I'm giving the book five stars to bump it up to the recommender algorithm. Books like this need to be more widely read. The main takeaway is that mostI'm giving the book five stars to bump it up to the recommender algorithm. Books like this need to be more widely read. The main takeaway is that most people have an instinct to experience (and express) contempt for people who violate the standard they hold other people to. Etelson explains how the psychology works now, but she doesn't delve into the natural history of it too much (the contempt instinct may be a genetic hangover from our Stone Age tribal past). Back then, for the first roughly 300,000 years of humanity's existence as a species, most people lived in small groups, surrounded by other small groups which were often hostile. The world was harsh, and few people could survive for long on their own. Therefore group cohesion was essential for our ancestors' survival.
Fast forward to today, and now we have a world with over 8 billion people. Fossil-fueled transportation has allowed many millions of people to migrate and mix all over the planet, building huge cities and nations with far more diversity than most of our ancestors ever had to cope with. And yet our brains still instinctively try to treat everybody else as if they are wayward members of our own little tribe - when they are not. They are members of other tribes, and our feeble Stone Age brains never really learned how to deal with those.
Etelson proposes a different way to talk to other tribes, using the rather peacocky marketing-speak term "Powerful Non-Defensive Communication." (For those of us who view tooting one's own horn as bad form, that's a bit cringe-inducing. It sounds like a name Trump might come up with, except that Trump slaps his own name on everything before he bankrupts it.) Etelson's method is not all that different from the norms of communication you find among scientists and scholars (see for example Rapoport's Rules for Debate, as adapted by Daniel Dennett), whose communities have for centuries been dealing with clashing views and increasing diversity. The main difference is that scientists and scholars place a much higher emphasis on facts than Etelson does. This is understandable, since few voters care primarily about facts, and few people have the intelligence necessary to cope with the complexity of facts on most real-world issues.
I don't agree with Etelson's entire world view, and I don't think her world view completely agrees with itself. For example, she's comfortable with biodeterminism when it comes to people's political predispositions (the emerging branch of behavioral genetics called "biopolitics"). But then she reverts to anti-hereditarianism when it comes to explaining economic disparities, health disparities, and so on. While there is certainly structural racism and sexism, it can't be the only factor, when the so-called "model minorities" in the USA (namely, Asian-Americans and Jewish-Americans) have faced plenty of negative discrimination yet still found a way to out-earn white Americans on average. That's an inconvenient fact for the anti-hereditarian narrative that doesn't appear in the book - imagine that!
But it would stand to reason that if we can inherit our political leanings - to some degree - then why wouldn't we also inherit our prosperity to some degree? Surely a person's innate cognitive capacity and behavioral traits have some influence on their ability to learn marketable skills and market them. Just because the social playing field isn't level doesn't mean the genetic playing field has to be. Why would Nature be fair when Nature's people are not?
Etelson also doesn't seem to have read a single book about the science of human intelligence differences. She even claims - without evidence - that intelligence has nothing to do with a person's cognitive errors:
Cognitive errors arise innocently and are unrelated to intelligence.
Given that "intelligence" is synonymous with "cognitive capacity," one wonders how a person's capacity for something would have nothing to do with their performance on that something. Certainly, people at all intelligence levels make mistakes, but do they all make mistakes at the same rate? The point of a test in school is to make it hard enough so very few students will get a perfect score. Most students will miss at least one question, but some students will consistently miss more questions on test after test. And what is true in school is true in life, which functions like a giant unending IQ test. That's why, for example, a low IQ can shave a decade or more off a person's life - because having a low IQ hampers a person's ability to obtain and heed health-related messaging. The low-IQ person is more likely to develop unhealthful habits. There is a whole field of study about this, called cognitive epidemiology, which Etelson seems to have never heard of.
Intelligence is the ability that enabled some unusually intelligent people to discover the long list of human cogntive biases in the first place. Intelligence differences also have some effect on which humans are likely to read about their cognitive biases and work to overcome them. If you read a book like this one, you are probably in the top quartile of the IQ distribution. You'll still make some errors, because everybody does, but the odds are that you'll make fewer cognitive errors than a person in the bottom quartile, who is very unlikely to read a book like this and become aware of cognitive biases.
