Two "Solutions" For The Same Predicament

In the Australian budget released this week, Joe Hockey outlined two measures to try to get groups associated with higher unemployment into work. For those over 50 and unemployed, the government will provide a financial incentive to employers to hire them - up to $10,000 if they remain with the employer for 2 years. For those under 30, however, anyone who is unemployed will face 6 months a year without any benefit, including an initial 6 month waiting period.

The rationale, at least how it seems prima facie is this: When it comes to older workers, the problem is the free market discriminates unfairly. When it comes to younger workers, however, the problem is the youth themselves, who by the implication of the exercise are simply unwilling to do that it takes to have sustained employment.

Both solutions are recognitions of the failures of the current private sector model we have for employment. The idea of seeing unemployment benefits as some sort of entitlement misses the reality of the job market. If everyone who wanted to work was able to get a job by the sheer desire to have a job, we wouldn't need to address the issue. But there are biases, employers discriminate, and these patterns of discrimination can be hugely problematic for those caught up in them. There's a reason that people who become long-term unemployed stay long-term unemployed.

This is a failure of governance, and a perennial failure at that. There's no point in laying the blame on Joe Hockey and the Liberal Party of Australia just because they happen to be the government in charge, but it applied just as much to Wayne Swan and Labor before that, and will apply to whomever comes next. The free market, like any other solution, is a means to an end. We recognise the limits of the free markets by practices such as a social safety net, government incentives, discrimination laws, etc.

I'll say now that I'm very sympathetic to the idea that young people should be in training. I'm also sympathetic to the idea that people should move for work. Yet what policy came with the policy to cut off unemployed youth from social security? And for that matter, what policy is there to help those evicted when they lose their income? Or even to ensure that the youth have stable employment such that they will be able to get housing to begin with?

Framing youth unemployment as an entitlement issue, I think, is a mistake. It's a survival issue - that a group of vulnerable people who are having a hard time entering the workforce to begin with are now being threatened with ruin for circumstances that are largely beyond their control. To say it's politically-charged rhetoric that shirks the responsibility of government would be a dispassionate way of describing the policy.

Whether it's the best of all possible systems, we live in a system where we depend on money. Take that away and you take away the ability to survive. And when it comes to the poor, it's not like the money is disappearing from the system. People who live on the edge tend to redistribute that money back into the economy because they need to spend all their money just to survive.

Over on Crikey, I saw this described as class warfare, but it goes beyond that. Health and education cuts are class warfare, allowing universities to price education away from the poor is class warfare, raising the age one qualifies for Newstart is class warfare, introducing mandatory co-payments for medical access is class warfare, allowing people to salary sacrifice their lifestyle is class warfare. This goes well beyond that - putting people potentially into harm's way for the crime of being young and not being able to find a willing employer.

William Lane Craig on The Problem Of Evil

I've been reading through The Cambridge Companion to Atheism, where William Lane Craig is the voice critiquing atheistic arguments and promoting theistic arguments. Of what he wrote, it's his critique of the problem of evil I want to explore.

Craig frames the problem of evil like so:

1. If God exists, gratuitous evil does not exist.
2. Gratuitous evil exists.
3. Therefore, God does not exist.

His contention is that (2) is the weak point of the argument. As Craig acknowledges "Everybody admits that the world is filled with apparently gratuitous suffering", but does Craig sufficiently deal with the problem? Here are his responses.

1. We are not in a good position to assess with confidence the probability that God lacks morally sufficient reasons for permitting the suffering in the world.

"Once we contemplate God’s providence over the whole of history, then it becomes evident how hopeless it is for limited observers to speculate on the probability that some evil we see is ultimately gratuitous."

2. Christian theism entails doctrines that increase the probability of the coexistence of God and evil.

(i) The chief purpose of life is not happiness, but the knowledge of God.

"Many evils occur in life that may be utterly pointless with respect to producing human happiness; but they may not be pointless with respect to producing a deeper, saving knowledge of God."

(ii) Mankind has been accorded significant moral freedom to rebel against God and his purpose.

"The horrendous moral evils in the world are testimony to man’s depravity in this state of spiritual alienation from God."

(iii) God’s purpose spills over into eternal life.

"Given the prospect of eternal life, we should not expect to see in this life God’s compensation for every evil we experience. Some may be justified only in light of eternity."

(iv) The knowledge of God is an incommensurable good.

"[T]he person who knows God, no matter what he or she suffers, no matter how awful his or her pain, can still truly say, “God is good to me!” simply in virtue of the fact that he or she knows God."

3. There is better warrant for believing that God exists than that the evil in the world is really gratuitous.

"[I]f God exists, then the evil in the world is not really gratuitous."

