Theists as advocates of hitting oneself with a baseball bat
The title is a metaphor--theists tend not to advocate this
1
“At another point in the discussion, a man spoke of some benefit X of death, I don't recall exactly what. And I said: "You know, given human nature, if people got hit on the head by a baseball bat every week, pretty soon they would invent reasons why getting hit on the head with a baseball bat was a good thing. But if you took someone who wasn't being hit on the head with a baseball bat, and you asked them if they wanted it, they would say no. I think that if you took someone who was immortal, and asked them if they wanted to die for benefit X, they would say no."
Afterward, this man told me I was deep.”
Note: The point of this article is not to convince any theists that theism is ridiculous—I’ll argue that in future posts. The point of this is to account for how I think about theists, given that I think their position is ludicrous.
A lot of public atheists make very bad arguments. Matt Dillahunty has a strange tendency to declare that his being unconvinced of a particular argument is a good objection. I remember one time when someone laid out a complicated contingency argument, only for Dillahunty to assert that he was unconvinced of all of the premises—as if that were a substantive objection. I quite like Sam Harris, but in his debate with William Lane Craig, he had no good objections to Craig’s objections to his moral theory. Hitchens likewise had no good objection to Craig’s arguments.
Many debates with atheists cause me to cringe based on how poor the arguments are and the replies are. There’s also a tendency to attach strange metaphysical significance to who has “made a positive claim.”
Interlude: A rant about positive claims
The plausibility of a claim does not change based on who is making the positive claim. If a theist says that god probably exists and an atheist disagrees, their position is identical to the position that god probably doesn’t exist. That is because if the theist is wrong that god exists, by necessity, god doesn’t exist.
Atheists will often give analogies like “suppose that I claim that there are an even number of gumballs in a container, even though there’s no basis for believing this. If you disagreed with my view, you wouldn’t be saying that there’s definitely an odd number, you’d just be saying that you don’t know.”
This case is misleading. If a person says that there are an even number of gumballs they mean that the odds are above 50/50 that there are an even number. You saying they’re unjustified would be correct—the justified conclusion is that there’s a 50% chance that there are an odd number of gumballs. However, as we saw in the last post, we have to assign credences to things. If you’re unconvinced of god then you should think that the odds god exists are about 50/50. It doesn’t matter who is making a positive claim—each person thinks there’s a certain probability that god exists, and they disagree based on the evidence on what that probability is.
Back to the rest of the post.
However, while I think a lot of atheists make terrible arguments, their position seems to be obviously correct. Theism isn’t just a false position—I’m probably more convinced that the god of Christianity doesn’t exist than I am that logical positivism is false. However, despite that, I often find myself siding with a lot of theists in the debates about the existence of god, just based on the arguments made. For example, when atheists respond to the fine tuning argument with anthropic objections, or by claiming that god hasn’t been demonstrated or something, so the fine tuning argument fails, but don’t respond to the substantive claim that the odds of life emerging on atheism are less than the odds of winning 1000 consecutive lotteries…they’re on the wrong side of the argument. So what’s with this phenomena of adherents to obviously false views often being more persuasive than people with correct views.
2
Logical positivism is a view that is obviously false. For those who don’t know logical positivism holds that statements are only meaningful if they’re potentially verifiable. So, for example, the statement murder is wrong is meaningless, because it can’t be confirmed or disconfirmed by empirical data. It has lots of problems.
1 Logical positivism isn’t empirically confirmable or disconfirmable so it would be meaningless by it’s own accounts.
2 As Huemer says “Third example
Positivists claimed that certain pairs of theories that explicitly contradict each other really meant the same thing. E.g., there is the theory of relativity, which posits a non-Euclidean geometry to explain gravitational phenomena. Then there is an alternative theory which would use a perfectly Euclidean geometry but which would claim that gravitational fields cause distortions in the sizes of all objects that encounter them (including light rays). Reichenbach and Carnap both claimed that these are really the same theory, because they make the same empirical predictions.”
But imagine a counterfactual world in which logical positivism was taught to people at a young age. It was demanded that they take logical positivism on faith—even if they couldn’t justify it. They claimed that there was an afterlife that would torture non logical positivists. Nearly everyone was raised as a logical positivist.
Now, some rebellious teenagers go around talking a lot about how logical positivism is nonsense—a terrible theory that can’t be verified and should be discarded. They talk about how it’s hateful and bogus. Well, now lots of young anti-logical positivists go on youtube, wanting to watch videos of people destroying logical positivism with facts and logic. However, because a lot of them are rebellious teenagers, they’re not interested in the anti positivists who can engage deeply with the arguments. Instead, they just want someone to be persuasive and dunk on moronic positivists.
Now the anti positivist contingent of Youtube grows, with lots of snarky people proclaiming confidently that it’s bullshit, not really challenging the best defenders of positivism. The more intellectual positivists, however, are not content taking positivism on faith. They want there to be actual good arguments for positivism. And so they go on a long search for good arguments for positivism. And they find some. Maybe these arguments ultimately fail. But they’re good enough to refute the anti positivist equivalent of Matt Dillahunty. They develop ontological arguments, moral arguments, and contingency arguments for logical positivism. Lots of anti positivists have debates and make really bad arguments, don’t read the positivists response, and the logical positivists feel like their position is the one believed by smart intellectuals. There’s a market for scholarly defenders of logical positivism—and potential scholarly defenders meet the demand.