But people don't get to choose how smart they are any more than they can choose how tall they are. That choice was largely made for us by factors we couldn't control, such as our genes and our early childhood environments and nutrition. Scientific progress might someday give people control, but for now we're stuck with what we have.
Etelson makes some other head-scratchers, like this one:
Liberals tend to value cooperation, collectivism, diversity, equality, critical thinking, questioning authority, conflict resolution, peace, harm reduction, health and safety, compassion, freedom, and fairness. Are there contradictions embedded in this set of values? None that I can see, thanks to confirmation bias, but I’m sure a conservative could spot some.
I'm no conservative, but I thought most educated people understood the inherent contradiction between equality and freedom. The more freedom a society has, the less equality it will have, particularly in the economic arena. Given that the genetic and social playing fields are far from level, some people "are born on third base" to use the baseball metaphor. In a perfectly free society, people with advantages and privileges would be free to exploit them to gain more advantages - much like Trump's cabinet of billionaires is soon to do as I write this. Only by reducing people's economic freedom can we hope to even approximate equality. That is, if you want equality, then people cannot be free to just keep on accumulating more and more billions. Progressive taxation is a giant infringement on economic freedom, and one that most liberals endorse. If you're not for progressive taxation then what kind of liberal can you be? If you think we have too much inequality, then you must also think we have too much freedom. Unless, perhaps, you are a transhumanist who wants to level the playing field by giving everyone the same enhanced abilities. That isn't scientifically possible yet, so it's not a policy option, but it might be the only thing that could actually work.
Etelson's message is an important one: we shouldn't hurl contempt at people for things they didn't get to choose. But then again, we didn't get to choose how much contempt instinct we happen to have either. The adjudicators have no more free will than the offenders. But reading a book like this becomes just another factor in the giant causal chain that decides our future actions, and maybe a factor that can nudge us a little in the direction of sanity. So read it....more
Seth's fourth book is about the communication style of the Christian community he left. What formerly sounded normal and reasonable to Seth when he was immersed in his formative community tends to sound rather odd to the outsider. Seth now takes the outsider's perspective toward his former speech habits, and concludes what the book title claims.
We know from psychometry that our adult IQs are about as stable as our adult heights, provided we haven't suffered any accidents, diseases, or age-related decline that reduce our intelligence. So it's likely Seth is correct when he says his intelligence level didn't change when he deconverted from Christianity to reason. But a human brain behaves quite differently as a function of what it feeds on. In Seth's previous book Deconverted: A Journey from Religion to Reason he details his religious upbringing; and then in Confessions of a Former Fox News Christian he describes his continued indoctrination by right-wing mouthpieces such as Rush Limbaugh. This book rounds out the story by going into more depth on the content of the doctrinal payload.
The term "idiot" might be a little over the top, since originally "idiot" was a clinical term to describe a person with profound mental disability, corresponding to an IQ of 25 or less and a mental age (at physical adulthood) of 3 years or less. That is, an "idiot" is an adult who performs like the average 3 year old and requires lifetime custodial care. Clearly that doesn't describe the vast majority of adults, of any faith or no faith, given that most adults are at least able to function independently.
There might be stronger parallels between the reasoning styles of the Christian and those of the delusional schizophrenic. See for example this quotation from the book Schizophrenia: A Very Short Introduction (2003):
One of the problems for people with schizophrenia is that their perceptions and beliefs are no longer appropriately constrained by the perceptions and beliefs of other people. Patients with bizarre beliefs are not irrational � they can justify their beliefs. There was a 56-year-old patient in Shenley who claimed to be six weeks old. Questioned by Eve Johnstone that this surely could not be right as she could walk and talk and do things for herself, she replied ‘I am very advanced�. The kinds of justification given are often quite skilful. For example, Alan Baddeley and his colleagues describe a patient who believes he is a Russian chess Grand Master.
