Category: Atheism

The "village atheist" strawman

Jason Rosenhouse takes on the “village atheist” criticism of Dawkins et al that Pagels and others are fond of using. (I personally encountered it several times in the last month.) In Wilkins vs. Myers, he lets John Wilkins erect the strawman:

Of course there are people who have a simplistic and literal view of God and religion. That is not at issue and never has been. But what Pagels is saying is something that the uppity atheists always seem to slide over – that there is a more sophisticated view of God that is not so easily knocked down as the idea that God has a backside. And what is more, there always has been (which is the point of studying the Gnostics)….

Rosenhouse’s rejoinder:

Of course, the more sophisticated view to which Wilkins refers is harder to knock down only because it asserts almost nothing in the way of empirical claims…. We uppity atheists do not slide over the possibility of such a God, we merely find it vacuous and irrelevant, and not the kind of God the large majority of Christians profess to believe.

In fact, Elaine Pagels herself (in the Salon interview in which she sneered at Dawkins) provides an excellent example of “sophisticated” beliefs that don’t really say anything:

So when you think about the God that you believe in, how would you describe that God?
Well, I’ve learned from the texts I work on that there really aren’t words to describe God. You spoke earlier about a transcendent reality. I think it’s certainly true that these are not just fictions that we arbitrarily invent.

WTF? Exactly how does Pagels expect an atheist (village or otherwise) to “engage with” this kind of vague handwaving? But she’s not alone. Here’s Terry Eagleton, as quoted by Sean Carroll:

For Judeo-Christianity, God is not a person in the sense that Al Gore arguably is. Nor is he a principle, an entity, or “existent”: in one sense of that word it would be perfectly coherent for religious types to claim that God does not in fact exist. He is, rather, the condition of possibility of any entity whatsoever, including ourselves.

Feels like classic Spinoza. But where did the “he” come from? Anthropomorphism alert…. As Carroll puts it:

The problematic nature of this transition — from God as ineffable, essentially static and completely harmless abstract concept, to God as a kind of being that, in some sense that is perpetually up for grabs, cares about us down here on Earth — is not just a minor bump in the otherwise smooth road to a fully plausible conception of the divine. It is the profound unsolvable dilemma of “sophisticated theology.”

(I’m quoting from a mammoth posting which does a wonderful job of analyzing the history of these two distinct conceptions of God.)
I’d like to see one of this Pagels/Eagleton/Wilkins/Collins/Jeffries crowd point us “uppity atheists” at one or two books that present the “sophisticated” arguments that we’re supposed to be addressing. While I personally agree with Rosenhouse that such arguments are unlikely to be recognizable by the average Christian in Kansas, I’ll be happy to spend some time on them. I’d prefer to see something that actually “connected the dots”, rather than jumping straight from the Kalam cosmological argument (or a “condition of possibility”) to the Nicene Creed, but whatever….
—
[Via PZ.]

The opiate of the masses….

Matthew Parris shares my indignation:

A nun has apparently been cured of Parkinson’s disease through writing the name of John Paul II on a piece of paper.
[…]
Where are you, intelligent Christians? Where is your voice, your righteous anger? Where is your honest contempt for this nonsense? Take that claimed recent miracle, for instance. I know lots of nice, clever Catholics — friends, thoughtful men and women, people of depth and subtlety, people of some delicacy, people who would surely cringe at the excesses of Lourdes. Do they believe that John Paul II may have cured this nun from beyond the grave? […] I have a theory about their reticence. I think they know this stuff is the petrol on which the motor of a great Church runs; that without these delusions to feed on, the unthinking masses would falter. And they may be right. But what a melancholy conclusion: that the thinking parts of a religion should be almost extraneous to what moves it; far from the core; just a little fastidious shudder; a wink exchanged between the occupants of the reserved pews.

