The End of Christianity (38 page)

Most importantly, the confrontation between two paradigms is a clash of fundamental worldviews, worldviews that do not even contain the same premises or consider the same facts or, sometimes, even have the same standards for what a “fact” is in the first place. It is not always possible for holders of different paradigms to communicate, let alone to “settle” their differences. Rival paradigms not only cannot quite talk to each other but therefore
cannot quite argue with each other.
The different premises, practices, and key terms and concepts are often not intertranslatable or interintelligible. It is not even quite possible, or profitable, to debate between paradigms since their basic vocabulary, their basic premises, their basic concerns are not the same. What is true in one is false—or is irrelevant or does not exist at all—in the other, and what is proof or a valid method of argumentation is invalid or insignificant in the other.

Kuhn's discussion focuses exclusively on science and its various historical forms, but his ideas can and should be applied beyond specific scientific theories and beyond science itself. The differences between scientific theories notwithstanding, science as an enterprise falls within a general paradigm with two key premises, which we identified above as detectability and doubt. These two premises lead to a number of corollaries such as neutrality, regularity, equality and openness, causation, and tentativeness/skepticism. Whatever particular theory of the moment reigns, or whatever specialization of research is involved (chemistry, physics, psychology, etc.), science is always distinguished by this paradigm.

Other systems of thought operate with other paradigms. “Religion” is one such system of thought, and we can now reformulate our earlier discussion of religion in these terms. What Tylor called the minimal definition of religion (“the belief in spiritual beings”) or what Wallace called the supernatural premise (“souls, supernatural beings, and supernatural forces exist”) is the central premise of the religious paradigm, its sine qua non. Contemporary evolutionary psychologists and anthropologists from Horton to Guthrie to Boyer and Atran and Harvey and Kirkpatrick have refined this concept of spiritual beings to nonhuman/superhuman agency: religion is that worldview, that paradigm, which sees nonhuman/superhuman minds/wills/intentions at work and which “explains” events and legitimizes relations and institutions in terms of these beings and their wills.

As in the case of science, the central premise entails a number of subpremises. For religion, these include

• Authority: There must be some source for individuals’ “knowledge” of the putative spiritual beings, and members of the paradigm take tradition or scripture or whatever is offered by the religion as the basis for making these knowledge claims.

• Subjective experience: Contrary to science, which values reproducibility and the openness of knowledge, religion often stakes its claims on the unreproducible and unverifiable experiences of “adepts” who have access to knowledge that others do not. Even rank-and-file members advance their personal and interior experiences or “feelings” as evidence of and/or source of their beliefs.

• Miracles: While the term
miracle
has a specifically Judeo-Christian pedigree, all religions share the notion that the world is not entirely regular but that the putative spiritual beings may intervene in it at any time and change things—from one's health or wealth to the very laws of nature themselves.

• Participation: Religion does not encourage and often does not allow neutrality. One must take sides, one must commit oneself—often heart and soul—to a particular belief system. This typically forces one to make a choice in what is really a false dilemma (Pascal's “wager,” Kierkegaard's “leap of faith,” William James's “will to believe”) between the “true belief” and all other actual or potential beliefs.

• Faith: Accordingly, religion does not encourage and often does not allow questioning or skepticism. The truth is already known; only minor details are left to work out (like how many angels can dance on a pin, or the precise dimensions of heaven). Even if questions do arise, the member should hold tight and not let them change his/her mind. But questions for the most part should be avoided.

That this religious paradigm is intensely unscientific and antiscientific is self-evident. Some of its most ardent defenders have been crystal clear about it.

The early Church father Tertullian actually said that religion and reason, belief and investigation, “Jerusalem” and “Athens,” have nothing to do with each other: “After Jesus Christ we have no need of speculation, after the Gospel no need of research. When we come to believe, we have no desire to believe anything else; for we begin by believing that there is nothing else which we have to believe.”
³⁰
Protestant founder Martin Luther was an equally virulent opponent of the scientific paradigm, calling reason “the devil's bride,” a “beautiful whore,” and “God's worst enemy”: “There is on earth among all dangers no more dangerous thing than a richly endowed and adroit reason,” therefore “[r]eason must be deluded, blinded, and destroyed” and “faith must trample under foot all reason, sense, and understanding.”
³¹

It is also important to note that although religions all share the basic paradigm of animism or nonhuman intentionality, they vary extraordinarily in how they develop and what they add to this premise. Some religions populate the world with “nature spirits,” while others posit supernatural “forces” like chi or mana or karma. Most religions maintain that human beings themselves have one or more supernatural components.