This seems like a pretty good parallel of what’s happened with theism. Smart theists meet the demand for intellectual arguments for theism. Glib atheists mostly ignore them. The theists then feel justified, like their opponents won’t engage with their arguments.
One disanalogy though is the skepticism being applied. Logical positivism is the skeptical position. It denies the meaningfulness of a certain class of statements. So as a result, the theism case has a wrinkle that the logical positivist case doesn’t—the strange use of skepticism. Because atheism is the skeptical position, atheists who don’t want to wade through the complex minefield of modal ontological arguments, arguments from contingency, and fine tuning arguments just adopt a blatant skepticism. They treat a claim having not been demonstrated empirically as sufficient grounds for dismissing the claim. If people spent hours every day hitting themselves in the head with baseball bats, for reasons taken on faith, but for which defenders generated implausible complex arguments, those opposed to hitting oneself in the head with baseball bats would be reasonably likely to adopt a blanket skepticism. They might say something like “YOU MUST DEMONSTRATE EMPIRICALLY ALL OF THESE BENEFITS OF HITTING YOURSELF IN THE HEAD WITH A BASEBALL BAT.” Arguments often seem ridiculous but turn out surprisingly hard to refute—ontological arguments are premise examples.
Scott Alexander gives lots of arguments for hitting oneself with a bat writing “
“It’s a great way to increase your pain tolerance so that the little things in life don’t bother you as much.”
“It builds character!”
“Every hour you’re hitting yourself on the head with a bat is an hour you’re not out on the street, doing drugs and committing crime.”
“It increases the demand for bats, which stimulates the lumber industry, which means we’ll have surplus lumber available in case of a disaster.”
“It improves strength and hand-eye coordination.”
“It may not literally drive out demons, but it’s a powerful social reminder of our shared commitment for demons to be driven out.”
“It’s one of the few things that everyone, rich or poor, black or white, man or woman, all do together, which means it crosses boundaries and builds a shared identity.”
“It binds us to our forefathers, who hit their own heads with bats eight hours a day.”
“If we stopped forcing everyone to do it, better-informed rich people would probably be the first to abandon the practice. And then they would have fewer concussions than poor people, which would promote inequality.”
“It creates jobs for bat-makers, bat-sellers, and the overseers who watch us to make sure we bang for a full eight hours.”
“Sometimes people collapse of exhaustion after only six hours, and that’s the first sign that they have a serious disease, and then they’re able to get diagnosed and treated. If we didn’t make them bang bats into their heads for eight hours, it would take much longer to catch their condition.”
“Chesterton’s fence!””
In a world where there was a market for intellectual defenses of hitting oneself with a baseball bat, numerous apologists for it would appear and design new, ingenious arguments. Many of these arguments aren’t wrong, they’re just inadequate to justify the conclusion. But a lot of them are amorphous and hard to verify. It seems conceivable that in a world full of bat-bashing apologists, lots of snarky anti bat bashers would say things like “DEMONSTRATE CHESTERTON’S FENCE,” “I’M UNCONVINCED THAT IT BUILDS CHARACTER.”
The actual correct responses to the arguments for hitting oneself with a baseball bat are as follows.
A) All of them can be true and the harms of bat bashing for hours a day in terms of pain and time wasted would dramatically outweigh.
B) All of the arguments are false—let’s go through them.
1 “It builds character!”
—No, even if there are some ways that it does there are probably better ways of building character. The 8 hours wasted would likely be better for character.
“Every hour you’re hitting yourself on the head with a bat is an hour you’re not out on the street, doing drugs and committing crime.”
—This is true, however, it’s also an hour not being spent on doing productive things. Presumably the expected value of people’s time is positive so wasting it is bad, even if it has certain upsides. Also, people would probably do more drugs and crime if most of their days were filled with unpleasant tedium.
“It increases the demand for bats, which stimulates the lumber industry, which means we’ll have surplus lumber available in case of a disaster.”
—If people weren’t doing this they’d be doing other things which would stimulate other industries. Also, creating jobs isn’t prima facie good—it’s only good if the jobs are doing productive things that make the world better.
“It improves strength and hand-eye coordination.”
—Nope, brain damage outweighs any positive effect on hand-eye coordination. Other things that could be done would foster more important skills than strength and hang-eye coordination. Reading a book has more marginal benefits than the strength increasing bat bashing.
“It may not literally drive out demons, but it’s a powerful social reminder of our shared commitment for demons to be driven out.”
—There’s no reason a social reminder is intrinsically good. It’s only good if driving out demons is good in the first place. Also, there are other better ways of remembering it.
“It’s one of the few things that everyone, rich or poor, black or white, man or woman, all do together, which means it crosses boundaries and builds a shared identity.”
—There’s no reason that everyone doing something at the same time is intrinsically good. Breathing doesn’t have any excess value in virtue of everyone doing it simultaneously.
