From: nadeem@deathstar.Stanford.EDU (Nadeem Hussain)
Subject: Bad arguments for religion
Organization: Stanford University, California, USA
Date: Tue, 7 Apr 1992 03:16:39 GMT

Hi folks,

I have been getting quite depressed reading this bboard and have kept 
myself from engaging in the discussion both because of a lack of 
time and because I don't really have a clear idea of how to deal with 
the pro-Islamic views on the table.

But I think there is an interesting family of arguments that gets 
used over and over again.  My hope is that looking at the structure of 
the arguments might help us get the discussion moving along more 
productively.

There are several arguments that go as follows:
	(A1)	Individuals in the West carry out an action of type A.
	(A2)	When the individuals in a large population carry out an 
		action of type A the negative consequence B results.
therefore
	(A3)	We should not do A.
and
	(A4)	Islam prohibits doing A.
therefore
	(A5)	We should follow the Islamic path.

It's a good form of argument for a pro-Islamic view because it does 
not explicitly rely on a religious premise, i.e., that Allah exists, or 
that Islam is the truth.  However there are still several points that 
should get people thinking:

A.	First of all (A2) is what we philosophers would call a 
contingent fact.  It happens to be true now but there does not, at 
least prima facie, appear to be any necessity involved.  One could 
argue for an account of history or social facts that has some form of 
necessity built into it but that would be an additional argument.  It 
would probably also be implausible given the lack of success such 
arguments have had in the past.  It looks in particular as if one 
would have to take on scientific epistemology (in my opinion the 
interesting battleground!) - a challenge that the above argument 
structure so neatly avoids.
	The contingency of (A2) has some serious consequences.  One 
would not want, I would think, to ultimately base arguments for 
religion on premises like (A2).  After all we only accept (A2) as 
being true because we are buying into a particular methodology of 
social science, a particular theory of social action, and a particular 
account of how society's doing A results in B (I am not making the 
stronger claim that all knowledge obtained by any methodology we 
would be willing to label as being part of a social science is 
necessarily contingent).  Do you really want to give up Islam the 
minute one of these bits of your social science fails?  Or perhaps 
more appropriately, do you want to give up Islam the minute the 
social facts change?  This was a problem that I think I noticed in 
passing raised by another poster while referring to the attempts to 
find scientific conclusions in the Quran.
	Thus you still need the grand arguments for God's existence 
and the truth of Islam - and those, I would readily propose, are well 
nigh impossible.

B.	A similar contingency problem arises when we consider the 
argument going from (A4) to (A5).  For (A5) to follow strictly from 
(A4) you need another premise something along the lines of 
	(A4.5)	Islam is the only or perhaps most efficient way of 
			preventing B by preventing A.
This is usually, that is for most As and Bs mentioned in the 
arguments, a extremely strong empirical claim to make and again a 
decidedly contingent fact.  Indeed to back this claim it is not merely 
enough to point out that if everyone was Islamic then B would not 
happen.  One would have to compare Islam to other approaches to 
solve the problem and defend the practicability of Islam - part of 
which involves arguing that Islam can actually come to reign across 
the world - a strong claim to say the least particularly given that 
there will be people like me in the way :-)
	And again to reiterate my point above in A. one wouldn't want 
to base an argument for believing in Islam on a contingent and 
empirical fact of this kind.

C.	Hyder at Austin, TX wrote a long article directed at my earlier 
postings about relationships both sexual and non-sexual.  (Hyder - I 
hope this serves as a much belated reply)  He mentioned the phrase 
"fallacy of composition" and used the principle in a manner directly 
opposed to how I would have used it.  To quote him, the fallacy of 
composition points out that "what is good for one may not be good 
for all."  His example was the one of an individual who stands up in a 
crowded stadium to get a better look and of course the point is that 
if everyone did it she would not get a better view.
	This principle and the examples can be taken in several 
different ways.  One can view them as n-person prisoner dilemmas.  
It is instrumentally rational for the individual to stand up 
particularly when they can make a good bet that others won't 
immediately stand up too and block her view or at least that the 
people who will stand up will be the ones behind her.  This could 
then be taken as a serious *problem* for Hyder's argument.  Why 
*is* it irrational to stand up?  One can of course argue that it isn't 
an issue of rationality but rather an issue of moral responsibility (I 
will return to this point in a second).  And then there is of course 
the Kantian line where the rationality claimed to be involved is such 
that the one has to, on pain of irrationality, universalize one's own 
action and then one realizes, supposedly, that there is some kind of 
contradiction involved.  This last conception of rationality has been 
traditionally terribly hard to back up though I would love to discuss 
it with anyone who wants to try.
	My point is not to settle the issue but to show that in fact it is 
not at all immediately obvious what force large scale consequences 
of many people doing the same action should have on the individual's 
reasoning about his own particular action.

D.	One of the possibilities I mentioned above was with regards to 
a moral concern about the outcome B.  I emphasize the phrase moral 
simply to point out that in a lot of the cases where this argument is 
run, B is not a direct consequence to the actor involved but rather to 
society as a whole and then only if others follow A's example.
	The degree to which the argument (A1)-(A5) is convincing 
depends to a large degree on the fact that the consequence B is 
considered bad by almost all S.C.Pians.  But of course a complete 
argument would have to point out that these are actually bad.  And 
that as we all know is phenomenally difficult.
	In some sense the issue is compounded if the proponent of the 
argument is religious.  You want to ultimately base the fact that B is 
bad on God and your religion but how is that going to be done without 
the, as I mentioned above, grand, ultimate arguments for God and the 
truth of your religion.


What I haven't discussed are the arguments that proceed with a 
liberal scattering of premises of the form "Allah says . . . " and "The 
Quran says . . . ".  Those only have weight with those who buy the 
religion in the first place and don't matter one bit with me.  But I 
hope the above preliminary points can get some more serious 
discussion going.

Take care,
Nadeem.

p.s.  The problem of derogatory feminine nouns is mostly in the third 
person, so why not just "aurat"?

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