You may be aware of recent events at University College, London, where the Atheist, Secularist and Humanist Society were asked to take down pictures of the “Jesus and Mo” pictures they put up. “Jesus and Mo” is a comic which, though relatively harmless to most people and barely offensive to Christians, is very offensive to Muslims because it contains, for example, depictions of Muhammad drinking beer. The comics are hardly the epitome of intellectual rigour which ostensibly characterises atheism, and perhaps reflect a wider, mocking attitude towards religion more than an approach which favours rationalism and substantive dialogue or argumentation. That said, most people would agree that they are not terribly offensive.

So let’s be clear: I don’t think people have a right not to be offended. Nor do I think there should be much censorship of, or attacks on, free speech. Similarly, I would never encourage an enforcement of this kind of censorship. Obvious exceptions are patient-doctor confidentiality, but I think even most Muslims in the UK would agree that Jesus and Mo is not the same kind of appropriately regulated situation as that.

But it is precisely because we have this mutual understanding of and commitment to free speech that I think the atheists have got it all wrong, in this case. I cannot find anything to suggest that any groups waere trying to enforce a Jesus and Mo ban on UCL ASH. Having looked at some of the exchanges between Muslim groups and UCL ASH, it very much looks to me as if UCL ASH have fundamentally misunderstood the purpose and behaviour of these groups. It very much seems as if they asked UCL ASH to take down the pictures, not out of threatened enforcement, but simply because it is an immature and needless offence to Muslims. And it looks like their appeal to the Student Union was not an appeal for enforcement, but for an official recognition that the things posted were insensitive.

The appropriateness of the civil liberty of free speech does not seem to me to constitute justification for being needlessly offensive. Nor does the fact that we cannot see why something would be offensive make it morally acceptable for us to be offensive. I cannot personally fathom why Hindus have so much respect for cows. I do not have a post-modern, anti-disagreement approach towards religion, and I am very happy with people saying that they disagree with religion. I am fine with them disagreeing with my own religion, and I would never seek to censor them or wish them to keep their opinions to themselves. There is no relativist, anti-liberty agenda on my part. But yet I would not openly and superfluously disrespect cows around Hindus. Why? Because I am anti-liberty? No. Because I think people have a right to not have things which are offensive to them put in their environment? No. Because I am an Orwellian fascist who seeks to censor the views of anyone who disagrees with me? Again, no. Primarily, the reason I do not disrespect Hindus this way is because I am not an ass. There is not much more to it than that.

This not fundamentally a legal issue, nor one of civil liberties. It is a moral one. The disagreement, so far as I can see, has always been moral. I have not seen any attempt at legal enforcement; all I have seen is requests for the picture to be taken down. If someone were criticising my mother, my asking them to stop would not constitute reasonable grounds for a campaign about civil liberties. Nor would it be grounds for them to caricature my position as fascist censorship. Might it just be possible that, rather than Muslim groups trying to enforce a ban on atheist activities and speech, all they wanted was for people not to be needlessly disrespectful to them? I don’t agree with Islam, and I’m happy to say things which are perhaps offensive to them – for example, that Jesus was God, and that Muhammad probably wasn’t a prophet. Indeed, I support my liberty to voice these opinions. But the difference here is that I say these things because I think they are genuinely important, and constitute responsible uses of free speech which are usually backed by intellectual rigour and politeness. In other words, not the superfluous offence caused by putative ‘Brights’, who apparently have nothing better to do than mock other people’s beliefs with no obvious substance behind it, and who then are happy in caricaturing them as opponents of free speech.

Of course, I am happy to be proved wrong. And I do not doubt that there are probably some individual Muslims who would like an enforced ban on Jesus and Mo. But evidence for Muslim groups seeking to censor in this way has not been forthcoming, and until we are presented with it I think we can reasonably be sceptical of the secularists’ attempt to portray them this way. If I am presented with strong evidence that Muslim groups attempted censorship, I will recant this post.

P.S. One does wonder why this libertarianism and civil liberties stuff comes out at conspicuously tactical times. I do not see quite the same demographic campaigning for free speech when it comes to Christians being fired or cautioned for their views, whether expressed or not. Swings and roundabouts, eh? One example might be this recent motion, also passed at the UCL Student Union: http://www.catholicherald.co.uk/news/2012/01/25/student-union-attempts-to-restrict-pro-life-talks/

P.P.S. I have received this confirmation from UCL’s AMSA group:

“Dear Calum,

Firstly, my sincere apologies for not getting back to you sooner. For some odd reason, new received messages have not been showing up as notifications on the facebook profile, which is odd, which is why I’ve only just come across your message.

