Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Brian L. Keeley and the Ultimate Conspirator
26 Plays4 years ago
Josh and M review "God as the Ultimate Conspirator" by Brian L. Keeley, which appeared in the 2007 special issue on conspiracy theories in the journal Episteme.
—
Josh is @monkeyfluids and M is @conspiracism on Twitter
You can also contact us at: podcastconspiracy@gmail.com
You can learn more about M’s academic work at: http://mrxdentith.com
Why not support The Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy by donating to our Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/podcastersguidetotheconspiracy
or Podbean crowdfunding? http://www.podbean.com/patron/crowdfund/profile/id/muv5b-79
Recommended
Transcript
Morrissey's Catacomb Mystery
00:00:16
Speaker
Upon my remarking that I was looking at the grave of Lord Morrissey Morrissey's former companion, Lord Chancellor of the Exchequer Stickle, Morrissey dashed across the room and pushed me to one side to inspect the engraved nameplate upon the coffin, which presumably contained the waterlogged body of his former investigative companion-turned-nemesis. With little care, he lifted the lid of the funereal casket and drew his lantern close to whatever lay inside. With a sigh of relief, he let the coffin slam shut.
00:00:40
Speaker
It is indeed him. He remains dead, Morrissey. He does, Pluddles. He does. Still, I wonder if this casket might tell us something more about this curious catacomb. Morrissey pulled from his pockets a portable screwdriver, and began to loosen the screws upon the Hoffen's nameplate. You see, Pluddles, how elevated the sprasses. I suspect it sits upon another nameplate. With little care, Morrissey ripped the nameplate off, revealing an older, tarnished piece of brass beneath.
00:01:07
Speaker
Have you amongst your position some brass cleaner? Or perhaps some hydrochloric? But of course, Morrissey, what man leaves the house without either? I handed to his Lordship a coarse rag and a bottle of polish which he duly applied to the brass plate. And what do we have here? I say, Morrissey, this casket originally belonged to... No, it can't be. Oh, it is Puddles. It is. Handsome Jack? Surely it cannot be. It is Puddles, the multiple murder of the late 1880s
00:01:33
Speaker
But why is Stickel interred in his grave? He calls puddles. He and Stickel are one and the same. No. Unfortunately, yes. I was easily taken in by Stickel, or whatever his real name was. I have a blind spot for those I love, you see.
00:01:51
Speaker
Marcy stiffened as he spoke, doubtless aware he was bordering on the impolite with his admission of sympathy for the lower classes. Doubtless this led me to not notice things that I should have. But Marcy, why the casket? What is the purpose of all this? This, pluddles, is where criminals come to be reborn with new identities. Once, as our American friends might say, the trail becomes too hot, they come to this church of orphans to bury their past and take on a new identity.
00:02:18
Speaker
Well, that is until such time they meet their final demise. Oh, that was all I could say in that moment. Some of these miscreants simply move into the shadows and do not need to take on new names. Others, like Stickle here, rebuild their criminal enterprise in daylight. It is quite ingenious. But what do Archibald and Miracat want from this place?
00:02:38
Speaker
Puddles, as ever you ask the most pertinent question. If they are connected to this enterprise, this place will be no mystery. And if they are not... With that a wind blew through the chamber, extinguishing the torches on the wall. By the light of our lanterns I detected two figures moving through the darkness towards us, but before I could warn his lordship, I felt a knock on the back of my head, and I was rendered unconscious.
Introduction & Election Context
00:03:15
Speaker
The Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy, brought to you today by Josh Addison and Dr. Imdentith. Hello and welcome to the Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy. I am Josh Addison. They are Dr. Imdentith. We are in Aotearoa, New Zealand.
00:03:33
Speaker
where the election has now taken place. It has, and what a tidal wave of red that election turned out to be. Yes, I mean, no real upsets to it, a really odd surprise. Apart from a lot of electorates down country which are traditional national voting bases turning red, I think there were a lot of upsets in this election.
00:03:59
Speaker
when you actually get down to electorates changing hand, and a party achieving a majority in an MMP system. So basically, actually, when you say there were no upsets, it was upsets all night long. Well, I mean,
00:04:15
Speaker
Overall, nobody was expecting Labour to lose this election. It was a surprise that they won with the majority that they've achieved.
00:04:30
Speaker
And I can't be bothered going into the New Zealand electoral system here, but certainly the party goat was all party vote, not the party goat. The party goat was going to go labour. Tell the listeners about this mysterious party goat, because I feel that's part of the election that no one has talked about. You know as well as I do that the first rule of the party goat
Political Humor & Scandal Discussion
00:04:51
Speaker
is that you do not talk about the party goat. Now the party vote, we can talk about that, and it was certainly obvious that was going to go to labour, but as the what? Party goat.
00:05:00
Speaker
No, nor the party coat. What about the party float? No, the party moat. I mean, that doesn't work anymore. It was drained several decades ago, but no. And then, of course, you've got Labour's party gloat. Well, yes, there's been no small amount of that going on, at least in private, I'm sure. What do we have? I mean, we had Chloe Swalbrick winning the electorate for the Greens in Auckland Central. I don't know if that was entirely expected.
00:05:25
Speaker
the Maori party getting ... taking the electorate off Labour. I don't know if anyone's expecting that either, but that was good. But yes, I think in terms of conspiracy theories and what have you, we might save that for the bonus episode towards the end there, but as it happens, the election occurred. And it was quite upsetting despite what Josh said.
