Beware the Peekaboo Fallacy
Saturday, March 27, 2010 at 12:10PM For very young children of a certain age, out of sight is out of mind. If they can't see an object or a person, it's as if it no longer exists in their universe. You can cover their eyes (the "peekaboo" idea) and you soon cease to exist to them.
Then those infants grow up, learn to play chess, and reason like this: "If I play my favorite opening against higher-rated player X, he'll know it better than I do and crush me like a bug. So here's what I'll do [heh heh heh]: I'll play some ridiculous opening I know nothing about, and surprise him!" It's peekaboo all over again. Just because our amateur has decided to engage in a bit of voluntary self-blinding doesn't mean the other player will be clueless against the sideline or joke/gimmick opening. Indeed, one reason why better players are better is that they have more knowledge, so if the weaker player is aware of the sideline, why wouldn't the better player know of it, too? The usual result of this strategy is that the weaker player loses quickly, passes up his best shot to get a good position (your odds are going to be best if you play what you know; so what if he knows it too?), and worst of all misses the chance to learn something. Even if the weaker player loses, he'll get valuable experience by playing his best openings against good players, experience that will pay off against later opposition.
What's even more interesting, I think, is that the peekaboo fallacy is a widespread one intellectually. In the past two days, I've read, and read of, philosophers making pronouncements in areas about which they clearly know very little. Now, it's not that philosophers should remain silent about other disciplines. Their skills can be very useful in evaluating the reasoning and claims made in other fields. They should, however, know what the heck they're talking about before doing so. It was as if their ignorance of the topic implied that no one else had thought or written about it either and had something relevant to say.
So in chess, and in life in general, build on what you know, and not on the assumption of others' ignorance.
Reader Comments (20)
Intellectual boundary-crossing is fraught, but can yield excellent results. I was told (but can't easily find a reference) that fulgurites mystified geologists until an expert in deserts recognised them immediately as petrified lightning strikes. GH Hardy came up with a principle used by biologists in population genetics without any interest in the field (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardy%E2%80%93Weinberg_principle#History for the nice story).
I'm not arguing that it's always a good thing. Creationists and Richard Dawkins both prove the point that people are normally better off sticking to their own fields (in my opinion, of course).
I agree with you, Dennis. The following is just an interesting anecdote - not to be meant as an argument for or against your position.
I was studying the French once - hadn't really played it in tournament chess, but really liked the ideas behind it (had been reading the Karpov/Korchnoi book in Kasparov's series). I had a simul scheduled against an FM and decided to look up his games on chessgames.com, and it turned out that strangely, he seemed to lose against the French fairly often - way more than the Sicilian, which was my standard black opening, and since he was an FM, he didn't have as many games there as most others, so I decided I'd try the French against him. Well anyway, he did a classic bishop sac on me and that hurt, but I didn't accept it, and then started fighting back. He ended up sacking that same bishop again for my then-g6 pawn, but I had worked out a problem with it because I had a zwischenzug move that could get my queen back into the defense and yet still retain the sacked piece. After that, he was rattled and just kept trying to blindly attack, even though there really was no attack anymore. It all ended when I had his queen trapped with a rook, my queen, and a bishop, and then he tried to save it through a fork with a knight. I saw the fork, and realized that if my queen just took his knight, despite it being defended, I'd win his queen on the next turn with my rook. He had nowhere else to move his queen, so he resigned, because I would have been up two pieces for two pawns (or a queen and a piece for a pittance). I thought at the time that what I did was somewhat reasonable, since I'd already been studying the French, but now I realize that even though I won, I should have played the Sicilian, which I knew so much better.
Which philosophers? What were the subjects? Just wondering.
Jerry
Jerry: Curiosity is very natural, and can be a good thing. :)
Chris: You raise an interesting example at the end of your comment. I agree that Dawkins is awful once he pretends to do theology or philosophy, and surprisingly Dennett, who is a professional philosopher and should know better, isn't much better when he dabbles in philosophy of religion.