But if you don’t speak Russian, isn’t that rather odd for a Russian chess player?
Yes, well, I don’t speak Russian, but I think it’s possible that I’ve been hypnotised to forget things like the fact that I can speak Russian.
This justification is very unlikely, but not logically impossible. What makes the TV series ''The X-Files'' such a successful example of the horror genre is that Mulder’s paranoid beliefs and the convoluted explanations he develops for them always turn out to be true. This madman sees the world as it is and we, the sane, are deluded.
Because the delusions of the schizophrenic are usually idiosyncratic (not shared by others), most people can recognize the delusions for what they are. And the delusions often hamper the schizophrenic's ability to function. This makes schizophrenia quite different than Christianity - odd Christian beliefs are widely shared, and generally stay compartmented away from real life (although not always - some varieties of Christianity reject medical care, leading to pointless death and suffering). Thus Christianity is usually not as debilitating as schizophrenia, which was of course necessary for Christianity to grow to great size and amass enormous wealth in the hands of its elite leaders.
But it's instructive to see the parallels between a schizophenic's justifications and Christian apologetics. In particular note the (possibiliter ergo probabiliter) used by the schizophrenic patients in the above quotation to justify their far-fetched claims. The evidence-free arguments of the Christian tend to have the same structure: "possibly, therefore probably." This differs from scientific thinking, whereby the scientist (or a whole scientific community) proposes hypotheses to explain observations, and then designs experiments or observations to test each hypothesis against the relevant evidence. (See: the .) The schizophrenic, and the Christian, think it's enough to propose one arbitrary hypothesis and elevate it immediately to the status of fact.
(Side note: given that appeal to probability is a fallacy, and fallacious reasoning is irrational, I disagree with the authors of the Schizophrenia book where they claim that "Patients with bizarre beliefs are not irrational." Offering plausible explanations can still be irrational when the patient refuses to consider alternative explanations, some of which are much more probable.)
Given these similarities in argument style, perhaps a more precise title for the book would be Christianity Made Me Talk Like a Schizophrenic - or, alternatively, we could use the portmanteau Christophrenic, just to keep clear that we aren't bringing in all the other features of schizophrenia including the poor life functioning.
My favorite chapter in Seth's book was Chapter Thirteen: Christianese � A Religion in Bumper Stickers. See this quotation. Although Seth doesn't use the word "" in the book, much of "Christianese" looks like deepities to me, or perhaps deepity-adjacent. about this:
While Seth Andrews doesn't explicitly use the term "deepity" in his book, the concept of using vague, seemingly profound language to mask a lack of substance is certainly relevant to the examples of "Christianese" he provides.
Deepities, as coined by Daniel Dennett, are statements that appear to be profound but upon closer examination, are often trivial or meaningless. They rely on ambiguity and double meaning to create an illusion of depth. Many of the phrases Andrews highlights in his book, such as "God just laid it on my heart" or "The Bible helps us 'do life' together," can be seen as examples of deepities. They sound meaningful and insightful, but they often lack specific content or clear implications.
While the term "deepity" itself might not be directly applicable to every instance of Christianese, the underlying concept of using vague language to mask a lack of substance is certainly relevant.
***
I did notice one small error in the book; Seth refers to "Former minister Dr. John Loftus ...". While John W. Loftus holds , and so is not a "Dr." (according to Wikipedia)....more
This was an interesting book to read in 2024 with the benefit of some hindsight. As the other reviews cover the book content well, I'll focus on some This was an interesting book to read in 2024 with the benefit of some hindsight. As the other reviews cover the book content well, I'll focus on some other things not already mentioned here.
