Hi Chris,

Okay, with this email I think I'll have responded to all yours to date addressed to me. If so, you're inbox will get a rest; if not, let me know and I'll try to rectify my oversight.

I appreciate that you think I've made some decent points. And I understand your hesitation to just accept arguments that sound good but which may have be rebutted by others even if your not personally aware of such rebuttals. I'd simply encourage you to look into the matter further; I think Mark's suggestion that you watch the Craig v. Carroll debate is a good one.

As for not finding the moral argument persuasive, I can understand and respect that. As you said, moral skepticism (or "anti-realism") is always an option. Still, I can't help but think that you're trying to have your cake and eat it to in this particular. After all, if there isn't really any such thing as right and wrong, then all your high-minded condemnations of God for his wickedness don't really amount to much. Conversely, if your condemnations of God's behavior are rooted in real right and real wrong, then moral skepticism isn't what you're really working with, and thus the moral argument reemerges as a serious problem for your atheism.

In other words, I'm not sure you can have it both ways. You can affirm moral skepticism and avoid the force of the moral argument... but that will cost you the force of the PoE relative to God; by defusing one particular argument for God you'll also be defusing your main argument against him too. Or, conversely, you can retain the PoE... but in doing so you'll be breathing life into the moral argument. That latter option might lead to some conceptual tensions (as we've seen with reference to my worldview) but it will make casual atheism awkward any my rationalizations less gratuitous.

So, which shall it be?

Sincerely,

Eugene

From: Christopher <[address removed]>
To: [address removed]
Sent: Tuesday, March 11,[masked]:00 PM
Subject: Re: re. [Provocateurs] Soviet Union

From: Christopher <[address removed]>

To: [address removed]
Sent: Tuesday, March 11,[masked]:41 PM
Subject: Re: re. [Provocateurs] Soviet Union

"In most cases that I can recall, you rarely deny any of my arguments out-right."

That is to some extent true, just because it is the philosophical thing to do.  If there is any decent case for an important idea, I am reluctant to dismiss it out of hand.  And you have made some points that seem to me fairly formidable.  

That said:  I am little moved by the argument about objective morality.  That is in part because if we simply take the option of moral skepticism at the expense of supposed objective (in your sense) morality, the argument has no force as a means of showing that God exists.  It may be true that our only values are the ones we devise through experience in the world and with each other, in which case the moral argument is rendered null.

I also consider the IPHBG weak for reasons I have indicated.

Picking up where I left off:

I thought your point about Jesus's apocalyptic statements and the Isaiah passage from which it apparently drew was a formidable point.  But then, when I looked at mainstream scholarly sources, I found agreement that Jesus did expect the Son of Man to return within the first century. Conversely, I found that an overwhelming number of scholars who denied that Jesus expected this event were members of the Jesus Seminar, which consisted of well over 200 scholars; and its expressed agenda gives an indication of why they voted down the apocalyptic Jesus.  Strangely, I could not find any source that directly addressed the Isaiah text you mentioned, but I remained satisfied, after consulting a considerable amount of mainstream literature, that Jesus did have the eschatological view that I have indicated.  That tells strongly against the truth of Christianity:  it shows that Jesus's mission--which depended on the belief that the end of the world was at hand--was false.  Of course, God could be tricking us into thinking that Jesus had this apocalyptic expectation so that we would be less likely to believe in him.  And, according to your way of thinking, this gambit was necessary for God's full respect for our free will, which seems to be the ultimate good, no matter how much evil it causes.  (Obviously, I consider the point about free will to be silly, but I think that what I have said about it is basically in line with your account.) 

I entirely lack the competence to evaluate the fine-tuning argument.  I surmise that there is a respectable case against it, and I do not know what it is.  I hope to find out the skeptical side of this claim in addition to the apologetic one.  The same applies to the implications of Big Bang Cosmology.  

I think that it is unnecessary to invoke God as an explanation of the spread of Christianity.  I think the causes for this were historical and social.

I there is something to Hebrew exceptionalism, and I had noticed it before we began corresponding.  I am still thinking about it.

