William Lane Craig, "Richard Dawkins on Arguments for God", Part IV, the Ontological Argument

So I'm skipping Part III, the Teleological Argument for now, because it's a little more complex to deal with, and focusing on Part IV, the Ontological Argument, because it's fun and easy!

So the Ontological Argument was either first or most famously formulated by St. Anselm of Canterbury way back in like the 13th century or something, and his formulation goes something like this:

God is that than which no greater can be thought.

Let us suppose that God does not exist.

Then we have a contradiction by definition, since we can think something greater than our idea of God, i.e. that+existence.

Therefore, God must exist.

It's sort of the Xeno's paradoxes of arguments for God, in that it is charmingly, obviously wrong, but deciphering exactly how is kind of difficult. The first attempts at refuting this argument got all mixed up with questions like, did it imply that the best island possible must exist in reality and shit like that, but most people confronted with it sort of just went, "Huh?" and moved on with their lives. Kant said some stuff about it which as near as I can figure was about how you just can't fucking do that, deriving actual existence from purely theoretical exercises. I didn't accept this argument even when I was a christian, because it's a form of argument that could only possibly be valid in this particular case, so the question of whether or not it is a valid form of argument is logically equivalent to the question of God's existence and we're right back where we started.

Anyway, Anselm's formulation is not the one Craig references here; rather, he's using Alvin Plantinga's formulation, which goes like this:

1) It is possible that a maximally great being exists.

2) If it is possible that a maximally great being exists, then a maximally great being exists in some possible world.

3) If a maximally great being exists in some possible world, then it exists in every possible world.

4) If a maximally great being exists every possible world, then it exists in the actual world.

5) If a maximally great being exists in the actual world, then a maximally great being exists.

6) Therefore, a maximally great being exists.

First off, let me just note that it is not at all clear to me that this whole possible world business is all that different from the world ensemble Dawkins postulates to answer the teleological argument, for which Craig ridicules him, but that's not the main point here. The point is that Craig insists that, "In order for the ontological argument to fail, the concept of a maximally great being must be incoherent, like the concept of a married bachelor." Setting aside the issue of whether that's actually true, what is demonstrably false is his further insistence that "the concept of a maximally great being doesn't seem even remotely incoherent." Observe.

Let's assume that the concept of a maximally great being is coherent. Let us represent this entity by n. Now let us posit an entity n + 1, which has all of the characteristics of n, and the additional characteristic, "can take n in a fight" (or "is greater than n", but I like my formulation best). It should be obvious that n + 1 is just as coherent as n - if you're not super comfortable with the idea of something being "more omnipotent", then you clearly haven't been watching enough anime. (I realize this seems like a flippant point, but it's not. The inability to conceive of something "more omnipotent" is actually a failure of the imagination. Or, if you're still not convinced, replace "can take n in a fight" with "is capable of making a better universe than n" because if you candidly think that this is the best of all possible worlds, well, congratulations, you're a white straight cisgendered christian male in the wealthiest one percent of the United States of America, and fuck you.) Point being, using the same inductive reasoning that the ontological argument (or at least Anselm's formulation of it) uses to derive God, I can derive the existence of a better God. This, of course, contradicts the idea that n is maximally great, therefore we have a proof by contradiction that the concept of a maximally great being is in fact incoherent, therefore the ontological argument holds no water.

Hey, privilege, what's up

So I'm in Arkansas (lest we forget) and have been, of late, subjected to what seems an endless stream of sexism and homophobia via my voyeuristic over-the-shoulder observation of my roommates' facebook feeds (my roommates themselves are stand-up folks, but many of their facebook friends are not.) So after a particularly nauseating instance in which my roommate dared to post a status implying that calling something "gay" in a derogatory sense was maybe, y'know, homophobic, and was subsequently dogpiled by three or four people vehemently protesting to the contrary, I felt that I needed to write a thing. So I did. Here it is.

To those who think using the words "gay" or "faggot" in a derogatory sense isn't homophobic: hey guess what you're wrong.

Look, I am as aware as anyone, more aware than you are, of the fact that language changes, that words come to have different meanings over time, that language is dynamic and that people who obsess over grammar at the expense of communication are stupid, but let's just take a moment and examine the facts:

Fact 1: The words "gay" and "faggot" come to have derogatory senses only because of the social (and legal!) stigmata associated with homosexuality.

Fact 2: The words "gay" and "faggot" continue to be used, right now, in this country, in a derogatory sense by the people who are responsible for the continuation of these stigmata, i.e., homophobes.

Fact 3: The stigmata associated with homosexuality have real consequences, right now, in this country, from widespread social disapproval, to greatly increased difficulty if not impossibility of adoption, to not being allowed to be with your dying lover, to being continually tormented to the point where you commit suicide. People die because of homophobia, right now, in the United States of America.