I think that creationists - by this I mean young-earth creationists and not just anyone who believes that the earth and its inhabitants were created, as that would include all theists (myself included) - are a different story. The reason is that "creationism" is not a discipline but a belief or set of beliefs. As such, someone could in principle be a member of any discipline and a creationist, and there are in fact biologists with Ph.D.s who think the Earth is approximately 10,000 years old and that all "kinds" were directly created by God. I don't agree with them, but I know that there are creationists who are aware of the data and arguments used by their intellectual foes and possess the relevant training as well. Indeed, this sort of situation occurs across the intellectual landscape: in political science, philosophy of religion, sociology, economics, etc. If they wanted to - and I'm sure they wouldn't - Tom Sowell and Paul Krugman could hold a mock debate where they took each other's point of view, and they could probably do it well enough that no one who didn't already know which was which could figure out that they really believed the opposite.
These lasting disagreements between intelligent, well-informed individuals doesn't mean that there's no such thing as truth or a good argument. One thing it shows is how broadly based our beliefs are. As a simple example, think of how you would evaluate the evidence that someone had committed a crime if (case 1) it was someone you didn't know and, for all you knew, they were as bad as the police's evidence seemed to suggest, and (case 2) compare that to how you would evaluate it if it was someone you knew well, for a long time, and had every reason to think that the crime went 180 degrees out of character for that person. Suppose further that you knew the person had a couple of enemies in his past. Those background beliefs would give your evaluation of the police's evidence a completely different shading.
Something similar is true from the creationist's perspective (and, in most non-trivial debates). Grant for the sake of argument that the creationist's broad theological beliefs are well-founded. (Belief that God exists and has revealed himself in religion X. [Most creationists are Christians, but they exist in all three Abrahamic religions.]) According to the creationist's holy book, it at least seems, on the most natural interpretation, to assert propositions that imply creationism (again, I mean by this term young-Earth creationism). Most creationists are well aware that (e.g.) the Bible isn't written as a scientific textbook, uses metaphors and other figures of speech, is written in different genres, uses phenomenal descriptions (i.e. reports things as they seem to individuals rather than from an objective view from nowhere), and so on. And a creationist could even grant that if we abstract from special revelation (i.e. revelation more or less directly from a supernatural source rather than from human investigation of the natural world) that the standard story of an old Earth and neo-Darwinian evolution is best supported by the evidence. (Though not 100% demanded by it.) But when putting all the parts together, he might believe that creationism is the right view, all things considered, just as you'd be right to believe your friend was framed, all things considered.
Again, I'm not agreeing with creationism, and certainly there are lots of creationists who are blissfully ignorant of even the most general evidence for an old earth and who don't even understand what Darwinism teaches. (Then again, I've noticed that there are plenty of people of all stripes, atheists included, who are happy to profess belief in evolution but without understanding how it works. So I'm not sure that there is any specifically religious ignorance at work, at least in the U.S.) But I do think the creationist vs. non-creationist debate is interestingly different from the one I raised in my post.
Dennis, I agree with you, I think. At least, I agree that a young-earth creationist's beliefs are consistent and defensible, at least in some realm. I happen to think that the realm is theology (or faith). When the rules of faith are applied in the realm of biology, you get a high incidence of nonsense, or so it seems to me.
I appreciate the arguments about observation being theory-laden, though I think these are best used as a warning against dogmatism in science, rather than a defence of it.
If someone told you that in order to play chess properly you should never ever allow your light-squared bishop to be attacked, under any circumstances, you might be able to point to a few stunning victories of the principle, but overall it would probably turn out to be a dead end. Similarly, if someone told you that you should never love anyone, even your parents, because obsession with family ties and irrational attachments has been proven to cause all sorts of unenlightened behaviour and conflict, you might see where they are coming from but would be pushed to take the advice seriously.
Apologies for the extended sideline. It's a subject I find interesting, and I hope the "occasional philosophy" disclaimer covers it from being too off-topic.
