Jacqueline Kory-Westlund

Three thoughts for today.

One:

"The Rationalist Press Association, in its Prospectus, defines Rationalism 'as the mental attitude which unreservedly accepts the supremacy of reason and aims at establishing a system of philosophy and ethics verifiable by experience and independent of all arbitrary assumptions or authority.'"

--- Charles Watts, essay "The Meaning of Rationalism", 1905, (in An Anthology of Atheism & Rationalism, Gordon Stein, pg 22)

Two:

"We have outgrown the old mode of propaganda, and we recognize more than ever the influences of our environment. We are, in this particular, like trees: we expand and grow from within, but often the iron band of circumstances that surrounds us prevents our free growth and expansion. We, therefore, adopt the rational plan of imparting a knowledge of the facts of existence as revealed by science and philosophy, believing that, in proportion as truth is recognised and accepted, error will disappear. Rationalism is bound by no ancient creeds, hampered by no alleged sacred books, nor marred by dread of punishment in some other world for entertaining unpopular opinions in this. Our desire, as Rationalists, is to urge a sound motive for conduct, which is that "the welfare of the people is the supreme law," to obtain freedom for all in matters of opinion, to promote ethical culture irrespective of theological teachings, and to foster friendly co-operation in spite of divergency of thought."

--- Charles Watts, essay "The Meaning of Rationalism", 1905, (in An Anthology of Atheism & Rationalism, Gordon Stein, pg 25)

Three:

"...Truth, is a thing to be shouted from the housetops, not to be whispered over the walnuts and wine after the ladies have left; for only by plain and honest speech on this matter can liberty of thought be won. Each who speaks out makes easier speech for others, and none, however insignificant, has right of silence here. Nor is it unfair, I think that a minority should be challenged on its dissidency, and should be expected to state clearly and definitely the grounds of its disagreement with the majority."

--- Annie Besant, essay "Why I Do Not Believe In God" , 1887 (in An Anthology of Atheism & Rationalism, Gordon Stein, pg 30)

Are we out of context?

In the book Evolutionary Medicine and Health: New Perspectives (2008), edited by Wenda Trevathan, E.O. Smith, and James KcKenna, there's a chapter by Carol Worthman titled After Dark: The Evolutionary Ecology of Human Sleep.

Worthman takes a look at how well people's current sleep patterns match up with our ecological and evolutionary history -- the context in which human sleep evolved. Any species with a long history is affected by the long-term development of the species over time in particular environments. When the environment changes dramatically in a relatively short period of time, there's a lag as the species' development catches up, so to speak, adapting to the change in environment. For a while, there's a mismatch between the species' current state and its current context.

The motivating question of Worthman's chapter is are we out of context?

Human sleep

No one actually knows exactly why organisms sleep. Researchers have shown it's essential; they've determined that sleep disruption and deprivation often has negative effects; they've mapped out stages of sleep as characterized by patterns of physiological, behavioral, and cognitive activities. Sleep habits are fairly plastic. We have the capacity to have "sleep debts" and make that up later -- but if sleep is so important, asks Worthman, why is that possible? What kinds of situations provoke sleep restriction? What roles do stress and stress physiology play in disrupted sleep? And, most importantly, how have our sleep habits and the conditions under which we sleep changed in modern times from the context in which we evolved?

Factors that Worthman addresses include:

• housing, beds, climate control
• co-sleeping practices
• material, social, and psychological contexts
• macrosocial factors such as technology, labor, social structure

How and when a person sleeps is regulated by demands for wakefulness from the circadian system, and demands for rest and slumber. Worthman talks about the evolutionary roots and elements of human sleep ecology. She discusses how sleep settings have tended to be social across societies, even before longhouses and one-room log cabins. We didn't evolve in an environment where we put oursleves in a room to "lie down and die" for the night. Rather, humans tended to live in groups and sleep in groups, with all manner of activity occurring throughout the night -- were fires, noise, other people, conversations, nighttime pests, and more. These were, ecologically speaking, signs of safety and security -- signs that it was okay to sleep and let our own vigilance mechanisms relax.

Now think about insomnia for a moment. In some instances, difficulties getting sleep in our current society may be related to how and where we now sleep. If we close ourselves off from noise, fire, other people (essentially, take ourselves out of an environment in which some of the vigilance is taken care of for us), our vigilance mechanisms go off, so to speak, and attention is focused on the kinds of things about which we should be vigilant.

In these kinds of group settings and active-nightlife contexts, was sleep interrupted? Sure. But rather than just losing sleep, people stayed awake for good reasons -- useful activities, time and energy demands, threats to physical survival, and social challenges. People have adapted to defer sleep to these kinds of activities. An interesting point -- one can recover from lost sleep in far less time than the original deficit. An example Worthman gives is that ten days sleep deprivation can be recovered in one or three eight-hour nights.

A question Worthman asks is just how atypical our sleep patterns are, and whether these patterns are giving us problems we wouldn't otherwise have.

