Convention speech: Dan Barker —‘Contraduction’ is not a contradiction

This is the speech given by FFRF Co-President Dan Barker on Sept. 28, 2024, at FFRF’s 47th annual convention in Denver. He was introduced by David Tamayo, a member of the FFRF Executive Board. To watch the video of this speech (or any convention speech), go to ffrf.us/con24.

David Tamayo: I have the privilege to introduce Dan Barker, who, after 19 years of preaching the Christian gospel, finally left the faith and announced his atheism in January 1984, something that not even George Orwell could have predicted.

Eight months later, after joining the Freedom From Religion Foundation, he gave his first talk at the FFRF convention in Milwaukee in September 1984. That is 40 years ago. In 2004, he and Annie Laurie Gaylor became co-presidents of the Freedom from Religion Foundation. That was 20 years ago. Since leaving the ministry, he has participated in 140 public debates and has written 11 books.

As a way of introducing this amazing person and his latest book, I would like to dedicate to him this very short poem.

“There was once a preacher, Dan Barker, whose sermons in Mexico were sharper from induction to instruction and spiritual production, but his faith faced a swift reduction.

He preached once of sin and seduction, now he writes on religion’s destruction.

From obstruction to function, God lost his conduction, and then found pure joy in reduction.

With abduction of faith in the night, he embraced reason’s bright reconstruction.

No more church instruction, Dan’s journey, a unique conduction from preacher to atheist production.

And that is not a contraduction.”

For more on this new word, I present to you my most admired friend,

Dan Barker.

By Dan Barker

My talk is “Contraduction.” If you looked at your program, you might have thought it was a typo since the “I” and the “U” are right next to each other on the keyboard. That happens sometimes, but it’s not a typo. We actually have a new word, and it’s a little bit bold to suggest I’m going to introduce a new word to philosophy because how often does that happen? 

Do any of you get the “Word of the Day” that Anu Garg puts out every morning? You should sign up for that because he explains a new word and a certain theme. In the first week of September the theme was “newly coined words.” And he started the week with my newly coined word “contraduction.” He thinks someday it could end up in the dictionary. So do a number of other people; people who have blurbed the book and have said they’ve read it and said yes, including Steven Pinker, who happens to be the editor of the New American Heritage Dictionary. Others include the British philosopher A.C. Grayling, who’s well-known all over Europe. He read the book in one afternoon, and he is now recommending it. Ron Reagan gave it thumbs up. Ann Druyan, the wife and widow of Carl Sagan, said, yes. Robert Sapolsky, the skeptic Michael Shermer, and, of course, the famous David Tamayo, read the book and gave an endorsement. The sociologist Phil Zuckerman. Kate Cohen said she read the book and said it made her laugh. “The Thinking Atheist” Seth Andrews, Matt Dillahunty and many others have read this and said, yes, we think we do actually have a new word.

Hidden fallacy

So, what is “contraduction”? In brief, it’s a hidden fallacy that happens to all of us. Usually, it’s an innocent hidden fallacy that completely inverts reality, a 180-degree reversal of reality based on us assuming everything from our human point of view.

Have you ever been sitting in a train that’s not moving when the train next to you starts to move and you briefly think it’s you who’s moving. Has that ever happened to you? That happens to me a lot. And then you realize, oh, I’ve got it backwards. Well, that’s one example of contraduction. It’s a 180-degree reversal of what we thought was true. But, actually, the inverse is true. And this has real implications with theology and apologetics. It has a lot to do with the design argument, and especially the fine-tuning argument for the existence of God.

But it’s not just religion. Contraduction is a reversal of any kind of order. It can be time or position, or it can be cause and effect. It can be relationships.

I think the most ancient, most powerful contraduction is the sunrise. Does the sun rise? Why do we call it sunrise? It’s because from our point of view, when we’re looking at it, it looks like the sun is rising, when, in actuality, it’s completely reversed. It’s not the sun; it is we who are rising. So, it’s a complete reversal. And the correction of that contraduction in history cost some people their lives.

Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake for going against the Church’s teaching that the sun goes around the Earth. Of course, Galileo and others were persecuted because of that belief, and yet they realized things were totally backwards.

Contraduction can happen with relationships. In the book “Killers of the Flower Moon” by David Grann, there’s a photo of an Oklahoma homeowner and her servant. This white woman is standing by the door of a summer retreat and next to her is this very dark-skinned Osage Indian woman. Many people who view that photo would just assume that the white woman was the homeowner, but it was the other way around. The Osage woman had become wealthy from oil rights, and she had hired the white woman.

So, that’s an example of getting a relationship totally backwards. There might be many reasons why you would assume the reverse, and we can imagine why, but whatever the reasons are, the reversal of the relationship is a reversal of a contraduction.

