February 11, 2014
This is the #1 emailed New York Times article at the moment, essentially an interview with Alvin Plantinga, an emeritus professor of philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, a former president of both the Society of Christian Philosophers and the American Philosophical Association, who believes in god and tries to explain why he believes the 62% of his philosopher colleagues who are atheists are not only wrong, but irrational (believing something for which they lack evidence and reason). It's clear that philosophy has gone downhill since the time of the Enlightenment when it peeled away from science (most Enlightenment philosophers were also heavily steeped in mathematics and science, something sorely lacking from those who study humanities today, for the most part).
Speaking of science, close to 100% of physicists - arguably those closest to studying the mind of god if there is one and grappling with eschatology - are atheists.
The modern American Christian theistic argument is quite specific, quite radical, and therefore quite easy to disprove. The good philosopher interviewed here does not seem to be aware of this, or perhaps is ignorant of the principles of probability and joint probability in general.
In general, the more specific a prediction the less likely it is to be true. For example, it is far more likely that Jane will be a librarian than that Jane will be a librarian working at a university library which itself is far less likely than the prediction that Jane will be a librarian working at a university library in New York City.
The broadest theistic argument is that there is some sort of god, or higher power, or original force that created the universe. Let's call this G.
This hypothesis is far more likely than the hypothesis that there is a god and only one god (monotheism). Monotheism is up to infinitely less likely than polytheism or agnostic polytheism (the belief in one god while not making any bet about the existence of other gods). Let's call this hypothesis MG for the two conditions M (mono) and G (god).
The joint probability that there is one and only one god is equal to the probability that there is at least one god times the probability that there is only one god. Both conditions must be true for this hypothesis to be correct. We don't know the probability that there is a god but we can work out roughly the odds that the god chosen by Christians is god by dividing by the numerator of all possible gods. Since this number is theoretically infinite, or close to it, let's instead divide by only the number of gods currently believed in by anyone on the planet. This again is a huge number, and there are doubtless many deities in isolated communities unstudied by anthropologists, but let's use the Hindu number of about 330 million gods since the others are rounding errors in this estimate. So, it is at least 330 million times more likely that there is more than one god than that there is one and only one god.
Again, the Christian theistic argument adds multiple additional conditions. This single god is male. Ignoring for a moment the possibility of androgynous or sexless gods, what is the probability that god has a penis? If we were created in the image of god and 50% of us have penises, then the probability god has one too is 50%. So the condition that god exists, is alone, and has a penis is half as likely as the probability that god exists and is alone which in turn is 330 million times less likely than that god exists and is not alone.
But there is more. The Christian theistic argument states that god has a name: Yahweh and was worshiped by a single people in a single place and time between several thousand to 2,000 years ago. The math can get very complicated here, but for simplicity's sake, let's use the world's relative Jewish population today as the probability that this people and only this people had a visit from god. According to the Pew Research forum as cited in the Economist in 2012, about 2 out of every 1,000 people on earth are Jewish.
So the probability of god being a single male Jewish god is equal to the probability that
- he is a he (50%) x
- probability he is single (1 / 330 million) x
- probability he is Jewish (2/1,000).
Let's call this hypothesis YMG and it's probability works out to 1 in 660 billion.
But Christians don't stop there. They layer in more conditions to this already astronomically unlikely prediction. Their god has another name because their god Yahweh impregnated a Palestinian teenager named Mary and had a son who had both godlike and human properties. His name was Jesus, and he lived almost exactly 2,000 years ago, mostly in Palestine. This complicates things quite a bit. We have to ignore the probability of an angel impregnating a teenage girl, something that no one has witnessed before or since (in fact, we are very much left to a single biblical author translated from the Septuagint was by Christians to their advantage in the last decade of the 1st century during the Synod of Jamnia (Jabneh),in Palestine,changing the Hebrew word Aalma (young woman) to the Greek word parthenos (virgin) which changed chapter 7, verse 14 of Isaiah to
About 200 million people were alive in Biblical times, so the probability that any one of them was a god would be 1 in 200 million. Multiplying this by 1 in 660 billion gives us the odds of god being a single Jewish male named Jesus of
1 in 132 thousand million billion or
1 in 132,000,000,000,000,000,000
1 in 1.32 x 1020.
