And, in other news, we will not be abandoning this original address (http://camelswithhammers.com).  Soon the archives of old posts, except for Eric Steinhart’s, will be at the new site rather than here.  Soon clicking on all of the older posts (except Eric Steinhart’s, which will remain exclusively at this original Camels With Hammers) will automatically redirect clickers to their new home on the new site.

After that, this, the original Camels With Hammers will remain for exclusively philosophical blogging purposes.  This will become more of a professional philosophy blog and much less of an atheism activism blog.  This will be where I blog more technically rigorous material that may interest casual readers less but advanced philosophers more.  Eric and I still are interested in building this site into a blogging hub for non-theist philosophers.  Ideally we would like to make it a blog with a greater plurality of voices.  It will be less distinctively my personal blog where I write about whatever happens to interest me.

At the new Freethought Blogs Camels With Hammers, I will continue to do atheist activist blogging and continue to write the sorts of philosophical posts you have become accustomed to at Camels With Hammers wherein I attempt to be simultaneously philosophically rigorous and popularly accessible.    

The two versions of Camels With Hammers will not overlap.  They will become separate blogs with separate identities.  I will be the common unifier between them and they will both be blogs for non-theist philosophy.  I will likely draw attention to posts at the original Camels With Hammers on the new site but do not plan to cross post them in their entirety as PZ presently does.  So please add both sites to your RSS readers if you want to automatically keep up with everything I am blogging.  And do not be surprised or think this old site is dead if, at least in the short run, it is updated less frequently than it has been in the past.

As I move on to my new blogging home and begin to reconceive this old one, let me offer my enormous thanks to those of you who have regularly trekked to the outskirts of the internet to read what I have had to write and to offer your comments on it.  One thing about being a relatively low profile blogger that is surprisingly rewarding is finding how much the readers you have tell you about yourself.  You draw people who connect especially well with you in your unique style of thinking and writing and I have been extraordinarily proud to see what kinds of people with what kinds of thoughts have been especially drawn to this blog.  I have put in an enormous amount of time and energy into building this blog over the last two years and the consistent quality of Your Thoughts and the philosophical spirit in which they have been offered have always been the most rewarding pay offs and the motivation to continue.

So, thank you so much and please help me build the new site and, if you are up for it, help this old one find its new purpose.

With that, let me link you all to my first post at Freethought Blogs: http://freethoughtblogs.com/camelswithhammers/2011/08/22/hello-freethought-blogs/

Your Thoughts?

But before I can spell out Nietzsche’s constructive attitudes about how there can be true judgments in the realm of values and how we could create moralities of any value, we must make sense of what it is he means to tell us about himself and about morality when he refers to himself as an immoralist.  So that is what I want to begin to do with in this post.

In the preface to Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality, at the beginning of section 3, Nietzsche writes:

Hitherto, the subject reflected on least adequately has been good and evil: it was too dangerous a subject.  Conscience, reputation, Hell, sometimes even the police have permitted and continue to permit no impartiality; in the presence of morality, as in the face of any authority, one is not allowed to think, far less to express an opinion: here one has to–obey! As long as the world has existed no authority has yet been willing to let itself become the object of criticism. and to criticise morality itself, to regard morality as a problem, as problematic: what?  has that not been–is that not–immoral?

Nietzsche refers to morality here in the singular, as though it were simply one thing, even though he knows quite well that there are numerous moralities.  When talking thus about morality, i.e., as though it were a monolithic entity, I interpret him primarily as taking the stance of a dissident under the reign of a specific morality which wants to be, and is assumed by most to be, “morality itself”.  But Nietzsche does not think it is all that can or ought to be considered “morality”.  To this effect, he writes in Beyond Good and Evil, section 202:

Morality in Europe today is herd animal morality—in other words, as we understand it, merely one type of human morality beside which, before which, and after which many other types, above all higher moralities, are, or ought to be, possible.  But this morality resists such a “possibility,” such an “ought” with all its power: it says stubbornly and inexorably, “I am morality itself, and nothing besides is morality.”

So the idea that there is only one kind of morality or that a specific morality can be “morality itself” is actually false, according to Nietzsche.  It is also not the case that Nietzsche is against all moralities—he clearly makes the normative judgment that “higher moralities” ought to be possible.  This means that Nietzsche thinks they would be a good thing that should be brought about.  This argument about what to be can itself be taken as evidence that Nietzsche’s “immoralism” is not an abandonment of all normative or “moral” judgments.  What he is attacking is a specific kind of morality which like an authoritarian ruler insists on never being questioned but only obeyed, and insists upon being seen as “morality itself”.

So, in the original text we are considering (Daybreak 3) Nietzsche adopts the perspective of someone under this authoritarian morality’s rule and who is writing for readers who accept this morality’s rule as well, and he notes that according to the way this morality functions, all questioning and dissent are morally forbidden and, so, according to its standards genuine, critical reexamination of it is “immoral”.  So Nietzsche, in open defiance of such oppressive strictures on investigation and reevaluation, takes this label of “immoral” as a point of pride and provocation.   If questioning the dominant morality is immoral, he will be an immoralist.

In fact, Nietzsche does not think that that questioning received moral precepts is actually a “wrong” or “bad” thing.   He does not actually accept the full legitimacy of the morality which judges him “immoral” for questioning it.   So Nietzsche’s immoralism is not a call to do whatever one genuinely thinks is wrong or bad according to one’s own best reasoned moral judgments.  He is not saying, “Determine what you think is right or good and do the opposite!”  On the contrary, immoralism means being willing to be perceived as immoral for daring to challenge false, dominant moral norms and, therein, challenging the very assumption of those norms’ absolute authority.

Since people regularly conflate their particular moral judgments with morality itself, whenever one promotes an opposing value to one widely held to be moral, one risks being accused of attacking morality itself and the authority of all moral rules whatsoever.  One risks being accused of being an immoralist.  Nietzsche accepts the mantle as a challenging affront to the authoritarian character of morality which challenges its legitimacy.

