Review: God is Great, God is Good

So I am home in Arkansas and it turns out that when you post on your public blog that you are an atheist you can be pretty sure that your grandparents will read it. So a while back I had lunch with my grandfather and we spent it talking about my atheism. His arguments, if I recall correctly, were "What do you think of the scientific principle that something cannot come from nothing," which is a) not scientific but rather philosophic, and b) actually directly contradicted by scientific evidence; "Evolution cannot explain love or morality," which is just false; and "If you are right, we will neither of us ever know it, but if I am right, you lose," which is of course Pascal's Wager, which is a) not a particularly valid reason for believing anything, b) based on a false dichotomy - if the only choices were between christianity and atheism, sure, but they aren't - you also have islam and buddhism and hinduism and scientology and raelianism and shinto and wicca and so forth and so on, and you have to pick the right one out of hundreds if not thousands of belief systems or you lose, and c) based on the assumption that neither being christian nor atheist has any relevant impact on the quality of this life, which is questionable at best. In fact, my grandfather went on to say that he thought there was no life better than that lived by christian principles, which I think is only a compelling line of reasoning if you have basically no experience with godless people in this country. But to my grandfather's credit, he politely listened to me explain all (or at least most) of the above, and it seemed to make sense to him. See I don't get my family at all - they are very intelligent and even open-minded to a point but this has never prevented them from being creationists or using Pascal's Wager as an argument. Anyway then my grandfather handed me a book called God is Great, God is Good which is a selection of essays by various Christians, pretty much explicitly targeted at what is called the "New Atheists" - Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, and so forth. So I'm going to go through this book and review it, but first I should make my position vis-a-vis the "New Atheists" clear.

I am not a New Atheist. I have never read any of Dawkins or Hitchens, though I probably should. I follow two New Atheist blogs: Pharyngula, by PZ Myers, and Daylight Atheism, by Ebonmuse. And I recommend both of these, particularly Daylight Atheism, and I agree with their positions on issues nine times out of ten, but I am not a New Atheist. What I am, first and foremost, is an Existentialist - which means that Camus, Sartre, Kierkegaard, and Dostoevsky are the people I agree with far more often - and you may have noticed that half of those people are christian. If you read Camus' The Plague (and you really should), it presents several characters, each with their own way of coping with the world. One of these characters is a Jesuit priest named Father Paneloux, and at the crux of the novel, he and almost all of the other important characters watch the effects of an experimental serum administered to a child afflicted with bubonic plague. The only effect the serum has is to drag the child's death throes out almost interminably, and afterward, one of the characters asks Father Paneloux essentially, How can you believe in God if this is what He does? Paneloux takes a long time to reach an answer, and when he does, it is that God is unknowable, that his ways are not ours, and rather than use this, as it is almost always used in my experience, to simply dismiss the problem of evil and to retreat into a fantasy divorced from reality (easy enough to do when you're middle-class and white in the First World), Paneloux instead comes to the apparently horrific conclusion that one's will must be in accord with God's, and that if God's will is to slowly torture a child to death, then we too must try to will that. Ultimately, the conclusion Paneloux reaches is that it is illogical for a priest to call in a doctor. Needless to say, this conclusion kills him when he too succumbs to plague. (I can't really do Paneloux or Camus justice here - you really must read the novel.) But the point is that this way of coping with the world is nowhere condemned in Camus' novel. It's portrayed, rather, as a meaningful and valid existential choice. It's not the one I choose, but the point is that I can have respect for and even approve of the religious choice.

Now, do I think most religious people in the United States or in the world have made that choice? Hell no. They live in denial. They make excuses for God. Do I think that religion, at least as practiced in the United States, is bad for society? God, yes. (Anyone who wants me to have even an iota of respect for their beliefs, why don't you stop lying to children about how evolution is false, and more importantly, how about you stop denying people I love equal rights? Seems reasonable enough to me.)