There are other specific claims made by Christianity, but these are the main ones. Each additional condition's probability must be multiplied by the probability of the Jesus Hypothesis (JYMG), reducing it further.
So how likely is this? Consider that the odds of winning a typical 6/49 lottery where 6 numbers are chosen from a range of 49 is 1 in 13,983,816. So you are roughly 10 trillion times as likely to win the lottery as you are to correctly bet on a single god named Jesus spawned from a male god named Yahweh (who in some sort of circular way was both father and son, but I digress). You may like those odds; I don't.
If you point out that 1 in 132,000,000,000,000,000,000 is not technically zero, so I still have not disproven that God exists, he is male, alone, and named Jesus, then consider this. The next time you fly a plane, remember that the probability it will crash are about 1 in 11 million. So if you have rock solid certainty in the existence of a single male god named Jesus then you should be 8.3 trillion times as certain your plane will crash - please don't fly!
The modern Christian's insistence that we either prove the non-existence of god or embrace the existence of a male god named Jesus spawned from a Jewish god named Yahweh 2,000 years ago in Palestine through angelic insemination (as thought those are the only two options) is an absurdly high bar we apply to nothing else.
We take medications, fly planes, drive cars, cross bridges that have a far, far, far higher probability of killing us without making the ludicrously overconfident prediction that this particular flight or car trip will kill us.
How did Mediterranean Monotheism become the default hypothesis? There may very well be some kind of overarching intelligence or force or spirit that moves the heavens in ways we can't understand, blah blah blah, but this does not mean this spirit has a penis, dresses in a toga, or takes sides in football games if called upon with just the right earnest verbal formula (best mixed with incense and candles).
"If You Don't Know There Are An Even Number of Stars... You Must Believe in Jesus"
OK, he didn't quite say it that way. This is what Mr. Plantingea said:
We know stars exist. We can see them, measure them, even determine their chemical makeup. All people in all cultures of whatever faith or none at all have seen and can count them.
We know that there are far more than one star in the sky. With the naked eye, you can see about 2,000 from anywhere you stand, about 6,000 if you bothered to travel the planet and count them in all seasons and latitudes.
We also know that all things countable fall somewhere in the set of natural numbers {1,2,3,4...} and that there is a 50% probability of any natural number being even or odd.
We know no such thing about gods. We cannot say with certainty that there is a set of gods {Yahweh, Jesus, Zeus, Poseidon, Mars, Athena, Diana, Thor, ...} and that the disproval of one ipso facto proves the other.
What we do know is that if god exists, no two human beings have ever agreed on what he looks like, whether she has feet, is really tall, can fly, gets jealous, marries humans, starts wars, or makes volcanoes erupt.
The biggest predictor of how you envision your god is where you live. Gravity, light, and heat don't work that way. All cultures understand that you should avoid cliffs, lightning, and fire because these are not abstract constructs unseen by any mortal.
Take It Away, Al
I close with the words of perhaps one of the smartest atheists who ever lived:
This is the #1 emailed New York Times article at the moment, essentially an interview with Alvin Plantinga, an emeritus professor of philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, a former president of both the Society of Christian Philosophers and the American Philosophical Association, who believes in god and tries to explain why he believes the 62% of his philosopher colleagues who are atheists are not only wrong, but irrational (believing something for which they lack evidence and reason). It's clear that philosophy has gone downhill since the time of the Enlightenment when it peeled away from science (most Enlightenment philosophers were also heavily steeped in mathematics and science, something sorely lacking from those who study humanities today, for the most part).
