False Argument #35: Religious Disagreement
Posted in False Arguments, Religion on | 3 minutes | 23 Comments →
Paraphrased, the Argument from Religious Disagreement (ADR) asks: if an all-powerful, all-knowing God really does exist, why do we observe so much religious disagreement?
Indeed, many religions exist and not all of them are compatible. Even within a single religion like Christianity, many factions exist, and some of their tenets are mutually exclusive (e.g., Calvinism and Universalism can’t both be true). Atheists and skeptics attempt to use this disagreement as evidence against the claim that any given revelation is actually from God, but I believe the underlying premises are naïve. Further, when one looks more carefully, I believe we should expect the religious disagreement we observe—especially if the Bible is true.
I’ve typically responded to ADR by asking if scientific disagreement provides reason to doubt any given hypothesis. Through history to this day, we observe disagreement on the singularity, evolution and many other scientific “revelations.” Does this mean there is nothing true about them? That they don’t exist? Of course not.
Skeptics typically respond by noting that science is the fruit of fallible men, so we should expect scientific disagreement. Okay, fair enough. However, skeptics remind us that revelation is purportedly from an infallible God, with the implied conclusion being that we should expect zero disagreement. After all, surely an infallible, all-powerful, all-knowing God would get His Own revelation right, right?
Well, yeah, but this ignores the fact that the audience remains fallible, not all-powerful and not all-knowing. Worse, the audience is corrupt, biased and evil. So, why should we expect such an audience to correctly intuit God’s revelation, even if we grant that the revelation is perfect? This has always been sufficient to defang the ADR in my opinion, but there’s another reason to reject it, and it has to do with Satan.
In my experience, every skeptic who advances the ADR loads their premises with cherrypicked exegesis. Among other things, they never factor Satan into their equations. The Bible describes Satan as many things, among them a liar who wants nothing more than to steer souls away from God. Moreover, the Bible tells us that Satan often masquerades as an angel of light and provides examples of Satan attempting to deceive and confuse believers. IOW, Satan directly benefits from introducing factions, schisms and error into Christianity. So where does this naïve idea come from, that we shouldn’t expect the disagreement we observe?
Adamoriens
says...Is biblical inerrancy a crock, then?
But why does God permit such a rogue agent in his affairs? Also, given biblical error, why trust its description of Satan?
Nolan
says...I think what is especially problematic for any most Christian theisms is the way that non-belief is distributed across the world.
Saudi Arabia is almost completely Muslim, and Scandinavian countries have high rates of disbelief. Even taking into account Satanic influence, it’s hard to see how Satan could account for entire countries succumbing to possibly damning belief systems.
It is certainly possible to come up with an explanation for religious demographics that is consistent with Christian theism, but all such explanations would seem to me like special pleading, with no independent evidence to back them up.
Instead, a non-theistic sociological view of the demographics of disbelief is able to account for religious disagreements to a greater extent, without having to resort to special pleading or huge amounts of unneeded assumptions.
Nolan
says...I should add that my argument basically comes from philosopher Stephen Maitzen in his paper Divine Hiddenness and the Demographics of Theism, which is easy to find through Google in PDF form.
cl
says...How so?
Adamoriens
says...I knew I recognized it!
The biblical authors are among the flawed audience you speak of, no?
cl
says...Nolan,
I searched for Maitzen’s PDF but it wouldn’t load, maybe it’s no longer there, I don’t know. Can you point me to an HTML version?
Why would that be problematic for a religion that claims most people won’t believe? If the Bible is true, wouldn’t we expect a large distribution of non-belief?
Adamoriens,
They are. That doesn’t entail that “inerrancy is a crock” any more than it would entail “science is a crock.”
Given biblical veracity on the vast majority of issues I’ve investigated, I trust it’s description of Satan, but that’s just me. You can trust or not trust whatever you want for whatever reason(s) you want.
Nolan
says...Cl, not sure what PDF you attempted to access, but I’m easily able to get the one here:
http://philosophy.acadiau.ca/tl_files/sites/philosophy/resources/documents/Maitzen_Hiddenness.pdf
What’s problematic isn’t the amount of disbelief, but its specific distribution. Disbelief (and belief) seems to be culturally dependent. In order to explain this using Satan, one would need to make the ad hoc assumption that Satan is targeting specific cultures disproportionately, or that there is a different demon in each country that affects disbelief differently.
On the other hand, postulating some form of cultural transmission of religious beliefs accounts for the uneven distribution of non-believers across countries, without having to make such outlandish and ad hoc assumptions.
I hope that’s clearer. Maybe I need to reread my Maitzen.
Adamoriens
says...Hi cl. I had the discourtesy to post my next response on my blog instead of in the comments section here. Please forgive me; it’s a salve for my negligence of my blog:
http://adamoriens.wordpress.com/2012/07/18/the-warfare-is-mental-on-religious-disagreement/
Adamoriens
says...Everything you’ve written looks right.
