Monday, June 23, 2008

Morality and atheism: an analysis -- 3 of 3

See here for the outline of all three posts on morality and atheism.

Let's look again at the exchange with my friend via email:
BUT WHAT DOES WRONG MEAN? WHAT DOES RIGHT MEAN? WHAT IS THE SIGNIFICANCE OF SOMETHING BEING RIGHT OR WRONG? AND WHY DOES THAT OR OUGHT THAT COMPELL TO ACT THIS OR THAT? FROM A THEISTIC PERSPECTIVE, IT MAKES SENSE. THERE IS A GOD WHO HAS THIS CHARACTER OF GOOD. WE ARE HIS CREATION AND OBJECT OF HIS CARE, AND OWE HIM LOYALTY AS HIM ON WHOM WE ARE UTTERLY DEPENDENT. HE IS ALSO THE JUDGE "WITH WHOM WE HAVE TO DO." THERE IS REASON TO ACT IN ACCORDANCE WITH HIS WILL. THERE IS REASON TO DO GOOD. IT ENTAILS THE DESIRE TO FULFILL OUR DESTINY AS THOSE MADE IN HIS IMAGE (TO BE GOOD), TO WALK IN INTIMACY WITH HIM, AND THE FEAR OF JUDGMENT FROM THE JUDGE
I think it should be clear that everything I've written in parts 1 and 2 was intended to deal with the question of whether or not, "from a theistic perspective, it [morality] makes sense." I attempted to argue that morality cannot be contingent upon God's nature, that God's nature is an unsatisfactory basis for moral justification, and that using God in talking about morality obfuscates, rather than enlightens. I further developed in part two on how using God in talking about morality brings up more questions than answers, given the inability for God to fit the criteria of moral virtue that our own (human) nature does.

In sitting here writing about morality, and in your sitting there reading about it, we both presuppose something important: that morality and moral motivation are amenable to reason. If, at a basic level, people will act how they feel like acting, despite rational arguments against this behavior, then both of us are wasting our time, in a cosmic sense. It is only in the hope that people can be swayed by argument and can respond to normative values that we spend time on this endeavor.

Two irreducible and irreplaceable components of morality are the fact-value and is-ought distinctions. If you cannot commit to the existence of ought or the existence of value (even if these are merely nominal or conceptual), then no moral argument can be made to move you, for all such arguments presuppose these two things. My approach in making a moral argument will be to talk about human nature, human desires, moral values and the principles of symmetry and justice. One of the things I need to assume for the sake of trying to persuade you rationally to act morally is that you have a value for your own life and/or that of others around you. If you (irrationally) conclude that your own life has no value and neither does anyone else's, then your feeling on this matter has precluded my ability to persuade you to rationally act on the values that I must assert exist.

It is here that theists often conflate atheism with a lack of value and/or lack of obligation. And they are correct in saying that if there is no value to anything, then moral realism is false and we are all really responding only to our genetic and evolutionary programming by acting on our desires and avoiding things that repulse us. If this latter scenario is correct, then we are wasting our time writing and reading about morality, and all we can hope for is that the instincts we have will serve us and our society well in the future. In fact, our "hope" in this case is just a "feeling" as well and does not necessarily conform to rational direction.

Now I want to address his question:
  • Why does that, or ought that, compel us to act?
This is where meta-ethics is done and moral psychology comes in.

Now, some theists assert, belief in God is a necessary part of moral motivation. Let's put one thing out there first: even if this is true, we cannot will ourselves to believe in something that we are not genuinely persuaded to be true. That means, in effect, that unless the theist can give the atheist a genuinely reasonable argument that persuades the atheist to become a theist, then this assertion is not normative. And so, if belief in god is not possible for a given person, and if moral motivation is dependent upon god-belief, then obviously that person will lack moral motivation. It doesn't mean that they can motivate themselves to believe in something they find unreasonable in order to motivate themselves morally!

Second, the theist appeals to two things for moral motivation that may seem uniquely available to theists:
  1. fear: if you don't obey God's commandments, you'll be punished for it
  2. self-interest: if you do obey God's commandments, you'll be rewarded for it
Simply put, the components of fear and self-interest exist in the atheist's world just as much (if not more so) than a theist's. If this life is all that there is, then it takes on an extraordinary amount of value, given that it is all that we have. Morality is logically necessary for society to function, rather than fall apart into chaos. Therefore, one can be motivated as an atheist by fear of anarchy and chaos, as well as the self-interest of hoping for a stable, prosperous society to live in. In this way, atheists can use fear and self-interest just as much as a theist. I can make other arguments of a similar fashion, whether the fear is based on going to prison, or the self-interest is based on "let live in order to live" symmetry. Bentham argued along these same lines, in showing how self-interest was not contradicted by altruism, for the overall good of society.

When we use the word "good" we imply value. If one is an amoralist, and claims there is no real ultimate value to anything, then it would be rather difficult to convince said person to be motivated to act morally. By reframing the motivation into one of a reasoned argument, you are still forced to accept, at some point in time, that doing something good is of value to you or to those you care about. Here's a short simple example:
  1. All of the following are good: wealth, health and happiness.
  2. Human beings can cooperate in societies, or they can compete tribally
  3. When human beings form societies, morality is necessary for order and stability
  4. The lack of society, in the form of tribal competition, does not bring about the greatest amount of these goods (from 1) for the greatest number
  5. Since the greatest good for the greatest number occurs within society, morality is necessary to bring about the greatest good for the greatest number
What this argument does is give context to "doing good" by showing that "doing good" brings about second-order goods, in the form of wealth, health and happiness. If someone denies the first premise, then of course we're back at square one. But denial of premise (1) would seem to pose a problem for a theist, as it seems that most religions accept that God wants good things for humans; what about belief in God could make (1) false?

In addition, it may simply be the case that morality is self-contained when it comes to motivation: you do what is good because it is the good thing to do; you shun what is evil because it is evil! This may be simple, but that doesn't disqualify it at all. In point of fact, this may be the best motivation of all: the nature of morality itself is normative and therefore motivates us. It does not require external factors or belief: when you know what is good, you do it; when you know what is evil, you avoid it.

  • On meta-ethics

I intend to deal with exactly what the first two questions he asked mean:
  1. What does wrong mean? What does right mean?
  2. What is the significance of something being right or wrong?
One question that meta-ethics brings up is what our ontological commitments are. That is to say, what sorts of things exist, and what properties do they have? We do not have to (yet) "account" for the things we think exist in simply describing ontology, as this is the purview of metaphysics and requires a comprehensive analysis. The question that is relevant here is that of moral realism and how it may affect the existence or nonexistence of moral facts and moral properties.

The queerness of moral properties has been known for a long time, but is probably best summarized by John L. Mackie in 1977. The roundness of an object is given in the object's dimensions and relations to itself. This is an easy property for us to define and make sense of. What about the property of clumsiness? We all must admit it exists, but to define it, and to show how this property is instantiated and exemplified gets very complex. What may seem awkward and clumsy to one person may seem a least satisfactory to another. In addition, while the property of roundness is given in an object's relations to its own dimensions (its shape), what exactly about someone or something makes it clumsy? Its movements, yes? But exactly which movements? Therein lies the rub...

Let's consider the case of evil I've been using since the first post: drowning an otherwise-healthy infant. Is it my pushing an infant below the surface of water that is immoral? Obviously not, mothers bathe their children in the same way every day. Is it the moment at which the baby's heart and brain are clinically dead? Well, that seems to imply that if I was able to resuscitate the child to life, then I've done nothing immoral. So in the same way that it becomes difficult to pin down the exact dimension of movement that is clumsy, so it is difficult to pin down the exact dimension of action versus intent that is evil. This is part of the issue of the queerness of moral properties: how to locate and define them in the first place.

One of the things that I think causes theists to argue that God is necessary for, or at least comports well with, moral realism is that they recognize that God is attributed the same queer properties as morality is: transcendence and metaphysical ultimacy. That is to say, there seems to be nothing about space-time and physics that make moral properties what they are, and they don't seem to be contingent upon the world in which we live.
  • If moral properties exist, and are metaphysically ultimate
If it is indeed true that moral properties exist in the same way the redness and roundness do, and are metaphysically ultimate (not contingent), like mathematical truths, then the answers to our questions about right and wrong are simple, although they may not be to our liking: 2 + 2 = 4 because by definition, that's just what it means to sum identities. In the same way, drowning an infant is wrong by definition, that's just what it means to be immoral. There is nothing "arbitrary" about this, it is the definition of what it is.

But wait, you say, that's not satisfactory! Perhaps it doesn't explain things to your liking, but if it's true, then it's true: morality may simply be about the issue of causing harm to others. That maybe all that it is, whether we like it or not. The problem we have with this is that even when we agree on the moral status of some act (like drowning a baby), we may come up with different justifications for why we feel it is so.

But is this problem unique for morality? Not at all. Think, for instance of defining something scientific, like the unit of length. We all use different systems of measurement, but the objects being measured, and their property of length -- assuming it is constant -- these things are not subjective, but objective. Are our own systems of measurement arbitrary? Absolutely! But, the object that we measure is not arbitrary!

Perhaps all we're doing with the different schools of thought on morality is measuring the fundamental harm that something causes, or looking at it from different angles, but we aren't changing the fact that morality is still all about harm!

Moving on to his second question: what is the significance of it? A simple answer exists: right and wrong possess their own virtuous force! The significance of something being good is its goodness, which motivates us and defines its value. The significance of something being evil is its badness, which also motivates us (away from it) and defines its (negative) value. If more significance is needed, such as fear or self-interest, then I've already covered that, above.

