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Daniel Greco's avatar

There's an old(ish) Hilary Kornblith paper I like called "Distrusting Reason", that I think may help provide a charitable lens through which to interpret at least *some* of what can otherwise look like sheer stupidity.

The basic gist is that it can be very hard to detect when apparent truth-seeking reasoning is mere rationalization. The cleverer the rationalizer--the greater his TQ, as you put it in an earlier post--the harder it is for third parties, and even the rationalizer himself, to distinguish rationalization from genuine, truth-seeking reasoning. On topics where there's a lot of mutual distrust, both sides will suspect intricate arguments for conclusions on the other side of being the products of rationalization. Long, complex chains of reasoning in such domains will be treated not as providing reasons to believe their conclusions, but merely as reasons to think someone has expended a lot of intellectual energy in the service of defending a predetermined conclusion.

What's crucial to this stance is that the distrustful person can't themselves easily distinguish genuinely probative arguments from sophistry. If they could, they could just inspect the argument and see whether it's any good. It's only when you're not reliable at doing that that it makes sense, from your perspective, to dismiss arguments even when you can't see anything wrong with them. (Because even if there was something wrong, you wouldn't be able to see it.)

I'm not saying this captures the actual behavior of the people you're talking about. I don't hang out in new atheist fora, and they do sound pretty annoying from your description. It's one thing to dismiss an argument with "here's why it's wrong!" and another to dismiss it with "meh", and this sort of stance goes with the latter more than the former. But still perhaps worth thinking about:

https://philpapers.org/rec/KORDR

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Bentham's Bulldog's avatar

I basically agree with your comment. It's reasonable to reject a complicated argument because you have independent reason to think its conclusion is false. It's not reasonable to think you've thereby spotted why it's wrong.

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skaladom's avatar

Very nicely said!

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Brandon Hendrickson's avatar

I'll tell you that I'm one of those whose tendency, when reading someone's anthropic argument for the existence of God, is to shake my head and think "but how could anyone not see this is undiluted nonsense!"

But I'll admit that this essay gives me pause, because it makes me acknowledge that I am disputing with a centuries-old vampire. I should be paying more attention to the fact that I can't put my finger on where the argument goes awry. Thanks for making me more rational!

(Though not with the EAAN. That really IS nonsense... 😉)

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Kevin Wells's avatar

Like TWD, it seems most ppl dont get what Plantinga meant with EEAN. Out of curiosity, what is your understanding of the argument?

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Brandon Hendrickson's avatar

That's an entirely fair question, and I'd love to explore my understanding of it in a longer format than this'll provide us. I'll only say here that I've spent a few hours trying to understand EEAN (first when I was a theist, and more recently in watching a series of videos that Bentham's Bulldog has recommended in another post), so I'm not coming at this with a mindset of "anything that sounds dumb must be dumb". If anyone here who really understands (and is a proponent of) EEAN would like to spend a half an hour over the phone in an ad-hoc Socratic dialogue, I'm game!

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Kevin Wells's avatar

I’ll check out BB’s objections.

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Brandon Hendrickson's avatar

Pardon me: I had been conflating Plantinga's Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism (which I'm not sure that BB has talked about) with the argument for God based on Psychophysical Harmony (which he has: https://benthams.substack.com/i/153167699/psychophysical-harmony-s). Insofar as those are substantially different, please downrate your assumptions that I know what I'm talking about!

(Edit: earlier I wrote "panpsychological harmony", which made me bust out laughing when I spotted it.)

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Kevin Wells's avatar

I like the EAAN, but not as an argument. Like the model ontological argument and the ever-widening Drake equation, it’s for me, more of an observation or a “Mooreian shift.”

Under Materialism, we shouldn’t see a strong selection for accurate abstract thought, ( such as cogitations around metaphysical naturalism), but we do, so materialism is most likely false, etc.