Crude
says...Sociological explanations don’t need to be non-theistic.
I know that cuts it short, but really, that alone torpedoes the main thrust of these sorts of arguments. It’s a little like pitting YEC against evolution. “Evolution is not in and of itself atheistic” wipes most of the more popular arguments out immediately – the same seems to hold here.
Adamoriens
says...Actually, Maitzen’s article is meant to buttress the argument from divine hiddenness. All of the “theodicies” for why God permits reasonable non-belief start looking odd when one realizes they must be geographically concentrated.
Crude
says...Not really. Or at least, not unless you have a good reason to believe that ‘reasonable non-belief’ would add up to some kind of weird ‘strict average’ distribution, such that you’d expect to find the same proportion of proclaimed Christians in each and every country.
And who says the non-belief has to be ‘reasonable’? What’s the metric for that again?
cl
says...I don’t see how Maitzen’s argument is relevant here. Nonetheless, it’s easily dispensed with. Theism doesn’t preclude cultural transmission. Or, as Crude put it, cultural transmission isn’t inherently atheistic. Maitzen’s argument smuggles the presumption that we wouldn’t expect cultural transmission of religious beliefs given theism. He offers us a false dichotomy (fallacy of limited options):
Nolan,
I think you’ve misunderstood. The OP doesn’t proffer Satan as a rival explanation for religious demographics. The OP provides grounds for rejecting the assumption that we would expect creedal consensus given theism. Without that assumption the ADR is a non-starter.
Adamoriens,
I don’t mind you linking to your blog. In my opinion, only drama queens like you’ll tend to find at “freethought” blogs get mad about such trivial things (it’s called “blog whoring” if you link to your own blog at FTB). Discourtesy is in the eye of the beholder. Personally, I think it’s discourteous that you ignored #6.
Nolan
says...I think this is a fair response. My critique I think reasonably shows why Satan is a bad explanation for religious demographics, but does not by itself falsify a viewpoint that assumes theistic cultural transmission of beliefs.
Crude and CL both seem to bring up similar points, that we would not expect to see any different distributions of non-belief if God exists. This is their main way of deflating the ADR.
I imagine a lot depends on one’s conception of God, but it’s hard for me to see why an all-good, all-powerful, all-knowing God who wants humans to believe in Him would allow 1)biased, fallible human reasoning to lead people away from consensus about God and 2)Satanic interference with belief in God.
This is, at least on its face, reason to expect no religious disagreement, given certain conceptions of God.
Stephen R. Diamond
says...You fanatics should love this one. A rationalist at Overcoming Bias argues that Pascal’s Wager represents a valid argument! The rationalists just don’t understand the argument. But be sure to read my comments. :)
Adamoriens
says...cl wrote:
Isn’t the idea of biblical perfection undermined when we affirm that the biblical authors were corrupt and biased witnesses to God’s revelation?
Fair enough.
Adamoriens
says...Schellenberg’s argument proceeds from the premise that we’d expect some sort of sensus divinitatus given the existence of God. That is to say, we’d have a non-negligible sense that God exists and wishes to enter into a relationship with us. As such, if people are not distributed geographically according to their willingness to believe in God, we would in fact expect a “weird” distribution of theistic belief around the world.
Of course, if there were an even global distribution of theists deepening their relationship with God (via the inner testimony of the Holy Spirit), and Christianity were true, we’d expect a strict average distribution of Christians globally.
The thesis is that there exist persons who are prepared in all relevant respects to enter into a relationship with God, and who yet fail to believe in him.
Adamoriens
says...cl wrote:
Actually, that’s implicit in the key premise of Schellenberg’s argument itself. Maitzen writes:
Obviously cultural transmission is far too slow and uncertain a vehicle to satisfy God’s desire for an immediate personal relationship. But if we find that theistic belief is generally a consequence of cultural transmission, then (given some plausible assumptions) there must not be a Sensus Divinatus, and therefore no God.
On Maitzen’s relevance: it seems to me that geographical observations of the sort Maitzen makes can be illuminating. For example, supposing you’re correct that Satan enjoys causing schisms, let us assume that Lutheranism is an aberration (a distortion, if you will) of the more accurate Roman Catholic “revelation.” Your proffered explanations entail conjoined with this scenario entail that the citizens of Denmark-Norway were unusually corrupt and/or particularly targeted by Satan. This is odd.
Crude
says...Only if you treat the sensus divinatus as the single factor that matters – but who does? What’s more, the statistics weren’t mentioned in what I read with relation only to ‘theistic belief’, but Christianity specifically.
