Cover via Amazon

“the entire nation of Qatar is like a good airport terminal: pleasantly air-conditioned, with lots of shopping, a wide selection of food, and people from all around the world.”

In an effort to keep myself somewhat intellectually stimulated, I read books now and then – that is between the breaks I take from learning fatalities on Mortal Kombat. The book i’m currently reading is “The Geography of Bliss” by Eric Weiner. It is intriguing to me not only because it deals with positive psychology but also because it is a travelogue – and its always interesting to learn about different ways of life. I’m planning to go on a trip completely on my own after I graduate in May and from what I’ve read about Bhutan in this book, I think that is where I want to go.

The book is divided into chapters, and it uses each country and its most well known quality to see if happiness is related to it. To my surprise, it includes Qatar and its wealth:

“…[a]nd if money can buy happiness, or at least rent it for a while, then surely Qatar, by some measures the wealthiest country in the world, must also be the happiest .. If you were to devise an experiment to study the relationship between sudden wealth and happiness, you would need to invent something like Qatar”

The author argues that, because of its new wealth or nouveau riche, Qatar craves validation. It uses extravagant amounts of money to be noticed in the world. The 2022 world cup bid and the barcelona sponsorship by QF proves it. Ofcourse there is absolutely nothing wrong with it. I couldn’t agree more. However, there are some very unfair assessments of Qatar made in this chapter.

The first comes from the comment on EC:

“Students earn the same education and earn the same degree they would in the United states only without the frat parties or the theater groups or, for that matter, any fun at all.”

Note to Weiner – for someone who is traveling around the world discovering happiness (that you yourself claim is not the same as pleasure), I would’ve expected you to have an open mind. The author doesn’t visit EC or talk to any student in EC. His only source of information is an american staff member at an undisclosed branch campus in Education City.

He proceeds to discuss the purpose behind  western expats coming to Qatar:

“Places like Qatar attract people running away from something: a bad marriage, a criminal record, an inapporpaite email sent companywide and other sundry unhappiness.”

- there could be absolutely no other reason.

Now i’ve not been in touch with many western expats, but many of whom I have talked to are here to experience something different. Some of them want to be a part of something deeper than a 9 to 5 job. They take their work seriously. One of them reads my blog, and takes a genuine interest in what the students she supports are upto. Sweeping statements are never good, especially for someone trying to explore a different culture.

History and Happiness:

The quote at the top of this blog addresses this. This is perhaps one of the most eye-opening part of the chapter. It discusses the need for culture or heritage in order for us to feel a part of something bigger than ourselves. Life is short, but we would like to believe that we are a piece of larger puzzle, that our presence matters and that we’ve made a difference. History and Culture provide us that. When we see cultural landmarks, we realized that the place we stand in matters, and that some day, we will matter too.

The author, after visiting an old museum with an extremely limited collection of art, agrees with his friend that Qatar has no culture at all. Firstly, I don’t think such a thing can ever be true. Culture can never ceases to exist. The way one walks, eats, interacts, gets angry, uses his/her body language are all indicators of culture. A friend of mine once said that “People watching” is her way of discovering a different culture. We therefore decided to sit at a cafe and watch people pass by. Culture  thus needn’t be in a form that is documented, and it can be felt through the lives of a place’s inhabitants.

I know it might seem that I hate the book. In fact, I found the book very enjoyable. There are parts of the Qatari society that it explores very well, particularly the importance of family and tribes – both the good and the bad sides. I recommend it to everyone. What bothered me was that this book is  a bestseller and the author should’ve written a bit more responsibly since the book will change the perceptions of many.

Perhaps we need to live in a place instead of visit it in order to gain a full understanding of what it offers. I remember my first few weeks in New Delhi were very unpleasant. But as time went on, I began to love the huge, lively city where there was a greater sense of freedom than i’ve ever experienced. First impressions are, well, just first impressions.

Frodo intends, of course, to stop Pippin from revealing the crowded bar too much information. He jumps on a table and makes a speech. But the evil things that happen often spring from good motives.

