How not to argue with an atheist

This is a different kind of post altogether from what I have written before: Although I probably squeezed in a few new thoughts in some of the corners, this is mostly rehashing things that in my view are very obvious. I just want a post up to refer people to when those who choose to engage me in debate return to the same tired questions, because I quickly grow bored with responding to requests to explain in my own words what is wrong with Pascal's Wager, why it's not weird that people naturally fear death, and so forth. I will probably add to this debating FAQ if more such issues arise…

Pascal's Wager

The brilliant mathematician and (apparently less brilliant) philosopher, Blaise Pascal, invented something that has become known as Pascal's Wager, to explain why it is a good idea to believe in God. The wager goes something like this:

Either God exists, or he does not.

If God exists, and you believe, you reap an infinite award, while if you do not believe, then you suffer an infinite punishment.

If, on the other hand, God does not exist, yet you believe, then you have lost nothing; whereas if you do not believe, you have won nothing.

There are many problems with this argument, and if you search the web or look up the Wikipedia entry you will find many objections to it. Since this is supposed to be a response to those who want me to respond in my own words, however, I will present my own objections.

First and most obviously, this is a false dichotomy—it assumes a binary situation: Either there's God, or no god at all. Yet we could easily conceive a much larger set of scenarios. For starters, there are many religions that describe some sort of Hell, and their rules are contradictory. According to Christians you will go to Hell unless you believe in the divinity of Jesus of Nazareth; according to Muslims you will go to Hell if you do. We could also postulate scenarios with gods that are not of the Judeo-Christian model at all. We could easily propose that there might be a Creator-God much like that described in the Christian Bible, but who punishes those who refuse their God-given gift of intelligence by succumbing to blind faith in old scrolls, and rewards those who do their best to make sense of the world, whether they miss the mark or not! In short, therefore, even if there is a god and you do believe, the reward is not guaranteed unless you can first show that the only god that could possibly exist is the one Christians believe in.

A second dubious point is the assertion—presented as though it were self-evident—that you lose nothing by believing in a false god and gain nothing in doubting it. As someone who considers truth a very important thing, values knowledge highly, and enjoys understanding what things are and how they work, I strongly disagree with this. If you believe in a false god, then you have lost something: An accurate picture of reality. How many wrong turnings will you take because of this delusion? How many facts will you miss, how many opportunities will you fail to take, how many misjudgements will you make, because you dismiss phenomena as divinely caused rather than seeking the true naturalistic explanation? (Some readers may disagree on whether this is true to reality, but remember: We are discussing whether you have nothing to lose by believing, if there is no god!)

Third, you are assuming that I can make myself believe, and you are presenting this as a good thing; a concept that puzzles me greatly! I could write at greater length about this, but to be very brief, I do not think that telling myself that something is true—against my own convictions—is at all the same as really believing it; I think it is an attempt at self-deception, and a very terrible thing to do. I generally describe it as intellectual suicide.

There are other objections, but those are the ones I came up with on my own. Look around if you want more.

Russell's Teapot, or You can't disprove God!

There are two very common sayings floating around that every scientist had best keep in mind: Lack of evidence does not imply evidence of lack, and Lack of evidence of non-existence does not imply evidence of existence. Note that I use the word imply in the context of formal logic! Colloquially, an implication is a fairly weak term; in logic, the word imply basically means inevitably leads to.

The first thing any theist says in a theist versus atheist debate, it seems, is You can't disprove the existence of God. This is true, and very obvious, and one would think that even the very primitive theists would not imagine that we've never heard the claim before. Yet it keeps being repeated, and citing the second of the sayings above does not seem to produce many supercapital lightbulbs, so Russell's Teapot is often invoked.

Bertrand Russell was a mathematical philosopher—whatever such people do!—and a famous atheist and humanitarian. In article (written for, but not published by, Illustrated Magazine in 1952), he illustrated the saying above with the following:

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

The short version is, of course, simply this: No, I can't disprove your God. But if I say There's a small china teapot orbiting the sun halfway between Earth and Mars, too small to spot with a telescope, you would not believe that claim—even though you cannot possibly disprove it.