That's all for now.

Christopher M. Riels

1332 Crosswinds Court Apt. 2
Lawrence, KS 66046
Telephone: (785)[masked]

From: Christopher <[address removed]>
To: [address removed]
Sent: Tuesday, March 11,[masked]:54 PM
Subject: Re: re. [Provocateurs] Soviet Union

Eugene,

Your remarks are difficult to answer briefly.  They are very general in nature, and my reply will therefore have to be somewhat diffuse and piecemeal.  It is hard to know where or how to begin. As for format, I see no manageable way of addressing your remarks except to interpose my replies between your various points, as follows:

 

(Eugene) First, you wrote that “if the Hebrew (or any other) God were the true one, he (not she or it) would have revealed himself, from his first contact with humanity, as the uniquely transcendent, single, and perfect being he was eventually supposed to be.”

 

In response I can only ask, why; what basis do you have for such a belief?

(Christopher)  Revealing himself as perfect would have shown more of an interest in letting us know about him. And it often seems that he acts as if he wants us to know about him; at other times he seems to intentionally evade us.  His acting in vicious ways repels us from knowing about him:  that is, if he really exists and is actually perfect.  If he does or creates evil (as in the Hebrew Scriptures he says he does, as he manifestly does if he exists, then his elusive and careless way of showing himself perfect would make good sense, and this point of mine would be null.  There is only a problem if he claims to be perfect and infinitely good, as he evidently does, if he exists.  And it is just possible that goodness is a perfection and a sine qua non of perfection; but I am by no means confident of this. God does not, however, seem to be perfectly bad; sometimes he does things that are characteristic of goodness, while at other times he shows himself cruel and hateful and elusive. But in every case, no matter what he does, he constantly thinks that he is equally and perfectly good.  This shows that he is--or, rather the people who conceived of him were--radically confused about the meaning of goodness. Confusion is not a characteristic of a perfect deity; that suggests to me that he does not exist, because his claims of perfection are contradicted by what actually happens, which is evidently what he chooses to show us.  He putatively wants us to love and worship him for his perfect character; and at the same time he acts hatefully and imperfectly.  If this is so, then, as the Psalm says, "You are truly a god who hides himself." Hiding and expecting us to know and worship him for his perfect goodness are utterly incompatible acts.  Perhaps this was one state of affairs that influenced the Israelites to resort to the worship of other gods:  their own was failing them.  We get only the Jewish and Christian points of view about such things.  But what might those errant Israelites have to say on their own behalf?

As I have said repeatedly, a perfectly loving god would necessarily instantiate perfect love.  There is no sense in calling hatefulness good just because it is God's hatefulness.  And, despite your speculative defenses--and speculative is what they are (maybe y exculpates god from the charge of cruelty although what he does may look cruel) of his perfect goodness), you are trying to justify God for doing things that are, by any reasonable account, evil, including the instances I mentioned above and throughout our correspondence.  That is a good part of what I have had in mind when I said that you are too easy on your god:  you claim that he is perfectly good, but when he strongly seems to instantiates evil, you defend him as perfectly good, usually by speculative rather than concrete means.  I mean you are too easily on him morally, evidence for his existence aside.  

I have to stop here for now.  

CR

____________________________________________________________________________________________

 

Second, you stated that “It does not seem to me that the one true, single […] and perfect God would have seemed as crude, anthropomorphic, violently and irrationally destructive, and generally petulant, as he did for so long before letting his people discern his perfection and singleness.”

 

Well, a few things could be said here. First, I don’t see a hard contradiction between the willingness to employ violence and moral perfection. If God is morally perfect, it seems that there are certain circumstances under which he could be violent, for some situations (I believe) justify violence as a morally legitimate option. Given that we have been raised in a somewhat soft first-world post-industrial liberal democracy, we may not particularly like violence or think of it as a first-option. But even we as a people, for all our refinement, still generally think that there are times when force is called for and its practitioners are righteous.

 

As for the crudeness and anthropomorphism of God’s depiction in the Old Testament, I think that there are two different entirely plausible ways of handling that.

