Discussion Grounds

Luke,

Greetings. I think you have described the situation well. Neither of our definitions is fully adequate. I see now that if one takes my (B) and (C) as conjunctive with (A), one ends up with heuristic explanation, which is adequate in many cases; but what we’re after is what is true, not what’s merely useful.

Your (A*) revision of my (A) is an improvement, and I suppose we could improve it still further with (A**):

(A**, Heuristic) By knowing x, where x is relevant to y’‘s causal background, we understand y better than by not knowing x.
[(B) and (C) must conjunctively accompany (A**)]

or

(A***, Ultimate) By knowing x, where x is true and x is relevant to y‘s causal background, we understand y better than by not knowing x

The second of these obviates the need to include either (B) or (C). What I like about it is that it emphasizes that explanation is more about increasing causal (as you rightly pointed out) understanding than it is about anything else. For the record, I accept Aristotle’s four-fold approach to understanding causation: material, formal, efficient, and final. This clashes with some scientific reductionists’ view that for many phenomena there are only material and efficient causes. I am not predicting we will have a disagreement over that, and I suggest we not try to sort this out in advance (unless you happen already to agree with Aristotle on this). If the disagreement arises, let’s deal with it then.

I think we have it sorted out well enough to progress, though I want to add these two remaining items to the list of explanatory virtues:

7. Explanatory scope: a good hypothesis will explain a wide range of data (a wider range than rival hypotheses)

8. Explanatory power: a good hypothesis is one that supports the epistemic probability of the evidence

In many cases the test (epistemic virtue 1) of hypotheses must be in the form that’s suitable to inference to the best explanation (IBE). With IBE, in the absence of other tests, one looks at the other explanatory virtues and determines which of two or more rival hypotheses better meets those virtues. There is, for example, no “test” for either the existence or non-existence of God as “test” is commonly understood. There is no “test” for the actuality of claimed historical events. There is, however, evidence in the world, in experience, and in documents, and there are rival hypotheses; and the test must be in the form, which of the rival hypotheses better explains the evidence?

In Letters 9, 10, and 11, I presented a set of phenomena, evidences relating to the human condition, and I suggested that Christianity explains them better than does atheism. I did not formalize it according to these explanatory virtues, since we had not developed the list yet. Would you like me to do that now, or is the case I’ve made on this point already in a form that you are ready to respond to?

Regards,

Tom

Tom,

You proposed an approach to explanation such that “x contributes to the explanation of y if” it meets three criteria. Your first criterion was:

(A) by knowing x we understand y better than by not knowing x

But this is problematic because it requires that any proposed explanation also be a successful explanation. Consider the phlogiston theory of combustion. I think this theory should at least be “in the running.” We reject it not because it cannot be an explanation for combustion, but because it fares more poorly on our list of explanatory virtues than the modern theory of combustion. Your criteria (A) requires that we only ever consider theories that are correct, but of course we can’t know which theory is correct until we can compare them!

We could modify your criterion like so:

(A*) if x were true, then by knowing x we would better understand y than by not knowing x

This works better, I think, but there is still a problem. Explanation is generally thought to be positing the cause of an event. And yet your criterion would be fulfilled by “explanations” that merely help us understand the effects of x. Suppose that y = “The murder of John Dominic.” And I offer x = “Upon his murder, John Dominic’s body did not decay because the court ordered that his body be preserved.” Now this x certainly helps us understand y better, and it also could score extremely well on your other criteria and explanatory virtues, but it would do nothing to “explain” our x, the murder of John Dominic.

And there is another problem with your approach to explanation. You say that “we assess whether x fulfills (A), (B), and (C) by reference to a set of explanatory virtues…” But this is too vague. That’s why I prefer my criterion of:

(B) H possesses the following explanatory virtues to a greater degree than any competing potential explanations of E…

But my account of explanation has problems, too. I said that for H to be even a potential explanation of E, it must be true that “if H were true, then E would be a matter of course.” But as commenter Richard Wein points out, this account doesn’t allow for explanations involving chance.

Suppose we want to explain why E = “Person P won the lottery.” It seems the best explanation we can offer would be something like H = “P bought a ticket. The choice of the winning ticket was random, but according to the rules of the game some ticket-holder had to win. And P was a ticket-holder.” That sounds like not just a potential explanation of E, but a good explanation of E. And yet according to my definition it is not even a potential explanation, for E does not follow as a matter of course from H. In fact, it is extremely unlikely that E would follow from H, assuming we are talking about a lottery involving millions of tickets.

