Failed Atheist: John Humphrys
Today presenter John Humphrys joined us on today's Sunday Sequence to talk about his new book, . The book is based on his Radio 4 interview series, "Humphrys In Search of God" (which you can hear again here). John explained why he lacks the intellectual confidence to be an atheist -- he is, he says, an "agnostic", and regards this as the most intellectually credible position to hold on the question of God's existence. We discussed arguments for God's existence, the problem of suffering, the case for deism, and whether John is likely to convert to some form of theism in the future. For the record, he promised me his first interview in the unlikely event of a Damascus Road conversion.
The atheists reading this blog may wish to give John some advice on how to beef up his agnosticism into full-blooded atheism. Those who believe in God may wish to point him to arguments for God's existence that could prove more compelling than the traditional "proofs" he disputes in his book.
Comments
Will, that was a nice interview - I thought you and John acquitted yourselves admirably. I was a bit taken aback to hear how he got pulled up on the notion of morality. A sense of morality, and even a lot of the basic programming for a "moralometer" makes eminently good evolutionary sense for a species such as ours, where social interaction is a Big Thing. In fact, in its purest form, i.e. contracting between individuals, the "Golden Rule" (Do Unto Others As You Would Have Them Do Unto You, or "DUO+") is perhaps properly seen as the only solution that maintains the social cohesiveness that provides the backdrop for much of our evolution over the past several hundred thousand years. Jesus was not the first to recognise that, but insofar as he did, I guess I would join John in being a "Christian Atheist" as a counterpart to his "Christian Agnostic".
The human brain often acts as a "decision engine", where the plan is to work out what to do next. "Morality" can thus be conceptualised as a key adaptation that affects this process, and is therefore not really as abstract as some would have us believe. It is an integral part of our biology, but it relates less to us as individuals than it does to the relationships *between* individuals (which is why simplistic argument towards "universal morality" is pretty much doomed to failure). Old Ricardo Dawkins even skirts around these issues in The Selfish Gene and The Extended Phenotype. Maybe they need revisited.
So, since there is nothing that requires the gods in order to adequately explain, and since we have already ditched the medieval notion that any god that happened to exist would give a monkey's about whether we believed in it or not, it seems that agnosticism is an unnecessarily complicated viewpoint.
Enlightened and open-minded atheism is where John should be at. He's a great chap with a marvellous mind, and as I intimated on another thread, I hope he can unsnag his britches from that rusty old barbed wire of morality.
-A
Will, that was a nice interview - I thought you and John acquitted yourselves admirably. I was a bit taken aback to hear how he got pulled up on the notion of morality. A sense of morality, and even a lot of the basic programming for a "moralometer" makes eminently good evolutionary sense for a species such as ours, where social interaction is a Big Thing. In fact, in its purest form, i.e. contracting between individuals, the "Golden Rule" (Do Unto Others As You Would Have Them Do Unto You, or "DUO+") is perhaps properly seen as the only solution that maintains the social cohesiveness that provides the backdrop for much of our evolution over the past several hundred thousand years. Jesus was not the first to recognise that, but insofar as he did, I guess I would join John in being a "Christian Atheist" as a counterpart to his "Christian Agnostic".
The human brain often acts as a "decision engine", where the plan is to work out what to do next. "Morality" can thus be conceptualised as a key adaptation that affects this process, and is therefore not really as abstract as some would have us believe. It is an integral part of our biology, but it relates less to us as individuals than it does to the relationships *between* individuals (which is why simplistic argument towards "universal morality" is pretty much doomed to failure). Old Ricardo Dawkins even skirts around these issues in The Selfish Gene and The Extended Phenotype. Maybe they need revisited.
So, since there is nothing that requires the gods in order to adequately explain, and since we have already ditched the medieval notion that any god that happened to exist would give a monkey's about whether we believed in it or not, it seems that agnosticism is an unnecessarily complicated viewpoint.