Where I differ from the New Atheists is this: they take truth to be the primary (and almost the only) criterion for beliefs, although to their credit they realize that they cannot be talking about absolute truth, but only whether beliefs are more or less true than other beliefs. This I cannot do - it is imperative, true, to ruthlessly confront oneself with reality as much as possible, to really plumb the depths of the absurdity of one's beliefs. But if, after that, one chooses to continue to believe the absurd (and I do not think there are truly non-absurd options available) then this, I think, is making one's existential choice, and that is good. But anyway, this apologetics book I have here: let's go through it.

1) William Lane Craig, "Richard Dawkins on Arguments for God"

Bit of a disadvantage here, never having actually read Dawkins, but I'm more concerned with Craig's arguments than I am in his reading of Dawkins anyway, so onward. Okay, first we have the Cosmological Argument, which Craig formulates as follows:

1) Everything that begins to exist has a cause.

2) The universe began to exist.

3) Therefore, the universe has a cause.

Note that the word "begin" is doing a lot of lifting for Craig. Had he left it out, and said instead, "Everything that exists has a cause," then it could be of course objected that this would require that God have a cause, and that cause would need a cause, and so forth into an infinite regress which Craig so deplores. However, it is unclear that the statement, "Everything that begins to exist has a cause," is any more true than the statement, "Everything that exists has a cause." It is, technically, a weaker claim, but as we have absolutely no experience of anything that exists without, at some point, having begun to exist, we are forced to conclude that, as far as we can tell, the statements have equivalent truth value. But one of them allows Craig's argument, and one spirals it into an infinite regress! To prefer one statement over the other is nothing more than special pleading - everything that exists has a cause, except God. It doesn't apply to him.

Further, I don't think that premise 1 is even true. My understanding of quantum physics has it that, for instance, particle-antiparticle pairs spontaneously form and annihilate in vacuum. Whether that amounts under any circumstances to the spontaneous creation of a universe, I don't know. But it does cast doubt on Craig's argument.

But you know, I'm fine with the conclusion of the argument. The universe (as we know it, that is, from the Big Bang until now) has a cause. However, my understanding of cosmology (and I am admittedly a layman) is that the state of the universe just pre-Big Bang was a singularity, which means that no information about prior states of the universe was preserved. Far from confirming Craig's claim that the Big Bang represents creation ex nihilo, it seems to me that this makes his statement completely unjustified. The most we can say about the universe pre-Big Bang is that we can say nothing about it. Note, too, that as time and space and the laws of physics were created during the Big Bang, the universe prior to that may well have had no resemblance to our own in any intelligible respect - including entropy and causation itself. This makes Craig's subsequent argument mostly moot, but let's follow along anyway - he makes some rather awful mistakes which I feel I should point out.

Let's first examine Craig's misuse of Ockham's Razor, which he says states that one should not multiply causes beyond necessity. I believe that a more accurate rendition of the principle would be that one should not multiply entities beyond necessity. Sadly, Ockham's Razor is, though an incredibly useful rule of thumb, and indeed one of the most reliable heuristics we have, it is not absolute. And it certainly cannot be used to say that an eternal entity is more probable than an infinite regress of events. To speak of an eternal entity is to posit an entirely new, unknown species of entity. This is the kind of thing Ockham's Razor is designed to prevent. To try to simply count the entities involved and then to say the one with fewer entities wins is to entirely miss the point of Ockham's Razor. Further: if we were to follow Craig's argument to its logical conclusion, we would be forced to admit that the only universe that exists is one moment of our consciousness, with illusory memories and illusory knowledge of an illusory externality. This (since Craig fatuously has declared "mind" to be "startlingly simple" - perhaps he means merely "divine mind", but I am led to think otherwise) would be by far the simplest explanation for the universe, and the one with the fewest entities. Craig's misuse of Ockham's Razor has inadvertently but irresistibly led him to solipsism. I'm going to assert that solipsism is an unacceptable point of view and move on, if there aren't any objections.

