Tuesday, August 28, 2012

Religion’s Social Influence

Home  >  Christianity  >  General

There’s been a lot of talk online and in books about whether religion in general and Christianity in particular has been good or bad for society. For the latter, an example is the atheist Christopher Hitchens in his book God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything who argued that it’s been bad. Theists like David Bentley Hart (as in Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies) and the authors in Christianity On Trial disagree.

Why think religion does have a negative effect on society? One reason might be to see how bad things have been done in the name of religion. Well, it’s often true that people who are religious use their religion to galvanize their cause, but how does that show that their religion is what causes them to do evil? Often lost is the effect of external cultural influences. Atheists who believe Christianity inspires people to burn their enemies at the stake should ask themselves, “Why do today’s Christians in e.g. the United States claim to abhor such acts?” Is it that they secretly wish they could do it? No. External cultural influences (such as a culture that values tolerance) are a factor, and we should ask which cultural influence, like that of valuing tolerance, better fits with the religion in question.

On that note, we should ask whether the act done in the name of religion violates the dictates of said religion. If for example it’s written in the religion’s scripture to love your enemies and the people brutally persecute their enemies in the name of that religion, it’s could be that the religion isn’t what’s causing the behavior and that there’s more to the story. What else could it be? Human nature has a streak of barbarism to it, and under this unfortunately large umbrella is sort of tribal mentality and the temptation to do ethically questionable things for one’s “tribe,” whether that tribe be a nation, religion, or some other ideology. Intolerance and bigotry can go under just about any flag, even tolerance itself (I’ll discuss that in a future blog entry).

I’m sure it’s far from coincidence that I’ve seen Christians believe their faith to have if anything a benevolent effect on humanity and atheists believe the opposite. Why are people up in arms about this in the first place? For whatever reason, there appears to be the temptation that what one accepts as true will have a beneficent effect on the world, and that which one disagrees with will have a malicious effect on the world. This temptation should be resisted, and this general truth should be remembered: it is fallacious to judge the truth of a belief by its social impact. I really don’t care all that much whether atheism or Christianity has a better social impact; I care about which view is true, and on this matter arguments about social impact are irrelevant.

Advice For Christians

We should remember that negative social impact of Christian belief does not constitute evidence for Christianity being false. Another thing to consider is Jesus’ own words. Jesus says that not everyone who calls him Lord will enter heaven. He tells a tale whereby evil bastards who have called him Lord are banging on the door to heaven, asking to be let in, and Jesus says, “No, you’re evil bastards; I never knew you.”[1] If we Christians are to take what Jesus said seriously here, I think we need to at least be open to the possibility that an awful lot of evil bastards have called Jesus their Lord. And whether by coincidence or otherwise, Jesus’ words were rather prophetic: there have been a number of people in human history who have called Jesus their Lord yet have done morally reprehensible things. If anything, evildoers calling Jesus their Lord in human history is to be expected. So if you meet an atheist says “People who are Christians have done terrible things!” reply with something like, “Yep, Jesus predicted that would happen a long time ago.” Feel free to mention also that it is generally fallacious to conclude a worldview is false because its adherents have done evil things, especially when the worldview in question predicts that there would be adherents doing evil things. Remembering this can be very liberating; it allows the Christian to follow the evidence where it leads on whether humans have used Christianity as a tool for good or evil; Jesus predicted that people who called him Lord would do evil, and we should not be surprised that this occurred. All that said, I’m rather skeptical that believing Jesus is the Son of God and that following Jesus’ teachings (to love our enemies, blessing those who persecute us, etc.) makes it more likely that a person will do evil, which brings us to the next section.

Why Religion Per Se Is Not the Problem

Consider religion A:

    (1) God exists.
    (2) Jesus is the Son of God (and thus an incarnation of God).
    (3) Jesus died for our sins and physically rose from the dead.
    (4) The two greatest commandments are to (a) love God with all our heart, soul, and mind; (b) love our neighbors as ourselves.
    (5) Jesus (an incarnation of God) taught us to love our enemies, to do good to those that hate us, and to bless those who persecute us.
    (6) Those who disagree with our religion may be our enemies, but even if that’s so we should still love them and do good to them anyway.


Now consider religion B:

    (1) God exists.
    (2) Jesus is the Son of God (and thus an incarnation of God).
    (3) Jesus died for our sins and physically rose from the dead.
    (4) The two greatest commandments are to (a) love God with all our heart, soul, and mind; (b) love our neighbors as ourselves.
    (5) Jesus (an incarnation of God) taught us to love our enemies, to do good to those that hate us, and to bless those who persecute us.
    (6*) In spite of (5), God wills it to for us to kill those Muslims over there and to persecute many who disagree with our religion.