Need for a new word

This whole book started basically because I was invited to a debate in March 2022 put on by the Central Florida Freethought Community. One of the hosts of the debate was David Williamson, and he and a local pastor had become friends. They wanted to have a debate, and they had this Free Flo event. One of the events was my debate with Adam Lloyd Johnson.

During Adam’s opening statement, he was arguing that the strongest argument for the existence of God is the “fine-tuning argument.” He said, “I’m going to be using abductive reasoning tonight to argue an inference to the best explanation.” He said, “I’m not arguing for the god of the bible. I’m arguing for mere theism.” He used that phrase, and I was thinking about abduction. Abductive reasoning is basically your best guess.

Sounds like a fancy word, but it just means you’ve got all these possibilities and hypothetical explanations. So, what one is the best guess? Investigators use it when they’re examining a crime, for example, to maybe come up with a prime suspect. But, you still haven’t convicted the person, you’re just coming up with your best guess. So, as I stood up at the podium there in my opening, I said, “I think Adam’s reasoning is backward. He’s got it reversed. And instead of abduction, I think we need a new word.” I was thinking on my feet. I was just ad-libbing, and I said, maybe we should call it “postduction.”

Well, the audience didn’t seem very impressed with that, and they shouldn’t have been because postduction is not the right word. A couple of months later, Annie Laurie [Gaylor] and I were driving down the coast highway in California, and it dawned on me: I need a prefix that doesn’t mean after, but a prefix that means inverted.

So, the concept of contraduction was born. I sat down to write what I thought was going to be a short article. No magazine would take it; they said it was it was too long. I finally found a publisher, Hypatia Press, who said they would take it. So, it became the book “Contraduction.”

In the debate, after I made that silly comment, I said, “The fine-tuning argument, people are so impressed about how all of these constants and parameters and ratios of the universe have to be exact. You talk about the force of gravity, the electroweak force, the strong nuclear force, the cosmological constant. These exact values, if any of them is off by even the slightest amount, life would not be possible in the universe. We’d be in a dead, stillborn universe.”

So, Adam, in his argument, in his abductive reasoning, asked, “What’s the best explanation for this appearance of exquisite fine tuning?”

In fact, if you take all of these variables and assume correctly that they can’t vary by very much, it’s estimated that the chances of life appearing are one over 10 to the 60th. That’s a teeny, teeny, teeny tiny number. It’s a number. It’s not zero, but it’s so tiny that, well, chance doesn’t seem to be the best explanation.

Adam says, “Well, the best explanation then must be the design argument.”

I got up and said, “I think this reasoning is backward. It’s kind of like the guy who’s so impressed that all of those rivers were made to flow right along the state border? How do you explain that? You know, if you think about it, it must have been a huge, massive civic undertaking, and expensive, to get each of those rivers to be exquisitely fine-tuned to match the border. What’s the best explanation for that?”

Well, of course that’s backward, isn’t it? The rivers came first and the borders came later. Or, it can be like the guy who says, “Look at the shape of the human nose. Look how perfectly shaped it is to support a pair of eyeglasses. How do you explain that?” I think the fine-tuning argument is like that. On its face, it’s very seductive.

But if you flip it around, you can see that there’s a backward kind of thinking.

More than just religion

In my book, I do talk about religion, but really “Contraduction” has a broader application. It can apply to time itself. Is time flowing or are we flowing? Is the sun rising or are we rising?

I also have a chapter on sleep. Should we ask what is the purpose of sleep or flip it around? Should we ask what is the purpose of wakefulness? Maybe sleep is the default and wakefulness is what needs to be explained. I also have a whole chapter on mirrors, which I don’t have time to go into, but if you ever look in the mirror, it looks like it’s reversed. You’re right and left in reverse. They’re not. The right and left are not reversed. Your right hand is to the east, that right hand is to the east and the left is to the west. What mirrors reverse is not left and right, but front to back. If you point to yourself north, it looks like it’s pointing south.

It’s a 180-degree flip. And, by the way, have you noticed that although left and right seem to be reversed, top and bottom doesn’t? Why is that? Einstein even started thinking that years ago. How? Why is that? Even if you’re lying on your side, why is it that mirrors do it? Well, it’s because mirrors aren’t reversing that way. They’re reversing front and back.

And the way to unreverse this paradox in your mind, is to imagine that you’re looking at a picture of yourself on a piece of paper, in which case you do see it like another person sees it. But if you turn the paper around and hold it up to the light and look at yourself through the back side, well, then it does line up.