Of course it is these “occupants of the reserved pews”, these representatives of “the thinking parts of a religion”, who excoriate Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris for the “crude” conception of God which they attack. “Dawkins is merely betraying his ignorance of the sophisticated aspects of theology,” they sneer. “If he is going to criticize religion, he should engage the best arguments, and not these crude populist forms.” But their silence in the face of arrant superstition exposes their hypocrisy. Either they disbelieve this nonsense, in which case they should join the secular world in calling it by its proper name, or they actually believe it, in which case their criticisms of Dawkins are inexcusable. Damned if they do, and damned if they don’t.

Distorting history because of religion

You hear a lot about “angry atheists” these days. Speaking personally, I see many more outrageous things being done in the name of religion today than there were 10 or 20 years ago. Take this story from the UK: Schools ‘avoid Holocaust lessons’

The Historical Association report claimed: “Teachers and schools avoid emotive and controversial history for a variety of reasons, some of which are well-intentioned.
“Staff may wish to avoid causing offence or appearing insensitive to individuals or groups in their classes.
“In particular settings, teachers of history are unwilling to challenge highly contentious or charged versions of history in which pupils are steeped at home, in their community or in a place of worship.”
The report gave the example of a history department in a northern city which decided not to teach the Holocaust as a topic for GCSE coursework.
It cited another school which taught the Holocaust, but then avoided teaching the Crusades because “balanced treatment” of the topic would have challenged what some local mosques were teaching.

Sounds familiar? Change “history” and “Holocaust” to “biology” and “evolution”. Reasons to be angry? You bet.
UPDATE: The full study can be found here. Ed Braytron has also been discussing this over at Dispatches from the Culture Wars, and getting some interesting comments.

Beyond Belief 2006

How I’m planning to spend much of this weekend: watching the videos of the Beyond Belief 2006 conference.

After two centuries, could this be twilight for the Enlightenment project and the beginning of a new age of unreason? Will faith and dogma trump rational inquiry, or will it be possible to reconcile religious and scientific worldviews? Can evolutionary biology, anthropology and neuroscience help us to better understand how we construct beliefs, and experience empathy, fear and awe? Can science help us create a new rational narrative as poetic and powerful as those that have traditionally sustained societies? Can we treat religion as a natural phenomenon? Can we be good without God? And if not God, then what?
This is a critical moment in the human situation, and The Science Network in association with the Crick-Jacobs Center brought together an extraordinary group of scientists and philosophers to explore answers to these questions. The conversation took place at the Salk Institute, La Jolla, CA from November 5-7, 2006.

Ignorance and stupidity is pandemic – but you knew that

First evolution… then geology… now the rotation of the earth. From the bacon-eating atheist Jew:

Saudi Arabia’s commission issued this ‘famed 1974 fatwa — issued by its blind leader at the time, Sheik Abdul Aziz Ben Baz — which declared that the Earth was flat and immobile. In a book issued by the Islamic University of Medina, the sheik argued: “If the earth is rotating, as they claim, the countries, the mountains, the trees, the rivers, and the oceans will have no bottom.”‘
In a university book? Don’t count on the cure for cancer coming from an Islamic state.
But don’t expect it come from the American Bible Belt either. Just look at the recent words of Marshall Hall of Cornelia, Ga., is a retired schoolteacher who has spent the last 30 years protesting the teaching of evolution. His books argue not only that Darwin was wrong but also that science has been wrong ever since Copernicus and that the idea of Earth turning is a “carefully crafted Bible-bashing lie.”

If you’re not thoroughly satiated, check out this entertaining demolition job at Good Math, Bad Math.

