Saturday, March 28, 2009

"The dragon in my garage"

Carl Sagan once wrote a little parable entitled “The Dragon In My Garage.”

http://richarddawkins.net/social/index.php?mode=article&id=35

This is meant to be a thinly-veiled analogy for Christian faith–or religious faith in general.

The first thing I’d note is that Sagan’s parable of the invisible dragon is a rip-off of Antony Flew’s parable of the invisible garden.

Both parables presume that Christians believe in God despite the total absence of evidence for his existence.

On a related note, they accuse Christian faith of being unfalsifiable since nothing would ever count as evidence against it.

There are some fundamental problems with this objection to the Christian faith:

1.There’s no real argument here. Sagan and Flew have imputed to Christians a position that many or most Christians reject. Sagan thinks there’s no evidence for God. (Flew has since changed his mind.) So that’s a presupposition of his parable.

In his parable, he tacitly imputes that assumption to the Christian, as if the Christian shared his belief that there is no evidence for the existence of God. His parable is then designed to illustration the vacuity and irrationality of Christian faith.

But, of course, most Christians (except for a few extreme fideists) wouldn’t grant his assumption in the first place. So his parable amounts to a straw man argument. What he’s done is to begin with an atheistic assumption, impute that atheistic assumption to the Christian, then point out that the Christian is irrational for continuing to believe in God in spite of the atheistic assumption.

But the parable is an exercise in mirror-reader since the Christian doesn’t buy into Sagan’s atheistic assumption. All that Sagan’s parable ends up revealing is his insular, hidebound perspective. Sagan lacks the critical detachment to even distinguish between his own viewpoint and the viewpoint of his opponent. His parable is monumentally obtuse.

2.There is also an elementary difference between inevidence and counterevidence. Lack of evidence is not synonymous with evidence to the contrary. As such, lack of evidence doesn’t falsify a position.

Lack of evidence might mean we lack adequate warrant or sufficient justification for what we believe. But that’s not the same thing as falsifying our beliefs. It most, it means our belief is irrational, not that our belief is erroneous.

In other words, Sagan is using the argument from silence. But the argument from silence is only cogent if, assuming the belief were true, we we’d expect there to be some evidence for what we believe.

That, in turn, goes to the types of evidence appropriate for the existence of God. In his parable, no physical test can detect the presence of the dragon.

But, of course, that’s parabolic. In order to convert this illustration into an argument from analogy, Sagan needs to step outside the parable and literally explain why we don’t have the types of evidence for God’s existence which we’d expect to find if he existed.

As it stands, Sagan is giving us an illustration in lieu of an argument. While illustrations can be useful, they need to illustrate an argument, and not take the place of an argument.

Ironically, the popularity of Sagan’s parable demonstrates the irrationality of the average atheist. An atheist would have to be pretty dense to be impressed with Sagan’s stupid little parable.

7 comments:

  1. Bahnsen skewers this argument in "Always Ready". Also, as far as Flew's "invisible garden" argument is concerned, he also shows that the reasoning is reversible, i.e., when confronted with the gardener's footprints, the unbeliever might say that it's a clever hoax, planted when no one was around; when confronted with the gardener's tools, they might say that these could be anyone's tools, etc. - such that no evidence would count for evidence in favor of a gardener existing.

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  2. I think part of the parable that you're skipping is that the dragon believer keeps shifting their claim. When the skeptic proposes tests based off the claim of a dragon, the believer changes the claim to rule out that test. Think it's supposed to be an analogy to the atheist saying (paraphrased) 'god was in the clouds, then we went there and didn't see him, then he was in space, then we went out there and didn't see him, so now he's outside space/time...' in terms of shifting claims about what/where/etc. about god.

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  3. Kraft,

    How is that analogous to Christian believers?

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  4. Kind of a caricature I know. It's a pretty common claim of "God retreating" from being active in the world to just being the cause of the big bang or origin of life or some quantum fluctuation. Similarly from coming down into the garden, being present guiding the Israelites in the desert and other biblical things to now being outside of time/space. See it on forums and in conversation*. Kind of 'as science explores things, god gets more elusive', and that is like the dragon and it's properties changing as tests are proposed.

    * I know these usually poorly represent Christian theology

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  5. KRAFT SAID:

    “Kind of a caricature I know. It's a pretty common claim of ‘God retreating’ from being active in the world to just being the cause of the big bang or origin of life or some quantum fluctuation. Similarly from coming down into the garden, being present guiding the Israelites in the desert and other biblical things to now being outside of time/space. See it on forums and in conversation*. Kind of 'as science explores things, god gets more elusive', and that is like the dragon and it's properties changing as tests are proposed.”

    i) The Bible already has a doctrine of ordinary providence or second causes. Israelites knew that fruit ordinarily comes from fruit-trees, rain from clouds, babies from sex, &c. They never took the position that God is the direct cause of everything, or even most things, that happen.

    ii) It’s not as if theologians like Boethius, Augustine, Anselm, Aquinas, Calvin, &c. thought that if you could send a man into orbit, he would be able to see God from outer space, but 20C theologians suddenly concocted the notion that God subsists outside of time and space when astronauts were unable to see God from the window of the Apollo spacecraft.

    iii) Moreover, Medieval theologians who taught that God subsists outside of time and space also believed in Medieval miracles. Belief in a timeless, spaceless God didn’t supplant belief in a God who answered prayer or performed miracles. These beliefs were held concomitantly.

    iv) Miracles are reported throughout church history and into the modern era. There’s no gradual displacement of belief in God’s miraculous presence.

    Christians have always believed in ordinary providence as well as miraculous. These are concomitant beliefs. And many Christians believe that miracles happen today. Let’s take a few examples from modern history:

    http://www.graveworm.com/occult/texts/thaumat.html

    http://dangerousidea.blogspot.com/2006/12/miracles-and-missionaries.html

    http://www.trueu.org/Academics/LectureHall/A000000425.cfm

    v) Specify the ways in which the criteria for determining God’s existence have changed over the centuries.

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  6. Thanks Steve.

    I-III - Guess I wasn't clear enough in indicating that I knew these weren't the views of more sophisticated theology. I was talking in terms of what you run into on the street, at work, when talking to self identifying Christians, which are not usually philosophically or theologically sophisticated.

    IV - Interesting, I'll look into those links.

    V - I'm just talking about the common sentiment. I don't feel like putting together a timeline would be worth my time, since I think I've made the point I was trying to.

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  7. I'm reminded of Bertrand Russell and his caricature of Christians as believing in an invisible teapot orbiting the sun...or something like it. Atheists really have no imagination apparently, Sagan, Flew, and Russell have similar non-arguments.

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