The book came out in 2020, with its most recent citations being from April, 2020. That was around the time that then-President Trump quit denying that COVID-19 was a problem, but before most of the ~1.2 million reported (~1.9 million estimated) had occurred. Quite a bit has happened since then, including: and the resulting protests; Trump's loss in the to Joe Biden; Trump's subsequent attempts to overturn the free and fair election, culminating in the . (Trump's large-scale attack on law enforcement made a mockery of Republican Party posturing as the party of law and order - but Republicans are still campaigning on this claim to their gullible gaslit marks.) Since then, Trump and other MAGA figures, including Fox News, have been involved in a remarkable number of court cases. Fox platformed Trump's election lies and paid the largest known libel settlement ($787.5 million) to ; a potentially even larger is still pending as I write this. Trump himself became the first former President convicted of felonies, and faces three more criminal indictments. Trump also faces large civil judgements, pending appeals.
In a thus-far successful ploy to avoid a likely prison sentence, Trump declared his candidacy for the 2024 election at a record-early date. Trump then rolled through the Republican primaries, secured the Republican Party nomination, and in just a few hours I will learn whether he goes back to the White House, or instead possibly to the Big House. (Post-election update: well, we saw how that turned out.)
That little recap of recent history shows the problem with writing a book about politics. History remains a work in progress, and whatever you write about current events will soon need an update. If Trump wins the election tonight, then Seth's book might have come before even the halfway mark in Trump's testing of America. What Trump did after Seth's book, or what came to light about things Trump did earlier, was arguably worse than the outrages that Seth mentions. And if Trump wins tonight, there's a strong chance that much worse is yet to come. In other words, as Seth is a prisoner of when he wrote, he didn't make as strong a case against Fox dogma as he could now or in another four years.
Also after the book came out, Trump's Pope-controlled Supreme Court supermajority . Since then, Republicans have been something like the dog that caught the car on abortion. As Wikipedia recounts,
"Referenda conducted in the decision's wake in Kansas, Montana, California, Vermont, Michigan, Kentucky, and Ohio uniformly came out in favor of abortion rights, generally by margins that were both bipartisan and overwhelming."
It's interesting to read Seth's coverage of the abortion controversy in Chapter 11 with the benefit of this hindsight. For example, Seth pleads for understanding and empathy between the two sides, which is well and good when it's two people having a discussion about what they should choose. (Don't like abortion? Don't have one.) But only one side is pro-choice! The other side, the Fox News Christian side, wants to use police state power to take away choice from everyone.
Whenever voters have been given a choice, thus far they have come down consistently against the theocrats. Thus from a tactical standpoint, it doesn't matter much what the Fox News marks think about abortion. When voters get to decide, there usually aren't enough theocrats to exert government control over the uterus. Accordingly, the anti-choice crowd has relied on non-democratic means to override the will of the people, such as the multi-decade project of the to increase the number of conservative judges who, with their lifetime appointments, no longer need to care about what voters think.
But I could point out a peculiarity in the "Fox News Christian" argument against abortion that Seth relays to us:
Still, approximately 80 percent of U.S. citizens embrace some type of heaven, a place where the soul resides after physical death. Given that significant number and the fact that 167 million Americans claim some flavor of Christianity, it becomes easier to understand why nearly half of the population opposes abortion. Often, that opposition isn’t motivated by a desire to discriminate against or control women but is instead laser focused on the unborn child, the precious soul, the human life that has no ability to defend itself. That rallying cry stirs the righteous to battle. Defenseless children are under attack, so God’s army must mobilize. Ultimately, this is an evangelical crusade to defend a soul residing among the multiplying cells.
But does it become easier to understand? Not when I think for a few seconds about it. Seth doesn't point out the glaringly obvious flaw in the argument that he no longer accepts. Namely, that Christians believe the soul is immortal and immaterial, thus making its defense both unnecessary and impossible. This imaginary soul survives anything, even a nuclear explosion. The only thing that mortal humans can defend is the biological part, the soul's prison of cells. Defending the part we can defend carries a large risk of being harmful to the soul, because in the normal course of things the zygote is going to grow up to be a sinner in need of salvation. What if the resulting sinful human fails to believe the correct religion, out of the thousands on offer? Then the soul that didn't need saving in the first place ends up in hell for eternity, experiencing endless burning and torture from the loving God.