00:05:49
Speaker
Well, certainly upsetting to national, wouldn't deny that. Very upsetting to national. Anyway, we're back on conspiracy theory. Now, Josh, I do have to ask the question because everybody who's watching the video of this podcast will be thinking it. Are you masturbating whilst on camera? No. No, I know that's the style these days. I know important gentlemen in the States are doing it, but it's just not my cup of tea. Have you ever masturbated on camera whilst recording this podcast?
00:06:18
Speaker
I can honestly say I have not done such a thing. Wasn't aware that was a good thing to do. What I should have said is, have you ever accidentally masturbated on camera whilst recording the podcast? Then you could have made a denial, and then people would have gone... Didn't actually ask the real question. Too specific that denial, yes. Yeah, yeah. Yes, we are of course referring to the case of a guy whose name I've forgotten. Is it Jeffrey Toobin? That sounds about right.
00:06:46
Speaker
And yeah, frankly, I've sort of, I've got the gist of it and I have not wanted to investigate any further to find out the full details of it because I don't think my life would be enriched by knowing anymore. What I find fascinating about the case is the number of media types in the US who are essentially running the argument of, but haven't we all masturbated on camera during a Zoom call in the past and people are going,
00:07:12
Speaker
No, no, no, actually, most of us haven't. And most of us would be mortified at the very thought of it. Hmm. I saw one one take from an article suggesting that the real problem is just simply that there's such a social taboo around masturbation.
00:07:29
Speaker
And we wish we should just be doing it all the time in any circumstance and suggested also that had the guy actually been having sex on camera that wouldn't have been as bad and I don't follow that line of reasoning. I mean it was a work call amongst high-powered journalists. The idea you start ramming your partner whilst discussing the plans for tomorrow's editorial really doesn't seem like the kind of thing which is acceptable in a work meeting. I mean
00:07:57
Speaker
I don't have an office job, even though I'm recording this in an office. So I actually do have a job that takes place in an office, but it's not an office job. But as far as I'm aware, we do not have sex during the job. Not that I think there's anything wrong about having sex on the job, many professions actually rely upon that. It's just that it's not normal in my workplace. And it certainly isn't normal in the media workplace, unless I'm very much mistaken.
00:08:24
Speaker
Yeah, so perhaps we should pledge here and now that the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy shall remain a masturbation-free zone. Can you make that promise? I can. Can you guarantee it? I mean, I'm saying, yes, I can guarantee it. Five episodes later, because, oops, sorry. Sorry.
00:08:43
Speaker
Well, we'll see. That's our promise to you, listeners. If you hear any dubious sounds in the background, it could be any number of things. Won't be that thing. Actually, no. Let's make a deal. If we get five more patrons in the next month, we can guarantee in perpetuity there'll be no masturbation taking...
00:09:02
Speaker
As you know now, I suddenly realized the problem with this. If there are people out there who want us to masturbate on camera, that will then make them not want to pledge. But if you do want to ensure there's neither any masturbation on camera.
00:09:18
Speaker
become a patron. If you get five new patrons over the course of October and November, we can guarantee in perpetuity there will be no masturbation occurring during this show. That's a cast
Conspiracy Theories & Philosophy
00:09:34
Speaker
iron guarantee.
00:09:39
Speaker
I don't want to speculate on what might happen if we don't get to those number of patrons. I mean, an element of spite might come into play. We might just start doing it. But no, it's not to go there. And revenge sex is taken to be the best sex there is. Well, that's they say. It's also supposed to be a dish best served cold. And I don't quite know how those two metaphors met. And I think maybe we should drop this line of
00:10:07
Speaker
conversation before I start saying sex with corpses. Mm. Yes. Anyway, it's an episode of of of of conspiracy people. I'm just seeing how badly I peaked on that. Anyway, such was my desire to change the topic. We have an episode. We have an episode featuring a paper by friend of the show, Brian L. Keeley.
00:10:34
Speaker
who has said to me that if he ever teaches another course on conspiracy theories, he actually would be tempted to assign some of these podcasts as listening for his students. Well, that's very flattering. I expect it'll get more flattering as we go into this episode because I don't know if you picked this one specifically for me, but the topic of this conspiracy theory is right up my alley.
00:10:58
Speaker
it is now right up we were going to have to cover this eventually and it is actually chronologically and numerically the next episode but i knew there's going to be a bit of talk of agnosticism and i know how much you like to ride the agnostic boat right so let's hop aboard play the chime and get down to it and watch out for that goat
00:11:26
Speaker
This week we are talking about God is the Ultimate Conspiracy Theory by Brian L. Kelly published in Episteme in 2007. And this is a special issue of Episteme in which every single article is on conspiracy theories and it's edited by none other than
00:11:45
Speaker
David Cody. Now I do want to get one thing out the gate immediately. There is a big debate amongst philosophers as to how we're meant to pronounce the name of this journal. Because as Josh has just said, most people think it's episteme, but other people might think that actually because it's Greek and it's ancient Greek
00:12:07
Speaker
It's probably episteme. And the thing is, nobody knows. The other thing to note is that by 2007, when this collection comes out, my work on my PhD has just begun.
00:12:22
Speaker
Right, so as we go through this, imagine a young, fresh-faced EM, not that you're ever not fresh-faced, I have to say, struggling, hunched over a desk, pounding out that PhD. It's an image that warms the cockles of my heart.
00:12:40
Speaker
that warms someone's cockles. Indeed. Well, let's not get into that. Now, this paper, it's actually it's a bit of an interesting one because it's it's kind of more a paper and philosophy of religion than it is philosophy of conspiracy theories. But let's start with the abstract, which reads.
