That belief in God is on par with belief in fairy tales is a fairly common charge levelled at Christianity. Highly regarded atheist Philosopher Michael Tooley argues,
If there is no evidence in support of the existence of God, then it is reasonable to believe that God does not exist. The essential line of thought which I would hope to develop later on is that if you consider other things like fairies, leprechauns, golden teacups orbiting around Venus, and so on, I would suggest that we have no evidence against the existence of those sorts of things, but if I asked you whether you were agnostic I think the answer would be “no.” You would believe there are no fairies, no leprechauns, no golden teacups orbiting around Venus. That illustrates the general principle in regard to God’s existence that the burden of proof must fall upon the person who is arguing in support of God’s existence. If there’s no positive support for it, then the other side wins by default.
Something like Tooley’s argument regularly features in popular discussions of religion where fairies, leprechauns and golden tea-cups are substituted for flying spaghetti monsters. The basic idea remains the same, to believe in God without providing compelling arguments or evidence for his existence is on par with believing in fairy tales and this is something no sensible, educated, intelligent person can take seriously.
To address this argument it is first necessary to unpack it. Three separate claims are being made; first, it is assumed that the rational stance to take towards the existence of fairies, leprechauns, orbiting golden tea-cups and spaghetti monsters is not a stance of agnosticism but one of certain denial. Second, it is contended that the reason why this stance is correct is not because we have reasons for believing such things do not exist, but rather that we lack any positive evidence for the existence of these things. Third, the objector assumes that a person who advocates or defends belief in God, in the absence of compelling evidence for God’s existence, has no principled way of distinguishing the case for God from the case for the existence of fairies, leprechauns, et al. Now I grant the first of these claims, it is obviously silly and irrational to believe in things like fairies, leprechauns, orbiting golden tea-cups and spaghetti monsters. The real issue is whether the second and third claims are correct; I will argue that they are not.
Turning to the second claim that the reason it is irrational to believe in fairies, leprechauns, et al is solely because we lack evidence for their existence and not because we have reasons for thinking that they do not exist. I am inclined to think this claim is false. Consider another claim for which we also lack evidence for thinking is true, that intelligent extra-terrestrial life (ET’s) exists somewhere in the universe. We lack compelling reasons for thinking this claim is true yet it seems mistaken to infer from this that such beings absolutely do not exist, at best all that we can say is that we do not know. Moreover, even in face of agnosticism, many scientists take the existence of ET’s quite seriously; for example, the SETI research site in California spends millions of dollars sending messages into outer space and searching the universe for signs of intelligent life. I note that they do not do the same in pursuit of the search for signs of fairies, leprechauns, orbiting tea-cups or spaghetti monsters and I cannot find any evidence of an agency anywhere in the world that does.
This example suggests that the reason it is rational to deny the existence of the stuff of fairy tales cannot be simply the lack of positive evidence for these things, if it was we would take the same stance towards ET’s yet we do not. This is because there are important differences between ET’s and fairies, leprechauns, et al over and above the mere lack of evidence we have for their existence. ET’s are the sort of things that could exist even if we lack evidence that they do. ET’s fit with the picture of the world we hold, we know that intelligent life can evolve on planets. This is not the case with fairies, leprechauns, orbiting tea-cups, spaghetti monsters and so on.
Leprechaun’s first appeared in fairy tales and folklore; in such tales they store their wealth in pots of gold at the end of rainbows. We know that the genre of fairy tales is fantasy. We know rainbows do not have ends in the way this picture envisages. Similarly tea-cups we know are artefacts made by human beings, seeing humans have not been to Venus it is unlikely that such things orbit Venus – even if they are made of gold. It is not just that we lack evidence for the existence of such things but that we have evidence against their existence. What we do know about the world provides us with reasons for doubting they can exist. With ET’s, on the other hand, we have no such reasons for doubting they can exist. Hence, in the latter case agnosticism is justified whereas denial is required in the former case.
The insinuation that belief in God is on par with belief in fairies, leprechauns, et al is equally questionable. In the case of these things we have no evidence for their existence. With God, however, the situation is different. It is not that no evidence exists; on the contrary, sophisticated and rigorous arguments for God’s existence have been offered and are still being offered in the literature today, it is that experts in the field are divided on the cogency of these arguments. The best that sceptics can suggest is that the evidence is inconclusive. However, even if we grant this, those who defend belief in God can and have offered principled distinctions between God and things like flying spaghetti monsters.
Two examples will suffice. The first stems from a tradition going back to William James and Blaise Pascal is that when one cannot avoid making a choice, one can act in hope or faith that a belief is true, even if there is no evidence for it, if the expected benefits of the thing hoped for outweigh the benefits of the alternatives. James Jordan provides an example,
A castaway builds a bonfire hoping to catch the attention of any ship or plane that might be passing nearby. Even with no evidence that a plane or ship is nearby, he still gathers driftwood and lights a fire, enhancing the possibility of rescue. The castaway’s reasoning is pragmatic. The benefit associated with fire building exceeds that of not building, and, clearly, no one questions the wisdom of the action.