It's not clear what the various Christian brands believe about the status of the aborted soul - the bible certainly doesn't clarify it, which wouldn't be surprising given that the pre-scientific goat-herders who wrote the bible had no idea of how fertilization and development work. (They also did not know where the Sun goes at night, making the bible worse than useless for astronomy.) So given the bible's silence, every Christian gets to make up their own story. It seems a bit unfair to send those souls to hell when they couldn't have committed any sin yet. Thus if the imaginary God views fairness like I do, zygote heaven is probably a pretty decent place. It might even be the actual (fictional) heaven. In that case, if Christians took their Great Commission seriously and they wanted to save the maximum possible number of souls, then they would fertilize and abort as many zygotes as possible.
The incoherency of the "soul" argument against abortion illustrates the disordered thinking of the anti-choice brands of "Christian." It might be more correct to say that the reason they give is not their true reason. The true reason might be that they are illogically conflating your embryo with their baby, such that harm to the one becomes harm to the other. (The error of connecting things that are in fact unrelated is called .) This sentiment is similar to that of the dog fanciers who complained about . If you happen to be a person who keeps dogs, and loves them, then hearing about some other person shooting their dog can feel like an attack on your dog, even though it is not.
Seth also points out the inconsistency between the Fox News Christian's deep concern for the embryo, and then their subsequent loss of concern for the resulting baby. We see this most pointedly at the southern US border, where grown-up embryos from Latin America come looking for work in the USA. Pro-"life" folks tend to be less enthusiastic about "life" when it's an undocumented immigrant. And just to pile on the irony, some fraction of those immigrants exist because Republican Presidential administrations kept blocking US assistance to family planning programs in low-income countries. That is, the number of future migrants is to some degree a policy choice, and Republicans have consistantly supported natalist policies ever since Reagan. Seth doesn't point out how pro-life attitudes increase the number of future immigrants for Fox News to terrify its viewers with - that's a point I'd like to see made loudly and often....more
In this book, Sterba and Swinburne debate the classical . This is a topic with a long and complex history that I won't summarize here (the Wikipedia article I linked gives a good introduction).
Only a very bad God could permit the suffering I endured by reading this book. Richard Swinburne, arguing for the superstition side, finds ways to insult the intelligence of this reader in nearly every paragraph. Swinburne, being a theologian, is unanchored to facts or evidence, which is to say unachored to reality. Therefore he is able to revise the properties of his imaginary God as necessary to make it somewhat compatible with all the evil in the world. James Sterba, arguing for the reason side, tries to stanch the flow of nonsense, but largely agrees, bafflingly, to grant much of Swinburne's fabulism, while trying to show how Swinburne's version of God is incompatible with the evil in the world, in particular with the "horrendous" evil. While Sterba's arguments for the most part hit home with me, I had to work harder than necessary to decode them, because Sterba's writing style is too often the opposite to what you see described in books about "plain language". Run-on sentences, subject and predicate divided by multiple subordinate clauses, etc. Many of Sterba's sentences required me to read them two or three times, and even then it was hard to be sure I had it. I was reminded of this quotation from Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! (Adventures of a Curious Character) by Richard P. Feynman, about a sociologist who encrusted simple concepts in impenetrable language. When you have to rewrite passages of a book to make sense of them, you're reading a book that a competent editor didn't. Fortunately, Artificial Intelligence might be on the verge of eliminating this instance of gratuitous suffering from the world, by translating academese into plain language for us.
I had the thought that some of Sterba's turgid prose might have been clarified with some diagrams, but I was too lazy to try drawing them. And it's not the reader's job to illustrate a book.
Both Swinburne and Sterba employ multiple acronyms I've never seen anywhere else, defined only at their first appearances. If (i.e., when) you forget an acronym when it reappears 20 pages later, there is no glossary to make lookup simple. I pity the reader of a paper copy who doesn't have an e-reader's search function. My advice: take notes as you go.