 

Perhaps, if one’s inclined to be “liberal,” these things are merely human attempts to fill-out the rather limited picture of God that was given them in revelation. Perhaps the ancient Hebrews took the precious little that God had genuinely revealed about Himself and filled in the gaps in their knowledge of Him using concepts drawn from the wider religious milieu of the day. Had sentient octopuses been the first rational species to emerge on our planet, and had God revealed Himself to one of them in a way analogous to what happened with Abraham (let’s call him “Abrapus”), I can easily imagine the subsequent octopus-sages that followed in Abrapus’s line imagining God to be a kind of heavenly Octopus—perhaps one depicted in the aquatic finery and with the all-too-octopus foibles of the great mortal octopus kings of the era (e.g. the Coral Age II).

 

Or, if one is inclined to be more “conservative,” perhaps God Himself was accommodating Himself to the mental capacities and cultural values of an ancient and somewhat crude people. Psalm 18:26 says, “With the pure You show Yourself pure, and with the crooked You show Yourself astute.” Perhaps to the barbaric God shows Himself barbaric as an act of cultural accommodation.

 

This issue often reminds me of a line from the film Thirteen Days. The Dean Acheson character, speaking to Pres. Kennedy’s cabinet, remarks: “Now I do not wish to seem melodramatic, but I do wish to impress upon you a lesson I learned with bitter tears and great sacrifice. The Soviet understands only one language: action. Respects only one word: force.” Leaving aside the Soviets for a moment, IF this were true of ancient, barbaric Israel, I would not at all blame God for “speaking” to them in a language they would understand and respect.

 

Third, you wrote that, “The supposed realization of the Hebrew God's singular and perfect nature seems to have evolved slowly with the tide of times, the march of civilizations, and the development of the human mind. This seems far more like a human process than any divine one.”

 

That’s entirely possible. As I said in my presentation, other cultures hit on a very sophisticated model of God without (I think) the aid of revelation: Aristotle, Mozi, the Nyaya, etc. But, again, as I said at the presentation, such groups were rare and Israel seems to have been an odd-man-out in the group given their lack of a rigorous tradition of philosophical investigation. So while it’s certainly possible that the refinement of Israel’s God-model was a merely human development, such is by no means obvious. After all, civilizations far more advanced that ancient Israel retained more primitive and deficient models of the divine contemporaneously with Israel’s unlikely entrance into the exclusive ethical-monotheists-club.

 

Finally, you wrote (citing me) that, “‘such a view leaves unresolved the issue of the emergence of those established patterns of polytheistic religion in the first place.’  It certainly does, and that is a problem.”

 

Well, I tried avoiding this since the problem, by its very nature, is only liable to very speculative solutions. But so long as you won’t hold that against me, I’ll offer one. 

 

Consider that the innate predisposition of humans to believe in God (IPHBG) is rather content-limited and easily coopted by culture. Also keep in mind that people have a habit of imagining God in ways that are amenable to their own experiences and interests. So, with all that in the background, consider this…

 

In small tribes of but few people, each person grows up with the IPHBG. But these people have different experiences and different interests. Some love the sea, others the sky, and still others the earth or fire or something else entirely. Each one comes to think of God in a slightly different way, a way influenced by these loves and more. As the people talk to one another, sometimes the God they imagine seem sufficiently similar that they are assimilated to one another. However, sometimes they are sufficiently different that they strike the interlocutors as distinct beings. And rather than deny the other person’s view, they just let them exist alongside each other.  Thus a simple polytheism of the tribe is born.

 

These tribes eventually come into contact with other tribes and the process repeats itself on a larger scale. One tribe’s Sun-god is assimilated with another tribe’s Sun-god; but the first tribe also has a fly-god that has no analogue in the second tribe’s pantheon—so it’s just added to the first tribe’s list. Thus some gods seem very territorially limited, and others seem more wide ranging.

 

These pantheons become established, religions are built around them, and the IPHBG operative in each successive generation is unconsciously and almost effortlessly routed into these established patterns of belief and worship.