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Brandon Hendrickson's avatar

I guess where I differ is that it seems like the selection for accurate abstract thought is about equal to what we see! That is, we shouldn't assume natural selection would supply reason easily, but we also shouldn't assume that the limited reason it has given us couldn't be cobbled together, over millennia, into something that approached being trustworthy. (In my mind, doing this better is the very project of rationalist community.) It's not surprising to me that we've figured out some cool stuff (eg atomic physics). I'm still not sure where the challenge to evolutionary naturalism is in this.

Again, if anyone would be up to a phone call or Zoom, ping me. Per the thesis of this post, I'd like to know what I'm missing, and asynchronous text is a hard medium for it.

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Kevin Wells's avatar

There is a positively epic level of recursive irony in your mistake. Nicely done. :)

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Muhammad Wang's avatar

I'm sure there are *some* mathematical conclusions of which Terrence Tao could convince you

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Bentham's Bulldog's avatar

I agree!

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Muhammad Wang's avatar

*without using higher order evidence

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Bentham's Bulldog's avatar

I still agree! I was being a bit hyperbolic!

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Marlon's avatar

Walking in the Lord’s footsteps…Very biblical of you!

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Petrus's avatar

This is totally fair. New atheists online are the worst. They always think that their preferred atheist apologist "destroyed" whomever they debated, even when literally the exact opposite is true.

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elijah_mckee's avatar

as the equivalent of a YouTube commenter (began only seriously getting into philosophy 6 months ago and only considering it as a major over the past few weeks),I think it’s because hearing arguments you don’t understand can make you feel like the Dumbest Boy Alive (to borrow Jon Bois’ analogy) and it hurts their feelings

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Ibrahim Dagher's avatar

They do make one good point: you do sound like Jeff Nippard! Haha

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Alex C.'s avatar

> [The anthropic argument] has convinced many competent philosophers

Yes, but has it convinced many statisticians, mathematicians, or physicists? No offense, but I hold those professions in higher esteem than philosophers.

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Bentham's Bulldog's avatar

I think you and I have discussed this before.

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Alex C.'s avatar

We did. You replied to me in January: "Well, seeing as there are no published works on the anthropic argument, there are none by people who know about statistics." Maybe something has changed since then? In any case, I'll continue to be skeptical of anthropic arguments until a larger mass of supporters, across different fields, finds them convincing.

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Bentham's Bulldog's avatar

The worry you're providing could be made against any new philosophical argument for anything!

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Alex C.'s avatar

Maybe, but I'm really only concerned here with a highly counter-intuitive argument with very important implications, if the argument is valid. (And also an argument that has a mathematical component to it, unlike many [most?] philosophical arguments).

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Muhammad Wang's avatar

I don't think mathematicians, physicists, or statisticians are more qualified to discuss the anthropic argument than philosophers. It's not as though the argument relies on any complicated mathematical theorems, controversial physical theories, or complicated statistical methods. If it did, you would be right to suspicious. But just saying "I hold these people in higher regard" is quite naïve and silly, since there are not reasons that the things in which they have expertise would bear at all on the validity of the argument.

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Alex C.'s avatar

The argument relies on a highly counterintuitive (if not explicitly complex) mathematical or statistical principle. For parsing the argument, I would have more confidence in someone with mathematical training.

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Bentham's Bulldog's avatar

Okay but if your objection applies to all new philosophical arguments then it's not a good reason to reject them!

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Daniel Greco's avatar

I don't see this at all. A methodological principle of "don't believe some new argument is sound until it's undergone some appropriate vetting period" is absolutely reasonable in some contexts. It certainly seems to be in place with math, where occasionally exciting proofs are announced, and the general reaction is to wait until they've been checked and no errors have been found before believing them. And errors are sometimes found. Philosophy is in some ways similar, in some ways not (you rarely get consensus that a new argument is sound, unlike in math).

