Theological Paranoia

Say you're God and you want to kill of all of humanity, but in such a way that no-one will know that it's you (as is your want). How would you do it? You might consider what humans' weaknesses are, in order to exploit them.

Addictive behaviour? Doesn't seem to be universal enough, even if you try to compensate with substantial negative externalities. Eg. Smoking.
Risk Management and Natural Disasters? It seems like people aren't very good at anticipating rare, catastrophic events. But humans would be on to you with this one, they've already labelled these 'acts of God'.

There are plenty of others, but I think your best bet would be a lethal collective action problem dispersed across the entire world. Humans are broadly self-interested, and at the very best can only consistently be altruistic in quite a limited way. So if you set things up in such a way that heaps of their actions have costs which they themselves don't have to bear, they will by and large do little about it, while collectively making themselves slowly worse off, to the point of self-extermination, if you set it up right. It would be more effective if it was dispersed across the whole world, because that makes it harder for people to bargain with each other and come to better outcomes that way.

That sounds pretty effective, but here's how you could make it even more deadly. You would make the costs so dispersed and hard to see that it would take the smartest people in the world to notice that they actually existed. Secondly, you would notice that academics aren't very good at collaborating across genres, so you make it a massive cross-disciplinary project to determine the costs precisely.

Finally, you set up a lot of the industries that produce the most cost with high fixed costs, and economies of scale. This makes them naturally fairly uncompetitive, that is, you have a small number of big companies producing in those areas. So there will be strong incentives on very powerful interests to resist pricing in the costs appropriately.

So far, so hypothetical. It's lucky for us that God loves us and... wait. Uh oh.

We are screwed.

Spontaneous (Dis)Order

Today William Easterly at his great blog Aid Watch argues that the Pope, like many, is suffering from what he calls the 'Man in Charge Fallacy' - a false assumption that the economy is or can be centrally run.

This fallacy is related to something Udayan discussed a while back on this blog; the way people like to assume design when there is none. Economist readers will no doubt recognise the links to Hayek's 'spontaneous order' theory of the economy (or perhaps Adam Smith's Invisible Hand), but an perhaps even more fundamental application of it is in our own evolution, where amazingly complex order arises without any design at all.

It is not surprising that the head of a major religion has a tendency to see design in non-designed processes. But the rest of us should be wary of making the same mistake.

The Aesthetic Atheist

Hardheaded atheism of this kind has become quite a publishing phenomenon over the last few years. Many, including myself, have enthusiastically jumped on this bandwagon, believing the time was ripe for a concerted effort attacking the excesses of organised religion. Rhetorically, these books are marvellous, whether it be the passionate and literate vitriol of Christopher Hitchens or the measured and witty analyses of Daniel Dennett. Strangely, I find myself retreating more and more from the postitions these authors espouse.

Make no mistake, my disbelief hasn't taken any body blows. I have yet to be assailed by visions of eternal damnation or blessed with divine revelations. But the more I think about the standard arguments against the existence of god, the more obvious it becomes that ultimately, atheism itself isn't a bastion of undisputed rationality.

Take the standard 'prime mover' argument. This holds that every effect must have a cause, but since this would imply an infinite regression of causes with no coherent beginning. But something must have set this chain of events in motion, and this first cause is god. The usual response is "But what caused God, silly?", normally given with various degrees of exasperation. Positing god as a first cause without explaining what gave rise to god himself is taken to be an act of desperate intellectual dishonesty. People who believe it are tarred as irrational fools.

I'd like to suggest that this is a mistake. I too, have little time for this argument, but if I was pushed on the ultimate metaphysical caustation of the cosmos, I would be thoroughly stumped. In fact, I don't think I am uniquely stupid on this point - the majority of well-educated atheists would be equally unable to 'rationally' trace their argument back to its philosophical foundations. Why then, do we atheists have such a strong conviction that we are right?

The answer for me, lies in an aesthetic preference. I find it remarkable that order arises out of the chaos of quantum theory. I marvel at the power of natural selection to blindly design mechanisms of incredible complexity. My exposure to these scientific disciplines gives me faith (!) that a similar process will be found to solve the causation problem, largely because I think it would be more elegant that way. But this of course, opens the door to believers. If some conception of beauty motivates my position, I can't scoff at those who would find this explanation ugly and the idea of a cosmic designer more attractive.

We can discuss why people might vary so dramatically in their preferences, but this requires abandoning the idea that atheism is simply more rational than religiosity. The more salient issue to address, is how the virulent aspects of religion can be shorn away, regardless of whether the faith at its core persists. An aesthetic perspective on belief can go some way to defuse the anger which tends to stymie this sort of discussion.