This is one answer to my friend's question, although we may not like it because it is "too simple".
  • If moral properties exist, and are contingent
Another possible answer to my friend's question about what right and wrong "are" could be that they are related to some objective facts about the world which are not metaphysically ultimate (like mathematical truths and analytical truths). Morality could be based on human nature and evolution. Indeed, it seems to be the case that humans can all agree on a few things (if you disagree, feel free to point out which premises you find faulty):
  1. Certain facts about human nature give us certain desires and needs.
  2. We rank or order these desires and needs into a sort of hierarchy. The need for food and water are foundational to our own minute-by-minute survival, while the desire to procreate is contingent on these first-order needs being met.
  3. We either: 1) assign value to these things, or 2) recognize that there is intrinsic value to them. This distinction is drawn for someone who may be inclined towards nominalism (1) versus realism (2) when it comes to properties and relations.
  4. When actions and behaviors promote our values, these are "good" and thus are morally what we ought to do. When actions and behaviors detract from, or go against these values, they are "evil" and thus are morally what we ought not do. This seems to follow definitionally from the concept of something having positive or negative value to us.
Imagine for a moment that pulling off someone's arm caused them to experience an orgasm, and they immediately regrew the limb. For that person, would pulling off their arm be an immoral act? It seems clear that the facts and restrictions about human nature; namely, how we experience pain and pleasure, directly influence our concept of morality. All you have to accept is that pain and pleasure form the basis of moral value, given human nature and the desire and need to avoid pain and the desire and need to enjoy pleasure. Thus the basis for many ethical theories involving utilitarianism.

Besides this simple but easily-followed layout of how we get the idea of objective moral properties that are contingent upon human nature, we can talk about how our moral faculties evolved and what role biology plays in the exercise of morality. Please notice that we're going from what good and evil are to how we recognize them.

On a recent Point of Inquiry, Marc D. Hauser spoke of how our moral faculties may be like our grammatical faculties -- cognitive modules that either develop properly or don't, but are entirely based on biology and evolutionary logic. He and Peter Singer summarize this view in a nice article hosted by the CFI. His co-author (Singer) has also written some great pieces on this same issue -- the evolution of a moral sense -- for NYT Magazine, among others. (also see this, this and this)

Now, what these scientific explanations really do is give plausible mechanisms to explain the evolution of a moral sense in humanity, including such evolutionary oddities as kin altruism. This, in turn, explains why we have an innate disgust at the idea of child rape and a universal set of moral principles involving avoidance of suffering and harm. What this does not do is give a meta-ethical justification as to whether or not causing harm without justification (i.e., self-defense, warfare) is actually wrong.

For that, we return to the question of whether foundational concepts form the basis of morality:
"Causing harm without necessity is wrong," or something of the like. The best answer seems to be that morality is all about causing harm, and that, by definition, humans ought not cause harm without justification (self-defense or the law).

In conclusion, the answers I present to my friend's questions are:
  1. Wrong and right refer to actions or behaviors that we ought not do, or ought to do, respectively. Either these things are metaphysically ultimate, such as 2 + 2 = 4, and therefore not contingent, or they are objective facts founded on human nature, based on the concepts of pain and suffering. If they are contingent, then, they are contingent upon human nature; the existence of these values flows from our own human natures: value is directly related to human needs and desires. These are universal and absolute, given that survival and death are universal human experiences, but may or may not be metaphysically ultimate. Either way, they are independent of the question of God's existence.
  2. The significance of rightness or wrongness is, as Kant would say, "the thing in itself": the value of acting morally is its own significance. If this sounds circular it is meant to be so, because the entire idea of morality is self-contained: as we have seen, appealing to authority or fear are not the same as appealing to one's sense of duty and obligation. Doing good is, itself, good (valuable/significant) and doing evil is, itself, evil (it works in opposition to that which we value and find significant). One must derive value from "doing what is good/doing what one ought to do," nor find reason to oppose "doing what is evil/doing what one ought not do"
And so it seems the crux of the issue is this:
  • If moral realism is true, then there are moral facts and objective moral properties.
  • If moral realism is not true, then "moral facts" may simply mean that certain statements or beliefs about morality are just how humans feel about them -- this is the essence of cultural relativism
  • If moral realism is not true, then we have no real cause to argue about morality, since you are simply affirming how you believe when you say, "X is good," or "Y is evil," and so am I. Our beliefs cannot be fundamentally proven right or wrong, and so moral disagreement may never be resolved.
See here for the outline of all three posts on morality and atheism.

Morality and atheism: an analysis -- 2 of 3

See here for the outline of all three posts on morality and atheism.

Something that I said in part one deserves to be revisited and expanded upon:
If theists contend that moral statements, such as, "Drowning an otherwise-healthy infant is wrong," are true in all possible worlds, then they accord to morality the metaphysical ultimacy which will undercut their argument that it can be contingent upon God's nature. If they do not accord such status to morality, then things get a little more complicated. Therefore, it is important to nail down the terms of the debate before we even begin. This is slippery, because some theists will try to "get away with" something here: if we agree that it is wrong in all possible worlds for humans to do X, but not God, then we have undercut the justification for using the same terms of "goodness" and "evil" in application to God as we do for ourselves. In other words, if what is good for us is not good for God, or if what is evil for us is not evil for God, then to say, "God is good," is an equivocation. Therefore, as shown in part one above, if metaphysical ultimacy is not accorded to moral standards transcending God's will or nature, then the phrase "God is good" itself is meaningless.
What does it mean, then, to say "God is good"?
  • Can God "be good" in the same sense that we can be?
The standards of goodness that are often used cannot apply to God by definition, or at the least, the claim that they can is falsified by the evidence

What theists may say is that God cannot do such a thing. If God cannot, then God is not a free moral agent, and so to refer to God as morally perfect is absurd. If God just doesn't do these sorts of things, then God is an exemplar of the virtues that we both agree are, in reality, the underlying definition of what makes one's nature "good" or "evil". Working on this assumption, then the nature of God needs to be such that God can exemplify the virtues and morality that we agree define goodness and evil. This is where using God as an exemplar of goodness (not a justification or basis for it) may itself lead to logical issues.

Most people recognize that morality can be boiled down to questions about "ought" and that "ought" implies a duty or obligation. It is from this very perspective that I would argue that morality is logical and self-contained, and that invoking or involving God in a justification of obligation becomes senseless. Because God is all-powerful and all-knowing, is it possible for such a Being to be constrained by obligation or duties to its creations? If God is good, where good entails such obligations, then to what extent is God obligated to humans? If God is perfectly good, then would God not be completely and perfectly obligated to us?

Given the evidence of human suffering and evil in the world, I would say that the evidence is clearly against making it reasonable to believe that God fulfills obligations to the creation perfectly, or even to a great extent. This will take on the evidential, rather than logical (although it's still viable), form of the problem of evil if followed from here. I have already followed it, and won't reiterate. Suffice it to say that theists who claim that God is the perfect exemplar of goodness, and admit that goodness entails moral obligations and duties, face a serious difficult in reconciling that notion with the evil and suffering in the world. If a morally perfect God exists, then the obligation that is attached to moral perfection logically entails that God would remove, or reduce to the greatest extent possible, the pain and suffering of the creation.

Again, the theist may be inclined to rescind any obligation as part of God's goodness, but if God is not morally obligated to us, is the phrase "God is good" reflective of the notions of objective moral goodness? Does it mean the same thing as when we say, "Joe is a good person, or Sally is a good parent?" Objective moral standards include moral obligation to refrain from causing suffering and to alleviate it whenever possible. How can God be exempted from these obligations?

Another, separate problem is how, if morality is exemplified perfectly by God, humans are supposed to acquire knowledge of this, aside from revelation and/or Scripture. We see this exposed clearly in the debate between atheist philosopher Michael Martin and Christian presuppositionalist John Frame:
I also argued earlier that the objectivity of Christian morality suffers from two other problems. First, it has no rational way of deciding between conflicting claims of divine revelation and, second, it has no way of deciding between conflicting interpretations of allegedly Christian revelation. Frame maintains that the truth of Christian revelation is shown by historical investigation while I maintain that historical evidence for the truth of Christianity is very weak. Frame wisely hesitates to get involved in a protracted historical debate. I too have no desire to enter such a debate online. Readers of our debate on the Internet should study our respective works and decide for themselves whether historical scholarship has established the truth of the Resurrection, the Incarnation, the Virgin with any acceptable degree of probability.
I am inclined to believe in moral realism and objective moral properties, which I will elaborate on in the next post. For a moment, I want to reflect on one possible explanation of these properties which is not metaphysically ultimate for the purpose of argument:
  • If morality is contingent on human nature
It may be that what we call "good" is in fact a reflection of things that human beings find of value. What we value is in turn often directly related to our own human nature, rather than that of God. For example, is it possible for God to be lacking in some way? Most theists would agree that the answer to that question is, "no." God can't be hungry. God can't be poor. God can't be sick. Interestingly, the things that we humans find valuable are those things that help us avoid hunger, pain, poverty, et cetera, and we all agree that those things lie at the heart of a lot of moral action. So what this means is that if we all agree that giving food to a hungry person is an act of moral goodness, then we all agree that there is value to it.

How can hunger, or its alleviation/amelioration, relate to God, when God cannot lack for anything and the very existence of the condition "hunger" is due to a physical universe that God supposedly created? Before God created this universe, did hunger exist? Was alleviating/ameliorating it good when there was no such thing as time or physicality? Isn't this a sort of nonsense way of looking at it? And this will be a recurring theme -- how is introducing God into the equation improving our understanding of morality? In fact, at each point that God is introduced into the question of morality, I would argue, we add layers of complication and confusion.