And then there are the gods. Some religions have god-concepts (theisms) and some, like Buddhism and most tribal religions, do not (nontheisms or atheisms). Of the theisms, some have one god (monotheisms) and some have more than one god (polytheisms). Within theisms, some gods are believed to be all-powerful and all-benevolent, and some are not: some have specific and limited power (say, power over thunder or the oceans or war), and some are partially benevolent or capricious or indifferent or malevolent. Some are utterly distinct from humans, while others are close to humans or even former humans. There is no standard, universal conception of “god” across religions, and many religions function perfectly well without any such concept. In short, while all religions operate under a basic shared paradigm of nonhuman agency, within that paradigm are many subparadigms: the “nature spirit” subparadigm, the “ancestor spirit” subparadigm, the “impersonal religious force” subparadigm, and the “god” subparadigm. And within each subparadigm are sub-subparadigms: the god subparadigm contains the monotheistic sub-subparadigm and the polytheistic sub-subparadigm, and the monotheistic sub-subparadigm includes the Jewish and Christian and Muslim sub-sub-subparadigms, and the Christian sub-sub-subparadigm includes the Catholic and Protestant and Orthodox sub-sub-sub-subparadigms, ad infinitum.

The difference between the scientific paradigm and the religious paradigm could not be clearer or more urgent. Science does not and cannot operate on the premises of authority, subjective experience, miracles, participation, and faith; to allow such premises would stop science in its tracks. But most fundamentally of all, science does not allow the central premise of religion, the supernatural agency premise, and it
cannot
allow this premise; a
seriously held
notion of nonhuman/superhuman agency makes science
impossible
—indeed, it paralyzes all human knowledge. It has this unavoidable effect for three critical reasons. First, nonhuman/superhuman agents and their minds or wills or intentions are always arranged in practice so as to be impossible to detect in principal, and so they violate the first and most basic premise of science. Even religious believers admit that their alleged beings are inscrutable, “work in mysterious ways,” and are “unknowable.” The believers are correct: we cannot know if these beings are at work, what exactly they are working on, or even whether they exist. And every “evidence” of their existence or action can be explained—and can be explained better—in nonsupernatural ways.

Second, the entire project of science depends on the regularity and predictability of nature, and supernatural agency makes nature irregular and unpredictable. By definition, agency or will is not completely determined by preexisting conditions; agents are “free” to act according to their own interests or intentions. Therefore, we do not and cannot know what they will do. The exact same conditions can lead to completely opposite results if the agents so choose; there is no connection between causes and effects. This precludes the possibility of ever knowing with any degree of confidence what will happen next or what connects to what. Human knowledge is displaced by supernatural mind reading—literally, often trying to “divine” the thoughts and wishes of invisible and probably nonexistent beings.

Third, while modern religionists mostly try to deny it, the supernatural premise of spiritual agency actually does destroy the notion of cause. Science strives to explain facts and events in terms of cause, which means antecedent conditions: if X is true or occurs, then Y will be true or occur. But agents, including human agents, do not act just in terms of causes. They act in terms of
motives
; that is, their goals or purposes or ends, which are idiosyncratic and future-oriented. The motives of agents are fundamentally “teleological”: our “reason” for doing something is to achieve some objective that lies in the future. And since the future has not happened yet, any knowledge of it is prima facie impossible.

We can conclude, then, that the crucial and incontrovertible difference between science and religion—that which makes them incompatible at their core, even if they happen to agree on some details—is the basic premise from which each arises and therefore the “kind of answer” that each wants to offer. Religion functions on the
personal premise
that some or all facts and events are the results of the motives of (supernatural) agents. Science functions on the
impersonal premise
that facts and events are the effects of antecedent and nonagentive—and therefore
knowable
—causes. In other words, when science explains a hurricane in terms of temperatures and winds, and so forth, none of the components has any “will” or “purpose” or “intelligence.” They are completely determined by natural, nonpersonal factors. Even the sciences of man (sociology, anthropology) study a
detectable
agency that is in turn explainable causally (human desires have causes in biology and evolution, for example, and in detectable circumstances of their environment). When
religion
explains something, that “explanation” by definition depends in some way on an entity that has will or purpose or intelligence—sometimes an “ultimate” intelligence—which is fundamentally unknowable to us humans.

Of course, religion can always come along and add a personal and agentive layer to scientific explanations: “The tsunami was caused by an underwater earthquake,
and
it is the will of God for the purpose of punishing/ teaching/testing blah blah blah.” However, this extra explanatory layer is undetectable and untestable scientifically (which means “actually”), could refer to any god/spirit/supernatural force, and in the end explains nothing. Science does not need the religious “explanation,” and, if religion had any merit at all, religion would not need the scientific explanation. In a word, science has no obligation to be “compatible” with religion and could not care less about its “compatibility” with religion.

by Dr. Richard Carrier

T
he “argument from design” is said to help prove the Christian God exists. But Christianity is actually the least credible explanation of any apparent design in the universe. In fact, the evidence argues against there being any intelligent design of the universe at all. All the apparent design in life
presently
on earth has already been more adequately explained by natural selection than any theory of intelligent design. But even the
origin
of life and the supposed “fine-tuning” of the physical constants of the universe make little sense as the result of deliberate engineering but make perfect sense as the result of random accident. Likewise the human mind, the experience of beauty, or the intelligibility of the cosmos. This conclusion can actually be demonstrated with such logical certainty that Christianity is fully disconfirmed by the evidence of life and the universe.