Pascal argued that if one acts on the assumption that God exists and that assumption turns out to be incorrect then one has lost little but if one acts on the assumption that God does not exist and that assumption turns out to be incorrect the one has lost everything. Modified versions of this line of argument are still defended by philosophers today.
A second reason is that even if one has insufficient evidence for the truth of some proposition, one can be rational in believing it if it is grounded directly in one’s experience. There are plenty of things we believe which are not based on evidence, our belief in the existence in the past or our belief that it is wrong to rape women, our belief that other people exist or that basic axioms of logic are true are not based on arguments or proofs. These things are true because we experience or see them to be true, for example, I remember the existence of a past event, I intuitively conclude that rape is wrong, I observe that other people exist, I see that basic axioms of logic are self-evident. Philosophers such as Alvin Plantinga argue that belief in God is like these beliefs; it is something a person directly sees as true via direct experience or intuition of some sort as opposed to the conclusion of an evidentiary proof.
I am not in a short article like this going to be able to develop and defend these lines of argument further. I mention them only to show that according to two standard ways of defending belief in God in the face of inconclusive evidence a principled distinction between belief in God and the stuff of fairy tales can be made. People tend to not directly experience or perceive the existence of these things nor does one risk losing everything by acting on the assumption they do not exist. Moreover, if belief in fairies, leprechauns, orbiting tea-cups and spaghetti monsters did possess these features then it is no longer obvious that belief in such beings is irrational. Suppose that instead of there being no evidence for the existence of leprechauns there was in fact some evidence but it was not compelling, perhaps experts were in disagreement. Suppose also that if I failed to act on the assumption that leprechauns existed and it turned out that they did then I would lose everything but if it turned out that they did not I would gain little. In addition, suppose that I directly perceived a leprechaun in front of me or I remembered clearly seeing one a few days ago and I had no reason for thinking my perception or memory was unreliable. If these conditions were satisfied then it would cease to be obvious that belief in leprechauns was obviously irrational. The claim that believing in God is on par with believing in “fairies, leprechauns, golden teacups orbiting around Venus” and flying spaghetti monsters is then unjustified.
I write a monthly column for Investigate Magazine entitled Contra Mundum. This blog post was published in the July 10 issue and is reproduced here with permission. Contra Mundum is Latin for ‘against the world;’ the phrase is usually attributed to Athanasius who was exiled for defending Christian orthodoxy.
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Tags: Alvin Plantinga · Blaise Pascal · Contra Mundum · Fairies · Faith and Reason · Flying Spaghetti Monster · Investigate Magazine · James Jordan · Leprechauns · Michael Tooley · Orbiting Golden Tea Cups · William James23 Comments
A common objection to belief in the God of the Bible is that a good, kind, and loving deity would never command the wholesale slaughter of nations. In the tradition of his popular Is God a Moral Monster?, Paul Copan teams up with Matthew Flannagan to tackle some of the most confusing and uncomfortable passages of Scripture. Together they help the Christian and nonbeliever alike understand the biblical, theological, philosophical, and ethical implications of Old Testament warfare passages.
I have yet to see any orphans (let alone thousands) fed by praying to a flying spaghetti monster.
Yet Muller did, and his ministry continues on the same basis today.
I should probably add that, to be fair to Tooley he rejects this argument in his more recent debate with Plantinga.
I have yet to see any orphans be fed by praying (or cured of AIDS). Usually it takes a bit of effort on behalf of other people to bring the orphans food.
Hello there,
I’m currently wrapping up a study of the end-times on my blog, Reflections on the Christ, at http://chasong.blogspot.com.
There’s been talk of guillotines being imported into the United States and other scary bits of news.
However, I am discussing about them from a prophetic point of view and hoping to stimulate more research and personal study of God’s word and the end times.
If you have the time, feel free to drop by, express your thoughts, and maybe even shed some light for others who come by. I’d be honoured.
Keep shining.
Cheers
I think you over simplify the fairy issue
(1) with strawman examples like the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Have you investigated the origin of this story, when it first originated, what it meant to its original audience etc. ie. have you treated this story with the same respect you wish the atheist would treat yours? There are many children’s stories about fairies around today, which is all most people will know, but these do not represent the actual beliefs in these entities which have been held, and indeed still are help by some people.
(2) you make a very strong claim that fairies (etc) are not the sort of thing that could evolve, or not the sort of thing which can exist within our world view.