The issues of explanation and chance have been discussed at length by Railton, Batterman, Strevens, and others. Also see sections 2.3 and 3.2 of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on Scientific Explanation.

I don’t think you or I will be able to solve the problems of explanation or even understanding - both of which are difficult – in the course of our debate. I just hope we can settle on some agreeable account of explanation so that we can then argue whether naturalism or Christianity offers the superior explanation of the human condition and other phenomena. Even still, offering explanations may not be the end of it. Explanations are like salted peanuts: “Getting one doesn’t make you stop asking for one; usually just the reverse is true.”

What do you think?

Luke,

I’m not sure why my other conditions, especially (B), all of which are conjunctive, do not solve the problem posed in your Zeus examples. Is the word “adequate” in (B) not (pardon me) adequate?

Tom,

I should have asked about this last time, but I’m still a little unclear about what you mean by offering the following criterion for x as an explanation for y:

(A) by knowing x we understand y better than by not knowing x

To “understand” something means “to perceive and comprehend the nature and significance of” something. So I guess that positing Zeus as the cause of lightning would help me understand that the nature of lightning is such that it has a supernatural cause hiding behind its proximate natural cause, and that each lightning bolt has a telos, as determined by the will of Zeus. Zeus sends each lightning bolt for a reason. So knowing that Zeus causes lightning helps me understand lightning better than I would if I did not know that Zeus causes lightning.

Have I got that right?

There’s also the problem of the word “know,” which assumes that x is true (since “knowledge” is considered to be “justified true belief,” ignoring Gettier problems). So maybe we could use:

(A) by positing x we understand y better than by not knowing x

But even the word “understand” presents a problem. Let’s say that the Ancient Greeks had good reason to believe that Zeus was the cause of lightning, and there were no competing hypotheses. But let’s say that Zeus did not, in fact, exist. Could we then say that by positing Zeus these fictional people understood lightning better than by not positing Zeus? I think it would be more proper to say that by positing Zeus they misunderstood lightning. The reason for this is that “understand” is a success term, at least to my ears.

I might be able to propose a less problematic account of explanation by making use of C.S. Peirce’s abductive schema:

(1) The surprising fact, E, is observed.

(2) But if H were true, E would be a matter of course,

(3) Hence, there is reason to suspect that H is true.¹

Any H that fits in (2) I will call a potential explanation. Given that, may I suggest:

H is a good explanation of E if:

(A) H is a potential explanation of E; and if

(B) H possesses the following explanatory virtues to a greater degree than any competing potential explanations of E:

1. Testability – a good explanatory hypothesis should be testable.
2. Consistency with background knowledge – a good explanatory hypothesis should not contradict our background knowledge.
3. Past explanatory success – a good explanatory hypothesis should fit in a tradition with much past explanatory success.
4. Simplicity – a good explanatory hypothesis should be simple, not making a lot of ad-hoc assumptions.
5. Ontological simplicity – a good explanatory hypothesis should not add more unknown things to our ontology than necessary.
6. Informativeness – a good explanatory hypothesis should allow us to deduce precise details of its effects.

How does that sound?

Luke

1. Peirce: Collected Papers 5.189. Peirce used letters C and A, but I use E for evidence and H for hypothesis. My approach to explanation here mirrors that of Gregory Dawes in Theism and Explanation. [↩]

Greetings once again, Luke,

Thank you for sharing more clearly what you meant by things like “werewolf” and “party tricks,” and for your expression of respect for me. I am glad to see this moving back the direction I always expected it to take from the beginning. I can easily accept (without agreeing, obviously!) that you literally believe “a theory of werewolfism could contain less implausible and less ad-hoc hypotheses than Christianity does.” That’s your position, and I accept it for what it is.

As to “party tricks,” though, which you continue press as a literal Christian belief, I still take exception to that. My son is an amateur magician who does party tricks. They’re not intrinsically dishonorable, but they’re not what Jesus did at Cana, either. The term generally connotes something trivial, an illusion rather than something real, done to draw attention to the trickster. I don’t think what he did was trivial (though I know some might argue that it was). It was certainly not an illusion nor was it done to draw attention to himself.