Implicit in all of this, Nietzsche is targeting “morality” as a powerful institution, not merely as a conceptual ideal.  He thinks of morality as not the merely a referee in struggles for power but as a power player itself.  And specifically he thinks of morality as a tyrannical power which cowers people from challenging itself and which wrongly impresses upon people absolute prohibitions and absolute commands.

If other Enlightenment moral philosophers, like Kant, are correct and morality ideally should be based on autonomy and reason, then it is morally scandalous and the height of all hypocrisies to the extent that Nietzsche is correct and in actual practice moralities dominate individuals and cultures in ways that are heteronomous and which actively discourage vigorous moral questioning and openness to changes of values.

I think this is the core meaning of Nietzsche’s paradoxical charges that “Morality is just as ‘immoral’ as any other thing on earth” (The Will to Power 308) and that “morality is itself a form of immorality” (The Will to Power 308) and that “The victory of a moral ideal is achieved by the same ‘immoral’ means as every victory: force, lies, slander, injustice.” (The Will to Power 306).

Moralities as institutional powers can be critiqued for how they live up to moral ideals in their implementation.  Do moralities (or those actual people and institutions which enforce them) impose and leverage their authority through lies, bullying, or any other manners of coercive force?  Insofar as they do they are probably hypocritical on their own terms and they are definitely immoral on the terms of the Enlightenment autonomy-based morality which Nietzsche implicitly judges them against repeatedly throughout his writings.

There is more to say about the topics above.  In particular, I should note that in the above discussion, I realize did not actually address any of the texts where Nietzsche specifically uses the term “immoralist” or identifies himself directly as an immoralist or explicitly defines his usages of the term for himself.  Those texts will complicate the meaning of the term further and in future posts I hope to do justice to those complexities.

Your Thoughts?

After years of intense focus on both reading and doing Nietzsche scholarship, towards the end of my dissertation my focus shifted to reading and doing more work on moral philosophy. And in the last two years of blogging at Camels With Hammers my focus has been primarily on continuing to talk about moral philosophy and has expanded to also include a heavy influence on the philosophy of religion and of atheism. I have continued to read Nietzsche but have for the most part been disinclined to blog about him with any frequency, even though this site’s name is an allusion to his philosophy and even though his philosophy is my area of strongest technical expertise.

But last night I was overwhelmed with a strong sense of the potential value of regular blogging on Nietzsche. Nietzsche himself is, to my mind, the 19th Century equivalent of a blogger. Rather than writing traditional books with focused topics and chapter long arguments, Nietzsche wrote most of his books in the form of numerous, numbered, short, several hundred word essays on a variety of loosely-related topics. His sections are self-contained enough that they can often be read profitably in isolation from the larger books they appear in or even from the sections immediately preceding or following them. But for a true and rich understanding of any given section’s full and most nuanced meaning, it must ultimately must be contextualized within the voluminous totality of Nietzsche’s complete writings. The same goes for his short, sentence or two long, aphorisms (or, as they would be called today, his “tweets”.*)

What I want to do therefore is devote blog posts to specific sections of Nietzsche’s writing and both explicate what is going on in each section and give the context which comes from years of studying and systematizing Nietzsche. I want to develop my own reading of Nietzsche by exploring how sections I did not have room to cover in my dissertation exemplify the points I made there (which I will reiterate here for you, since, of course you have not read my dissertation). Along the way I will be leisurely building a fuller and more nuanced textual and philosophical case for my interpretation of both Nietzsche and the philosophical insights he offers which I think deserve a wider hearing. I will be addressing head-on texts where Nietzsche says things I disagree with philosophically and I will be defending my interpretations of Nietzsche in the contexts of texts that on the surface seem to refute me.

Most importantly, I will be mining a rich wealth of insights for both professional philosophers and lay people (especially atheists) alike. Nietzsche is in many ways an under-tapped resource for the atheist community—despite his ubiquitous cultural association with atheism. Unfortunately, he is a provocative writer who says many things which out of context can be exploited by the enemies of atheism (and at least a few things which even in context, we would do best to disassociate ourselves from). I appreciate many atheists’ wariness to be linked to him because of his potential for drawing counter-productive controversy or because they do not have an adequate background in his writings to make sense of what is really going on in his writings. I hope to use more of Camels With Hammers to give such atheists the necessary guidance to properly understand and debate Nietzsche’s ideas for themselves.

Nietzsche is not a prophet to be read as an unquestionable fount of divine revelation. I will often enthusiastically trumpet some things he says as exciting and deserving of influence. I will regularly try to soften some of his more excessive rhetorical blows so they don’t overshadow his more nuanced insights. I will frequently attempt to show the deeper harmonies between his ideas where others see only flat contradictions. And I will give more positive attention to the humane and constructive side to his discussions of morality than one often hears from those who focus only on his harshly negative side.

But for all this I am not arguing that he is inerrant or free of any contradictions whatsoever or that his ideas have authority to which any one must submit categorically, without reasoning for themselves. Sometimes I will encourage running far far away from a given idea he defends. And sometimes we will learn much more from the debate he inspires than from his actual position. And sometimes the dialectic of my defense of him and your vigorous rejection of him will be the most productive aspect of these posts.

Feel free to suggest sections from Nietzsche that you would like me to discuss. Sometimes I may focus on a particular series of sections from one work, other times I may post on several sections that tackle a common theme across different works, and other times I may just discuss something that randomly struck me as worth highlighting. There will be no programmatic approach to the reading and writing schedule. I will just write on one section (or series of sections or group of sections) at a time and over time a fuller and fuller sense of Nietzsche’s philosophy and its value will emerge.

Your Thoughts?

*Apologies to Eric Steinhart for the Nietzsche/Twitter observation.

This is probably a minority of Christians who are like this. A significant minority, mind you, not just some extreme fringe, but probably a minority nonetheless.

As to this not being inline with Jesus’ turn-the-other-cheek, man, that’s just for starters. I’m still baffled how these Prosperity Gospel people manage to avoid thinking about that whole thing about the camel and the eye of a needle. The Christian Religious Right in America holds pretty much the exact opposite philosophy as Jesus.