Enlightened and open-minded atheism is where John should be at. He's a great chap with a marvellous mind, and as I intimated on another thread, I hope he can unsnag his britches from that rusty old barbed wire of morality.
-A
I agree that it was a fun interview. Will and John obviously like and respect each other. I wasn't persuaded by John's agnosticism (not that he was trying to persuade anyone). He skirted over the problem of philosophical scepticism with the word "tosh" as though no reight-minded thinker could take those problems seriously. I have to tell him that philosophers take those questions extremely seriously, as Will tried to point out to him. My only complaint is that I wanted to listen to another 20 minutes of that discussion!
Will, that was a nice interview - I thought you and John acquitted yourselves admirably. I was a bit taken aback to hear how he got pulled up on the notion of morality. A sense of morality, and even a lot of the basic programming for a "moralometer" makes eminently good evolutionary sense for a species such as ours, where social interaction is a Big Thing. In fact, in its purest form, i.e. contracting between individuals, the "Golden Rule" (Do Unto Others As You Would Have Them Do Unto You, or "DUO+") is perhaps properly seen as the only solution that maintains the social cohesiveness that provides the backdrop for much of our evolution over the past several hundred thousand years. Jesus was not the first to recognise that, but insofar as he did, I guess I would join John in being a "Christian Atheist" as a counterpart to his "Christian Agnostic".
The human brain often acts as a "decision engine", where the plan is to work out what to do next. "Morality" can thus be conceptualised as a key adaptation that affects this process, and is therefore not really as abstract as some would have us believe. It is an integral part of our biology, but it relates less to us as individuals than it does to the relationships *between* individuals (which is why simplistic argument towards "universal morality" is pretty much doomed to failure). Old Ricardo Dawkins even skirts around these issues in The Selfish Gene and The Extended Phenotype. Maybe they need revisited.
So, since there is nothing that requires the gods in order to adequately explain, and since we have already ditched the medieval notion that any god that happened to exist would give a monkey's about whether we believed in it or not, it seems that agnosticism is an unnecessarily complicated viewpoint.
Enlightened and open-minded atheism is where John should be at. He's a great chap with a marvellous mind, and as I intimated on another thread, I hope he can unsnag his britches from that rusty old barbed wire of morality.
-A
It was a very good interview, but I have low expectations of the book having read the extract printed in the Times:
I was extremely disappointed with the flabbiness of the thought process on display in the article. He appears to have a strong emotional desire for religion to be true that gets in the way of his ability to analyse his conclusion that it is false.
Along the way, he gives credence to many standard anti-atheist jibes 鈥 only the atheists are certain, few atheists in foxholes or cancer wards. Groan-inducing stuff.
He also falls for the 鈥榗ontemptuous militant atheist鈥 bogeyman and his efforts to distance himself from that imagined movement lies behind his preference for the label agnostic.
In the Times extract he lists 7 strawman examples of atheistic excess. Even though the whole attraction to strawmen is their ease of demolition, he manages to agree with several of them.
Atheist vs. agnostic is mostly a definitional misunderstanding. You鈥檙e an atheist John, get over it. But regardless of what he chooses to call himself or the conclusion he reaches, I expected a journalist of his standing to be able to produce a more tightly argued case.
Unlike Janet, I think that 鈥榯osh鈥 is a reasonable way to dispense with the 鈥榩hilosophical scepticism鈥 argument. The 鈥榖rain in a vat鈥 idea might be theoretically possible, but to admit it disables all argumentation, not just religious ones. If I am uncertain about everything beyond 鈥業 think鈥︹ then I cannot hold an opinion on any subject, but strangely this is not raised as an objection in other settings 鈥 鈥淭he evidence proves your guilt but the past may not exist so I鈥檒l let you go free鈥. If we refuse to accept the evidence of our senses when confirmed by others then we may as well never get out of our (non-existent) beds.