Clearly, whether religion will inspire violence depends greatly on the specific religious belief system. It’s pretty implausible that (1)-(5) will by themselves cause people to do evil; to do evil you’d need more, e.g. (6*). It might be that (6) fits in more naturally with (1)-(5) than (6*) does, but the fact remains that religion B being taught and believed does make it more likely for people to do evil.

That said, is religion B really the cause of the evil action or more of an intermediary? I wonder if blaming religion B for being the cause of the evil is a bit like blaming a meat cleaver for a victim’s death rather than the person who struck the victim with it; the meat cleaver helped, but it wasn’t the root cause. Both Christians who abhor the violence and persecution done by Christians and the Christians who inflicted the violence and persecution accept (1)-(5), but they differ on whether to accept (6) over (6*). External cultural influences (like that of a tribal mentality and a streak of barbarism) likely played a role in favoring religion B over religion A, because given that both groups exist, there has to be some reason why some Christians would follow religion B over religion A and vice versa, and if so at least part of the reason would have to lie somewhere in the societies and cultures that subsumes those two religions. Moreover, (6) seems to fit in better with the original religion than (6*), further suggesting the existence of some factor in the culture and society subsuming religion B that influences people to accept religion B over religion A.

One could argue that religion B being available to be taught and believed made it more likely that horrible things would be done, just as having weapons (meat cleavers or otherwise) make it more likely that killing would happen. I find that plausible, but I am not convinced it’s quite appropriate to say that religion B is the cause of such evil any more than the meat cleaver caused the murder, because external cultural and societal factors are needed for people to choose religion B over religion A in the first place. To put it metaphorically, it’s not enough to have a meat cleaver lying about; you also need external factors to drive someone to use it to kill someone rather than to prepare food.

Even if it’s true (as I think it is) that religions of a certain sort, like religion B, make it more likely that horrible things will result if that religion is taught and believed, the problem really isn’t religion per se but certain varieties of it. It’s implausible that religion A will inspire violence, and it’s implausible that items (1)-(5) will by themselves inspire evil.

Both Sides

There’s also the potential for religion to inspire good that atheists sometimes overlook. In 1930 the exceptionally intelligent and renowned atheist philosopher Bertrand Russell published an essay titled, Has Religion Made Useful Contributions to Civilization? Unsurprisingly, the answer was in the negative, but notice he says this before going into the evils of religious influence:
I cannot, however, deny that it [religion] has made some contributions to civilization. It helped in the early days to fix the calendar, and it caused Egyptian priests to chronicle the eclipses with such care that in time they began to predict them. These two services I am prepared to acknowledge, but I do not know of any others.
Russell’s ignorance here is astounding. What about all the universities and hospitals the people built under the Christian flag? Religion has been used as a tool to abolish slavery (it was Christians who rebelled against the historic status quo and quashed it in the West despite how well entrenched it was in the world economy), rally against child labor laws, and promote public relief programs.[2] Even a non-historian could ask, “What about the loads of charity work done under the influence of religion?” It’s almost as if Russell looked only at one side of the ledger before declaring religion’s influence morally bankrupt.

There are many religious charities, and Christianity is not unique among works of charity; giving to the poor is one of the pillars of Islam. In Arthur C. Brooks’s book Who Really Gives he cites statistics to show that those who attend a place of worship weekly tend to give more, and that should hardly be surprising. If you live in a community of like-minded believers, congregating in a faith that emphasizes charity (e.g. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) these sorts of beliefs are more likely to be reinforced, especially if one in the community proposes, “Who wants to help me do some volunteer work at this place that helps feed starving children?” That call to action makes it more likely that charity work will be done; certainly I’ve found that to be true for myself. I’ve volunteered where I otherwise would not have because the request was made within my own religious circle, and admittedly I’d feel a little guilty if I said “No” particularly when I reflect on how little volunteer work I do.

Of course, it could also be argued that religion is also a tool of much evil. That’s true, but to say that religion has on the whole been a tool of evil will require a pretty extensive historical survey of all the relevant goods and evils, and more often than not I see atheists who claim that religion’s net influence is harmful fail to do that. Bertrand Russell, with all his brilliance, is an example of just this sort of spectacular failure.