Both of these claims are over simplifications. If you read about the history of fairy belief in England (particularity pre-Shakespeare) you would find a very different presentation of the fairy. What you present is a Disney child story version and argue against this – exactly what most new-atheists do wrto God (ie argueing against a 10 year olds conception of god as a man in the sky with a big beard). You dismiss the genre of fairy stories as fantasy a little too easily – again in the same way the new atheist does with your holy book.
The idea that some other sort of creature exists on this planet, and has evolved alongside us, is not as farcical as you make out. We DON’T happen to have a SETI equivalent for fairies, or angels for that matter – but this seems to be more a product of out culture than because fairies are a priori less likely to exist than ETs.
Now I am not claiming that fairies exist. i am just saying that perhaps the distinction you are trying to make is not as clear cut as you would like.
Richard, there was at least one case of Muller’s orphanages running out of money and food, only to have the food donated at the door after they had given thanks to God for it.
His orphanages never made a public appeal, and his ministry (now caring for the elderly) still runs today on the same basis over a hundred years after his death.
Now, God meeting the needs of one praying man (Muller operated his personal finances for several years in the same manner) over several years might be a series of coincidences and sampling biases, but inevitably never asking for money for a large enterprise like the orphanages he created would sooner or later end up with starving, ill fed orphans. Yet this never happened.
Anonymous, I take it when atheists use the fairy example they do have in mind the Disney fantasy version of fairies in children’s stories, given this the dis analogies I put forward between fairy’s and God are appropriate in this context. We do have reasons for thinking these kinds of fairies do not exist just as we have good reasons for thinking superman does not exist or Sid from Ice age does not exist.
Your suggestion that there is a different kind of fairy belief which can’t be dismissed so easily further pushes the point. Before I could dismiss the phenomena you are talking about I would need to actually get more information, learn what this sort of belief is, etc,
Finally you state The idea that some other sort of creature exists on this planet, and has evolved alongside us, is not as farcical as you make out. We DON’T happen to have a SETI equivalent for fairies, or angels for that matter – but this seems to be more a product of out culture than because fairies are a priori less likely to exist than ETs.
If this is correct, then it would only strengthen my point. If what your saying is correct, we should be more open minded about fairies and have a position more like SETI research towards their existence. But then the original claim that we should adopt atheism because the contention that this is the correct stance to take towards fairies would be mistaken.
We also have no positive evidence that the first life form on earth happened by random chance.
I think what i said DOES strengthen your point Matt – which is why I said it 😉 Not everything is geared at disagreeing!
Anonymous, LOL my apologies, perhaps I am getting a bit paranoid.
The biggest problem I can see with your argument Matt, is that faeries and leprechauns in current popular imagination are the result of Christianity’s effects on the pre-existing belief structures in Northern Europe – particularly in Ireland where the church took a more adaptive view of winning over the locals to the new religion.
So perhaps we should re-align the comparison of your “one” god versus the previous pantheon of tree spirits, water nymphs, thunder gods and whoever else?
Sure, science shows how static electricity removes the requirement for Thor to get angry and evolution is an equally strong theory that doesn’t require your god to get out the modelling clay.
Actually James, the origins of belief in fairies has no bearing on my argument at all. The issue is whether we do not believe in fairies merely because we have inconclusive evidence for them or because we have no evidence for them and also some evidence against them. The origins of the belief do not speak to that issue, although I am sure it might serve a nice rhetorical purpose to make a sneer at Christians.
Similarly, your second argument would be valid if the sole reason people believed in Thor was because he explained thunder and the sole reason that, prior to Darwin, the only reason people believed in God was because they took Genesis 2 literally and believed that God was necessary to explain how humans came from clay. But, of course, none of these claims are true or even plausible, as even the most superficial acquaintance with the history of philosophy and theology would tell you.
What your comments do show is how some atheists think that caricature, sneering, ignorance and ridicule is a substitute for a good argument. It is not.
I’m not entirely sure that the point Anonymous makes does strengthen your position, though, Matt. (Speaking as an evidentialist, here.) For example: Suppose we just thought of leprechauns as “very small people who wear green clothes and live in the woods.” Nothing to do with rainbows or pots of gold. Then, suppose that we realized that we have no reason for believing that they exist. We wouldn’t be as scoffingly incredulous of the idea as we are of leprechauns conceived as magical beings who find pots of gold at the ends of rainbows, but we wouldn’t _believe_ in them. I think Tooley short-changes his point by choosing rather farcical examples. He would do better to use more sober-sounding ones. Or consider any strange-looking animal that actually exists, and then imagine that you had simply conceived of it but had no evidence that it did exist. Take a manatee, for example. Suppose that you were imaginative and conceived of the notion of a manatee but had no reason to believe that there are real manatees. While you wouldn’t think their existence impossible or ridiculous, you also wouldn’t believe that they exist. You would be in some sense a “manatee infidel.”