I also have some problems with equating “magical” with “supernatural,” and with viewing God as a wish-granter, but if that is how you viewed it, that is how you viewed it, and who am I to dispute that? Here’s the distinction: if you represent something as your belief about Christianity (that it’s less plausible than werewolf-ism, for example) then it is what it is, you believe what you believe, and that’s not subject to dispute. If you have a strongly negative view of Christianity overall, again, that’s not open to debate, I merely ask that you continue to bear in mind that this website is for “disciplined debate,” which includes respect for persons who hold those beliefs. If on the other hand you represent something as being an actual belief of Christianity, and if, as in the case of “party tricks,” it’s not an accurate representation, then you can expect to be corrected on that.

Now, on to the matter of explanations. I think we can meld your answers and mine and come up with a good overall definition. In my last post I focused more on “what is an explanation?” than on “what makes it a good explanation?” I can attribute this to a discussion going on simultaneously at Thinking Christian, where one commenter has claimed that under no circumstances could God ever be an explanation for anything (“there is no such thing as a supernatural explanation,” and other similar statements following). He has a rather idiosyncratic take on what an explanation is, and that was on my mind when I wrote Letter 11.

One small thing: on further reflection I would revise my statement there to begin,

x is explanatory of y if…
or
x contributes to the explanation of y if …

rather than

x is a good explanation of y if …

The reason for that change is that it makes the qualification I added in my first footnote much less necessary. I still mean to imply that x‘s contribution to the explanation of y is a good contribution provided that (A), (B), and (C) are met.

You say,

Saying that theory x is a good explanation for y is precisely what gives us reason to believe that x is true (as I understand explanation). So to put (B) in the requirements for a good explanation just sets us back to the starting point.

I agree and disagree. We need some reason to believe x is true. Its fit with y is certainly one potential reason (see below), but just one among many.

I did acknowledge and I still agree with your list of explanatory virtues. By them we can assess whether x fulfills (A), (B), and (C). So my suggested statement as a result would be,

x contributes to the explanation of y if:

(A) by knowing x we understand y better than by not knowing x; and if

(B) there is adequate reason to believe that x is true, reliable, trustworthy, etc.; and if

(C) there is no competing z, such that z is contrary or contradictory to x and fulfills the conditions of (A) and (B) more successfully than does x.

And we assess whether x fulfills (A), (B), and (C) by reference to a set of explanatory virtues including:

1. Testability – a good explanatory hypothesis should be testable.
2. Consistency with background knowledge – a good explanatory hypothesis should not contradict our background knowledge.
3. Past explanatory success – a good explanatory hypothesis should fit in a tradition with much past explanatory success.
4. Simplicity – a good explanatory hypothesis should be simple, not making a lot of ad-hoc assumptions.
5. Ontological simplicity – a good explanatory hypothesis should not add more unknown things to our ontology than necessary.
6. Informativeness – a good explanatory hypothesis should allow us to deduce precise details of its effects.

Note that when the argument is of the form, inference to the best explanation, part of the test for x is its fit with y, compared with other candidate explanations’ fit with y. My argument in the last several letters has been of this form, and the test I have been proffering has been a test of fit.

So my guess is that we’re in agreement on what we’re going to call a good explanation, or how we’re going to assess the quality of explanations. Am I right?

Regards,

Tom

Tom,

I think that when I talk about werewolf-theory and about Jesus performing “party tricks” you may think I am disrespecting you. If you could hear me say these things face to face I think you would not feel disrespected, by my tone of voice is not communicated clearly via a text medium.

So allow me to reinforce what I said about werewolf theory and Jesus performing party tricks, as examples. I do not mean these to be flippant, dismissive remarks. I mean them very specifically and literally. I literally think a theory of werewolfism could contain less implausible and less ad-hoc hypotheses than Christianity does. And Jesus literally performed party tricks: turning water into wine at a wedding. So I mean that all quite literally, not flippantly.

I’m doing the same thing when I tell people my deconversion story and I recall the moment when I realized I literally believed I had an invisible magical friend who granted me wishes. I believed Jesus was my friend, I believed he was invisible, I believed he had magic powers (aka “supernatural” powers), and I believed he sometimes fulfilled telepathic wishes I made (prayers). When telling this story I do not mean that statement flippantly or dismissively, either. I mean it very specifically and literally.

And of course it’s possible that I really did have an invisible magical friend who granted me wishes. When I realized this I did not give up my faith. I had many reasons to believe it was true. It was only after these reasons were undermined by argument and evidence that I had to admit it was not true that I had an invisible magical friend who granted me wishes.