(Please note I am not one of these “Jesus was a great philosopher” atheists. Legitimate doubts about the historicity of Jesus aside, even the Jesus character in the gospels is a clear douchebag a lot of the time. Look no further than the story of the fig tree. Quick summary: Jesus sees a fig tree in the distance and decides he’s hungry. He gets there and there’s no fruit, so he’s all like, “What the fuck, fig tree?!?” And his apostles are like, “Uh, Jesus? Figs are out of season, yo.” So Jesus gets all pissed and he goes, “Ain’t no fucking fig tree gonna mess with THE JESUS,” and he curses the fig tree so that it will die and nothing will ever grow there again. WTF?!?!??)

‘Nuff Said.

Your Thoughts?

So you might wonder about the meaning of the term evolution.

Since the term evolution is abstract, it’s definition will be abstract: a process is evolutionary if and only if it increases complexity. Generally, this means that the complexity of the most complex things is increasing. Less complex things may still exist. This means that evolutionary processes build stratified layers of complexity – they build complexity hierarchies. Of course, the weight is now on the term complexity. And, fortunately, there are explicit ways to cash that out. Different types of evolution will obviously use different complexity metrics (and that, indeed, is exactly what makes them different types of evolution).

Within biological evolution, the arrow of complexity hypothesis states that: “the complex functional organization of the most complex products of open-ended evolutionary systems has a general tendency to increase with time.” (Bedau, 1998: 145) And biological evolution does support various arrows of complexity. You might say this is Kantian purposiveness without purpose. But it would be distracting to get into that. On to the metrics:

Bower says that the complexity of an organism is the number of distinct cell types it contains (1988: 101). He argues that evolution tends to increase the complexity of the most complex (species of) organisms. Adami et al. (2000) equate the complexity of organisms with the complexity of their genomes; they define the complexity of a genome to be the amount of information it encodes about the environment in which it has evolved. Generally speaking, this genomic complexity has always been steadily increasing.

Within chemistry, one might simply define the complexity of an element to be its number of protons. Within molecules, more structural definitions can be used. Over time, ever more complex elements have progressively appeared in our universe. Thus the complexity of the most complex elements has been increasing.

At the most general level, Chaisson says that the complexity of a system is “the rate at which free energy transits a complex system of given mass”; it is “the free energy rate density, alternatively called the specific free energy rate, expressed in units of energy per time per mass” (2001: 134). Chaisson shows – with impressive clarity – how the complexity of the most complex things have been steadily increasing.

Another way to look at physical complexity is to use Dennett’s levels (1991). He distinguishes between the physical, design, and intentional levels. The history of our universe started with just the physical level; design levels emerged (chemical and biological); and then intentional levels emerged (psychological, social). Dennett has also applies his levels to other types of universes like cellular automata. And, close to Dennett’s ideas, I’ll give a shout out to Jaker op Akkerhuis’s operator hierarchy (2008). (Though I admit I find Akkerhuis very hard to understand.)

One very general measure of complexity (and probably the best) is Bennett’s notion that complexity is logical depth (1988). The complexity of a structure is the amount of computational work required to generate the structure. This can be measured formally in terms of the run times of programs that generate the structures. For cosmological evolution, something like logical depth is a good measure. The process atheist says that cosmological evolution is increasing the logical depth of universes.

It’s interesting to note that logical depth maps very closely onto Leibniz’s notion of perfection. (And Leibniz, remarkably, even offered his analysis of perfection in terms of binary strings! I love Leibniz!) Leibniz offers a quantitative analysis of perfection: he says perfection is quantity of essence (1697: 86). Leibniz often says that perfection has two dimensions: it is a product of variety and order (Monadology, sec. 58; Theodicy, sec. 207; Discourse on Metaphysics sec. 6). Order is like algorithmic regularity and variety is like algorithmic randomness. Hence Leibniz’s concept of perfection is like logical depth.

Once we get out into the infinite, more powerful measures are needed. Kyburg (1961: 392-393) says that the complexity of a theory is measured by the number of quantifiers in the shortest version of the theory. Another and probably better approach is to use something like the Kleene-Mostowski hierarchy. Given any axiom system (any theory), expressed in the predicate calculus in prenex normal form, the complexity of the theory is the number of alternating blocks of the same type of quantifier. Thus the complexity of a universe is the complexity of the simplest theory of which the universe is a model. The process atheist says that this (or some similar) metric of complexity is steadily increasing as structures are produced one after another by metaphysical evolution.

Adami, C., Ofria, C. & Collier, T. (2000) Evolution of biological complexity. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 97 (9), 4463 – 4468.

Bedau, M. (1998) Philosophical content and method of artificial life. In T. Bynum & J. Moor (Eds.) (1998) The Digital Phoenix: How Computers are Changing Philosophy. Malden, MA: Basil Blackwell, 135-152.

Bennett, C. (1988) Logical depth and physical complexity. In Herken, R. (1988) The Universal Turing Machine: A Half-Century Survey. New York: Oxford University Press, 227-257.

Bower, J. (1988) The Evolution of Complexity by Means of Natural Selection. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Chaisson, E. (2001) Cosmic Evolution: The Rise of Complexity in Nature. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Dennett, D. (1991) Real patterns. Journal of Philosophy, 27-51.

Jagers op Akkerhuis, G. (2008) Analysing hierarchy in the organization of biological and physical systems. Biological Reviews 83, 1-12.

Kyburg, H. (1961) A modest proposal concerning simplicity. The Philosophical Review 70 (3), 390-395.

Leibniz, G. W. (1697/1988) On the ultimate origination of the universe. In P. Schrecker & A. Schrecker (1988) Leibniz: Monadology and Other Essays. New York: Macmillan Publishing, 84-94.

Process atheism is a positive and optimistic philosophy. One of the main points of process atheism is that many people would stop being theists if they could believe that atheism had something positive to offer. To many people, atheism just seems nasty and negative. But a process atheism sees value and meaning in evolution. Every type of evolution is an optimization algorithm of some type – it is an algorithm for hill-climbing in some landscape of possibilities.