Really, this just drives the point home:
Sorry, but explanations like these strike me as a hell of a lot weirder than ‘Satan’s after the Norwegians’ (which I reject as an explanation, other than in a ridiculously qualified manner.) It’s treating the sensus divinatus (which I believe comes from Plantinga and in that sense has far more to do with theism, period, than Christian specifically) not only as a kind of fundamental force like gravity, but one for which there is absolutely no other factor in play, including individual human will.
Yet ‘cultural transmission’ was the explicit method chosen in the Bible – so, so much for the claim that it’s obvious it’s ‘too slow and uncertain a vehicle’. Again, the SD was never intended as some replacement for Christian preaching even as it was conceived. It was, if I recall Plantinga, an awareness of God – and even then, God generally. It’s entirely possible someone could have the SD, yet be invincibly ignorant with respect to Christianity, to use some Catholic language.
Crude
says...Actually, my bad. If wiki’s to be believed, the SD comes from Calvin – of course, it also mentions that via Calvin, there were no true atheists. For Plantinga, the SD could be faulty. For others, other factors were in play.
Granted, it’s the wikipedia, but at a glance – treating the SD as the sole factor just seems like such a mistake.
cl
says...Nolan,
Well, yeah, but nobody’s saying that Satan is a good explanation for religious demographics, at least, not in isolation. On my view, cultural transmission, human bias, human stubbornness, human sin, Satan, etc. are all factors that, when combined, explain religious demographics just fine. To focus on Satan while ignoring the other factors is to misapprehend the argument.
What is God supposed to do? On your view, does “all-good, all-powerful and all-knowing” entail that God should make a special trip to Earth every single time somebody screws up? I don’t share that conception of God. I don’t believe in a cosmic coddler. There is real risk and genuine loss in my theology.
Adamoriens,
Sure, if you complete ignore the Bible’s claim to divine inspiration—but I don’t.
Again, only if you completely *IGNORE* what the Bible itself says on this issue. Why don’t you actually put your money on the mark and quantify this for us? How many Christians should we expect to see in each country if the Bible is true? I want a number, followed by a justification for the number.
No, it isn’t. “God wants all to be saved” does not preclude the Biblical statement that most will reject salvation. You’re simply picking the verses you need to make your case and failing to address those that challenge your case (e.g. the Great Commission).
Do you really think this logic holds? C’mon. Let’s say I agreed there was no SD. Even then it does not follow there is no God. Besides, some form of theism is near-ubiquitous throughout human history. The details obviously differ, but historically, atheists are a tiny, tiny minority. IOW, something like an SD clearly exists, albeit a truncated version that’s simply a sense of a Creator or spiritual beings beyond ourselves.
No, they don’t, but even if they did, that such is “odd” to you doesn’t amount to a hill of beans. To me, the idea that there are clusters of “unusually corrupt” people isn’t odd at all. On my view we have clusters of corruption evenly distributed everywhere. Just because the USA purportedly has X Christians doesn’t mean the USA has X elect. You have to consider the Bible in it’s entirety. Remember, many who say “Lord, Lord” are going to hell. Further, your “logic” assumes that because the people of Denmark-Norway identify primarily as Calvinist, that there are less elect per capita than, say, the US. We don’t know that’s the case. There’s no way, even in principle, to determine the number of elect per capita. Maitzen’s argument is very naïve. Imagine a billion different people each wearing full-body suits of different colors, blue, black, purple, etc. Maitzen’s “logic” is akin to saying everybody in a blue suit has black skin. In order to make an accurate assessment we need data we cannot possibly acquire: the number and geographical distribution not of people who identify with a particular faith, but of the elect.
Crude,
Exactly. It’s like a game of “let’s hone in on that which we need to make our case but ignore anything that challenges it.” I’m not saying they’re doing it on purpose, but Adamoriens, Maitzen, et al. hone in on “God wants all to be saved,” but completely ignore the rest.
Perfect example of what I mean by “ignoring the rest.” In my notes to this thread I wrote, but never posted: Obviously, the writers of the Bible (and ultimately God) don’t think this is the case, for if it were, whence the Great Commission? Jesus’ command to make disciples in all nations only makes sense on the presumption that cultural transmission is how beliefs spread. Adamoriens would have us believe cultural transmission is “too slow” to accomplish God’s goals, yet, God commanded cultural transmission.
Stephen R. Diamond
says...,
Maybe a few particularly charismatic preachers turned the tide in one direction in one location and in another direction in the different location. You mustn’t forget that existence is a divine gift; hence, no injustice is being perpetrated against members of cultures who lose out.
cl’s argument should be a straw man, and the real contradictions are in theism’s root, allowing it to “explain” anything. To argue against specific explanations within theism is to grab the bait.
The proliferation of religions should be of concern to theists for epistemic rather than doctrinal reasons. What kind of hubris is required for one not-particularly-smart theist like cl to think he, unsupported by consensus, could conceivably get these matters right? I mean, it’s ridiculous, isn’t it?
Adamoriens
says...I’m going to duck out of this thread for now. Cheers.