Kieran Healy

Battleground God

I just took the Battleground God test. My results:

You took zero direct hits and you bit zero bullets. The average player of this activity to date takes 1.37 hits and bites 1.10 bullets. 96240 people have so far undertaken this activity.

Ha! Who says sociologists can’t think straight? Their analysis of my performance says:

Congratulations!

You have been awarded the TPM medal of honour! This is our highest award for outstanding service on the intellectual battleground.

The fact that you progressed through this activity neither being hit nor biting a bullet suggests that your beliefs about God are internally consistent and very well thought out.

This is my reward for being married to an analytic metaphysician. Years of conversation with someone able to prove theorems in quantified modal logic teaches you to articulate your position very carefully on important questions like “Who’s doing the washing up?”, “Did you put all the beer in the fridge?”, “Can you take out the rubbish?” and “Is that the same plate that was in the sink this morning?” In comparison, a series of trick questions about the existence of God is a cakewalk.

I dislike this part:

“Evolutionary theory maybe false in some matters of detail, but it is essentially true.”

True seems to me to be a loaded term, bearing in mind that Popper assigned a provisional character to truth in science. Provisionally true would have been fine.. particularly since it later blames you if you attempt to reject god on a preponderance of evidence (but retain a provisional possibility regarding his existence).

I took one direct hit, and I profound disagree with it. I agreed that it is rational at a certain point to reject the existence of the Loch Ness monster, but took the agnostic position on God. I absolutely reject that these are the same thing, or that there is a logical inconsistency in this case. There is a difference in scale and type of phenomenon here. To believe in the Loch Ness monster is to believe that an animal, a physical creature, inhabits a lake. That’s a very different claim than to talk about God, and the evidence required for the two is different.

I too, took one direct hit. It was the Loch Ness rationality versus antheistic faith that did me in; the same as Timothy Burke. My defense is basically the same, though not as concise, as Burke’s.

I took zero direct hits and bit zero bullets.

Ha! Who says guys in advertising can’t think straight?

Great link. Like the other posters above I bit one bullet over the Loch Ness vs. atheism inconsistency. The FAQ talks about this distinction in some detail and I have to say that, unlike the other posters, I have to agree that this is a valid “bullet.” The upshot of getting it wrong is that I can improve!

In regards to ryker,
“The upshot of getting it wrong is that I can improve!”
While we can work on the continuity of our logic/rationality we can never improve on this test. It is not reasonable to take the test again in hope to receive a better score; it would not be fair to ourselves. Has anyone run-across similar types of these online ‘tests’?

I took the Loch ness hit also. I think part of the problem is that I sort of took the word “rational” to mean something different in the two cases. With Nessie it meant “sensible,” and with God it meant “logically required.”

Are there any mathematicians in the crowd? Is it really impossible to describe a surface on which a circle could be square? And isn’t saying it’s “impossible” that 1+1=72 like saying it’s impossible that V+V=X? really just a question of notation? Just asking. Needless to say, they didn’t like my answer there.

I think the analysis of this question depends in part of what kind of God you’re talking about. I think there is evidence that a benevolent and omnipotent God (such as the one proposed by Christianity) does not exist. There isn’t merely an absence of evidence for such a God, but evidence of absence.

If the Loch Ness Monster does exist, we would expect to have found some credible evidence that it exists. We have found no such evidence, so we conclude that it probably does not exist.

If a benevolent and omnipotent creator God exists, we would expect to find a world that is consistent with such a creator. Instead, we find a world, as revealed by science, that is characterized by great suffering and imperfection. Human life appears to be the product of a series of accidents. Biological evolution is a violent and chaotic process, full of false starts, dead ends, and jerry-rigged designs, undirected, and utterly indifferent to concerns about suffering or justice. It is difficult to understand the world we observe as the creation of a benevolent and omnipotent God. I therefore conclude that such a God probably does not exist.

marcum – obviously a person can’t improve on this test but they can improve the consistency of their thinking. That you didn’t get my meaning suggests I could improve my clarity as well. Like you I would also be interested in similar logic tests. It’s interesting to contrast the thought process undertaken when teasing apart these statements versus the similar process used to assess, say, arguments expressed in symbolic logic systems. I guess that’s my interest – to make sure the baggage we bring to the table when looking at these statements doesn’t commit us to irrational conclusions or, if it does, to have the opportunity to revise our beliefs.

