Category: Atheism

I was reading Slacktivist this evening and came across a piece that contained a simple idea that I had never thought about. (It seems so obvious now that I wonder if I’m the only one who hasn’t got it.) Put simply: religious conservatives and political conservatives are both obsessed with the primacy of authority over reason. Their sacred texts must never be subjected to reasoned interpretation, because then they cease to be magical tokens of authority.

Let me quote the author, Fred Clark:

At the FRC’s “Justice Sunday”… clergy and religious leaders… railed against any judge who dared speak of a “living Constitution”…

[they cited] a Supreme Court ruling barring the execution of the developmentally disabled. That decision was based, in part, on evolving community standards, and that idea — the evolution, or progress, or development of moral understanding — is what these religious leaders find dangerous and terrifying. From their perspective, community standards have been devolving ever since Mt. Sinai. The idea that the Constitution, or any revered text, might be read differently over time due to evolving community standards is the very idea these folks have been fighting against for the past century.

This is simply a continuation in a new arena of the fundamentalist/modernist controversy of the early 20th century. The fundamentalist “battle for the Bible” has escalated to include the battle over another sacred text: the U.S. Constitution. The terms of this battle are exactly the same. So too is the underlying motivation. It’s all about control. A “living Constitution” threatens that control as surely as the living word of the Bible.

A superficial reaction would be to assume that the fundamentalists of both types adopt this stance – authority instead of reason – because they are incapable of defending their positions rationally and reasonably.* A more nuanced view is that capability has nothing to do with it: conservatives are temperamentally drawn to arguments from authority. (This is perhaps the fundamental distinction between the conservative and liberal worldview, although many conservative intellectuals might disagree.) And finally a cynical view is that conservative leaders – intellectual, organizational – adopt this stance simply because it is a path to power, to command and control the mass of people. Demagogues have always known the power that comes from unshakable conviction coupled with unquestionable authority.

—
* The last thing a Biblical fundamentalist wants is to be dragged into a debate about why Leviticus is authoritative about homosexuality but not shellfish, let alone slavery and mixed fibres.

With all this blather about if and when it is proper to display the (Biblical) “10 Commandments” (but which version? there are so many), it’s worth remembering that the “Ten Commandments” which truly underpin our system of ethics, democracy, and law come from a very different source. The commandments in question are those of Solon the Athenian. He lived from 638 BCE to 558 BCE (approximately), and in 594 BCE he was chosen to draw up the first written civil constitution, something that no prophet or rabbi did. Solon is the founder of democracy as we know it, and his commandments have stood the test of time. They don’t include prescriptions that apply only to one small sect, nor do they include ideas (such as sabbath-keeping and proscribing graven images) which few acknowledge and vanishingly few actually pay any attention to. The only reference to religion is the good advice to be appropriately respectful of everybody’s deities:

1. Trust good character more than promises.
2. Do not speak falsely.
3. Do good things.
4. Do not be hasty in making friends, but do not abandon them once made.
5. Learn to obey before you command.
6. When giving advice, do not recommend what is most pleasing, but what is most useful.
7. Make reason your supreme commander.
8. Do not associate with people who do bad things.
9. Honor the gods.
10. Have regard for your parents.

See Richard Carrier’s The Real Ten Commandments for the whole story – including Solon’s claim to fame as the author of the RKBA! If any set of ancient commandments deserve a place in our courtrooms, it is those of Solon.

Check out Michael Shermer’s delightful creation myth parody over at the Huffington Post: all the way from:

“In the beginning – specifically on October 23, 4004 B.C., at noon – out of quantum foam fluctuation God created the Big Bang. The bang was followed by cosmological inflation. God saw that the Big Bang was very big, too big for creatures that could worship him, so He created the earth. And darkness was upon the face of the deep, so He commanded hydrogen atoms (which He created out of Quarks and other subatomic goodies) to fuse and become helium atoms and in the process release energy in the form of light. And the light maker he called the sun, and the process He called fusion. And He saw the light was good because now He could see what he was doing. And the evening and the morning were the first day.

to a satisfying conclusion:

By now the valley of the shadow of doubt was overrunneth with skepticism, so God became angry, so angry that God lost His temper and cursed the first humans, telling them to go forth and multiply (but not in those words). They took God literally and 6,000 years later there are six billion humans. And the evening and morning were the sixth day.
By now God was tired, so God said, “Thank me its Friday,” and He made the weekend. It was a good idea.