"The lively and sophisticated world of non-belief"

To listen to some people these days, you’d think that atheists are the new Taliban. First we have the preposterous Colin Slee, Dean of Southwark, ranting that:

“atheists like Richard Dawkins are just as fundamentalist as the people setting off bombs on the tube”

And then sophisticated poseurs like Stuart Jeffries seek to portray the situation as a shouting-match between two equally dogmatic and intolerant factions: believers and unbelievers. Now Caspar Melville, editor of the New Humanist, provides a welcome rebuttal:

The evidence for [Jeffries] claim is depressingly shopworn. He quotes without challenge [from] Colin Slee… [and] criticises both Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens for their “aggressive” attitude to believers without addressing the substance of their many and complex arguments. […] Throughout, atheists and secularist are characterised as “dogmatic”, “evangelical”, “fundamentalist”, and as obsessed by God and the idea of belief, as Billy Graham. Jeffries is quite right to point out that these days secularists seem exasperated. But who can blame us when the case against unaccountable and undemocratic religious privilege is so misrepresented by articles like his?

Melville goes on to describe the diverse views of contributors to his journal and others, disproving the assertion of a uniformitarian quest to “airbrush” religion from public debate, to create a soulless, value free public sphere.
Ultimately I would think that believers of any stripe would be unwise to associate themselves with Jeffries’ wry cynicism. The logic of his position is that it doesn’t really matter what people believe, and we should accept all beliefs with a Mencken-like shrug. I don’t think so. For people like Dawkins and Hitchens and PZ (and me), belief matters – and irrational beliefs should be “named and shamed”.
Melville concludes:

Was this the same Mencken who wrote: “The evangelical churches are rapidly becoming public nuisances. Neglecting almost altogether their old concern about individual salvation, they have converted themselves into vast engines for harassing and oppressing persons who dissent from their naïve and often preposterous theology.” Hardly “respectful of others cherished beliefs”, was he? […] I suspect that if he were around now his arguments would be far closer to those of Christopher Hitchens than Stuart Jeffries would like to imagine.

Faith and contingency

Author Sam Harris and blogger Andrew Sullivan have been conducting an interesting debate of letters on the subject of religious belief. The latest piece by Sam Harris is particularly thought-provoking. Key paragraph:

You also appear to see some strange, epistemological significance in the fact that you cannot remember when or how you acquired your faith. Surely the roots of many of your beliefs are similarly obscure. I don’t happen to remember when or how I came to believe that Pluto is a planet. Should I say that this belief “chose me”? What if, upon hearing that astronomers have changed their opinion about Pluto, I announced that “I have no ability to stop believing…. I know of no ‘proof’ that could dissuade me of [Pluto’s planethood], since no ‘proof’ ever persuaded me of it.” I’m sure you will balk at this analogy, but I’m guessing that your parents told you about God from the moment you appeared in this world. This is generally how people are put in a position to say things like faith “chose me.” The English language chose both of us. That doesn’t mean that we cannot reflect critically on it or recognize that the fact that we both speak it (we might say it is the “air we breathe”) is an utterly non-mysterious consequence of our upbringings. Indeed, you do admit the role that such contingency plays in matters of faith. As you say, if you had been raised Buddhist, you’d almost certainly be a Buddhist. But you refrain from drawing any important conclusions from this. If you had been raised by atheists, might you even be an atheist?

Sullivan owes an apology

An email to Andrew Sullivan:

Subject: You owe an apology
From: “Geoff Arnold”
To: andrew@andrewsullivan.com
Date: Thu, February 1, 2007 11:27 am
To respond to someone who says this:
> I, personally, as an atheist, find meaning in my own possibility
> and will to act in this world. I have the opportunity to interact
> with others and to create things. I have the chance to leave this
> world a bit better than when I came into it… for my children and
> for the rest of humanity. I don’t do this because a particular
> flying spaghetti monster ordained that I do it and will punish me
> with his noodly appendage if I don’t. I do it because I have the
> power and I believe that it is better for me if I help those around
> me. What else would give my life more meaning than that?
with this
> But why is that more meaningful than flying a plane into the World
> Trade Center?
is something I would have expected from Pat Robertson or Bill
O’Reilly, or a Christianist but not from you. If you really can’t see
why, you’re a fool. If it was just a thoughtless rhetorical flourish,
you should be ashamed of yourself.