There are many different types and levels of evolution. And there are all sorts of ways that evolution does a better job of answering questions once answered by God. Here are some informal presentations of a few types of evolution:

1. Biological Evolution – Theists say that God designed life on earth. Process atheists say, instead, that some sort of entirely Godless evolution by natural selection generated all life on earth. Of course, reality is much bigger and deeper than the biology of earth; and evolution by natural selection is not the only type of evolution. There are other types. And it’s worth noting that evolution by natural selection is far from simply being blind and purposeless. It’s climbing all sorts of ladders of value. It’s progressive in many different ways. It has produced all sorts of beautiful structures and systems. People who call themselves religious naturalists say they find deep emotional and aesthetic satisfaction in the evolution of life on earth. They regard it as a religiously meaningful process. And many of them are non-theists. Process atheists can agree with non-theistic religious naturalists.

2. Moral Evolution – Theists often say that morality depends on God. Or at least the objectivity of morality depends on God. Process atheists counter that evolution can explain not just the natural history of morality (e.g. through the evolution of altruism), but also the objectivity of morality. Writers like Cambpell, Collier & Stingl, and Harms have done interesting work on how evolution can make ethics objective.

3. Physical Evolution – Theists often point to God as the source of all the order and complexity within the universe. But process atheists disagree. Older writers like Herbert Spencer in the 19th century already argued that evolution (though not by natural selection) is the source of all order in the universe. More recent writers like Chaisson argue that evolution in a general sense is the source of all order and complexity in the universe. Biological evolution is just one type of this more general evolution. Here on earth, biological evolution is the result of the principles of self-organization in an open system far from thermal equilibrium. For Chaisson, very deep physical features of our universe entail that complexity tends to increase everywhere at all levels, at least for a very long time.

4. Cosmological Evolution – Theists often say that God is needed to explain the deep physical features of our universe. This is the theistic conclusion of the fine-tuning version of the design argument. And even if everything in our universe is evolving, theists say that it evolves because God designed it that way. But process atheists say that the deep features of our universe are themselves the products of evolution. Cosmologists like Smolin have developed various theories of cosmological evolution. Those theories do not involve natural selection. Process atheists can use those theories. And process atheists can find meaning and value in cosmological evolution. Cosmological evolution is sublime, awe-inspiring, and its mathematical depths are formally beautiful. It is progressive in many ways and climbs many ladders of value and significance.

5. Metaphysical Evolution – Theists often say that God is the ultimate explanation for everything. Even if evolution generates all the concrete contingent things, God answers all the ultimate questions. Why is there something rather than nothing? Theists say the answer is found in God. Process atheists reply that evolution provides better answers to ultimate questions. Although Leibniz was (or at least appeared to be) a theist, he sometimes gives surprisingly atheistic answers to ultimate questions. His theory of the striving possibles can be interpreted as an atheistic and purely evolutionary explanation for why there are any concrete contingent things rather than none, and for why the system of concrete universes is the way it is. These ideas are sometimes taken up in the work of axiarchists like John Leslie and Nicholas Rescher. Process atheists can work out evolutionary metaphysics similar to these Leibnizian or axiarchic theories.

At the deepest level, a process atheist might say that the totality of concrete contingent things is generated by evolution by rational selection. Purely logical principles like the principle of sufficient reason and the principle of plenitude drive evolution by rational selection. Process atheists can find the deepest meanings and values in metaphysical evolution. It is ultimate, necessary, eternal, and infinite. It is the ground of all concreteness. It is rational and mathematically beautiful. It may even be possible to use evolution by rational selection to derive a soteriology – even a theory of life after death. If so, then evolution can serve as a better foundation for hope than theism. It can be more emotionally satisfying.

Obviously, I’ve only provided a very superficial outline of process atheism here. Every point I’ve made can be rigorously developed and defended (with as much academic precision as you want). My main point is that process atheism is a positive and optimistic atheistic philosophy.

Campbell, R. (1996) Can biology make ethics objective? Biology and Philosophy 11, 21-31.

Chaisson, E. (2001) Cosmic Evolution: The Rise of Complexity in Nature. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Collier, J. & Stingl, M. (1993) Evolutionary naturalism and the objectivity of morality. Biology and Philosophy 8, 43-50.

Harms, W. (2000) Adaptation and moral realism. Biology and Philosophy 15, 699-712.

Leibniz, G. W. (1697/1988) On the ultimate origination of the universe. In P. Schrecker & A. Schrecker (1988) Leibniz: Monadology and Other Essays. New York: Macmillan Publishing, 84-94.

Leslie, J. (1970) The theory that the world exists because it should. American Philosophical Quarterly 7 (4), 286-298.

Leslie, J. (1989) Universes. New York: Routledge.

Leslie, J. (2001) Infinite Minds: A Philosophical Cosmology. New York: Oxford.

Leslie, J. (2007) Immortality Defended. Malden, MA: Blackwell.

Rescher, N. (1984) The Riddle of Existence: An Essay in Idealistic Metaphysics. New York: University Press of America.

Rescher, N. (2000) Optimalism and axiological metaphysics. The Review of Metaphysics 53 (4), 807-835.

Smolin, L. (1992) Did the universe evolve? Classical and Quantum Gravity 9, 173-191.

Smolin, L. (1997) The Life of the Cosmos. New York: Oxford University Press.

Spencer, H. (1862) First Principles. London: Williams & Norgate.

In this post, I am going to explain why I don’t think we should model our primary identification on any positive metaphysical position, but rather should stake our ground on epistemology and methodology instead.

Christians identify themselves based on an allegiance to Jesus Christ. First and foremost they communicate “I am a follower of Jesus Christ”. When pressed for explanation of what this means the traditional response is to identify with the sorts of doctrines one finds in the Apostle’s Creed.

For many devout Christians these beliefs are primary and no other beliefs can be accepted which undermine these ones. And while many Christians will try their best to reconcile apparently contradicting scientific, logical, philosophical, historical and common sense truths with their Creed, there are infamous problems that they have doing so. And this leads to the numerous embarrassments Christianity has suffered from Christians who cannot cope with science or its metaphysical implications.