TESTING CLAIMS WITH BAYES’ THEOREM

Bayes’ theorem is an argument in formal logic that derives the probability that a claim is true from certain other probabilities about that theory and the evidence.
¹
It's been formally proven, so no one who accepts its premises can rationally deny its conclusion. It has four premises, each one stating a probability that's conditional on our total background knowledge
b
(everything we know with reasonable certainty is true about history, science, and everything else):

P(
h|b
) = the prior probability that a given claim
h
is true

P(
~h|b
) = the prior probability that claim
h
is false

P(
e|h.b
) = the consequent probability of the evidence
e
if claim
h
is actually true

P(
e|~h.b
) = the consequent probability of the evidence
e
if claim
h
is actually false

This means we first ask what the probability is that our claim is true “before” we get to look at any of the specific evidence for it. That will be the prior probability. The other prior probability (of “not
h
”) is always the converse of that (e.g., if the prior probability of h is 25 percent, the prior probability of ~
h
is 75 percent). Then we look at the specific evidence for our claim, and there we ask how likely all that evidence would be if our claim really is true, and then we ask how likely it is that we'd still have all that evidence even if our claim is false. Once we have our answers, the conclusion necessarily follows according to a fixed formula.
²
That conclusion is then
by definition
the probability that our claim
h
is true given all our evidence
e
and all our background knowledge
b
. In other words, that's simply what the probability is that our claim is true.

Since that conclusion necessarily follows from the premises, we should aim at premises no one can rationally deny, as then no one can rationally deny the conclusion, either. For the following analysis I shall be relying on previous publications that deserve much of the credit.
³
I will present every argument in plain English but provide the mathematical proofs in associated endnotes (for those readers who are keen to check the math). I will first define the “God hypothesis” in Bayesian terms, then determine what its prior probability must be, then complete a Bayesian analysis for each of three kinds of alleged nonterrestrial intelligent design (or NID): current life, the origin of life, and the construction of the universe. Then I will analyze three lesser known examples of design sometimes touted: mind, beauty, and intelligibility.

DEFINING THE GOD HYPOTHESIS

First we must define the claim being tested: that NID exists. By “intelligent design,” I mean design that is not the product of blind natural processes (such as some combination of chance and necessity), and by “nonterrestrial,” I mean neither made by man (or woman) nor any other known life-form. For instance, a bird's nest exhibits intelligent design, but that's because birds have the rudimentary intelligence to build nests, and there isn't anything supernatural about that. And it's really the supernatural we're trying to find.

In fact I will assume, solely for the sake of argument, that the probability that God exists if NID exists is effectively 100 percent.
⁴
That's far higher than that actual probability could possibly be, because if we met with any strange artifact on another planet or really almost any other instance of NID, we would never conclude God made it but that some extraterrestrial intelligence had done so—which proves we all agree it's far more likely that any observed case of NID is a product of aliens than a god. Indeed, even if we narrow the reference class to things seemingly beyond a mere alien's abilities, that conclusion still follows. Designing life certainly isn't beyond such ability—we're well on our way to being able to do that ourselves, and we'll surely be doing it with consummate mastery within just a thousand more years of technological development. Yet any alien civilization selected at random will statistically be millions or billions of years more advanced than even that. We already can envision ways in which creating designer universes will enter the purview of such a species. By contrast, we have no comparable background knowledge establishing that gods are even as likely as aliens, much less
more
likely. So when I say “for the sake of argument” the probability that God exists if NID exists is 100 percent, please know I'm being absurdly generous to the God hypothesis.

NID and God are then fully interchangeable hypotheses if we delimit “God” to mean only “a very powerful self-existent being who creates things by design.”
⁵
Other gods are not relevant, since not being “designing” gods by definition, the prior probability that there would be NID given any of those gods is effectively zero; that is, the probability that a non-NID god would intelligently design life or the universe is zero because, by definition, such a god doesn't do that sort of thing. Conversely, the probability that a “designing” god exists but never intelligently designed anything is likewise virtually zero, since by definition that's also not how such a god behaves. Likewise, “gods” who aren't very powerful are out of account, since by definition they can't make universes or life; and designing “gods” who are not self-existent are basically extraterrestrials, not gods—and I just said I'm assuming no such beings will ever exist (even though I know full well that's not true). Hence, from now on I will often substitute God for NID and mean thereby “a very powerful self-existent being who creates things by design.”

