(Hace poco escribi esta nota. Comentarios bienvenidos)
It is often claimed that religious people tend to hold their beliefs come what may, even in the face of recalcitrant evidence. And I do think that some religious people (I think not all of them –though I don’t have the statistics needed in order to be more specific) is plainly fanatic. The fact is that I’ve heard the same attack now in the side of the religious: unreligious people can come to be fanatically atheist, they say, even coming to the point of intolerance.
I do agree that atheism can come to be intolerant, as is the case for almost every human conception of whatever you may think. (To be sure, I also do agree that theism can come to be intolerant. But this is not suprise). To start an investigation of the roots of this intolerance of both opposites, one day reading Nozick’s The examined life, I came to imagine some stories that may be interesting. Let’s see.
[In advance, I apologize for any grammatical or syntactical or semantical or... ...errors you may find through the text]
Imagine, just for a moment, just for the sake of fanciful argumentation, that there is a unique god. Call it, him or she (whatever), “God”. (I don’t wanna be mysoginist or anthropocentric. But for the sake of brevity I’ll call Him, “Him”). Furthermore, imagine history had been just as it actually has been up to this moment but, diferring from our history, in the story we are imagining God decides to become known to us humans tomorrow (or what, in the story, would correspond to our history’s tomorrow). Now ask yourself what could God do in order for us to recognize God’s existence. So Imagine God somehow manages (after all, God is the god) to write his name in the Sun, in a way anyone speaking any language could see it was the name of the god –”God”, “Dios”, “Gott”, “Dieu”, all of those in one, so to speak. Could this be evidence for God’s existence?
Many people –let’s call them “The Irrationals”– would say this: Yep, it is so evidence. (And even conclusive evidence).
Many people –let’s call them “The Rationals”– would say this: Nope, it is not. It is not conclusive, if only because it is no evidence at all.
And in which side truth may lie?
The Rationals may then speak thus: “the appearance of God’s name is of no help to the Irrationals. For we have plenty of alternative explanations for the phenomenon in question, other than the theological. Consider theory 1: there are aliens, and were they who somehow (and here comes theory zero) managed to write that. Now consider theory 2: there a solutions to equations X such that, though extremely improbable, are still possible. And these solutions imply events of this kind –bording with the unnatural only because their extremely low probability but not because their being above natural laws. The disanalogy with the unnatural is this: the probability of these solutions to equations X is infinitesimal, as close to zero as you can get –while the probability of the unnatural is just zero”.
And so we would be led to think that God’s name written in the Sun’s surface is of no help (at least, not decisive help) to the Irrationals.
Now I think we should ask what could count as evidence for God’s existence, in the face of this story.
To have more grounds over which ask that, let’s continue imagining. And imagine one day God decides to appear to us. So He asks Himself (metaphorically speaking –for, by definition, God knows all the answers) how shall He appear to us in order for us to recognize Him not only as existent but as existent and the god. There seem to be two ways: He could appear to us as human or not.
Imagine, even more fancifully (if it is possible), that He decides to appear to us as nonhuman. So he must appear to us as something like an event, an inanimate object of whatever the number of kinds of inanimate objects there may be, an animal, a plant, a fungus, a process… what would be preferable? How could we consider a, say, stone, God? How different should we be as we are now in order to understand that this rock is God? And even more so for things like events or classes. (For can we even imagine that a set, say, could manage to make ourselves be sure that we were coming to be sure of God’s existence? (What kind of axiom would that be which were describing that set? If not before, we are here peeking at the absolutely unintelligible)). How about an event? Well, we may ask: How about? How could an event make us think that that event is God making Himself present to us? Even, maybe, for animals. For imagine one animal one day gets on two foots (or not, this may be not so important), and starts speaking to us. So he would be making Himself (Itself) present by resembling a human, and we would take this fact –or so it seems to me– as a serious revelation of God’s existence only to the extent that we would a take a speaking human claiming himself to be God as a serious revelation of God’s existence.
So imagine (as fancifully as before) that He decides to appear to us as a human. Now this human, it seems, could take two ways for making ourselves aware that not only is He God, but that we must be shure he is God. So he could tell us, well, “I am God” or he could not tell us so. And in this last way he could tell us “I am not God” (which would make Him just a wacky passerby) or He could say nothing about God –about him. (In one sense (favoured by the de dicto reading) it seems He could tell us a lot of things about him without making us aware of facts about God. For imagine He says to His friends: “I like fishing”. It would be strange if one of them came, just by that, to believe that God likes fishing. So it seems He could speak about Him without making us aware of facts about God; but a theory of opaque contexts is needed here to reach the ultimate answer).
Now, both ways of saying nothing seem to be strange ways, if the goal is to make us aware that He is God: the one, existent God. For if not by talking to us and saying, loudly (making it explicit) that HE IS GOD, how could we came to even consider that possibility? (The possibility of He being God: the epistemic possibility, that is). It seems He would have to appeal to some inanimate object, or event, or anything but a person, in order to make us aware of His divinity. But then we would be back to where we started to think the possibility of being necessary to Him to express Himself as human.