My concern is that, given the nature of the human mind, putting any particular belief as one’s intellectual bedrock and key identifier of one’s position in the conflict of ideas and practices risks this same problem. If people begin identifying themselves as first and foremost “evolvers” or “evolutionists” (rather than just as skeptics or atheists, etc.), then this positive position becomes paramount to them and an attack on it risks being taken as an attack on their very identity, just the way attacks on many religious people’s belief in God is wrongly taken by them as offenses against them themselves as persons.

This is the danger of tagging yourself with a specific idea—especially in the arena of religion. And when you start saying things like that evolution can do a better job of solving every problem God has previously been thought to solve, then you set up your evolutionary metaphysics as a competitor religion. Already atheism, which is, strictly speaking just the negation of theism, is tagged by many lazy dualistic taxonomers as a religion simply because it addresses the question of gods and the question of gods is treated as primarily a religious (and not a philosophical) question in the public mind.

The crude classifiers think “well everyone must have a religion” or “something fulfills religious functions for everyone” or “everyone has a god, even if it’s only their own reason”, etc. and on such grounds just insist on exposing atheists as having a religion after all no matter what we do or say. Do we have prominent figures in our movement? They must be the atheists’ priests! Do we have any firm epistemological, metaphysical, or moral commitments? Those must be the atheists’ dogmas! This is even the case while atheists are typically a group suspicious of, and hostile to, metaphysics and all broad, speculative claims that do not have scientific backing. Were atheists to call themselves “evolvers” and back a robust speculative metaphysics, there is no doubt in my mind that the lazy would immediately tag this as being just like faith-based reasoning no matter how much we protested to the contrary.

And, worse, if we saw ourselves and defined ourselves by our belief in metaphysical evolution first and foremost, we would be more likely to start to treat it as rigid dogma as the religious tend to do. We would be more likely to have implicit faith, the unwillingness to reconsider and explore new evidence against our current metaphysics.

In a way, this is a potential danger even with atheism itself–that identifying with disbelief in gods could become so important that we become hostile to any legitimate evidence for gods. This is a potential hazard of any believing or disbelieving.

So, given all of this, I think the best ground to stand on is epistemology. When asked “what are you?” our answer should be along the lines of “freethinker”. This has an unfortunately presumptuous sounding connotation of course, in that it can sound self-congratulatory, like you’re saying you are freer thinking than others. You had might as well go the whole arrogant nine yards and call yourself “The Correct Ones”.

But that’s not what “Freethinker” really means. It does not mean the presumption of superiority, but it means the acknowledgment of no arbitrary authorities in thought. Freethinkers, in principle, stand for free thought and against the right of anyone to demand assent to propositions by faith alone. The key contrast with the faith-based is that they acknowledge a legitimacy to surrendering one’s belief to priests, prophets, institutions, dogmas, and holy books even when no appeal to common sense or rigorous philosophy or science is given.

Self-professed “Freethinkers” should not be heard as congratulating themselves on thinking better than anyone else, but rather as those committed to the principle that everyone is entitled to, and responsible to demand, sufficient reasons for believing anything they are asked to assent to.

Allegiance to this principle of free thought is what should mark us as distinct from the faith-based as our key, anti-faith, anti-authoritarian principle. And free thought can stand for thought free of all prejudicial encumberances that stand in the way of true knowledge. It is an embrace of the scientific method, of philosophical rigor, of logical rigor, and of all that we have learned in the past several hundred years about how to identify and overcome bad forms of reasoning and replace them with more truth-conducive ones.

This should be our rallying point because today’s best metaphysics might tomorrow be refuted. Even today’s best science could see an earth shattering paradigm shift. People’s identities should not be bound up with any doctrine since that makes it harder for them to change their minds and abandon it when such a cataclysmic change happens. They should think of themselves first and foremost as those who oppose prejudice and willful belief of what is unsupported or undermined by evidence. The more obedience to this principle is the only thing they anchor themselves by, the more likely they are to be properly flexible when understanding progresses.

Plato and Aristotle were wonderful metaphysicians and the Catholic Church was to be commended for learning a great deal from them. But the Church’s dogmatic elevation of ideas from their metaphysics into non-negotiable absolutes has a once vibrant and progressive intellectual tradition lumbering stagnantly and regressively into the 21st Century.

Eric is right that atheists should give much much more rigorous and open-minded accounts of metaphysics than at present. But we should only believe them with as much conviction as their rational strength warrants. And before we bring up our metaphysics, we should be wary of giving the impression that we are saying, “oh I have heard your faith-based gobbledygook which I’m free to ignore and now here’s my faith-based gobbledygook which you are free to ignore too” (which is what too many people hear when metaphysics, especially related to religion, is raised).

So, instead we should stress our epistemic standards, stress their proven viability in practice, and then, when pushed for how we might answer metaphysical answers say (in so many words), “Well, these are the best alternatives there are and here is why they are better than theistic alternatives, and here is me stressing that I am only going to assent to the best alternative to the extent to which it is likely to be true.”

Finally, this prioritizing of free (and rigorously critical and skeptical) thinking is not another kind of faith as might be ironically charged. Placing skepticism as the priority is not some overestimation of the mind’s ability to refute every false doctrine or to know that every metaphysical doctrine is false, or anything like that. Cautious skepticism and slow willingness to assent to propositions until their evidence has been adequately established is not a statement that everything not assented to is false. Rather it is a recognition of the limits of the human mind to know and a painstaking curb on the temptations of the human mind to presume too much too impetuously and to believe by faith.

Skepticism is the antidote to the poison of faith, not itself another faith.

Lastly, why do I identify primarily as an atheist, despite having made the passionate case for “freethinker”. Well, it is factually true I am an atheist and it is in accepted parlance the scandalous word that signifies rejection of submission to all faith-based authorities more boldly and defiantly than any other and draws the line in the sand against theists in particular, in a way “freethinker” does not quite manage.

And given the current state of things, that confrontational stance is where the action is. It’s where the principled stand I want to make against faith is best understood.

