Consensus gentium and double counting

Here’s a way that an atheist could undercut the consensus gentium argument (the argument for theism based on how much belief in God or gods there is in the world), building on my previous post.

Suppose that views about God or “big gods” came into the world as follows: Brilliant very early thinkers came up with plausible arguments for the existence of God. These arguments may have, for instance, included some selection taken from among cosmological, teleological, moral and religious experience arguments. These arguments were rationally taken up by their followers, but eventually supernaturalistic and maybe even theistic belief was simply passed on by testimony, with the selective advantages of supernaturalism (say, social cohesion effects) helping to keep communities where these beliefs were widespread going.

If this is right, then treating the consensus gentium argument as evidence for theism involves double counting. For the theist presumably also counts the evidential force of arguments like cosmological, teleological, moral and religious experience ones, and since on the above story theism (a) started with one or more of these, and (b) its further spread and persistence can be explained naturalistically quite well by selection effects.

Now, the above argument-focused story may not be plausible to all. But the atheist can make a further move. Dilemma. Either the above story is true or not. If it’s true, then the consensus gentium argument involves double counting. If it’s not true, then likely theism started in some way that is not rational, and then spread and persisted by naturalistic selection effects, and that’s not evidence for theism, either. So, either way, we can dismiss consensus gentium?

What do I say to this? As a theist who is convinced that the other arguments for theism do provide significant evidence, I don’t find it particularly hard to just concede the point.

But there is another move: a merely partial concession. The story about how belief in God is helpful to communities is a plausible story. But it is even more plausible on theism! For on theism, there is an additional probability that God would “go out of his way” and have rational animals exist in conditions where belief in God is helpful, precisely as a means to making belief in God persist and spread naturally. Thus, widespread of theistic belief may be probable on naturalism, but on theism is even more so. This may not be strong evidence for theism (the Bayes ratio can’t exceed 2, which is “substantial” but not “strong” on Jeffreys’ scale), but is still some evidence.

Debunking and testimony

An evolutionary debunking argument against theism can be employed defensively or offensively by an atheist. Applied defensively, it is a response to the theist’s offering an argument from the prevalence of belief in God. Applied offensively, it is suppose to show that whether or not God exists, because theistic beliefs come from a suspect source, they are not knowledge.

The focus of debunking argument tends to be on mimetic selection. The idea is that theistic (or maybe more generally supernaturalistic) beliefs confer some kind of a selective advantage on the communities or individuals exhibiting them, and hence we can explain naturalistically the prevalence of these beliefs. This explanation works whether or not God exists, and hence whether or not God exists, typical theists’ beliefs are not knowledge.

But there is a serious gap in this argument. Mimetic selection only operates on a belief once the belief is in place. But we still have to ask: Where did the belief come from in the first place? And I think that if we are to be honest, we have to say that not only is this something we don’t empirically know, but given how it concerns fine-grained details of events before written history, we have no empirical access to the answer. For any particular lineage of theistic beliefs, there was a first believer in the lineage. How did they come to believe? Well, we can make up a bunch of ideas:

1. They were philosophically inclined and came up with a good argument for theism (say, a good design argument).

2. They were philosophically inclined and came up with a bad argument for theism (say, a bad ontological argument).

3. They got an apparent perception of God from eating bad mushrooms.

4. They got an apparent perception of God from God.

5. They were bullied into believing in God by a tribal leader who claimed divine right of ruling.

6. They heard a fairy tale told by their parents and misunderstand it as history rather than fiction.

And a lot more. The point is that empirically we have no idea. This was very long ago, and we have no records of how it went. And it may be that for different mimetic lineages of theism the initial explanation is different.

Now notice that the options include ones that are friendly to theistic knowledge (1 and 4) as well as ones that are unfriendly (the others). Furthermore, if the lineage begins with one of the options friendly to theistic knowledge, then we might say that this knowledge was then testimonially transmitted. Of course, the selective facts helped with the transmission. But as long as the chain of testimony goes back to a case of genuine knowledge, the fact that the transmission was made possible by selective effects that are not as such truth conducive may not undercut the possibility that the chain actually does transmit knowledge.

