Category: Atheism

I was reading the latest RSS feeds from blogs.sun.com and came across an entry by my friend Chris Gerhard that began, “I’ve been waiting for Geoff’s review of The God Delusion“.
Oops. Mea culpa. Let me fix this right now….

I did mention Dawkins’ book in passing, and said that I basically agreed with it. The fact that it’s #2 on the Amazon best-seller list is a good thing; it’s going to get a lot of people talking – and hopefully thinking – about atheism as a practical alternative. Structurally, it’s a “horizontal” book, a series of essays on various topics related to theistic belief. There’s something for everyone, as it were. This means, however, that it lacks the structural coherence of, say, Dan Dennett’s Breaking The Spell – or of most of Dawkins’ earlier work. It’s closer to Sam Harris, an author who alternately delights and infuriates me.

Those few of us that have read widely on the topic of atheism (from authors such as Russell, Flew, Michael Martin, Wells, and Dennett), will find nothing new in Dawkins’ book. But we’re in a distinct minority, of course: most people have not encountered these ideas, and for them the book is to be highly recommended. I applaud Dawkins for using his well-earned reputation in evolutionary biology to advance this controversial message, and for exposing himself to clueless reviewers such as Marilynn Robinson in the latest Atlantic Harper’s.

However if I were allowed to take only one work of Dawkins to the fabled “desert island” along with my discs, it would not be this one. I’d be agonizing over the choice between the magnificent Extended Phenotype and the inspirational Ancestors’ Tale. If I’m lucky, perhaps I’ll be allowed to take both.

Dan Dennett recently had emergency surgery for a dissection of the aorta. As Boing Boing reports, his friends were anxious to see what effect, if any, this experience had on his atheism. Dan’s response (which you should read in its entirety) included this:

Yes, I did have an epiphany. I saw with greater clarity than ever before in my life that when I say “Thank goodness!” this is not merely a euphemism for “Thank God!” (We atheists don’t believe that there is any God to thank.) I really do mean thank goodness! There is a lot of goodness in this world, and more goodness every day, and this fantastic human-made fabric of excellence is genuinely responsible for the fact that I am alive today. It is a worthy recipient of the gratitude I feel today, and I want to celebrate that fact here and now.

Beautifully put. Get well soon, Dan.

UPDATE: In a comment, Chris questioned what he called Dan’s “anthropological optimism”. I asked Dan about this; here’s his reply:

Actually, I’ve been thinking a lot about goodness during the last two weeks since surgery. In one sense it is just obvious: in every human activity there is some measure of quality control, and practically everybody takes this for granted. In the lowliest marketplace, the good food sells before the bad unless the bad is priced lower. People always care. That’s not moral goodness, just the multitudinous excellences of all things we touch and care about. Is there more goodness every day? In this sense, sure. There’s lots of junk, too, of course, but our standards for what is acceptable keep rising, and we keep taking more and more excellence for granted. What about moral excellence? This depends a lot on infrastructure: no matter how heroic you are personally, you can’t save many lives, or help many people, unless you are part of a huge system of design, manufacture and delivery of whatever you rely on in your good works. But that’s easier and easier every year. See my piece “Information, Technology and the Virtues of Ignorance” (last chapter in Brainchildren) about how we are now actually oppressed by all the can-do that science and technology has imposed on us.

Keith Parsons has come up with a beautifully-written paper entitled No Creator Need Apply: A Reply to Roy Abraham Varghese. It’s worth reading the whole piece, but this paragraph will give you a sense of the strategy that Parsons adopts:

[Varghese] does tell us that “It is as absurd to ask for an explanation for the existence of a self-explanatory being as it is to ask ‘Why is a circle round?'” (pp. 14-15). Well, yes, it would be absurd to ask “What is the explanation (meaning an explanation external to that being itself) of the self-explanatory being?” But we are still left completely in the dark about just how we are to construe God’s alleged self-explanatoriness, and, in particular, how it would differ from the condition of a putative original, uncaused state of the physical universe. Worse, until and unless we have such clarification of what it means to be self-explanatory, it is hard to see how God’s alleged self-explanatoriness really amounts to anything other than just being inexplicable. If God, by definition, can have no cause or dependence on anything else (since all else is caused or depends on him), then God’s existence is placed beyond the bounds of any possible explanation, account, or understanding. Ironically, therefore, Varghese and Meynell may have only succeeded in defining God into utter inexplicability, and so making him into precisely the sort of ultimate brute fact that they decry.

