debate-pointsI just purchased The God Delusion Debate: w/ Dawkins and Lennox from Amazon, it was a pretty poor debate (find my review here). However, there was one point presented by Lennox that I’ve heard previously, and I’d like to get some input and responses on it: (approximate quote only)
“How is faith in God different than the belief that your wife loves you?”
I have my own defense to this, but I’d like to hear from others.
That’s the whole blind faith versus informed faith thing again.
If you believe against all evidence that your spouse loves you, and yet (s)he repeatedly lets you down, then you are a right fool.
To reiterate, faith in itself isn’t a vice; blind faith is. Dawkins has made this point beautifully in his Growing Up in the Universe talk. He placed a cannonball suspended on a string (a heavy pendulum) right before his forehead, standing back so that the pendulum was suspended at an angle – and let the cannonball go. Now, despite his knowledge of the cannonball’s momentum (and the dire consequences of the cannonball smashing in his forehead) he didn’t budge as the cannonball swung back at him, thus demonstrating his faith in the principles of mechanics.
If my partner treated me the way gods treat their beleivers, I’d be divorced!
I think love as an emotion is inherently confusing because it is a statement of emotion in the observer (feeling loved) that makes an almost implicit statement about the emotion in a third party (loving you). Using the term “love” in both contexts is a fallacy of equivocation. To the former usage, I’d say I’m the obvious ultimate authority. “Love” in this context is a statement of an internal emotion. I can feel loved by my dog, even if I object to the idea that dogs are generally capable of “love”. To the latter, I would take one of two defenses:
Agnostic approach to love: I have no evidence whatsoever, but rather than proclaiming I accept this statement on faith, I’ll instead say I have no evidence and I reject this statement wholey. I’m with my wife because she makes me feel loved. I don’t have any objective evidence that she in fact loves me, nor do I need that evidence to stay in my relationship. If I didn’t have her, I’d move onto something, or someone else that could invoke the same positive feeling that I enjoy when in my current relationship. I believe a good way to hilight this usage problem is the polysemous statement, “I love being loved.” Those two verbs should not be the same, because the latter requires a bold presumption.
Occam’s razor approach: State the obvious signs of love your spouse exhibits, and state that you invoke Occam’s razor to kill off the less probably explanations. Assert that you reserve the other possibilities in the event you come up with evidence, examples of which would be a contract for your head, or some sort of self-enrichment on her part.
First, you could in principle check it by doing the appropriate measurements and tests on your spouse, can you do that with god?
Second, even if we don’t want to go that far, surely, your spouse is there and saying “I love you.” Can the same be said about god? I know some people claim to be in contact with god, but except for a possible bunch of wacky followers, there is not much testifying for it.
Third, your salvation doesn’t depend on your spouse loving you or not. If your spouse doesn’t love you anymore, you can leave him/her. If you leave god, you burn up in hell if we are to believe many of his followers. So, even granting the existence of god, the comparison is still a shoddy one.
The first and second points are showing us that our faith in our spouse’s love is not baseless, where is the basis for faith in god?
The third point shows that granting god’s existence, his love is not worth the trouble.
The obvious counterargument is that I have empirical evidence that suggests that my wife loves me, whereas I have none to suggest that God does, or that he even exists at all. I may be mistaken in believing my wife loves me, but this would be an honest mistake arising from my misread of the evidence.
This is also an example of the fallacy of Appeal to Emotion, which is enough by itself to dismiss the argument. He doesn’t say, “How is faith in God different from belief in Gravity?” He intentionally chooses an emotional comparison, with the obvious implied correlation that if you don’t believe in god then your wife won’t love you. Real dirtbag move, ergo his argument is worthless. If he can’t do better than that, he should concede.
The main thrust of Lennox’s argument thus presented is an equivocation between the knowledge type of situational awareness tied to correlated verifiable facts interpreted as love (the spouse), and an epistemic claim of existence verified through facts about the world and interpreted as justification for faith in god.
This equivocation fails because the spouse is an example of correlation between acts directly attributed to the wife (presumably, caused by love), and the faith in god necesitates a causatory link of god’s will in the world that cannot be objectively confirmed (and is instead based on attributing all things good to god, rather than all things god to good).
Faith in [God] and faith that one’s spouse loves you can be pragmatically the exact same for an atheist.