With that in mind, let me reaffirm the respect I have for you. Tom, you’re a smart guy. A loving guy. A genuine seeker of truth. I don’t think you’re being willfully dishonest (like some apologists are). And I respect that. I think it’s literally true that a common conception of Jesus is that of an invisible friend who sometimes grants wishes, and I think it’s literally true werewolfism could be less implausible and less ad-hoc than Christianity, but none of that means I disrespect you. It just means I think you’re wrong, for very specific reasons.

Okay, back to the main topic.

We’re at the point again where we need to find some common ground before we can continue. Before I say anything more about whether Christianity or naturalism offers a superior explanation for the human condition, we should get clear on what we think a good explanation is.

You gave three criteria for a good explanation:

(A) by knowing x we understand y better than by not knowing x; and if

(B) there is adequate reason to believe that x is true, reliable, trustworthy, etc.; and if

(C) there is no competing z, such that z is contrary or contradictory to x and fulfills the conditions of (A) and (B) more successfully than does x.

But I’m not sure how this can work. Saying that theory x is a good explanation for y is precisely what gives us reason to believe that x is true (as I understand explanation). So to put (B) in the requirements for a good explanation just sets us back to the starting point. We are left asking, “Well, is that x a good explanation of y, so that we have good reason to believe x is true?”

When you say that e is evidence for x, what you’re saying is that x provides the best explanation for e. Otherwise, e could just as well be evidence for the Zeus theory of lightning as for the electric theory of lightning. The reason e is evidence for the electric theory of lightning instead of being evidence for the Zeus theory of lightning is that the electric theory is a better explanation of e. (And it is a “better” explanation of e in that it has better explanatory scope, explanatory power, and so on – compared to the Zeus theory. See below.)

At least, that’s what I mean when I use these terms. But they are used in varying ways, and that’s probably why we need this cleared up.

So how do we tell which hypothesis (or theory, a collection of hypotheses) is the best explanation of some phenomenon (say, “the human condition”)? Some prefer the approach of Bayesian confirmation theory, such that the best explanation is one who final probability is greater than 0.5. One non-fatal difficulty with this approach is that we cannot assign accurate probability numbers to the terms of the equation. Another is that it seems to set the bar too high. Scientific theories are often accepted before we have reason to believe their probability is greater than 0.5.

One alternative view to confirmation theory is “explanationism.” The explanationist may accept a theory whose probability does not exceed 0.5. Instead, the explanationist may merely require that a theory possess certain explanatory virtues to a greater degree than competing theories.

Scientists and philosophers have developed an indefinite but useful set of explanatory virtues. The list looks something like this:

1. Testability – a good explanatory hypothesis should be testable.
2. Consistency with background knowledge – a good explanatory hypothesis should not contradict our background knowledge.
3. Past explanatory success – a good explanatory hypothesis should fit in a tradition with much past explanatory success.
4. Simplicity – a good explanatory hypothesis should be simple, not making a lot of ad-hoc assumptions.
5. Ontological simplicity – a good explanatory hypothesis should not add more unknown things to our ontology than necessary.
6. Informativeness – a good explanatory hypothesis should allow us to deduce precise details of its effects.

Of course, there are other virtues we might consider. I could also spend time arguing why these explanatory virtues, if fulfilled by explanation x, argue in favor of x being the correct explanation. But I suspect we agree on several or all of these explanatory virtues already, and I have said enough for one post.

So, Tom, are we any closer to a common understanding of what a “good explanation” is?

Your turn!

Luke

Greetings, Luke,

I could also rattle off a long list of things I think are wrong with atheism, if that were our purpose here. I could “give a hint at” why I think atheism is “a terrible explanation for the world,” for indeed I think it is. I haven’t done that (“not even close!”) because that’s not what we’re about here. So I’ll take it as duly noted that you believe Christianity is a “tangled mess,” etc., and move on to the discussion we’ve agreed to have.

I’m also not going to get into your misrepresentations of Christian theology, because that would just throw us off track. That discussion is proceeding just fine without me in the comments.

Now for the meat of it. You said,

I think the natural explanations for these phenomena are plausible, while the Christian explanation is absurd. You think natural explanations for these phenomena are weak, while the Christian explanation for them is strong. Therefore I suspect we have very different ideas about what makes an explanation strong or weak, good or bad…. Personally, I tend to think of a good explanation as one that possesses many explanatory virtues: testability, consistency with background knowledge, simplicity, informativeness, and so on.