He also addresses a common theistic sleight-of-hand: the leap from logical contingency to ontological contingency.

But why should any nontheist suppose that the doctrine of creatio continuans has any rational credentials? Why, for instance, would a quark require any metaphysical props to uphold its existence and underwrite its powers and liabilities? Of course, all physical things are contingent in the sense that they might not have existed, but logical contingency does not imply ontological contingency. Just because something might not exist at a given time is no reason to think that in fact its existence is maintained by something else. From the nontheist’s perspective, the insistence upon an explanation of the universe in terms of creatio continuans is just another instance of the propensity of theistic apologists to create a mystery where there is none, and then offer God as the tailor-made answer to the pseudoenigma. As for why existing things remain in existence, nontheists just do not see any mystery here and no need for an explanation.

Indeed. Nicely done.
[Via Mark Vuletic, whose Subucula tua apparet is also well worth a read.]

You may remember that right after 9/11, when people were trying to come to grips with what could motivate suicidal jihadis, we heard a lot about madrassas, Islamic schools in Pakistan and elsewhere, usually paid for by Saudi oil money. Do these descriptions sound familiar?

… political agendas and slogans are mixed with [religious] rituals that end with most of the kids in tears. Tears of release and joy, they would claim — the children are not physically abused. The kids are around 9 or 10 years old… and are pliant willing receptacles. They are instructed… that we must form an “army” to defeat the Godless influences….
Awareness of the rest of the world is curtailed — one can only view or read that which agrees with the agenda. Naturally, the kids being so young, there is no questioning of any kind — they simply accept what grownups say — they get pumped up, agitated, they memorize [political and religious] slogans and shout them back obediently. They become part of a support group — a warm, safe, comfortable feeling for anyone, for any social animal, for you and me. No one strays or gets out of line even the slightest bit.
…at one point [the group leader] instructs the little ones that they should be willing to die for [their religion], and the little ones obediently agree. [They] may even use the word martyr.
[A] cardboard cutout of [their charismatic political leader] is brought out and the children are urged to identify — many of the little ones come forward and reverently touch his cardboard hands.

Sounds pretty familiar, doesn’t it? And the natural reaction is anger towards the adults who would brain-wash innocent children and fill them with hatred for others. But this isn’t in Pakistan – this is in Colorado Springs. And the cardboard cut-out is of George W. Bush….

From Pharyngula:

There was a weird court case [in Oklahoma] recently. Well, maybe not so weird, unfortunately – I could see it happening here. To make it short, an atheist girl in high school was kicked off a sports team because she wouldn’t join in team prayers; abuse ensued; school officials lied; the principal assaulted the father; police and principal perjured themselves to press charges against him; threats were made to try and drive the family out of the state.

Read the whole thing. Amazing. Simply amazing. (And depressing.)

Here’s a wonderful rant by Pharyngula:

You don’t find that much arrogance in science. If you want arrogance, you need to go to those uninformed, lying christianists who pronounce doom and destruction and declare who is evil and who is going to hell and whose country must be destroyed and its inhabitants converted to the One True Faith. When I hear people declare that Dawkins is the arrogant one, while they are surrounded by Robertsons and Coulters and Dobsons, I give up on them. They’ve just admitted that they lack any sensible perspective on the world.