Hi Chris,
Bear in mind that I'm not arguing for the truth of creationism, but that their beliefs, if defensible, are intellectually defensible - full stop, and not just defensible within the realm of theology. (Another side note of importance: theological beliefs are factual beliefs. It is either true or it isn't that God exists; there is no such thing as God existing only in some miasmic realm of faith. Having faith in x does not mean believing in x apart from or in contradiction to evidence, but in having confidence or placing trust in x. This can, and typically should, be done based on evidence, whether propositional or non-propositional. [Unfortunately, Kierkegaard and his followers have ruined a perfectly good word.] Back to the main topic.)
Sophisticated creationists do not believe that their biological views contradict the evidence - the biological evidence. Rather, they believe that based on all the evidence they have at their disposal - evidence that is unavailable to an atheist, for starters - supports their view. Put it the other way around, and look at it from an atheist's point of view. Given what they believe about the world, there is simply no choice but to accept an old earth and neo-Darwinism. That doesn't mean that either conclusion is wrong, but given their background beliefs no other conclusion is presently available, even if, let's suppose, there are still big gaps in the evidence.
Suppose - and I'm making numbers up purely for the sake of elaborating the example - that some neutral observer decides that in the abstract, without reference to whether God exists or not, whether the Bible or some other holy book is true, etc., that the probability that the Earth is very old and all life evolved from some very small group of proto-ancestors (call it OE) is .9. Suppose further that the probability that holy book H teaches (young earth) creationism is greater than .9, and that creationist C takes himself as having both propositional and non-propositional evidence (e.g., roughly, philosophical and historical arguments for the first, religious experience/experiencing for the latter) that makes the probability that H really is a holy book extremely high as well. In that case, he can accept that the prior probability of OE is .9 and still rationally - not making some sort of special appeal to a non- or a-rational faith - conclude that C is the intellectually correct stance to take based on his total evidence.
As I understand the topic, then, it's not a question of theory-laden observation. A creationist, just like the friend of the accused criminal in my earlier example, could admit that some bit of evidence confirms the opposing view, but still believe that the total evidence is in favor of their own side. (Likewise for their opponents: they might acknowledge some bits of evidence in favor of H's veracity or the vengeful enemy hypothesis, but still take their position to be best-supported overall.)
Note: some might think that I'm contradicting myself: earlier I wrote that creationists don't take their view to violate the biological evidence, and here I'm saying that they can acknowledge that the other side's view might be confirmed by some bit of evidence. What gives? The answer is that a bit of evidence can better support one theory or another but be consistent with both. Two theories may be logically incompatible - they can't both be true - without the evidence for one or the other theory being logically incompatible with both.
Thanks for your excellent response again. I'm out of my depth already, but I'm going to carry on because I really like the subject.
I think I have a slightly different view about truth, or about factual beliefs at least. Scientists (on the whole) only accept as true observations that can be replicated. They don't believe in their theories - at least, they are professionally required to accept that a better theory might appear in future (this applies less in practice to neo-darwinism than, for example, string theory, but the principle remains). Thus "factual beliefs" in science are fundamentally dull things, and theories, which aren't factual beliefs but inventions, are required to explain them. A scientist who wants to allow non-observed information, or non-replicable observation, as valid scientific data is, I think, trying to change the rules of science. The rules of science are not set in stone, so they are in with a chance of changing them, but I personally don't think it's time well spent.
A truth (or fact) like "God loves me", or "God created the universe" seems to me to be another type of truth. I'm all for it, but I don't think it's relevant to scientific enquiry. If you believe it as a matter of faith, then you aren't weighing up probabilities in a rational way, any more than you make a spreadsheet to see who you want to marry. So it might be factual, but it isn't scientific. Is it true that the Mona Lisa is a good painting? Science can only say that it's worth a lot of money and give a breakdown of the chemicals in the pigment. But we can still enjoy it.
Chris,
You wrote "If you believe it as a matter of faith..." - please re-read my previous post on that matter. Faith is confidence or trust in someone or something, generally on the basis of evidence or experience. It's not some sort of weird way of believing apart from evidence. As for "types of truth", that seems dubious to me as well. Aristotle had it right 2400 years or so ago when he said that to say of what is, that it is, and of what is not, that it is not, is truth. If God exists, then "God exists" is true; if God doesn't, then it's not. It's not "true (only) by the eyes of faith" or some such nonsense; that's the kind of thing you'll hear in a church that's in danger of becoming nothing more than a Parents Without Partners meeting with tithes. (With apologies to atheists in that organization.)