00:13:01
Speaker
Traditional secular conspiracy theories and explanations of worldly events in terms of supernatural agency share interesting epistemic features. This paper explores what can be called supernatural conspiracy theories by considering such supernatural explanations through the lens of recent work on the epistemology of secular conspiracy theories. After considering the similarities and the differences between the two types of theories, the prospects for agnosticism both with respect to secular conspiracies and the existence of God are then considered.
00:13:29
Speaker
Arguments regarding secular conspiracy theories suggest ways to defend agnosticism with respect to God, from arguments that agnosticism is not a logically stable position and that it ultimately collapses into atheism, and it has been argued by N. Russell Hanson and others. I conclude that such attacks on religious agnosticism fail to appreciate the conspiratorial features of God's alleged role in the universe.
00:13:51
Speaker
And from talk of God, go straight into talk of Donald Rumsfeld. Yes, I was about to say what's interesting is that this abstract is very high-minded, and yet the first thing we get is a discussion of that infamous speech by Donald Rumsfeld about no one knowings, no one unknowings, and unknowing unknowings.
00:14:12
Speaker
which as Keely points out was something that Rumsfeld was roundly mocked for at the time, but as epistemologists have argued, isn't actually a stupid point at all.
00:14:28
Speaker
No, I mean, I think I don't know. People just objected to the fact that he suddenly launched into this vaguely poetic metaphysical discussion on the limits of knowledge in what was otherwise a
00:14:45
Speaker
It sort of had the tone of somebody trying to bluff his way through an answer, but the fact remains that he does make a very good point. There are things that we know, there are things that we know we don't know, and then there are things we don't even know we don't
Intelligence and Miracles
00:15:01
Speaker
know.
00:15:03
Speaker
When you're worried about intelligence, particularly intelligence about activities going on overseas, the things that we know we don't know and the things that we don't know are even happening and have no suspicion about are the really worrying things. So to talk about 9-11, for example,
00:15:25
Speaker
It was knowing that there were movements overseas that were against the United States of America due to its activities in the Middle East.
00:15:37
Speaker
But depending on who you talk to, it was completely unknown to the American intelligence apparatus where a major terrorist attack was being planned for the continental United States. Now, that is contentious because there is quite a lot of evidence indicated that the intelligence apparatus in the US, if they had acted on things they had known, could have prevented 9-11 from occurring.
00:16:00
Speaker
But there is one version of the story where they go, look, 9-11 was a complete surprise because we did not know to be suspicious of this kind of attack. It really was an unknown unknown.
00:16:13
Speaker
And so Brian himself says, obviously, Rumsfeld has no answer to offer here, but he does want to claim that in the case of national security threats, we do in fact know one thing about unknown unknowns. We know that it is extremely likely that unknown unknowns exist. And that that resonates a lot with what Lee Basham was talking about, with the idea of there being at least one malevolent conspiracy going on in the background at this point in time.
00:16:41
Speaker
Yes, and I think this paper certainly shows that from the looks of things Lee had been rubbing off on Brian at this point. Obviously he specifically cites Lee Basham's Resilience and Ubiquity paper, and we can see bits of it coming in as it goes. Brian goes on to make the interesting point that
00:17:08
Speaker
And this is something again actually kind of reminds you of the likes of Lee Basham stuff about local context and the number of unknown unknowns there might be sort of being a feature of the world around us. He says
00:17:24
Speaker
For example, Rumsfeld is speaking from his position as the United States Secretary of Defense. It might well be that his opposite number in the Sultanate of Brunei has fewer grounds to worry about some completely unexpected threat. For a variety of reasons, Brunei has far fewer and much less diverse enemies than does the United States. By the same token, it might not be the case that all domains of knowledge have this feature. Knowledge of national security threats does, but does my knowledge of what's likely to be found in my local grocery store? Probably not to any significant degree.
00:17:52
Speaker
Why does the domain of national security have this feature? I suggest that part of the answer is that it is a realm in which conspiracies arrive and conspiracies have interesting epistemic features as philosophers have recently begun to explore in earnest. And so from there, that's sort of the introduction, I think, that does a little bit of scene setting. The next section of the paper is basically a recapping of Brian's previous works. And particularly, you'll recall from the very first of his papers we looked at,
00:18:21
Speaker
He used the analogy of Hume talking about miracles to say, can we talk about conspiracy theories the same way and decided possibly not. And that is a nice way of bringing in the religious angle that comes into this paper. So he says, the impetus of my investigation into the epistemology of conspiracy theories, in particular those which seem particularly dubious, and then list off a bunch of dubious conspiracy theories,
00:18:48
Speaker
was the question whether there might be a Humean analysis of such theories that would identify them as incredible a priori. In other words, can we identify a class of conspiracy theories, I call them unwarranted conspiracy theories, or UCTs, that were by definition incredible? My conclusion was that, alas, such an analysis fails. The chief problem was that there is a class of quite warranted conspiracy theories about such events as Watergate, the Iran-Contra Affair, and so on, that there is no principled way of distinguishing a priori the two classes from one another.
00:19:17
Speaker
And this leads Brian on to his discussion about how there's no mark of the incredible, because the standard human tactic on miracles is that because miracles are incredible, i.e. miracles don't occur, then when someone talks about a miracle, that's prima facie a rationale for going, I don't need to believe that occurred, because miracles are by definition impossible.