I would center my conception of explanation around this:

x is a good explanation for y if

(A) by knowing x we understand y better than by not knowing x; and if

(B) there is adequate reason to believe that x is true, reliable, trustworthy, etc.; and if

(C) there is no competing z, such that z is contrary or contradictory to x and fulfills the conditions of (A) and (B) more successfully than does x.

That’s a fairly simplified and generalized picture of what I think explanation is about. It leaves open the door for variations like tentative explanation (the best explanation we have so far, where (B) could possibly be true, but is not well established), multiple coinciding explanations (where z is complementary rather than contrary or contradictory to x), and so on.¹ It also provides for some comfortable flexibility in how we determine whether (A), (B), and (C) are each true. Certainly your list of explanatory virtues is relevant.

Now I think that Christianity certainly meets condition (A) for the phenomena I focused on in my last two posts. The Judeo-Christian doctrines of the imago Dei and the fall certainly help us to understand the confusing, paradoxical human condition. We were created in dignity, love, and moral innocence for an intimate relationship with a holy God and with others of his creation. We rebelled against God and fell away from that state of complete dignity, love, and relationship; and we feel the sting of it in the form of alienation, moral failure, and multiple indignities including physical illness and death. Our longing for something better or something more is a sense that is built into us by virtue of being in God’s image. Our moral awareness, which is largely (not perfectly) in tune with truth, is a reflection of God’s moral character still stamped in us. Our successes in love, giving, sacrifice, etc. are real successes in living in tune with that character as it is known to us through conscience and natural law (and also, for those who know and accept it, by revelation from God). Our awareness of failure, on the other hand, is a result of really not matching up to a really existent standard. It’s an awareness that is not born of our own imaginings, it’s not a mere social construction, it’s not the result of evolution, but it is based on a standard that has stood forever.

Knowing our origin and state—created in the image of God but fallen—certainly gives us a better understanding of our paradoxical condition than not knowing it does. Thus it meets part (A) of my definition for an explanation. Does it meet the test of (B)? I think so. I know you disagree. I cannot present the whole case for that here; it would require having our whole discussion about all of Christianity at once! I am content to show that it meets (A), but not just that; that it meets (A) better than the competing naturalistic explanation. If it succeeds in that, then that by itself contributes to the case (B) for its being true.

The naturalistic explanation for the human condition seems problematical to me. Yes, I know there’s more than one naturalistic explanation, but they all share the view that every cause that produces every effect, including every human feeling, thought, or behavior, is purely natural: matter and energy interacting according to necessity (natural law) and chance (quantum effects).² The naturalistic worldview entails the causal closure of the physical; that is, that all causes are physical. Matter and energy interacting by law and chance constitute the entire ultimate causal picture for everything.

More proximately, the cause of all human feeling, thought, behavior, etc. is to be found in evolutionary processes that are built in randomness and seek and reward³ only reproductive fitness. If there is any other naturalistic explanation available for any organism’s characteristics, well, it hasn’t been suggested yet.⁴ Random variation and reproductive success constitute the entire causal schema for all organisms’ attributes. This, too, is causal closure. On this level of analysis, there are no other causes for human behavior.

The naturalistic explanation requires one to suppose that the painful, paradoxical experiences that go with being human led to reproductive success sometime in our species’ natural history. Now, I have trouble seeing how a purely natural process could have thrown up any reliable sense of right or wrong whatever: it’s just not in the nature of physical things to be right or wrong. I can imagine natural processes producing a sense of right or wrong, but not a reliable sense; for there is nothing about natural processes that could be expected to produce such a thing, in a way it could be relied upon as true. So on naturalism, I have to take it that our sense of being somewhat right, somewhat wrong; somewhat good, somewhat bad; somewhat dignified, somewhat dirt; somewhat eternal in value, somewhat eternally flawed—all of this is just a sense, and there is no reason to consider it the least bit reliable. It is only a sense, one that was developed and preserved in humans just because it served our ability to make more babies that made more babies.

I have spoken of two levels of explanation for human behavior. On the most ultimate level, all causation is accounted for in terms of physics, interactions of particles by lawlike or chance processes. On a more proximate level, all causation relevant to human behavior is accounted for by random variation and natural selection (reproductive success). This does not obviate or contradict the most ultimate level of causation. Evolution expresses physics, at a more complex level of organization, it does not deny it or override it.