The scary thing is that there are people out there that might take it seriously….

In discussing Pigliucci’s review of Jablonka and Lamb’s controversial book Evolution in Four Dimensions, Jason Rosenhouse (a.k.a. Evolutionblog) makes a key point that it’s easy to overlook:

…the problem facing evolutionary biologists is never ‘How could bit of anatomy X possibly have evolved naturally?’ Rather, the question is ‘Of the many possible mechanisms by which this system might have evolved, which is the correct one?’ It seems that scientists are constantly discovering new mechanisms for explaining evolution….

Of course, any talk of fiddling with the neo-Darwinian synthesis tends to make the hearts of creationists go pitter pat. They know that any suggestion that the nineteen fifties version of evolution may have been incomplete can be spun into a statement that evolution is dying. They will conveniently ignore the fact that the discoveries that are persuading scientists of the incompleteness of the original synthesis are all in the direction of making evolutionary change easier, not harder, to explain.

[Emphasis added.]

In my earlier posting about Antony Flew’s Introduction to God and Philosophy, I noted that Flew had identified the “argument from fine tuning” as a “development” which future authors in this area should take into account. In this post, I want to explain what this argument involves, and why it is completely devoid of merit.

The argument from fine tuning is a derivative of the argument from design. (It is also one of several theories that have been associated with the phrase “anthropic principle”, but since this term has been applied to various mutually contradictory theses, wise people will avoid it.) One of its chief proponents is the former astronomer Hugh Ross. A summary version of the argument runs as follows:

There are many fundamental parameters in physics which determines what kind of a universe this is. Examples include the Plank’s constant, the mass and charge of the electron, the gravitational force constant, the speed of light, and many others. It turns out that if some of these numbers are slightly different than their actual values, our universe would not be able to support life. It is virtually impossible that the universe came to have these correct parameters for life by chance, because so many of these numbers must all lie in such a small range of values. So it appears that the constants of the universe were fine-tuned for life. The being who did this fine-tuning must be God; without such a being, there would be virtually no chance that life could exist. *

At first glance, it is tempting to argue against this proposition on its own terms, by examining the actual values of cosmological and physical constants and calculating whether or not the proposition describes the circumstances accurately. The web site from which this quotation is drawn cites one such argument, and goes into great detail to refute it. However this is (mostly) beside the point, for the following reason:

Every intelligent species that observes the universe that it lives in will find that the constants of its physical and cosmological models of this universe appear to be fine-tuned to support its own life – even if these constants are radically different from those in another universe, such as ours. If the constants of a particular universe are such that life is not possible, there will simply be no species to observe this fact. And we have no a priori reason to say how many possible universes fall into each category, and therefore no basis for asserting how likely or unlikely life is.

Consider the following thought experiment. In another possible universe, the cosmological and physical constants are such that large dense bodies such as planets cannot form; instead, stars are surrunded by shells of gas. Stable patterns can form in this gas due to some resonance phenomenon, and over time self-replicating patterns emerge. Since this patterns can change, and gas resources are finite, Darwinian evolution will occur, and one may suppose that in time intelligence may arise. Such cloud-creatures might develop cosmology and physics, and may think to themselves, “How fortunate we are that the constants of the universe are so finely tuned. If they were slightly different, solid planetary bodies might form that would gravitationally disrupt our fragile forms; life as we know it would be impossible!”