00:19:43
Speaker
But the whole problem with the problem of conspiracy theory is that there is no mark of the incredible. And as Brian says, there is no mark of the incredible, as it were, as Hume argues there is for reports of miracles. As a result, contrary to being able to reject conspiracy theories out of hand,
00:20:03
Speaker
prior to any investigation, we ought to adopt an agnostic attitude with respect to conspiratorial claims. Or, initially at least, as time passes in investigation's shoes, we will generally come to lump the given theory in either with the Watergate, the credible, or with the faked lunar landings, the incredible.
00:20:24
Speaker
Yes, in reading that, my
Agnosticism & Fallibilism
00:20:26
Speaker
ears pricked up agnosticism, you say. I might have a thing or two to say about agnosticism. Why might your ears prick up at the notion of agnosticism? Set the same. Well, this will become more more pertinent as we get further into the paper, but while I never went on to the dizzying heights of a doctorate as did the good Dr. Denthith, I did my master's
00:20:51
Speaker
Master of Arts in Philosophy, in which I wrote a master's dissertation, and agnosticism was kind of the subject of it, or at least indirectly it was. My dissertation was on the compatibility of fallibilism and faith, and I argued towards the end that agnosticism, as it was first conceived of by Thomas Henry Huxley, essentially is fallibilism applied to the religious sphere, so it all works out nicely.
00:21:21
Speaker
Now, when we, in a little while, we'll get into a discussion on the merits of agnosticism or not, and I may have a thing or two to say. You may indeed. Now, I want to interject here and say what's interesting is that Brian in putting forward the idea that we should adopt an agnostic attitude, or as he will say later on in the paper, a humble agnosticism.
00:21:46
Speaker
is kind of a response in my eyes to Lee Basham's idea of the pragmatic rejection and that Lee's response is there's nothing we can do. Brian's response is we just just be agnostic about these things until such time we have more evidence. So having recapped what he'd spoken about in the past he then looks into the realm of philosophy of religion saying
00:22:13
Speaker
Initially, I took a discussion in the realm of philosophy of religion and saw what light it shed on the epistemology of conspiracy theories. In the present paper, I want to view questions of religious epistemology through the lens of the philosophy of conspiracy theories. What happens when one looks at God and the supernatural more generally as a sort of conspiracy?
00:22:30
Speaker
And I think here is where he mentions in a footnote, Lee Basham's kindness as you recall, when we talked about after thoughts on conspiracy theory resilience and ubiquity. Lee Basham in trying to show that the conspiracy theory is essentially baked into our very notion of society talked about how
00:22:49
Speaker
a certain kind of religious thought is almost overtly conspiratorial when you have these supernatural agents acting in secret, one way or another, towards a common end, whether that's sort of, you know, the forces of God versus the forces of Satan or whatever you want. That certainly has all the form of a conspiracy theory. And it's as old as religion.
00:23:16
Speaker
Now what's interesting about this to my mind is the way that Brian's first paper is taking Hume on miracles and applying it to the philosophy of conspiracy theories. Now he's taking his reply to Hume on miracles via the philosophy of conspiracy theories and going, can we now make the trick back to the philosophy of religion?
00:23:40
Speaker
And so to do so he starts talking about supernatural conspiracy theories. So those are conspiracy theories about the show Supernatural? No. Has that ended yet? In about four weeks time. They're into the last set of episodes now. How many seasons did it run for?
00:23:59
Speaker
17? No, 14? It's a big number. The show was running out of steam. I'm still watching it because I want to see how it ends. It probably should have ended quite a long time ago. Didn't it basically end after like season five or something? It did, but it was very popular. And it has continued to be very popular for another nine years.
00:24:23
Speaker
So, I mean, while you probably could come up with certain conspiracy theories as to why the show Supernatural stuck around for as long as it did, that's not actually what we're talking about now. It's conspiracy theories that include intentional but supernatural agents who can't be detected, on account of them being supernatural, who are essentially working in a kind of secret to achieve a common goal.
00:24:51
Speaker
Who are these supernatural agents? Or who is the supernatural agent? Well, indeed. So to give an example of this, he talks to Boethius, the medieval philosopher Boethius, whose name I remember from philosophy, but it has been so long now. He was a sixth century philosopher in Rome who wrote the Consolations of Philosophy. He was
00:25:16
Speaker
I think he became a Christian when he was imprisoned. I don't know that he was Christian before his incarceration. The constellations of philosophy is famous in philosophy for a variety of reasons, one of which is in the foreword to the constellations of philosophy. Boethius admits there are mistakes in the text, but they've been put there deliberately for the careful reader to discover.
00:25:41
Speaker
which is the cleverest thing a philosopher has ever done. It's to go, yes, there are mistakes in this text. You're quite right. When you find them, you're very clever. I knew you'd find them. I put them there for you to find. They're definitely not mistakes I made. No. No, they're deliberately in there to mislead people.
00:25:59
Speaker
So he's obviously a very clever person. And one of the things he talked about, and I'm sure this must have been the reason why I studied him, is his talk on the problem of evil, which is one that comes up in metaphysics all the time, basically the idea that if God is omnipotent,
00:26:15
Speaker
why does evil exist in the world is the short answer. It's a fact that bad evil and suffering exists and surely if God were all-powerful, all-knowing and all-good he would be able to stop that, so why hasn't he? Boethius' solution to it is essentially that
00:26:35
Speaker
There is no such thing as evil. What we perceive as evil is just simply a limitation of us as human beings who are unable to fully comprehend providence or God's divine plan. If we understood the entirety of his plan, then we'd know why these things are necessary and so that it isn't actually evil whatsoever.
