Believing Bullshit: How Not to Get Sucked into an Intellectual Black Hole (14 page)

“What is truth?” said jesting Pilate; and would not stay for an answer.
⁶

This kind of use of the question “What is truth?” is the intellectual equivalent of throwing dust in your opponent's face to make quick your escape. When arguments are going our way, we are generally quite happy to say that we have good grounds for supposing that what we believe is true. Only when things start
going badly for us does it suddenly occur to us to ask, “Yes, but
what is
truth?!”

This is not, strictly speaking, a version of
Going Nuclear
, as it's not actually claimed that all beliefs are equally reasonable or equally true. However, it's related to
Going Nuclear
, in that it involves the selective use of a philosophical puzzle in order to generate enough confusion to make quick your escape.

T

Most of us will have come across this strategy. I focus here on a certain kind of example. It involves shifting one's
meaning.
I call it
Moving the Semantic Goalposts.

Moving the Semantic Goalposts
has been developed into something like an art form in certain theological circles, where it is capable of producing an interesting variety of Intellectual Black Hole. But it's a specialist gambit: comparatively few religious people engage in this sort of tactic, certainly not in the systematic fashion described here. Many would rightly condemn it.

Let's start with an example I call
effing the ineffable.

EFFING THE INEFFABLE

This strategy is sometimes employed to deal with the evidential problem of evil. As we saw in the introduction (appendix B), traditional Theism faces an obvious objection: enormous amounts of seemingly pointless suffering look like very powerful evidence against the existence of a maximally powerful, knowledgeable, and good deity.

In response, some say, “Ah, yes. You may have succeeded in showing that there's no ‘God,' if
that's
how you define him. But that's not what
sophisticated
theists such as myself mean by ‘God.’” They then add, “What we're talking about is, in truth,
ineffable and beyond our comprehension.
So you have not refuted
my
sort of theism.”

Here's an actual example made on a blog by a Christian minister in response to the evidential problem of evil:

It is a central claim of the tradition that God is ultimately mysterious and not finally knowable. We cannot attain to a position of oversight with respect to God, we are always in an inferior position—that's part of what the word “God” means—something which is above and beyond our comprehension. Any analysis which seeks to render God's attributes definable is not engaging with a Christian analysis.
¹

Fair enough. If what this minister means by “God” is something indefinable, something beyond the grasp of our conceptual and linguistic apparatus, then obviously any criticism of his theism based on the assumption that the “God” he believes in is, say, maximally powerful, knowledgeable, and good must miss its mark. If all that's being claimed is that there's a transcendent something-or-other—an indescribable cosmic thingamajig—well, yes, that's certainly a hard claim to refute. I concede that it isn't vulnerable to the evidential problem of evil.

However, those who play the ineffability card to deal with the
problem of evil typically don't stop there. Even while insisting on the ineffability of what they call “God,” they nevertheless continue to eff the ineffable. They almost always go on to say all sorts of positive things about this being, such as that he is good, that he is something we ought to worship, and so on.

So, for example, our Christian blogger, in response to the suggestion that enormous amounts of pointless suffering are excellent evidence that there's no good God, adds:

What's at stake is what is meant or understood by “God” in that sentence. I'm not persuaded that we can put much flesh on the bones of “good” when that term is ascribed to God; the God I worship is beyond good and evil, he doesn't fit within those categories. Though I'd still want to call him “good.”

When it's pointed out that a good God would not, presumably, engage in the indiscriminate torture of children or unleash hundreds of millions of years of pain and suffering on animals for no good reason, God's goodness turns out to be of an ineffable variety. However, it subsequently turns out we can put
some
“flesh on the bones of ‘good’” when applied to God, because it's then supposed that “good” is, say, a rather more appropriate way of describing God than, say, “indifferent,” “callous,” or “evil.” Indeed, our blogger speaks of the “God I worship.” But this raises the question: why is it that our grasp of the meaning of “good” as applied to God won't allow us to say that the horrendous suffering of children is evidence there's no such God, yet is sufficient to allow us to say that God nevertheless merits our boundless adoration, gratitude, and praise?

Let me be clear about what I am and am not criticizing here. Is God ineffable and beyond our comprehension? Let's acknowledge the possibility that the answer “In one way yes and in another no” might be correct. I'm neither rejecting that suggestion nor criticizing anyone for making it. What I'm objecting to is the
unjustified and partisan
use of this suggestion to immunize
Theism against powerful counterarguments, while at the same time allowing a degree of effability whenever, say, there appears to be something positive to be said in its favor.

SEESAW MEANINGS

Effing the ineffable involves an example of what I call a
seesaw meaning.
It relies on seesawing between two meanings of an expression. Suppose I ask someone to go to the bank. They say there are no such financial institutions nearby. I say I meant the riverbank. They say there's no point: you can't take money out of a river. This annoying individual is seesawing between two meanings of the word
bank.
When it suits them to use a word to mean one thing, they tilt the seesaw in one direction. When it suits them to use a word to mean the other thing, they tilt it back the other way. Effing the ineffable involves seesawing between effable and ineffable meanings of the word
God.

DEFENDING THE EVIL GOD HYPOTHESIS

The mischievous character of effing the ineffable is nicely brought out by noting how the exact same seesaw strategy can be used to immunize other sorts of god hypotheses against similar criticisms.