What you're really saying, perhaps, is that alleged truths have a different epistemic status based on whether they are empirically verifiable or not - something along those lines. This is a popular thesis, especially among those who fancy themselves scientifically-based, tough-minded individuals. It has a certain sheen to it, but there are some problems. First, many theists are happy to be empiricists, and believe that their faith (referring to the content of what they believe, not a non-rational way of believing) is supported both directly and indirectly by good old-fashioned empirical facts. Second, sticking to creationists, some, perhaps many of them, will say the same thing. It's not that they surrender on every ostensibly scientific fact to their opponents, and just rely on special revelation. Third, even the hard sciences rely far less on simple empiricism than one might at first think. This is true both of the objects of their theories (think of the whole edifice of quantum physics, for example, or the evolutionary history of our planet - until there's a time machine, it's an inference and not something we can replicate [I don't say this as a criticism of evolutionary hypotheses, but of the pretense that they are justified by simple empiricism]) and in their interpretation (scientists like Feynman professed not to care about what the theories meant, but only whether they worked.
A fourth point deserves to be singled out: the thesis that only theories clearly based on the empirically verifiable is most likely self-refuting. That thesis isn't itself empirically verifiable, and I'm unaware of any collection of premises, all of which are empirically verifiable, which together with truths of logic entail that thesis. As such, the thesis is false by its own criteria, and thus suitable only for rejection.
Finally, working backwards through your last reply, creationists are not claiming that God is somehow a scientific datum. They claim that the best overall explanation - whether it gets labeled as "scientific" doesn't ultimately matter - of the publicly accessible data present to any investigator is that God created the Earth in the relatively recent past and created "kinds" in special acts of creation. That may not be satisfying to a scientist, but so what? It's silly to reject a theory's truth on the basis that it isn't derived by the methods of one's preferred discipline.
Again, this isn't to say that non-creationists should therefore accept creationism. It is to say that a priori rejection of creationism, or any other theory, based on a premise like "Any statement that isn't a product of investigation in physics, chemistry and biology is epistemically worthless or at least second-class" is foolish - if only because we're once again in the presence of a self-refuting statement. Logical positivism is dead, and so are its near neighbors.
And let's table the topic for now, please: I have to catch up on my work! A very good recent book, with which I'm largely in agreement and that covers many of these themes in detail, is Dallas Willard's Knowing Christ Today: Why We Can Trust Spiritual Knowledge. The main title is rather unfortunate, as it sounds like a book for believers only. On the contrary, it's a book that's at least as relevant to unbelievers; in particular, to those who make or assume the sorts of fact/value and fact/faith dichotomies you've made in your posts. Willard is a philosophy prof at USC (as a Notre Damer, I'll forgive him of that, but with a little regret) and his works are intellectual rich. It's worth a look!
Thanks for the book recommendation. I'll see if I can get hold of it. Also thanks for taking the trouble to try to understand what I'm saying (and restate my arguments better). I find I agree with almost all of what you say, but I'm perhaps more skeptical than you about the truth of scientific theories. Maybe that's the dead logical positivist in me. Anyway, I'll let you get on!
The book seems to be published in the UK as "Personal Religion, Public Reality?: Towards a Knowledge of Faith". But I can't find a web page that definitively tells me that the two are actually the same.
Very interesting. That's a much better title than the U.S. version's. Looking at the Amazon UK site, it looks as if "both" books are available, and according to the one customer review of PRPR?, they are the same. The book's publication date and general description fit the one book/two title hypothesis as well, but I haven't found an official statement somewhere that they're the same, and the pagination and ISBNs are different. I'm inclined to trust the customer review, but wish there had been a sample available of PRPR so I could have confirmed it for you myself.