Speaking of science, close to 100% of physicists - arguably those closest to studying the mind of god if there is one and grappling with eschatology - are atheists.
The modern American Christian theistic argument is quite specific, quite radical, and therefore quite easy to disprove. The good philosopher interviewed here does not seem to be aware of this, or perhaps is ignorant of the principles of probability and joint probability in general.
In general, the more specific a prediction the less likely it is to be true. For example, it is far more likely that Jane will be a librarian than that Jane will be a librarian working at a university library which itself is far less likely than the prediction that Jane will be a librarian working at a university library in New York City.
The broadest theistic argument is that there is some sort of god, or higher power, or original force that created the universe. Let's call this G.
This hypothesis is far more likely than the hypothesis that there is a god and only one god (monotheism). Monotheism is up to infinitely less likely than polytheism or agnostic polytheism (the belief in one god while not making any bet about the existence of other gods). Let's call this hypothesis MG for the two conditions M (mono) and G (god).
The joint probability that there is one and only one god is equal to the probability that there is at least one god times the probability that there is only one god. Both conditions must be true for this hypothesis to be correct. We don't know the probability that there is a god but we can work out roughly the odds that the god chosen by Christians is god by dividing by the numerator of all possible gods. Since this number is theoretically infinite, or close to it, let's instead divide by only the number of gods currently believed in by anyone on the planet. This again is a huge number, and there are doubtless many deities in isolated communities unstudied by anthropologists, but let's use the Hindu number of about 330 million gods since the others are rounding errors in this estimate. So, it is at least 330 million times more likely that there is more than one god than that there is one and only one god.
Again, the Christian theistic argument adds multiple additional conditions. This single god is male. Ignoring for a moment the possibility of androgynous or sexless gods, what is the probability that god has a penis? If we were created in the image of god and 50% of us have penises, then the probability god has one too is 50%. So the condition that god exists, is alone, and has a penis is half as likely as the probability that god exists and is alone which in turn is 330 million times less likely than that god exists and is not alone.
But there is more. The Christian theistic argument states that god has a name: Yahweh and was worshiped by a single people in a single place and time between several thousand to 2,000 years ago. The math can get very complicated here, but for simplicity's sake, let's use the world's relative Jewish population today as the probability that this people and only this people had a visit from god. According to the Pew Research forum as cited in the Economist in 2012, about 2 out of every 1,000 people on earth are Jewish.
So the probability of god being a single male Jewish god is equal to the probability that
- he is a he (50%) x
- probability he is single (1 / 330 million) x
- probability he is Jewish (2/1,000).
Let's call this hypothesis YMG and it's probability works out to 1 in 660 billion.
But Christians don't stop there. They layer in more conditions to this already astronomically unlikely prediction. Their god has another name because their god Yahweh impregnated a Palestinian teenager named Mary and had a son who had both godlike and human properties. His name was Jesus, and he lived almost exactly 2,000 years ago, mostly in Palestine. This complicates things quite a bit. We have to ignore the probability of an angel impregnating a teenage girl, something that no one has witnessed before or since (in fact, we are very much left to a single biblical author translated from the Septuagint was by Christians to their advantage in the last decade of the 1st century during the Synod of Jamnia (Jabneh),in Palestine,changing the Hebrew word Aalma (young woman) to the Greek word parthenos (virgin) which changed chapter 7, verse 14 of Isaiah to
Behold, a virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name ImmanuelIgnoring the probability of a chain of authors all copying and translating with true fidelity, or the probability that Isaiah would have agreed, had he been asked, that Jesus of Nazareth was what he was talking about all along, let's just get on with it, asking what the probability of any individual being a god would be, ignoring all the metaphysical leaps of faith and logic that would get us to an immanuel (literally "god in man").
About 200 million people were alive in Biblical times, so the probability that any one of them was a god would be 1 in 200 million. Multiplying this by 1 in 660 billion gives us the odds of god being a single Jewish male named Jesus of
1 in 132 thousand million billion or
1 in 132,000,000,000,000,000,000
1 in 1.32 x 1020.