My name is Tahir Nasser-the treasurer of the AMSA and the letter writer. Thank you for your kind message. You are absolutely right-we have never made any request to the Union to force the cartoons to be removed-our request was always directed at the UCLU Atheist, Secularist and Humanist Society and we requested them to remove the cartoon themselves, on the basis of mutual goodwill and consideration for the sensibilities of others.

I have received a deluge of messages from others attacking my letter, so thank you for being able to read our intentions clearly and having the good sense to see the wood from the trees. This cartoon-nonsense was never a question of free-speech from our point of view. It’s always been a question of behaving like grown-ups and not wielding one’s freedoms in an obnoxious manner.

Best
Tahir Nasser
UCLU AMSA Treasurer”

Tahir also confirmed: “Moreover, no Muslim group requested the removal of the cartoons”, even though “Individual Muslims complained to the Union”.

So we begin with a basic axiom of probability theory:

This is to say that the probability of both A and B being the case is the probability of B being the case multiplied by the probability of A given B. One can also put this the other way round:

Since both these latter halves are equal to , it follows that:

Now, if we divide both sides by , we get:

This, in short, is Bayes’ Theorem, which says that the probability of A given B is equal to the probability of A, multiplied by the probability of B given A, divided by the probability of B.

Now, to get to the odds form, we need to do a few more things: firstly, we note that:

And so we can deduce that:

The odds form allows us to compare and directly. To get further towards this, we can go through the whole process again, this time using in place of . This will eventually give us:

From this, we find we can divide by , which gives us the following:

This may look confusing, but we can note that the denominators of both the top half and of the lower half are the same – if we multiply top and bottom by that denominator, we get the much simpler equation:

Separate out some of the terms on the right hand side, and you get:

And you now have the odds form of Bayes’ Theorem! Perfect. As I said, I won’t go into its use or anything here: this is purely to provide the formal derivation for future reference. I hope you won’t be too disappointed, therefore, if you find that there is nothing at all interesting to you in this post.

Calum Miller

“It’s straightforward, on a logical basis, if everything has to have a cause, then something would have had to have created the thing that caused the cause.”

Wow. Talk about misunderstanding a simple premise. It’s hard to be gracious and gentle with responses like these, but I’m trying. Seriously, though, is this what passes for rational discourse among journalists these days?

The book is actually a relatively good introduction to the philosophy of religion – it tackles more contemporary issues than many introductions (such as the kalam version of the cosmological argument), and explains them clearly. It’s honest about its aims: namely, to provide an introduction to the area in the context of arguing for atheism. Unfortunately, it turned out to be a lot better as a normal introduction than as an argument for atheism. I don’t have much time to go through it in  detail, so I’ll just provide the key points of the book:

Part I – The limits of theistic explanation

Here, Le Poidevin criticises arguments for God’s existence, as well as the idea of God as an explanation in general. He discusses the three classical types of arguments (and recent counterparts) – cosmological, ontological and teleological.

Cosmological – temporal
This is essentially the kalam cosmological argument and, as explained in my last blog, the main objection given is that Le Poidevin expresses scepticism over the premise that the universe began to exist. This is not based on anything – it is basically just an assertion that there is no good reason to believe it. The reasons given for the premise are not difficult to find: it is hard to believe that Le Poidevin has seriously implied that he knows of no reason to accept that premise. Both scientific and metaphysical arguments can be given, but there is no time to rehearse them here (if you really care, see my article introducing the Kalam Cosmological Argument).

Next, Le Poidevin tries to question the authority of the first premise, that everything that begins to exist has a cause, asking whether it is an analytic a priori truth, a synthetic a priori truth, or an a posteriori truth. The first suggestion is disregarded, since there is no semantic contradiction in the idea that something begins to exist without a cause.

The second suggestion is dismissed by saying that we cannot conceive of the falsity of an a priori truth, whereas we can conceive of something beginning to exist without a cause. But it is not at all clear that we can conceive of something beginning to exist without a cause – even if we can conceive of something without explicitly conceiving of its cause. Indeed, Le Poidevin takes this point on board, and says that he will give a different objection later.

The third suggestion, that it is an inductively inferred truth, is dismissed by saying that causation is inherently a temporal concept – causation necessarily takes time. There therefore cannot be a cause of something which has existed for all time, and thus we have an intrinsic defeater for the premise. Even if everything within the universe (which did not exist at the very start of the universe) which begins to exist has a cause, it makes no sense to talk of a cause for the universe itself, since a cause is necessarily temporally prior to its effect, and there is nothing temporally prior to the universe. This doesn’t seem to me to be especially convincing – there doesn’t seem to be any prohibition of simultaneous causation. We might explain a dent in a cushion by a ball hitting it. But is the ball’s hitting the cushion temporally prior to the dent? Not really, but the ball is still plausibly interpreted as being the cause of the dent in the cushion.