While admitting upfront that I'm an unbeliever, I have a couple of comments to this discussion:
- The idea that only empirically verifiable (better "testable" or "potentailly falsifiable" maybe?) claims should be entertained does not suffer much from not itself being logically necessary: It is sufficiently justified on pragmatic grounds, since no other way of knowing come close to the scientific method's record of increasing humanity's store of knowledge.
- Empiricist apologetics is actively discouraged by many religious traditions, including Christianity. Doubting Thomas was the one apostle who took a rational, skeptical stance towards the resurrection of Jesus in the gospels, but he was morally condemned for it. According to Jesus at least, it is better to believe without seeing. Do you read these passages differently, or just disregard them?
- Dawkins and other "new atheists" tend to get into trouble when they assume that religious people believe to the letter the dangerous dogma in the Bible, the Koran and other holy texts, when in practice usually they don't. But Dawkins makes two important points that I've yet to see anyone refute in a debate: Firstly the low initial probability of God, which necessitates stronger evidence than most scientific claims. There's no way that nature becomes easier to explain if on top of all the complexity there's an almighty God as well. Secondly, while colonial conquests, wars and genocides have happened under theocratic, secular and atheistic regimes, religion can conveniently be used to justify atrocities in the name of a higher purpose. Atheism on the other hand is simply non-belief, and cannot in itself justify moral or immoral decisions.
Hi Stig,
The problem with the verifiability criterion isn't just that it isn't logically necessary; it's self-refuting, which means that its falsehood is logically necessary. That's bad. This doesn't mean that there's something wrong with empirical testing per se, but there is something very wrong with certain narrow forms of empiricism.
"Empiricist apologetics is actively discouraged by many religious traditions, including Christianity." I won't claim to speak for other religions, but as a blanket statement about Christianity it's utterly false. To take only the most prominent historical example, Thomas Aquinas is one of the major philosopher/theologians in church history, unquestionably an apologist (though one can't really tell this from the way he is very badly misrepresented by the "new atheists") and he was an empiricist in his epistemology. Today there are many Christians apologists who are broadly empiricist (or rather, to use a better term, evidentialist) including William Lane Craig, Gary Habermas, and J.P. Moreland.
About "Doubting Thomas", I've seen similar interpretations over the years, but it doesn't seem to hold up when one examines the text and the context. Remember first that the apostles are not in our situation, living two millennia after the fact. They lived with Jesus for 3+ years, saw him perform countless miracles (including Jesus' bringing Lazarus and others back to life), and heard him proclaim that he would rise from the dead. Further, the claim that "Thomas was the one apostle who took a rational, skeptical stance towards the resurrection of Jesus" doesn't make sense: the other 10 already saw him! So it would be odd for the others to take a skeptical stance at this point. It's therefore unclear - at best - if Thomas's skepticism is fully warranted at this point, given his own experiences of Jesus plus the testimony of the other apostles.
In any case, Thomas was not "morally condemned" for doubting, nor does Jesus says it is better to believe without seeing. He says "blessed are those who believe without seeing," but doesn't condemn or criticize Thomas. So I don't disregard such passages; I read them. Incidentally, while it would be anachronistic to read the Bible as some sort of evidentialist or empiricist treatise, there are occasions where believers ask God to confirm something or other, and often God does. (See for instance the callings of Moses and Gideon.)
Now to Dawkins' "two important points", which have been addressed by many authors in a variety of ways. On the first point: First, regarding the supposedly low initial probability of God: it's not at all evident that the probability really is low. I'm inclined to think that the near universality of belief in God or something very god-like around the world and through history, together with the widespread phenomena of religious experience (both of an everyday and a more dramatic sort) turns the tables. Now, there are challenges to both of these points, responses to the challenges, and so on, but the initial data tell me that it's the atheist who starts off with at least as big a burden of proof. If people at all times and in all cultures tend to form a certain sort of belief, then that should be the default position, innocent until proven guilty. Second, taking a step back, with respect to what is the probability of God's existence supposed to be low? Perhaps it's low with respect to your beliefs, but while that might be biographically interesting it's far from obvious that I or anyone else with other beliefs should be especially concerned. Third, I'm not really sure why you're bringing up the "initial probability" point in the first place. (Design arguments [Dawkins' main target] attempt to support the posterior probability that God exists, based on our prior beliefs having nothing to do with God's existence, so worries about prior probabilities seem irrelevant.)
