In a YouTube short (Ricky Gervais Debunked) posted by Alex O’Connor, he criticizes Ricky Gervais’s use, on Stephen Colbert’s show, of what I call the ‘just one more god’ argument. Gervais is an atheist and Colbert is a Catholic. The idea is that humanity has posited thousands of gods, all but one of which Colbert rejects. Gervais rejects all of the gods that Colbert rejects but adds just one more: the Catholic God in which Colbert believes.
O’Connor shows a short clip of that part of the Colbert/Gervais conversation, which goes like this:
Gervais:
So you believe in one God, I assume.
Colbert:
Uhhh, in three persons, but go ahead.
Gervais:
Okay, so you believe– okay. But there are 3,000 to choose from, you know, of people —
Colbert:
I’ve done some reading, yeah.
Gervais:
So basically, you believe in– you deny one less god than I do. You don’t believe in 2,999 gods, and I don’t believe in just one more.
O’Connor tries a reductio ad absurdum:
Which I think is the most, like, unthinking thing that you can say about the issue of God’s existence. Imagine you were sat around with your ten brothers and none of you had ever met your father, and you were discussing “What do you think our father was like?” One of your brothers says “Well, you know, I think he might have been French.” And someone says “No, no, no, I’m sure he was American. If you look at the kind of man that Mum’s into, I’m sure he might have been American.” And, you know, the next brother thinks he’s Italian, and the next brother thinks that he’s German, and it gets round to me and I say “You know what, guys? I don’t think we had a dad.”
And they’re like, “What? Of course you had a bloody dad. What are you talking about?” [I reply] “Oh, hold on, guys. Like, you don’t believe in the French dad, and the American dad, and the German dad. You don’t believe in any of those dads. I just go one dad further.”
I think you’re making a mistake there… Notice that there’s a huge difference between, say, the difference between ten and eleven, or the difference between five and six, and the difference between zero and one. It’s a difference of quality rather than just quantity.
He’s being unfair to Gervais. If you watch the full Gervais/Colbert segment and not just the part that O’Connor excerpted, it’s clear that Gervais isn’t trying to justify atheism, he’s just explaining it. Here’s the lead-up to the part I quoted above:
Gervais:
I’m an agnostic atheist, technically. ‘Agnostic’ means no one knows whether there’s a God. So everyone’s technically an agnostic. We don’t know.
Colbert:
That’s true.
Gervais:
An agnostic atheist is someone who doesn’t know whether there’s a God or not, as no one does.
Colbert:
So you’re not convicted of your atheism.
Gervais:
Well, I am. No, I am. Atheism is only rejecting the claim that there is a God. Atheism isn’t a belief system. Atheism– so this is atheism in a nutshell. You say, “There’s a God.” I say, “Can you prove that?” You say, “No.” I say, “I don’t believe you then.”
Then Gervais presents the ‘just one more god’ argument. To me, it’s clear that he doesn’t think it disproves the existence of God. He’s just explaining atheism and pointing out that Colbert is an atheist with respect to thousands of gods, while he is an atheist with respect to just one more.
When I use that argument, I use it to invite the believer to apply the same skepticism to their own religious beliefs as they do to the religious beliefs of others. If a Muslim tries to convert a Christian, the Christian will presumably demand evidence that Islam is right and Christianity is wrong. Without such evidence, the Christian won’t be persuaded. That same standard should be applied to their own Christian beliefs, and in my experience, that rarely happens. For most people, their religious beliefs are the default, and evidence is only required when they are asked to change those beliefs.
O’Connor is right that ‘just one more god’ would be a poor argument against God’s existence, but that isn’t what Gervais (or I) use it for.
Flint writes, “I’d argue that it’s not that there are as many gods as there are religions, but rather there are as many gods as there are theists”
This is an interesting point, and ties into some earlier comments about language. Abstract concepts, especially about non-empirical entities, including fictional entities, exist in the minds of individuals: they do not exist outside in some composite, unified manner. The only way they take on a quasi-independent nature is through the use of shared language, where groups of people come to have approximately similar understandings. So Flint is right in this sense: each theist has a different concept of what “god” means, from slightly different to very different. Furthermore, since there is no commonly accessible empirical experience of God, all that shared language can do is express an affirmation (but not a confirmation) of what a group of people want the word to mean.
Flint:
One of the most common mistakes I see theists making is that they assume that if their beliefs seem internally consistent and capable of explaining the things they think are important, then those beliefs are true. In reality, those are necessary but not sufficient. False beliefs can be internally consistent, and false beliefs can provide explanations.
What we really want (or should want) are beliefs that are internally consistent, capable of explaining, and better supported by evidence than competing beliefs.
aleta:
Right. We can’t observe God directly, so most of what people say about God is pure speculation. Even if we assume that he exists, we can only infer his nature from what we see around us. It’s evident that if God exists (and is omni-everything), then he doesn’t care much for humans, given that he allows us to suffer so badly, keeps himself hidden from us, and doesn’t give us the information we desire, such as knowing that he exists, what his plan is for us, what is and isn’t ethically permissible, how to cure cancer, who drank the last Coke in the refrigerator, etc.