Within many familiar systems, loveliness is very very rare. It’s very rare within the models of simple physical theories and even more rare within the models of complex physical theories (e.g. the solutions to the equations of string theory). This can be illustrated with the cellular automaton known as the game of life. You can read lots about the game of life on the web. I’ll just give a very quick presentation of the relevant points.

The game of life is played on a grid composed of square cells, like a chessboard. A clock is ticking (all cells can hear it). A cell is either ON or OFF (alternatively, LIVE or DEAD, or 1 and 0). Cells blink ON and OFF like lightbulbs, according to a rule each cell computes every time the clock ticks: (1) a cell counts its ON neighbors; (2) if it is ON and has 2 or 3 ON neighbors, then it stays ON, else it turns OFF; if it is OFF and has 3 ON neighbors, then it turns ON, else it stays OFF.

The figure below illustrates how cells change according to the life rule.

The game of life supports regular patterns, such as the glider, which appears to move across the space of the life grid. The glider is shown below.

It’s even possible to construct universal Turing machines and self-reproducing patterns in the game of life. But the game of life is rare within the class of similar cellular automata.

The rule for the game of life can be expressed in a small table. The table is shown in the figure below.

Since there are 16 slots in this table, and each can take the value 0 or 1, there are 2^16 different variants of the game of life. That’s 65536 variants. These are all the possible classes of life-like universes. Some of these variants are shown below.

Out of these, very few support any physical content at all. Perhaps a dozen or so support moving patterns. And only one is known to support patterns that compute and that reproduce (namely, the game of life itself). Within an extremely large number of physical systems, or purely mathematical systems, loveliness is vanishingly rare. Hence, that any actual universe is lovely, when almost all possible universes are not, is extremely surprising.

To say a fact is “surprising’ is far from merely subjective. Surprising facts almost always carry information. That’s because carrying information is itself a lovely feature. And that’s why our brains are highly sensitive to loveliness: when, out of the endless background of noise, you are given a signal carrying information, you’d better pay attention. It’s a good rule to follow in any uncertain environment.

Part of this discussion meant pointing out that many things now associated with religion can be salvaged for good if only they stop being poisoned by faith.  Geoff though wants to know why I don’t make any room for salvaging faith itself also:

I have to admit that I didn’t get through the entire piece. A former Baptist
churchgoer in my youth, I witnessed the pitfalls of faith-based devotion to
antiquated morals first-hand (and I continue to note their prevalence today). The arguments you pose seemed, in part, a reiteration of things I’ve
understood–if not expressly stated–so I found myself longing for some counter argument FOR faith.

I’ve since done away with religion, but I, like you, believe that there are
undeniably positive things about it; faith, in my opinion, being one of them.
To this day, I credit my experience in Christianity for instilling a faithful,
optimistic quality to my life. I glanced through the titles to your series on
‘Disambiguating Faith’ hoping to find a more optimistic view of faith–maybe one that explains how it can be valuable to those without religion, rather than all the ones that seem to demonstrate how damaging it is to religion.

One thing to clarify about my Disambiguating Faith series is that if you read through the titles, you will see that I defend the value of many things people call faith. To repeat, with links to articles distinguishing things confused for faith from faith, a list I gave in the following post: I talk about the proper understanding of the value of “rationally justified confidence, proper trust, proper loyalty, holding probable beliefs which nonetheless have some uncertainty, educated guessing, gut feelings, epiphanies,  brainstorming, hypothesizing, counter-intuitive reasoning, [and] trusting one’s subconsciously formed intuitions“.

I also could add that self-confidence and optimism or a number of other good things that people regularly call faith are great things worth encouraging.

The key issue to me is that none of these things are good when having them involves a will to believe what one perceives to be undersupported or outright undermined by evidence.  This is the distinct thing that faith demarcates that is not covered by the other good words for good things.  I would never suggest anyone should abandon all those other good things.

What I am trying to make clear in post after post is

(1) that when those other good things are mixed up with willfully believing more strongly than the evidence warrants or believing against what the evidence indicates, then those otherwise things are corrupted

(2) just because these other good things are sometimes called faith, we cannot let people equivocate and have us think that therefore willfully believing more strongly than evidence warrants or willfully believing despite refutation are themselves acceptable (either rationally or ethically)

In other words, if the word faith is allowed to ambiguously cover all the good things I listed above (and more) then that hides the morally and rationally crucial distinction.  If the same word is used for the good and for the bad, then people are not adequately instructed about the clearly isolatable vice of faith and so they can confuse instances of the vice faith for just more instances of the virtuous things (wrongly and misleadingly) also referred to as faith.

I want to make clear, the target “faith” is not any of those good things, it is this specific bad thing.  Others want to keep things ambiguous and say, “well if you want optimism, beliefs which are only probable, loyalty, trust, deference to experts, then you have to accept that faith is legitimate and that means accepting that it is good to have beliefs stronger than evidence warrants or beliefs which disregard counter-evidence”.

I want to say “No, I can have all those good things and still reject willful belief that disregards evidence because those good things, properly understood and practiced, are completely separable and distinguishable from that kind of faith-based believing.”  And the most decisive way to send that message that is to clearly as possible specify that faith is a word only for this specific intellectual and moral vice and not a word for the various intellectual and moral virtues which it is misleadingly lumped in with.

All that said, I do think there is at least one exception to my ban on faith (defined as I define it.  You can read about that in this post: “Disambiguating Faith: Faith As Admirable Infinite Commitment For Finite Reasons”.

Your Thoughts?

———-

For more on faith, read any post in my “Disambiguating Faith” series.  It is unnecessary to read all its posts to understand any given one.

Trustworthiness, Loyalty, And Honesty

Faith As Loyally Trusting Those Insufficiently Proven To Be Trustworthy

Faith As Tradition

Blind Faith: How Faith Traditions Turn Trust Without Warrant Into A Test Of Loyalty

The Threatening Abomination Of The Faithless

Rational Beliefs, Rational Actions, And When It Is Rational To Act On What You Don’t Think Is True

Faith As Guessing

Are True Gut Feelings And Epiphanies Beliefs Justified By Faith?