 

This speculative story seems plausible, and it squares with the little evidence that we have on the matter. So while I don’t know whether it is ultimately true, I think it can deflate the “problem” that polytheism might pose for the apologetic usefulness of the IPHBG—assuming polytheism presents a problem in the first place, something I’m not entirely convinced of anyway.

 

With all these points made, let me say something else.

 

In our conversations, Chris, you’ve said that I’m essentially being too easy on God—letting my belief in Him skate by on evidence that, while perhaps interesting, seems like less than one might expect if God really existed. I obviously don’t agree with that idea, but I think it is interesting all the same. But allow me to turn the tables on you a bit now.

 

As we’ve spoken and corresponded it has seemed to me that you are holding the evidence for God to a very high standard. Perhaps too high. In most cases that I can recall, you rarely deny any of my arguments out-right. Instead, you tend to cite peripheral issues that have the potential to complicate the argument and reduce (though not overthrow) the credibility of the wider case for God (e.g. a weak version of divine hiddenness—God may have made himself known, but not with sufficient specificity).

 

But you presumably believe a great many things, the evidence for which is good but not utterly air-tight: evolution, climate change, etc. In each case, while the evidence in favor of the reality of the phenomena in view is good—good enough to be conclusive—you no doubt recognize that one can always cite peripheral matters that might complicate the issues or chip away at utter certainty. But you don’t allow those things to prevent you from accepting, at least tentatively, the reality of the phenomena in view. Sure, Piltdown man was a hoax, but the evidence of human evolution is still good enough. Sure, the climatologists at the University of East Anglia seem to have been up to some jerky shenanigans, but the evidence for climate-change is still good enough.

 

Why are you, it seems, resistant to seeing the evidence for theism (or even Christianity) as similarly “good-enough” despite the potential complications lying off to one side?

 

Sincerely,

 

Eugene

 

From: Christopher <[address removed]>
To: [address removed]
Sent: Saturday, March 8,[masked]:10 PM
Subject: Re: re. [Provocateurs] Soviet Union

Eugene,

I failed to express at least part of a point that I had in mind.  It seems to me that, if the Hebrew (or any other) God were the true one, he (not she or it) would have revealed himself, from his first contact with humanity, as the uniquely transcendent, single, and perfect being he was eventually supposed to be. In this respect, as I have said before, it seems to me that you demand too little of your supposedly perfect god both in himself and in his relation to us.  If he were perfect and one, he would instantiate perfection and one-ness in an obviously perfect way; a way that we could clearly recognize as uniquely perfect. And that is strikingly not the case.  And "It's not my place to challenge his ways" is not a satisfactory reply; it is, to be blunt, a cop-out, and in effect it betrays God's imperfection.  But I suppose God, in our eternal interest and his perfect love, was fooling his little human playthings into thinking he was a nasty and immature, though heavenly, boor, because, had he not done so, he thus would have compromised our free will.

 

It does not seem to me that the one true, single (except for that trinity problem), and perfect God would have seemed as crude, anthropomorphic, violently and irrationally destructive, and generally petulant, as he did for so long before letting his people discern his perfection and singleness. The supposed realization of the Hebrew God's singular and perfect nature seems to have evolved slowly with the tide of times, the march of civilizations, and the development of the human mind. This seems far more like a human process than any divine one.

"Of course," as you say, "such a view leaves unresolved the issue of the emergence of those established patterns of polytheistic religion in the first place."  It certainly does, and that is a problem.

Christopher M. Riels
1332 Crosswinds Court Apt. 2
Lawrence, KS 66046
Telephone: (785)[masked]

From: Eugene Curry <[address removed]>
To: [address removed]
Sent: Friday, March 7, [masked]:56 PM
Subject: Re: re. [Provocateurs] Soviet Union

Hi Chris,

 

You raise some good questions.

 

"I grant that comparatively recent history, down to our own, is the only era to which your claim explicitly refers.  But do you think that IPHBG, if it operated in the remote human past, has always suggested monotheism?"