It seems to me that these examples make the point that when it comes to concrete, specific existence claims, before we actually _believe_ such claims, we need evidence for them, not merely an absence of concrete evidence against them.
Tooley seems to be treating God as if he were a thing in the universe. But the classical Christian view of God is that He is Being, than on which the universe is absolutely dependent. Aquinas understood this, and that is why he offered the Five Ways rather than the apologetic equivalent of a Sherlock Holmes detective mystery.
Hi Lydia.
I agree with your comment about needing some evidence, rather than simply a complete lack of evidence against. However that is the Christian position also.
Christian belief (as opposed to just general belief in “a” god, which can be accepted on purely philosophical grounds) is justified by the historical evidence of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. Go read the book of Acts and see how often, when confronted by critics of their preaching, the Apostles appealed to what was at the time common knowledge, common even to their critics.
I’m not sure that pure evidentialism can produce a self-supporting epistemology, but Christianity provides both a philosophical framework for explaining why we can know, and evidence to support what we do know.
Matt, the origin of belief in faeries is important because you’re using the post-christian charicatures that they have become. Before the arrival of Christianity, people had thousands of reasons for believing in their existance and proof in their minds because whatever rituals they performed to worship or appease them had a measurable result in the next year’s harvest, weather or whatever. We don’t believe in them anymore because we now understand how things that were attributed to them really work.
So the argument that I’m making is that if it is valid to not believe in those earlier multiple spirits and deities because our knowledge has moved on and we have rational explanations for phenomena previously attributed to them (Thor being one simple example), then it is equally valid to dismiss the existence of a single all-powerful deity, if one is satisfied that science provides an alternative rational explanation for our existence.
Of course one could say that faeries were ridiculed out of existence by christianity but what comes around…
Stephen
When atheists like Dawkins et al use the example of fairies they are using the post Christian caricature of them. If they were referring to the pre-Christian entity which in its context “people had thousands of reasons for believing in their existence” the whole point of the appeal is to provide an example of something for which people have no evidence.
So the argument that I’m making is that if it is valid to not believe in those earlier multiple spirits and deities because our knowledge has moved on and we have rational explanations for phenomena previously attributed to them (Thor being one simple example), then it is equally valid to dismiss the existence of a single all-powerful deity, if one is satisfied that science provides an alternative rational explanation for our existence.
I addressed this in my reply, this assumes that people believe in God because he explains some phenomena ( Thunder) and science now explains this phenomena. The problem is this is debatable.
First a good amount of contemporary religious epistemology denies God is postulated as an explanation at all.
Second, when God is argued for on the basis that he explains something its for phenomena science has not yet explained ( and in some cases in principle cannot explain).
In the 13th century for example Aquinas discussed the argument that belief in God was unnecessary because everything could be explained in terms of natural causes ( no its not a new claim) his response was not to talk about thunder, or harvests, or life, or the even the origin of species etc. He responded by saying that things like purpose, moral properties, laws of nature, the existence of contingent existence itself, the first causal moment of the universe and so on could not be explained this way.
It would be a highly dubious to say that science has now explained these things. It’s a caricature to suggest that medieval people believed in God to explain crops etc, and science gradually replaced these theological definitions with scientific ones.
Hi Frank, in The Knowledge of God Tooley retracts the argument. His reason is around the ET example. He notes that the claim “somewhere else in the universe intelligent life exists” and “within a certain distance of our solar system intelligent life exists” are both claims for which we have no evidence, we are agnostic about both, and yet find the first more probable than the second.
As a result he changes gear and, on the assumption that God’s existence is contingent, uses aprori probabilities to argue that the existence of God is less than 1/3. I think Plantinga points out the problems with this, but it is an interesting contrast to the “leprechauns” and “fairies” mantra that is so frequently paraded by new atheists.
Jason, yep, absolutely. I didn’t realize how small a pond I usually move in on the ‘Net. I’m an evidentialist _Christian_. Rather a loud-mouthed one, actually. But I take Matt’s position to be that it is false that we need positive evidence for the existence of God to be justified in believing in God. My understanding is that Matt takes belief in God to be rational as “properly basic” (the position of Plantinga). Also, in this post, Matt takes a Pascalian approach rather than an historical evidentialist approach. But I don’t want at all to misrepresent him, either. I know that Matt is very positive about the historical evidences as well. Where we differ is simply on the question of the need for those evidences.
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We KNOW that God and fairies and gnomes, witches and leprauchauns(as mentioned in the post) are MAGICAL beings, in as much as they operate in a manner outside of our reality.
But, we are NOT expecting Extra-terrestrials to operate outside our reality at all, and there ARE other examples of beings(in the general sense) which have been hypothesized, sought out and FOUND.
Seems to me that philosphers(dualists) are ALWAYS willing to play this and similar word-games, as if they do not realise how disingenuous they are being.
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