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Alex C.'s avatar

My skepticism toward any hypothetical new philosophical arguments would be lessened if the arguments made more intuitive sense. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

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[Sic]Sea's avatar

This is why youtube comment sections continue to not be worth giving any amount of attention! Even more "intellectually" driven channels have, well, drivel in their comments.

This is why it is such an important skill to become a good communicator! One of the reasons I loved reading Nozick so much in debate (and, I suppose, generally), was that he was incredibly gifted at making opaque otherwise incredibly dense subjects. I think most notably is probably what he does defending normativity against skepticism in Philosophical Explanations, because skeptical arguments are generally. . . very confusing. Probably has to do with what intuitions I have though.

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American Wanderer's avatar

Holy shit, you do sound exactly like Jeff Nippard though

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Benjamin Tettü's avatar

I just want to mention that I spent 100's of hours studying philosophy of religion, I read Rasmussen, Aquinas, Craig, Pruss, Collins, Koons, Van Inwagen etc. and I still consider theists to be utterly crazy to believe in God (if understood as a perfect being). Because it's just a Moorean fact that a perfect being would absolutely not create a world like ours.

Otherwise, the Anthropic arg fails because it assumes moral realism (which is meaningless) and because it assumes that the ION is false, which is absurd.

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Nexter's avatar

Strange, what's the case that moral realism is meaningless?

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Benjamin Tettü's avatar

Because it affirms the existence of agent-indenpendent practical reasons

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Marlon's avatar

Interesting. So, a Moorean shift works against theism? In what sense? Does that move provide stance-dependent or stance-independent reasons against it?

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Benjamin Tettü's avatar

Yes it does. Anybody who is not completely blinded by motivated reasoning can understand that this world was not created by a perfect being. It's obvious to the point of being a moorean fact.

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Marlon's avatar

Your comment appeals to motivated reasoning in a way that, to me, seems deeply uncharitable. Saying that “anyone not blinded by motivated reasoning” would find theism obviously false suggests that no rational disagreement is possible on this matter, which is a strong claim that requires justification.

If your view is that most or all theistic belief results from non-truth-tracking cognitive processes, then I think it’s fair to ask: what is your evidence for this? Many smart theists, including philosophers trained in the analytic tradition, explicitly reject wishful thinking and aim for epistemic rigor. To dismiss all of that as mere psychological bias seems to undermine the very idea of rational dialogue.

Also, if I were to take an uncharitable reading, I’d say your claim borders on being epistemically question-begging.

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Nexter's avatar

Okay... are you claiming "the existence of agent-independent practical reasons" is meaningless? What's the case for that?

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Benjamin Tettü's avatar

Because a reason is an agent-relative notion

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Nexter's avatar

I'm asking your case for that.

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Dominik's avatar

The theist could just as well say that it's a Moorean fact that a "coincidence" like the fine-tuning of the cosmological constants wouldn't just happen through chance. You might think the fine-tuning argument doesn't ultimately succeed, but then we are back to Matthew's point: It's very obvious that the argument doesn't fail *trivially*.

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Seth Finkelstein's avatar

Well, at the risk of a recursive problem (i.e. this article being so far above me I can't refute it), this strikes me as claiming that if someone can construct a sufficiently sophisticated line of BS, then a person is obligated to grant some credence to that BS, even if it a complete confabulation of lies and nonsense on stilts, because they can't definitively point out the exact error. It seems to me there is a reasoning problem here, as essentially empowering the people who can construct the most obscure and hidden fallacy arguments, denigrating the sanity-check.

"Here is my argument that society is best if the rich eat the babies of the poor"

"That's nonsense!"

"Ah, you irritating skeptic, you haven't examined my argument in detail! You must defeat my genius!"

Of course there's a failure-mode there of being closed-minded. But aren't you effectively advocating for the failure-mode of being so open-minded your brains fall out?

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Bentham's Bulldog's avatar

First of all, it isn't actually true that one can contrive a clever argument for eating babies.