“It binds us to our forefathers, who hit their own heads with bats eight hours a day.”
—This is a fully general objection to every changing anything. This has no intrinsic value. Looking at the moon doesn’t get excess importance because our forefathers did.
“If we stopped forcing everyone to do it, better-informed rich people would probably be the first to abandon the practice. And then they would have fewer concussions than poor people, which would promote inequality.”
—The harms of inequality are outweighed by the harms of making everyone worse off. It’s also not clear why this is true. Also poor people are probably disproportionately harmed by brain damage.
“It creates jobs for bat-makers, bat-sellers, and the overseers who watch us to make sure we bang for a full eight hours.”
See the above response to the demand for lumber objection.
“Sometimes people collapse of exhaustion after only six hours, and that’s the first sign that they have a serious disease, and then they’re able to get diagnosed and treated. If we didn’t make them bang bats into their heads for eight hours, it would take much longer to catch their condition.”
Overall diseases increase from bat bashing. The tradeoffs are obviously not worth it.
“Chesterton’s fence!””
This is a fully general objection to every changing anything. Maybe this should make us slightly more cautious about abolishing head bashing, but it’s definitely not decisive.
However, these arguments take a little bit of time to think through, particularly given the responses that the bat bashing apologists would generate. I’ve also spotted that there are some okay arguments for it—Chesterton’s fence in particular—which is a big no no in public debates. It’s especially taboo when your intelocutors position is rightly regarded as being fully ridiculous. So I think in a world with the disputes the anti bat bashers would just make mediocre objections—saying things like “you can’t demonstrate any of these things,” and fold to increasingly complex modal ontological arguments for bat bashing. Those anti bat bashing teenagers aren’t looking for a nuanced dialogue, over the course of which the superiority of the anti bashing position is born out. They’re looking for the anti bashers to solidly bash the pro bashers with simple but satisfying arguments. And that’s what we’ve seen in the atheism context.
3 The implications of this for my mental schema of apologists
Lots of apologists are (arguably justifiably) irritated at many popular atheists, thinking that they fail to make good arguments. I think they’re right. I also think that lots of theists make ingenious, very sophisticated arguments. However, I think those arguments are like the arguments made by bat bashing apologists. In the world where lots of people were bat bashing apologists, there would no doubt be scholarly papers defending it—and unsophisticated critics. The scholars would justifiably be irritated at the failure of the critics to adequately address their arguments. Many apologists would win debates with bat bashing skeptics.
I do high school debate. In high school debate, lots of people will argue that their proposal would save the world (debate is weird). Against these, I’ve sometimes argued that the end of the world would be good. This view is asinine—the end of the world would be very very bad. However, the world has lots of things. There are more good arguments for ending the world than there are for nearly any other view that I hold. There are vast numbers of upsides to ending the world. They’re just outweighed by the upsides of not ending the world. Theism is similar. It’s such a sweeping view that it has lots of supporting evidence. The evidence against it is just so much stronger. But it’s hard to communicate in a dialogue the sheer weight of the evidence. It’s hard to accept that the other side has lots of evidence, more evidence than you have for most things that you believe, but it’s merely outweighed by the evidence against their position.
There’s a sord’ve dichotomy between the simple atheists and the more sophisticated atheists. The simple atheists generally think that theism is obviously false and not a serious intellectual position. They see William Lane Craig or Plantinga the way one might see a defender of homeopathy. They’re generally looked down on by the more sophisticated atheists and theists, who think they just miss whole dispute. I think they’re both partially right. The simple atheists are right that theism is total nonsense—it’s plausible on the level of homeopathy or a flat earth. But the sophisticated atheists are right that there are sophisticated arguments for theism that are often ignored. In a public dialogue, competent theists could hold their own against the most competent atheists.
So I too look down on the foolish atheists. I quite sympathize with theists who think that many atheists are unfamiliar with the good arguments for the existence of god. I share the desire to sneer at many of the new atheists and respect people like Craig. But at the end of the day, the view that they argue for, despite their sophisticated arguments, is nuts. It’s crazy on the level of belief in the desirability of hitting oneself in the head with a baseball bat. Smart people can devise clever arguments for absurd views. If the average person was transported to a world full of bat bashers, the best bat bashing apologist would annihilate them in a debate. Given how sweeping of a view theism is, with broad implications for all phenoma and hundreds of phenomena that are more predicted on theism than on atheism, there are lots of good arguments for theism.
This essay has been pretty muddled and rambling so I’ll state the thesis as concisely as possible. Here’s the overall conclusion
Theism is obvious nonsense.
Theism has lots of good arguments supporting it.
Lots of atheists make terrible arguments.
It’s easy to lose a debate to a theist because there are lots of good arguments for theism. If theism has 100 good arguments for it and 500 against it, assuming each one is equal in strength and changes the odds of theism by a factor of 2:1 either for or against it, then overall the odds of theism are 1/2^400. However, it’s hard to show the 400 arguments against it over the course of a debate.
Atheists respond to this fact by adopting bad epistemology that ignores Bayesian evidence. This makes theists mad and causes atheists to make terrible arguments. However, it’s rhetorically effective so it spreads rapidly.