I took two hits and bit two bullets. On both hits the contradiction was False to 7 “justify your belief on inner conviction” and True to 15 and 17. My objection is that even though I cannot justify my beliefs based on only inner conviction that does not make me capable of denying others’ justifications of their beliefs.

I also bit the Nessie/God bullet, Bernard, and agree that there is a difference between sensible (no Nessie) and necessary (no God.)

I agree with the assessment of my last bite, True on 16. “saying that any discussion of God…cannot be constrained by basic principles of rationality… would seem to make rational discourse about God impossible.” Anyone who has tried to make rational discourse about God with someone who disagrees with your answer on question 1 knows that that is the deal.

It was fun to play though.

Ryker – that i did not understand what you meant could imply two things: 1) as you said, you did not clarify; 2) or more likely, I did not read carefully enough.

After exhaustive and higly scientific Boolean searches, I found only one logic test worth attention.

If Iraq says it doesn’t have WMD, the lack of evidence of existence doesn’t preclude existence. That is, it would not be rational to believe in nonexistence. The lack of evidence of nonexistence does not increase the likelihood of existence. In the first instance, a probability of existence 0.

If Iraq says it doesn’t have WMD, the lack of evidence of existence doesn’t preclude existence. That is, it would not be rational to believe in nonexistence. The lack of evidence of nonexistence does not increase the likelihood of existence. In the first instance, a probability of existence less than 1 can’t be excluded. In the second instance, if you start with a probability of 0, the lack of evidence of nonexistence does not make the probability of existence greater than 0.

should read “a probability of existence equal to 1 can’t be excluded”

or it would be rational to believe in nonexistence only with a probability less than one given the lack of evidence of existence

Alice:

I find your post pretty incomprehensible.

If no evidence of Iraqi WMDs is found despite a thorough search for such evidence, it is rational to conclude that Iraqi WMDs probably do not exist.

Given that I was expecting to emerge from the test as a bloody, bullet-riddled corpse, I was happy to merely take two direct hits. And, yeah, I’d have to concede that the test’s reasoning was valid when it argued with me over my ‘hits’.

Questions 10 and 14 are poorly worded if they are meant to expose internal contradictions in peoples’ beliefs. The “bullet” seems to depend on a very strong use of the excluded middle in an entirely opaque context; it is not obvious that “it is rational to believe” is incompatible with “is a matter of faith, not rationality” in context. I think that the problem is that the authors are trying to treat “it is rational to believe” as a simple one-place predicate, assuming that the same standards of rationality apply when we are considering the existence of a physical giant lizard versus a non-material supernatural entity. On the one hand, we have a clear concept of what might constitute evidence for or against the existence of a monster in Loch Ness; we don’t have any such clear beliefs in the theological case.

For example, replace Nessie in Q10 and God in Q14 with “the existence of a solution to Fermat’s Last Theorem”. We then get:

10: If, despite years of trying, no strong evidence or argument has been presented to show that Fermat’s Last Theorem has a solution for values of n>2, it is rational to believe that such a solution does not exist.

and

14: As long as there are no compelling arguments or evidence that show that there is no solution of Fermat’s Last Theorem for values of n>2, then belief that there is no solution is based on (faith) intution, not (rationality) proof.

And it seems to me that any mathematician who believed 10 before 1997 would also have to believe in the truth of 14. Substitute the travelling-salesman problem or your favourite open question, etc.

I also question, on Wittgensteinian grounds, the following direct hit, sustained by me:

>>You’ve just taken a direct hit! Earlier you said that it is not justifiable to base one’s beliefs about the external world on a firm, inner conviction, paying no regard to the external evidence, or lack of it, for the truth or falsity of this conviction, but now you say it’s justifiable to believe in God on just these grounds. That’s a flagrant contradiction< <

This is only a contradiction if I were to believe that God was part of the external world, or that external evidence is the only kind of evidence, two questions which I was never asked.

Bit two bullets: one for requiring that proof of God’s existence must meet higher standards than proof of evolutionary theory (answered true to questions 6 and 13), and another for saying that God could do what is logically impossible.

The first one seems fair, but the second one not so. I’m under the impression (or is it misconception?) that what is a necessary truth in one possible world is not a necessary truth in another possible world. If God is that which creates such worlds (I put down that I was an atheist, and was telling the truth, BTW), then God could create a world in which circles could be squared, and 1 + 1 = 72.

Maybe that’s an extravagant misunderstanding of the question (and a baroquely mistaken defense), but FWIW, there it is.

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