But second of all, suppose that one could contrive a clever argument for a ridiculous conclusion (many such cases). It would be fine to reject it on grounds that its conclusion was something they had independent reason to reject. When I was young, for instance, I was confident the McGrews were wrong, though I wasn't sure about most of the moving parts in their argument.

What would be wrong would be supposing that you've thereby spotted where the argument goes wrong. That an argument is wrong is easier to see than why it is wrong.

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Seth Finkelstein's avatar

There was once an entire not cottage, but massive factory, industry about contriving clever arguments for enslaving people. Really, it's very instructive to go and read some of that stuff. That's not too far from eating babies to our moral sensibilities.

I don't think there's a general belief that one can *unerringly* find why an argument is wrong from it being wrong. This comes up with crank math and physics a lot - a crank can write elaborate wrong reasoning for something outright wrong. Rather, again, the idea is more at there's a bunch of errors and fallacies that come up over and over, and in practice the argument is almost certain to be one those. It doesn't strike me as profound to be arguing that it's possible for a wrong argument not to be one of those very common cases, while refuters will mistakenly think it is. Also, how can you tell yourself? Every crank, by definition, think they're found something the Establishment is all wrong about.

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Neeraj Krishnan's avatar

It is odd to complain that in mediums like YouTube or Substack, that are meant for lay audience, the rigor of arguments and counter arguments falls short of trained logicians. You ought to make novel arguments about the "existence of objective moral truths is proof of god" in academic journals.

And to the extent the philosopher or scientist wants to popularize their work, it is their responsibility to write in an engaging and lucid manner. "The Selfish Gene" is a masterpiece in this genre.

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MJR Schneider's avatar

People tend to intuitively agree or disagree with conclusions and then work backward from there, whether they admit that’s what they’re doing or not.

I remember before I became a theist thinking the classical arguments for God’s existence were self-evidently wrong, but they now seem much stronger now that I agree with their conclusion. But of course in order to objectively evaluate these arguments, you need to work against that intuitive way of thinking.

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James Banks's avatar

Imagine the situation of someone who wants to know the truth, but doesn't have the time and/or intellectual strength to sort through huge masses of arguments. For instance, I heard once that some rationalists convert to Orthodoxy or Catholicism because they have "an answer" for everything. But obviously the Orthodox and Catholics disagree about some things, so just the fact that they have an answer for everything doesn't mean they're right. Similarly you might hear about predestination and think "there's no way God could be into that" and think you could go "checkmate Calvinists" on some point. But Calvinism has been around a long time, and they probably have "an answer" to whatever you want to say. But the fact that they have an answer doesn't make them right. So you need to get something like a PhD (a literal one, or maybe an "autodidact PhD") to sort through all the various complete, more-or-less well-argued argument masses that defend various intuitions.

Two different ways a truth-seeking "non-PhD" can go about it: use heuristics to choose experts, rather than actually examining the arguments themselves, or believe in their intuitions rather than arguments, to a greater or lesser degree. A heuristic religious people might use is "a certain church treated me well, or gave me something I wanted, so I will believe what they do". Atheists may sometimes be atheists because it just seems unintuitive that God exists. (Arguably, on some level there are always things we believe unsupported by any external validation, foundational beliefs, and who can say that atheism couldn't be one of them? (Maybe Plantinga, in a somewhat complicated way, tries.))

A more experimental, maybe risky approach for the truth-seeking "non-PhD" is to use some kind of rational "sieve" to enable one to throw out arguments without understanding them. A sort of philosophical triage. I find this appealing but am not sure it can be done, and wonder if it's already been tried.

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Seth Finkelstein's avatar

For believing in various God(s), I find it very convincing that basically it must be true that at least every monotheism must be wrong, minus at most one. i.e. at very most one can be right, all the others must be wrong, by definition. The various God(s) advocates then argue over which one is true. Essentially the joke that all believers are nearly an atheist, they disbelieve in all the other God(s) without qualm.