Here’s an interesting thesis over at SecularOutpost:

One interesting thing about conservative Christianity in the US is the parallel social and cultural reality it has been able to sustain. There are Christian books, music acts, movies — a whole cultural world Christians try to keep pure of contamination by a corrupt secular environment. There are directories of Christian businesses for those who want to shop according to their moral values. […] Ordinarily, I would not be too concerned. Let them create a fantasy world and live in it — it would not bother me as long as it did not significantly interfere with things I care about. But that rarely happens. Inevitably, the parallel ideological reality competes for resources in the real world. And occasionally, the right-wing religious populists get ambitions of taking over the country.

It’s easy to ask the question, hard to follow through to the logical conclusion. From the BBC:

Pope Benedict XVI has made a historic visit to the former Nazi death camps of Auschwitz and Birkenau at the end of his four-day tour of Poland. […]
It was particularly difficult for a Christian – a German pope – to speak from such a place of horror, he said.
“In a place like this, words fail. In the end, there can only be a dread silence – a silence which is itself a heartfelt cry to God: Why, Lord, did you remain silent? How could you tolerate all this?” he said in a speech in Italian.

If Benedict’s conception of an omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent deity is compatible with such horrors, then he’s delusional. Mind you, he’s in distinguished company. Pretzel logicians all. They’d rather hang on to their world of make-believe instead of simply admitting the truth. Human beings did these horrible things to other human beings, and it’s up to us human beings to prevent such atrocities from happening in the future. No supernatural agent is going to save us from ourselves: we have to grow up, take responsibility, and sort it out on our own.

Over at Dispatches From The Culture Wars there’s a discussion about the relationship between evolution and atheism:

There is the Dawkins/Dennett position […] And there are people like me, Wesley Elsberry and Eugenie Scott, who take the position that while evolution is certainly incompatible with certain forms of religious belief, it is not incompatible with other forms of religious belief […] But many [intelligent design] advocates believe that people like Wes and Genie and myself are just pretending to think that they’re compatible, and that really makes me angry.

As I commented, it seem to me that this is an inevitable consequence of a massive (historical) equivocation on the word “god”. Everybody picks the high-level dichotomy: “atheism” vs. “some form of ontological commitment towards something that the believer chooses to label ‘god’“. But in terms of belief-clusters, the difference between one self-avowed believer and another may be huge. Remember that the Romans called the early Christians “atheists”….
Personally, I style myself as an atheist because there is nothing that I believe exists that I choose to label ‘god’. Of course there are plenty of things that I do believe exist that other people have chosen to label ‘god’, but I prefer not to play the equivocation game. When Frank “Omega Point” Tipler and Pat Robertson both use the word “god”, how much overlap is there? Precious little, I suspect. (Semantic or ontological!) (And don’t get me started on Freeman Dyson!)
When a non-atheist challenges my atheism, my response is usually along these lines: “Over the centuries (and even today), so many people have used ‘god’ in so many different ways that I honestly don’t know what you mean by the word. Do you mean ‘sol invictus’, or ‘Odin’, or ‘Osiris’, or ‘the god of the Pentateuch’, or ‘infinite mind’, or ‘Gaia’, or something else? Define your god, tell me in what way it exists for you, and I’ll tell you if I believe in it.”

Interesting review of Julia Sweeney’s one-woman show Letting Go of God:

You might think coming out as an atheist would be no big deal in 21st Century America.
Wrong.
When Julia Sweeney performed excerpts of her solo play “Letting Go of God” on the popular public radio show “This American Life,” response from listeners flooded in.
And when she spoke about her metamorphosis from born-and-bred Catholic to nonbeliever in a conference on religious skepticism, Sweeney’s devout parents in Spokane were none too pleased. In fact, they were horrified.

Interesting reading. Though I don’t know what rock the reviewer has been living under if she seriously thought that coming out as an atheist would be “no big deal”. Oh, wait: I do. Seattle. OK, maybe that makes sense…. (Chris? Jon?)
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[Via Pharyngula]