I am not making the argument that calling someone a faggot is morally equivalent to killing them. That would be a stupid argument, and it would be stupid to think I am making it. What I am saying is that homophobia is a serious issue, right now, in this country, and it is facile to suggest that derogatory uses of the word "gay" are A-okay because the word's meaning has changed. It hasn't.

To use "gay" or "faggot" in a derogatory sense, is to associate negativity with homosexuality. This is how language works: words mean things. They don't stop meaning things just because you don't mean them (or claim not to mean them). When you say, "that's so gay," or "what a faggot," what you are communicating, whether you intend to or not, is that gays are less: less worthy of respect, less entitled to rights, less human. That is what people will hear, and that is not their fault, because that is what you have communicated.

But okay, maybe using "gay" and "faggot" as slurs, repeatedly, doesn't make you homophobic. (Maybe using "nigger" or "kike" or "spic" doesn't make you racist.) Maybe you have gay friends. (Maybe you just used the same argument Sarah Palin did. Congratulations.) Maybe you don't think people should burn in hell for eternity just because they're gay. (You probably also don't think the Holocaust was a good thing. You don't get a cookie for that either. I'm not impressed by very very basic human decency.) Here's the real reason that you, specifically, are a homophobe:

Your immediate, knee-jerk reaction when someone brings up that your use of "gay" to mean "bad" is homophobic, is not to listen, or to examine yourself for any unrecognized homophobia, or to just stop using two words with hundreds if not thousands of substitutes which, by contrast, do not communicate that certain classes of people are subhuman - no, your immediate reaction is to justify how you are not at fault, and how the fault lies with the people who might be hurt by your thoughtless language.

Here's the moral of the story, the central point I'm trying to get across: if you are some combination of white, male, straight, cisgendered, or Christian, when dealing with people who are some combination of not those things, about those things where you are in the majority or privileged class, your first response must always be, without exception, to shut the fuck up and listen, because you have no idea whatsoever what it is like to be them, what they think, how they feel - whereas everyone knows what Christian white straight cisgendered males think and how they feel because we have entire media networks devoted to delivering us this information. Shut the fuck up and listen, because you have lived all your life in a bubble of privilege, and you aren't even aware that it exists, because no one has ever given you hateful looks because you are holding hands with someone you love, and you don't have a one in three chance of going to prison because your skin is too dark, and you don't have a one in four chance of being raped because you don't have a penis, and your father has never thanked God out loud before dinner that the rest of the family isn't like you. Shut the fuck up and listen - stay shut up and continue to listen. Ask questions to clarify, if you need help understanding - and you do need help understanding. Let no one accuse me of anti-intellectualism; there is a time for rigorous intellectual discourse and argument, but that time is not now, because you have a serious case of straight (or white or male or cisgendered or Christian) privilege, and the only cure is to shut the fuck up and listen, because until you learn how to do that, you will continue to be a homophobe (or a racist or a sexist or a genderist or a creedist), and I will continue to call you what you are: Bigot.

William Lane Craig, “Richard Dawkins on Arguments for God,” Part II: The Moral Argument

Oh my god the moral argument. In its worst forms, this looks like the “Atheists cannot be moral! None of you are safe!” sort of fearmongering, or worse still, “But Hitler was an atheist!” which, as some people can attest, is absolutely the fastest way to get me to lose any intellectual respect I might have had for you. (It is fallacious, blatantly false, and excruciatingly common. That’s why.) To his credit, William Lane Craig is not here engaged in fearmongering. It is still the moral argument, however, which means it is among the more infuriatingly idiotic weapons in the unreflective apologist’s arsenal.

Here’s Craig’s formulation of the Moral Argument:

1) If God does not exist, objective moral values and duties do not exist.

2) Objective moral values and duties do exist.

3) Therefore, God exists.

Craig goes on to say that most people – including Dawkins – would agree with the first two premises, cites Dawkins a few times to prove his point, and moves on to the teleological argument, all within two pages. We, however, will spend a little more time on it, as I have a lot to say on the subject.

Let us examine the word “objective”: what, precisely, does Craig mean by it? In 1), he evidently means something along the lines of “absolute, universal, set in stone”, and I’ll grant that God may well be necessary for that kind of objectivity in a moral code. In 2), he must mean something more along the lines of “not merely a matter of personal or cultural preference”, and in this case, I would readily concur – but notice what an enormous gap there is between the two usages. (Lest I be accused of twisting Craig’s words, I should reiterate that Craig’s entire defense of his two premises is that most people believe them (which is a perfectly legitimate defense), and all I have done is determined for what values of “objective” this is true. It’s just algebra.)