Cosmological – modal
Here, Le Poidevin turns to the argument from contingency, that everything whose existence is contingent has a cause of its existence, that nothing can be the cause of its own existence, that the universe’s existence is contingent, and therefore that the universe has a cause which is not itself.

The primary objection here is based on the arguments against the temporal version, namely, that there cannot be a cause in the ordinary sense. If the universe is not temporally infinite, then the problem of atemporal causation arises. If the universe is infinite, then there can be no real first cause. I can’t see how any advocates of this kind of Leibnizian argument will be dissuaded by this objection. For these, the argument is not really about causation at all, but about sufficient reason. The idea is that everything which exists has a sufficient reason for its existence. Since the universe is contingent, there must be something necessary which in some sense explains its existence. Many, for example, would point to the analogy of a train. Each carriage’s motion can be explained by its being pulled by the carriage in front. Even if there are an infinite number of carriages, there are still other necessary components: engines, wheels and so on. On the modal version, God would be seen more as an explanation in terms of engines and wheels than in preceding carriages, and so there is no real problem here, either.

#3 will come tomorrow – for now, time to move onto my next few books: Michael Licona’s “The Resurrection of Jesus: A New Historiographical Approach” and Peter Atkins’ “On Being”. Take care!

My main concern at the moment is getting back on course with university – as some of you may know, I broke my leg last term/semester and so (for various subsequent reasons) fell behind quite a lot on work. I’m therefore revising plenty of Neuroscience (my main examination topic), as well as working on my research project and extended essay. For my research, I’m doing a neuroimaging project, quite similar to the work of Libet in the 1980s. Libet was the person who did the famous work on free will, where he – in some people’s view – demonstrated that our free decisions are made before we are consciously aware of them. I’m doing similar work, using magnetoencephalography to look at the difference in brain activity between movements made freely (the subject can choose which hand to use and whenever to move it) and those dictated by an external stimulus. I’ve done all the scans and have moved onto data analysis, so will hopefully come up with something good! I’ll perhaps share some of the eventual results and discussion here, for those who are more interested in that kind of thing. In any case, it’s been interesting to see the apologetic and theological implications of this area of research – and will hopefully allow me to be one of the more informed participants in discussions about whether neurology has gotten rid of the idea of a soul!

For my essay, I’m covering the slightly unusual topic of sex and the brain. I haven’t come up with a more specific subject area yet, but I’m roughly hoping to look at the neurobiology of love, relationships and the rest. This will have obvious apologetic implications too, which are potentially broad (thinking about reductionism, relationship with God, unembodied mind, as well as pastoral issues). The problem is that the field has expanded so rapidly that it’s hard to pick a particular area to focus on. People have looked at genetics, neurotransmitters, similarities with diseases, and sociological/evolutionary studies to look into this area, which has generated some Google searches you might not expect to find on a Christian’s computer (‘chimpanzee sex’, for example). For those interested in this issue further, do feel free to get in contact. The main areas of current exploration seem to be to do with vasopressin, oxytocin, serotonin and dopamine, differing levels and dispersion of these and their receptors having enormous effects on both romantic relationship and general social function. After several rodent studies showed dramatic changes in paternal and mating behaviour after vasopressin changes, for example, the most interesting finding in humans recently is that humans with a particular variant of a vasopressin receptor are substantially more likely to have marital problems than those with the normal variant. Implications abound!

In terms of direct apologetics, philosophy and theology, my recent aims have been to develop as rigorous a natural theology as possible, particularly in light of potential debates I have coming up this year (details to be confirmed – keep watching). In particular, I’m currently trying to get through some of the most cogent defences of atheism around, so received several books on the subject for Christmas. One was Robin Le Poidevin’s “Arguing for Atheism: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion”. I got this on the recommendation of Luke Muehlhauser from Common Sense Atheism, who I consider to be a fair and honest person when it comes to the Philosophy of Religion. This book was included in the “Advanced” section of his recommended books on atheism.

Le Poidevin comes across as a fair and honest philosopher; there is nothing here suggesting any particular antipathy against religion. Indeed, there are hints of Don Cupitt’s ‘religious atheism’ (Cupitt being his doctoral supervisor) in the book. I have no doubt that Le Poidevin is attempting a balanced and sincere critique of natural theology. Having got about halfway through, however, I’m both disappointed and encouraged by this book: disappointed by the weakness of its objections, and encouraged that one of the apparently foremost defenders of atheism in academic philosophy has not really come up with anything remotely detrimental to the project of natural theology.