Some believers then go overboard and start raising objections like That's a silly analogy!, God is not a teapot, or You just made that up. Specific rebuttals aside, that completely misses the point. The point is this, and only this: Just because I can't disprove something, that doesn't make it true, and, crucially:

My default position, to any claim that strikes me as extraordinary, will always be skepticism. Otherwise, if I simply take it on faith—I may not end up believing in the teapot, specifically, but if I just take it on faith that your god is real, then on what basis will I reject some equally extraordinary claim? I require positive evidence to believe in something. Lack of evidence against a claim may mean that it's true, but it may just as easily mean that it's a claim that's been constructed so as to be impossible to disprove, and without positive evidence there's no way to tell the two apart.

I admit that I did say any claim that strikes me as extraordinary rather than (a higher ideal, perhaps) any claim. The fact is that there are many claims that I consider sufficiently probable not to raise objections; I accept them provisionally, but with a high probability (see the latter part of this essay for an explanation of what I mean by this). For instance, if you say I had a ham sandwich for lunch, unless I have some reason to believe that you have an interest in deceiving me, I will accept that as very likely true (say, 90% or 95%, maybe). Experience tells me that ham sandwiches are pretty common fare, and also that most people do not seem interested in telling lies about them. If, on the other hand, you say The creator of the universe spoke to me this morning, well, I'll ask you to back that claim up (or, statistically more likely in my experience, Sorry, I don't have any change).

Fear of death

If you believe that when you die, you just cease to be, then why don't you just…die? Why would you be afraid of dying unless you're worried about what happens afterwards?

This is an extremely silly question, and in light of that, surprisingly common. I have several responses to it, quite apart from the obvious riposte: If you believe that, upon death, you will receive eternal bliss, why don't you spend every night praying to your god to kill you now? Why do you fight to avoid death, rather than welcoming it with open arms?

But I shouldn't be so flippant—my answers, then. The first one should be extremely obvious. We are evolved creatures. Although survival of the fittest is an evolutionary criterion so vague as to be frequently misleading (what does fit mean?—whose fitness are we measuring, anyway?) it is certainly clear that evolution among animals cannot progress except with individuals who live, survive, and reproduce. Survival (at least to reproductive age!—and then as long as possible while reproductive ability remains) is, in fact, pretty key. A good way of surviving is to avoid danger. One of our danger-avoidance tools is fear: We have evolved so that in the face of danger, our natural response is to feel fear, an emotion that causes us to avoid it.

This is the answer to one sense of the question Why do you fear it?—the sense of Yes, we feel fear, and here's an explanation of why that naturally happens. It's a bit inadequate, though, because it could be dismissed as an irrational fear—yes, that's what nature demands of us, as one might say, but does it make sense? Surprisingly, this follow-up question rarely seems to be raised! All the same, even if I had to come up with an objection to my own answer, I acknowledge its validity and will respond to that as well. Now we've raised the bar: My answer no longer needs only to be true, but it has to make sense as well…

I think there are two chief reasons to avoid death, even as a rational being who can override basic survival-and-reproduction instincts. One is that, while life has a good deal of suffering in it, there are good things as well. Lots of them, in fact. Love, friendship, sex, microbrewed ales, mochas, muffins, ice cream, karate, and attractive women, to name but a few. Even if one takes an extremely dry approach and sets up a cost/benefit equation of life, one might simply conclude that hey, there are some rough times, but the good really does outweigh the bad.

That's one answer, but even if the good doesn't outweigh the bad (and I'm sure most of us feel that way at least some of the time), there is also the fact that being an atheist, contrary to what some seem to think, is not the same as being immoral, unfeeling, or heartless. There are people for whom I care very deeply, and who, in return, care deeply for me. Many of them would be crushed if I were to die, and moreso if it were by my own hand. This is not idle speculation; I have experienced a suicide in my immediate family and it is devastating. Because I am not uncaring, I am willing to put up with a good many whips and scorns and bear quite a few fardels in order to spare my loved ones the pain that my jump off this mortal coil would cause them.