 

Your point that most ancient people were polytheists is well taken, and it’s partly what gives my point about Hebrew exceptionalism its force. And since most ancients were polytheists, I hesitate to say confidently that the IPHBG was pushing toward monotheism, specifically, in ancient contexts—as opposed to a more generic (mono-/poly-/pan-)theism generally.

 

Still, keep in mind that Japan, to the extent that it has a spiritual patrimony, is at least nominally polytheistic as a culture. Nevertheless, as Petrovich’s research shows, even against the backdrop of such a polytheistic culture the IPHBG seems to incline to something like monotheism in young children. Perhaps the same thing was happening in ancient Sumer.  

 

The IPHBG is admittedly malleable and easily co-optable by more specific ideologies. So perhaps the IPHBG inclined ancient children towards a simplistic proto-monotheism, but then the cultural realities around them channeled that burgeoning perspective into the established patterns of (polytheistic) religion in which they lived—just as the cultural realities around us today tend to channel the IPHBG into a specifically Abrahamic religion here in the modern West.

 

Of course, such a view leaves unresolved the issue of the emergence of those established patterns of polytheistic religion in the first place. But any attempt to resolve that issue would take us deep into the highly contested territory of the history of religions and into unavoidable speculation.

 

~             ~             ~

 

When you state that the Hebrews were not the first group to articulate rigorous monotheism, I cheerily concede the point. The higher Greek beat them to the punch by several centuries, so did the followers of Mozi, and (perhaps) the Egyptians for a fleetingly brief period. I mentioned the former two peoples in my presentation.

 

And I further grant that it is quite possible that the Hebrews were, for much of their history, monolatrous polytheists or henotheists. I’m not necessarily convinced of that, but it’s definitely possible. Nevertheless, regardless of the specifics of early Israelite religion, eventually the Jews did come to affirm a rigorous monotheism prior to the birth of Jesus of Nazareth.

 

Either way, as I tried to make clear, the Hebrews were not exceptional in that they were the only group to articulate a rigorous monotheism. Rather, they were exceptional in that they were members of a rather sparsely populated set of such peoples and, further, unlike the other members of that set, the Hebrews don’t seem to have arrived at their views through the brilliant philosophizing of their sages. Instead, were you to ask a 1^st c. BC Jew how his people came to know that God is One, he would likely reply, “God told us.”

 

As I said, given the above (and given some of the other remarkably refined aspects of their theological model), were I looking for places where the Creator of the universe might be at work in a culture, Israel would make it onto my short-list.

 

Sincerely,

 

Eugene

From: Christopher <[address removed]>
To: [address removed]
Sent: Friday, March 7,[masked]:32 PM
Subject: Re: re. [Provocateurs] Soviet Union

Eugene,

Just a couple of quick thoughts, which I hope you haven't already addressed and which may or may not be apposite.

You wrote: "[R]elying on the findings of developmental psychology, it seems that people (including children) have an innate predisposition to believe in God as minimally defined in the first section of my presentation: a transcendent, mindful creator of the universe. That's all I'm claiming here and that does seem supported by the data."

Although I recognize that the IPHBG is not essential to your case for theism, it may worth noting, for the complete record, an apparent misconception in your claim above.  For all I know, it may be perfectly true, at present, that the IPHBG tends almost universally to attract people to monotheism. I grant that comparatively recent history, down to our own, is the only era to which your claim explicitly refers.  But do you think that IPHBG, if it operated in the remote human past, has always suggested monotheism?  (I doubt it, because I do not think you would be oblivious to this obvious objection.)  From the standpoint of the entirety of human prehistory and history, it strongly seems that monotheism is, on the whole, a rather recent development.  The very few pre-modern thinkers who arguably became monotheists (whom I can discuss upon request) were not ordinary persons influenced by the IPHBG as it may have affected their coevals.  Rather, they were highly extraordinary thinkers who arrived at monotheism (if they actually did so) by their own independent, speculative thought.  If the IPHBG operated in more remote historical periods, it seems in almost every known case to have awakened people to the existence of many gods, not a single one.  