Also the hiding-God part strikes me as suspicious. If the Creator of the Universe wants me to do something, He/She/It can tell me directly, without obscurity.

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James Banks's avatar

Assuming you're offering two "sieves" (disagreement of monotheists, hiding-God):

I think those definitely could be used in triaging beliefs, so in that sense they may qualify as "sieves" given what I said, but they are somewhat weak and inconclusive. By "sieve" I was thinking more like, can you offer an argument for why it is impossible to form an argument for why God exists and hides himself/herself/etc., such that it overturns the divine hiddenness objection? A theist might be able to come up with a response to the problem of divine hiddenness, and might see a kind of "dramatic irony" in your ruling out belief in God based on your "sieve" that they already know is faulty. At the minimum, they might know that it isn't clear that you're right, and that the rational thing to do would be to at least consider the possibility that God exists. But if you could show that no matter what, even if they thought they were right, they were actually wrong, without even looking at their argument's details, that arguments showing that God's hiddenness doesn't imply his non-existence are actually impossible, that's more of what I was going for with "sieve".

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Woolery's avatar

> One of the more irritating features of the new atheists is their near-universal belief that they can hear any argument—however complicated—and immediately identify what’s wrong with it.

*Near-universal* belief in *immediately* identifying what’s wrong with *any* argument? I’m not a new atheist, but this opening claim about virtually all people of a group you oppose reads as hyperbolic and biased, similar to the positions you go on to criticize.

Can you explain to me, an “average person” like the ones you go on to say can’t grasp the nuance of advanced reasoning such as yours, how claims like this represent a higher level of critical thinking?

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Bentham's Bulldog's avatar

I don't think they explicitly have the belief that they can hear any argument and immediately spot what's wrong with it. It's simply that for any particular argument they hear, provided it's for a conclusion they don't like, like that God exists, they think they can identify what's wrong with it.

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Woolery's avatar

>It's simply that for any particular argument they hear, provided it's for a conclusion they don't like, like that God exists, they think they can identify what's wrong with it.

But you think you don’t fall into this trap? Like when you hear an argument for a conclusion you don’t like, like that God doesn’t exist, you don’t think you can identify what’s wrong with it? From the posts I’ve read, it certainly seems like this same criticism could be reasonably applied to your approach.

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Bentham's Bulldog's avatar

No I don't! It's just I tend not to write blog posts about arguments I don't know what's wrong with. It would be a pretty long blog post if I said "I don't know what's up with this argument but I have higher order evidence it's wrong."

For example, I remember a while ago a friend had some weird argument from set theory against God. Now, he didn't think it was a very good argument, and he later became a theist. But I would never claim I could immediately spot what's wrong with it! Similarly, there was a long while when I couldn't spot what was wrong with anti-SIA money pump arguments.

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Seth Finkelstein's avatar

But isn't that an entirely reasonable belief in practice, given that the arguments are so well-worn overall? If you're saying it's possible to make a mistake in identifying an uncommon argument as a common argument, that might be so, but it seems entirely understandable as a practical matter.

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Eliot Kern's avatar

Alex O'Connor gave a fascinating anecdote the other day about Richard Dawkins, in which Dawkins almost outright said "I have no patience for philosophical arguments". I always suspected that about Dawkins but Alex confirmed it from firsthand experience.

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Litcuzzwords's avatar

Interesting. I get worried when people talk about closed-minded thinkers as not being intelligent per se. Foolish, I suppose, is indeed the right word. It could very well be that many opponents of just about any philosophical position may be intelligent, that is have the ability to grasp multi-faceted concepts and reason therefrom, they have simply chosen to cease philosophical enquiry in favor of a sort of smug resting on laurels. I suppose some may also not have the training or capacity to evaluate certain arguments, as you may not have certain math skills. Do you suppose they find this frightening, or are they so impressed with themselves they cannot see it? What a bizarre way it must be to live, being sure of everything. Wouldn’t one get bored?

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