Faith Is Neither Brainstorming, Hypothesizing, Nor Simply Reasoning Counter-Intuitively

Faith In The Sub-, Pre-, Or Un-conscious

Can Rationality Overcome Faith?

Faith As A Form Of Rationalization Unique To Religion

Faith As Deliberate Commitment To Rationalization

Heart Over Reason

Faith As Corruption Of Children’s Intellectual Judgment

Faith As Subjectivity Which Claims Objectivity

Faith Is Preconditioned By Doubt, But Precludes Serious Doubting

Soul Searching With Clergy Guy

Faith As Admirable Infinite Commitment For Finite Reasons

Maximal Self-Realization In Self-Obliteration: The Existential Paradox of Heroic Self-Sacrifice

How A Lack Of Belief In God May Differ From Various Kinds Of Beliefs That Gods Do Not Exist

Why Faith Is Unethical (Or “In Defense Of The Ethical Obligation To Always Proportion Belief To Evidence”

Not All Beliefs Held Without Certainty Are Faith Beliefs

Defending My Definition Of Faith As “Belief Or Trust Beyond Rational Warrant”

Implicit Faith

Agnostics Or Apistics?

The Evidence-Impervious Agnostic Theists

Faith Which Exploits Infinitesimal Probabilities As Openings For Strong Affirmations

Why You Cannot Prove Inductive Reasoning Is Faith-Based Reasoning But Instead Only Assert That By Faith

How Just Opposing Faith, In Principle, Means You Actually Don’t Have Faith, In Practice

Naturalism, Materialism, Empiricism, And Wrong, Weak, And Unsupported Beliefs Are All Not Necessarily Faith Positions

How Faith Poisons Religion

Disambiguating Faith: How Religious Beliefs Become Specifically *Faith* Beliefs

Your Thoughts?

In this way faith is essentially a matter of will and not just belief.  Simply having a belief that is unsupported or undermined by evidence is insufficient to have a faith belief—you have to perceive that your belief is unsupported or undermined by evidence first and then defiantly choose to believe anyway.  This also means that there could be some beliefs that are supported by evidence but a given believer does not know that and, despite thinking that the belief is unsupported by evidence, chooses to believe anyway.  In this case, someone could hold a belief by faith even though it is actually unnecessary to do so since the belief is evidentially supported.  If it is blameworthy to believe without perceiving that there is appropriate evidence for your belief (as I argue it usually is), such a person’s believing would be culpable even though the belief is warranted by evidence she does not know about (or does not properly weigh).

Some interesting things follow from this.  Even though religious people the world over, throughout time, have believed many strange things which seem to modern minds utterly refuted by evidence, they have not necessarily had faith in all these strange things.  Quite often they may have (and may still) perceive themselves to be responding to evidence.  Their standards of evidence and their various metaphysical, epistemological, scientific, etc. assumptions may be totally erroneous.  But this is due to an inadequacy of critical thinking skills and/or a lack of information, and not due to a contemptuous disregard for critical thought and subordination of reason to willfullness, like faith is.

It is rationally justifiable and appropriate for children to accept the word of their elders in a great many matters.  Their default assumption has to be that unless they have reasons to doubt what they are told, that it is likely to be true since they do not themselves have the wherewithal to investigate every piece of information for themselves and they have an immense amount of information to assimilate as fast as they can.  Children are rationally justified in considering their parents and teachers trustworthy guides until they give signs of untrustworthiness in specific areas.  When children accept the metaphysical, ethical, and scientific guidance of their parents they are justified even if what their parents and teachers are saying is false.  This is not faith as the children are not making any willful choice to reject evidence in principle but rather a justified deference to those more expert than they are.

During this period, rather than train children in the rigorous standards of critical thought which have made the modern revolution in knowledge possible, many religious people train their children to reinforce their worst, natural, human cognitive biases where it suits their religion.  Many children are trained to adopt the vice of faith in this way.  But this is a distinct issue from their default trust in their parents’ teachings about how the world works, which is rationally justified for them even if it means some of their beliefs are false.  Sometimes we can be rationally justified in believing what it is impossible for us to know, given our situation, is false.  We don’t actually have knowledge in such a situation, but we are at least blameless for our error.

So, in this context, we can understand how someone can mature into an adult with many false beliefs that, while not knowledge, were nonetheless formed through a rationally justified process of trusting the best authorities available to oneself.  From our parents and teachers we learn a wealth of true things and so we are justified in our trust even though we will inevitably pick up some false ones.

Now in my experience, many religious people hold many of their religious beliefs as though they were matters of knowledge (or high likelihood of knowledge) because (a) they do not have proper training in critical thinking skills to assess them philosophically, logically, or scientifically, or through other appropriate methods and/or (b) they have not been adequately exposed to the arguments for alternative possible beliefs to the ones they trustingly learned from their parents.

So such people may not actually hold many of their religious speculations directly by faith, i.e., by a choice to believe what is unsupported by evidence and even undermined by evidence.  Such people are just implicitly accepting the passed on beliefs of their religion as automatically as they accept all the other beliefs that came from their parents and teachers and tradition, etc.

Before specific, effective intellectual challenges to their beliefs arise, where their faith is really located is in a disposition to retain their religious beliefs (if not many others) even if they are undermined by future evidence.  So, whereas the average religious believer, prior to serious exposure to devastating arguments, believes that God is a likely true entity and also believes that water is comprised of two hydrogen elements and one oxygen element, and believes that both these perceived truths are trustworthy, she is ready to abandon the theory of the composition of water if scientists change their teaching but she has been trained in advance to affirm the God belief even if she should encounter an intellectual challenge.

Many religious believers do implicitly think belief in God is the most rational metaphysical explanation of the universe, especially before they encounter vigorous challenge to that assumption.  They do not really think they are being especially defiant of evidence.  Yet their belief that faith is a virtue disposes them to defy the evidence should a strong argument be made against their belief just the way that I may have a belief in, and general disposition towards, the virtue of courage though usually I have no need for it.  For many religious believers, even though they believe many strange things, they do not actively do so as matters of defiance of evidence until the case against their strange beliefs is made and then they activate their vice of faith, thinking it is a virtue.

