Author: Gene

If you’re following along you’ll know we are on a new chapter, and that I have skipped a section, Free-Floating Morality. I skipped that section because Keller makes no actual claims in it, but instead relates an anecdote about people who don’t know why they believe what they believe. This, like all anecdotes, provides nothing in the way of evidence, the section exists only as a precursor to Keller’s larger point.

In this section Keller asserts that all people feel a set of absolute moral values and moral obligations. He says everyone believes that there are some things that are wrong regardless of what the people doing them think. That’s pretty much all he claims in this section.

Amazingly enough I’m going to disagree even with this assertion. I don’t think this is true of everyone, or anyone. I don’t hold the false dichotomy alternative position Keller offers, that of absolute relativism either, however. I certainly believe that people are doing “wrong” things, even if they think they’re doing “right”, but I don’t think the things are just wrong because they’re wrong. There is an underlying reason. Say, murder is wrong, but it’s wrong because it increases suffering and destroys something that cannot be replaced.

Now, you could say the underlying values are the morals, like that happiness is good and sadness is bad. I would argue that they’re just logical conclusions based on experience, though, which is not what is typically understood by the term “morals”.

I suspect that people that hold classical “moral” beliefs are doing the same calculations I am doing, just unconsciously. Morals is a sort of short hand, a stereotype for actions. Instead of evaluating each circumstance to base values people tend to lump them into categories for faster results.

If you disagree, and you believe, as I suspect Keller is leading to, that god has anointed us with a sense of morality, then I would wonder why morality is so different across the globe. There are no universally held morals, which is odd if god gave them to all his children. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

This section is the conclusion of the clues (somehow I thought there’d be more) in which Keller sums up all the inconclusive arguments he’s made and presents the total as extremely compelling evidence for the existence of god. He says non-believers, although they can avoid the conclusion that god exists from each of the clues, must still admit that the big bang happened and the universe is fine tuned and that there is no reason to expect such things without a god. And that non-believers resort to using their faculties and the constancy of nature in assessing the world, but that there’s no reason to expect such things without god.

I don’t wish to rehash all the arguments I made against the individual clues again. From my perspective, and hopefully yours after reading my retorts to each clue, they are all wholly unconvincing. The sum of any number of completely unconvincing clues, to me, is still unconvincing.

The answer to all the assertions Keller makes in this section are in previous posts on the individual clues. Please reference those posts if you have any questions.

If, for some reason, you are convinced by Keller’s clues, I would just like to remind you that he is speaking of an abstract supernatural force, not any particular god. In fact, the god Keller argues for, due to the clue of the regularity of nature, does not interfere with us humans. So, even if I’ve been ineffective in my attempts to persuade against Keller’s position, his position is no where near explaining why the Presbyterian God is what is out there.

In this section Keller provides no clue to the existence of a supernatural entity, but refutes a common critique of other clues. The clue killer is evolutionary biology. This section is fairly long but can be summed up concisely, as Keller did in closing.

It comes down to this: If, as the evolutionary scientists say, what our brains tells [sic] us about morality, love, and beauty is not real– if it is merely a set of chemical reactions designed to pass on our genetic code– then so is what their brains tell them about the world. Then why should they trust them?

Earlier, I wrote that Keller seemed to indicate that he understood what science was. This section argues strongly against that.

The simple answer to Keller’s question is that scientists don’t trust what their brains tell them. They do experiments as tests. As I said in the previous post, science was developed as a process to sort out things that are true from things we only think our true because of all the mistakes our brains make.

You could argue that experiments are not good enough. Scientists still have to see with their eyes and think with their brains, ultimately. Even if the experiments can be replicated by others and be used to make airplanes and cell phones, that doesn’t necessarily mean that what we experience is the true reality.

Philosophically this is correct. There is no way to know for certain that what we experience has any relation to reality. Science assumes that the universe exists, that I exist, and that I can observe the universe. From there it went on to double the human life span and stuff like that.

All the advancements and interwoven explanatory power of science might all be an illusion, it’s true, but that doesn’t get a believer in god anywhere. All it does is make any knowledge impossible, making any possible belief equally likely. It would be exactly as likely that a trillion trillion ant gods are dreaming our existence without knowing as they battle for the cosmic corn kernel as that the bible was accurate.

Nobody really thinks this way anyway. If they want to call into question the validity of science they have to reject one of the assumptions of science, and there are only those three listed above. I don’t think they can creditably do that, since rejecting any one makes living fairly impossible, and certainly makes having any sort of argument about the nature of the reality impossible.

This is not to say that science is perfect or that it can never be wrong. Any specific belief in science can, and should, be questioned whenever possible, but Keller is trying to question the entire methodology of science as a way of knowing things, and he has no basis for doing so.