In point of fact, I would argue that bringing God into the discussion muddies the waters of clarity and may not make sense. Compassion and charity, for example, are universally agreed upon to be "good" and thus are called virtues. The question of how God can be charitable or compassionate is a very good one. Charitableness can only exist when we give something of ourselves to benefit another. Typically, the degree to which any action is charitable is related directly to what it costs us and what it benefits them. Since nothing costs God anything, and since God's sovereignty precludes any notion that God may "give" something over to someone else entirely, this may be a nonsensical virtue for God to have. In addition, God is responsible for and "owns" everything, so if someone ends up suffering and in need of charity, God is at least indirectly responsible for their condition. To alleviate a condition that one has caused is not a virtue, but making right a wrong -- rectitude.

Compassion exists in large part because we are capable of relating to the suffering of other sentient creatures. St. Paul talks about this in 2 Cor 1. When we see an animal howling in pain in a trap, we feel moved because our human nature overlaps with its animal nature in that we both feel pain. Since God cannot experience suffering and pain, how can God be moved with compassion?

Patience is a virtue. It exists for creatures within time, who experience time and wish to hurry along some thing or event in order to facilitate and make their lives easier or less bored. Since God is outside of and does not experience time, it is illogical to attribute patience to God.

Many, many more examples could be given to show that using God as an exemplar of moral goodness and virtue is logically flawed, due to the nature of God and its properties. The character and properties of God do not allow the same moral goodness that humans can and do possess. In that sense, using another human's life and actions as a standard of morality is more logical and useful than using God.

Some Christians would interject the doctrine of Incarnation at this point to try to argue that God can experience pain or charity, and I'll not spend much time refuting it, but I want to make a few quick points: (1) the properties of God may or may not be internally inconsistent, but even if they are not, they are certainly incompatible and logically contradict with the properties of human beings, (2) given that logical contradiction implies incoherence, it is incoherent to argue that God and human beings can coexist, (3) the doctrine of the Incarnation states that Jesus was/is both 100% God and 100% human being, (4) therefore, the doctrine of the Incarnation is false, reductio ad absurdum. If the doctrine of the Incarnation is not possibly true, then the argument that it can serve as a basis to support the contention that it makes sense to use God as an exemplar of morality is false.

For another logical argument I've written refuting the notion of justice based on an Incarnation, see here.

Conclusion: Because moral goodness carries with it moral obligations, this implies that if God is good then God is obligated to its creation. Attributes of human nature that make sense of morality are lacking from God. Therefore, talking about God as an exemplar of goodness may be illogical, and the evidence of failing to meet human needs is itself an argument that God does not meet moral obligations and standards. The doctrine of the Incarnation is logically flawed, and invoking it is revealing: it is necessary to introduce a human element in order to make sense of morality. This tells us that talking about God as a nonphysical omni-X entity places a burden on dialog, while we can all make solid progress talking about morality from a "merely" mortal perspective. God cannot thus be "good" in the same sense that we (humans) can be and are.

I will pick up with moral motivation and an atheistic ethical justification in the next analysis.

See here for the outline of all three posts on morality and atheism.

Morality and atheism: an analysis -- 1 of 3

See here for the outline of all three posts on morality and atheism.

I would argue that inserting God into the question of "what is good" actually confuses the issue, for two reasons:
  1. The standards of goodness have to be objective and non-relative for us to use the phrase meaningfully, and thus not contingent on God's nature
  2. Attempting to solve the Euthyphro Dilemma by invoking "God's nature" as non-arbitrary fails, and does not elucidate the meaning of "goodness"
Let's get into this further by looking at a recent dialog I'm engaging in with a friend.

He is a theist who is arguing that atheists have no ultimate justification, or grounds, for morality. This is a common claim, and has been replied to extensively by philosophers and scholars (myself being neither). This should not be confused with a weaker claim: that atheists cannot behave morally. Instead, the claim is that they can behave morally, but that their rationality and justification for doing so may be flawed. The idea is that atheists have an inconsistency in their moral argument by virtue of the claim that all morality is contingent upon God's nature in some way. The capitalized quotes come from an email he sent me, and I have italicized the relevant portion:
...BUT WHAT DOES WRONG MEAN? WHAT DOES RIGHT MEAN? WHAT IS THE SIGNIFICANCE OF SOMETHING BEING RIGHT OR WRONG? AND WHY DOES THAT OR OUGHT THAT COMPELL TO ACT THIS OR THAT? FROM A THEISTIC PERSPECTIVE, IT MAKES SENSE. THERE IS A GOD WHO HAS THIS CHARACTER OF GOOD...
Morality is typically taken as a sort of system, or set of rational principles, by which we recognize or render behaviors and actions as “good” or “evil”, where good means, “things that we (humans) ought to do” and evil means, “things that we (humans) ought not do.” Will you agree? To avoid circularity, it is usually helpful to try to use context in defining good and evil. That is, can we develop concrete examples of and definitions for the terms "good" and "evil" for the purpose of argument?

The concrete example of an immoral action I will use throughout is: drowning an otherwise healthy infant is immoral. This is an arbitrary choice, as I could substitute shooting for drowning, or an eleven-year-old child for an infant, and the moral value of the statement has not changed.

Developing concrete examples of morality and immorality is something of a problem for a theist who wants to rely on nothing more than “God’s nature” as the ultimate foundation/basis/ontology of goodness. For example, in my asking the question, “Is action X good?” it may be difficult, if not impossible, for you to answer if you only want to lean upon recourse to God’s nature, because God's nature is not self-evident and is therefore an unknown quantity. Simply by defining God's nature as the good does not help me to further elaborate on just what that means! If X = going to a baseball game today, what would your answer to, "Is action X good?" be? Is it morally neutral? How would you know that? Does God like baseball? Would you say that God's nature is baseball? Of course not...

Do all moral actions reflect something that God would do? If so, then I can mount a counter-argument that the absence of moral action on God's part makes your assertions dubious: e.g., if you say that I am morally obligated to feed my baby, but God is not obligated to feed the human race (God's children), then we have a bit of a double standard. This seems to be an approach that Willam Alston takes, in that he argues that God does not have the sort of moral obligations that we humans have. If this is true, then there is a semantic non-trivial error in calling God "good" if by "good" this does not entail and connote the same things for God as it does in all other circumstances. If God's version of "good" is substantively different than any other, then a separate moral standard has been introduced which should not be equivocated with the objective moral standard we usually pick out with that word; relativity is now in play, because there is more than one moral standard being used. In other words, what's good for the goose is not good for the gander.

If one cannot reliably give objective, non-God-related examples of morality, without recourse to Scripture or divine commandments, it may be difficult to have a dialog in the first place. If I asked you to define "what is good/evil?" and the answer is "whatever God is" then I can simply ask, "and what is that?" You must be able to give me a working definition, or else the statement, "God is good," is a tautology, as viciously circular and useless as the statement, "God is that which God is," or "God is wgoweigwe," or "goodness is wegoeiwgwe" -- none of these are meaningfully veridical. In addition, there are many properties of God that have no moral bearing: power, knowledge, presence...

In part three of the Craig-Nielsen debate, we see this raise its ugly head, as Craig is posed with a fundamental question of how he knows that God is good:
Here I think he is clearly confusing the order of knowing with the order of being. In order to recognize that God is good, I may have to have some prior knowledge of what the good is in order to see that God is good. But that does not affect the fact that in the order of being, values derive their source from God’s being. He’s confused the order of knowing with the order of being. Simply because you can recognize moral values without belief in God, you cannot infer from this that therefore objective moral values can exist without God. So I would say that we have fundamental moral intuitions. In fact, the Bible says that God has planted these on the heart of every human person so that we intuitively recognize objective moral values. These values are rooted ontologically in the being and nature of God himself.
Craig admits here that humans have "fundamental moral intuitions" that give us the ability to "intuitively recognize objective moral values" -- that certainly addresses the question of how humans could "know" God's goodness. That is, we have the faculties (reason) to evaluate goodness in the first place. A follow-up question for Craig that would get to the definition would be, "Okay, Dr. Craig, since you know God's goodness, tell me exactly what it is about God (or about God's nature) that makes God good?" In fact, I might be tempted to probe Craig's response further: if objective moral values exist, then we are saying that principles and standards exist against which we could assess God's own moral nature -- but in what way could we do this, to know that God is good, besides recourse to revelation/Scripture? How else could God's nature be known, except to suppose it? Indeed, it cannot, and Craig and other theists simply suppose and define God's nature to be good without bothering to further elaborate on what this means and how it would constrain or limit God and God's moral agency or freedom.

Does Craig's response get to the heart of what it means to say that God (or God's nature) is good? Not at all, and I'll revisit this again frequently to hammer home this point. It does not bother to address the issue of how and whether goodness is (or can be) defined by the theist in such a fashion. Craig claims that objective moral values are "rooted ontologically in the being and nature of God" but as I'll show below, metaphysical ultimacy and logical contingency refute this claim.

So, I would say that the following things are true about saying, "God's nature is goodness," or a similar sentiment:
  1. The phrase "God's nature" must be refined to exclude those characteristics and properties that are amoral: power, knowledge, &c.; in so doing some approximation of morality may emerge, but this clarification is integral to making any sort of philosophical progress
  2. The term "goodness" may convey veracity only if it is given context or a non-circular and non-tautological definition; "God's nature" fails to do this
  3. To say that we know God's nature depends on revelation or Scripture, both of which require significant human liability in establishing the veracity thereof; then, to say God's nature is goodness must mean we simply suppose this
On to supporting these premises:
  • What it means to say that morality is not contingent on God's nature
Someone like myself, who may or may not believe in God, likes to try to see if we can separate morality entirely from the question of God’s existence. I think we can, and I think we must. I think we can use a rational approach based on classical foundationalism to figure out what sorts of things are “good” and “evil”, just as I will do in the next post on the subject, when I offer an atheistic ethical justification and moral motivation. Not only would I argue that we can do this without recourse to God, but I would argue that we have to. I would argue, in fact, that if goodness is not an objective standard by which God's nature/character can be judged and assessed, then the statement, "God is good," has:
  1. zero meaning or value, like "God is qegfoqeif"
  2. or is merely a tautology
And for the statement to be meaningful, for it to convey value, be non-relative, non-circular and non-tautological, goodness cannot be contingent upon God's nature, just as logic cannot be.