Point 1b: "There's no way that nature becomes easier to explain if on top of all the complexity there's an almighty God as well." This is one of Dawkins' favorite arguments - perhaps his all-time favorite, as he has been using it since at least The Blind Watchmaker in 1986. If you haven't seen a reply on this one, you're really not looking, as (a) Christian apologists have critiqued it for years, in many ways, and (b) it's not even obviously relevant to Christian theism. To elaborate the latter point, Christians for most of their history (along with most Jewish and Islamic thinkers since at least the time of their co-existence) have held that God is simple, that is, without parts - not complex. Paley's version of the design argument (which is only one of many ways in which theists have argued for God's existence [in fact, it's only one of many forms of the design argument], and also not really relevant to the creationist topic of the previous comments) doesn't say that for any complex entity E, there must be a more complex entity E* that designed and caused it. What it says is that specified complexity is not self-explanatory, and we should conclude, in the absence of counter-evidence, that its cause is an intelligent designer. Again, there are plenty of arguments pro and con (and this is one of very many arguments for the existence of God, and far from the only or the most interesting one), but Dawkins doesn't even manage to get this one quite right, even after almost a quarter of a century.
Now for the second point you haven't seen refuted (i.e. religion can be used to justify atrocities, atheism qua atheism cannot): the quick answer is "So what?" Any beliefs can be used or misused to try to justify immoral decisions, but it's hard to see how that, in and of itself, could be an interesting point in evaluating the truth or falsity of those beliefs. In fact, a purely naturalistic atheism has a very bad time of it here. The reason is that while the Christian (but not only the Christian) has an easy time explaining why a certain bad act is immoral, those for whom reality is exhausted by the objects studied by the natural sciences have a tougher time of it. It may be that the naturalistic atheist doesn't like certain acts, or things they're not useful to society, but accounting for the badness of the act or the agent is something that can't be easily explained, if explained at all, within his worldview.
To elaborate: If we say that some agent or event is bad, then we are attributing badness to them - it is a property that agent or event possesses. Now, it's one thing to account for physical properties like shape or color in a naturalistic universe, as one can point to the relevant aspects either overtly or via the natural sciences. But nothing of the sort can be done with the moral features of agents or events. In a slogan, then, we can summarize the situation like this: Christians can be wrong, but naturalists can't be right. (That is, Christians can make moral errors - even grievous ones, alas - but if naturalism is true it's impossible for there to be any such thing as objective moral and wrong.)
At any rate, this comment is now WAY too long and the thread has gone far afield. If you want to pursue the discussion, please do so after reading a book like Ed Feser's The Last Superstition and/or J.P. Moreland's Scaling the Secular City. Also, Dallas Willard has written a useful article, though limited to a discussion of Dawkins' The Blind Watchmaker. It's available at http://www.dwillard.org/articles/artview.asp?artID=52.
I had second thoughts and maybe it was a bit offensive of me to stomp in here and "defend" Dawkins, but that was an impressive reply! Thank you.
I've seen Dawkins come out on top in many debates, but maybe he just chooses his opponents "wisely". For example he has not yet taken on John Polkinghorne who certainly knows his science and argues for the fine-tuning of the universe.
A simple God might be easier to accept as an explanation, but the God of all three monotheistic traditions (and the Old Testament in particular) is also strikingly antropomorphic, with traits like jealousy, vengefulness and even regret. This personified God that many ordinary believers stick to is really Dawkins' main target. He often "accuses" refined philosophers and theologians of watering down the specific truth claims of Christianity so much that they could almost pass for atheists.
On morality: If there is no objective, absolute morality that is a frightening thought, but naturalism is still better off for acknowledging it. I go with Mackie, Dennett and various psychologists and primatologists, who see a gradual emergence of an intuitive moral sense through both evolutionary and historic time. Even the chapter on this in The God Delusion points to a gradually changing "moral zeitgeist" in history, both among religious and secular people.