Getting monotheism to catch on was an enormous process that unfolded over thousands or more years.  What seemed clear, at least to almost every early Greek and Roman, was that there were innumerable gods, each responsible for his or her own dominion and function (but with considerable overlap).  As long as I am on the subject of Greeks and Romans, there seems to be an inaccuracy in the celebrated account in Acts 17 of Paul's encounter at Athens with certain "Epicurean and Stoic philosophers."  Paul says that he had seen in Athens an "altar with an inscription 'To an unknown god'." As everyone knows, he claimed that this "unknown god"--being singular--was in fact the Christian one.  But, to the best of my knowledge, archaeology--which, of course, has been practiced extensively at Athens--has not uncovered any inscription "to the unknown god"; inscriptions to "unknown gods" have, however, been discovered.  (That is not, of course, certain proof that Paul's putative altar and inscription never existed.  But its absence at least tends to suggest that it is unlikely.)

It is worth noting in this connection that the "exceptional" Hebrews were not at first monotheists.  Rather, they were what might be called "henotheists," believing that there were other gods than their own, but that only their own could be legitimately worshipped; and initially, there was hot dispute about which one was their own.  

 

Again, I hope you have not already addressed this question before.

Christopher M. Riels
1332 Crosswinds Court Apt. 2
Lawrence, KS 66046
Telephone: (785)[masked]

From: Mark <[address removed]>
To: [address removed]
Sent: Friday, March 7,[masked]:27 AM
Subject: Re: re. [Provocateurs] Soviet Union

Eugene,

I'll admit that I haven't researched this area thoroughly.  I'd like to clarify that when I said "supported more strongly" I meant that, being more basic, the more vague "agency inference" would have to be established before continuing on to what qualities that agent might have.  This would mean that any evidence supporting the latter would also support the former, but not necessarily  vice versa.

On Fri, Mar 7, 2014 at 11:13 AM, Eugene Curry <[address removed]> wrote:

Hi Mark,

I understand your point, but the findings of developmental psychology simply don't seem to support you in this. As I said, Dr. Petrovich's cross-cultural work indicates that children are willing to go beyond merely some vague notion of agency to a genuine minimalistic picture of God--even when such a conclusion is counter-cultural. I recommend that you read or view some of her popular interviews on the topic.

You can, of course, simply ignore the data. But I don't think that either of us feel that that is a good way to go.

Sincerely,

Eugene

From: Mark <[address removed]>
To: [address removed]
Sent: Friday, March 7,[masked]:32 AM
Subject: Re: re. [Provocateurs] Soviet Union

Eugene,

That is why I said we could ratchet this back one step a time.  I think "  a transcendent, mindful creator of the universe." is going a bit too far.  I would gladly grant that humans have a tendency to infer agency behind many/most phenomena, but thinking that it's the same "person" behind it all seems more like cultural indoctrination.  This more vague trait of inferring agency is supported more strongly and better explains the varieties of belief and experience of humanity's diverse cultures and worldviews.  Including pantheistic/panpsychic, pagan and other such beliefs.

This is why I say you're smuggling in the God concept.

Mark

On Fri, Mar 7, 2014 at 9:29 AM, Eugene Curry <[address removed]> wrote:

Hi Mark,

I'm not sure that I agree that I've smuggled an unjustified premise into this point. I'm not claiming that humans have an innate predisposition to believe in God with a clear understanding that God is ontologically simple, triune, etc, etc, etc. Rather, relying on the findings of developmental psychology, it seems that people (including children) have an innate predisposition to believe in God as minimally defined in the first section of my presentation: a transcendent, mindful creator of the universe. That's all I'm claiming here and that does seem supported by the data.

That various cultures have different specific models of this Being is obviously the case. And I said as much in my presentation: humans, while predisposed to believe in God, often have different (and sometimes very deficient) models of God. That's precisely why I find what I called "Hebrew exceptionalism" so remarkable.