00:26:57
Speaker
And the reason why Boethius—well, one of the reasons why Boethius comes up with the idea of providence explaining the appearance of evil in the world is that Boethius is in prison when he's writing the constellations of philosophy for a crime he did not commit. Or at least a crime he claims not to have committed. He was charged with treason. He was thrown into prison. It was very likely he was going to be executed. He was going, if there was a good and benevolent god out there,
00:27:27
Speaker
Why would that God allow me and Innocent to be punished for a crime I never committed? How can I explain this evil that's occurring to me? Ah, the best way to explain it is that some greater good will eventuate because of this, and so it's not really evil at all. It's part of God's grand plan to bring about a greater good somewhere down the line.
00:27:52
Speaker
And so Brian picks up on this saying,
00:28:09
Speaker
But of course you don't necessarily have to just rely on the idea of providence for a sort of conspiratorial thinking because you may be of the sort of religious school the idea that there are forces of evil at work in the world that Satan or whoever is actually is actively seeking to combat God's plan and that the evil exists in the world because there are actually these supernatural evil agents
00:28:35
Speaker
seeking to further it. And then actually mentions the nice sort of crossover here that occurs when you get people who look at stories of UFO sightings and try to reevaluate them essentially as encounters with supernatural angelic beings. So whether that's the people going through the Bible talking at the various
00:28:58
Speaker
sites people have supposedly saw there and mapping them to UFOs or mapping modern UFO sightings to actually being encounters with the divine so that you actually have a case of sort of secular UFO style conspiracy theories and supernatural conspiracy theories overlapping, which is nicely symmetrical.
00:29:19
Speaker
Yes, and actually there is actually some very interesting work on that, both with respect to re-evaluating UFO encounters as interactions with supernatural beings, and other work which goes UFO encounters seem an awful lot like Witch Abduction Stories, which indicates that maybe we can explain one of those away. We can probably explain the other ones away as well.
00:29:46
Speaker
Now, at this point Brian points out that supernatural conspiracy theories do differ from secular ones in some ways, but in most of the time we can work around it. I mean, first of all, we do say that conspiracies need to have more than one person behind them.
00:30:03
Speaker
And if we're just going for the article, for the idea that everything is simply God's plan, there's only one God, if you're a Christian at least. Now let me interject there, because people who have fanned the tripartite God, the idea that God is three in one, God the Father, God the Son,
00:30:22
Speaker
and God the Holy Spirit might be able to get away with the technicality by going well you technically we're monotheists but our God is made up of three parts so technically could conspire with itself. But in either case you could make the argument that sort of omnipotence and omnipresence kind of makes God a special case and maybe we should allow for that there.
00:30:50
Speaker
Keeley has argued in the past that—I'm swapping between calling him Brian and calling him Keeley again, I shouldn't do that—that conspiracy theories tend to be malevolent, which would certainly apply to satanic conspiracies, but probably you wouldn't want to say that divine, quote-unquote, conspiracies are malevolent.
00:31:16
Speaker
But he decides to go with something that Charles Pigton came up with in Complots of Mischief, the idea that conspiracy theories should be at least morally suspect, although not necessarily morally wrong. Yes, and this is a line that I use a lot, which is, it doesn't really matter whether your intentions are good or bad.
00:31:39
Speaker
If people think you're acting secretively, they are going to be suspicious of what you're doing, no matter what you intend to achieve. So the idea that someone is acting in a secretive manner means it allows you to make the move to say what you're doing is suspicious, because otherwise, why would you keep it secret from me?
00:32:01
Speaker
You simply can't make the move to the claim that that behavior is sinister because sometimes people do secretive things for good reason, such as organizing a surprise party. Although I should point out that Brian kind of poo-poos the idea of surprise parties fitting into the schema of what counts as a conspiracy appropriate for a conspiracy theory.
00:32:25
Speaker
And sticking on the notion of secrecy, another sort of possible point of difference here is that providence isn't so much secret as it's just unknowable. We literally can't know it, not because it's hidden from us, but because it's the sort of thing that our human brains are not capable of grasping.
00:32:48
Speaker
So Brian says, if Boethius is correct, God is not hiding his intentions from us, we are constitutionally incapable of understanding his motivations and plans due to a necessarily limited, temporally bound perspective, and goes on to say that God, as a providential entity, is the ultimate unknown unknown. Which is why Donald Rumsfeld declared war on God back at the beginning of the War on Terror.
00:33:12
Speaker
So the next section of this paper is titled agnosticism with respect to the supernatural. And as we saw in the abstract, he's refers to Nord Russell Hansen's criticism of the agnostic position and claimed that the evidence used to support agnosticism better supports atheism. Now, I'm going to
00:33:37
Speaker
I'm going to introduce a definition here because it's one that I'm going to argue against shortly. I assume when we're talking about agnosticism here, we're talking about the position that you can't say that God exists and you also can't say that God doesn't exist because there isn't sufficient evidence for either position.
00:33:59
Speaker
Now, Hansen claims that the problem with the agnostic position like this is that it pulls a fast one, that it changes tack halfway through its argument. So Hansen says that the agnostic begins by assessing whether or not God exists as if you were a fact-gatherer,
00:34:20
Speaker
So in other words, the agnostic will say, well, no, there isn't, we look for evidence, we don't find enough to support the notion that God exists, so we can't believe that. Hanson continues, he ends by appraising the claims denial, not as a fact gatherer, but as a pure logician. So in other words, the agnostic says, okay, I've looked for evidence for God, I haven't found any, so I'm going to reject it there. But in terms of whether or not you should believe that God doesn't exist, well, you can't prove a negative. That's just a logical fact. So that's my reason for it there.