Now Craig gets to the good stuff - the cause of the universe, he argues, must be personal, because it is timeless and immaterial, and there are only two things which possess these properties: mind, and abstract numbers. Leaving aside his extremely controversial and not-well-justified statement about the nature of numbers, we turn to his assertion that there exists this thing called 'mind' and that it is both timeless and immaterial. William: you do not get to posit things like that. What you are calling 'mind' is, first of all, inextricably bound to time. Your consciousness is dragged whether it will or no from one moment to the next. This is not timelessness. If you wish to reply that memory counts, first, no - there is an enormous and qualitative difference between memory and experience, and second, we have no memory of the future, which again doesn't look a lot like timelessness. As Lewis Carroll might put it, "It's a poor sort of timeless mind that only works one way." Second, positing that mind is immaterial flies in the face of all the scientific evidence which points to the identity of the human mind and the human brain - the case of Phineas Gage is the most obvious example, but the scientific literature is simply resplendent with these cases. The problem of consciousness - and it is a problem - is something I will discuss in a later essay - I merely wish to point out here how totally unjustified Craig's wild assertions are.

Craig has another argument for why the cause of the universe must be personal, and it is even worse. Given that the first cause of the universe is beginningless, and that the universe began to exist a finite amount of time ago, the cause of the universe must be personal, he says, for a non-personal cause would have created the universe infinitely long ago, and only a personal cause could choose to create the universe a finite amount of time ago. William: literally two paragraphs ago, you called the first cause of the universe "timeless". As in, "outside of time". Now you are using the word "beginningless" to suggest, instead of timelessness, merely an infinite past. Hey, William, pop quiz: when was the universe, including space and time, created? How about, "at the beginning of time"? There's no such thing as "before time" - the concept is incoherent. I'm going to assume good faith here, William, and merely conclude that you are an idiot. Is this the best Christendom can muster against the New Atheists? (Answer: no, it's not. Alvin Plantinga, for instance, does a much better job handling Dawkins at the end of this book. He's still wrong, but he's much less stupid, and much more of a gentleman, than is Craig. I know, of course, that the tone in this debate is vitriolic on both sides, and I'm (obviously) okay with that, but the only thing worse than an idiot is a smug idiot, and Craig couldn't be smugger if he had just been awarded top prize in the annual "You're Always Right" competition for the third year running and Dawkins was the guy who had to hand the trophy to him.)

I'm also pretty sure Craig is blatantly misreading Dawkins, but I don't have The God Delusion on hand, so this will have to remain an unwarranted aspersion (but if someone wants to compare p. 17 of GIGGIG to p. 77 of The God Delusion, you can see for yourself.)

More to follow.

Edit: Augh the font and line-spacing is all wrong I can't fix it. Does anyone know how because otherwise we are all stuck reading something with inconsistent formatting oh nooo.

The Perfect Game

So crash course in RPG theory: the basic trichotomy that gets tossed around is the Gamist-Narrativist-Simulationist, which in its extreme cases works like this:

Gamist thought tends to treat RPGs as though they were games like Go or Chess - that is, there's a focus on making the game mechanically balanced, and the point of the game is for the players to win - to beat the DM. Games like old-school D&D and I think to some extent Paranoia tend toward a gamist perspective - and I have to say: that's fine, and that can certainly be fun, but it's not intuitive to me - which is interesting, as I am extremely competetive with regard to board games. RPGs just don't hit those same switches with me, I suppose. Scorpio has a heavily gamist bent, and that has led to some friction in the past. (Jack, near as I can tell, doesn't really have any particular bent, but tends in practice to fit somewhere between narrativist and gamist, probably weighted toward narrativist.)

Narrativist thought views the players as providing the protagonists for a story, the rest of which is written by the GM. Extremely narrativist games, like Polaris or Universalis, dispense with the GM entirely, instead relying on things like ritualistic interplayer negotiation (for Polaris) or an interplayer economy (for Universalis) to determine things about the game world and resolve conflicts. I'm much more in sympathy with the narrativist perspective, obviously, but even though I have no problem viewing my own life, human life in general, and indeed the life of humanity as a whole as a fiction - and in fact probably couldn't view it any other way if I tried - I am not entirely satisfied with narrativist gaming.