Of course there are still other levels of explanation, including our mental processes of belief-forming and decision-making; but on naturalism, given the causal closure of the physical and the causal closure (on another level) of random variation and reproductive success, it is impossible for this level of explanation to escape the causal necessities of the more ultimate levels of explanation. Therefore whatever mental processes we think are influencing our behavior, those mental processes are ineluctably and inescapably caused by physical interactions of particles (on one level) and by randomness and reproductive success on another level. There is no other causal stream contributing to human attributes, and thus no other causal stream contributing to human mental processes.

To state it baldly: all of my and your most human mental attributes—our aspirations, hopes, dreams, confusions, moral victories, moral shames—do not exist because we really do have dignity, worth, moral value, etc. They exist in us because attributes like this helped our ancestors reproduce more successfully and for no other reason.⁵ This is the conclusion Dawkins draws in The Selfish Gene, and if naturalism is a true picture of reality, then I don’t see how he could be wrong on this.

Further evidence for my position is found in the immense difference between humans and animals in this respect. Animals do not agonize over unfulfilled aspirations, and they don’t mourn their moral failures. They don’t reach for something higher. What could evolution have done to some population of primates to produce this in homo sapiens? It would have had to introduce in us a sense that some things were right, and other things were wrong. But is it plausible to think of this happening in that population of primates, when what evolution cares about⁶ is getting the male and the female together in some environment where they’ll make babies that will live to make babies? It works awfully well in animal populations without all this mental anguish of hope and failure; why would evolution have bothered to do more than that for humans? Where is the reproductive advantage in it?

So naturalism could plausibly explain the sense of human aspiration and failure, but it cannot explain it as a reality. It can tell how we feel worth and dignity, but it certainly cannot say how we really have worth and dignity beyond those feelings. If that sense or feeling is actually tapping into something real, then naturalism’s explanation for it is inadequate. Or as I put it last time, what we know to be true about the human condition fits within the Christian worldview. It takes some serious Procrustean hammering to make it fit with naturalism.

1. I’m also saying we can call x a good explanation without requiring that it be the whole explanation. The pot is boiling on the stove because I want to make spaghetti is a good explanation, even if it doesn’t make reference to how the electricity was supplied, how the resistive stovetop coil produces heat, how heat makes water boil, etc. The greater the explanatory scope of x, the better an explanation it is, of course. [↩]
2. I have seen attempts by naturalists to avoid the such reductionism, but I’ve never seen any that succeeded in avoiding self-contradiction. [↩]
3. Please pardon the anthropomorphism [↩]
4. Genetic drift is just randomness writ large. [↩]
5. There actually is another possible reason: that these things came up as a co-adaptation along with some other human feature that served purpose of reproductive success. If so, and if there is any actual truth to be found in this co-adaptive state, that’s just marvelously lucky indeed. The odds are not in favor of such a thing happening. [↩]
6. I know, I’m anthropomorphizing again [↩]

Tom,

I have no aversion to being flowery. And as flowers go, Pensées is a lovely one. I just don’t know how to argue with a flower.

I’m glad you did not try to respond to everything I said in my last letter. But let me assure you it did not represent everything I think is wrong with Christianity! Not even close.

I did not want to open arguments over every theological point I raised. Rather, I wanted to give you a hint at why I think Christianity is a terrible explanation for the world as it is. Christianity is a tangled mess of horribly implausible and extremely ad-hoc hypotheses, and as such Christianity fails badly as an explanation for anything. So my letter was a direct response to your claim that Christianity offers a good explanation for the human condition.

Many of your fans complained that I offered “typical atheist misrepresentations of Christian theology.” However, nobody has yet told me precisely what was incorrect in my representation of Christian theology. Furthermore, let me remind everyone that the theological absurdities I drew attention to were not problems raised by atheists. They were first raised by Christian theologians – the ones I named in my previous letter. I specifically chose problems raised by earnest Christians, not atheists. These thinkers were believing, pious experts on Christian theology, but they saw the many contradictions and absurdities inherent to Christian theology (especially when they had scientific worldviews to compare Christianity to), and they devoted their lives to either reforming or abandoning the parts of Christian theology that make no sense.