In modal logic, there is a classification known as "logically necessary" such that logical necessity can be applied to X when X must be true in any and all possible worlds. It is the heart of the issue involving the Euthyphro Dilemma: are moral standards and properties logically necessary, or are they contingent upon some other aspect of reality? The proposition: "All red carpets are red," is an a priori logical necessity -- it is true by definition and must be true in any and all possible worlds. Ditto with the idea of conclusions drawn from correct premises in a syllogistic mode of logic. The idea here is that God could not even make this proposition false.

The same would be true using false propositions that are logically necessary: "All completely round objects are completely square objects," is necessarily false. Something cannot simultaneously be fully round and fully square, and even God could not make this proposition true. God cannot change such logical principles, so they are not contingent.

On the other hand, the proposition: "There exists a red carpet," is a synthetic, or a posteriori logical possibility, whether or not the predicate is physically real -- this means that it may or may not be true in any one possible world, but it does not have to be true in all possible worlds. This is contingency. If a state of affairs, like me having a red carpet, is possible but not actual, then we would say that it doesn't obtain in this world, although it could in any possible world. The existence of the carpet is contingent, not necessary, and so God could control whether or not the proposition is true. As I have just shown, God cannot "change" logic in order to make a false statement true, nor a true statement false, because logic is not contingent upon God. Is morality any different?

What I would argue is that theists want to have their cake, and eat it too, by saying that morality depends upon God in some fashion (contingency), but they also want to have morality fixed to certain standards, and so they confine and limit the possibilities of God's character to fix the problem. This is theistic essentialism, and it's the trick up their sleeve: argue that God's nature must be good, such that possible worlds arguments do not hold because there can be no possible world without a morally perfect God. I'll challenge that in a moment, but for now, let's say it's true. What does this entail?

If theists contend that moral statements, such as, "Drowning an otherwise-healthy infant is wrong," are logically and therefore necessarily true in all possible worlds, then they accord to morality the metaphysical ultimacy which will undercut their argument that it can be contingent upon God's nature. That is to say, God cannot make drowning an otherwise-healthy infant moral by decree or will or command. Now, they qualify this further by saying that the reason for this moral truth is God's nature, but the important part is that God cannot change the moral truth: it is a logical necessity that drowning infants is a priori immoral.

Now, if theists do not accord such transcendent status to morality, then things get a little more complicated. This would be a theist who says that moral propositions must be evaluated as contingencies, where "drowning an infant is morally wrong," may or may not be true, given other facts and circumstances. Theists who assert such claims undermine the idea that truth in morality is an objective and transcendent affair, such as truth in mathematics. Therefore, it is important to nail down the terms of the debate before we even begin. Most theists would agree that God cannot change moral values, and they would argue this is because God cannot change God's own nature. This is an interesting argument, as it implies a few things about God's freedom and moral agency.

William Alston might argue at this point that God could drown an infant because God's moral perfection is different than moral values that humans apply because God cannot be morally obligated to act in a way consistent with an external standard. This is slippery, because some theists will try to "get away with" something here, but really they are still trapped: if we agree that it is wrong in all possible worlds for humans to do X, but not God, then we have undercut the justification for using the same terms of "goodness" and "evil" in application to God as we do for ourselves. In other words, if what is good for us is not good for God, or if what is evil for us is not evil for God, then to say, "God is good," is an equivocation. Thus theists who claim that there are different standards of morality undercut their claim that morality is objective and also render the phrase, "God is good," meaningless, as God's goodness may have little to nothing resembling our form of goodness. This flows logically into part (2) below, where I ask the question if it is intelligible for us to use God as a standard of goodness when it does not seem that God's nature can comport with goodness per se.

If theists do agree with my proposition about the transcendent moral wrongness of drowning an otherwise-healthy infant, then I would ask them if drowning the entire world, including children and infants, in the Noachian Flood was thus morally wrong, and they then have a bit of a dilemma if they believe this event is an actual historical event. If it is true that God's nature is the basis of goodness, but if God has committed acts which contradict moral standards of goodness, then there is an incoherence. Therefore, even theists recognize that a moral standard cannot be compromised in order to make it congruent with God's own character. Somehow, God's goodness must be salvaged because they know that the standard itself is ultimate, therefore there must be an excuse or apologetic to explain away any deviations from this standard, such that it does not appear to have been transgressed.

Now, this problem should not exist in the first place if goodness is that which God is. If goodness is that which God is, then there is no way that drowning infants is anything except good, since that is what God has done.

Really, all we've done here is pushed back the Euthyphro Dilemma by one step: while the Euthyphro Dilemma's original phrasing involves God's commands, which are assumed to be arbitrary, the use of "God's nature" in substitution is assumed not to be arbitrary. However, if indeed God's nature defines and ontologically roots goodness, is it by virtue of fact that it belongs to God, or is it by virtue of the fact that drowning infants is not in God's nature? If anything that belongs to God is automatically assigned the status of moral perfection, then it is obvious that morality is contingent upon the person to whom it refers, and is relative. This is what I will develop on in the next section. If God's nature defines and ontologically roots goodness by virtue of the fact that God's nature already corresponds to the objective standards of goodness, then the absolute, non-relative and non-tautological status of morality is preserved. The Euthyphro Dilemma is still alive and well, you see.

  • Does invoking God's nature give any adequacy of explanation to "goodness"?

What would be implied if morality is contingent upon God's character simply because it is God's is that if the theist said that anything that was God's nature is defined as "the good", then if God's character qualities included the drowning of infants, the theist would have to say it is good to drown infants. Most theists would, understandably, not want to claim that God's nature includes anything we all already accept as immoral. And so what they are doing is, from the outset, limiting God's nature to mutually-agreed-upon objective moral standards of goodness.

This belies any claim that they make that God's nature supercedes morality, because there is no theist who will honestly say that if God's nature was one of meanness and jealousy and selfishness, that the moral value of these things would suddenly become positive. And thus they concede the metaphysical primacy of morality: it is not contingent upon God's nature. What they may argue instead is that it is logically necessary for God's nature to be morally perfect. Supposing this is one thing, supporting it is quite another.

After all, why could there not be an all-powerful and all-knowing being whose nature was such that it relished the suffering of its creations? Why could there not be an evil God? It is only paring down logical possibilities that the theist is capable of trying to define a morally perfect God. However, there is absolutely no substantive refutation of the existence of an evil God (it is a logical possibility), and thus it is not logically necessary for God's nature to conform to the objective standards of goodness that Craig admits humans have intuitions and knowledge of. Instead, Craig and other theists are admitting to us, up front, that the objective moral standards and values we all agree represent "goodness" are the logical necessities, and that only in supposing that God's nature conforms to these values makes God truly "good".

The reply that God is defined a priori as "all good" is not an objection or refutation to my claim, because it is not logically necessary that God's nature be thus, as there is no argument that could be presented that God's nature is somehow determined by metaphysical principles; and so to say, "God is good, and goodness is that which God is" is tautological and conflicts with the existence of objective moral standards. One way to prove this is to investigate as to what God (and therefore goodness) is: does God's nature permit, or even incite God to perform, actions such as the drowning of an infant? If yes, then theists have just asserted the moral goodness of drowning infants. If not, then they admit that God's nature is a reflection of objective moral standards. The circularity of "Goodness is that which God is" undercuts any ability to make philosophical progress or define the terms independently of one another, because the primacy of objective moral standards is undermined.

So in effect, they must admit that in all possible worlds, God's nature must be such that it is limited to the things that we all agree are standards of moral goodness. Thus the real issue is exposed: they define God's nature as good because they assign to it all of the virtues. It is not the other way around. What "God is good" really means is that "God is good because God's nature conforms to the objective standards of goodness that we all already agree exist."For example , God's nature is good because God's nature opposes the drowning of infants, and logically would not be good if it did not.

They don't really mean what they say when they claim goodness and evil are in some way dependent upon or contingent upon God's nature, because if "morality is whatever God is," then by definition, morality is contingent upon the character of God, which necessitates that God's nature conforms to objective standards of morality. There is no explanation as to why, at a metaphysical level, God's character must be that which corresponds to our sense of good: it is not logically necessary that God's nature be opposed to the drowning of infants. And in that sense, God's nature defines goodness, goodness is that which God is, yet that which God is becomes presupposed...a viciously circular logic and tautology at the same time.

By this contingency, it is possible that any attribute belonging to God defines goodness, and yet there are many logically possible attributes of God that would be immoral (such as enjoying the drowning of infants), as well as those which obviously have nothing to do with morality: God's omnipotence, omniscience, &c...

Here’s something from a debate between Drs. W. L. Craig and K. Nielsen:
"But God is all-knowing; he has perfect knowledge [whereas] we do not," which is true by definition. If there is such a God, this doesn’t give you any reason for doing it because perfect knowledge is compatible with perfect evil. "Well, it’s because God is all-good." Now I ask you Christians, "How do you know that God is all-good?" I know you believe it, you accept it, but how do you know it? Probably, the most common answer is this: "Well, you read the Scriptures, and you see the kind of exemplar that Jesus was ... and there are plenty of passages in which Jesus shows himself to be an incredible exemplar." But notice that to see that he is an exemplar already presupposes that you have a prior understanding of what is good and bad. Because you have an understanding of what is good and bad, you see Jesus to be a desirable exemplar. So you have an independent moral understanding and knowledge which doesn’t rest on your belief in God.