So, when you look at a mirror, do the same thing. That image in the mirror is not looking at you. That image in the mirror is looking with you through you, and you can reverse it around. You know that that plays into the chapter on free will, which I don’t have time to talk about today. But if you’re looking backward in past, we see strict determinism. But, if you’re looking forward into the future, like looking into the mirror, we don’t know the future. So, we have this illusion that arises that we have free will and I think, by the way, that free will is an illusion, but it’s a beautiful illusion. While others think maybe it’s a pernicious illusion. Many of the readers of the book disagreed with me on some of these chapters, and I’m glad some of them said, “No, that’s not a good example,” but none of them disagreed with the whole idea of “contraduction” itself.

Design argument

So, you may disagree with a chapter or two. I have a chapter on design, pointing out that most design arguments look valid and strong. The basic design argument says we’ve never observed design without a designer. The universe appears to be designed. Therefore, the universe had a designer. That looks like a seductive argument, doesn’t it?

But, science proceeds from what we do observe, and the design arguments go from what we don’t observe. We could use that logic with all sorts of things. We have never observed an intelligence outside of a physical brain. God is intelligent. Therefore, God must have had a physical brain. Why? You can use that logic to produce all sorts of meaningless conclusions.

The fine-tuning argument is seductive. Christopher Hitchens said he thought it was the best argument they have because of this scientific veneer to it. The late Victor Stenger, the astrophysicist who was a member of FFRF, wrote a book, “The Fallacy of Fine Tuning,” in which he concluded the universe was not fine-tuned for us. We were fine-tuned for the universe.

Think about evolution, how we evolved to fit. If the universe had been different, we would have been different. If the river had flowed differently, the border would have been different.

I also talk a little bit about the Kalam argument, which has some contraductory fallacies within it. The Kalam is the cosmological argument that says everything that begins to exist has a cause. The universe began to exist. Therefore, the universe had a cause. That sounds kind of cool, doesn’t it? Well, yeah. And so that argument, they call it the Kalam. It’s an ancient Islamic word for the idea that there could not have been an actual infinity. There had to be a beginning, because if there were an infinite number of preceding events, we never could have traversed it to get to now.

But, we have arrived at now. Therefore, there couldn’t have been an infinite number, there had to be a beginning. You combine that with Big Bang cosmology to come up with this Kalam cosmological argument. But, I don’t have time to destroy that. There’s five killer arguments against it, which I put in the book.

So, one hypothesis other than chance or a supreme being is a multiverse. I do not argue for a multiverse. I even said during the debate that we don’t know. A multiverse at this point in time is a hypothesis. However, it’s plausible. It doesn’t contradict any known laws of physics. Many physicists are concluding that there must be or could be a multiverse, meaning a multiple collection of universes.

If that’s true, then that raises the numerator in the fraction that produces the probabilities in the fine-tuning argument. So, if you have a higher numerator, you have more rolls of the dice, so there’s more chances to have a life-permitting universe, in which case we happen to be in one of those. What I point out is not so much that the multiverse is a factual argument, but it’s a hypothesis, and so is the idea of a supreme being.

So, if Adam is going to argue that his hypothesis has some probability to it, I would say, “Well, then we can counter this hypothesis with this hypothesis.” It’s like imaginary numbers that cancel out in an equation or like matter and antimatter. And we need to wait until someday when either the supreme being or the multiverse has evidence for it. Then we can ask whether one of those is the cause of the appearance of fine-tuning.

When ancients were looking at the sunrise, they came up with all sorts of explanations. The bible even says the sun rises and sets. And in the second century, Ptolemy said “Look at the sun and the stars and the planets and all this stuff. How do you explain it?” And he came up with what’s called the Ptolemaic solar system, which was this weird Rube Goldberg kind of machine of spheres within spheres in retrograde. That kind of explained it all, but it was so complicated. And, if he had just reversed the contraduction and realized it’s not the sun that is rising, you wouldn’t even need to answer the question, because it wouldn’t even be a question to ask in the first place.

And a lot of these debates that theologians and apologists are raising are trying to answer these questions that are kind of like Gilda Radner on “Saturday Night Live.” “Never mind!” You don’t even have to argue it anymore.

So, a word for that is “waldo.” Robert Heinlein, the science fiction author, wrote a 1942 short story called “Waldo.” This guy named Waldo was a physical weakling, but he builds this huge, fantastic Waldo pantograph machine that makes him look really powerful.

Today, the word “waldo” has come to represent any unnecessarily complicated, overly convoluted explanation. A lot of these theistic arguments are waldos.

A woman called her husband. He was traveling. And she said, “Honey, I just heard a report that there’s a vehicle going the wrong direction on the interstate.”

And he said, “I know! There’s dozens of them!”

I think a lot of these apologists are like that driver. There’s all these Waldos coming at him. The correct answer is not to just continue plowing headlong into those Waldos. The correct answer is to pull over, turn around and head back to the natural world.