Conclusion

Religion itself is not the problem; like technology, religion can be a tool for good or a tool for evil. Christians especially should be open to the possibility that Christianity has been used as tool for evil and that Christians have done terrible things, since Jesus predicted long in advance that there would be evildoers calling him Lord, and I do not believe it would be recorded were it not meant to be a sober warning. Whether on the whole religion has been a tool used for good or evil is not exactly the easiest judgment to make, and would require pretty extensive historical research of the relevant goods and evils. As I said earlier, I’m rather skeptical that believing Jesus is the Son of God and that following Jesus’ teachings (to love our enemies, blessing those who persecute us, etc.) makes it more likely that a person will do evil. Still, even if I’m wrong it is irrelevant to what’s really important: whether Christianity is in fact true.







[1] Matthew 7:21-23. I may have paraphrased it slightly.

[2] Sheiman, Bruce, An Atheist Defends Religion (New York: Alpha, 2009), p. 101

Sunday, August 19, 2012

Why Relativism Sucks

Home  >  Philosophy  >  General Philosophy

By relativism I mean the “it’s all relative” sort as opposed to the tamer versions (saying that only some truths are relative, e.g. “This tastes good” being relatively true since different people have different tastes). While there are many varieties of relativism, I’ll consider only a few here.

Shoot-Myself-In-the-Head Relativism

Let’s call an absolute truth one that is true for all frames of reference, and a relative truth a truth that isn’t an absolute truth. Truth-value relativism says that truth is relative to some frame of reference. What is a frame of reference? It can vary depending on what flavor of relativism one uses, e.g. individuals, cultures, or time periods. Let R be a placeholder for whatever frame of reference the relativist wants to use. One version of relativism then says this:
For all frames of reference R, no truth is true in all R.
A somewhat oversimplified way of putting it is “No truth holds for all people at all times.” But is this version of relativism itself true for all frames of reference R?
  • Yes. If the answer is yes, then the statement contradicts itself, because the statement would be true for all R (e.g. each individual), when the statement entails that no truth is true for all R.
  • No. If the answer is no, this leads to a contradiction, because it says that holds for all frames of reference R.
Either way, we get a logically incoherent form of truth-value relativism.

Save-Me-From-Myself Relativism

To simplify, I’ll consider the “true for me but not for you” sort of relativism, where a person believing that proposition p is true makes p true for that person. In this case then, save-me-from-myself relativism becomes:
For all individuals, all truths are relative truths except for this one.
This version of relativism has the benefit of not immediately shooting itself in the head, but it’s still problematic. For example, there exist people (e.g. me) who believe that this proposition is true: Two plus two equals four, and this proposition is not a relative truth. Even according to this milder version of relativism, Two plus two equals four, and this proposition is not a relative truth is a relative truth, which is logically incoherent. A true proposition that ends with ...and this proposition is not a relative truth being a relative truth is self-contradictory. Examples could be multiplied; all you need is some frame of reference R in which “Two plus two equals four is true, and this proposition is not a relative truth” is true, and a logical incoherency is generated for relativism.

Tuesday, August 7, 2012

A Defense of the Material Conditional

Home  >  Philosophy  >  Logic

This is part 3 of my series on logic and critical thinking.
  1. Introductory Logic, Part 1—Introducing both logic in general (such as the difference between a deductive and inductive argument) and propositional logic in particular
  2. Introductory Logic, Part 2—More propositional logic
  3. Introductory Logic, Part 3—A defense of the material conditional
You don’t necessarily need to read parts 1 and 2 to understand this article. If you’re already familiar with propositional logic, or you think you might understand the crash-course in some rules of inference (e.g. modus ponens) that I’ll provide here, feel free to read on.

The Problem

One sort of statement propositional logic deals with is the conditional, i.e. an “If P, then Q” statement. In symbolic logic, “If P is true, then Q is true” is symbolized as P → Q (though sometimes also symbolized as P ⊃ Q), where P is the antecedent and Q is the consequent. Propositional logic uses what’s called a material conditional, which means “If P, then Q” is equivalent to “It is not the case that P is true and Q is false.” Thus, whether the material conditional P → Q is true is determined entirely by the truth of P and Q as follows, where the truth table below exhausts all possible true/false combinations of P and Q:

pq  
TTT  
TFF  
FTT  
FTF  


The truth table above has the following counterintuitive implications:
  1. Whenever the consequent (q) is true, the statement “If p is true, then q is true” is true.
  2. Whenever the antecedent (p) is false, the statement “If p is true, then q is true” is true.
These counterintuitive properties result in the so-called paradoxes of material implication, e.g. “If there is a married bachelor, then the earth is round” is true because the antecedent (“there is a married bachelor”) is false, and “If grass is air, then two plus two equal four” is true because the consequent (“two plus two equal four”) is true. Such implications seem strange. One way to resolve the paradox is to just note that the material conditional doesn’t match the conditionals (“if-then” statements) of ordinary language. In ordinary language, there’s the requirement that the consequent in some sense relevantly follows from the antecedent. For example, “If I am a man, then I am human” is a case where the consequent (“I am human”) more relevantly follows from the antecedent (“I am a man”) compared to “If I grass is air, then I am human.” Thus, ordinary language conditionals don’t have counterintuitive properties #1 and #2, even if material conditionals do. There’s one problem that strategy though. As counterintuitive as properties #1 and #2 are, it turns out that if we follow certain logical rules of inference, any “If p is true, then q is true” statement must have these strange properties, and I’ll prove that in this very article.

Recapping Some Rules of Inference

Some propositional logic rules I’ll use:

simplification
 
In English In Symbolic Logic
p and q

Therefore, p
p ∧ q

∴ p
p and q

Therefore, q
p ∧ q

∴ q
Disjunctive Syllogism
 
In English In Symbolic Logic
p or q
Not-p

Therefore, q
p ∨ q
¬p

∴ q
p or q
Not-q

Therefore, p
p ∨ q
¬q

∴ p

modus ponens
 
In English In Symbolic Logic
If p then q
p

Therefore, q
p → q
p

∴ q
conjunction
 
p
q

∴ p ∧ q
addition
 
p

∴ p ∨ q

conditional proof
 
a) p conditional proof assumption
b)
 ...
 q
c) p → q a-b, conditional proof

indirect proof
 
a) p indirect proof assumption
b)
 ...
 q ∧ ¬q (or ¬q ∧ q)
c) ¬p a-b, indirect proof
a) ¬p indirect proof assumption
b)
 ...
 q ∧ ¬q (or ¬q ∧ q)
c) p a-b, indirect proof


Indirect proofs and conditional proofs have a “What is true if such-and-such is true?” approach, and use the rules of logic to derive further statements. Given some proposition p, such proofs use the rules of logic (and possibly prior premises) to show what is true if p is true. For example:
  1. (H ∧ R) → ¬(H ∧ R)

  1. H ∧ R indirect proof assumption
    1. ¬(H ∧ R) 1, 2, modus ponens
    2. (H ∧ R) ∧ ¬(H ∧ R) 2, 3, conjunction
  1. ¬(H ∧ R) 2-4, indirect proof
Thus, if H ∧ R is true, then ¬(H ∧ R) is true, which leads to a self-contradiction, and therefore ¬(H ∧ R) is true.

In propositional logic, theorems are statements you can prove without premises. For example:
  1. A conditional proof assumption
    1. A ∨ B 1, addition
  1. A → (A ∨ B) 1-2, conditional proof
A slightly more complicated logic example:
  1. (C ∨ D) → Z

  1. B conditional proof assumption
    1. C conditional proof assumption
      1. C ∨ D 3, addition
      2. Z 1, 4, modus ponens
    1. C → Z 3-5, conditional proof
  1. B → (C → Z)2-6, conditional proof
One nice thing about these rules of logic is that they resemble how human beings naturally reason, e.g. we tend to think that a belief that leads to a self-contradiction is false. That seems especially noteworthy when we consider that “If P is true, then Q is true” must have those counterintuitive properties if we are to accept the above rules of inference as valid, as I’ll prove next.

Line by Line

One way to show that the two counterintuitive properties hold for any “If P, then Q” statement that follows the rules of inference is to go through each line of the truth table and show that each line of the truth table is needed if the rules of inference are to be accepted as valid.

The Second Line

pq
TFF


I’m starting a bit out of order, but what I’ll say here is important for the other stuff to build upon. A rule of inference is valid if and only if true input statements guarantee a true output statement. For example, consider the rule of modus ponens:
  1. P → Q
  2. P

  1. Q 1, 2, modus ponens
Modus ponens is a valid inferential form only if it’s impossible to have true premises (lines 1 and 2) and a false conclusion (line 3). That is, for modus ponens to be a valid rule of inference, true input statements (lines 1 and 2) must guarantee a true output statement (line 3). The only way this can happen is if the second line of the truth table is true. Proof: suppose it could be that P being true and Q being false makes line 1 true. Not only would line 1 be true in that case, but with P true and Q false, line 2 would also be true and line 3 would be false, which means we would have true input statements and a false output statement. So for modus ponens to be a valid rule of inference, the second line of the truth table must be true.