Suppose somebody says, "Look, God is the perfect Good by definition." Some philosophers used to call this an analytic truth--like "Puppies are young dogs." But if you didn’t know what "young" meant, you couldn’t even know what "puppy" meant. If you didn’t know what "good" meant, you couldn’t even know what "God" meant. You have to have some understanding of "good" to judge that God is the perfect Good. So again, you need a moral criterion that is your own and doesn’t come from God. It may come causally from God, but it doesn’t come in a justificatory sense, which is the relevant thing in arguing about morality. [emphasis mine]
This last part is especially useful when I hear theists say, “the Euthyphro dilemma doesn’t apply/work because goodness is not contingent upon God’s commands, and thus arbitrary, nor is it an objective standard by which God judges actions, and thus supersedes God entirely, but instead goodness is God’s nature.” What does this mean? What does it explain? Furthermore, is God's nature not simply the collective assembly of God's will and commands and actions? And in that sense, is it not just as arbitrary as the individual series of God's commands? If not, what determines (or determined) God's nature?

That is to say, the theist's reply that God's nature "solves" the Euthyphro Dilemma must purport to show how God's nature is non-arbitrary. Some theists, including Robert Adams, and along a different line, William Alston, have tried to do just that, but in so doing, have revealed its impossibility. Adams admits that God's nature is good in virtue of the fact that God's nature is loving towards God's creatures. Adams thus admits that the standard of "being loving towards other creatures" is the virtue that makes God good. Ergo, if someone is not loving towards other creatures, then that person is not good, which is the transcendent moral principle that is not contingent upon whom the being or Being is. It isn't that "being loving towards other creatures" could be good or bad, and simply is good because that's God's nature, versus nsfl's. So Richard Adams is impaled on the second horn of the dilemma.

Alston removes moral obligation from the definition and thus equivocates on the meaning of goodness. This impales Alston on the first horn of the dilemma -- in attempting to make sense of God's goodness, the definition of goodness itself becomes relative to the person to whom it refers. This is, admittedly, a logical escape from the implications of the Euthyphro Dilemma. But it may be an escape from the frying pan into the fire: now using the phrase, "God is good," connotes entirely different concepts from the phrase, "nsfl is good," and so while in the latter case it means, roughly, "nsfl is good, thus he does not drown infants," no such logical connotation is made by the former.

What should immediately follow from the claim "God is good" is, as Dr. Nelson pointed out, that theists are pressed to explain the claim they make: what does "God is good" mean? We all understand that the concept "young" is not contingent on puppies, and so it is non-circular to say, "puppies are young dogs" in pointing out a vital distinction in the nature of puppies v. dogs. When the theist says, "God is good," however, without recourse to an external standard against which we can evaluate God's goodness, it is a circular reference if all this means is "God is that which God is" because "Good is that which God is, and God is good." To avoid circularity or tautology, theists must make recourse to using the objective standards of morality that we all agree on, and thus define goodness in terms of these standards.

Theists claim that God's nature, as Craig said in the quote above, serves to "ontologically root" moral values, which appears to be the same as to claim that moral values exist as (part of) God's nature. But have we made any progress? Are all these things virtuous because they relate to God, or is God good exactly because these virtues are God's nature? It must be the latter, because otherwise we make morality contingent upon God's nature.

Some theists believe that God's authority or omnipotence somehow give a logical foundation to morality, but philosophers have refuted these notions long ago. Simply because someone has authority over you does not mean that they will use their authority/power in a moral fashion, and this has been shown by human rulers in history. The quantity, or degree, of authority does not have any bearing on the quality of how it is used. Simply because God has more authority does not entail that God will/must use this authority in a moral fashion. The Euthyphro Dilemma is as clear here as ever: is something good because God's authority demands it, or does God use its authority to demand those things that are good because they are good?

The exact same points can be made about any other attribute of God's nature/character, be it God's power or authority or knowledge: none of those attributes logically necessitates morality in how they are used, nor can morality be contingent upon any of them. The idea that God has a determined nature/character brings up questions. While human nature is determined by DNA and environment/development, what could God's nature be determined by? If God's nature is not determined, then God's nature could freely change, and if God's nature is the basis for morality, then morality itself is arbitrary: contingent upon a relative standard.

One way to think about how God's nature is arbitrary, but morality cannot be, is the following possible worlds thought experiment:

Suppose that there is a world in which a god named Booblefrip exists, and so do humans, almost exactly like our world. Booblefrip created all that we see and experience as humans in a physical world. Booblefrip is "all powerful" in the sense that any logical possibility (contingency) can be accomplished by his will. Booblefrip is also omniscient. The only significant difference between our world and the world of Booblefrip is that Booblefrip takes pleasure in the suffering of humans. In point of fact, Booblefrip so enjoys our suffering that It (gender neutral) introduced pathogens and parasites and genetic defects into this world in order to elevate human suffering. And, Booblefrip enjoys flooding the world so as to drown infants. The question I would have to ask a theist is this -- is morality contingent upon the nature of Booblefrip in this world, in the same way that you claim that morality is contingent upon the nature of YHWH in ours?

Those who are interested in more extensive debates of this sort, especially with respect to questions about whether "God's nature" is a sufficient reply/solution to philosophical problems like the Euthyphro Dilemma and other presuppositional apologetics, should see the Martin-Frame written dialog. as well as some other articles at infidels.org. In it, the heart of the question is laid bare: is it possible to say that morality is contingent upon some aspect of God's character?

They would argue vociferously that "taking pleasure in the suffering of others" is not a character quality that is morally good. This is a standard we agree on.

The sorts of people who make these arguments include, but are not limited to, presuppositionalists. The problem is that if they leave "God is good" as an undefended and unexplained presupposition, then they have no more philosophical economy than if I simply say, "Doing harm without cause is evil." Or if I say, "Contributing to the physical or mental well-being of others is good." If you can’t give me a reasonable explanation of God’s nature, or why it good, then you’ve no more explained why something is good than if you said, “Goodness is awvpoweigfnqwe.” (nonsense) And if I can't go further with my meta-ethical justification, then we're on equal footing, if that. Also, these presuppositionalists have to be careful in making claims like, "drowning an infant is morally evil," because they will immediately be confronted with things like the Genesis Noachian Flood, and they will have to try to reconcile the notion that when God does an action, it is morally good, while when humans do it, it is morally evil. This is clear moral relativism.

I think that most theists would jump at the opportunity to correct me if I said, "God has a nature whereby God causes harm without justification, and this is the definition of evil." What they would correct is not likely that my definition of evil (causing harm without justification) is wrong, but that this evil is not what God's nature is. So in a sense, we agree on the foundational principles, like that causing harm for fun is morally evil. And they would probably agree that the principle is metaphysically ultimate -- it would be just as wrong for God to do it as for us, and this would apply in any and all possible worlds. Therefore it cannot be contingent upon God's nature, as there are possible worlds in which God's nature obtains differently. QED

Conclusion: Saying "God is good" has little to no explanatory value. Either moral propositions are logically necessary or they are contingent. If morality is contingent, then we can come up with possible worlds in which moral standards are defined by a god's nature, but that this god's nature does not conform to the same moral standards accorded to YHWH. That is, it is completely logically possible that a god can exist with a different defined character/nature, and thus God's nature is contingent but not moral standards. If theists make morality contingent upon a god's nature, while nothing determines god's nature, then to say, "God is good," is tautological and conflicts with the existence of objective moral standards. This is incoherent, and therefore God's nature cannot "determine" morality when it is, itself, indeterminate (nothing transcends God in this view).

See here for the outline of all three posts on morality and atheism.

Sunday, June 22, 2008

Morality and atheism: an introduction

In this introduction, I lay out my perspective and approach, and my feeling that we'll either run into a regress or circularity fairly quickly; the latter is to be avoided at all costs. In the first post -- part one -- I analyze atheism and morality by looking at two critical issues: 1) whether morality can in fact be contingent on God's nature, 2) whether invoking God's nature gives us an adequate explanation of goodness. In the next post -- part two -- I analyze whether God's nature can conform to the objective standards of goodness and virtues, or whether evidence and logic contradict this approach. Finally, in the last post -- part three -- I want to lay out a case for moral motivation and justification that I think makes being a moral atheist not only good (by definition), but rational.

Outline of posts:
  1. Introduction

  2. Morality and atheism: an analysis -- part 1 of 3
    morality cannot be contingent on God's nature

    does "God's nature" explain goodness?

    conclusions
  3. Morality and atheism: an analysis -- part 2 of 3
    God cannot be "good" in the same sense we can be

    God's nature vs. human nature

    conclusions
  4. Morality and atheism: an analysis -- part 3 of 3
    on moral motivation

    on meta-ethics

    conclusions
Although I have, on more than one occasion, attempted to talk about morality flowing from basic facts about human nature and society, I also put on a thick coat of whitewash and preface everything with, "I never took a philosophy course...so forgive my errors..." But it's not a real excuse to commit fallacies of logic, and so I'm going to try to parse out some things about morality that I've pondered on for a long time and make them clear. Also, there's no excuse for indolence, and I've procrastinated on writing up a more clear and extensive treatment of morality than my last attempts for a long time, partly out of recognition of the work it would require.

I think of myself as someone who is capable of at least some degree of objectivity in analysis, and I think I've shown that in criticizing fellow atheists for dismissing valid theistic arguments and criticizing what is thought of as "militant atheism" as well. Like the lib-deb, there are things about the culture of atheism I sincerely dislike. I also admit freely that there are things about strictly materialistic naturalism that are unattractive to deal with, when compared with religious and transcendent dealings. I think that this is due to the ability of a theist to simply invoke certain phrases which effectively end any philosophical inquiry or analysis, such as "God's nature" or "God's will" or other mysterious things which they sort of fall back on when pressed on something difficult. I want to see if perhaps these maneuvers, or belief in a god generally, are a valid way to deal with morality. Even though I don't believe in the Christian God (for reasons manifold), if I found out that there was a good argument to believe in the God of Aristotle and Ben Franklin, I could easily live with that. Also, it takes quite a few leaps and bounds to get from a philosophically-necessary god (little "g") to the God of the Jews or Christians or Muslims from revelation and Scripture.