One must assume love from either case, as evidenced by fidelity and contradicted by infidelity (including emotional infidelity, i.e. ‘I’m not in love with you anymore’, etc). In either case, if one is motivated solely by self-interest with no attachment to the fulfillment faithfulness of the other party and just attempts to act out of good faith efforts, then evidence to the contrary faithfulness of the [God]/spouse is irrelevant. It is irrelevant because the [God]/spouse infidelity never influenced your modus operandi in the first place.
If a [God]/spouse fails you, it is not because you mistakenly put faith in them, it is because [God]/spouse is a failure. In the case of [God]’s failure, the lack of existence entails the lack of fidelity. In the spousal case of failure, the lack of fidelity is due to a poor choice to enter into and maintain a contract with that person. Basically, one can have faith in someone who isn’t necessarily there and operate as though they are. If the entity proves they aren’t there through some infideliity, one’s faith is not actually betrayed, the entity just failed it’s tests.
To expand the metaphor, like [God] and marriage, Empiricism is a faith based choice one makes one’s worldview. It is a statement to the effect that “I have faith that anything can be tested and verified, but I am not about to do the testing everyday of my life so I am going to carry on with this assumption in my pocket.” We carry on until it fails us, at that time it might be abandoned or we take it to therapy to find out why it failed and we make adjustments.
The “love” concept is itself inherently porous.
But, in the context provided, we’re essentially asking the difference between something which offers no direct evidence and something that does.
If you believe a spouse loves you, it is because they have said so (whatever definition of “love” you and they happen to have/share or not). The question, then, becomes one of trusting their honesty (e.g. the possibility of potential deception or not), not one of faith.
I went to a talk by Marcus Borg several years ago. He compared marriage and faith in God. He knew his audience consisted of people who had experience with religion, most still attended church, and that most understood that they had chosen their faith based on community and culture, and if they had been born somewhere else, or even if they just wanted to shop around for a new church, they might chose a different faith and be just as happy. But once you make that choice, you would no less say that about your god than you would tell your spouse that they were not the most important one in the world, one in a billion billion, the perfect match for you.
Your spouse is there, in your presence, visible, tangible, and physical. The sky-fairy is not in your presence, not visible, not tangible, not physical. There is evidence that your spouse loves you in some form, whether it be word or deed, or even the mere memory of words or deeds that suffice as evidence.
Meanwhile, you have no evidence whatsoever for the existence or love of the sky-fairy.
At some point in the past you had evidence (again presumably) that your spouse loved you. After all, they became your spouse. You exchanged vows of some form (in the case of marriage) that function as evidence of love.
You have no such evidence of the sky fairy. None.
I'll try my shot at an argument in support of them being similar. I happen to like many of the other responses, but I think there is a case to be made at a somewhat higher level.
I would just like to point out that this could be subsumed in a larger argument about the difficulty of inference more generally. This is a topic important for all of science and epistemology more generally, and the approach I am discussing is perhaps being described at the Stanford Encyclopedia article on Bayesian Epistemology.
In both cases, you can think about this as trying to make inference about which of two (or more) hypotheses is true. In one case, it is whether God exists, in the other case it is whether your spouse loves you. (In full formalism, it might be more like trying to decide the probability of a set of hypotheses is true or false, but we need not split those hairs here).
Then, assuming that there is a contrasting set of hypotheses, then you can perform inference about how the evidence lines up in these cases.
Now one way in which these things may be different are in the types of evidence that supports the two classes of hypotheses. It may be that the class of evidence that is potentially consistent (ideally uniquely consistent) with the hypotheses that god exists is wider than the class of evidence that supports your belief that your spouse loves you.
If this is the case, i.e. if there are less ways the world can exist that are consistent with the idea that your spouse loves you, then the hypotheses that your spouse loves you is likely to gain more weight more rapidly, since the probability of hypotheses outside this set will, by definition, decrease.
However, if your hypotheses can accommodate essentially any kind of evidence(i.e. no matter what your spouse does, you think she loves you), then there is less evidence that has low probability given that she does not love you, and thus it will be difficult to ever change or sufficiently (rationally) justify your belief in your spouse's love.
If the god hypotheses can accommodate everything and the spouse love hypotheses can accommodate everything, then they are highly similar. But it all depends on the structure of the hypotheses and their relation to the data.
Edit note: I encourage others to edit this for brevity and clarity. As someone who works with this sort of domain which is highly specialized and uses occasionally difficult jargon, it is difficult for me to tell what parts are unclear or overly pedantic/repetitive. I only ask that you do not remove the link to the actual article on Bayesian Epistemology or, if possible, the use of the language "hypotheses" and "probability", since those are the rigorous way to discuss this. Thanks!
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