I would wonder just how viable each of those options are. (1) is an concession to our ignorance on matters at all. If the objection held, then we'd just as equally be able to say that the evidence of an all-evil God or a morally-indifferent God is just as likely as an omnibenevolent God. So whatever other reasons one would have to believe that there's a divine power, we'd have no reason to favour just what nature that divine power embodies. Would believers be comfortable in accepting that the universe is just as easily made by a malevolent deity as an omnibenevolent one?

(2) is a curious strategy, not least because it immediately conjures up the Epicurean objection: "Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent." Even if knowledge of God was an immesurable good, why would we need to have gratuitous suffering alongside it? If it doesn't matter, then it's powerful evidence against God's benevolence. One might be able to make the case iff suffering increased the likelihood of knowledge of God, but then that would require good evidence in its favour. Knowledge of the Christian God is largely based on the actions of Christian evangelism rather than by suffering directly. Most people throughout our species' history have suffered (sometimes gratuitously) without there even being the idea of Christianity, let alone the exposure to it. So the premises (2i), (2ii), and (2iv) don't even make sense for most of the suffering we have.

Furthermore, most life evidentially can suffer, and there's no question of a chimpanzee or an octopus having knowledge of God. Other animals react much the same to pain as we do, so why would a God allow them to suffer when none of the four responses even begin to address animal suffering? Craig's answer from elsewhere is "God has shielded almost the entire animal kingdom throughout its history from an awareness of being in pain!" Though almost doesn't include all animals beside from human, even if Craig is correct in interpreting the evidence as other great apes have the structures, yet don't have knowledge of God. So at best Craig has merely reduced the scope of animal suffering but not eliminated the problem.

The idea of heaven (2iii) seems to work against the notion of a benevolent God. Far from a saving grace, it highlights exactly what the problem of evil says - this world doesn't look like it was created by a benevolent God. If God could have created the world without gratuitous suffering, then why do we have gratuitous suffering? Also, why would a child need to die slowly and painfully of cancer before heaven rather than just getting into heaven without experiencing that suffering at all? Similarly, (2ii) asks the question of why a benevolent God would create us in such a depraved way. Quite a lot of atheists, for example, are quite civilised and don't contribute to the gratuitous suffering of our fellow humans. Their spiritual alienation from God doesn't lead to total depravity. Meanwhile there are believers who tortured others in the name of their faith. Did they have spiritual alienation? Besides, most suffering in the world has nothing to do with the actions of humanity - spiritually alienated or not.

For (3) to work, we would need to have greater confidence in the evidence for God's existence than the evidence for gratuitous suffering. Since we have very good evidence for gratuitous suffering such that Craig acknowledges the apparent gratuitous suffering, so it's setting a really high bar for evidence for God. It's not helped by the problem that other arguments for God, as Stephen Law points out, are neutral on the moral characteristics for God. So even if the other arguments are very persuasive, they wouldn't be evidence against the actual gratuitous suffering in the world. Perhaps a morally-indifferent God or an omnimalevolent God would be a better fit for the data. But even if we ignore that issue (perhaps God is necessarily omnibenevolent), that the morally-indifferent god or omnimalevolent god would be a better fit for the data would suggest that the evidence really doesn't favour God over the fact of gratuitous suffering.

The Appearance of Legitimacy

Japan have suffered a setback in putting whale meat on the table with their "scientific program" being labelled a ruse by an international court. Of course, the Japanese knew it was a ruse too (their disappointment was expressed in the denial of tradition, not of what they could have learnt from slaughtering whales), yet it was a ruse they needed to keep up for international obligations.

This same kind of legitimacy is presumably what Russia sought with the referendum in Crimea, or any dictator does with a "poll". It's the kind of ruse that fools nobody, yet it's enough to fend off simple criticism. Russia doesn't care about having a fair election any more than a dictator does, yet the burden is now on those who say it's unfair - a burden that really can't be met beyond suspicion.

The example I want to highlight, though, is scientific creationism. What should be said about all creationism is this - any starting point other than the science will exclude it from being science. It's that simple. The goal of science isn't to vindicate any doctrine, religious or otherwise, but to use observation to develop and test theories. Creationists fall afoul of this because they already have the answer.

Yet creationists want scientific legitimacy. While many will affirm that the bible is their starting point, they are also quick to criticise any scientific claim that seemingly contradicts that. They also crave people with qualifications - real qualifications if possible, but degree mills in the absence of those. They even have their own "scientific" journals where people submit "real" research.

What is interesting is exploring what the response to that should be. Science, of course, needs to be an open enterprise and people need to be able to explore avenues wherever they lead. At the same time, scientists need to guard against pseudoscientists who are looking to use the scientific process to serve their own ends.

What we end up with, sad to say, is Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. The complaint was that Intelligent Design isn't being given a fair go by the scientific community, and proponents are finding that their support of Intelligent Design is meaning losing academic credibility. It sounds appalling, which it would be if it were the case.

