Alec blogged a link to Brent Rasmussen’s DarkSyde’s What It Feels Like to be an Atheist with the comment “One for Geoff”. (Thanks, Alec.) Here’s Brent’s DarkSyde’s intro:

“I’m amazed everyday of my life that everyone isn’t an atheist like me. But they’re not, I have no idea why that is, but it is reality. And based on many questions over the years it sounds possibly hard for someone who is not one to understand it. So follow me for a bit if you can. And I’ll try to describe the world as seen through atheist eyes.”

As rants go, it’s a real tour de force, and it’s definitely worth reading. However in the final analysis it didn’t really work for me. Rather than tackling theism head-on, Brent DarkSyde offers an analogy:

“Say they believe in Santa Claus; beard, the big red suit, the flying reindeer, the sled loaded with a billion gifts, the North Pole Workshop, Mrs. Claus and the elves; all of it. But in this fantasy world, they’re not content merely to believe in Santa Claus, they want you to publicly agree all the time that you also believe in Santa, in their specific version of same, and they pressure everyone else in numerous ways to pretend that they’re not strange or childish for believing in this.”

While many of his subsequent points are effective, the Santa Claus parallel falls down in two important respects. First, it is too damn specific, too concrete. Different people use the term god to mean totally different – and grotesquely incompatible – things, from concrete physical phenomena to vague psychological or emotional tendencies. On the other hand, Santa Claus is pretty much defined by a handful of 19th century stories and carols and an avalanche of Disneyesque Hallmark products.

Secondly, Santa Claus doesn’t have all of the baggage that the various god-ideas are encumbered with. The importance of this is not that passages like this are a stretch:

“Just two or three-hundred years ago it was totally SOP to take folks, men, women, children, who didn’t believe in a specific version of Santa and stick red-hot steel objects into their rectums and vaginas, boil their limbs, beat them senseless with padded clubs, tear them apart with teams of horses, cut open their stomachs and rip out their intestines while they’re still alive in front of their loved ones, or slowly burn them alive in public; all in the name of Santa’s good will and often on the mere anonymous allegation from some two-bit ten-year old kid or a crazy deranged nutcase suffering from schizophrenia that you once said you don’t believe Santa can really fly.”

No, the problem is that the Santa Claus analogy misses one of the key aspects of being an atheist: the sheer head-spinning contradictions and hypocrisy that we encounter all the time in believers. For example, I simply don’t understand why liberal Anglicans don’t rip out the pages of their Bibles that glorify ethnic cleansing, rape, pillage, and stoning to death for just about everything, or why Bible-belt footballers violate the Sabbath rules set forth in what they view as the word of their god. I guess tradition and tribal identity are more important than intellectual honesty these days.

Brent DarkSyde followed up this piece with one on why he’s an atheist. This was less interesting. Since he claimed he’d been an atheist since he was a small child, he should perhaps have called this one “ideas that sustain my identity as an atheist”. No big deal.

UPDATED 20-Nov-05: As Brent pointed out, the original piece (and follow-up) were written by DarkSyde.

A nice little quiz from the New Humanist. Rather specifically English, which has led to some confusion.

Handholder

You go out of your way to build bridges with people of different views and beliefs and have quite a few religious friends. You believe in the essential goodness of people , which means you’re always looking for common ground even if that entails compromises. You would defend Salman Rushdie’s right to criticise Islam but you’re sorry he attacked it so viciously, just as you feel uncomfortable with some of the more outspoken and unkind views of religion in the pages of this magazine.

You prefer the inclusive approach of writers like Zadie Smith or the radical Christian values of Edward Said. Don’t fall into the same trap as super–naïve Lib Dem MP Jenny Tonge who declared it was okay for clerics like Yusuf al–Qaradawi to justify their monstrous prejudices as a legitimate interpretation of the Koran: a perfect example of how the will to understand can mean the sacrifice of fundamental principles. Sometimes, you just have to hold out for what you know is right even if it hurts someone’s feelings.

What kind of humanist are you? Click here to find out.

(Via Majikthise, who got the Hairshirt card.)

CBS News has published another survey on American attitudes towards evolution: “Most Americans do not accept the theory of evolution. Instead, 51 percent of Americans say God created humans in their present form, and another three in 10 say that while humans evolved, God guided the process.”

Personally I’m going to ignore the second number, since “guided” is such a wishy-washy term (almost as ill-defined as “God”). But when over half the population is willing to deny that humans are connected with the rest of the animal world, things have come to a pretty pass. I’d love it if CBS would ask the following question: “The efficacy of many drugs is based on the theory that tests of these drugs on animals are reliable predictors of their effects on humans, because humans and animals share a well-understood biological and genetic relationship. Is it hypocritical for someone who does not believe in this relationship to use these drugs?”

(Via BoingBoing.)

UPDATE: I feel much better after reading The Abstract Factory on ID. Thanks, Susan!

Occasionally someone will post a comment on a blog entry that deserves a more prominent response than simply adding a further comment. A few hours ago, Alec commented on my criticism of Thomas Friedman:

“Morally bankrupt” – that’s one of the phrases that even scientifically hip biology-teaching evangelical Christians use on me when I deny the existence of God and generally toast their tootsies with atheist rejection of their belief.

Does it actually mean anything to you, or have you too succumbed to subjective mudslinging as a means of argument, however odious the target, my good man?

The belief that morality is impossible without a belief in God, and that to be an atheist “shows a recklessness of moral character and utter want of moral sensibility” [1] is widespread; indeed it used to be the law of the land. One would expect those theists for whom the existence of [some kind of] God is an “objective fact” to argue from this that morality has an objective basis. What is curious is that some atheist philosophers have historically conceded the consequent of the argument, and have argued that, in the absence of a God, morality is necessarily “subjective” or “invented”. (See, for instance, Mackie [2].)