I鈥檓 with Amenhotep in being surprised he was tripped up by the morality question. It might be early days, but there is a developing body of evidence exposing our innate rules of thumb and the proto-ethical behaviour of some animals. The divergence of religious opinion on all the big ethical issues, e.g. stem cell research, and the ability for religions to change their stance, e.g. on slavery, does not support religion as the source of morality. I wouldn鈥檛 even give Christianity the golden rule thing 鈥 since it existed prior to the New Testament, you might as well declare yourself a Confucian Atheist.
Aaargh! Sorry about the triple posting, folks (Will, maybe you could cull the errant ones?) - the server kept giving me an error message, so I just kept hitting "send"...
Actually, on the "tosh" point, I thought John hit the nail on the head. Yes, from a philosophical viewpoint we can't exclude the possibility that we're brains in a vat being piped sensory inputs from alpha centauri. Since there's bugger all we can do about that, and we can't test it, why don't we just note it, set it aside, and get on with things? The key issue is why some philosophers seem to feel that this question deserves a fuller response than the one I've just given, or the one John Humphrys gave.
Maybe it's to do with "belief" versus "models". We can entertain any number of different models about the world, and attach various degrees of confidence to them. When we start *believing* them, we've slipped too far into the Matrix :-)
"Dear god if there is a god, save my soul if I have a soul." That's the agnostic's prayer. Is the difference between an agnostic and an atheist merely a semantic one? "Atheist" literally means "without god." The agnostic says paraphrasing John Humprhys as he put it, I have no evidence that god exists, I have no evidence that god doesn't. (I don't think most people who call themselves atheists would take exception to that, in fact they would add it's impossible to prove a negative.) Then he goes on to say that to believe in something for which there is no evidence is by definition "faith." About the only step he left out was that it is irrational to believe in something for which there is no evidence. It is also irrational to insinuate as he did near the end of the interview that he'd like to believe in God because it would bring him emotional comfort. Well isn't that true for all of us, to have someone who controls everything that exists taking care of us personally, what does that have to do with the price of tea in China?
Humphrys has a simplistic notion of god, one which the major world religions subscribe (which is apparently where he got it from) to where he is preoccupied by notions of good and evil and intervention or lack of it in human affairs such as inhuman cruelty and devastation resulting from both human actions and by natural causes without any apparent reason. Maybe he should go back and start reading Freud. He might get more insight into human behavior from the study of psychiatry than from religion and philosophy especially in more recent studies of advances in understanding brain chemistry and how psychopathic serial killers and megalomaniacal mass murderers come about. I'm sure he finds the explanation of many theists that the deaths of large numbers of people including new born babies from natural disasters is god's mystery totally unsatisfactory. Among those credible scientists who say they believe in god (I'm not talking about some babbling fools like Andrew MacIntosh or his fellow asylum inmate Wilder-Smith) they are well aware of the size and age of the universe and its timelessness and endlessness in human terms, approaching the question of existence on a far more circumspect level (I don't take them seriously either, they have no more proof of god than anyone else does.)
So where does that leave Humphrys? At sea, just as he said. Where am I, who am I, what is this place, why am I here???? Why not also ask Jean Paul Satre, he had something to say about it too.
I think Humphrys is just pussy footing around the terminology here.
I've heard many free thinkers describe themselves as agnostic atheists.
If we take agnosticism to mean scepticism then this makes sense. I think scepticism should be the default position on any topic. Dawkins is prepared to entertain the statistical possibility of the exsistence of god but doesn't believe the evidence is their to back it up, but we wouldn't call Dawkins an agnostic.
From reading this piece I'd say Humphrys is definitley an atheist, but he's just jealous of the warm fuzzy feeling that he believes theists get from believeing in god. Just remember John - a life without god isn't a life without meaning.