Sincerely,

Eugene

From: Mark <[address removed]>
To: [address removed]
Sent: Friday, March 7,[masked]:45 AM
Subject: Re: re. [Provocateurs] Soviet Union

Eugene,

I've noticed in your discussing the IPHBG you seem to smuggle in at least one unjustified premise.  Namely that last letter in your acronym.  I doubt you mean to say that humans, including babies, innately believe in the Christian God as understood and outlined by the SBC.  We can reign this back one step at a time until we arrive at a reasonable premise that we could both agree with.  Where do think that might be?

Mark

On Thu, Mar 6, 2014 at 11:30 PM, Eugene Curry <[address removed]> wrote:

Hi Chris,

 

I’m glad to hear that you’re mulling my presentation over.  And I’m happy to interact with your thoughtful push-back. For convenience sake, I’ve attached the relevant slides from my presentation to this email.

 

First, I want to be clear about what I was doing when I appealed to the innate predisposition of humans to believe in God (from now on the IPHBG). As I said at the time, this point is one that I consider after having established theism to my satisfaction on the basis of arguments drawn from so-called Natural Theology—specifically the Kalam, Teleological, and Moral arguments as I presented them. So I don’t invoke the IPHBG in support of theism’s truth per se. Rather, I invoke it (along with the other contextual issues I mentioned) to increase the plausibility of Christianity given theism (slides 1 & 2). The basic idea is that, if God exists, it’s remarkable that He’s designed the world in such a way that His self-aware creatures come naturally to believe that He exists. It implies that God wants at least some sort of minimal relationship with people—one in which He is aware of us and we are aware of Him.

 

Second, I wasn’t basing my claim that there exists an IPHBG on the Soviet experience. Rather, I based my belief in an IPHBG on the findings of developmental psychology (slide 4). I was using the Soviet experience merely as a dramatic case-study which illustrated the deliverances of developmental psychology (slide 5).

 

Now I recognize that during my presentation I ran through that pretty quickly. My presentation was already an hour and a half long and I recognized that I couldn’t linger on every point. So while I had initially intended to discuss the IPHBG at greater length, by the final draft of the presentation I had chopped that section down a bit. Still, I didn’t get rid of the material I had initially intended to discuss; I merely moved it to a subsidiary presentation in the event that the topic came up in the Q&A session.

 

Sadly, the topic didn’t come up (though I did get to use my sub-presentations on the Problem of Evil and the so-called Christ Myth Theory).  But I’m happy that I get to go over it now. (slides 6 & 7)

 

As I said in the main sequence of my presentation, quoting Justin L. Barrett, “The preponderance of scientific evidence for the past 10 years or so has shown that a lot more seems to be built into the natural development of children's minds than we once thought, including a predisposition to see the natural world as designed and purposeful and that some kind of intelligent being is behind that purpose.” (slide 4)

 

If one were interested in an example of the findings that constitute the “preponderance of scientific evidence” that Dr. Barrett was referring to, I was prepared to appeal to the work of Olivera Petrovitch, specifically her research with children in Japan (slide 8). Dr. Petrovitch found that even in a culture such as modern Japan—a culture in which theism is not particularly well-established (let alone imposed on young children)—children nevertheless come to see the world in a theistic way of their own accord. In the context of some recorded interviews, she recounted that even native Japanese adults were surprised by the children’s responses since they didn’t conform to cultural expectations (slide 9).

 

(If you wanted a fuller discussion of the research related to this topic, you could get Barrett’s recent book—though I confess I haven’t read it yet.)

 

Of course, it’s one thing to identify a phenomenon and quite another to explain it. And to merely say that the IPHBG is real isn’t to explain why or how the beliefs are produced. Nevertheless, there is some research that might clarify the matter to some extent.

 

Researchers have found an exception to the above belief-producing dynamics: the autistic. The higher one’s “autism quotient,” the more likely one is to be an atheist (slides 10 & 11). And as the researchers conclude, this seems to imply the IPHBG is a by-product of our ability to “mentalize”—that is, to understand minds and to recognize them when we encounter them. Those who (like the autistic) have some impairment in this area very often become atheists because, if they struggle to recognize minds “in” people around them, how much more might we imagine that they would struggle to recognize a transcendent Mind beyond all worlds? Or, phrased in a more neutral way, regardless of whether God actually exists, given that the very concept of God involves an ur-Mind, surely we would expect those who don’t perceive minds that are obviously present (i.e. other people) to be least likely to “perceive” a mind that may-or-may-not be there.