Keller doesn’t like some of the current hypotheses of science and he has proposed alternative explanations as rivals. The alternative explanations are unconvincing, however, since they do not fit in with what is known with the rest of reality, and they are tinged with his obvious bias towards a belief in a Christian deity. He feels ever more threatened because the more we do experiments the more evidence we find against his position. Rather than adjust his beliefs, which would be the reasonable thing to do, he tries to come up with a catch all reason why science doesn’t matter. Unfortunately, the best one he can come up with invalidates all his arguments as well and makes life incoherent and debate meaningless. Still, he includes it in his book about reason. This is a clue to the strength of his position.

Keller’s next clue to the existence of god is the presence of beauty. Keller says that true beauty elicits in us a desire for god and the existence of this desire indicates that a god exists, just as hunger indicates that food exists. Keller begins this section by saying

If we are the result of blind natural forces, then what we call “love” is simply a biochemical response, inherited from ancestors who survived because this trait helped them survive.

Keller disparages this interpretation implicitly, suggesting that love cannot be only this. This seems weird to me on several levels. First, it is simply amazing to think that we, a complex collection of atoms, through evolution over billions of years have developed brains complex enough to experience love. Love seems more meaningful as the culmination of a million generations of evolution than as an abstract notion bestowed on us by a vague creator. Second, since love, and beauty and justice and other Keller examples, are entirely internal phenomena, their origins cannot diminish their impact. Love feels as nice and is just as wonderful whether it’s a gift bestowed by god or an evolved method of gene replication. I see no need for Keller’s bias against a materialist interpretation of these concepts.

Moving on to the main argument, that a desire for god is evidence of god, I call bull. First, not everyone feels this desire for god. Like, say, Hindu’s, or animists, or secular humanists. I mean, if beauty inspired a longing for a monotheistic father figure in everyone, why aren’t all religions monotheistic? Keller has been taught to interpret the emotions elicited by art as a desire for god, but that’s clearly not the only interpretation of those emotions. So if you believe that a desire for X is evidence that X exists, in the case of this beauty argument, X is not god.

I don’t think art, or beauty, make you desire anything. I think it makes you feel things devoid of usual context, and people can fill that context with whatever they want. Even if you disagree, the notion that wanting something is a clue that it exists is absurd. The whole practice of science has been developed to determine if the things we feel are true (desire to be true), are in fact true, because just feeling it is not sufficient. Further, all the things associated with god are just logical extremes of mundane things that do exist. Like, if God exists, then we live forever. Well, life exists, and we want it, so it makes sense to desire life, but that doesn’t mean infinite life exists. God will dole out perfect justice. As a social animal we have an evolved sense of fairness, and it makes sense to want justice, because it does exist to a certain extent in our society, but that doesn’t mean the perfect justice exists. Just like it makes sense that we get hungry, because food exists, but that doesn’t mean infinite food exists.

Just think of all the things other people desperately want to exist, that you are not at all compelled to believe in. Xenu, Santa, unicorns, bigfoot, Allah, faith healing, fad diets, etc. etc. forever and ever.  Why is what you desire any more likely to exist than what I, or Tom Cruise, desire?

This argument was made by believers, for believers. It is designed to make someone who already believes in god feel better about that belief, but anyone who isn’t motivated to accept it uncritically can’t help but see it as nonsense.

Keller’s third clue to the existence of God is the regularity of nature. Meaning that observations of the past are useful for predicting the future. Keller says that this feature of the universe is taken for granted and overlooked, but that science depends on it. He admits that this is not rock solid proof, since one can always say, “We don’t know why nature is regular,” but contends that it is a clue to the existence of god nonetheless.

Unfortunately, for those who want to believe in a god, this “clue” is just an extension of the last clue, that the cosmos is nice for life. As a result my arguments against clue 2 also work here.

It is true that science relies on the basic laws of the universe remaining the same to function (or at least very close to the same) but science is not the only thing that relies on this. Suppose the laws of the universe were free to change within bounds that would allow life to develop, at random. So, things could change quite dramatically, but slowly enough for life to adapt to it, and nothing so drastic as to make matter incohere or planets dissolve. Life in such a universe would be challenging, but possible. However, intelligent life would never evolve. In such a universe knowledge of the past would not be useful in predicting the future, so evolution would not favor intelligence beyond reacting to immediate threats. Memory would not need to last, tool making would be impossible, since the way to make and use a tool would change frequently, etc. Basically, life like us would not exist to question why the laws of nature are so changeable. In this way it is exactly like the cosmological constant argument, either life like us can exist, or it can’t. In the case that it can’t, we can’t know it, so it is impossible to determine the odds of these things.