If there is an objective morality in holy texts, why does moral practice change so much through the centuries? Christians are perfectly capable of judging which parts of the Bible seem morally right, and which have now become problematic and must be "interpreted away" (harsh penalties for minor crimes, women not allowed to speak in congregations, homosexuality as a sin [the last one still depends which country/state you are in of course]). But these re-interpretations mean that we are really judging the Bible by an outside (intuitive + cultural) standard. I contend that people have always done this.
Stig,
This isn't an apologetics blog, so what I merely hinted at last time I'll be explicit about now: no more. I'll answer the last batch of "questions", and then it's time to move on.
RE: Dawkins winning debates: He must be choosing extremely wisely, or you're evaluating based on his ability to offer witty comments. Crushing the arguments he has been using the past quarter of a century is like shooting fish in a barrel; not because there aren't intelligent, well-informed atheists out there, but because he isn't one of them (wrt the "well-informed" part).
Anthropomorphic God vs. the God of the philosophers: First of all, it's evident that Dawkins hasn't read anybody serious, so what you're attributing to him is far more generous than he deserves. Second, bear in mind the original OT audience. At least part of the story is God communicating with them in a way and on a level they'd understand. As for the last sentence of your third paragraph, I'm not sure who he has in mind, but while I'd agree with that about some churches that are (very) theologically liberal, it's certainly possible to try to "finesse" some of the harder OT problems without giving in on any NT teaching. In fact, I think there's a very good apologetic case to be made based on a combination of religious experience, philosophical arguments for the existence of God and historical apologetics for Jesus' resurrection, which leaves the OT difficulties as just that - difficulties, but not refutations.
Your claim about naturalism being better off for acknowledging the absence of objective morality has at least two serious problems. The first is that I - and you too, I hope - really do know that torturing babies for fun is really and truly bad, not just something we all dislike or find repugnant or likely to lead to societal discord. And even if, let's suppose, I'm not 100% sure that there are objective moral truths, I'm still a heck of a lot more sure about that than I am about naturalism! There really aren't any good, positive arguments for naturalism; at best there's a methodological argument from Ockham's Razor. But remember, the Razor is at best a tiebreaker: if you have two theories that account for all the data and are roughly equally plausible, prefer the one that posits fewer entities (or perhaps fewer types of entities). But this doesn't apply here, as one theory says something that seems extremely implausible. Naturalism doesn't explain all the data; rather, it explains large portions of it away. That's problem one.
Problem two is this: the claim that naturalism is better off for acknowledging the "frightening thought" that there is no objective morality is self-refuting. To say that it's "better" is to posit a value property, but naturalism rules out not only moral properties but axiological properties in general. You can say that you like naturalism for that reason, or find it inspiring, bracing or whatever, but you can't legitimately claim that it's better in any objective way.
You then bring up a story about the development of the moral sense. I can grant for the sake of argument that it's true, but the more interesting question is whether this sense corresponds to anything.
Likewise, the last paragraph is an interesting diversion at best. The first question is whether there is objective morality, not how we humans make our moral evaluations. I'll note only that while there have been different moral standards on various points over the centuries, this isn't much of an objection to the Bible or people's ostensible belief in it. I don't know if you're an American, but we have heated debates between different factions about how to interpret the U.S. Constitution. (If you're not an American, I'm sure you're still aware of similar legal/judicial wranglings where you are.) Should one interpret it by the strict letter of the law, or in its spirit? And how loosely or tightly defined is that? Further, what do we do when one constitutionally-based principle seems in tension with another one? The existence of those debates haven't been taken to imply that no one "really" judges the Constitution on its own merits. Similarly, such tensions exist in biblical interpretation.