Once on the table he finds quite unaccountably the desire . . . to slip it [the Ring] on and vanish out of the silly situation.

How do good hobbits end up serving the purpose of evil? It happens through the intersection of evil and weaknesses which evil can exploit: It seemed to him, somehow, as if the suggestion came to him from outside, from someone or something in the room.

After a song and a fall from the table Frodo vanishes. Feeling foolish afterward, he tries to figure out how it happened: He could only suppose that he had been handling it in his pocket while he sang, and that somehow it had slipped on when he stuck out his hand with a jerk to save his fall.

By contrast, Strider is wise. He knows how to keep weaknesses far from the manipulating hand of evil. It is not just good intent that hobbits need, but wisdom as well, wisdom about evil and many other things.

Near the end of chapter 7, Bombadil advised them: Don’t you go a-meddling with old stone. They were to pass quickly through the Barrow Downs on the green grass passing the downs by on the West Side.

They followed Bombadil’s plan, but their mistake was a small one: they went down into a hollow circle. In the midst of it stood a single stone, standing tall under the sun above, and at this hour casting no shadow. It was shapeless and yet significant; like a landmark, or a guarding finger, or more like a warning . . . so they set their backs against the east side of the stone.

At noon the stone casts no shadow. In the full light it looks harmless. But this old stone will make them wait for a darker hour: They woke suddenly and uncomfortably from a sleep they never meant to take. The standing stone was cold, and it cast a long pale shadow that stretched eastward over them.

Now it is near dark and a fog is rolling in. A cold grey shadow sprang up in the East behind . . . They felt as if a trap was closing about them.

And, fooled by the one stone that stood apart from the others, seemingly harmless, they find themselves separated in the dark and are soon prisoners of the Barrow Wights. Temptation comes in harmless guises.

If Bombadil had not saved them, the Quest would have ended before it started.

In this chapter Loftus exclusively takes issue with a statement made by William Lane Craig, which has been much-discussed in the blogosphere, that were he to go back in time and see Jesus not rise from the dead, he would assume he had been tricked. Craig’s reason for thinking this is twofold:

(1) Had Jesus not risen from the dead, Craig wouldn’t have the Holy Spirit within him; Craig does have the Spirit; therefore, Jesus must have risen from the dead.
(2) The inner witness of the Holy Spirit is in some way (apart from the previous syllogism) epistemically stronger than all other kinds of evidence.

Craig adds the caveat that if he knew Jesus didn’t rise from the dead, he would not be a Christian.

This fact about Craig bothers Loftus, so he spends a chapter on it. I can decipher a few separate difficulties Loftus perceives. First, Loftus “see[s] no reason why the evidence cannot trump [Craig's] belief in the witness of the Spirit. … There is no way the witness of the Holy Spirit can be more reliable than his own two eyes if he went back in time and saw for himself, but that’s what he said.”

A second problem Loftus perceives is that people in competing faiths claim to have comparable experiences. Loftus cites Craig and William Alston as holding that people in other religions may have an experience of God “as the Ground of Being on whom we creatures are dependent, or as the Moral Absolute from whom values derive, or even as the loving Father of mankind.” Loftus in response quotes Michael Martin, who says that “To accept Craig’s thesis one must believe an outrageous and outlandish hypothesis: namely, that billions of people now and in the past were not telling the truth when they claimed that they never had such an experience.” This is a most curious response, since the claim that everyone has had an experience of God is not under discussion. The issue hasn’t arisen in this chapter; why does Loftus offer a response to it?

Loftus goes on to point out, and quote others as saying, that Craig’s personal experiences don’t constitute third personal evidence. Such experiences, while perhaps constituting good evidence for the person having the experience, are limited in their ability to convince others.

Loftus then offers a dual criticism, that there’s no account of how the inner witness teaches Craig specific doctrines, and furthermore that Christians have disagreements about doctrine.

Loftus ends by claiming that Craig can’t distinguish between emotional feelings and the Spirit, and furthermore that there are better explanations of religious experience, such as “wish fulfillment.”