It may be the case that there are simply some philosophical problems that are insoluble. If that is true, and if morality is one of those things, all that it means is that there is no final clear solution to questions like, "what is the good?" and "how ought man live?" If that is the case, then perhaps whether or not we believe in God, we come to a place where assumptions must be made (presuppositions) that are incapable of being reduced further or explained further. The sorts of theists who make these arguments include, but are not limited to, presuppositionalists. When this happens for the theist, they may invoke a god-related phrase to end the regress, while an atheist may simply say, "perhaps that's just all there is to it." When this point occurs, does the theist have a "leg up" on the atheist? Do they have more philosophical economy and currency, or are the god-related phrases just another way to layer on complexity and mystery, rather than clarifying the problem? If I say, "it seems that the nature of morality is such that moral actions have the property of producing happiness, health and wealth, while immoral actions produce pain and suffering, and perhaps that's all there is to it," have I lost an argument with a theist who says, "moral actions are a reflection of God's nature"?

It seems that we have two basic options when it comes to justification: 1) a regress that ends with a basic belief, or brute, irreducible fact, or 2) a circular system of justification. In 1) we see justifications of the form, "A is based on B, which is based on C, which is based on D...Z is a standalone presupposition." An example of this: "I wash my shirt because I want to be clean and smell good; I want to be clean and smell good in order to be sociable and attract a mate; I want to be sociable and attract a mate because these are my biological nature; my biological nature is an insurmountable part of me and my happiness." It is understood that we reach some basic (brute) fact upon which we agree the problem is not easily digested any further, and hopefully we are satisfied with the progress and rationale in ending there. These can be thought of as axioms or basic beliefs.

In 2) we see justifications of the form, "A is based on B, which is based on C, which is based on A, which is based on C, which is based on B..." An example of this: "I believe that God exists; I believe that the Bible is God's Word; I believe that a strict-literal-historical interpretation of the Bible is imperative because the Bible itself has been translated and preserved by God; the Bible reveals God and shows me that God exists..." and in this sort of justification we see an interdependent set of premises that are set out to sustain an overarching world view or religious belief. In my particular example, there is a hierarchy of linkage: obviously if the first premise is false, all the rest are false as well. That is not necessary. Sometimes, A, B and C are all on "equal footing" and if one fails, then the others are still left standing, albeit with one less "linkage".

It's possible that all justifications will come back to one of these two ending points: 1) a brute fact or presupposition, or 2) a vicious circularity. If that is indeed the case, then all we can hope to do in our arguments and justifications is simply avoid contradiction and incoherence. So long as we don't set out some thing B which logically violates some thing A, then we may be offering substantively similar rationales. I am inclined to believe that (1) is supremely favored over (2), for the simple reason that circularity doesn't imply any sort of progress, which some degree of progress can be made in chaining together logical premises. Circular reasoning is recognized as fallacious, while limited reasoning and knowledge leading to basic beliefs is not. Also, by the very nature of either: a) our limited and mortal minds, b) our language, or c) both of these, it is possible we are simply never going to be able to unify all philosophical questions and solve all philosophical problems and answer all philosophical questions. This implies that basic beliefs and axioms may always exist.

In closing, what I have hoped to do in this introduction: I wanted to point out my attitude coming in to any dialog or analysis of atheism and morality. I wanted to point to my attempts at objectivity and willingness to concede that god(s) or a God may exist, given certain limitations. I wanted to point out the general direction that such analyses/arguments will go: towards properly basic (unjustified) beliefs, also known as brute facts, or towards circularity. I have staked out that a regress is preferred over circular reasoning, and so what I'm already asserting is that basic presuppositions will be staked out.

Two funny irreverent things

Okay, so when the huge spawn of twisters killed lots of people throughout the SE, and when a huge spawn of twisters killed lots of people in KS and AL, I asked for some logical consistency: the fat self-righteous religious right kooks needed to step up to the plate and claim that God hates TN, or KS, or AL...just as they did when Katrina hit LA. Finally, someone has stepped up to the plate, blaming Iowa for God's wrath -- Jason Werner. PS: See this take-down at the Secular Philosophy blog of arguments based on the idea that God sends wrath down on specific locales when God gets pissed.

See this hilarious spoof of Expelled, just substitute Intelligent Design Creationism for Astrology and Biology for Astronomy and you get the joke:

Friday, June 20, 2008

Paul and Zuckerman on global trends in religiosity

Having written a few articles on social analysis of religion here at home and abroad, I felt vindicated reading the new article in Edge by Gregory Paul and Phil Zuckerman about global religiosity trends. Their conclusions mirrored my own from sampling polls: the growth in nonreligion at home and abroad is a literal explosion. I am going to post the full text of the article below, but first point out some conclusions they made that I had observed a while back:
  1. The greatest increase in both global and domestic religious self-identification for the past 50 years falls into the category, "no religion", link
  2. Megachurches are not evidence of growth, but consolidation, link
  3. The growth of Islam in Europe -- forming "Eurabia" -- is overrated, link
  4. The growth of religion in third world countries does not balance out the contraction of religion in the West, link
The reason (4) is important is pure economics: the G8 countries may only have 14% of the world's population, but they have 65% of its GDP and 72% of its military expenditures. Therefore, the growing secularization that is occurring in these countries will have far greater influence over world demographics than, for example, the Islamization of Sudan.

In addition, a new Pew Poll reconfirms the numbers on the growth of nonreligion in the US (all data here):
The survey finds that the number of people who say they are unaffiliated with any particular faith today (16.1%) is more than double the number who say they were not affiliated with any particular religion as children. Among Americans ages 18-29, one-in-four say they are not currently affiliated with any particular religion.
...
Like the other major groups, people who are unaffiliated with any particular religion (16.1%) also exhibit remarkable internal diversity. Although one-quarter of this group consists of those who describe themselves as either atheist or agnostic (1.6% and 2.4% of the adult population overall, respectively), the majority of the unaffiliated population (12.1% of the adult population overall) is made up of people who simply describe their religion as "nothing in particular." This group, in turn, is fairly evenly divided between the "secular unaffiliated," that is, those who say that religion is not important in their lives (6.3% of the adult population), and the "religious unaffiliated," that is, those who say that religion is either somewhat important or very important in their lives (5.8% of the overall adult population).
...
one need only look at the biggest gainer in this religious competition -- the unaffiliated group. People moving into the unaffiliated category outnumber those moving out of the unaffiliated group by more than a three-to-one margin. At the same time, however, a substantial number of people (nearly 4% of the overall adult population) say that as children they were unaffiliated with any particular religion but have since come to identify with a religious group. This means that more than half of people who were unaffiliated with any particular religion as a child now say that they are associated with a religious group. In short, the Landscape Survey shows that the unaffiliated population has grown despite having one of the lowest retention rates of all "religious" groups.
That's amazing.

On to the article by Paul and Zuckerman:
WHY THE GODS ARE NOT WINNING
by Gregory Paul & Phil Zuckerman

GREGORY PAUL is an independent researcher on subjects dealing with paleontology, evolution, religion and society. Books include Predatory Dinosaurs of the World and Dinosaurs of the Air.

PHIL ZUCKERMAN is a sociologist at Pitzer, and the author of Invitation to the Sociology of Religion, Du Bois on Religion, and Sex and Religion.

Abstract:
Disbelief now rivals the great faiths in numbers and influence. Never before has religion faced such enormous levels of disbelief, or faced a hazard as powerful as that posed by modernity. How is organized religion going to regain the true, choice-based initiative when only one of them is growing, and it is doing so with reproductive activity rather than by convincing the masses to join in, when no major faith is proving able to grow as they break out of their ancestral lands via mass conversion, and when securely prosperous democracies appear immune to mass devotion? The religious industry simply lacks a reliable stratagem for defeating disbelief in the 21st century.
_____

A myth is gaining ground. The myth seems plausible enough. The proposition is that after God died in the secular 20th century, He is back in a big way as people around the world again find faith. In 2006 Foreign Policy ran two articles that made similar, yet distinctive claims. In the spring Phillip Longman's "The Return of the Patriarchy" contended that secular folk are reproducing themselves, or failing to reproduce themselves, out of existence as the believers swiftly reproduce via a "process similar to survival of the fittest." In the summer FP followed up with "Why God is Winning" by Samuel Shah and Monica Duffy Toft, who pronounced that the Big Three— Christianity, Islam and Hinduism—are back on the global march as secularism fades into irrelevance. In the fall Foreign Affairs joined the chorus when Walter Russell Mead's God's Country? gave the impression that conservative theism continues to rise in a United States jolted back to the spiritual by 9/11. In American Fascists Chris Hedges warns that hard-core Dominionists are accumulating the power to convert the nation into a fundamentalist theocracy.

The actual situation, as is usual in human affairs, much more complex and nuanced, and therefore much more fascinating. Let's start by considering the analytical superficiality that mars the twin articles in Foreign Policy. While Longman proposes that rapid reproduction is the primary agent behind the resurgence of patriarchal faith, Shah and Toft think it is mainly a matter democratic choice in which younger generations reject their parent's secularism. In reality all these claims are well off base. Religion is in serious trouble. The status of faith is especially dire in the west, where the churches face an unprecedented crisis that threatens the existence of organized faith as a viable entity, and there is surprisingly little that can be done to change the circumstances.