Take the evil god hypothesis outlined in my introduction. Suppose the universe is the creation of a maximally powerful and evil being. As I pointed out, this claim faces an objection mirroring the evidential problem of evil—the evidential problem of good. Surely there's far too much good stuff—too much love, laughter, and ice cream—for the universe to be the creation of such an evil being?

But now imagine another earth-like planet where theists believe not in a good god but in this evil god. Call this planet Eth. The Ethians are struck by the problem of good, and some of them
reject belief in an evil god on that basis. But other Ethians remain committed to their deity. And some of them attempt to deal with the problem of good by means of the same sort of semantic sleight of hand outlined above. When critics raise the problem of good, these Ethians say:

Ah, I see you are guilty of a crude misunderstanding. True, evil god creates love, laughter, and ice cream, and so on, but you must remember that “evil,” as applied to God, means something other than it means when applied to us Ethians. Indeed, God's “evilness” is of an ineffable, incomprehensible sort.

If these Ethians nevertheless continue to express horror at the boundless cruelty and malice of their deity, perhaps even using him to explain all the bad stuff that exists (“Look at all this terrible suffering—clearly this is evidence that evil god exists!”) most of us would see through
their
linguistic ruse straightaway.

KAREN ARMSTRONG'S
THE CASE FOR GOD

In
The Case for God
, Karen Armstrong, former Roman Catholic nun and bestselling author of several books about religion, defends her variety of religious belief against the attacks of the “new Atheists” such as Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, whom she condemns as theologically illiterate.
²

Armstrong also addresses the evidential problem of evil. In response to the question “How do we account for the great evil we see in a world supposedly created and governed by a benevolent deity?” Armstrong maintains that this question
betrays a misunderstanding of what “God” means.
“God” says Armstrong, “is merely a symbol of indescribable transcendence,” which points “beyond itself to an ineffable reality.”
³
Armstrong insists that “all faith systems have been at pains to show that the ultimate cannot be adequately expressed in any theoretical system, however august, because it lies beyond the reach of words and concepts.”
⁴
Of course, by insisting “God” is nothing more than a symbol of indescribable transcendence, Armstrong begs the question of whether there is any indescribable transcendence for “God” to label. Perhaps there isn't.

Still, Armstrong does at least succeed in rendering her brand of theism immune to the evidential problem of evil. If God can't be described, then he can't be described as, say, all-powerful, allknowing, and all-good. Armstrong seems to concede that the problem of evil would indeed constitute an excellent argument against the existence of a God of
that
sort. But that's not the sort of God, she claims, that the vast majority of religious people down through the centuries have believed in.

So far, so good. Armstrong has dealt with the problem of evil. However, reading through Armstrong's book, it becomes apparent her God is not quite so mysterious and ineffable after all. Indeed, Armstrong says that “God” is a symbol of “
absolute
goodness, beauty, order, peace, truthfulness, justice.”
⁵
Not only does Armstrong appear here to be effing the ineffable, it seems she also thinks she
knows
things about this indescribable transcendence of which “God” is the name. She
knows
not only that it is the sort of thing to which moral concepts apply, but also that the correct concept to apply is absolute goodness rather than, say, absolute indifference or absolute evil. How is she able to know this?

Because it turns out that what “God” symbolizes isn't something
entirely
incomprehensible and ineffable. “God,” says Armstrong, refers to a “sacred reality” of which she supposes some of us, after lengthy immersion in the right sort of religious practices, can at least catch “momentary glimpses.”
⁶

Armstrong's book is in large measure an exercise in such dodging and weaving. When objections such as the evidential problem of evil are raised, Armstrong pulls the protective cloak of ineffability around her God, rendering him invulnerable. But then, when it suits her, she lets the cloak slip a bit, so that certain dedicated religious folk can take a peek and provide us with at
least some hints about the nature of this “sacred reality” that she supposes is out there—a reality that, it turns out, can be described as absolute goodness, beauty, order, peace, truthfulness, justice, and so on after all. This is another example of seesawing between effable and ineffable meanings.

Of course, if Armstrong could
justify
her view that the use of “God” is such as to allow her to say God is absolute goodness, beauty, order, and so on, but not such as to allow critics to run the evidential problem of evil, then my suggestion that Armstrong is just seesawing back and forth between meanings to suit herself would be unfair. But I can find no such justification in Armstrong's book, nor even any attempt to provide one.

THE APOPHATIC THEOLOGIAN

Some theists hold the “apophatic” view that we cannot say what God
is
, only what he
is not.
Apophaticism is associated particularly with Christian philosopher Thomas Aquinas and Jewish philosopher Maimonides, who said, “No attributes of God can be inferred—He is Infinite and we can only say what He is not.”

The immunizing potential of apophaticism is obvious. If you never say what God is, then you can never be contradicted or proved wrong. Refuse, for example, to say that God is maximally powerful, knowledgeable, and good, and the evidential problem of evil is no longer a problem.

Professor Denys Turner of the University of Cambridge is a theologian who embraces a version of apophaticism. According to Turner, “God” stands for something radically other—something beyond our understanding. “God” is not the name of a further “thing” that exists in addition to chairs, tables, planets, and the universe. To describe God, we would need to categorize him, but, argues Turner, he is beyond categorization—he is not an instance of any kind, not even a unique instance, for “there cannot be a kind of thing such that logically there can be only one of them.”
⁷