Yet the notion that morality and ethics are God-given is hard to sustain these days. Indeed it is under attack from both science and theistic philosophy! For philosophers and theologians such as Swinburne, the notion of “goodness” must be independent of God, otherwise the assertion that “God is good” is simply a tautology. On the scientific front, we are developing better and better models of how creatures develop social behaviours, including cooperation and altruism: Matt Ridley’s The Origins of Virtue [4] provides an excellent high-level account of this work, though geeks should also dive into Axelrod’s fundamental work. [5] The key insight of researchers such as Kagen, Wilson, and Frank is that morality derives not from reason, but from instinct:

Wilson chides philosophers for not taking seriously the notion that morality resides in the senses as a purposive set of instincts. They mostly view morality as merely a set of utilitarian or arbitrary preferences and conventions laid upon people by society. Wilson argues that morality is no more a convention than other sentiments such as lust or greed. When a person is disgusted by injustice or cruelty he is drawing upon an instinct, not rationally considering the utility of the sentiment, let alone simply regurgitating a fashionable convention.
[4, p.143]

So to return to Alec’s charge: when I refer to Thomas Friedman as being “morally bankrupt”, I am inviting the reader to join me in an instinctually-based reaction, which derives from our shared heritage as social animals. These instincts are perfectly objective: the behaviours to which they give rise can, and have, been measured and modelled in a variety of ways. And the source of these instincts is, quite simply, our old friend natural selection. No theistic hypothesis is required.

[1] Odell v. Koppee, 5 Heisk. (Tenn) 91. Quoted in [3].
[2] John L. Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (New York: Penguin Books, 1979)
[3] Michael Martin, Atheism, Morality and Meaning (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2002)
[4] Matt Ridley, The Origins of Virtue (London: Penguin Books, 1997)
[5] Robert Axelrod, The Evolution of Cooperation (New York: Basic Books, 1984)

I always like to think that when I meet someone famous, I can bottle up my enthusiasm, and act cool, calm, collected, and adult. But looking back on each occasion, I have to confess that I’ve failed. Check out this piece by Maralily about her magical airport encounter with Teller (complete with photo). The refreshing honesty is, well, refreshing.

(Via Susan.)

Nice op-ed piece on ID in the NYT by Dan Dennett entitled Show Me the Science. Key paragraph:

In short, no science. Indeed, no intelligent design hypothesis has even been ventured as a rival explanation of any biological phenomenon. This might seem surprising to people who think that intelligent design competes directly with the hypothesis of non-intelligent design by natural selection. But saying, as intelligent design proponents do, ‘You haven’t explained everything yet,’ is not a competing hypothesis. Evolutionary biology certainly hasn’t explained everything that perplexes biologists. But intelligent design hasn’t yet tried to explain anything.

All this god stuff is really simple when you get right down to it.

(Thanks to Alec.)

In the spirit of equal opportunity, the Huffington Post is providing a platform for that Sensitive New-age Guy Deepak Chopra*. For an M.D. (lapsed?) he seems remarkably ignorant when it comes to science. For example, one of his “leading principles” is “Consciousness may exist in photons, which seem to be the carrier of all information in the universe.” Paging Steve Weinberg….

UPDATE: Michael Shermer deals with Deepak in a kinder, gentler, and more comprehensive manner.

—
* Last heard of on a Buddha Bar Volume II track called “Desire (The Lover’s Passion)/Do You Love Me/Come to Me/Desire”, vocals by Demi Moore.

My contribution to the Priests in Lab Coats debate going on at Salon.com:

Science, including evolution, says nothing about theism in general. Given the wide variety of gods that people have believed in, this should not be surprising – it’s not clear that ANYTHING speaks to theism in general.

However it is true that science – evolution, of course, but also geology, physics, and biology – is incompatible with certain religious viewpoints, particularly those that hold inerrantist positions concerning various ancient texts. Science explores regular relationships between phenomena – gravitational (stuff falls), chemical, kinetic, and so forth. If such relationships are merely the whimsy of a capricious deity – if water can be conjured into existence to create a flood and then made to vanish – then such regularities are impossible. Evidence becomes meaningless: we may as well believe in solipsism or Last-Thursdayism (the reductio ad absurdum that the universe was created last Thursday, complete with people with memories of a longer existence).

Scientists MUST disbelieve in a world that is phenomenally capricious. If a theist believes in such a world, they cannot accept science. There is no coherent worldview that is consistent with both. But this is not an argument about theism, merely about a particular fundamentalist worldview.

Over at Body and Soul there’s an interesting piece about the background to Cardinal Schönborn’s recent op-ed in the NYT “clarifying” the Roman Catholic position on evolution. Not only does it seem that the red-hatted one was working from an outline prepared by the creationist Discovery Institute, but: “The cardinal’s essay was submitted to The Times by a Virginia public relations firm, Creative Response Concepts, which also represents the Discovery Institute.”

Now why would the former Count Christoph Maria Michael Hugo Damian Peter Adalbert von Schönborn require the services of a PR firm in Virginia?

(Via Suburban Guerilla.)

UPDATE: It turns out that Creative Response Concepts has an interesting notorious history. They became (in)famous as the PR firm responsible for packaging the Swift Boat Veterans’ libel The principals include Greg Mueller and Mike Russell, formerly communications directors for Pat Buchanan and Pat Robertson respectively. They’ve been caught out trying to feed stories into the blogosphere as part of their PR work on behalf of various right-wing groups, to the extent that they actually had to (vaguely) apologize for it.