Shah and Toft cite the World Christian Encyclopedia as supporting a planetary revival because its shows that "at the beginning of the 21st century, a greater portion of the world's population adhered to [Christianity, Islam and Hinduism] in 2000 than a century earlier." They point to a table in the WCE that shows that the largest Christian and largest nonChristian faiths, Catholicism, Protestantism, Islam and Hinduism, rose from half to nearly two thirds of the world in the 1900s. But that it is a peculiar choice of sects. If every Mohammedan and Hindu sect large and small is tallied, shouldn't every Orthodox, Coptic and so on be too? Another look at the WCE table shows that all Christians, Muslims and Hindus combined edging up a much more modest 60 to 66% (but see below correction) since the reign of Queen Victoria.

What scheme of thought did soar in the 20th century? Although Shah and Toft cite the WCE when it appears to aid their thesis, they seem to have missed key passages near the beginning of the work. The evangelical authors of the WCE lament that no Christian "in 1900 expected the massive defections from Christianity that subsequently took place in Western Europe due to secularism…. and in the Americas due to materialism…. The number of nonreligionists…. throughout the 20th century has skyrocketed from 3.2 million in 1900, to 697 million in 1970, and on to 918 million in AD 2000…. Equally startling has been the meteoritic growth of secularism…. Two immense quasi-religious systems have emerged at the expense of the world's religions: agnosticism…. and atheism…. From a miniscule presence in 1900, a mere 0.2% of the globe, these systems…. are today expanding at the extraordinary rate of 8.5 million new converts each year, and are likely to reach one billion adherents soon. A large percentage of their members are the children, grandchildren or the great-great-grandchildren of persons who in their lifetimes were practicing Christians" (italics added). (The WCE probably understates today's nonreligious. They have Christians constituting 68-94% of nations where surveys indicate that a quarter to half or more are not religious, and they may overestimate Chinese Christians by a factor of two. In that case the nonreligious probably soared past the billion mark already, and the three great faiths total 64% at most.)

Far from providing unambiguous evidence of the rise of faith, the devout compliers of the WCE document what they characterize as the spectacular ballooning of secularism by a few hundred-fold! It has no historical match. It dwarfs the widely heralded Mormon climb to 12 million during the same time, even the growth within Protestantism of Pentecostals from nearly nothing to half a billion does not equal it.

Yet Longman, and especially Shah and Toft, left readers with the impression that Christianity, Islam and Hinduism are each regaining the international initiative against secularism. Again we can turn to the WCE, whose results are presented in the pie charts (with the above adjustment, and with the proviso that the stats are inevitably approximations).



Since 1900 Christians have made up about a third of the global population, and are edging downwards. No growth there. Hindus are coasting at a seventh the total, no significant increase there either even though India adds more people each year than any other nation. The WCE predicts no proportional increase for these faiths by 2050. The flourishing revival of two megareligions whether by democracy, edification, or fecundity is therefore a mirage. Having shrunk by a quarter in the 20th century, Buddhism is predicted to shrink almost as much over the next half century. Once rivaling Christianity, paganism – whether it be ancient or modern as per New Ageism and Scientology — has over all contracted by well over half and is expected to continue to dwindle.

One Great Faith has risen from one eighth to one fifth of the globe in a hundred years, and is projected to rise to one quarter by 2050. Islam. But education and the vote have little to do with it. Generally impoverished and poorly educated, most Muslims live in nations where democracy is minimalist or absent. Nor are many infidels converting to Allah. Longman was correct on one point; Islam is growing because Muslims are literally having lots of unprotected sex. The absence of a grand revival of Christ, Allah and Vishnu worship via democratic free choice brings us to a point, as important as it is little appreciated — the chronic inability of religion to recruit new adherents on a consistent, global basis.

It is well documented that Christianity has withered dramatically in Europe, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Japan. The failure of the faith in the west is regularly denounced by Popes and Protestant leaders. Churches are being converted into libraries, laundromats and pubs. Those who disbelieve in deities typically make up large portions of the population, according to some surveys they make up the majority of citizens in Scandinavia, France and Japan. Evolution is accepted by the majority in all secular nations, up to four in five in some.

In his paper "Christianity in Britain, R. I. P." Steve Bruce explains that the recent rise of pagans is not nearly sufficiently to make up for the implosion of the churches, which are in danger of dwindling past the demographic and organizational point of no return. A commission of the Church of England agreed, proposing that little attended Sabbath services be dropped, and concluding that the advent of modern lifestyles "coincides with the demise of Christendom." The church commissioned Making Sense of Generation Y study advised the clergy to "avoid panic." Perhaps that response would be appropriate considering the absence of quantitative evidence of a significant Christian revival in any secularized democracy. God belief is not dead in these nonreligious democracies, but it is on life support. The ardent hopes of C. S. Lewis and John Paul II to reChristianize Europe have abjectly failed.

EuroMuslims may become a theological plurality by outnumbering active Christians in a few decades, but that does not mean much in the context of a shrinking Christian minority. In most western nations Muslims are less than one percent to under three. The only exceptions are the Netherlands at five percent, and France at ten, and the native French have the highest birth rate in western Europe.

The mass loss of popular faith in the Eurocultures is often waved away as an isolated aberration in a world still infatuated with the gods. After all, who cares what the "old Europe" of France and Sweden is up to? This is a big mistake. Such a thing has never been seen before in history. And where it has happened is critical to the future of faith. Aside from constituting proof of principle that religion is dangerously vulnerable to modernity, that secularism and disbelief do best in nations that are the most democratic, educated and prosperous directly falsifies the Shah and Toft thesis that these factors are the allies of religiosity.

But hasn't the loss of faith in old Europe been matched by a great revival in new Europe? In his account of his voyage along the Siberian Lena River, Jeffrey Taylor in River of No Reprieve observed that the locals remain atheistic, and the religious minority seems more nationalistic than devout. This premise is applicable to former KGV officer Putin's embrace of the Russian Orthodox church, which had tight connections with the Czarist secret police. Just a quarter of Russians absolutely believe in God, the portion who say that religion is important in their lives are down in the teens, and irreligion may be continuing to rise in very atheistic eastern Germany and the Czech Republic. Even in Poland, the one eastern bloc nation in which religion played an important role in overturning atheistic communism, just one third consider religion to be very important in their lives, and faith is declining towards the old European norm. It turns out that the "new" Europe is not turning out particularly godly.

The Central Kingdom has never been especially religious, became atheistic under communism, and is striving for world dominance via materialistic consumerism. The finding by the Shanghai university poll that religious Chinese lifted from 100 million in the 1960s to 300 million resulted in headlines along the lines of "Poll Finds Surge of Religion Among Chinese." But the 300 million figure is far below the 600 million religious estimated by the World Christian Encyclopedia, and is less than a third of the adult population. Nor should monotheists be particularly comforted. The survey uncovered 40 million Christians, about half the inflated estimate in the WCE, and just 4% of the adult population. Most religious Chinese are Buddhists and Taoists, or worship the likes of the God of Fortune, the Black Dragon and the Dragon King. By the way, The Economist says women are using religion as a way to battle traditional Chinese patriarchy. If the survey is correct that over two thirds of Chinese are not religious then they may approach a billion in China alone, expanding the global total even further.

Mass devotion remains strong in most of the 2nd and 3rd world, but even there there is theistic concern. South of our border a quarter to over half the population describe religion as only somewhat important in their lives. Rather than becoming more patriarchal as democracy and education expand, Mexico is liberalizing as progressive forces successfully push laws favoring abortion and gay rights to the vexation of the Roman and evangelical churches. There is even trouble for Islam in its own realm. A third of Turks think religion is not highly important in their lives, and Iranian urban youth have been highly secularized in reaction to the inept corruption of the Mullahs. In Asia 40% of the citizens of booming South Korea don't believe in God, and only a quarter (most evangelical Christians) identify themselves as strongly religious.

Doesn't America, the one western nation where two thirds absolutely believe in God, and nine in ten think there is some form of higher power, show that religion can thrive in an advanced democracy? Not necessarily.

A decade and a half of sampling finds conservative (thought to be about two thirds to four fifths of the total of) evangelicals and born-agains consistently stuck between a quarter and a third of the population. The majority that considers religion very important in their lives dropped from over two thirds in the 1960s to a bare majority in 1970s and 1980s, and appeared to edge up in the Clinton era. But instead of rising post 9/11 as many predicted, it is slipping again.

Those who feel the opposite about religion doubled between the 1960s and 1970s, have been fairly stable since then, but have been edging up in recent years. American opinion on the issue of human evolution from animals has been rock steady, about half agreeing, about half disagreeing, for a quarter century. What has changed is how people view the Bible. In the 1970s nearly four in ten took the testaments literally, just a little over one in ten thought it was a mixture of history, fables, and legends, a three to one ratio in favor of the Biblical view. Since then a persistent trend has seen literalism decline to between a quarter and a third of the population, and skeptics have doubled to nearly one in five. If the trend continues the fableists will equal and then surpass the literalists in a couple of decades.



Even the megachurch phenomenon is illusory. A spiritual cross of sports stadiums with theme parks, hi-tech churches are a desperate effort to pull in and satisfy a mass-media jaded audience for whom the old sit in the pews and listen to the standard sermon and sing some old time hymns does not cut it anymore. Rather than boosting church membership, megachurches are merely consolidating it.

From a high of three quarters of the population in the 1930s to 1960s, a gradual, persistent decline has set in, leaving some clerics distressed at the growing abandonment of small churches as the big ones gobble up what is left of the rest. Weekly religious service attendance rose only briefly in the months after 9/11—evidence that the event failed to stem national secularization – and then lost ground as the Catholic sex scandal damaged church credibility. As few as one in four or five Americans are actually in church on a typical Sunday, only a few percent of them in megachurches.

In his Foreign Affairs article Mead noted that conservative Southern Baptists constitute the largest church in the states, and they are among the most evangelical. Mead did not note that a Southern Baptist church release laments that "evangelistically, the denomination is on a path of slow but discernable deterioration." The greatest born again sect is baptizing members at the same absolute yearly rate as they did half a century ago, when the population was half as large, and in the last few years the overall trend has been downwards.