People like Bill will argue that he does provide us with some of that information via the Bible, but as I’ve commented before, blaming the Bible on God is a huge insult to him. No self-respecting omniGod would ‘publish’ a book that bad and say ‘this is my word’.
I added another comment to Dillahunty’s video this morning:
Dillahunty hasn’t replied to it or the previous comment, which I left last night. I’m not expecting a response at this point, because what could he say when his position (that claims aren’t evidence) is wrong by his own criterion? Perhaps he’ll surprise me, but his earlier prickly response suggests that he won’t.
colewd,
What problems? Be specific. How does ‘design theory’ better explain those same problems? ‘A guy made a watch so a guy must have done X’ seems weedy. Especially since the watch is a result of the action of many separate designers, which I doubt you are arguing for.
Consensus omnium is a different, also weak, argument. Christianity is not, in fact, the dominant religion, nor is disbelief in evolution a dominant subset thereof.
Allan Miller,
Also to note: the most vocal flat earthers are biblical literalists.
How restrictive. Many faiths, both present and historical, have whole pantheons of gods. Generally, each of them has a specialty (although I understand that Hindu gods are essentially infinite in number, and only about six are more or less specialists). Your comment makes the repeated assumption that there is only one god (which is one more than the atheist accepts), but it ignores the whole pantheon of gods, demi-gods, etc.
Well, I think we know enough about biblical history to realize that there were quite a few competing sects, and at least four were influential enough to get their say in the bible. Interestingly, some of the historical stuff in the bible has been ratified by archaeologists – like how certain buildings were constructed, etc. The OT covers maybe a thousand years of history, some of it (perhaps most) fictions, so it’s necessary to separate the straight descriptive stuff from anything religious. For example, the tel al amarna tablets sent (as letters) from Jerusalem to Egypt speak of harassment from the bandits in the hills – which have been reasonably interpreted as David and Saul and the biblical warring tribes of Israel.
In any case, the Bible is a compendium of miscellaneous stuff, collected over a long period, flavored with religious interpretation or fabrication, and was never intended (or written) as a coherent work of literature. Quite a few different gods are mentioned – at least different by attitude, behavior, interface with the authors or those known to the authors, so that several of these gods wouldn’t dream of doing what others did. But they all have the same name, and all lead the One True Faith in the minds of those writing biblical texts.
Flint:
No, this entire thread is premised on the fact that there are thousands of gods, as mentioned in the OP and the comments. In the comment you’re quoting, I’m talking specifically about the Christian God as you can see from my mention of the Bible, which is a Christian book. No one claims that the Bible is Krishna’s holy word, after all.
Of course, but many if not most Christians think that it is coherent and that it is God’s inspired word. Hence my statement:
Christians including Bill cite its supposed unity and coherence as evidence that it couldn’t have been written without divine inspiration, but that’s absurd to anyone who actually reads it with an open mind. It’s not unified and it’s not coherent. I’m sure Bill makes that claim not because he’s read the Bible and reached that conclusion, but rather because he’s been told by others that the Bible is coherent and he wants to believe it.
They don’t all have the same name. There are other gods besides Yahweh in the Bible. Real gods, not just idols, though that will probably upset Bill, who like most Christians thinks the Bible is monotheistic.
I’ve been reading that there is some disagreement about the First Commandment. One interpretation is that this is a concession that there are other gods, but the Jewish god insists on being top dog. Another interpretation is that this commandment dismisses other gods as being fiction or superstition and not actual gods. Another interpretation is that the object of proper attention is the god and not material wealth or personal popularity. But here is a direct mention of “other gods”, which I think indicates that the Jewish author(s) were deliberately contrasting monotheism with the polytheism they saw around them.
keiths,
Arguments with you and your cherry picking skill convinced me of divine inspiration. 🙂
colewd:
That’s an odd argument to make, given that the topic is the supposed coherence and unity of the Bible. It’s precisely the ‘cherries’ that matter — the places where the Bible contradicts itself or doesn’t cohere, and there are plenty of those. Wouldn’t an omnipotent and omniscient God easily be able to produce a unified and coherent book? The Bible ain’t it.
Flint:
The dominant view among Biblical scholars is that the author of that commandment thought that other gods existed and that Yahweh was specifically commanding the Israelites to put him first. The commandment didn’t apply to everyone else. That’s consistent with the fact that the gods of that era were all tribal gods, and you were supposed to worship the god of your particular tribe. Yahweh was just one of those tribal gods.
Those are rejected by most biblical scholars, the exceptions being the ones who are motivated by their present-day religious beliefs and cannot allow the Bible to say what it clearly says.
And affirming the actual existence of the other gods.
I should add that the first commandment is far from the only place where the existence of other gods is affirmed. One of the most interesting places — and Bill will hate this — is where Deuteronomy mentions that Yahweh has a dad, from whom he inherits the land of Israel. Other gods get other lands.
Early Judaism was decidely polytheistic, and Yahweh was just one among multiple tribal gods. It was only later that he got promoted to head honcho.