Debating Atheism

Last night’s Q&A program on the ABC, featured a debate between evolutionary biologist Professor Richard Dawkins and Catholic Cardinal George Pell. Predictably, the debate quickly lost its way in the Q&A format as it largely descended into sniping and peripheral point scoring. Even worthwhile questions open to the development of a clearly reasoned argument in response rarely elicited one.
For example,

·         In what way are moral values dependent on the existence of a god?

·         Without religion, where is the basis of our values?

·         Clarify the Roman Catholic church's position on evolution, and comment on whether the dichotomy between science and religion is in fact real.

All good, open ended questions. Each gave one of the protagonists a chance to state a position and justify it with a brief argument, then allow the other a reply. If you watch the show, this didn’t happen in any serious way.

We even had a nice segue into exploring the high correlation between religious conservatism and climate change skepticism in

·         As a climate change skeptic, you a demand a high standard of evidence to support the hypothesis that global warming has an anthropogenic cause. Why then do you not demand the same standard of evidence for the existence of God?

George Pell of course fluffed about in response, but Richard Dawkins missed the chance to absolutely cream him.

A major problem with the debate was that it did not begin by establishing exactly what is meant by atheism, agnosticism, spirituality and religious faith. Richard Dawkins touched on the first two and the spectrum of disbelief or agnosticism about a quarter of an hour into the program, but any chance of a meaningful, epistemological discussion quickly fizzled out.

From this, it could have led into what science and rational inquiry in general has to say about religion and what religion believes it provides that the former not only does not, but cannot.

The statements

1.      I believe that god does / gods do not exist

2.      I do not believe that god exists / gods exist

have different meanings.

From an epistemological perspective, there are three possibilities:

1.      That god exists / gods exist and there is sufficient information available to allow the question to be decided.

2.      That god does / gods do not exist and there is sufficient information available to allow the question to be decided.

3.      That one does not know whether or not god exists / gods exist, either because there is currently insufficient information available to decide the question or because the proposition is logically undecidable.

The first statement takes an active position in favour of possibility 2 and thus necessarily against both possibilities 1 and 3. The second statement takes a position which may, but does not necessarily include the first because it is compatible with either possibility 2 or 3, though obviously not both, since they are mutually exclusive.

The first statement is stronger than the second. It is saying that the proposition that god exists and the proposition that the question is undecidable are BOTH false. It is also saying that the person making the statement has access to the information required to decide that god does not exist and moreover, that the information has been analysed correctly.

The second statement may include people who actually mean the first, but whose language is imprecise. It also includes people who believe possibility 3 and who dispute both possibilities 1 and 2 based on the decidability of the question.

Even if one affirms statement 2 but not statement 1, one can elaborate in several ways:

·         I do not believe that god exists / gods exist and I believe it is more likely than not that god does / gods do not exist.

·         I believe that god(s) cannot have the following properties …

This second statement would have made for an interesting panel discussion, since although metaphysical, it is amenable to logical analysis. For example, the possibility that God might exist but not be omnipotent or omniscient could have been discussed, or even the possibility that God may have evolved after a certain level of complexity had been reached, in the same way as self awareness has evolved in (some) humans.

The program was weakened by a panel of two almost diametrically opposing views and a moderator (Tony Jones) who was clearly well out of his intellectual depth. What it needed was a philosopher of science and perhaps a more modern thinking, Protestant theologian as counterpoint to George Pell’s Catholic superstition and dogma on the other side. Of the former, A.C. Grayling is on Q&A this coming week and physicist Laurence Krauss is in town. Either would have considerably broadened and deepened the discussion.

The problem with Richard Dawkins’ public debating on religion is his approach to his opposition. His method is to essentially lay out a summary of an undergraduate course in evolutionary biology, then say words to the effect of: “Well, after all that, if you still don’t believe in evolution, you must be a delusional idiot”.

He is correct, but the effect is that his opposition becomes even more intransigent as they respond to the threat by looking for safety in numbers. Logical argument is pointless, because that’s not how such beliefs are formed and maintained.

If you deal with enough idiots in settings where you don’t have power over their behaviour, you figure this out or suffer. Richard Dawkins is a strange sort of person, though. He has almost no sense of humour or ability to understand the thought processes and motivations of the profoundly illogical (most of the population). It’s almost as if he’s a tiny bit autistic. It’s a great shame, because he’s an excellent lecturer and scientific writer, but only effective as a preacher to the converted.

He has also spent almost all his adult life in academia, where idiots are dealt with in a completely different way. Whether you’re writing a paper, delivering it at a seminar or lecturing students, you’re essentially telling people how things are and responding authoritatively to questions. If people don’t believe you, they can either provide a coherent counter argument, fuck off or fail their course. You don’t need to care if an idiot refuses to believe you based on some absurdly incoherent world view.

In business, politics and most general social interactions, you do need to care, because such idiots can make decisions which affect you. You either need to find some common ground and use it to bring them along socially with you ie. to make them feel you and they in some way belong to some common group, or if this cannot be done, treat them as the enemy, form your own social coalition and exclude them as much as possible from positions of power and influence.

To successfully prosecute either of these strategies against the menace to freedom of organized religion, Liberalism needs public proponents just as intelligent and knowledgeable as Richard Dawkins, but vastly more urbane. I suspect A.C. Grayling or Laurence Krauss, or particularly the late Jacob Bronowski would have gently painted George Pell into a corner and shown him up as the meagre intellect and hypocrite he is.

Instead, the highlight of the evening was a (possibly Freudian) slip where George Pell was recounting his earlier days in Rome:

“We were preparing a group of boys …”

Perhaps they were preparing them for an older, Frank Thring style cardinal:

“Bring me another boy … this one’s full.”