I would probably have to write another book to detail everything I didn't like about this one. But I can give a very brief taste. Here's one example, where Swinburne writes:
Since only vertebrates have brains in any way like our brains, there is no adequate reason to suppose that any creatures other than vertebrates suffer.
This is Swinburne's way to dismiss the suffering of the caterpillar being slowly eaten alive from the inside by a parasitoid wasp larva. The ichneumonidae and braconidae famously caused great problems for naive natural theologians of the 19th century. These devout men of science began with the assumption that by studying God's handiwork in Nature they would learn about the nature of God - hence, "natural" theology as opposed to "revealed" theology (i.e., "knowledge" about God deriving from "revelation"). But as natural theologians learned more about Nature, they discovered more and more horrors. (That is, things that seem horrifying to humans. Even if these things are not horrifying to the victims such as caterpillars, why would a good God have filled Nature with things to horrify us?) These horrors are hard to square with the traditional omni-benevolent God of theology, but are perfectly explained in terms of natural selection. For example, the parasitoid wasps have been shaped by natural selection to make the most efficient use of their prey. The mother wasp injects an egg into a caterpillar which then hatches, with the caterpillar providing a temporary home and food source for the growing wasp larva. The larva instinctively consumes the caterpillar's innards in a precise sequence, leaving the vital organs for last. This keeps the caterpillar alive long enough for the larva to pupate and emerge from the spent caterpillar husk as a newly-formed adult. (Fans of the Alien horror franchise will recognize these wasps as the inspiration for some of the more frightening movies that have been made.)
If we subjected an anesthetized human to the same treatment of being eaten alive, the human would not have any conscious experience of suffering. But what human observer could not see this as a tremendous evil being done to the unfeeling victim?
Now, whether or not the caterpillar has sufficient neural complexity to have subjective experiences, humans who observe the caterpillar's horrific fate certainly do. And this created difficulties for human observers who are less sociopathically detached than Swinburne apparently is. In particular, the parasitoid wasps have no other way to reproduce. This left natural theologians struggling to explain why their omni-benevolent God would have specifically designed these wasps to lay their eggs in this particularly macabre way, rather than in some other way we humans might regard as more humane. Generally speaking, we humans view it as more humane to kill quickly rather than slowly, when killing is necessary. Yet here the parasitoid wasp larva kills the host caterpillar as slowly as possible.
But in keeping with Swinburne being at least a little bit wrong about almost everything he writes, he's not even right about the sophistication of invertebrate brains. In particular, he seems unaware of the octopus. According to Wikipedia: "Octopuses have a complex nervous system and excellent sight, and are among the most intelligent and behaviourally diverse of all invertebrates."
But Swinburne points out, correctly, that it's currently impossible to know if nonhuman animals experience pain in ways like humans do. None of us can see directly into the subjective experience of any other human, let alone the experience of an animal that lacks the language to argue for its own experience. So just for fun :
Me: Do chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans experience pain and suffering like humans do? I don't refer just to behavioral indicators of pain, such as withdrawing a limb from an injury, or crying out. I refer to the subjective experience of pain, which I imagine is hard to measure objectively.
Gemini: This is a complex question that scientists and philosophers have debated for centuries. While we cannot definitively know what another being subjectively experiences, there is strong scientific evidence suggesting that chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans do experience pain and suffering in a way similar to humans.
Here's why:
* **Physiological similarities:** These great apes share many of the same neural structures and pain receptors as humans. When they experience injury or illness, their bodies release similar chemicals (like endorphins) to alleviate pain, just like ours. * **Behavioral responses:** They exhibit behaviors that are consistent with pain, such as wincing, limping, and avoiding painful stimuli. They also seek out pain relief, such as using leaves to soothe wounds. * **Cognitive empathy:** These apes are highly intelligent and empathetic. They show concern for others in pain, suggesting they understand and relate to the suffering of others.
While we cannot directly measure their subjective experience of pain, the combination of physiological, behavioral, and cognitive evidence strongly suggests that they do experience pain and suffering. It's important to treat these animals with compassion and respect, recognizing their capacity to feel pain and their need for humane treatment.