Simulationist thought tries to model the game world as accurately and realistically as possible. It tends toward the complex rules systems - Shadowrun, for instance, which can fill several books with mostly rules and tables of vehicle stats, or D&D 3.5, the Dungeon Master's guide for which is very possibly the most stultifyingly boring RPG book I have ever read - and the point is that a realistically modeled world is more immersive - which is a relatively difficult quality to achieve when what you're looking at is the people you're in college with, a bunch of funny-shaped dice, and a Word document with a lot of numbers on it. And here's a weird thing: perhaps because worldbuilding is one of my favorite aspects of fiction, I am at heart a zealous simulationist. I know that byzantinely complex rulesets are no fun to play with. I understand that there is relatively little difference between rolling to throw a grenade, rolling to determine scatter, rolling the target's dodge, and rolling the target's damage soak, and and the GM simply interpreting the results of one die roll, except that the first one is a bitch to do and will make combat unreasonably long. But, dammit, it feels different. And of course there's no way so far as I can tell to have quick, clean combat resolution and accurately modeled conflicts. The rules hack for Shadowrun I and my players are working on is supposed to contain various levels of granularity, to allow you to make that trade-off on a case-by-case basis, but that's a makeshift solution to an apparently insoluble problem.

But that's only a problem because we have a limited amount of processing power, yeah? Given the ability to easily remember a very large number of rules and the ability to perform complex calculations very quickly, simulationist games really come into their own. More than that - we can get more complex than that - truly three-dimensional space combat, computer hacking that involves actually finding holes in the programs and systems the game has constructed, magic duels with ebbing and flowing mana, attacks and counterattacks on your opponent's qi, fights won by wits and swordsmanship rather than by dice rolls (which, just between you and me, has always seemed like an unsatisfactory conflict resolution mechanic - though comparing static numbers is worse). And since we're operating theoretically - the things we could do with unlimited processing power! And so on until, like the map of Borges' cartographers, our simulation is precisely as complex and as intuitive as the universe itself. That, to my mind, is the perfect game.

Turns out, we can't do that. So near as I can figure, the difference between an actual simulationist and an actual gamist or narrativist is that the simulationist probably sighs and looks up at the stars, half-imagining what cannot be, before going and playing a gamist or narrativist game.

Addendum: that perspective on games certainly opens one up to accusations of escapism. That's valid insofar as games are actually used as an escape from the burden of actually doing something with one's life. And this runs into the problem of me being a very bad existentialist. See, I think that a person's life is inherently meaningless - that the meaning of one's life is self-determined. I then want to turn around and tell some people that the meaning they seem to be deriving from their life doesn't count - people who work their way up the company ladder and then retire to a country home and a yacht, people who work in a factory nine-to-five and drink beer with their friends on the weekends in front of the TV - in fact, my (totally unreasonable) instinct is to exclude politicians, lawyers, doctors, and teachers from the category of people who have meaningful lives, leaving only scientists, artists, and people like Joshua Abraham Norton I, Emperor of these United States and Lord Protector of Mexico, whose lives are in themselves such interesting narratives that it counts as production. Of course, this is only my own personal existential choice - these are the lives that I personally would find meaningful.

So, back to the point, which is: I don't think playing games is sufficient for a meaningful life - it certainly is not for me, and I want to say (but can't) that it isn't for anyone. However, I do think that it can be part of one - whether I end up doing the art thing or the life-as-narrative thing (scientist being, unfortunately, not really one of my options), that games can add to it. I learn a lot about storytelling, among other things, from playing these games, and that is valuable. It's just not valuable enough, on its own. (I should reread Nabokov's The Defense, which if I remember correctly is on more or less the same subject, but with chess instead of Shadowrun.)

Further addendum: it's pretty clear that many of my positions are philosophically incoherent. I'm okay with that - in fact, it's somewhat deliberate. The line of reasoning is this: I am never going to be right about everything. If I attempt to construct a coherent philosophical weltanshauung, any error in the initial premises is like to be amplified until I find myself believing unacceptable things once I get down to particulars. Besides, I have a certain amount of faith in human instinct - not in any mystical way, but simply that our ethics, our art, and our drive to know are all products of pretty nonrational impulses, which means we already have pretty okay heuristics for a lot of things. Not, obviously, unimprovable, and I'm certainly not rejecting reason - I can be logically convinced that some of my heuristics are bad and should be changed - but by and large, I think it's pretty reasonable to go with one's initial reactions on a lot of things.