One further point you should know when thinking about these things is that in the New Testament, it's clear that in some sense the Mosaic Law is no longer applicable. So silly objections that Christians don't really believe that this or that is wrong because they don't use OT punishments are strikingly ignorant. What Christians try to do is to extract moral principles from the OT that transcend the particularities of God's covenant with the Israelites. There is nothing intrinsically evil about eating pig: God created pigs, and that the kosher laws in particular were suspended in the NT is evident from Peter's vision in the NT book of Acts (chapter 10, verses 9-16). On the other hand, murder does seem intrinsically evil and is condemned in the OT even before Moses comes on the scene.
Lastly, even if it's correct that believers judge the Bible's moral claims with (partial) reference to external moral sources, it doesn't follow that there's no objective morality in the Bible (or holy texts in general). To say that it does is to confuse ontology and epistemology, to confuse what is real and true with how we know it. (Note too that the "intuitive" standard is itself referred to in the Bible, and can be thought of as part of the divine design plan.)
Alright, I will move on. Since you disagree both with the applicability of Ockham's razor and the relevance of variabile moral sentiments across history and cultures for determining whether there is an objective morality, we have too little common ground to get very far anyway.
Btw. by naturalism being "better" off I didn't intend a value judgement. I simply meant if, as I believe, naturalism happens to be right we should accept it even if that makes it very problematic to establish objective morality (which I agree would be a nice thing if it could be justified).
Have a pleasant Easter.
Stig,
What is the sense of "should" in "we should accept it"? If it isn't in some way a value judgment, then I'm afraid I have no idea what you mean.
I certainly disagree about Ockham's Razor, if you're claiming it's anything more than a tiebreaker. But I bet that outside of theism/atheism, you believe more or less what I do: we'd both disagree with solipsism, even though it's magnificently parsimonious. (Ironically, we couldn't coherently agree about agreeing about it.)
As for the variability of moral sentiments across history and cultures, of course there's some. (Perhaps less than you might think, when we approach from the level of values rather than specific moral beliefs, though.) Who disagrees with that? But that no more proves that (objective) moral judgments always fail to correspond to reality than the evolution of scientific theories proves scientific anti-realism. Further, it seems as clear to me as anything could be that events like the Holocaust or acts like torturing babies for fun are really and truly evil. Isn't that far more obvious than the putative truth of naturalism? Remember: being a fan of science doesn't require embracing naturalism. Contrary to the gruesome caricatures of Dawkins et al, one can be extremely intelligent, well-educated, a fan of science and rationality and a religious believer - and without cheating intellectually.
Thanks for your Easter wishes!
Maybe I used "value" the wrong way then. I'm just trying to say that I discount objective morality not because I dislike the very idea (quite the opposite in fact), or prefer nihilism to it, but simply because I don't believe it exists. What I believe to be true is logically independent of what I like, or what I want to be true.
I agree wholeheartedly with your last sentence, generalized (except for certain "cooked" examples). But I might not have been as clear as possible in talking about "value" - it's not just ethics that get affected. You probably think, or are at least inclined to think, that if the evidence says X, we should believe X, whether or not it's convenient or intrinsically desirable, and I agree with you. The "should" here isn't necessarily an ethical property, though there is some sort of obligation inherent here - intellectual obligation, say. (Some, like Linda Zagzebski, in Virtues of the Mind, think that intellectual obligation is in fact a sub-species of moral obligation. This is plausible, but I'm happy to waive the claim.) But this too seems to bring us into the realm of non-natural properties, and raises all the same problems for naturalism that objective moral statements do.
The upshot is a very strange one: even if naturalism is true and the evidence supports it (needless to say, I don't grant this!), there's no objective obligation to believe it and someone who rejects it, fully aware of the evidence in its favor, is neither intellectually nor morally blameworthy. This strikes me as a reductio ad absurdum of naturalism, but fortunately the choice doesn't seem forced.
On a relatively banal note, I wonder if there is a psychological benefit to avoiding being defeated in your favorite chess opening. If so, that could help explain why the peekaboo fallacy is so common.
I understand that if a player has a pattern of losing against a specific opponent, it may be good to accept an early draw just to break the mental stigma. Perhaps if a player has a habit of winning using his/her pet line, that helps the player to visualize winning and convert that image into reality against most players. Conversely, losing games in that same line could break that image, at least in the short term (within a single tournament).