Some criticisms:

(1) The chapter’s main project is pointless, because no one in apologetics or philosophy generally seeks to convince other people based on their personal experiences, however veridical. Craig certainly doesn’t do this – why spend time attacking his psychological disposition?

(2) Loftus’ non-sequitur regarding other religions was noted above. In any case, competing religious experiences do not provide defeaters for someone without additional premises, such as reason to think the experiences are equally credible, comparably strong corroborating evidence, etc.

(3) The point about specific doctrines and characteristics of God seems like a non-starter to me. First, there are plenty of other items which motivate specific doctrines and other beliefs – e.g., philosophical considerations, historical facts, etc. Second, there aren’t any conceptual grounds for thinking that God could not reveal specific doctrines to someone directly. I certainly don’t think Christian doctrines have been revealed to me, but autobiography is not relevant.

(4) Loftus’ point about better explanations for religious experience at least goes beyond the irrelevant topic of the chapter. But unfortunately it also constitutes a non-starter. Unreliable mechanisms can generate any number of experiences and beliefs (e.g. visual hallucinations, feelings of paranoia, etc.). But this is not evidence that our visual apparatus, or reasoning, is generally unreliable. The same observation applies to any cognitive faculty, including faculties involved in religious experience. The widespread confusion on this issue annoys me.

(5) A general point here is needed: So-called “Holy Spirit epistemology” plausibly takes two contemporary philosophical forms. The first is “presuppositional apologetics.” I have nothing favorable to say about this philosophical method, as it is weirdly postmodernist in its allowing personal perspective and narrative to dominate our critique of outside ideas. Maybe interesting worldviews can be constructed on the basis of presupposed theological resources (e.g. the Bible), but usually that is not the question of interest. A second, more substantive form of “Holy Spirit epistemology” really just involves what would be true if the Holy Spirit were active. In Plantinga’s application of his epistemology to Christian belief, for example, he argues that, in virtue of epistemological mechanisms including the Holy Spirit, Christian belief, if true, is very likely warranted, warrant being that quality enough of which turns true belief into knowledge. A warranted belief is produced by properly functioning cognitive faculties in a congenial epistemic environment with a design plan successfully aimed at truth. Because Christian theism (specifically the so-called “Aquinas/Calvin model”) posits, among other things, the “internal instigation of the Holy Spirit,” its truth will very likely result in the corresponding beliefs being warranted. Loftus either misunderstands the use of the Holy Spirit in Christian epistemology, or deliberately distorts it. Very likely he actually has no interest in it, nor should he, given his non-truth-oriented goal to merely “overwhelm the believer.” But it seems to me to be a matter of course that if the spirit of God is present within a person, other forms of evidence will and should be unconvincing. Yet Loftus arbitrarily limits the theoretical ability of God to provide a self-authenticating witness.

This chapter seeks to develop a couple of arguments, mostly inspired by David Hume and J.L. Mackie. Loftus begins by giving four prima facie motivations for finding certain Biblical miracle claims implausible: the miracle narratives sometimes represent (1) an “outmoded cosmological viewpoint,” (2) sometimes violate “natural science,” (3) sometimes violate “biological sciences,” and (4) sometimes “just seem strange.” These four reasons collapse into one reason, that miracles seem out of place given our general understanding of the universe, supported by natural science.

Loftus repeats a view he attributes to Hume, that even if a miracle occurred, it wouldn’t be rational to accept, since it is always more likely that a miracle has not occurred. This is an epistemological argument about rationality, but Hume also presents arguments particular to empirical knowledge of history. Along these lines Loftus approvingly cites Ronald Nash as saying that the strongest such argument from Hume is that competing miracle claims of different religions cancel each other out.

In addressing objections to what he takes to be Hume’s argument, Loftus’ own discussion reduces to a claim he relies on throughout the chapter and book, that what one does here depends on whether or not one already accepts Christian (or Hindu, or Muslim…) theism.