We can buttress the need for the second line of the truth table further by proving the following theorem:
(P ∧ ¬Q) → ¬(P → Q)
A proof of the theorem goes as follows:
  1. P ∧ ¬Q conditional proof assumption
    1. P → Q indirect proof assumption
      1. P 1, simplification
      2. Q 2, 3, modus ponens
      3. ¬Q 1, simplification
      4. Q ∧ ¬Q 4, 5, conjunction
    1. ¬(P → Q) 1-6, indirect proof
  1. (P ∧ ¬Q) → ¬(P → Q) 1-7, conditional proof
Because theorems are necessarily true, the above theorem means that it is impossible for the statement in line 8 to have a true antecedent (P ∧ ¬Q) with a false consequent ¬(P → Q), so what we have here is an example of something called strict implication. Given some “If P, then Q” statement, a material conditional merely says it is the case that “P is true and Q is false” is false, whereas a strict conditional (also referred to as strict implication or entailment) says it’s impossible that P is true and Q is false. To illustrate, “If the earth is round, then Abraham Lincoln existed” is true as a material conditional, but there is a possible world where the earth was round and Abraham Lincoln never existed, so this isn’t a true strict implication. In contrast, “If there are more than five particles, then there are more than three particles” is a legitimate example of entailment, because there is no possible world where “there are more than five particles” is true and “there are more than three particles” is false. According to the above theorem, “P is true and Q is false” entails (or strictly implies) that “If P, then Q” is false.

The First Line

pq
TTT


A theorem that illustrates the first line of the truth table:
(P ∧ Q) → (P → Q)
A proof of that theorem goes as follows:
  1. P ∧ Q conditional proof assumption
    1. P conditional proof assumption
      1. Q 1, simplification
    1. P → Q 2-3, conditional proof
  1. (P ∧ Q) → (P → Q) 1-4, conditional proof
Thus, the rules of inference entail that whenever the antecedent and consequent are both true, the conditional is true.

The Third Line

The third line of the truth table:

pq
FTT


A theorem that illustrates the third line of the truth table:
(¬P ∧ Q) → (P → Q)
A proof of that theorem goes as follows:
  1. ¬P ∧ Q conditional proof assumption
    1. P conditional proof assumption
      1. Q 1, simplification
    1. P → Q 2-3, conditional proof
  1. (¬P ∧ Q) → (P → Q) 1-4, conditional proof
Thus, the rules of inference entail that whenever the antecedent is false and the consequent is true, the conditional is true.

The Fourth Line

The fourth line of the truth table:

pq
FTF


A theorem that illustrates the fourth line of the truth table:
(¬P ∧ ¬Q) → (P → Q)
A proof of that theorem goes as follows:
  1. ¬P ∧ ¬Q conditional proof assumption
    1. P conditional proof assumption
      1. P ∨ Q 2, addition
      2. ¬P 1, simplification
      3. Q 3, 4, disjunctive syllogism
    1. P → Q 2-5, conditional proof
  1. (¬P ∧ ¬Q) → (P → Q) 1-6, conditional proof
Thus, the rules of inference entail that whenever the antecedent is false and the consequent is false, the conditional is true.

Conclusion

The material conditional has the following two properties:
  1. Whenever the consequent (q) is true, the statement “If p is true, then q is true” is true.
  2. Whenever the antecedent (p) is false, the statement “If p is true, then q is true” is true.
Odd as it may seem, for any “If P is true, then Q is true” statement to follow the set of inference rules I mentioned earlier (modus ponens, disjunctive syllogism etc.), it must have these two strange properties. For those rules of inference to be valid, it cannot be otherwise. We might think of an if-then statement in the ordinary sense as having more than just the “it is not the case that the antecedent is true and the consequent is false” requirement; e.g. one might want to add the requirement that the consequent in some sense relevantly follows from the antecedent. For example, “If I am a man, then I am human” is a case where the consequent (“I am human”) more relevantly follows from the antecedent (“I am a man”) compared to “If I grass is air, then I am human.” But there’s a catch: the “consequent must more relevantly follow from the antecedent” requirement for an if-then statement means such an if-then statement can’t follow the rules of inference. If you’re like me, that’s rather interesting and surprising; one would actually have to give up that set of logic rules to avoid counterintuitive properties #1 and #2, but those rules of logic seem very rational to use in our everyday lives.