So it seems we are led to conclude he would have to appear to us as a human, and a human which says, publicy, that HE IS GOD. But imagine the poor possibilities of that poor guy. Should he ask for a two-minutes speech (or even less: he would speak and say “I AM GOD” and then do some miracles) at the UN General Assembly? Should he ask for some of Oprah’s time? Well, if He is God then He, as imagined, could do some miracles. So what miracles could count as evidence that He is God?
Imagine He manages to get into the UN General Assembly and, standing in front of all the countries’ delegates, He turns water into wine, then the wine back to water, and then multiplies the water and walks over it. And imagine He does it in the five minutes everyone (everyone permitted by coherence with the assumption that this story resembles our world as close as possible) is watching TV, and watching the proceedings of the UN General Assembly. So an enourmous part of the world’s population comes to know there’s a man in TV who claims to be God and has turned water into wine and wine back into water, who has multiplied this water and has, then, walked over it for some seconds –precious few, but still visible, seconds.
Would then we all become theist and accept there is a God, an existent God, who, in order for us to know about His existence, has come to Earth and manifested as a man who turns water into wine and wine back into water?
I’m not sure we would. More exactly, I’m not sure we all would. And, importantly: I’m not sure all of the Rationals would. Let’s call the Rationals who remain unconvinced even after the UN eventuality “The True Rationals”. (I would like to know how big is the percentage of Rationals who are True Rationals –unfortunately, I may never know it).
The True Rationals may speak thus: “This is still no evidence. For let us put our hands over this ‘God’. (If he or his frieds deny us to do so, that runs contrary to their supposed security in believing he’s God). And let us investigate how come he turns water into wine. And then we may say if he is, or is not, God”.
So imagine God offers himself to the True Rationals to investigate his psychology, phisiology, neurochemistry, and all that. Given time, either the True Rationals will find the source of the so-called ‘miracles’ in the self-claimed God or not. If they do find them, then they (given the assumption that True Rationals are doing science and not magic) could explain what the underlying causal mechanism of the so-called ‘miracles’ was –and so, the self-claimed God would amount to nothing but as an experienced illusionist, one of those who have some training in both physics and hypnosis.
But if they don’t find the causal explanation for the so-called ‘miracles’, why stop there? How many things have been taken as a mystery for a long time before they are explained? Aren’t there many cases in which a revolution in science is bred by the need to account for something deeply troubling?
I think the True Rationals would have open an answer of that fashion –and not only open, but obliged upon them in pain of leaving Truerationism in favor of theism.
And now I think we should ask what could count as evidence for God’s existence, in the face of this story. More exactly, what could count as evidence-for-God’s-existence which would be acceptable for the True Rationalist. So let’s ask:
What possible fact, object, person, word, event in the world could count as acceptable evidence for God’s existence, given Truerationism?
Is it that Truerationism knows, somehow, a priori that the concept of ‘God’ is per se impossible? Then we may ask on what grounds could this be. For this concept seems neither inconsistent (for all logic tells us, God exists –or he does not) neither conceptually impossible (for all the non-theological concepts we have (and even perhaps for most of all our theological concepts (and perhaps even for all of our theological concepts, including that strange one, possessed by some, of existing God)), God exists –or he does not).
Of course, it may be inconsistent with concepts or theories from physics, biology, chemistry or else. But precisely the point of imagining all of what we have claimed to be imagining was to test the very possibility of some God’s manifestating. This manifestating may be physically impossible (for all physics tells us, God is not possible), but that is not a priori, and even it is extra-physical: to derive, from an axiomatization of physics, that God does not exist, one must express (in the ‘physics language’, let’s say) the concept of ‘God’, and that is an extra-physical concept. So to say that God is physically impossible is to accept one prior conception of God which, then, is said to be inconsistent with our present conception of our (physical) world. And again: precisely the point of imagining all of these was to test to what extent even a flagrant violation of physical laws (turning water into wine and things like that) would count as evidence for God’s existence. We seem to be led to think that Truerationism would consider this either a priori and metaphysically impossible or, though possible, as no conclusive evidence for God’s existence. So we seem to be led to think that Truerationism seems to be, by definition, the position that denies God’s existence.
And so we seem to have a case of a theory which: (i) defines itself (as least partly, but importantly) as a negation of something’s existence, and then (ii) claims that nothing (nothing possible? or nothing epistemically possible?) in the world would count as evidence for that thing’s existence. So we seem to be faced with a theory that just asserts (at least partly, but importantly) its own truth and a priori denies all possible ways to falsify it.
As said, I do not know how many Rationals are True Rationals. I just thought it would be fun to check what could be happening on this side. Because if Truerationism is just the position that affirms its own truth and denies every possible way to falsify it, then it shouldn’t come out as surprise that even some atheism can come to the point of being fanaticism: it seems that, at least partly (but importantly), fanaticism is defined as a view that just affirms its own truth and denies every possible way to falsify it.