There is a perceived circularity with scientific orthodoxy. Intelligent Design, to be a legitimate view, needs to have academic support. But since the evolutionists are the ones in charge of what gets called science, Intelligent Design cannot get the academic support it needs. In other words, the orthodoxy rigs the game by excluding any person or paper that might be sympathetic to ID as simply being anti-science.

Of course if this were really circular, then it would be utterly astounding that science progresses at all. Yet science does, and the ideas accepted by the biological community now are not the same as 50, 100, or 150 years ago when Darwin first published. The big deal is made of the orthodoxy because it's a convenient scape goat standing in the way of perceived scientific legitimacy.

What Expelled did was tie cases of ID proponents being fired or denied tenure to the fact that they were ID proponents. That in turn was tied into the wider narrative of academia trying to exclude God from the picture. What this does is gives a reason for the lack of legitimacy. They are serious scientists doing serious research promoting a serious view, but the atheistic evolutionists stand in their way. (One of the most baffling things about Expelled is how much of the film is about Richard Dawkins' atheism, from theologians discussing it to Ben Stein drilling Dawkins on what gods he doesn't believe in.)

The argument so far has been made without context. If we were to put ID into a cultural and historical context, ID an incarnation of creationism in an attempt to give it scientific legitimacy at least as far as what gets taught to students. ID is aimed at school boards, politicians, and at the wider public. It craves scientific legitimacy not because God should be vindicated in science, but because scientific legitimacy is what counts as far as what is taught in science class. If ID were to limit itself to being an expression of natural theology, there'd be no issue. But as the wedge document confirms, the motives of ID proponents is to ultimately bring people to Jesus.

Thus scientists are put in an awkward position. If people want to use the appearance of scientific legitimacy for their nonscientific ideas, then scientists have to guard against it. But if they do guard against it, they are accused of guarding the orthodoxy against proper scrutiny. Proper science is brought down to the level of pseudoscience by virtue of pseudoscience being able to better posture itself as legitimate science persecuted by the orthodoxy.

The value of real science is that what is the mainstream now had to be earned through the scientific process. Just as a real democracy requires an open political process. The pale imitation of dictatorships fools no-one even though it's an attempt of dictators to appease their critics. The same goes for creationists pretending to do science. They aren't doing so because they want to find the truth - they know their truth already - but because it's what's expected of them.

The problem is that their pale imitation isn't the same thing as doing real science, and real scientists call them out on it. The irony of it all is that scientists standing up for science has become to be seen an expression of ideology, while ideologues craving the appearance of scientific legitimacy as the persecuted minority standing up for Truth.

Review: God in the Age of Science? by Herman Philipse

Generally speaking, one can divide religious critique into two categories. The first is to attack religion as a political institution, whereby the social effects of religion are examined and subject to scrutiny. The second is to go after the truth status of religious claims. While these two categories have some overlap, it's worth remembering that truth and utility aren't the same thing.

It is unfortunate that critiques of the utility of religion are taken as the reason for critiques on the truth of religion. It's not that God is a nonsense notion, it's that atheists have some psychological hatred of theism as it is practised that leads to the denial of God altogether. It's unfortunate because the critiques of belief itself are ignored as some outcome of one's impression on the utility of religion, they remain largely unaddressed. Explain the "reasons" for atheism and explain away the need to address atheism.

Herman Philipse's book completely focuses on the second category. This category is further narrowed by the distinction between natural theology and revealed theology, where the focus was almost exclusively on natural theology. The question the book explores is what to make of a concept like God in light of modern science, and is largely an exploration of the case made by the philosopher Richard Swinburne.

To understand the way Philipse laid out the critique, it's worth exploring the three dilemmas Philipse proposes the theist has to answer:
Claims about God's existence are (a) factual claims, or (b) non-factual claims.
If (a), religious belief (c) needs to be backed up by reasons evidence, or (d) it does not.
If (c), this can be done by (e) methods completely unlike those used by scientists and scholars, or (f) like those methods.

Although there are a few exponents of (b), the claims themselves are prima facie (a) claims. "God exists", is for most people an attempt to say something true about the world, and not just an attitude they take to it. For (d), there are a couple of chapters devoted to exploring the merits of Plantinga's argument for reformed epistemology. But the real concern is the answer to the third dilemma, with Richard Swinburne's cumulative inductive case for the existence of God taken as the paradigmatic example of how one ought to approach God in the age of science.

