A while back now, I did a video over on YouTube where I took a look at the Cosmic Skeptic, Alex O’Connor and pointed out that, at least when it came to specific charity claims that he was making, he was going entirely off the rational reservation.

Since then, I’ve looked at a couple of his videos here and there and then, I saw this video from the Non-Alchemist addressing it and I thought I needed to respond. Instead of heading to YouTube though, I really wanted to take an in-depth look, so here we go. Links to videos concerned will be below the fold.

Now generally, I don’t mind Alex and I mostly enjoy Non-Alchemist, but this video really made me cringe. It has all of the same problems that the original video that I took on did, only now, combined with a seeming misunderstanding of religion.

Therefore, I’m going to borrow some parts from the N-A video to demonstrate my point. He, at one point, puts up a syllogism that’s supposed to present his argument but it’s absurdly nonsensical and no Christian I have ever run into will fall for it. So let’s look at his premises:

1. In order for extreme suffering to be justified, a creature must either deserve it or be compensated.

2. Non-human animals experience extreme suffering, do not deserve it and are not compensated.

3. Therefore, the extreme suffering of non-human animals is unjustified.

Now I’m going to take exception to every single one of the premises and they simply do not lead to that conclusion because “justified”, even given the  definition which he provides in the description of “having, done for, or marked by a good or legitimate reason“, is a completely wishy washy definition. Everything in that is a wiffle word. Justified by who and in what way? Who gets to decide? Because all of this, all of these emotionally-validated claims that I’ve seen from Alex and now from N-A, they aren’t objectively so. It’s just their opinions.

Granted, they are certainly welcome to their opinions, but this is, at least according to Alex, the “biggest problem for Christianity”, apparently, that there is.

So let’s go take a look at it.

First off, your fee-fees, and this goes for absolutely everyone, don’t get to be considered absolutely true, just because you really, really like the idea. This was my original objection to Alex’s video back in the day and it still remains so. It doesn’t matter if you’re a Christian or an atheist or anything else, your feelings don’t override objective reality, nor do you get to insist that reality follows your feelings because it makes you happy. You don’t just get to demand that your feelings get coddled because you really want them to be.

So we look at the first premise, that in order for suffering to be justified, yadda yadda yadda. Well who says it does? What happens in nature happens in nature. We don’t have to like that it happens, we only have to accept that it does. That goes for absolutely everything. We don’t have to like bot fly larvae digging into the eyes of children. It sucks. There is no justification for it, it just happens and, if we can stop it, we probably ought to, just out of self-preservation, but otherwise, life sucks, move on. Right there, the whole thing falls apart because nature doesn’t need justification at all. It doesn’t act with a purpose. It just does what it does.

We could just stop right there, the entire thing just falls apart but we’ll continue. The second premise is even worse, I think. It’s just a bald assertion, based on the first, that animals neither deserve suffering, based on what I don’t quite know, likely more feelings, and are not compensated. Well what kind of compensation do you think they deserve? He argues that animals ought to go to heaven of some sort, but that’s just silly. Nobody, based on every shred of evidence that we have, goes to heaven. It’s all pure fantasy. This is where so many of these philosophical arguments entirely leave the reservation. They’re based on absolutely nothing but wishful thinking.

Now I get that he’s trying to pose these questions to Christians, that is the name of the video after all and Alex’s primary claim, but that won’t work because it’s relying on assumptions that the vast majority of Christians simply don’t make. If you go right back to Genesis, it’s very clear. Genesis 1:26 says “Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.””

In other words, according to Christian theology, animal suffering is irrelevant because man has unquestioned dominion over them. We can slaughter them wholesale and, in fact, the Bible is full of that kind of thing. That nature is cruel by our estimation, either from an atheist perspective or a Christian one is entirely irrelevant. It just doesn’t matter and if Alex and N-A think that this is going to convince any theists whatsoever to change their  tune, I think they’re sadly mistaken. All the Christian has to do is say “Genesis 1:26” and the problem is solved. That you don’t like what Genesis 1:26 or other verses in the Bible say is irrelevant. They do. That’s all that matters to them. You aren’t going to convince them that they’re wrong because you haven’t demonstrated that you are, in fact, right.

This is something that I’ve seen a lot lately, especially from the arm chair philosophers. They are doing, effectively, the same thing that the religious have been doing for centuries. They are making moral pronouncements, based on their emotional state, which cannot be demonstrated to be anything more. “This is how I feel, therefore anyone who disagrees with me, they have to be wrong!” Well isn’t that what religion has been doing since day one? “I think my god wants X!” There are a lot of variations on the theme, after all, there are more than 42,000 distinct sects of Christianity out there and they mostly disagree, but what does that actually mean? Where does that actually  get you?

It doesn’t matter what you think. It doesn’t matter what you believe. You have to do a whole lot better than that and there are no double standards here. I hold absolutely everyone to the same standard and, in cases like this, neither side can come up to expectations. It doesn’t matter whether you’re talking about Matt Dillahunty and slavery, and just for the record, I wish him well in his open heart surgery, or Alex and his “give your money to the people I want you to” videos, none of it is justified because they haven’t remotely given us a standard by which justification can be measured, nor shown that your preferred standard has any meaning. You don’t just  get to pick your goalposts and demand that everyone rally around them. Truth isn’t up for a vote. Just because you can get the most people on your side, that  doesn’t make your side right. It really can’t be that hard!

Yet for some reason, for a lot of people, it is. Kind of sad, huh?