Thus, once we think of the variety of ways that the lineage of theistic beliefs could begun, we see that an offensive debunking argument fails, as the offensive debunker would need to offer evidence that our lineage of theistic belief began in one of the knowledge-unfriendly ways. On the other hand, the same line of thought leaves unaffected the defensive debunker, who only needs a serious possibility that the lineage of theistic belief began in a way that gives no special credence to theism.

I think this line of thought is most plausible if you have an irreducible view of testimonial evidence.

Where does the evolutionary argument for naturalism work?

I’ve never been moved by Plantinga’s evolutionary argument against naturalism in general, but I’ve also always found it plausible that naturalism and evolution undercuts cognitive reliability in certain areas, such as metaphysics. It seems, on the other hand, really plausible that we would get cognitive reliability for empirical things (largely because of the fact that naturalism makes causal theories of content very likely).

One might go on to conjecture that Plantinga’s argument works everywhere outside of empirical areas. I thought so until I realized that there is a significant area of normativity where the argument doesn’t work: prudential value judgments. This is because that life and reproduction is good for living things, and many other goods, noncoincidentally, contribute to life and reproduction. But at the same time, we are evolutionarily selected for successful promotion of life and reproduction. A being that believed that life is bad would be unlikely to promote its own survival, and hence unlikely to pass on its genes.

Plantinga’s standard answer to similar objections in the empirical arena is that behavior does not come just from beliefs, but from a combination of belief and desire. But this response is rather implausible in the prudential rationality case. It is extremely plausible that there is a conceptual link between a mental state representing something as good for one and having a desire for that thing. If there were no correlation between a mental state S respecting a thing and having a desire for that thing, that mental state just is not a belief that the thing is good for one.

A constraint on metaethics

Suppose that we lived lives like ours in a world (possible or not) whose metaphysics included nothing like moral duties except that there was a loving God and he issued commands. If in that world we used the phrase “morally wrong”, that phrase would refer to the property of being forbidden by God.

Or suppose that we lived lives like ours in a world (possible or not) whose metaphysics included nothing like moral duties except that we had Aristotelian forms and they specified what the will should will, the phrase “morally wrong” would refer to the property of being contrary to what our form says the will should will.

But suppose now we lived in a world where there was nothing like moral duties, no God, no forms, but buried underground and unseen by humans there was a stone tablet that arose from a random volcanic process millions of years ago. On these tablets by chance there were markings that looked just like French sentences, and when interpreted as French sentences, they stated imperatives, like the Golden Rule, that that fit very well with our intuitions about what are the core moral duties. I doubt that the phrase “morally wrong” would refer to the property of being contrary to what the stone tablet would enjoin if it were interpreted as French. (I am careful in my wording, because strictly speaking the stone tablet, being the product of random processes, does not contain any sentences—it only contains markings that look like sentences of French.)

Suppose my intuition is right. What is the difference between the third case and the first two? Here is a hypothesis. In the divine command world, presumably our beliefs about what we call “morally wrong” have some sort of a connection to the commands of that God. In the Aristotelian world, our beliefs about the “morally wrong” presumably come in some way from the Aristotelian forms. But in the stone tablet world, the “morally wrong” beliefs have no connection to the stone tablets, except that the stone tablets happen to fit them.

This suggests an important constraint on metaethics: our beliefs about the morally wrong had better have a real connection—perhaps even a real causal connection—with their grounds. If this constraint is right, then evolutionary debunking arguments against morality cut more deeply than is recognized: if the arguments correctly show that our “moral concepts” lack a relevant connection with any grounds, then our “moral beliefs” not are not knowledge, but they are in fact just nonsense.

Of course, I want to turn this around: given that our moral beliefs are not mere nonsense, it follows that they have a real connection with grounds, and this undercuts the idea that we are mere products of completely unguided evolution.