How much do you sleep?

The biggest thing I got out of her article was this: Bedtimes are fluid. In the US, we seem to have the idea that to sleep properly, we have to be dead to the world for a solid chuck of eight hours. But sleep's more fluid than that, and sleep isn't just the time during which you're dead to the world. We probably underestimate the time that we actually spend sleeping, and we probably make a bigger deal than is actually necessary about getting the recommended eight hours.

Take a look at other cultures -- in some, people sleep for five or six hours and night, and maybe have a two-hour nap in the afternoon. Sleep doesn't have to just be in one chunk. Punctuated sleep is fine. Napping is fine. Some college students seem to have figured this one out already.

Essentially, Worthman argues, we should worry about our sleep a little bit less.

Interested in more of the details?

Worthman's chapter is definitely worth a read. Pun intended.

I designed and painted t-shirts as gifts for some family and friends. Each shirt's design reflected something I knew the recipient would appreciate.

Movin' right along

This one's the masterpiece. My dad appreciates The Muppets—I remember him singing along with Fozzie Bear and Kermit when I was a kid. The song Moving' Right Along was one of his favorites. And so, I present the shirt that, at first, he didn't realize was hand-painted!

I love grammar

For my sister, who had studied languages and enjoyed being a grammar nerd, I made a purple shirt proclaiming "I love grammar." Simple, effective.

I've got soul but I'm not a dualist

One of my college friends, who had studied cognitive science and was staunchly against the philosophical position of dualism, happened to be a fan of music, too. He would sing along to The Killers' song All These Things That I've Done, changing the lyric "I've got soul but I'm not a soldier," to "I've got soul but I'm not a dualist." Yup.

The airlock is ajar

After I played Mass Effect for the first time, I made this one for myself featuring the character EDI with one of the funnier lines she says in the game.

That's outside the scope of my project

Engineers frequently have to enforce constraints on the number of features that other people try to add to their projects. The phrase featured on this shirt was no stranger to my husband, Randy, who used it quite a lot... That's outside the scope of my project.

Is belief in God unjustified?

As a part of my recent philosophical wanderings, I'm reading Kai Nielsen's 1985 book Philosophy & Atheism. He wants to show that belief in God is unjustified.

This is the fifth and final post in the series. I encourage you to read Part I, Part II, Part III, and Part IV if you haven't yet.

Loose ends

The remaining chapters of Nielsen's book take a broad look at some of the common concerns and objections people have to atheism, including religious ethics versus humanistic ethics, and religion and rationality.

I'm not going to summarize these chapters in depth. Nielsen (and others) have written entire -- and more recent -- books on these topics, which at some point perhaps you'll see me read and discuss here.

Instead, I've collected up miscellaneous notes on some of Nielsen's smaller but still interesting points -- his thoughts on agnosticism, discussions of science and religion, anthropomorphic deities. Let's start with...

Against agnosticism

Nielsen spends one chapter discussing whether agnosticism is a reasonable alternative to either theism or atheism. He proposes, paraphrasing T. H. Huxley, that "we ought never to assert that we know a proposition to be true or indeed even to assent to that proposition unless we have adequate evidence to support it" (p. 56). Are we justified in asserting the truth of propositions about God's existence or non-existence? He argues that we are, and that to take an agnostic stance is to accept the possibility that 'God' has a coherently specifiable referent -- which he argues is not the case.

Science and religion

Also in the chapter on agnosticism is a discussion of how, even with a sophisticated analysis of religion and the assumption that religions are making truth-claims about the state of things, there exist numerous conflicts between science and religion. E.g., many Christians take "as central to their religion that Christ rose from the dead and that there is a life after the death of our earthly bodies" (p.64); these claims don't generally line up with our scientific understanding of the world.

Widely accepted now is the view of the Bible and Bible stories as mythical and poetical; the stories, such as those about demons and Jonah in the whale's belly, should not all be taken literally. But how far, asks Nielsen, should we extend this?

"Are we to extend it to such central Christian claims as 'Christ rose from the Dead,' 'Man shall survive the death of his earthly body,' 'God is in Christ'? If we do, it becomes completely unclear as to what it could mean to speak of either the truth or falsity of the Christian religion. If we do not, then it would see that some central Christian truth-claims do clash with scientific claims" (pp. 64-65).

Nielsen suggests that atheists and agnosticists generally answer this by saying either (a) these religious utterances do not function as truth-claims at all, or (b) science and religion clash. In the case of (b), scientific knowledge is to be preferred as a method of fixing belief because it is more reliable. If there is good scientific reason to suggest that people cannot be resurrected when they die, then we have a strong reason to reject the Christian claim that "Christ rose from the Dead." We could, alternatively, reject the scientific beliefs in favor of the religious ones, but more often is it the case, suggests Nielsen, that scientific understanding drives people toward atheism or agnosticism.