Loftus describes Mackie’s similar view that one might address miracles in two different “contexts.” The first is where divine intervention is “on the cards” – say, in a discussion between two theists. The second is where the discussion is really about “the truth of theism itself.” Loftus criticizes Plantinga’s response to Mackie on the basis that Plantinga “ignores” this distinction by “debating Mackie from within a viewpoint Mackie doesn’t accept.”

Loftus refers to John Earman’s book Hume’s Abject Failure. However, in this section he addresses not Earman but William Lane Craig and J.P. Moreland. Loftus repeats the accusation that how one evaluates the evidence depends on background knowledge, and that for Christian apologists this includes the existence of God.

Loftus then wonders how an immaterial God could interact with a material world. He says that Christians “need to show how it is possible for two different types of, for lack of a better word, ‘substances,’ can interact.”

Loftus ends the chapter by presenting a dilemma: if Christians show how miracles can happen, then they aren’t miracles; if they can’t show how miracles can happen, then skeptics won’t be convinced.

Here are a few comments:

(1)  Two different miracle claims cancel each other out only if they are equally credible and mutually exclusive. I suspect this is almost never the case. Competing claims in general are just about never equally credible, even if both are ridiculous. Loftus compares the miracle claim that God inspired Muhammad’s writing of the Koran with the claim that God raised Jesus from the dead. On plausible readings of the Koran, these two miracles can’t have both occurred, because the Koran claims Jesus did not rise from the dead. But I take it that there are well-developed historical arguments for the resurrection, and I assume there are arguments for the inspiration of the Koran. These arguments can be compared, and then we can decide which claim is more credible. Until we do this sort of analysis, we can’t say they cancel each other out merely in virtue of their mutual exclusivity.

(2) For some reason Loftus almost invariably ends up relying on the claim that belief in miracles depends on belief about theism. Of course there is technically an entailment, namely miracles entail a supernatural agent; likewise, atheism entails there being no miraculous events. But there is not necessarily an epistemological dependency in one direction. As Loftus knows, apologetics for miracle claims mostly do not assume theism. Apologists Loftus cites (e.g. William Craig and Gary Habermas) offer such arguments. The claim in non-presuppositional apologetics is that these arguments are compelling even if one does not assume theism. The hodgepodge of excerpts Loftus gathers in his chapter obscure this aspect of the most common defenses of miracles.

(3) Loftus’ dismissal of Plantinga is characteristic of his apparently poor education in philosophy. Plantinga’s point, here and elsewhere, is that because one’s belief about theism is so crucially connected to evaluating miracles, one cannot dismiss miracle claims without first addressing theism. If the atheologian fails to do this, then, in light of this fact, he has failed to offer a defeater for Christian belief in miracle claims. Loftus is apparently oblivious to this subtlety in Plantinga and, it seems, in the whole issue itself. Thus Plantinga isn’t debating Mackie “from within” some presupposed viewpoint.

(4) It is plainly false that Christians (or anyone else) must first show how a phenomenon occurs before showing that the phenomenon occurs. Generally, the exact opposite is true. We usually have to be aware that phenomena occur before we start investigating mechanisms. I take this to be a relatively trivial methodological principle, even in the natural sciences.

(5) Loftus’ closing dilemma is confused. The way he characterizes it is highly equivocal. Trivially, if a Christian offers a “natural” explanation of a miracle yet has a definition of miracle stipulating violation of natural law, then the event will no longer be miraculous. Thus Loftus has pointlessly refuted the television documentary he takes as his esteemed target (“Mysteries of the Ancient World,” 1993). I’ll unnecessarily make two points. First, apologists don’t stupidly offer natural explanations for miracles while maintaining a definition of them that stipulates violation of natural laws. Even if they did offer natural explanations, Loftus himself shows brief awareness of alternative definitions of miracles near the beginning of his discussion of Hume, and then proceeds to ignore them. Second, Loftus ignores the important distinction between demonstrating how and demonstrating that. The usual apologetical method is to show that something has occurred which is best explained by divine agency. This explains the miracle non-naturally and fails to give some detailed “how” account, yet is a perfectly respectable method, glossed over by Loftus’ purported dilemma.