The chapters addressing Plantinga are instructive to the tone of the rest of the book. While Plantinga has weaved an elaborate logical defence, of ad hoc claims, bare assertions, defeater-deflectors and defeater-defeaters, one might be curious as to what purpose Platinga's argument would achieve. At no point do we have any evidence that our brains possess a sensis divinitus, let alone that it's actually at work in religious experiences, that it's faulty for most people, but less faulty for monotheists, and reliable when it comes to Christian beliefs. Yet this idea gets two chapters of logical objections!
v But the vast majority of the book is taken up with a critical analysis of Swinburne's ideas. His argumentation style, much like the opening of the book, often involves particular dilemmas, followed by why each horn of the dilemma is problematic. For dilemma 3 above, the danger of choosing (e) is choosing methodology that has no respectability among intellectuals, while the danger of (f) is that it opens God up to empirical disconfirmation.

The exercise begins by seeing whether Swinburne is successful in casting God as a successful theory in the way scientific theories are. Swinburne's approach is correct, but unfortunately God is not up to the task of being a proper scientific theory. There are obstacles to this, such as God being an irreducible analogy, or using personal terms to describe something that doesn't fit our use of personal language.

To examine Swinburne's inductive argument, he sets aside his earlier criticisms before forcefully showing the problems with Swinburne's approach. Some of the errors are quite technical, such as whether some of Swinburne's arguments are successful C-inductive arguments, but there's a lot of food for thought at each stage. The end result (predictably) is that Swinburne's approach simply doesn't have the predictive power attributed to it.

Like Plantinga's argument, there were times when the exercise bordered on the absurd. God being the simplest thing there is because infinites are simpler than non-infinites mathematically. Philipse deals with this argument early, but as a justification this keeps coming up in Swinburne's inductive argument. One could simply point out that since there is no way of measuring God, there is no way of knowing how simple God is, but the joke goes beyond the pale when Swinburne insists that infinite things are simpler than finite things of the same kind. It takes a lot of complexity to have finite persons with finite knowledge, but an infinite person with infinite knowledge is simple?!

---

Is this book worth reading? It's a tough question to answer. There are many ways of addressing the truth questions of religion, and whether one feels it's worth digging into this book depends on whether natural theology is seen as the best way to assess the truth. This is in contrast to revealed theology (the specific doctrines of theistic religions) and in contrast to the idea that theology is a pseudodiscipline.

Philipse does his best to argue for the relevance of natural theology as the approach one ought to take, and he aimed at the best natural theology has to offer in his arguments. The end result is something quite technical, but still full of interesting approaches to particular problem. The arguments themselves cover a wide range of philosophical topics, covering not only philosophy of religion, but questions of language, epistemology, mathematics, and meaning. In that light, the case for natural theology is not as esoteric as it seems prima facie.

One of the strengths of the book is that it pushes the issue of theology in the scientific age, and is full of dilemmas facing believers at each potential turn. In that respect, the book is incredibly useful for the current debate about whether science and religion are compatible. Anyone who has an interest on this question will find this book invaluable.

However, this is not a book about how religion is practised, nor is it a book about revealed theology, and the arguments sometimes get bogged down in logical problems when empirical arguments would have been more to the point. And for those who see believing in God as an act of faith, there will be nothing in this book to change their minds. But for those who find the question interesting, and for those who seek a modern understanding of how to address the question, this book is well worth reading.

Adopting The Rational Stance

As a programmer, it's not unusual to have to justify my position, or to have to think through a problem, as well as listen to others do the same. We argue on logic, on solutions, on frameworks, on practices to code - and all this in an environment where no two people completely agree on anything. Yet despite this, what doesn't happen (at least not in my experience) is seeing one programmer dismiss a proposition by finding some emotional "reason" the proponent might happen to hold it for.

Are computer programmers under the illusion that humans are purely rational beings who have not understood the role of emotion in cognition? Perhaps, though it seems somewhat unlikely that programmers are divorced from the human tendency to see rationality in their own views and emotion in the views of others. What seems more likely, however, is that it's quite irrelevant to the task at hand. That is to say, even if programmers aren't fully rational, it's still right to adopt the rational stance.

Yet this only seems odd in light of online discussions, where experience has taught me the harsh lesson that rationality is at best a front. Unconstrained by a shared goal, folk psychology tends to dominate. It seems quite ironic that in a state of anonymity we get even more personal.

What I fail to see, however, is much of a distinction between the two activities. To be sure, programming might often benefit from being highly constrained compared to some of the more open questions that people tend to fuss over, yet the aim of the activity is fundamentally the same. It's not whether we can be fully rational, but whether we ought to adopt the ideal of trying to be rational. Failure to do this would be like playing chess for the purpose of flipping over the board.

Any debate over ideas is an invitation to adopt the rational stance - to treat a problem as an object of rational thought, and assess the relative merits as if it were put forward by a rational agent. The goal, normatively-speaking, is not to worry about how an idea is held, but whether holding an idea is warranted. No easy task in practice, but as an aim it's evidentially achievable. Programmers do it everyday, and there's nothing special about programmers.