The Ontological Argument in One Easy Step

"Oh dear," says God, "I hadn't thought of that," and promptly disappears in a puff of logic.—The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

I was watching an interview with Colin McGinn where he said that he thought the ontological argument is interesting because nobody's ever managed to pinpoint exactly what's wrong with it even though it's wholly unconvincing to everybody who hears it. There are lots of ways to show it's absurd (e.g. Guanilo's Island), but none are concise and direct enough to seem like the problem with it.

Well, a line of reasoning recently occurred to me that I'd like to put forth as the problem with the ontological argument. The normal version goes something like this:

1. God is defined as the most perfect being conceivable.
2. If he didn't exist, he would be less perfect than a being who did exist.
3. Therefore, God exists.

I think there's a two-part gimmick in the argument, and that I can simplify it down without losing any of the meaning:

1. God is defined as a being who exists.
2. Therefore God exists.

The trick is in confusing the levels, and losing the difference between a definition and reality. If you dream that you woke up, it doesn't mean you're awake. By the same token, a being that's defined to exist doesn't necessarily exist (nor a being that's defined as "a being defined to exist"). The part about "what it means to be perfect" just acts as misdirection from the meat of the argument enough to block your common sense.

There's no contradiction whatsoever within the definition, nothing wrong with it even, but every definition is a hypothetical of sorts, just a label to tell me what you mean when you use the word.

I did happen to notice that Kant looks to have proposed almost the same counterargument, but his version seems wordier and was one of four bullet points in his argument. I wonder if Colin McGinn is familiar with Kant's refutation...

Fatalism and Futility

"I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go." —The Waking, Theodore Roethke

Fatalism is the belief that there is only one possible future. The name comes from "fate" rather than "fatal", but emotional nuances still haunt the term from the first time you hear it, making it more natural to dismiss and criticize. The idea is at odds with the idea of free will because the normal conception of free will requires that no natural laws completely determine human behavior, whereas obviously human behavior can affect the physical world. This would imply that non-physical causes have physical effects, and therefore the sum of physical laws isn't enough to completely predict the future.

Fatalism suggests that the conditions of the future have a constant, non-variable value. However, everyday language, even among fatalists, treats the future as a variable to be affected by each decision and action. I've heard several people ask, "If the future is predetermined whether or not I make a given choice, why bother doing anything?". There are two ways to read this question: present actions don't actually affect the events of the future, or actions don't affect the fixedness of the future. Both are troubling thoughts.

The first case is obviously absurd. We make choices every day that ripple outwards and have incredibly unexpected consequences. It's even more absurd than it might seem, because if memories are physical states in the brain, then future memories couldn't be affected by present actions, so you could have absolutely no recollection of many choices and actions. The absurdity leads many people to reject fatalism and determinism outright.

But fatalism doesn't require this absurdity, because fatalism holds not just the future as constant, but also the present and all choices and mental states. Any choice that will be made is fated to be made one way or another. It's still a perfectly valid and useful mental model to treat the future as a variable, because it's a mathematical unknown in any equation and still must be solved for. Even the past can be treated as an unknown, as historians are well aware, because we've lost information and can't be certain of exactly what happened. There are many "variables", but no free variables.

The reasoning of the original question is a form of proof by contradiction, assuming fatalism and then deriving absurd results from the assumption. Proof by contradiction is worthless if it makes extra assumptions, because then the error can't be traced back to the original tentative assumption. In this case, the contradiction came from the extra, false assumption that there are free variables.

I can't refute the other way of reading the question, though, because I completely agree with it. Your actions and decisions (constants) can't affect the fixedness of the future by any means. It's like pulling yourself up by your bootstraps: you have no variability to imbue the future with, so you can't actually change its course. The feeling of helplessness is understandable in a psychological way, but not actually supported by any logical argument.

As an example, imagine I can read your mind, and you're standing at a fork in the road. You decide to go left and I tell you "Go left". So then you decide to go right just to spite me, and I say "Go right" right away. You give up and decide to stay put, so I say "Don't go anywhere". Then you decide to run in circles quoting Shakespeare, but before you can move I say "Run in circles quoting Shakespeare". You will probably feel an overwhelming sense of futility before long, but eventually you decide to ignore me and just go about your business. After a while, you start to realize I'm the one who should feel overwhelmed with futility, not you. If I keep doing this forever, I'm nothing but a nuisance. If I ever stop, you've won the game. Finally, I'll say "Tape my mouth shut" and you will.