THE PRIOR PROBABILITY OF
NONTERRESTRIAL INTELLIGENT DESIGN

What is the prior probability of NID? By definition, this must be the probability that such design would exist
before
we even get to look at any specific evidence for it. In other words, given all our background knowledge—everything we know with reasonable certainty about science and history and everything else—how likely is it that
anything
we point to is the product of NID?

Probability measures frequency (whether of things happening or of things being true). So we're really asking how
frequently
are things we point to (in all our background knowledge) the product of NID? Quite obviously, very infrequently indeed. In fact, so far, that frequency is exactly zero. And that's out of a vast number of things we've found exhibiting apparent design. That includes things made by people (trillions upon trillions of things), things made by animals (many trillions more), things made by other life-forms, like bacteria blindly following their genetic computer programs (those programs may be intelligently designed, but here I'm referring only to their behavior once they've come to exist, for example, bacteria exhibit intelligent behavior but are not themselves intelligent; and counting up everything like that, we're adding trillions upon trillions of more examples), and things made by blind physical processes, like crystallization or the forming of stars from collapsing dust clouds (processes that, again, may have been intelligently designed but are not themselves acting intelligently).

If we set aside all contested cases (and take them all out of
b
and put them in
e
, so we can deal with those later—which means any alleged design of the universe, the first life, or current life), what do we have left? Not a single case of NID. And countless billions and trillions of cases of
not
NID. It might have been different. We could have had by now a scientifically confirmed case of NID. Even lots of them. But so far science has failed to properly verify even one alleged case in the way that science has established as known facts such things as the laws of physics or the size and age of the universe. Thus, based on our background knowledge
alone
, in other words, before we consider
any
as-yet-only-alleged cases of NID, the frequency of NID is practically infinitesimal (if not, in fact, zero). This means its prior probability is vanishingly small, approaching zero.
⁶

This follows even if we narrow the reference class and discount all things intelligently designed but not a product of NID—which is proper, since no one believes life or the universe are intelligently designed by humans or animals or any known life-form, so we can limit our interest to things we're sure are
not
made by any already-known life-forms. But still we have trillions of cases of ~NID and no cases of NID. Likewise if we narrowed our reference class again to things that are especially complex, since even then we still have no confirmed instances of NID yet
many
confirmed instances of ~NID. And even if we narrowed it further to include only things with such highly specified complexity that we don't observe any instances at all (apart from those we're putting in
e
), we
still
don't have any established instances that are NID in
b
, and thus cannot get a higher prior for NID that way. In fact, if we narrowed our reference class to the point that the only instances to count are the cases we're putting in
e
, then we're begging the question (by assuming those instances are too improbable on any other account, which is actually what we are supposed to be proving in the first place).

It would be silly to narrow the reference class to such rare instances anyway, because by far most instances of intelligent design (such as by humans and animals) are not anywhere near that improbable as products of other causes,
apart from coincidences of correlation
, which is how we normally learn that intelligent agents exist and have acted in the world: the probability that observed correlations between human actions and their results are all the product of chance rather than design is absurdly small (hence, in those cases, the design hypothesis is the more probable, no matter how low its prior probability may have been). That's why we interpret such simple things as flipping a light switch or moving a cup as being the result of intelligent design even though such things can actually plausibly happen by accident. Hence it's precisely the fact that God never does things like that in our observation that makes positing God as a causal explanation of
other
things so implausible. An agent you never see acting is usually the
last
causal hypothesis you would ever consider for explaining anything. This reasoning is exactly what is being reflected in our calculation of prior probability from observed (non)instances of divine causation in the world.

To understand why this follows, imagine that we can reach into the set of all things in the universe that look designed (but were not made by humans or any other known life form) and pick one of them completely at random. We place it in front of you but behind a curtain so you don't yet get to see what it is. What probability would you say it has of being
demonstrably
a product of NID? We must say “demonstrably,” because this cannot be based on what you believe but only on what you know, and we're talking about established background
knowledge
here. You can't use fallaciously circular logic to declare “everything is a product of NID.” Rather, we must reason from only what you and I, and everyone else who's rational and sane, agree is an established fact. That's the
prior
probability that anything is a product of NID. Behind that curtain could be a rock, a star system, a river, a complex hydrocarbon molecule. Are any of those things already proven to be the products of NID? No. To the contrary, science can fully explain how they formed without any reference to NID. And we all know this. You could still say that, for example, the laws of physics that
caused
those things to form were a product of NID. But that has not yet been
demonstrated.
So we've put that in e. If we put it behind this curtain it would only be inconclusive, not a
known
instance of NID. So far, nothing is. You know full well no intelligent designer needs to put a rock together. He may have set up the rules, but once those rules are in place they put rocks together without any intelligence being involved.