Philosophers have been dancing around the divide between decidables and undecidables for some time without clarifying it. A nice example was William Clifford, a brilliant American mathematician and freethinker whose work on curved spatial geometries might well have brought him into relativity theory well ahead of Albert Einstein. But he dropped dead in his thirties in the 1870s so we’ll never know (another of those pesky undecidables).
Anyway, in an 1877 essay written late in his short life, “The Ethics of Belief,” Clifford proposed something dear to the secularist’s heart: that as a general principle people should never believe anything without sufficient evidence. As examples of things that didn’t sound very plausible using that yardstick, he included belief in biblical miracles. Generations of atheist rationalists have followed much the same line of reasoning, from Bertrand Russell to Carl Sagan. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, don’t they?
Russell slipped on the NOMAD issue, though, when he dismissed the existence of gods as just as unprovable (or disprovable) as whether or not a teapot orbits the sun. Alas, Russell forgot rocketry here: the existence of an orbiting teapot, while not easily ascertained without expenditure on a lot of space probes and maybe porcelain-detecting instrumentation, could in principle be nailed down just as precisely as the reality of Olympus Mons on Mars.
And that nature of decidability as a strictly defined standard is exactly what is not available when trying to affirm whether Zeus or Quetzalcoatl or the God of Abraham are more or less “real” than the Flying Spaghetti Monster or the Thor of Marvel Comics (grist for atheist Joss Whedon film epics these days rather than the province of devout ode chanters).
Now you’ll notice Clifford’s use of the word “belief” in his essay and recall my NOMAD distinction between “decidable” knowledge versus “undecidable” belief. How can anyone “know” that religious events (from voices in the shrubbery to Joseph Smith’s golden tablet library loan) either did or did not occur (or, for that matter, that Caesar did or did not have an illegitimate son by Cleopatra, or what went on in the mind of Elizabeth I as the Spanish armada neared). What are the standards of evidence for essentially historical events, inaccessible to direct verification unless you have a time machine? Historical events start out observed and occurring or not, but by their natures transform into matters of probabilistic conviction and philosophical judgment for later generations as the events fade out of personal experience.
But things are even dicier than that. There is a problem with Clifford’s main argument, rather a big one, as philosopher William James noted in his 1896 essay, “The Will to Believe.” To be fair, this was written long after Clifford was dead, so we have no way of knowing how he might have modified his views in response to James’ criticism: aren’t you assuming that all true beliefs are things for which you can in principle find sufficient evidence?
What if that isn’t true? And the area James highlighted concerned not Bible stories, but more fundamental moral and ethical matters, the shoulds and oughts of daily life, the very turf religionists today are so keen to defend as their proprietary hill. Never mind whether any particular god or gods exist or whether tales of divine activities really happened; are “good” or “bad” things good or bad, and how do you decide? (And Plato’s Euthyphro is waiting in the wings from 2500 years ago to quiz today’s moralists on command versus absolute morality, allowing secular moralists like Austin Dacey to step onto the field and defend absolute ethics no less fervently than Ten Commandment groupies.)
Questions like these are undecidable in the strict sense defined previously because what you ultimately can’t settle are the standards of evidence for accepting them. What is “better” to do, and why is your better “better” than my “better”? And around and round all will go, the issues never going away, never getting resolved, in the way decidable scientific propositions, like the earth going around the sun can be settled (Ellwanger and Willis notwithstanding).
To be continued.
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