Tom, we agree that humans experience what they call “dignity, moral purpose, goodness, destiny, value, beauty, and wonder, along with all of their opposites.” I think the natural explanations for these phenomena are plausible, while the Christian explanation is absurd. You think natural explanations for these phenomena are weak, while the Christian explanation for them is strong. Therefore I suspect we have very different ideas about what makes an explanation strong or weak, good or bad.

When you say that Christianity is a good explanation for the human condition, what do you mean? Do you mean that the Christian story for the human condition “feels” right for you? I hope you mean something more specific than that, because I will simply reply that the naturalistic story for the human condition feels right to me, and we will get nowhere.

So I’d like to suggest we sharpen our debate a bit. We are talking about explanation, but we seem to have very different ideas about what makes a good explanation. There are many models of explanation on offer. They each have particular strengths and weaknesses and applications. Personally, I tend to think of a good explanation as one that possesses many explanatory virtues: testability, consistency with background knowledge, simplicity, informativeness, and so on.

But perhaps you have something very different in mind when you use the word “explanation.” Maybe we can seek out some agreement about what makes an explanation good or bad, strong or weak. And then we will be equipped to argue about which of our worldviews offers the stronger explanation for the human condition.

How does that sound?

Cheers,

Luke

Greetings, Luke,

I have to agree with some of the comments that have been posted since your letter number 10, especially here and here. One of them said it would have helped if my last letter had been shorter, and I’ll accept that advice and correction. I got carried away with Pascal, plus it’s been a rough week with the loss of a friend. But I do want to recall for you the idea of this website, which is to keep our debate focused and somewhat disciplined. I wrote about one topic and received a response that covered just about everything you think is wrong with Christianity.

You wrote,

I would love to have somebody explain to me how Christianity makes sense. Even before we discuss whether Christianity also happens to be true, I would first like to hear a presentation of Christianity that even makes sense.

It appears to me you missed the point of what I wrote. Maybe it got buried in the glut of words I used. I’m going to repeat most of an entire paragraph in hopes it will come through this time:

The first reason I would adduce for my believing in the Christian revelation is … a step towards a first-phase outcome I hope to reach, which is to show that Christianity makes sense. This is more important than it once was…. Now we have the New Atheists (including Hitchens) presenting [Christianity] as something ridiculous or awful; or we have writers representing its beliefs as equivalent to Casper the Friendly Ghost or involving something as absurd as “metaphysical ectoplasm.” In an environment like this I don’t think it’s such a great idea to start with trying to prove Christianity. I would rather tell its story in a way that shows that it really does make sense.

In other words, what you called for in your Letter 10, with all the accompanying invective implying its impossibility, is something I said I was working on in my Letter 9. Moreover, I said it was a first step. I’m well aware of the questions you raised in your last letter. They’re not new to me. I’m not going to try to answer them all at once, okay? I’m taking it a step at a time.

Apparently my last letter did not present a clear and coherent enough argument for you to respond to. You wrote,

Tom, you have said many flowery things and quoted the lovely Pensées at length, but your argument was presented so vaguely that it raises suspicions of obscurantism. If you present your argument so unclearly it cannot be refuted or supported, and if you can present it more clearly I suspect it will be easily refuted.

I’ll try to be more clear. But whatever floweriness there was in my last letter was there for a purpose: to represent or to call to mind what it means to be human. I didn’t want to dry that out like dust in some syllogism. Since you asked, though, I’ll be glad to clarify my argument, as follows.

To be human is to experience a paradoxical mix of awareness of dignity, moral purpose, goodness, destiny, value, beauty, and wonder, along with all of their opposites. This is not easily accounted for by naturalism and especially by evolutionary explanations for behavior. Evolutionary psychology is a pseudo-science in the first place, since it has little to no evidence to draw on for most of its conclusions. In the second place, even its supposed explanations fail to to explain adequately how the first arising of these paradoxical experiences took place. And in the third place, naturalism provides no ontological ground for the actual existence of things like dignity, truth, destiny, beauty, and value, or for their opposites, either, for on naturalism there is only matter and energy arranged in varying degrees of complexity, interacting according to necessity and/or chance. I don’t know how matter, energy, necessity, and chance can acquire properties of truth, dignity, value, or destiny.

Naturalism cannot actually deny the reality of these things, so it tries to accommodate them, but based on the evolutionary picture of organisms (including humans), the ultimate explanation for these things must resolve down to their contributions to humans’ reproductive fitness, or what Churchland called the Four F’s (feeding, fighting, fleeing, and reproducing). This is a poor fit with what we know to be true about our experience of these things. We know they have more meaning and more reality than just perpetuating some set of selfish genes.