You can also think of this as just another cosmological constant. A nob that defines how quickly the other constants change, or within what range. In our universe they change very slowly, or within very small margins, or not at all. This is now just another aspect of the “fine tuning” of the previous “clue” that I argued against.

My final problem with this “clue” is that the regularity of nature doesn’t suggest there is a supreme intelligence at all. In the bible God is always messing with the laws of the universe to perform miracles. Modern Christians, and other religious people, argue the miracles still happen and pray for specific ones. The regularity of nature actually argues against a god, or at least against a god that interferes in our lives.

This “clue” really just seems like desperate padding.

Keller’s second “clue” that god exists is the anthropic principal. (read the link and it argues against Keller…) As he describes it there are many cosmological constants that must be tuned within a small margin of error for the universe to be as we see it. Keller says it is as if some supernatural force created the universe by tuning several dials very carefully so that we could exist. Keller grants that this argument is not a slam dunk and gives the multiverse hypothesis as an alternative explanation, that is, that there are many many universes so one is bound to be as this one is. He dismisses this explanation, though by relaying two analogies. One is that a man deals himself four aces in twenty straight games of poker. The other is a man sentenced to death by a firing squad of fifty expert marksmen and is not hit. In both cases you could say that there are infinite universes, so one in which this rare thing occurs is probable, or certain, but in both cases Keller says nobody would be convinced by this argument.

This completely misunderstands that anthropic principal, however. Both analogies are false. The point of the anthropic principal is that no one could exist to observe any universe that wasn’t capable of supporting life. In both analogies there is no accounting for this, which is why they are not applicable. So ignore those, they’re just distractions, straw men.

Lets get back to the actual universe. It is true that the cosmological constants, if not as they are, would not allow a universe as we know it to form, and many possible combinations exist where it is difficult to imagine life existing at all since stars and planets would not form. However, this doesn’t mean anything. Although there are infinite possible values for the cosmological constants (assuming there aren’t some unknown constraints somehow), there are really only two categories. The universe could exist in such a way that life exists, or not. In the first case the life that exists will evolve to fit whatever conditions exist as best they can, so the universe will seem “fine tuned” to them. If not, then nothing will exist to observe the universe and it will go unremarked. Because of these two possibilities it is impossible to calculate the true odds of a universe supporting life, except that we know it is non-zero. (Unless we can somehow detect, count, and determine the cosmological constants of other universes) Since observers can only exist in, and observe, one part of the fraction, the other part is indeterminable. From what we can observe the odds of a universe supporting life are just as likely to be one as one in a trillion trillion.

Another way to think of this is from the perspective of a null hypothesis. Lets assume there is no god, that’s the null hypothesis. What is predicted? We would expect the universe to appear to be fined tuned for any life within it, for the reasons explained above. Now lets compare to an alternate hypothesis, that there is a god. What is predicted? We would expect the universe to be fine tuned for life within it. Since these two predictions are identical the fact that the universe is fined tuned is not useful in determining if there is a god or not.

Keller, in his Intermission chapter, wrote some things that indicated to me that he knows how science works. He should be able to see that this argument is useless.I don’t know why he chose to keep it in his book.

This next section is as short as the last was long and I might have skipped it but it angers me some, so I wanted to write about it.

Keller says that you have to trust the bible enough to let it contradict your beliefs. He says you cannot pick and choose what to believe in the bible. He makes reference to Stepford Wives, saying that if God cannot contradict your beliefs, through the bible, then you cannot have a true, intimate, personal relationship with him. You will create a Stepford God.

The logic of what Keller says here, such that it is, is sound. If you believe that the bible is written by God then you do have to believe everything it says. You can’t pick and choose. But just a few sections ago Keller was picking and choosing, and admitting that it is difficult to tell what is literal and what is poetic in the bible. Choosing to believe that parts of the bible are poetic is equivalent to not believing what it says, since I could interpret any piece of the bible I personally disagree with to mean something poetic I do agree with. Keller offers no acknowledgment or defense of this practice, but I assume he doesn’t think of his God as a Stepford God.

I’m sure Keller believes that what he is doing is accurately interpreting God’s word and what others are doing is distorting God’s word purposely or otherwise, but there is no evidence for this. He has no basis for which to claim he is correct, and I, or anyone else, incorrect. If you follow Keller’s advice, you will never know if you are interpreting the bible as the author’s intended, or if you are projecting your own desires onto an ambiguous text.

And really, which is more likely, that an omnipotent benevolent force that wants to spread his message wrote an incomprehensibly ambiguous self contradictory book, or that you, and many before you, unconsciously interpret a mundane text in a way consistent with ones personal desires?