Right on cue, Pharyngula has a blog entry today that gives the "Can't have morality without a deity" line a comprehensive and well-deserved kicking:
Amen, nonplussed- You mention the 'brain in a vat' argument. Although we can't say with any sense of certainty that we're not a brain in a vat, there really isn't any particular reason that we would be. Why would any other being wish to provide these experiences for us? The Wachowski brothers suggested an answer with a modified 'brain in a vat' argument for their film The Matrix: these beings need our brains as batteries. We're just a big farm. But the central problem with such a thesis is that, although our brains are many things, a good battery is not one of them. There don't seem to be any good reasons to think that we are a brain in a vat.
But.
There may be a very, very good reason to doubt the nature of our existence, and it's called the Simulation Argument (developed by Oxford University professor Dr Nick Bostrom). I interviewed Bostrom for two separate radio shows on both sides of the Atlantic a few weeks ago, and I found it fascinating.
First, he extrapolates what we know about computers into the future and decides that a post-human society would likely have the capability to produce fine-grain simulations that are able to look and behave like our current universe. Then, he asserts that certain widely-held expert opinions about the conditions necessary for consciousness are true. Then, he postulates that the simulated beings would far outnumber the non-simulated beings (the beings of the first-run civilisation which the simulations are modelling). Finally, he uses probability to decide the likelihood that we are one of the many simulated rather than one of the few actual (or that we are one of the many simulated rather than the only first generation en-route to becoming capable).
His conclusion is that at least one of the following propositions is true: (1) the human species is very likely to go extinct before reaching a 鈥減osthuman鈥 stage; (2) any posthuman civilization is extremely unlikely to run a significant number of simulations of their evolutionary history (or variations thereof); or (3) we are almost certainly living in a computer simulation.
"It follows that the belief that there is a significant chance that we will one day become posthumans who run ancestor-simulations is false, unless we are currently living in a simulation. A number of other consequences of this result are also discussed."
He says it seems reasonable to give equal adherence to the probability of each of the three conclusions: ie. there is a 33 percent chance we're in a simulation; he personally believes there is a 20 percent chance we're in a simulation.
The website devoted to the argument is .
John, I would sort of agree (he wrote an article on the topic for New Scientist a while back), but the problem is that the simulation is completely *unnecessary*. If the universe is a mathematical entity (like a computer simulation), from the point of view of any "beings" inside it, it is irrelevant whether it is being hosted on a computer; it's the information that matters, not the computing substrate. Crucially it never has to be "actualised" in a computer for this to work, any more than Pi has to be actually calculated in order to "exist" as a number.
But it makes little difference at the end of the day. The universe behaves as if it were "real", so we may as well treat it as such. Max Tegmark has good things to say about all this.
You just blew my simulated mind. Any idea where my reset button is?
I haven鈥檛 had a chance to do justice to that website yet but it looks like it has caught quite a few people鈥檚 imaginations.
I was with your summary right up until the last paragraph, where you got to probabilities. The knowledge available to our particular simulation includes only one known universe, with only one non-posthuman civilisation - I鈥檓 not sure how you can assign those probabilities given a sample size of one. Equal chance of each sound more like a pluck from thin air than a piece of maths.
Some of the summaries on the website focused on how this information, if true, should change how we live 鈥 care less for others, live for today. I鈥檓 not sure how it changes anything, though, as nothing has changed about my existence except the medium it is running in 鈥 much like their assumption that consciousness can be hosted by processors as well as by wet meat.
If I get pleasure from eating ice cream, I should still eat ice cream - whether that desire is programmed by evolution or Microsoft and implemented in synapses or code, my simulation is set to prefer pleasurable things. I still want a just society as even simulated anarchy is not enjoyable for its simulated residents.
I guess one difference would be that if it was a Microsoft implementation we should be on the lookout for the bugs 鈥 an imperfect implementation might be detectable. We might also be able to figure out some cheat codes and turn the place into an episode of Heroes. The 10 year old kid running us would probably just restart the game at that point, though.