Nielsen discusses several counters to this argument, such as beliefs in miracles, which he defines as events of divine significance that are exceptions to at least one law of nature, noting that scientific laws are falsified only by classes of experimentally repeatable events.

The cool thing about anthropomorphic deities

Nielsen notes that the "anthropomorphic deities of the various cultures are tailor-made projectively to meet the anxieties and emotional needs of their members" (p. 116) Two of his examples: Eskimos see Sedena, a female god who lives in the sea and controls storms, weather, and sea mammals. Israelites see Yahweh, a ferocious male god of the desert who protects the Israelites from alien peoples. Cultural preoccupations are projected onto the universe, and stories are created about the deifications.

He spent a while early on dicussing why one ought not believe in anthropomorphic deities.

Philosophy's role in theology

Nielsen takes some time to question whether or not philosophy has any business at all criticizing, refuting, constructing, or justifying theological systems. The claim is that philosophy is a conceptual inquiry and can evaluate the logic of theological arguments but not their truth.

You're not going to be surprised at what Nielsen argues -- after all, he's a philosopher who has just written an entire philosophy book about theology. Philosophy does have a role to play, he says, and that role is not as a neutral bystander. Rather, philosophy is at the heart of theology. It is the basis on which fundamental religious concepts, claims, revelations, and so on are developed; philosophical criteria such as validity, intelligibility, and truth must be referenced in determining what portions of theology are genuine.

I agree with Nielsen here.

So my question for you is this: Which arguments and philosophies should I read next?

Is belief in God unjustified?

As a part of my recent philosophical wanderings, I'm reading Kai Nielsen's 1985 book Philosophy & Atheism. He wants to show that belief in God is unjustified.

This is the fourth post in the series. I encourage you to read Part I, Part II, and Part III if you haven't yet.

The presumption of atheism

One question Nielsen takes care to address is With whom does the burden of proof lie?

That is, must the theist propose and defend the concept of God, providing sufficient reason for belief? Or must the atheist provide proof for disbelief?

Nielsen introduces a collection of essays by Anthony Flew called The Presumption of Atheism, in which Flew argues that it is on theists to produce evidence in support of their beliefs. Like in law, wherein a party to a trial is assumed innocent until proven guilty, Flew argues that one should presume that belief in God is unreasoanble until proven otherwise. This doesn't preclude believers from having deeply held convictions about God's existence or the nature of God (in the same way some people may be convinced of a party's guilt, despite a lack of evidence).

Nielsen doesn't think this is the way to approach the question. Instead, he points out that

"In speaking of God, we are speaking of what the believer takes to be an ultimate mystery. A reflective believer, if he is philosophically literate, knows very well the concept of God--the concept of such a mysterious reality--is only partially intelligible to him and is likely to be through and through unintelligible to the skeptic. Given this state of affairs, it is very unlikely that it will be the case that the believer can produce good enough reasons to convince the skeptic that this procedural presumption of atheism has been defeated and that it is not unreasonable to believe in God." (p. 132)

And similarly, it seems just as unlikely that the atheist will ever be able to produce sufficient proof against God's existence for the theist to accept it.

Flew assumes that reasonable people will proportion their belief to the evidence and will not take belief in God to be justified until evidence that could convince other informed, impartial, reasonable people can be produced. But this would trap the believer and throw the debate in favor of the skeptic. As Nielsen points out, even if it is rational to seek evidence to ground one's beliefs, isn't it also rational to have adequate grounds for disbelief?

According to Nielsen, Flew also assumes that:

"Beliefs must be shown to have grounds to be reasonably believed. So it is perfectly in order and nonprejudicial to demand that of the believer, particularly when the belieg is that this exhibiting of grounds is just what cannot be done for certain fundamental religious beliefs. So, Flew reasons, given that reasonable demand for grounds, the presumption of atheist is justified." (p. 137)

The main problem with this is that "[t]here are many things we reasonably believe which we do not believe for a reason" (p. 139). Not all the beliefs of the theist or of the atheist are intimately grounded in conscious reasoning and evidence. In fact, Nielsen argues that it is "wildly unrealistic and indeed actually an unreasonable demand" (p. 139) to requires that all beliefs must be grounded in reasons and evidence, and that all beliefs should be proportional to those reasons and evidence. I would have liked Nielsen to expand on a few examples of such reasonable beliefs here, but he points us instead to Wittgenstein's On Certainty to find further arguments on the matter.

Nielsen covers a few more of Flew's assumptions and how we ought not accept those assumptions as truth. Without reading Flew's essays myself it's hard to evaluate how justifed Nielsen is making these arguments, so perhaps I'll add them to my reading list.

Where next...

There are still a few chapters left in Nielsen's book, covering religion and ethics, religion and rationality, and whether philosophy has any business criticizing or justifying theological systems. Given how large each of these topics is, and given that Nielsen has written entire books on these subjects since the writing of this one, I may gloss over them and end with a final post tying up loose ends with miscellaneous notes and thoughts. Stay tuned.