The three kinds of pain experience indicators that Gemini lists seem compelling to me. For example, seeking out pain relief sounds very telling. That's a response to pain that is in a different class than something that might be explained by instinct or reflex, such as immediately withdrawing from a painful stimulus, or crying out. To seek pain relief seems to require some level of intention and abstract thinking ability.
And cognitive empathy - how could this be merely reflexive? It seems easiest to explain in terms of an animal having mirror neurons similar to a human's, along with subjective experiences for the neurons to mirror. Trying to explain this behavior in terms of unfeeling animals behaving purely by instinct begins to sound absurd.
And just to further poke at Swinburne's "vertebrate-ism", :
Me: Do octopuses also seek pain relief?
Gemini: Yes, there's compelling evidence suggesting that octopuses experience pain and seek relief. Studies have shown that they exhibit behaviors such as:
* **Avoiding painful stimuli:** When exposed to a harmful substance, octopuses actively avoid the area where they experienced the pain. * **Seeking pain relief:** They have been observed using natural remedies like rubbing their arms against rocks or plants to soothe wounds. * **Physiological responses:** Octopuses show physiological responses to pain, such as increased heart rate and changes in skin color.
These behaviors and responses strongly suggest that octopuses have a subjective experience of pain and actively seek to alleviate it. This highlights the complex cognitive abilities and sentience of these fascinating creatures.
Now, I'm not suggesting that octopuses have complex mental lives to fully rival a human's. But it may be that they experience a lot more pain than Swinburne thinks any invertebrates can.
OK, that was a lot of retort triggered by just a few lines from Swinburne. I could do much the same thing for the rest of Swinburne's share of the book, making this review a book in its own right. But I'll stop here, except to mention that both Swinburne and Sterba accept (with Sterba allowing that he prefers but he accepts libertarianism for the debate). They agree that free will is a highly contentious topic, and that to engage with it would massively enlarge the book. Fair enough, but to dismiss the case against libertarianism puts the book on the same epistemic footing as astrology and geocentrism. See for example Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will by Robert M. Sapolsky, which obliterates any scientific basis for free will. That is, there is not the slightest hint of any activity in the brain which is uncaused by prior natural processes. Such uncaused activity would seem to require violating the conservation laws, which would mean that every time I have a thought it means a miracle happened in my head, to paraphrase Steven Pinker. If my mental life is not a continuous sequence of miracles, it means that every thought I have, and therefore every choice I make, must have been caused by natural events that happened before.
The only reason to suspect we have free will is our intuitive sense that we have it. But human intuition has been shown unreliable before. For example, before Galileo, almost everyone believed their intuitive sense that they stand on a solid, unmoving Earth, and the Sun, Moon, planets, and stars wheel around us every day. Now we know that almost everything our intuition told us about cosmology is illusory and wrong. No one with understanding of science history can feel confident taking intuition as the final word on anything - except for the existence of intuition itself.
Now, a huge part of Swinburne's theodicy hinges on humans having free will, which is convenient for the victim-blaming strategy that lets God off the hook. However, as a whole category of predestinationist Christians have long understood, free will for humans cannot be compatible with an all-powerful God. Free will also cannot be compatible with prophecy, if - as Swinburne declares - God's omniscience does not extend to knowing what all our future choices will be. But if God cannot know everything that every human will ever do, how can God predict the future where humans are involved? As an atheist, I don't suspect that prophets are anything but charlatans, but legions of Christians believe in prophecy.
Consider, for example, the prophecy that a particular human will be born centuries in the future. For this to happen, a staggering number of humans must make precisely the correct choices at the correct times. All the intermediate humans had to be born with exactly the right genomes so that the future human's parents would be brought into existence and find each other and mate at exactly the right moment to bring exactly the right sperm and egg together. This micromanaging of human choices would have to have occurred all the way back through the ancestral line. And it's not just the ancestors themselves, but also everyone else who could have interfered at any point in the process....more
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