There are other specific claims made by Christianity, but these are the main ones. Each additional condition's probability must be multiplied by the probability of the Jesus Hypothesis (JYMG), reducing it further.
So how likely is this? Consider that the odds of winning a typical 6/49 lottery where 6 numbers are chosen from a range of 49 is 1 in 13,983,816. So you are roughly 10 trillion times as likely to win the lottery as you are to correctly bet on a single god named Jesus spawned from a male god named Yahweh (who in some sort of circular way was both father and son, but I digress). You may like those odds; I don't.
If you point out that 1 in 132,000,000,000,000,000,000 is not technically zero, so I still have not disproven that God exists, he is male, alone, and named Jesus, then consider this. The next time you fly a plane, remember that the probability it will crash are about 1 in 11 million. So if you have rock solid certainty in the existence of a single male god named Jesus then you should be 8.3 trillion times as certain your plane will crash - please don't fly!
The modern Christian's insistence that we either prove the non-existence of god or embrace the existence of a male god named Jesus spawned from a Jewish god named Yahweh 2,000 years ago in Palestine through angelic insemination (as thought those are the only two options) is an absurdly high bar we apply to nothing else.
We take medications, fly planes, drive cars, cross bridges that have a far, far, far higher probability of killing us without making the ludicrously overconfident prediction that this particular flight or car trip will kill us.
How did Mediterranean Monotheism become the default hypothesis? There may very well be some kind of overarching intelligence or force or spirit that moves the heavens in ways we can't understand, blah blah blah, but this does not mean this spirit has a penis, dresses in a toga, or takes sides in football games if called upon with just the right earnest verbal formula (best mixed with incense and candles).
"If You Don't Know There Are An Even Number of Stars... You Must Believe in Jesus"
OK, he didn't quite say it that way. This is what Mr. Plantingea said:
No one thinks there is good evidence for the proposition that there are an even number of stars; but also, no one thinks the right conclusion to draw is that there are an uneven number of stars. The right conclusion would instead be agnosticism.Where to begin...
We know stars exist. We can see them, measure them, even determine their chemical makeup. All people in all cultures of whatever faith or none at all have seen and can count them.
We know that there are far more than one star in the sky. With the naked eye, you can see about 2,000 from anywhere you stand, about 6,000 if you bothered to travel the planet and count them in all seasons and latitudes.
We also know that all things countable fall somewhere in the set of natural numbers {1,2,3,4...} and that there is a 50% probability of any natural number being even or odd.
We know no such thing about gods. We cannot say with certainty that there is a set of gods {Yahweh, Jesus, Zeus, Poseidon, Mars, Athena, Diana, Thor, ...} and that the disproval of one ipso facto proves the other.
What we do know is that if god exists, no two human beings have ever agreed on what he looks like, whether she has feet, is really tall, can fly, gets jealous, marries humans, starts wars, or makes volcanoes erupt.
The biggest predictor of how you envision your god is where you live. Gravity, light, and heat don't work that way. All cultures understand that you should avoid cliffs, lightning, and fire because these are not abstract constructs unseen by any mortal.
Take It Away, Al
I close with the words of perhaps one of the smartest atheists who ever lived:
I don't try to imagine a personal god; it suffices to stand in awe at the structure of the world, insofar as it allows our inadequate senses to appreciate it...
I do not believe in a personal god and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly... The idea of a personal god is quite alien to me and seems even naïve.."
The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honorable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation, no matter how subtle, can (for me) change this.
For me the Jewish religion like all other religions is an incarnation of the most childish superstitions. And the Jewish people to whom I gladly belong and with whose mentality I have a deep affinity have no different quality for me than all other people. As far as my experience goes, they are also no better than other human groups, although they are protected from the worst cancers by a lack of power. Otherwise I cannot see anything 'chosen' about them.
- Albert Einstein
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