 

Now, again, I want to be very clear. I am not—I repeat, I am NOT—saying that all atheists are autistic. (After the presentation, at the Blue Moose, someone thought that this was my point and said I was being “douchey.” LOL) Rather, my point is simply that the disproportionately very high levels of atheism among the autistic implies that the IPHBG is a function of neurotypical brains.

 

What’s more, the IPHBG seems to be a function of neurotypical brains even among atheists. Bethany Haywood and Jesse Bering have found that even among atheists generally, a strong majority evince the fundamental psychological dynamics that seem to produce the IPHBG.

 

When these researchers asked autistic people questions about purpose in the universe and meaning in seeming coincidences, the subjects normally gave answers that were entirely a-teleological; notions of purpose and meaning didn’t even enter into there responses. But when the researchers asked the same questions of atheists generally, fully 76% of atheists gave answers that either indicated that they were toying with notions of teleology or which were self-consciously anti-teleological (and not just a-teleological).(slide 12)  In effect, the atheists by and large revealed that teleological interpretations of the world around them were occurring to them, but that they were consciously resisting those interpretations (unlike the autistic).

 

So even when one ultimately rejects theism, the IPHBG is still there, being suppressed. That’s why even after 75 years of brutal atheistic indoctrination, when the pressure came off only 5% of the residents of the former USSR held on to atheism. It’s why atheism has the worst cross-generational retention rate of any “religion;” about 70% of those raised in atheistic household ultimately go on to embrace a religious faith, including such notable examples as Bertrand Russell’s daughter and Madalyn Murray O'Hair's son.

 

While not wishing to sound triumphalistic, it’s enough to remind one of a line from Rage Against the Machine’s political protest song Sleep Now in the Fire, only put imaginatively on the lips of God: “I’m deep inside your children, they’ll betray you in my name.”

 

Now, an innate predisposition to believe something obviously doesn’t mean that that something is really true. So whether the IPHBG, while recognizing that it exists, should be suppressed is a separate issue. (St. Paul’s view of the matter can’t be justified on the basis of the IPHBG alone.)  But as I said, I’m not putting the IPHBG forward as evidence for God per se. I’m putting it forward, in a pre-established context of theism, as a reason for taking reasonably well-evidenced religious claims more seriously (as opposed to mere deism). If there is a God, it’s remarkable that He’s so made the world that we generally come to believe in Him. Perhaps the relationship he desires to have with us is more than just minimal; perhaps it’s quite deep.

 

Sincerely,

 

Eugene

From: Christopher <[address removed]>
To: [address removed]
Sent: Wednesday, March 5,[masked]:22 PM
Subject: [Provocateurs] Soviet Union

Eugene, 

I recently looked back at some notes I took during your presentation in February, and was reminded of your point about the endurance of Christianity in the USSR as support for your thesis regarding "humanity's innate spiritual sensibility."  In general, I think this thesis is pretty well neutralized by what Mackie (The Miracle of Theism, Oxford 1981, ch. 10) called "the natural history of religion" (which unfortunately I don't have the time to summarize for everyone else here).  And your point about Christianity in the USSR is weak support for an already weak thesis.

The USSR existed from 1917 to 1991. This number of years could easily constitute the life-span of many individual persons. This is a too short a time for the purpose of extirpating belief in Christianity over such a vast territory, especially in view of the fact that Russia had been Christian for centuries before the founding of the USSR.  People don 't abandon their long-held religion--which was strongly linked to their entire culture--in one fell swoop; not even one of 74 years.  Additionally, no doubt, many Russians were savvy enough to realize that Pravda did not equal truth.  Thus, if you want to continue to appeal to "humanity's innate spiritual sensibility", I recommend jettisoning this point as support for it.

Christopher M. Riels

1332 Crosswinds Court Apt. 2
Lawrence, KS 66046
Telephone: (785)[masked]

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