The same reasoning applies to fatalism. Everything you do is predetermined even if you try to cheat the system by changing your mind, but it doesn't matter. You'll never know what's around the corner until you turn the corner, and it shouldn't bother you that something is already around the corner whether you look or not. It can't help being there, but you can (deterministically) decide whether to look.

Dear Typical Atheist: Please Stop Embarrassing Us

I was raised Christian in a private Christian school, my entire extended family has always been Christian, and I didn't know any atheists to speak of until I became one (I love my family and friends tremendously even though I disagree with them, but I do wish I had had someone to share the journey with). Since then, my exposure to other atheists has been limited, split between self-advertised atheists and people who haven't cared enough to dig into the issues or argue the point, but would rather sleep in on Sunday mornings. I've also read a few relevant statistics, but they're notoriously unreliable for all kinds of reasons. As a result, I can't really profile the entire atheist cross-section of society, but almost every atheist or agnostic I've met has a few irritating viewpoints in common, and I'd like to systematically challenge those perspectives. (If anyone can point me towards counterexamples, please please get in touch with me).

Firstly, science does not unequivocally prove your case for atheism. Science, as a collection, is not a mass of truth or facts, but a mass of data. It's messy, it's ambiguous, and most of it is either outright wrong or just an approximation. You don't own Science, it's not your God, and if it happens to be in your favor it's only a matter of probability, not certainty.

Next, you don't sound as smart as you think repeating again and again that you don't believe the Bible because it's full of contradictions, and you look downright stupid making an official list of them. Wikipedia's full of contradictions, and so are you. My favorite example, Proverbs 26:4-5, is a litmus test of small-mindedness:

4 Do not answer a fool according to his folly,
or you will be like him yourself.
5 Answer a fool according to his folly,
or he will be wise in his own eyes.

These verses are adjacent! Do you really think that this "contradiction" just slipped through the proofreading? Does this really have any bearing whatsoever on whether the Bible is worth believing?

In my opinion, most of the Bible is not very significant because it's not reasonably falsifiable: there are too many "escape clauses" and too few risky predictions. There are a few decent examples of self-contained arguments against the Bible's credibility, but for the most part you're not going to point to a group of passages in the Bible and raise many eyebrows, Christian or atheist.

There's one perspective that's only shared by agnostics and Christians, never atheists, but needs to be called out nonetheless: that it's impossible to be atheist because you can't prove God doesn't exist, and therefore there are only agnostics and believers. This claim is exactly as absurd as the reverse, that you can't be Christian because you can't prove beyond all doubt that God does exist (regardless of which perspective is better supported by evidence).

There's a similar attack stating that you can't really be a relativist because the statement "everything is relative" would have to be absolutely true, but again that perspective confuses two levels of assertion: the assertion itself (P), and the assertion that P is undeniable or absolute. I can easily state that I have no reason to believe anything is absolute. I'll save the relativism debate for another post, though.

The Wrong Idea about Evolution

"An intelligent couple can [...] know that the ultimate reason for their sexual urges is procreation. They know that the woman cannot conceive because she is on the pill. Yet they find that their sexual desire is in no way diminished by the knowledge." --Richard Dawkins

Many people seem to get the idea that eugenics would be the natural conclusion of evolutionist thinking. If nature has been driving all life in one direction, to be as "fit" as possible, and we intervene to protect the weak instead of letting them be "naturally" removed from the gene pool, aren't we committing some sort of crime against nature?

Let me answer that with an analogy. Your entire life, hair grows on your head at about 1/8 inch per week. The process is entirely natural, and has a clear biological purpose. But I bet you cut it periodically, and I bet you don't feel the slightest twinge of hesitation.

I'd like to also rebut my strawman more directly. Evolution does continuously drive life in one direction, towards the most "fit" species, but that direction changes over time. It's called coevolution. As one species changes, so do all the others, so the ideal of "fitness" will change from generation to generation. Sometimes evolution goes in circles, often in predator-prey relationships (see "The Blind Watchmaker" by Dawkins for some excellent examples). The upshot is that "fitness" means whatever survives, and if our cultures protect the weak, they're out of evolution's jurisdiction. We're part of nature, too, so "artificial selection" is natural selection.

Does that mean we should do everything we can to protect the weak? Not really. It doesn't really have any bearing on what we should do. Either way, it's natural selection, and it wouldn't matter if it weren't (unless you are a conscientious objector to haircuts).

I think ultimately, it's a choice for each individual: would you rather live in Sparta or Athens? I personally think it would be a dystopian disaster (again) if we tried to do anything like a national eugenics program. I find the whole idea pretty revolting. If you think otherwise, I encourage you to fight for your values, but I will also be fighting back.