And this is what is so insidious about faith.  One begins a debate with a religious believer who, despite the strangeness of what he thinks to outsiders, finds his beliefs entirely sensible given the inculcation in him of a certain intricately interconnected and seemingly coherent view of metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, science, history etc. all together from a young age by the same people who taught him innumerable reliable, proven, practical things as well.  One then brings to light for this religious believer all the inconsistencies internal to the believer’s religious system of thought and all the inconsistencies between the religious system and what is known about history and science and morality and metaphysics, etc.  One creates in the religious believer cognitive dissonance and the room for doubt.  One clarifies the rules of logic and the scientific and philosophical methods and attitudes and standards of evidence which have separated the modern era from areas of such slower intellectual progress.  And this sensible person who believes in their religion because it made sense to them has a choice: engage in a process of correcting for all these inconsistencies by abandoning the received religious beliefs as erroneous or cling to those beliefs while admitting they are unfounded or undermined by the evidence.

Some religious believers will still insist they have the most rational account, of course.  I was this kind of religious believer for most of my religious life.  In retrospect, I relatively rarely had faith except for one period where I sort of did—but that’s a story for another time.  But such believers who will make modifications to their beliefs about metaphysics, science, history, ethics, etc. in order to keep their religious beliefs both internally consistent and consistent with their beliefs in non-religion specific matters, to some extent are avoiding deliberately having faith.  Sometimes they become rationalizers who distort their views on a host of issues just to keep their religious beliefs logically consistent with the rest of their thought and avoid cognitive dissonance.

And other times these religious believers wind up with religious beliefs that are more modified and compatible with the rest of what they know to be true.  Oftentimes they are still unaware of further serious problems that would cause further need to adapt.  But while ignorant of those further challenges, they still are not resorting to faith.

And of course, some of these religious believers who modify some beliefs to avoid cognitive dissonance will feel like faithfulness to their religion requires biting the bullet on some issues and adopting an explicitly faith-based, willful defiance of evidence on those select issues rather than all of them.

And some believers are so intractable that they give little or no ground whatsoever and just embrace the “nuclear” (faith) option fullthroatedly.   Sometimes, such people even become outright misologists who fear and distrust reason itself.

This account, I think, explains in part why many religious believers start out thinking their beliefs completely sensible, even obviously true, and yet within the space of even a relatively short debate will wind up switching gears drastically and saying things like “but that’s why you need faith!”  They often shift from thinking what they have to say should be totally comprehensible and persuasive to conceding that of course there are no good reasons for their positions but of course that’s not a reason to abandon them.

That, I think, is because they initially overestimate the justification for their beliefs and faith is the fail safe built in by religion to protect the strangeness of their beliefs when it is finally exposed to them.  It kicks in as a “get out of cognitive dissonance free” card.

This allows religious people to convince themselves they are perfectly reasonable people who have no problem with evidence and whose religious beliefs are of course sensible (and at least likely true if not provable), even though in sudden emergencies they will become explicit enemies of evidence and reason on a dime.

And this should offer a little more insight into how faith is the poison that paralyzes religions and religious people from abandoning false beliefs and improving their practices, and, thus, why it is what is really wrong with religion and what stands in the way of truer religion (i.e. religions which are based on and reinforce truth, rather than passionately preserve and perpetuate the ossified errors of our superstitious, scientifically ignorant, and morally barbaric ancestors).

Your Thoughts?

———

For more on faith, read any post in my “Disambiguating Faith” series.  It is unnecessary to read all its posts to understand any given one.

Trustworthiness, Loyalty, And Honesty

Faith As Loyally Trusting Those Insufficiently Proven To Be Trustworthy

Faith As Tradition

Blind Faith: How Faith Traditions Turn Trust Without Warrant Into A Test Of Loyalty

The Threatening Abomination Of The Faithless

Rational Beliefs, Rational Actions, And When It Is Rational To Act On What You Don’t Think Is True

Faith As Guessing

Are True Gut Feelings And Epiphanies Beliefs Justified By Faith?

Faith Is Neither Brainstorming, Hypothesizing, Nor Simply Reasoning Counter-Intuitively

Faith In The Sub-, Pre-, Or Un-conscious

Can Rationality Overcome Faith?

Faith As A Form Of Rationalization Unique To Religion

Faith As Deliberate Commitment To Rationalization

Heart Over Reason

Faith As Corruption Of Children’s Intellectual Judgment

Faith As Subjectivity Which Claims Objectivity

Faith Is Preconditioned By Doubt, But Precludes Serious Doubting

Soul Searching With Clergy Guy

Faith As Admirable Infinite Commitment For Finite Reasons

Maximal Self-Realization In Self-Obliteration: The Existential Paradox of Heroic Self-Sacrifice

How A Lack Of Belief In God May Differ From Various Kinds Of Beliefs That Gods Do Not Exist

Why Faith Is Unethical (Or “In Defense Of The Ethical Obligation To Always Proportion Belief To Evidence”

Not All Beliefs Held Without Certainty Are Faith Beliefs

Defending My Definition Of Faith As “Belief Or Trust Beyond Rational Warrant”

Implicit Faith

Agnostics Or Apistics?

The Evidence-Impervious Agnostic Theists

Faith Which Exploits Infinitesimal Probabilities As Openings For Strong Affirmations

Why You Cannot Prove Inductive Reasoning Is Faith-Based Reasoning But Instead Only Assert That By Faith

How Just Opposing Faith, In Principle, Means You Actually Don’t Have Faith, In Practice

Naturalism, Materialism, Empiricism, And Wrong, Weak, And Unsupported Beliefs Are All Not Necessarily Faith Positions

How Faith Poisons Religion

How Religious Beliefs Become Specifically *Faith* Beliefs

What About The Good Things People Call “Faith”? (Or “Why I Take Such A Strong Semantic Stand Against The Word Faith”)