally malicious and do not constitute a real life threat to our real life dignity or real life rights.
The Moral Right to Offend the Religious
But what about the religious? Don’t they have the moral right to get offended when their beliefs or their revered figures are flagrantly mocked in public?
No. They have the moral right to feel irritated and they have the legal right to feel offended. But if they try to use moral or legal means to prevent their ideas, identities, institutions, values, or leaders from being satirized then they are saying it is immoral for others to subject these things to harsh scrutiny.
This is because the only bases which they could possibly have for treating these things as off limits to criticism, including mockery, is the authority of their religious traditions. Their religious traditions may explicitly or implicitly guide them to never treat certain things with irreverence, critical thought, or mockery. If that is the case, it is understandable that they feel personally or communally bound not to do so. I think it is bad and unhealthy for them to do this since putting anything off limits to criticism and mockery stifles their likelihood of rejecting or improving any inadequate ideas they might have. But it is their prerogative morally and legally insofar as people are morally and legally free to be mistaken and to hold false moral ideas whose harms to themselves and others are sufficiently limited in scope.
But the moment that the religious insist that their gods or ideas or values or revered leaders or institutions or books, etc. be off limits from intellectual or artistic or interpersonal criticisms (including ones which have extremely sharp and irreverent humorous edges to them) lest they be offended, they are insisting that their traditions and beliefs, etc., are morally in principle above reproach. This demands implicitly of all outsiders to their tradition that we treat their tradition’s attitudes about what is sacred, inviolable, and never to be criticized as our own. This effectively demands that we take their religious judgments as our own moral guideline and to let them restrict our own abilities to pass moral and intellectual judgment according to our own consciences.
In effect this demands us to adopt their religious values as our own. This is too much for them to demand of us. This is a violation of our own moral and legal rights to intellectual and moral conscience. To be offended at our exercise of our own rights to criticism (including artistic or intellectually forms of mockery that have the potential to be insightful) is to assert a moral claim against our consciences. But our consciences should feel innocent here. The religious have no right to make such claims on our consciences, either morally or legally. Therefore, they should not take offense—no matter how irritated they may be or how substantively wrong they may think our implicitly or explicitly made claims may be.
Atheists (and others) have the moral right to critically satirize religious ideas, values, institutions, people, identities, practices, etc. The religious may get irritated as they wish. They may respond with their own satires or vigorous intellectual criticisms if they wish. But morally they do not have the right to complain we have assaulted their dignity or disrespected them simply because we criticize them or use impersonal humor as part of doing so. Therefore they have no moral right to be offended. To claim otherwise is to claim that non-adherents to a religion are bound to respect that religion’s precepts about sacredness even in violation of the non-adherent’s own conscience. That is a morally unconscionable demand.
Just to wrap up the gelato affair (3 months late!): this is why I didn’t think Andy Drennan was within his moral rights to be offended. This is why I thought he needed to apologize for more than just discriminating against atheists by denying us access to his shop. This is why I thought he had to stop implying that his offended reaction was itself morally understandable. It is obviously psychologically understandable, in that it is normal for people to get offended when they really have no moral right to. But it is not something morally approvable and unless he recognizes this, he goes on assuming he has the right to get offended by valid forms of atheistic criticism. And then he has learned nothing and may continue to be part of the immoral dominance of religious people who silence atheistic critics by illicit claims to a right not to be offended.
It was nice to see Jon Stewart finally have a chance to weigh in on last week’s absurd push from the Catholic Church to win the exemption from the law requiring employers to provide health insurance that covers contraception:
In case you missed any Camels With Hammers last week, this story had my attention quite a bit. First I debated a Catholic theology student for three posts:
Maryam Namazie has been on top of the story of Hamza Kashgari, a 23 year old Saudi journalist whose life is on the line after he tweeted the following on Mohammad’s birthday:
“On your birthday, I will say that I have loved the rebel in you, that you’ve always been a source of inspiration to me, and that I do not like the halos of divinity around you. I shall not pray for you.”
“On your birthday, I find you wherever I turn. I will say that I have loved aspects of you, hated others, and could not understand many more.”
“On your birthday, I shall not bow to you. I shall not kiss your hand. Rather, I shall shake it as equals do, and smile at you as you smile at me. I shall speak to you as a friend, no more.”
He had been in Malaysia and the Malaysian government handed him over to the Saudi authorities where he could very well be executed for apostasy despite his making retractions and apologies for his tweets.
Malaysia must be made to pay for this heinous act of returning someone to their possible death (something that Western governments also do all the time by deporting asylum seekers).
And Saudi Arabia must feel such rage that it dare not touch a hair on Hamza’s head.
Saudi Arabia be warned. We will not let you kill Hamza. Be warned.
A campaign for Hamza will be announced shortly.
More coverage from the mainstream press is below the fold. If you have any ideas or information about how to secure his safety, now is the time to share them or to privately act on them.
Daniel Fincke is the founder, owner, and primary blogger of Camels With Hammers. Dan has his PhD in philosophy from Fordham University. He wrote his dissertation on Nietzsche’s philosophy and metaethics. At Camels With Hammers he aims to discuss atheism, ethics, religion, Nietzsche, secularism, and general issues in philosophy in ways that are both accessible to non-philosophers and yet stimulating to professional philosophers. He is simultaneously an Adjunct Assistant Professor at both Hofstra University and the City University of New York Hunter College, and also an Adjunct Professor at William Paterson University, Fairfield University, and Fordham University. He has taught at the university level since 2003. His remarks on this blog, of course, do not speak for any of the universities with which he is affiliated.
Until he was 21 he was a devout Evangelical Christian. As an undergraduate, he studied philosophy and minored in religion at Grove City College, which is one of America's most religiously and politically right wing colleges. He became an atheist there during his senior year five months after The Portable Nietzsche dealt what would prove to be the fatal blows to his faith.
Dan lives in Manhattan. He is a muppet of a man. You can SUBSCRIBE TO CAMELS WITH HAMMERS. You can also e-mail Dan at camelswithhammers at gmail . com. You are invited to become his Facebook friend, +1 him on Google Plus, follow him on Twitter, and/or or like Camels With Hammers'Facebook page. Listen to an interview he gave to the Angry Atheist podcast to hear him discuss his deconversion and his views on atheism and religion. Watch a 10 minute video in which he overviews some of his views on Nietzsche that he developed in his dissertation. Read his article Apostasy As A Religious Act (Or "Why A Camel Hammers The Idols Of Faith") if you are curious about the meaning of the blog's name. Eric Steinhart is an occasional guest contributor, so remember to check the authorship of each blog post to know who you are reading. He is a non-theist metaphysician and philosopher of religion. He is Professor of Philosophy at William Paterson University, and is the author of many scholarly articles and three books.
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February 22, 2012 at 10:29 am 
Daniel Fincke 
and it is as appalling as the title promises. Here’s a salacious and infuriating taste:
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