Further, the sense of human experience is that there is something higher toward which we ought to be striving, and that this something higher is real. On evolution it’s not real, it’s always a proxy or a scheme for producing more offspring, which is the only ultimate explanation for any behavior.

On Christianity,¹ the sense of greatness, dignity, higher purpose is grounded in a reality of having been created in God’s image. The paradoxical experience of failure is explained in our having fallen away from the ontologically genuine goodness of our origins. It makes sense, on Christianity, that humans have high intrinsic value and such a confusing mix of goodness and badness.

That’s the essence of my argument at this stage, and this is the portion of the discussion I’m asking you to interact with at this time.

1. Also on Judaism, for this comes from the part of the Bible Christians call the Old Testament, which we share with the Jews [↩]

Tom,

You wrote that

[My first reason for] believing in the Christian revelation is not one I would present as any kind of proof, but rather as a step towards a first-phase outcome I hope to reach, which is to show that Christianity makes sense.

I would love to have somebody explain to me how Christianity makes sense. Even before we discuss whether Christianity also happens to be true, I would first like to hear a presentation of Christianity that even makes sense.

I reject theism pretty firmly for many strong reasons, but my objections to Christianity are so numerous that it is truly less plausible to me than belief in werewolves. I don’t mean that as an insult. If anything, it is an insult to werewolf-belief. Christianity is that problematic.

I could write thousands of pages on the extreme absurdities of even “mere” Christian doctrine – and many other people have done precisely that, so I don’t have to. In fact, we can turn to Christian theologians themselves to elucidate the absurdities of traditional Christian doctrine: thinkers like Schleiermacher, Harnack, Bultmann, Tillich, Robinson, and others.

Christian theology is such an ocean of contradictions and ad-hoc implausibilities that I barely know where to begin.

I don’t mean to be abrasive. But I hope you and other Christians can come to understand what Christian theology sounds like to an indifferent audience. It sounds like the rantings of a strung-out madman.

As far as I can tell, you believe that God created the universe 13.7 billion years ago, then kicked off a series of self-replicating cells called “life,” then tinkered endlessly with this this process as 99.9% of all species that have ever existed were completely wiped out. Life progressed for billions of years with no purpose – nothing but terror, desperation, and misery. Eventually, God tweaked the primate design into something as impressive and yet badly designed as the modern human. He then injected a supernatural ‘soul’ into these humans. And this is the origin of ‘man.’

As far as I can tell, you believe that God created man in full awareness that his imperfect nature would lead him to sin, and then condemned him to death (and later, eternal torment) for sinning, but then decided to provide a way for man to ‘redeem’ himself for his inevitable failure that God designed into him. And the best way God could think to do this was to send himself in human form to perform some magical healings, exorcisms, and party tricks for a few years among illiterate Jews in a 1st century desert. God then sacrificed himself to himself to appease himself for the sins he designed man to commit. God also decided that the way mankind could redeem himself would be to perform the cognitive work of believing that this all happened.

I could go on and on and on. Christian theology only gets weirder. Don’t get me started on the Trinity!

My point is that Christianity is absurd in the extreme. It is so implausible and so ad-hoc that it cannot offer itself as the “best explanation” for anything. Even if scientific explanations were unavailable to us, I would still say, “Uh, no thanks, I think I’ll keep looking for another explanation.” In fact, I could invent a hundred supernatural explanations for our universe that make much better sense than Christian theology.

And I’m still not clear on what your argument is. You wrote that “Christianity makes good sense of the human condition.” Are you saying that Christianity provides the best explanation – or even a coherent explanation – of the fact that we can know good and evil and perform both in great degrees? By what measure is Christianity a good explanation for the human condition? Do you think it has great explanatory scope, explanatory power, coherence with background knowledge, ontological simplicity, testability, and so on? Or do you mean something else?

Tom, you have said many flowery things and quoted the lovely Pensées at length, but your argument was presented so vaguely that it raises suspicions of obscurantism. If you present your argument so unclearly it cannot be refuted or supported, and if you can present it more clearly I suspect it will be easily refuted.

I would very much like to understand your argument so we can see if it has any merit. As I requested last time, “please give [your argument] in clear, logical form so that I know for sure what I’m responding to.”

Cheers,

Luke