There are good points, of course, and I do not mean any of this as an attack on Le Poidevin. Indeed, he is a very good teacher, and he does a good job of linking and narrating the Philosophy of Religion. Rather than attacking blatant caricatures from medieval theology, he at least tries to do justice to recent formulations of arguments, giving some space to both William Lane Craig in the cosmological argument and Alvin Plantinga in the ontological argument. His discussion of the ontological argument, in particular, is both clear and interesting, and he does a good job in demonstrating what proponents of the modal version of the argument must do to clarify their proposal. He calls on the defender of the ontological argument to make clear what is meant by necessity, and whether this is the same as analyticity. Four options are given, under two main groups: necessity being the same as analyticity or the two being different. If they are the same, there are three options: (1) “God exists” is an analytic truth. If this is what is being defended, however, the ontological argument is redundant – If what is meant by “God” includes the clause “that he exists”, there is no need to argue for the conclusion that he exists, and so no real need for the ontological argument. Position (2) is that “God exists” is analytically false. Obviously, proponents of the argument will not want to defend this. (3) is that God’s existence is neither analytically true nor analytically false. If this is true, however, the main premise, “If it is possible that God exists, then necessarily, God exists”, is false. The 4th option is the rejection of necessity being the same, in this argument, as analytic truth. This, I think, is what most proponents of the ontological argument would want to defend. But in this case, Le Poidevin argues, we have no reason to prefer the premise, “It is possible that God exists” over the premise, “It is possible that God does not exist”. The modal atheistic argument is then just as convincing, and demonstrates that God’s existence is impossible. Whether or not Le Poidevin refutes the ontological argument in his chapter I am not so sure (I am not persuaded that he does), but he does call, importantly, for advocates to give a clearer notion of necessity than is typically done.

In contrast, his treatments of the cosmological and teleological arguments are surprisingly weak. After giving the “basic” cosmological argument, that everything that exists has a cause of its existence, that nothing can be the cause of its own existence and that the universe exists, Le Poidevin modifies these to give arguments that someone might sanely make: the first premise can say that whatever begins to exist has a cause (à la Craig), or that anything whose existence is contingent has a cause of its own existence (à la Leibniz).

I do not know how Le Poidevin views science so cannot accuse him of hypocrisy, but his main criticism of the “temporal” version (known to most as kalam) is astoundingly weak. After noting that, according to the Big Bang theory, the universe did begin to exist, he argues: “Can we be confident about [the premise that the universe began to exist], however? Suppose that the Big Bang theory is false – not an unreasonable supposition since, after all, cosmological theories are highly controversial, and even if there were universal agreement among physicists on this question – which is not the case, such agreement would not make the theory true. For all we know, the universe may not have had a beginning. This suggests two possibilities: (i) The universe extends infinitely far into the past; (ii) The universe is temporally closed: i.e., it is finite yet has neither a beginning nor an end.”

This is simply puzzling. Aside from the exclusion of the metaphysical arguments for the past’s being finite from discussion, Le Poidevin chooses, apparently arbitrarily, to simply reject physics on this point. It is stated that “such agreement [among physicists] would not make the theory true”, as if theists had ever suggested that the agreement among physicists on this point causes the universe to have a finite past. Creationists might as well argue that, just because evolutionary biologists agree on evolution, does not mean that evolution is true. Well, of course not, but that doesn’t mean that we have good reason to cast doubt on it, or that there isn’t an enormous amount of evidence for its truth which causes the scientists in question to agree on it. This makes Le Poidevin’s subsequent assertion that, “For all we know, the universe may not have had a beginning” especially baffling. For all we know? Is he seriously suggesting that we have just as much evidence for all three of these theories, that physicists have made a significant, axiomatic, foundational change in their belief about the finitude of the past on the basis of sheer whim? This is hard to sustain. Until a few decades ago (up to a century), the overwhelming majority of physicists followed the foundational axiom that the universe has always existed, from eternity. While there is not time here to lay out the evidence for the beginning of the universe, it is incredibly troubling to see how Le Poidevin has suggested that there is nothing really substantive behind this revolution in physics, the evidence for which prompted Stephen Hawking to say that the beginning of the past was probably “the most remarkable discovery of modern cosmology”. That Le Poidevin puts this down to whimsical conjecture seems to me to be remarkable, especially considering that this is held to be one of the most cogent philosophical defences of atheism in contemporary academia (even if it is an introduction for students). If anything, this treatment of the cosmological argument has made me more certain of its soundness than before – not a result I imagine Le Poidevin would have wanted!

There is, of course, more to be said. I will offer some more thoughts in due course, but for now I hope this has given you a little taster of my recent activity. See you soon!

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Happy reading!