I’m about to delve into some pretty involved discussionn about the nature of objectivity and morality, and we’re about to leave Craig far, far behind, so let’s just deal with him quickly so we can get to the interesting stuff: Craig’s argument, as we have just seen, hinges on an equivocation not much more subtle than

1) Split-pea soup is better than nothing.

2) Nothing is better than a really terrific cheeseburger.

3) Therefore, split-pea soup is better than a really terrific cheeseburger.

He boasts that his argument is “logically airtight”, too, which I find just fantastically amusing.

So much for that.

My go-to example of things that fall between “absolute and universal” and “a matter of personal or cultural preference” is actually morality, which would here be a little bit circular, so we will talk instead about music. I think most people would agree upon reflection that the quality of a particular piece of music isn’t an absolute or universal thing – try having a 6^th-century Norseman listen to Madonna, or better yet, try getting an alien species to comprehend any human music, even assuming the relevant physiology exists! But I also think that most people would agree upon reflection that there is something more to it than mere personal taste. Personal taste enters into it, yes, but I think most of us are cognizant of some music which we do not personally like, but do not consider to be bad (The Grateful Dead, The Sex Pistols, or The Strokes are the examples which come most readily to my mind) – or that we keep listening to despite the fact that there’s probably not much of value there (for instance, I am right now listening to “Boom Boom Pow” by the Black-Eyed Peas). The fact is, we all want to be able to say that, yes, Led Zeppelin is in fact better than Aerosmith, or that The Joshua Tree is a far superior album to How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb, or that the dreck churned out each year by the CCM industry is in fact dreck.

The difficulty is that we start with visceral reactions: I like this music, I don’t like that music, I don’t know why. We do not start with a coherent rational framework that we can coldly evaluate every piece of music with. That comes later, if at all, after a whole lot of listening and reacting, when we begin to piece together commonalities in the good stuff, or in the bad stuff, to figure out what makes something good or bad and why. Even after that, in my experience, music remains mostly a visceral thing, but once we have some model of what makes music good, we can support or modify our visceral reactions with that model – and vice versa. It’s a complex two-way process.

Morality works, in my experience, much the same way: we have certain a prioris, the conclusions of models that do not yet exist – murder is wrong, stealing is wrong, breaking promises is wrong, and so forth – and we have to reverse-engineer models from those conclusions, which leads to moral frameworks like utilitarianism or Kantianism or virtue ethics or what-have-you: again, a complex two-way process in which we confirm our models by how it deals with particular cases, and modify our response to particular cases as our models indicate.

(It is difficult for me, in the abstract, to state the criteria that separate those instances in which we alter our models based on our visceral reactions to particular cases, from those instances in which we modify our reactions to particular cases based on the input from our models – in either music or morality. This is a subject for further inquiry.)

So that’s more or less my model for how we arrive at morality. Note that it is a descriptive model, which applies in my experience both to religious and irreligious people (unless you’re of the incredibly rare variety of religious person who actually just follows every rule in their holy book of choice, which is stupid).

As for how we get the a prioris (murder is wrong, etc.), that is very easily explained in terms of the evolution of a social animal. Morality is an evolutionary advantage – it allows us to cooperate with each other without fear that the other will break their promise or our skulls.

On to a different but related subject: the moral argument is often presented in the form, “How can you, as an atheist, be moral?” This is a stupid question. Here are all of the possible reasons for behaving morally, no matter what your belief system: 1) because you fear the consequences if you don’t behave morally (hell, jail, ostracization) or desire the rewards if you do (heaven, social approval, warm fuzzy feelings), or 2) because you choose to, “because it’s the right thing to do”, which is ultimately tautological. Any set of reasons for moral behavior can be broken down into some combination of those two reasons. Therefore the claim that theists have more of a reason to behave morally than atheists causes me to look at you askance, because the only difference between theists and atheists on this score is that theists have a bigger carrot and stick. Guys, behaving morally because of the carrot-and-stick is not good enough. We can train animals to do that. The guy who will backstab you in a heartbeat if he thinks it will benefit him and he can get away with it is not moral, and the only difference I can see between that guy and the theist who asks this question is that the theist doesn’t ever think he would get away with it. Which makes the purely selfish theist better for society than the purely selfish atheist (at least in theory), but the person who chooses, whatever their stance on the existence of God, to be moral because, well, they choose to be moral, is a far better person than either of the above.

It is true that there are circumstances in which I would make the choice not to behave morally. They are highly improbable, and all involve people I happen to care about more than I care about society or morality. I would only point out that this is equally true for at least the christian, if you want to take the story of Abraham and Isaac at all seriously.