00:34:50
Speaker
So Hanson says, but the consistency demands that he either be a fact-gatherer with both the claim and its denial, or else play logician with both. So he sort of says there's an inconsistency going on there, and that to be properly consistent, the agnostic should just be an atheist. So basically, the agnostic, according to Hanson, is on the horns of a dilemma, and they should either go the evidential way and say, there's just not enough evidence to believe in the existence of God, so I'm an atheist.
00:35:17
Speaker
or they should go, well, logic dictates I can't prove a negative, but at the same time, I should bite that bullet. Now, of course, the problem with these objections is that they fail to contend with faith and fallibilism, certainty and doubt, published by Addison 1999.
00:35:35
Speaker
The reason why they probably don't contend with this is that it was just my dissertation and a copy of it exists in the philosophy department of the University of Auckland and on my bookshelf and nowhere else in the world. So probably they can be forgiven. Are you sure it's not available electronically through the University of Auckland now? I don't know, do they scan things? They are digitising a whole bunch of stuff now, so it actually might be available online.
00:36:02
Speaker
I've never looked, I should, I suppose. Maybe it is. Because if you do, you'll find out whether it's been read because they track downloads on those things now. You might go, oh, I'm really, really popular. I should set up an academia.edu account and a fill people account and just see all the references start flowing in. You might be a superstar in the world of agnosticism.
00:36:28
Speaker
Well, now you put it that way, I kind of don't want to find out and just live with that fantasy in my mind rather than have it dashed. But the point is, so the point of my dissertation essentially is that faith is compatible with fallibilism for a given definition of fallibilism and a given definition of faith.
00:36:48
Speaker
And the point that I argued for is that agnosticism is best understood as the extension of fallibilism into the religious sphere. And that fallibilism is best understood not as a specific position, but it's more of an attitude. So it's not a belief, it's an attitude towards belief.
00:37:12
Speaker
and should be used more like a rule of thumb. It's more similar to the likes of Occam's razor than it is to any other position. So fallibilism doesn't make any claims about the truth or falsehood of particular propositions. It just reminds us that no matter what proposition we believe to be true or false, we should be open to the possibility that it could be revised on the basis of future evidence because we human beings
00:37:42
Speaker
don't know what we don't know. So fallibleism is a statement about us more than it is a statement about any particular belief. And so applying that to the religious sphere, you come up with an idea of agnosticism, which is not a position. So agnosticism
00:38:01
Speaker
isn't a position as to whether or not God exists or God doesn't exist. It's not on the spectrum of atheism versus theism. What it is is an attitude that says whatever you do believe, you should be willing to accept that, willing to revise that belief on future evidence. And
00:38:24
Speaker
the immediate problem there of course is that that doesn't that kind of sounds contrary to the idea of of faith and so I in the dissertation I do a bit of a discussion on the nature of faith and how we can um different different ways of perceiving it and seeing that there are ways and and and what I think are productive ways of thinking of faith which do make it compatible with a fallibilist agnostic attitude and the and then the main point of it that I sort of made towards the end is that
00:38:50
Speaker
The term agnosticism was first coined by Thomas Henry Huxley, who was kind of Charles Darwin's right-hand man.
00:38:58
Speaker
And when he talks about agnosticism, he very clearly is using it as a fallibilist attitude towards the question of whether or not God exists, basically. He doesn't argue in those particular words, but a bunch of the things he says that basically is advocating fallibilist positions. So there you go. So in my view of it, if we were to be properly agnostic, that kind of avoids all of this criticism
00:39:28
Speaker
entirely. But that's not the view of agnosticism. Sorry, I don't reply there with a Douglas Adam quote. Well, that about wraps it up for God. Pretty much does. Anyway, that's all kind of immaterial, really. I just can't resist
Epistemology of Conspiracies
00:39:44
Speaker
the urge to jump on my own little topic of expertise.
00:39:49
Speaker
Toot your own horn. Blow your own humpers. We swore that we weren't going to do that in this podcast. We just, we actually, no, we haven't got the number of patrons yet, so who knows? Maybe I could blow my own horn. Well, precisely. Live on camera. Anyway, the point, digression aside, the point of this is that
00:40:11
Speaker
Another problem with this is the idea that the fact that you can't prove a negative, that's an objection that applies to basically anything imaginary. Anything you can say as an objection to the
00:40:30
Speaker
to atheism, it also applies to anything, basically. Yes, you can't prove that God exists, you also can't prove that God doesn't exist, you also can't prove that unicorns don't exist, or that flying magical pixies don't exist, or it just goes on and on and on and on. So, what does this mean for conspiracy theories?
00:40:54
Speaker
Wow, so are you asking what are the implications for conspiracy theories? Well, the implications are when looking at conspiracies, and I'm actually reading your own notes here, the rule of thumb above doesn't apply because as has been said before, conspirators are actively hiding the truth from you in a way that the objects of scientific investigation don't, brackets, we hope. Now, this seems like an updated version
00:41:20
Speaker
of Keeley's argument from of conspiracy theories, which is the argument that nature doesn't lie, but conspirators do. So as Brian points out, what are the problems with talking about falsificationism when it comes to talk of conspiracy theories?
00:41:37
Speaker
is that when it comes to investigating nature, nature tells us no lies. The problem is when you're investigating anything in the social sciences, the things you are interrogating often turn out to be human beings, and human beings often do lie about their internal lives or what they've been up to. So nature doesn't lie, but conspirators do. And that way,
00:42:04
Speaker
Because we know that conspirators might be actively hiding what they do, it's very hard to apply this rule of thumb to entities of that type. So once again, my ears pricked up at the next section when Brian says... Your ears are pricking a lot at the moment. They sure, well, that paper had this effect on me. At this stage, your ears must be levitating above your head.