Throughout this chapter Keller has tried to persuade us that the bible is a text worthy of complete trust. He has told us to ignore any faults we see in it as unimportant, and now as necessary. He has waved some of the fault away as poetry. He has explained some of the faults away as cultural, or temporarily biased. But even if you do all of those things, even if you get past all the objections I have raised, Keller still asks you to trust the bible completely, just because. He has no reason for why you would do this. Given the title The Reason for God one might hope for more. Ultimately, though, it still comes down to the old circle, the bible is true because the bible says so.

If you’re following along at home you know we’re now out of the science chapter and have moved to the bible chapter. This seems much less fun to me, but where Keller goes I will follow. You also might have noticed that this first section is very large, so I’m going to have to take a broad strokes approach.

Keller decides to only focus on the four canonical gospels, Mathew, Mark, Luke, and John. Keller makes several core claims to back up the gospels as historically accurate. First, he says that scholars believe they were written around 40 – 60 AD. He says this would be within the lifetime of eye witnesses to the life of Jesus. He says the gospels are counterproductive to the causes of the early church leaders, that if they were just making up whatever they wanted they would have made it more useful and flattering of themselves. He also claims that the details of the gospels provide evidence that they were not fictionalized, because fiction of the time lacked details.

Keller finishes this long section by defending the bible culturally. He first explains that 1st century Roman slaves were not at all like more modern slaves that we think of and that is the slavery referenced by the bible. He then argues that any moral fault you find in the bible is because of your temporal bias, the notion that the values of today are superior to values of all other times. He argues that this bias should be avoided, just as cultural bias is.

Okay, well, Keller doesn’t give rigorous sources for his claims, but to my understanding his time frame for the writing of the gospels is extremely conservative. Just check wikipedia… that should have a general picture of what most scholars think. Even if you take Keller’s earliest number, 40 AD, and assume that the authors were about 25 when Jesus died… they were still really old for the time. Seems strange that they would wait until the end of their lives to write down the most important thing ever.

His point about the writings being counterproductive to early church leaders, like the apostles, only matters if his dates are right. If the mainstream is correct, and the apostles were all dead, then making them look bad in the pursuit of other goals would be no problem.  His points about women be prominent and Jesus himself not looking perfect in the gospels seem flimsy. Maybe women feature prominently in the gospels to attract female converts. Maybe the early Christians could rationalize Jesus’s apparent infirmities just as modern one can.

There are similar possible explanations for the idea that the gospels have too many unnecessary details to be fictionalized. Perhaps the authors wanted to make it seem like and eye witness account after the fact. Maybe the gospels are the earliest example of “found footage”. Remember how people thought the Blair Witch was real? Maybe the authors recorded the stories of many witnesses, or witnesses once removed, to get such details. Maybe someone was insane, and thought they were recounting things they had seen, but were actually just making things up. Keller frequently, in this section, asserts that there is “no reason” for something in the gospels other than the gospels being true accounts. Whenever you read that, be careful. There’s always at least one other reason, that someone wanted to make it seem like it was a true account, and there are usually many more reasons than that if you think about it.

And as for his argument against cultural or moral displeasure with the bible, it makes no sense to me. He mentions that we today think many of the ideas of our grandparents as antiquated and regressive, and says that there is not reason to think this won’t continue, that our grandchildren won’t think our ideas outmoded. He makes no argument to suggest that this process is cyclical, though. If he believes that, I don’t know why he would. There is no historical pattern of cyclical moral leanings on say, individual liberties or the rights of women. I agree that the currently held norms will be improved upon and soon, and when I am an old man some of the notions I hold now may seem antiquated. This seems like a great reason not to use a 2000 year old book to get moral guidance, though.

Keller again in this section encourages readers to ignore minor qualms, like the treatment of women or the acceptance of slavery (which btw wasn’t exactly great in the 1st century either) and focus on the core messages of bible. This is problematic for me. The reason people get hung up on “small” things in the bible is because they are asked to take it as the sole “evidence” that the whole Jesus story happened. Keller asks that you ignore all the things that make you question the credibility of the bible when deciding whether it is true. That doesn’t seem like a good idea to me.

So what if you believe everything Keller says and don’t care about any of my arguments above? What you are left with, in the best case of Keller’s argument, is four guys telling you some other guy came back from the dead. If four random people came up to you on the street and told you some guy in Venezuela had risen from the dead would you believe them? If they said, ask this other guy, Rupert, and Rupert corroborated their story, would you believe them? What if they had ten friends that corroborated them? You still wouldn’t believe them. And that’s not even how good the evidence is. Really the four guys would be writing a story forty years after the fact, 2000 years ago, in a language you don’t speak, and since then it has been translated and copied countless times. That’s what Keller’s arguing for, that’s the best case.