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David_Gerard comments on An argument that animals don't really suffer - Less Wrong Discussion
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Comments (86)
Voted up for giving us an argument to chew on that's both important and terrible :-)
The punchline is, of course, "and therefore God exists." Craig is trying to solve theodicy here - he's trying to show that animal suffering doesn't exist, therefore doesn't count as God allowing evil.
The obvious Google search turns up a string of refutations of Craig's argument and, indeed, his bogus neuroscience. This one and this one go over a pile of the obvious errors. PZ Myers, who, as well as being an obnoxious atheist sceptic, just happens to be a professor of developmental biology, gets stuck into both Craig's bad science and his odious ethics. (For the philosophy, Myers also points out that Craig has just made an argument in favour of freedom of abortion. Philosotroll notes that Craig's argument rejects dualism: "Does God then have a prefrontal cortex?")
Also, the mirror test is interesting.
In general, if William Lane Craig publicly says the sky is blue, he's going to follow it with "and therefore God exists."
Related: the Discovery Institute (the organisation formed to push Intelligent Design; Craig is a Fellow of the DI) has started a newsletter called The Human Exceptionalist. DI and Craig both have a religious requirement of humans being a different kind to any other animal, despite the ever-increasing mountains of data on ways in which this just isn't the case. "Human exceptionalism" is apparently the new marketing slogan. Like "theistic evolution", it's creationism with a funny hat on.
I notice both of the objections to this mention that they don't like the implications (animal "cruelty" is okay) as if it's part of their counter-argument. That's hardly relevant. You might as well argue that animals don't feel pain because that would imply there's no omnipotent, omnibenevolent, god.
Also, they talk about other animals having pre-frontal cortex. This would mean that the argument is more specific than it states, but would still imply that many animals do not feel pain.
Animal cruelty could be a case where our evolved intuitions mislead us: we feel as if animals are suffering and empathize with them (even though they aren't) because they are visibly in pain. In fact, I assume that most people would feel some mild aversion to animal "cruelty" even if they knew with certainty that the animals in question lack sensory awareness, because our evolved intuitions cannot be overridden without some effort.
There's a lot of cultural variation there-- the animal fights in the Roman coliseum, bull-fighting,, and bear-baiting are all examples of culturally supported use of animal suffering as part of entertainment.
Plus the infamous cat-burning in Paris.
Cat's? They burned cats? Why on earth would they bother burning cats? It's witches, wood or nothing!
This is why cruelty to animals is useful as an indicator of sociopathy in humans.
I wonder if torturing Sims is also correlated with sociopathy?
They may be too few players who don't to test.
My housemate's favourite sim pastime was creating a house for the cast of Buffy and Angel... complete with a graveyard to patrol. Swimming pools without ladders are dangerous apparently.
Yes, they're more "this is bogus science and I am disgusted by his conclusions from the bad science" than they are robust philosophical argumentation. As I note above, this is philosophically tainted and not the strongest refutation to give to those who might be convinced by Craig's argumentation; I assume they're assuming their readers are familar with Craig and his habit of starting with the bottom line.
The trouble with the question "does a given animal feel pain?" is the particular usage being applied of the words "feel" and "pain".
I've just glanced at these, I'll read them properly in a second.
My preliminary concern about those two rebuttals is that they seem to be arguing based on the punchline. I think it's obvious that whether or not animals feel pain is pretty irrelevant to arguments about God's existence, personally. So it icks me that both the posts mention this before mentioning actual factual arguments.
Fair enough. I will note that, although tainted in terms of pure philosophy, refutations of Craig that start at his punchline may well be quite reasonable given Craig's long history of always starting with the bottom line.
You stated a concern with the neuroscience, which Myers addresses pretty well.
I don't think that I agree. Jumping to the bottom line is always a problem, especially cases like this where the debate doesn't even really affect any God-existing debates.
Theism and atheism can both easily explain animals suffering and not suffering. I don't think that Craig even considers this to be a particularly strong argument in favor of Christianity. Both of those posts, particularly the second, used their (correct) disputation of the neuroscience as an argument against God. That's a sign of bad reasoning.
Like, for instance, the atheism.about.com page says Craig is "lying" about the prefrontal cortex thing, when it's far more likely he's mistaken.
I don't like either of those blog posts, even though they both raise a correct point.
Not "mistaken", but "doesn't care". Craig is starting with the bottom line; the presumption that he is not is useful philosophical hygiene when attempting a refutation, but is factually incorrect.
If you can get to the conclusion that God exists regardless of the facts, then of course, you will be indifferent to the facts. That is, I think, the big danger in reasoning to a foregone conclusion.
One commenter on PZ Myers' post notes that the argument that animals don't feel pain as humans know it is not at all original with Craig:
I'm not aware of the history of the argument - anyone else familiar with it? Another commenter notes the similarity to the claim that humans, even severely brain-damaged ones, have souls, and smart animals just don't.
I don't know all of the ins and outs of the literature, but the basic problems here go back at least to Bentham and Mill, who had a dispute about kinds of pleasure and pain. Bentham took the view that all pains and pleasures were on the same footing. A human appreciating a work of art is no different from a pig appreciating a good roll in the mud. Mill took the view that pains and pleasures had more internal structure. Of course, for both Bentham and Mill, pain played a big part in the moral calculus. General concern about the moral standing of animals goes back a lot further: Descartes, for example, claimed that we have a moral certainty that animals have no souls -- otherwise, we couldn't eat them -- but it's not clear to me whether he connected this to pain.
More recently, the debate seems to be about the degree to which an analogical argument works that takes us from human pain to animal pain. See, for examples, an older article by Singer (excerpts only) and a newer article by Allen et al (pdf). But for most of these people, the issues are not theological.
Thank you :-) I meant in particular religious pedagogy really pushing the point, but I suppose that follows from the sort of backlash against the Enlightenment that inspired Fundamentalism.