The proponents of the argument emphasize the “fine” in “fine tuning”, but this seems unwarranted. In any universe, every system of cosmological and physical science devised by a sentient species will include a wide range of constants and other fundamental properties. Some of these will be such that the overall system is particularly sensitive to their values; for others, the precise values will be relatively unimportant. Chance alone will dictate that some of these constants will seem to be finely balanced. Since these properties are largely emergent and are likely to be contingent in ways that we do not understand today, this “balance” may well be completely illusory. **

So where does this leave us? Every intelligent life form in any universe will necessarily perceive a “fine tuned” situation, whether it is true or not. There is no reason to believe that there is only one type of universe that might support life, no way to observe those universes that do not, no way to assess the significance of particular constants. (Indeed the argument is consistent with the hypothesis that a malevolent designer is manipulating physical constants to reduce the probability of life!) The bottom line is that the argument is a bust. It purports to derive an ontological statement from a contigent epistemological argument, but the unquantifiable character of the argument renders it meaningless.

—
* I struck out the final sentence because it is such a grotesque non-sequitur that I’m sure no reasonable person would want to be associated with it.

** In his important new book A Different Universe – reinventing physics from the bottom down, the Nobel physicist Robert Laughlin makes the point that many of the “laws” of chemistry and physics are dramatically insensitive to precise numbers, pure samples, and other properties that we might expect to be important. Since we only know the large-scale properties of one universe – this one – we are on very shaky ground if we presume certain kinds of sensitivity.

Here’s a press release from the mayor of Lebanon, Tennessee. Apparently we should “regardless of religion… come together as Christians”. Note also that “tolerance” is singled out as evil….

“Man has achieved highs and suffered lows during our history of struggling with the wiles of Satan in Satan’s quest for our souls…. When our only recourse was to have a savior, God sent us Jesus….tolerance by Christians has caused our nation to slide further and further away from God…. Let us call upon the Lord together by gathering on the National Day of Prayer…. We do this when we, regardless of religion, sing and pray together calling upon God to intervene and forgive our sin and heal our land. For one hour, surely we can leave the signs on the buildings and come together as Christians“

Coincidentally, I read that “cheerful piece of religious propaganda”, as Andrew Sullivan calls it, just after I’d finished an article which provided the perfect context for it. In the May 2005 edition of Harper’s Magazine, there’s a piece by Chris Hedges called “Feeling the hate with the National Religious Broadcasters”. After a thoroughly depressing account of the annual convention of the NRB, he concludes with a personal recollection:

“I can’t help but recall the words of my ethics professor at Harvard Divinity School, Dr. James Luther Adams, who told us that when we were his age, and he was then close to eighty, we would all be fighting the ‘Christian fascists’. He gave us that warning twenty-five years ago, when Pat Robertson and other prominent evangelists began speaking of a new political religion that would direct its efforts at taking control of all major American institutions, including mainstream denominations and the government, so as to transform the United States into a global Christian empire. At the time, it was hard to take such fantastic rhetoric seriously. But fascism, Adams warned, would not return wearing swastikas and brown shirts. Its ideological inheritors would cloak themselves in the language of the Bible; they would come carrying crosses and chanting the Pledge of Allegiance.“

Exactly. Today, Lebanon, Tennessee and Colorado Springs. Tomorrow?

(All links and emphases are mine.)

Following his thoughtful piece in The New Republic on faith and conservatism, Andrew Sullivan has been responding to some of his critics. Here’s the core of his argument, which has nothing to do with right and left, and everything to do with how we live together. Quoted at length, because it deserves it:

“A conservative of doubt” [or indeed any sincere person – c’mon, Andrew] “may believe that he has a very clear grasp on moral truth. He may believe he is in the grip of divine revelation. He may believe he is so brilliant that he has solved the riddle of truth for all time. But he is also aware that he is not the only one on the planet, that others may have equally certain views of the truth, and that turning politics into a place where one eternal truth is pitted against another is a recipe for civil war and social conflict. The result would be a religious war…. Avoiding this kind of conflict was the crux of the liberal state and of the American founding. It requires bracketing your own moral truth in favor of political peace and pluralism. This is a big sacrifice, as Hobbes and Locke and the American founders fully understood. It may even, as Nietzsche suspected, sap religious faith of much of its power. But they were prepared to make it.”