00:42:29
Speaker
Well, they were when I first read it. Obviously I've calmed down since then, which is why they're not showing up on video at the moment. But yes, I can assure you that was the case. But no, Brian says, we human investigators are fallible and we know this to be the case. And at which point I'd look directly in the camera and go, huh? Huh? Huh?
00:42:49
Speaker
And history is rife with credible conspiracies. This is one upshot of the Rumsfeld epigraph. Because, I argue of the conspiratorial nature of the world, we know that there are not only national security threats that we know we do not know about, what a known terrorist group is currently planning, but we also know, with as much certainty as we know anything else about the socio-political realm, that there are threats about which we do not even know we are ignorant.
00:43:15
Speaker
By their very nature, these unknown unknowns are impossible to factor into any kind of a calculus of threat assessment, but there is a lesson to be drawn here, and that is a significant degree of humility with respect to our threat assessments. Humility, again, is, I think, another thing that pops up a lot in the fallibilist literature further.
00:43:35
Speaker
The point is not simply that we should acknowledge our ignorance and fallibility of reasoning, surely we should always take our reasoning with a grain of salt. The point here is to make it very clear that in some select domains and under certain conditions, we would be prudent to be especially skeptical more so than normal. And to me, everything he just said describes a fallibilist position, not a skeptical one at all.
00:43:57
Speaker
And so if, as I argued, we can see agnosticism as just a kind of fallibilism, and he's arguing what sounds an awful lot like fallibilism to me, frankly, I think this just makes me look better and better. Indeed. This is confirming everything you've always thought. Also, this to a very large extent
00:44:18
Speaker
goes to show that the characterisation of Keeley's work in the early days is inaccurate because this is this is perfectly in tune with particularism. So we now come to the question of
00:44:34
Speaker
what is god more like is god more like um actually sorry i've skipped i've skipped a little bit the the conclusion no no no no see what do you see you should you you should have bit that said what is it god more like the Loch Ness monster or a conspiracy theorist that's how you should have gone there i will do yes is god like the Loch Ness monster or is he like a conspiracy theorist now the reason why you say that is because um
00:44:59
Speaker
Hanson basically says the likes of Donald Rumsfeld, and then he also refers it to Carl Sagan, who says a similar sort of thing, that absence of proof is not proof of absence. Now, this is the idea that unknowns exist. But Hanson says, well, actually,
00:45:18
Speaker
When we're talking about, when we're investigating the real world, absence of proof pretty much is proof of absence. And if you deny that, then we get in the position of the fact that we can't deny the existence of anything, the Loch Ness Monster, you know, Brontosaurus with Mokale Momembe, the Brontosaurus looking thing in Africa and any other pixies and whatever else you want to come up with.
00:45:42
Speaker
When we're talking about objects of scientific investigation, people have looked for the Loch Ness Monster. They've sunk probes. They've sonarred the crap out of Loch Ness. And nothing's come up. And we should be able to say, actually, this is good enough evidence that the Loch Ness Monster just doesn't exist.
00:46:00
Speaker
Yeah, if
God as a Conspirator?
00:46:01
Speaker
we keep looking for something and we find absolutely no evidence of that thing, the fallibilist is obliged to go, probably should suspend judgement or even go slightly further and go,
00:46:17
Speaker
Actually, the probabilities here are given a sustained investigation into this topic, and no positive evidence accruing. I am conditionally allowed to say, if no new evidence comes to light, that probably it's not worth believing in this thing. Yeah, again, fallibleism isn't even about suspending judgment. It's believe what you want to believe, just acknowledge there's always that possibility there. But so the point is,
00:46:46
Speaker
So we have objects of sort of investigation where the idea that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence doesn't really apply. But then we have the likes of conspiracy theories where conspirators are actively hiding from us, in which case it probably is reasonable to say, well, evidence of absence isn't actually, sorry, evidence of absence isn't actually
00:47:10
Speaker
evidence, absence of evidence. I'm going to tangle myself up with this because we have people actively trying to conceal themselves from us.
00:47:22
Speaker
Brian says, unlike with the brontosaurs, by hypothesis an omniscient god knows what we would consider evidence for his existence, and an omnipotent god could certainly leave only the evidence he wished to be found. Looking for a god that does not wish to be found would be quite a futile task. If god can be thought of as a kind of conspirator, he would surely be the ultimate conspirator. He's gone from the ultimate unknown unknown to the ultimate conspirator.
00:47:45
Speaker
Brian continues, my suggestion is that the domain of beings whose power and knowledge far outstrip our own are precisely the kind of domain where we ought to be especially careful in trusting the outcome of our reasoning. I believe that it is that humility which is the basis for agnosticism with respect to God. So there the
Conclusion & Future Topics
00:48:04
Speaker
claim is that you know we have different cases
00:48:09
Speaker
If we're looking for positrons, then it's one sort of case. But if we're looking for conspiracies and possibly God, then it's the other indifferent rules apply.
