repost - file under A for: argumentum ad arboretum
(Originally posted Feb. 5, 2014. The original post can be accessed at alphascrawl.wordpress.com.)
A lot of people are talking today about last night’s Nye/Ham debate. Some people talked about it with pen and paper. I’m more interested in this than I am in the debate itself. These are the types of people we interact with and talk to; these are the things people say when science and religion are discussed.
There’s a lot to dig into, here. These 22 responders have condensed their whole arguments into one-sentence zingers– a kind of brevity I have a hard time achieving– because of the constraints of their internet photo gimmick, but that’s a thing that people do in real conversations, too. Get into a conversation with somebody who has something to prove, and they’ll often deliver a one-liner they think is too good to dispute (and by the smirks on some of these faces at the link, they’re pretty proud of their cleverness).
I think this is fascinating. This process of boiling down a point of view to a single sentence does some interesting things– it shows you what a person thinks is important about their reasoning, what they find convincing, and what they’re really aiming to disprove. It cuts through a lot of obfuscating language and can reveal thinking errors really clearly. (If you like to hunt down logical fallacies, the one-sentence responses in this link are easy prey.)
Because I saw it asked about elsewhere, I want to talk about comment #5: “How do you explain a sunset if there is no God?”
This is a version of a pretty standard street-level apologetic. The assertion is that everybody should know that God exists, because the splendor of the natural world counts as evidence. (I’ve heard this called argumentum ad arboretum after the common form: “Look at the trees….” Man, I wish I had come up with that first.)
It’s often related to a serious problem for believers: what happens to people who live and die without ever having heard of their religion, and who have never had a chance to either accept or reject its claims? Do they go to hell by default, and if so, how is that fair? This motivates a lot of proselytization, this idea that evangelizing in the farthest corners of the world saves people from hell by default. But Christians must also surely realize (as I did in Sunday school, to the consternation of my teacher) that even if it’s possible today to reach 100% of the population with your message, for most of history it has been totally impossible.
If Christian doctrine is correct, Hell is full of people whose crime is being born in the wrong place and time– anyone born before Jesus’s ministry, or in any part of the world before Christian missionaries could reach that region. Never having had any chance to consider a religion they’d never heard of, they’re eternally tormented by default, and that makes the Christian God look like an asshole.
This is an uncomfortable problem for Christians, and apparently unsolvable without making stuff up. So we get to this idea that the natural world counts as enough evidence to get you to the right religious conclusion, and anyone who still winds up in hell, well, it’s their own damned fault for ignoring all the very clear signs. Of course, if I’m Chinese in 50 C. E. or a Native American before any European reached America’s shores or a present-day member of an isolated tribe with no contact with the modern world– I should still be able to look around at trees and sunsets and logically deduce not just the existence of a god but the correct god, deduce sin and the need for atonement, deduce Jesus, deduce that I should pray in a highly specific way to ask for salvation, the whole package.
I should be able to figure all of that out on my own, based on trees and sunsets. And if I can’t, then it’s hell, forever. (“Ignorance is no excuse. Why weren’t you paying attention to the trees and sunsets?”)
At its most basic level, this “sunsets equals God” sentiment is tacky, high-gloss spirituality, saccharine and shallow. Follow it back to its root, though, and you get this sinister justification for hell– everyone ever born has seen plenty of evidence for God, according to this claim, and if you’re not a proper believer then you’ve seen all that evidence and rejected God anyway.
In this way, argumentum ad arboretum fuels theists’ misunderstandings of atheists. After all, in their worldview, there’s irrefutable evidence of God all around us, every day, and we’ve all seen it– how can it be possible for someone to just not believe? I think the common misconceptions about atheists– that we’re “mad at God,” or that we “know God exists but are deliberately rebelling because sin is so much fun” or whatever– come from this idea that disbelief is impossible because God is so obvious.
It’s a dangerous idea that fuels hostility, because when atheists say we don’t believe because we don’t see any evidence, they conclude we must be lying. And once you’ve decided that someone’s lying about their position or their reasons for holding it, it’s easy to fill in the blanks with whatever horrible narrative about evil infidels your culture has supplied.
One last point before we file this one away: I mentioned near the top of this post that these messages are dense in logical fallacies. So for message #5, “How do you explain a sunset if there is no God?”, I’m going to pick out two separate fallacies (not counting the whole argumentum ad arboretum business we’ve discussed already).
First, it’s begging the question– the writer asks the question in a way that presupposes the answer she wants. Who’s to say sunsets need a divine explanation, or any explanation at all, or that “God made it” is any kind of useful or satisfactory explanation?
Also, I’d be prepared to call this either an argument from ignorance, or an argument from personal incredulity, depending on which way you want to try inferring the writer’s premises. A subtle distinction, but interesting to me, between the argument from ignorance (“We don’t know why sunsets are the way they are, therefore God”) and the argument from personal incredulity (“I can’t imagine something so beautiful without a God who made it, therefore it’s not possible without God”).
Long post, I know. Thanks for sticking with me.