I wish there was a better word than lying for spreading false information. It’s concise, charged, connected to the idea that the information being conveyed is false. But the scientific definition of “lie” isn’t a false statement. We make false statements all the time, unintentionally. They’re called mistakes.
The scientific definition of a “lie” is a statement intended to deceive. Intent is critical to this definition. If I tell you, “Bob’s in the robot lab” because that’s where I saw him last, but he’s actually headed out to the barista, that isn’t a lie, even though it’s false: it’s just a mistake.
But if I tell you “Bob’s back at the office” – knowing full well that you’re likely to look at his desk in the office, when he’s actually taking a nap behind a closed conference room door across the hall, where you’re unlikely to find him – then I’ve lied, even though the statement is true.
The problem is worse when we consider intellectual dishonesty. When someone puts forth a really terrible argument, are they actually being dishonest, or are they simply caught up in fallacious reasoning or even just honestly mistaken beliefs?
The truth is, people argue in bad faith all the time, and it’s legitimately hard to tell – most humans are quite bad at spotting liars. Once an activist asked me to workshop a proposal he was making about a telescope built on native Hawai’ian land: he demanded ten percent of the budget go to native education.
“Isn’t that reasonable?” he asked. “No,” I said. “Imagine you’re building a house. If you’ve budgeted a million bucks – half to land and half to construction, then if someone chops ten percent out of your budget, there goes your roof. No-one could agree to that even if they wanted to.”
He tried various other unworkable permutations, until I finally asked, “Look, what do you want?” He thought, then said: “I want to put forth something so reasonable-sounding that no-one could oppose it, but which would be a poison pill for the telescope project. I want the telescope not to be built.”
I declined to help him further. He was arguing in bad faith. To a casual observer, his proposals sounded like he genuinely wanted to help native Hawai’ian education, and was just naive about building construction: but behind that facade was a deliberate attempt to deceive.
It’s hard to tell these apart. Politicians often lie, fooling mostly their own constituents; partisans assume their opponents lie by default. But the principle of charity demands that we assume the opposite: that others use ordinary words to make true statements with valid arguments about something interesting.
So, when positivist philosophers fail to extend this principle of charity to the tenets of religion, it’s perhaps a stretch to accuse them of lying. I’m not even sure that they’re actually being intellectually dishonest – but it is funny to encounter incoherent arguments from someone arguing that religion is incoherent.
I encountered this incoherence in an essay disparaging one of the key issues of the Great Schism that split the Roman Catholic Church from the Eastern Orthodox Churches: the doctrine of the Trinity, or, more specifically, how the Holy Spirit “proceeds”: from the Father, or from the Father and the Son.
While this was enough to fracture churches back in the day, modern theologians think this “difference” to be mostly semantic, not doctrinal. But the author of the essay went further, claiming that it wasn’t simply semantics – but that both positions had some unspecified fatal flaw which rendered them unintelligible.
But this 18 page essay on what’s wrong with religious and philosophical thinking never gets around to actually telling you what, concretely, wrong with this kind of thinking. I’m not going to link the essay until I can read it again to be sure, but as you may have guessed, the problem is in the author’s thinking.
The author mistook his disbelief in the premises for a flaw in the arguments. Since there is no logical flaw in these arguments – and I’ll get back to that – they, as they said repeatedly in the article, found it difficult to put a finger on what’s precisely wrong with this and other similar kinds of reasoning.
Well, I can help you out with that: the key mistakes philosophers make about religion is the allegation that religion consists of statements that are unprovable in principle, and therefore, because these statements are unprovable, they are therefore incoherent.
One professor put it like this: A man claims they met a man in a garden. You see no-one, so they claim the man’s invisible. You listen, so they claim the man’s inaudible. You excavate the garden and scan the dirt with X-rays, so they claim the man’s intangible. At some point, you decide, the man just ain’t there.
But that’s not what happened at all. That’s just the procession of bad judgments that follows from the bad arguments in David Hume’s essay “Of Miracles”, which we took apart earlier, perhaps unfairly, because Hume didn’t have Bayesian or Jaynesian probabilistic reasoning at his disposal, but it’s still wrong.
To be intellectually honest, we need to be up-front and open about the moves we’re making. Religious people are not like a man claiming to have met an invisible man in a garden: they’re like a man with a letter in his hand from that absent friend, reading it in the garden, waiting for them to come back.
You can claim that the letter is a forgery, or that the author is dead and is never coming back. Jaynesian probability theory tells us that if you entertain a variety of alternative hypotheses, you can get trapped in a state where you never accept an unlikely proposition, whether it is true or not. And that’s fine.
That’s your prerogative. But it’s also a choice. And choosing not to believe the premises of an argument doesn’t make the content or structure of the argument invalid. It just makes it not relevant to you. Like arguments over phlogiston or the luminiferous ether, they’re simply no longer relevant.
Humans suck at understanding our judgments about logical arguments. We’re strongly biased to think arguments are valid if we feel good about the conclusion, and invalid otherwise. If you’ve internalized Hume, and wrongly exclude the possibility of miracles, any argument about the spiritual feels wrong.
But choosing not to believe in the spiritual doesn’t make it impossible. Jesus Christ did or did not come back from the dead; He was or was not the Son of God; He is or is not one Person of the divine Trinity, and did or did not inspire the information recorded about Him in the Bible.
If all that is true, why, then there may be any number of technical points which need to be worked out, and there’s nothing incoherent about asking the question whether one aspect of this God we barely understand has this or that relationship to another aspect, which is equally difficult.
Similar debates go on right now in quantum mechanics, where extremely subtle issues about reality and measurement are debated every day, and while they look as abstract and as arcane as any arguments about angels dancing on the head of a pin, they can get cashed out into real experiments.
If there is a Judgment Day, discussions of the Trinity will get cashed out into real experiences as well. If not, they won’t. If a philosopher, in their heart of hearts, just doesn’t find the evidence for the Trinity convincing, I think he can be excused for gracefully bowing out of any of those discussions.
But calling those discussions incoherent is wrong, I think it’s intellectually dishonest, and it sure feels like lying. I don’t know that the people who hold that are actually lying, so I extend the principle of charity: and yet … If you don’t believe, just say you don’t believe: don’t argue your opponents are incoherent.
-the Centaur
Pictured: E. T. Jaynes, author of Probability Theory: The Logic of Science.