00:48:22
Speaker
I got a little bit flummoxed at this point because he says, however, in this paper, I'm arguing that the existence of the supernatural also calls for the Sagan rule, which I thought was the opposite of what he'd been saying up until now. The Sagan rule being the Carl Sagan, Donald Rumsfeld idea, the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. I thought he'd just finished saying that, but that is
00:48:43
Speaker
the case of God is a case where that doesn't apply, and he's saying it does apply, so I was a little bit lost there. Maybe he's just going back to Hanson and saying he agrees with Hanson's position. I think the point here he's making is that when you start looking at the debate in theism versus atheism,
00:49:01
Speaker
It becomes a much more interesting debate than, say, between scientists and pseudoscientists, in which you can kind of see there's a domain issue going on here between people who accept the scientific method versus those who don't. But when it comes to the terms of debate around theism versus atheism,
00:49:22
Speaker
There's a whole bunch of reasonable atheists and reasonable theists who go, actually, the debate here isn't just about evidence. The debate here is about what even counts as evidence. So there's a big worry here that the debate in this domain goes well beyond just a simple evidentiary.
00:49:42
Speaker
hearing. There's also a much larger meta debate about what the terms of the debate turn out to be. So I think that's where the Sagan rule is coming into effect here. Right. So we reach the conclusion and Brian rounds everything out by saying
00:50:02
Speaker
At the very least, I believe I've shown that this is all grist for the mill, that considering theological questions about the existence of God in the light of the strange epistemology of conspiracy theories enriches the discussion in interesting ways. God's alleged mysterious ways are not unlike the alleged secret and mysterious activities common to secular conspiracy theories, and just as it is impossible to reject even the more dubious secular conspiracy theories are priori, requiring us to adopt an agnostic stance until such time as the evidence begins to roll in, similarly it is prudent to abandon
00:50:31
Speaker
adopt an agnostic attitude with respect to God. At the very least, considering belief in God as the ultimate conspiracy theory indicates that agnosticism is not the logically bankrupt position folks such as Russell Hanson worry it is. And I also don't think that agnosticism is in any way a logically bankrupt position. But then I think of it as something slightly different, I think, from what they're talking about. So there you go. Interesting, an interesting paper doesn't really further the debate around the philosophy of conspiracy theories, but does an interesting job of
00:51:00
Speaker
mapping it back onto the philosophy of religion? Yes, it does feel like it's the second half of conspiracy theories, where you start from human miracles to point out there's no mark of the incredible when it comes to these things which we pejoratively call conspiracy theories, thus we should actually be particularists about conspiracy theories and appraise them on the evidence.
00:51:24
Speaker
And then takes that argument and goes, ah, can we now make that flow back to a discussion in the philosophy of religion? We can, the circle is closed, everything is complete. Now we can ascend to Godhood. Excellent. I'll look forward to that after we finish recording.
00:51:41
Speaker
Now that's all we have for you in this episode of Conspiracy Theory Masterpiece Theatre. Have we anything else to say before we start plugging the Patreon episode? No, we've got more articles from this special issue, including a bit of a debate as to whether one of the papers we're even going to talk about, because there's one really odd paper in this special issue which isn't really about conspiracy theories at all, and I'm
00:52:11
Speaker
kind of wondering whether we should even bother looking at it. We'll have that discussion fairly soon. But otherwise, I think basically we should move on to the exciting bonus content that our patrons can listen to very shortly. And remember, if five of you become patrons by the end of November, we can guarantee there'll be no tooting of anyone's horns on this podcast ever again. Or indeed, ever.
00:52:39
Speaker
But as to the content of that bonus episode, what are we going to talk about? A bit of post-election conspiracy roundup. We have to mention Rudy Giuliani being called by Sasha Baron Cohen, something which is ludicrous on so many different levels. We have some manner of peaceful coup in Bolivia.
00:53:05
Speaker
We have the Great Barrington Declaration, which sounds a lot more lofty than I think it actually is, but we'll talk about that. More developments on the story of Hunter Biden and the alleged laptop containing his alleged emails. Which now apparently contains a lot of things if you believe social media.
00:53:29
Speaker
So, that's what we're going to be talking about shortly. If you'd like to hear about that, and you are currently a patron, then you're in luck, because you can. Just like that. Don't have to do a single thing. If you would like to hear about that and you're not currently a patron, then you can just become one. Just as simple as that. Just go all Judith Collins and say, I would just simply become a patron.
00:53:53
Speaker
That's the sort of thing she'd say. Do we really want Judith Collins as a patron of this podcast? I want anyone who wants to be a patron of this podcast to be a patron of this podcast. Hmm. Who may have to have discussion after this podcast about that attitude? Do you get to have plans about my issues with my plans to dig up Hitler's corpse and make him a patron of this podcast?
00:54:15
Speaker
We're definitely having a conversation about how this works after the podcast. Fine. Yes, if you want to become a patron, go to... Now, actually, I looked it up and it is patreon.com slash podcasters guide to the conspiracy. All one word, I think. But if I have got that wrong, just search for the podcasters guide to conspiracy. You'll find us just fine. Or you can go to conspiracism.podbean.com, which is where this podcast is officially hosted and they have their own patronage scheme there as well.
00:54:43
Speaker
And actually all the details are listed in the show notes of this very podcast you're listening to. So there you have it. And I don't think there's anything else we need to say right now. No. Other than, we're not masturbating on camera. Quite, you can be sure of that. I guarantee it. Goodbye. Hurrah.
00:55:12
Speaker
You've been listening to the podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy, starring Josh Addison and Dr. M.R. Extended, which is written, researched, recorded and produced by Josh and Em. You can support the podcast by becoming a patron, via its Podbean or Patreon campaigns. And if you need to get in contact with either Josh or Em, you can email them at podcastconspiracyatgmail.com or check their Twitter accounts, Mikey Fluids and Conspiracism.
00:56:13
Speaker
And remember, remember, oh December was a night.