We Weren't Ready for Deutsch

I was wondering why The Beginning of Infinity didn't take off when it released. I think it's because we were not ready for it.

It was a time when religion still had a foothold, and it was still a little unusual to confess your atheism. This was 2011, and the New Atheism movement was in full flux. Only a few years earlier the Four Horsemen had released their books: Harris with The End of Faith; Dennett with Breaking the Spell; Dawkins with The God Delusion; and Hitchens with God is Not Great. Teenagers and young adults around the world were hypnotised by this new rationality, or "Militant Atheism" as it was sometimes called.

Notably, it wasn't merely trying to delete God; it was an attempt to popularise a new epistemology. The question was posed to the God-fearing, rhetorically: So you're saying the creator of the universe perpetuates evil at a scale that embarrasses the most ambitious psychopaths, and that he has a keen interest in the affairs of your bedroom, but that he also loves you? And you know this because it's written in a book?

It was all very dramatic and entertaining for sure. Though now that all that's behind us, we can see the nuance they missed. The big move was to hammer in a respect for evidence. The framing was to show that it was the other side that needed this evidence — or, as they put it, the burden of proof was on those who make the claims. That way they could sit back, listen, and criticise instead of putting forth a Godless metaphysic, though on rare occasions Naturalism was defended.

And it is true that genuine progress in popular epistemology was made, but it wasn't the final story by any means. The New Atheists positioned scientific truth — the well-established parts at least — as infallible, and claimed it as a straightforward derivation from the evidence.

No one had the courage (or the knowledge, frankly) to tell the creationists that science is purely guesswork. They're guesses that are criticised. Evidence is one among several ways to criticise those guesses, and those guesses — conjectures — that still stand after criticism are considered the science of the day. There's no such thing as a final word or a final theory; any theory is vulnerable to new discoveries. Having a mountain of evidence for a theory does not make it immune to future criticisms, the content of which is unknown and unknowable.

But if this argument had been made back then, the New Atheists wouldn't have won. It doesn't have the same bravado, memetic strength, or intuitiveness as just saying that faith is that which you believe without evidence, and therefore irrational by definition. But as Popper pointed out, evidence cannot logically confirm anything; it can only disconfirm.

A simple example: suppose in the theory of God, it is specified that God wants you to be in loving communion with him, and that in being in a relationship with him, you will feel your life to be deeply meaningful. Suppose a depressed atheist wandering in his nihilism becomes baptised, starts his Catholic life, and through his new beliefs finds his life to be much more meaningful. Does this say anything about the truth of Christianity? No, it doesn't. Because evidence does not confirm.

Deutsch's account in terms of good and bad explanations is the correct refutation of religious claims. They're not so much shown to be false as not taken seriously at all, because they're the kind of theories that can be easily varied in the face of new evidence.

Consider the hypothesis that prayers do in fact work, and that they work because an omniscient invisible pig floating around in space grants them. Suppose to test this hypothesis you set up an experiment where subjects are asked to pray to this pig, asking it to manifest a particular outcome.

Suppose no desired outcome manifested and the experiment failed — what happens then? Are we done with the omniscient pig hypothesis? Well, we can arbitrarily change the account to fit whatever happened; we can say, for instance, that this pig wouldn't grant prayers out of spite if they're for the purpose of testing theories about it. And this type of ad hoc extension can be used to explain virtually anything that happens. If it rains, it's because the pig is sad; if it was predicted to rain and then it didn't, it's because the pig, owing to some unforeseen events, became happy, and so on and so forth.

Naively, one might think that if a theory can explain any sort of outcome it makes it powerful. On the contrary, the power of a theory comes not from what it allows but from what it excludes. Freudian psychoanalysis had a similar problem. There was no act a human could do for which there wasn't a psychoanalytic explanation. The wide applicability makes it weak; it makes it unfalsifiable.

Good scientific theories don't have this character. They are hard to vary. They are composed of parts that fit together, each having a defined purpose, such that they give you precise predictions. And when a prediction fails, the theory falls apart. They can't be varied easily to fit the facts. They're brittle, and that makes them good.

Consider how easy it was to test Einstein's general theory of relativity. He theorised that space-time is an actual, continuous entity which warps in areas where there are objects of high mass, and that it's this warping of space-time that we interpret as the effect of gravity, as objects of all kinds, even photons, follow the shortest path in this warped continuum. It follows that the light coming from stars behind the sun would curve due to the sun's intense gravity. During the day on Earth, this is hard to notice since the sun would outshine anything coming from behind it. But during a solar eclipse, the effect should be clearly visible. One could compare the positions of the same stars at night with those photographed during the eclipse, and if they deviated, the theory would survive a strong attempted falsification.

If the experiment had falsified general relativity, there wasn't an easy way to vary the theory to account for it. Indeed, this experiment falsified Newtonian mechanics, and the only way to improve upon it was the radically new way of looking at reality that Einstein worked on for more than ten years. If we were testing a theory about God, however, it would take only a modest amount of creativity and no more than five minutes to fix it.

Of course we couldn't have talked about all this in 2011. It was too early. We had to do the rounds with the stacking of evidence, burdens of proof, and the infallibility of scientific theories. Though I must say, they popularised some important epistemic habits — notably a sensitivity to the appeal to authority, and especially the authority of words in a book. And pointing out that the claims about the truth of the book come from the book itself. And other such silly things. But now that all of it is behind us, we finally have the space to make way for Deutsch and Popper, and we're all the better for it.