It鈥檚 a much more engaging mental exercise than the Vat version, I鈥檒l definitely give them that, but first impressions are that its impacts are as limited. Without evidence to the contrary, we are still stuck living our lives on the presumption that things are how they seem 鈥 if we doubt everything then why bother at all.
The scenario put me in mind of the Transhumanists. They reckon we are not too far away from the 鈥榯echnological singularity鈥, where our computers get sufficiently advanced to design better versions of themselves. This leads to an exponential technological leap and then the ability to download our consciousness into computers and achieve immortality. Might depend on the computers not taking over first though!
Just hope there isn鈥檛 a power cut.
Amen, nonplussed- Yup it's an interesting one. You're right of course that it doesn't mean much, although one of the things I chatted about with Bostrom is his belief that, if we someday produce our own ancestor simulations, we should probably conclude that we're already in one, and that the civilisation simulating us are probably simulated themselves. This is because the argument claims that there's a statistically insignificant chance that we could be non-simulated if simulations are ever created at all. If we create our own, we've proved that's not the case, and therefore we should conclude we're almost certainly simulated ourselves.
'Course, it may actually be the opposite, since it's unlikely that there would ever be enough computing power to provide an infinite number of stacked simulations: if we produce our own it could be evidence that we're not simulated! Or, as Bostrom suggests, maybe all simulated civilisations get terminated when they're about to produce their own - in that case we should kill the scientists that try to produce them.....
If you'd like to hear my interview with Bostrom (who is a transhumanist, btw!), .
And what could one say about second life. Many people actually spend more time as their second life avatar than as their first life self. The more sophistication is brought to these virtual scenarios, and the more realistic the simulation becomes, the less it will seem and feel like a simulation. Real court cases have already been fought between avatars. The more this "virtuality" gets a grip on people the more absolutely at sea they are going to feel, and the more they are going to cry out, from within the identity vacuum that it will engender, for that which is anchored and unmovable, that which offers clear-cut definitions. This will undoubtedly lead many (from entirely secular backgrounds) to explore Christianity afresh. Unfortunately it will also fuel the fanatical Islamic impetus for the Sharia law. Nature abhors a vacuum.
No such thing as an "atheist" God doesnt believe in them either! Atheists are nothing more than Christ rejectors and rebellious sinners who love the darkness rather than the light, and who are in need of Gods saving grace, by the imputation of the righteousness of Christ received by faith alone in Christ alone.
Also, there are rumours flying around that you (william) have converted to Romanism. Is there any truth in this?
JT Newtownabbey
No such thing as an "atheist" God doesnt believe in them either! Atheists are nothing more than Christ rejectors and rebellious sinners who love the darkness rather than the light, and who are in need of Gods saving grace, by the imputation of the righteousness of Christ received by faith alone in Christ alone.
Also, there are rumours flying around that you (william) have converted to Romanism. Is there any truth in this?
JT Newtownabbey
No such thing as an "atheist" God doesnt believe in them either! Atheists are nothing more than Christ rejectors and rebellious sinners who love the darkness rather than the light, and who are in need of Gods saving grace, by the imputation of the righteousness of Christ received by faith alone in Christ alone.
Also, there are rumours flying around that you (william) have converted to Romanism. Is there any truth in this?
JT Newtownabbey
Jonathan Trimble- I've never heard such a stupid question asked in such a ridiculous way. Congratulations for holding to the faith: your method of evangelism is impeccable.
#15 #16 #17
Jonathan, seeing as Atheists don't believe in your god - there's no point trying to define them using Christian terminology.
I think the existence of Atheists is certainly more provable than the existence of god.
"Christ rejecters...gods saving grace...righteousness..." means nothing unless you prove gods existence in the first place.
Evangelists are very good at the florid language but not the cold hard facts.
In the Bible God says:"You will seek me and find me when you search for me with all of your heart." I hope and pray John will keep searching.
(By the way, if I may be forgiven for saying so, it may not actually be that clever to be an agnostic...A word very close to that in meaning is ignoramus!)