Rather than Amerofaith becoming deeply patriarchal as Longman thinks, it is increasingly feminine. Women church goers greatly outnumber men, who find church too dull. Here's the kicker. Children tend to pick up their beliefs from their fathers. So, despite a vibrant evangelical youth cohort, young Americans taken as a whole are the least religious and most culturally tolerant age group in the nation.

One group has experienced rapid growth. In the 1940s and 50s 1-2% usually responded no asked if they believe in God, up to 98% said yes. A Harris study specifically designed to arrive at the best current figure found that 9% do not believe in a creator, and 12% are not sure. The over tenfold expansion of Amerorationalism easily outpaces the Mormon and Pentecostal growth rates over the same half century.

America's disbelievers atheists now number 30 million, most well educated and higher income, and they far outnumber American Jews, Muslims and Mormons combined. There are many more disbelievers than Southern Baptists, and the god skeptics are getting more recruits than the evangelicals.

The rise of American rationalism is based on adult choice—secularists certainly not growing via rapid reproduction. The results can be seen on the bookshelves, as aggressively atheistic books such as Sam Harris' The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation, Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion, and Daniel C. Dennett's Breaking the Spell, break the mainstream publishing barrier onto the best-sellers lists. Long disparaged as neither moral or American, the growing community is beginning to assert itself as a socio-political force.


What is actually happening here and abroad is a great polarization as increasingly anxious and often desperate hard-core believers mount a vigorous counterrevolution via extreme levels of activism to the first emergence of mass apostasy in history. No major religion is expanding its share of the global population by conversion in any circumstances, much less educated democracy. Disbelief in the supernatural alone is able to achieve extraordinary rates of growth by voluntary conversion. Why?

It is to be expected that in 2nd and 3rd world nations where wealth is concentrated among an elite few and the masses are impoverished that the great majority cling to the reassurance of faith.

Nor is it all that surprising that faith has imploded in most of the west. Every single 1st world nation that is irreligious shares a set of distinctive attributes. These include handgun control, anti-corporal punishment and anti-bullying policies, rehabilitative rather than punitive incarceration, intensive sex education that emphasizes condom use, reduced socio-economic disparity via tax and welfare systems combined with comprehensive health care, increased leisure time that can be dedicated to family needs and stress reduction, and so forth.

As a result the great majority enjoy long, safe, comfortable, middle class lives that they can be confident will not be lost due to factors beyond their control. It is hard to lose one's middle class status in Europe, Canada and so forth, and modern medicine is always accessible regardless of income. Nor do these egalitarians culture emphasize the attainment of immense wealth and luxury, so most folks are reasonably satisfied with what they have got. Such circumstances dramatically reduces peoples' need to believe in supernatural forces that protect them from life's calamities, help them get what they don't have, or at least make up for them with the ultimate Club Med of heaven. One of us (Zuckerman) interviewed secular Europeans and verified that the process of secularization is casual; most hardly think about the issue of God, not finding the concept relevant to their contented lives.

The result is plain to see. Not a single advanced democracy that enjoys benign, progressive socio-economic conditions retains a high level of popular religiosity. They all go material.

It is the great anomaly, the United States, that has long perplexed sociologists. America has a large, well educated middle class that lives in comfort—so why do they still believe in a supernatural creator? Because they are afraid and insecure. Arbitrary dismissal from a long held job, loss of health insurance followed by an extended illness, excessive debt due to the struggle to live like the wealthy; before you know it a typical American family can find itself financially ruined. Overwhelming medical bills are a leading cause of bankruptcy.

In part to try to accumulate the wealth needed to try to prevent financial catastrophe, in part to compete in a culture of growing economic disparity with the super rich, the typical American is engaged in a Darwinian, keeping up with the Jones competition in which failure to perform to expectations further raises levels of psychological stress. It is not, therefore, surprising that most look to friendly forces from the beyond to protect them from the pitfalls of a risky American life, and if that fails compensate with a blissful eternal existence.

The effect can be more direct. For instance, the absence of universal health care encourages the utilization of faith-based medical charities. The latter, as well intentioned as they are, cannot provide the comprehensive health services that best suppress mortality at all ages. But charities extend the reach of the churches into the secular community, enhancing their ability to influence society and politics, and retain and recruit members.

Rather than religion being an integral part of the American character, the main reason the United States is the only prosperous democracy that retains a high level of religious belief and activity is because we have substandard socio-economic conditions and the highest level of disparity. The other factors widely thought to be driving forces behind mass faith—desire for the social links provided by churches, fear of societal amorality, fear of death, genetic predisposition towards religiosity, etc—are not critical simply because hundreds of millions have freely accepted being nonreligious mortals in a dozen and a half democracies. Such motives and factors can be operative only if socio-economic circumstances are sufficiently poor to sustain mass creationism and religion.

So much for the common belief that supernatural-based religiosity is the default mode inherent to the human condition. What about the hypothesis that has gained wide currency, that competition between the plethora of churches spawned by the separation of church and state is responsible for America's highly religious population? Australia and New Zealand copied the American separation between church and state in their constitutions, yet they are much more irreligious. Meanwhile the most religious advanced democracies in Europe are those where the Catholic church is, or was, dominant.

To put it starkly, the level of popular religion is not a spiritual matter, it is actually the result of social, political and especially economic conditions (please note we are discussing large scale, long term population trends, not individual cases). Mass rejection of the gods invariably blossoms in the context of the equally distributed prosperity and education found in almost all 1st world democracies. There are no exceptions on a national basis. That is why only disbelief has proven able to grow via democratic conversion in the benign environment of education and egalitarian prosperity. Mass faith prospers solely in the context of the comparatively primitive social, economic and educational disparities and poverty still characteristic of the 2nd and 3rd worlds and the US.

We can also explain why America is has become increasingly at odds with itself. On one hand the growing level of socio-economic disparity that is leaving an increasing portion of the population behind in the socially Darwinian rat-race is boosting levels of hard-line religiosity in the lower classes. On the other hand freedom from belief in the supernatural is rising among the growing segment that enjoys higher incomes and sophisticated education. Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, Ted Turner, Richard Branson and Rupert Murdoch are typical upper crust disbelievers.

The practical implications are equally breath taking. Every time a nation becomes truly advanced in terms of democratic, egalitarian education and prosperity it loses the faith. It's guaranteed. That is why perceptive theists are justifiably scared. In practical terms their only practical hope is for nations to continue to suffer from socio-economic disparity, poverty and maleducation. That strategy is, of course, neither credible nor desirable. And that is why the secular community should be more encouraged.


Skepticism of the transcendent has not swept the planet with the completeness expected by some in the 20th century. Doing so would have required the conversion to atheism of an unattainable 50 million people a year in a world where the great majority chronically lack the high level of science-oriented education, secure prosperity, and democracy that spontaneous disbelief depends upon. The expectation of global atheism was correspondingly naïve, and will remain so as billions live in, or fear living in, substandard conditions. Which should not comfort theists. Even so, theists are equally naïve when they dream that faith can retake the entire world.

Disbelief now rivals the great faiths in numbers and influence. Never before has religion faced such enormous levels of disbelief, or faced a hazard as powerful as that posed by modernity. How is organized religion going to regain the true, choice-based initiative when only one of them is growing, and it is doing so with reproductive activity rather than by convincing the masses to join in, when no major faith is proving able to grow as they break out of their ancestral lands via mass conversion, and when securely prosperous democracies appear immune to mass devotion? The religious industry simply lacks a reliable stratagem for defeating disbelief in the 21st century.

Even though liberal, pro-evolution religions are not at fault for unacceptable social policies, organized faith cannot reform itself by supporting successful secular social arrangements because these actions inadvertently suppress popular religiosity. They are caught in a classic Catch-22. And liberal churches are even less able to thrive in advanced democracies than are their more conservative counterparts, so if churches, temples and mosques become matriarchal by socio-politically liberalizing they risk secularizing themselves into further insignificance.

In Commonweal Peter Quinn contends that Stephen Gould, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett and Sam Harris have sanitized the social philosophy of Charles Darwin, which was not sufficiently kindly and tolerant to produce "the sole and true foundation for a humanistic society, free of the primitive and dangerous irrationality of religious belief."

Aside from the above nontheists never having promoted Darwin's personal world-view as the sole fountain of societal goodness, Quinn is making the even bigger mistake—the same mistake nearly everyone is making—of believing that the contest between popular faith and secularism is an epic struggle of ideas that then determines the quality of societies. But the level and nature of popular faith is really set by economic conditions, and only secular egalitarian prosperous democracies that reject extreme social Darwinism can produce the best practical conditions.

Assuming America continues to secularize towards the 1st world norm then what can we expect? The decline in faith-based conservative ideology is predicted to allow the country to adopt the progressive policies that have been proven to work in the rest of the west, and vice-versa. Even Wal-Mart has come out in favor of universal medical coverage as bottom-line busting health care expenditures compel the corporations to turn towards the system that has done so much harm to the churches of Europe. If and when religion declines in the states Darwin's science will automatically benefit enormously as it has in ungodly Europe, but Darwinistic social policies will not fare as well as they have in Christian America.

In the end what humanity chooses to believe will be more a matter of economics than of debate, deliberately considered choice, or reproduction. The more national societies that provide financial and physical security to the population, the fewer that will be religiously devout. The more that cannot provide their citizens with these high standards the more that will hope that supernatural forces will alleviate their anxieties. It is probable that there is little that can be done by either side to alter this fundamental pattern.
I suppose I shouldn't really care one way or the other about the growth of godlessness, but to me, it's a sign of overall progress and rationality. The myths and superstitions of ancient times are slowly, slowly dying. This despite the fact that religion will probably always be around in one form or another, and thus the religions that remain will be less dogmatic and at least quasi-rational relative to today's fundamentalisms.