The biologist PZ Myers (who blogs as Pharyngula) has a beautifully written op-ed piece in the Minneapolis Star Tribune. After contrasting how real science is done, compared with the unproductive sniping of “the hodge-podge of lawyers, philosophers, theologians, rhetoricians, and rare scientists willing to abandon scientific principles found in the ID movement”, and giving a quick tour of the state of evolutionary biology today, he concludes:

“ID is a sterile philosophy whose proponents spend their time lobbying school boards, producing nothing new, and with no promise of new ideas for the future. Asking our schools to teach ID is like suggesting that they offer instruction in buggy whip manufacture – it’s a futile exercise that is going to leave the students unprepared for both college and the real world. As a university instructor, I want my incoming students to be well versed in the fundamentals of biology, which includes evolution but not the empty pseudoscience of ID, so that we can move quickly to the real excitement of modern biology…which is almost entirely informed by the concepts of evolution.”

(Via Evolutionblog.)

Check out this account by Teller of how he and Penn received the 2005 Richard Dawkins Award from the Atheist Alliance International. I’ve had dinner with Doug Hofstadter; next on the schedule are P&T. (Hey, I can dream.)

(Via Susan – thanks.)

In his weekly opinion piece for the BBC, the British political commentator (and ex-Labour MP) Brian Walden wrote: “Sir Martin Rees, the Astronomer Royal, wrote something recently that chilled me to the bone. Sir Martin is the winner of the Michael Faraday Prize awarded annually by the Royal Society for excellence in communicating scientific ideas in lay terms. In my case he did almost too good a job. He pointed out that though the idea of evolution is well-known, the vast potential for further evolution isn’t yet part of our common culture. He then gave an example. He said: ‘It will not be humans who witness the demise of the Sun six billion years hence; it will be entities as different from us as we are from bacteria.’“

Now, why should this chill someone to the bone? After all, we’ve known for about a century that humans have only been around for a tiny fraction of the lifetime of this planet, let alone the universe. Furthermore the extrapolation of this pattern to the future is not scientifically hard. There’s no reason to believe that evolution stopped once homo sapiens arrived on the scene.

But then Walden brings in religion. “A growing number of people believe that we need a fresh dialogue between science and religion. I mean religion in its widest sense – a belief in the value of human life. [Don’t use those code-words, Brian.] Apparently the direction of scientific progress means that we have to make moral judgements about what’s permissible and what isn’t. We need a moral consensus. Most emphatically, I don’t mean that we need to create a sort of blancmange morality that wobbles about, containing a bit of God, a bit of physics, a dash of Catholicism plus a smattering of Buddhism and a few sprigs of well-meaning atheism. That kind of ethical coalition wouldn’t survive, and we need something that will. What we all need is to acknowledge our interdependency.”

I’m all for a robust debate about ethics, for creating a coalition that will survive. But I’m not sure that religion as we presently understand it is capable of adapting to this role. We’ve just gone through a series of religious holidays in which everybody – bloggers, magazine editors, broadcasters, politicians – seem fixated on a handful of people, events, places, and ideas from a brief period of time, roughly 2500 to 1500 years ago. It’s going to be hard to open your mind to the future if you insist that some historical events are uniquely privileged. Forget about six billion years: a hundred thousand years from now, nobody will remember, or care about, any of those ideas.

If Walden wants to talk about “religion in its widest sense”, I suspect most of his opposition will come from those who espouse religion in the narrowest and most retrograde sense. Perhaps we need a new label. Humanism? In the meantime, he might want to contemplate the role that religion’s historically narrow perspective may have played in creating an intellectual climate in which cosmology “chills him to the bone.”

Thought for the day: “When Kepler found his long-cherished belief did not agree with the most precise observation, he accepted the uncomfortable fact. He preferred the hard truth to his dearest illusions: that is the heart of science.” – Carl Sagan, Cosmos