Category: Atheism

In the New Humanist, A. C. Grayling carves up “Dissent over Descent”, the new book on Intelligent Design by the ludicrous Steve Fuller. Money quote:

Fuller has written about Popper; he seems to forget Popper’s killer point, namely, a theory that explains everything explains nothing. ID is such a theory; everything is consistent with it, nothing disproves it. The idea that there is such a thing as a deity behaves logically as a contradiction does unsurprisingly, because the idea is indeed contradictory: anything whatever follows from it. But presumably this is okay for Fuller because he was educated by Jesuits.

Secular geek quote-of-the-day:
“The Bible exploits unpatched vulnerabilities in the human mind.”
(via A Division by Zer0 )

Stephen Law is bemused, because in Nigeria…

Muslims are attacking Christians because they think that Christians prayed for the death of their leader, and their prayers worked.
Why would their prayers work, though, if, as Muslim’s think, Christianity is a false religion?

I assume that this is a rhetorical question, because the answer is pretty clear. Once you embrace supernatural woo, all kinds of magical thinking starts to crowd out logic and reason. And since the religious seem to have a need to feel persecuted and threatened, they are prone to conjure up all manner of demons and diabolic forces. The impulse to Manichaean thinking lies just below the surface of even the most impeccably monotheistic belief systems – even the respectable version of Roman Catholicism practised in Westminster:

WESTMINSTER, UK, August 15, 2008 (LifeSiteNews.com) – A priest of Westminster, the leading diocese of the Catholic Church of England and Wales, has written that promiscuity, whether homosexual or heterosexual, can lead to dire spiritual consequences, in addition to the dangers to physical health.
Promiscuity, as well as homosexuality and pornography, says 73 year-old Fr. Jeremy Davies, is a form of sexual perversion and can lead to demonic possession. Offering what may be an explanation for the explosion of homosexuality in recent years, Fr. Davies said, “Among the causes of homosexuality is a contagious demonic factor.” […]
He also said that Satan is responsible for having blinded most secular humanists to the “dehumanising effects of contraception and abortion and IVF, of homosexual ‘marriages’, of human cloning and the vivisection of human embryos in scientific research.”

WTF? And this idiot is also a (medical) doctor? Better not let any schizophrenics get too close, or he’ll try to exorcise their demons.
And I particularly like this bit of woo from Davies:

Extreme secular humanism, “atheist scientism”, is comparable to “rational satanism” and these are leading Europe into a dangerous state of apostasy.

Let’s see:

apostasy |əˈpästəsē|
n. the abandonment or renunciation of a religious or political belief.
Orig.ME: from ecclesiastical Latin apostasia, from a late Greek alteration of Greek apostasis ‘defection.’

I do hope that Fr. Davies is right!
UPDATE: More on the Nigerian mess from Compass Direct, via Thin Guy.

A long time ago, when I was using different blogging software, I used to maintain a book page, in which I listed some of the more important atheism-related books in my library. I’ve decided to revive this, and I’m using my Amazon Associates aStore to do so. If you click through to the store, you can browse about 50 of the more influential volumes that I’ve read which are relevant to the subject of atheism. I don’t agree with all of them – that would be tedious – but all have made me think. The list is relatively light on works of academic philosophy, because in the near future I’m going to organize my favourite philosophy books along similar lines.
I’m adding a permalink to the store in the right sidebar of the blog.
Anyway, enjoy the list. And no, I’m not looking for click-through sales. I’m just using this as a convenience, and letting Amazon.com do the heavy lifting for me.

Here’s a nice piece by Christopher Hitchens in Slate, in which he muses about the implications of blind cave-dwelling creatures: species that once had eyes but have lost them. Obviously such cases are going to be difficult for creationists. People who get all misty-eyed at the improbability of the evolution of such complex organs are unlikely to be happy with nature’s obvious “easy come, easy go” approach to adaptation. And Hitchens makes another, more general point:

I do think that there is a dialectical usefulness to considering the conventional arguments in reverse, as it were. For example, to the old theistic question, "Why is there something rather than nothing?" we can now counterpose the findings of professor Lawrence Krauss and others, about the foreseeable heat death of the universe, the Hubble "red shift" that shows the universe's rate of explosive expansion actually increasing, and the not-so-far-off collision of our own galaxy with Andromeda, already loomingly visible in the night sky. So, the question can and must be rephrased: "Why will our brief 'something' so soon be replaced with nothing?"

Even many atheists still cling to the idea of Progress, with a capital “P”. Of course it’s a more sophisticated, less species-centric notion of progress: the old notion that humans represented the summum seems… quaint. Nevertheless there is often an assumption that, over time, complexity and functional sophistication will increase. But… “ceteris paribus”, dear boy, “ceteris paribus”. As Hitchens reminds us, the blind salamander is evidence that such things are contingent. It’s fitness that wins, not sophistication. And sometimes there is no “win” available.

Here’s another straightforward, common-sense piece by Greta Christina on why she doesn’t believe in the soul.

I mean, even when we didn’t know what gravity was (which, if I understand the science correctly, we still don’t fully grasp), once we got the idea of it we understood that it was a physical phenomenon. Once we got the idea and began studying and observing it, we didn’t try to explain it by invisible spirit- demons living inside objects and pulling towards each other. We could see that it was physical objects having an effect on other physical objects, and we understood that it was a physical force.
In other words, we don’t need to completely understand a phenomenon to recognize it as a physical event, governed by laws of physical cause and effect.
And when you start looking at the “soul,” you realize that that’s exactly what it looks like, too.
Everything that we call the “soul” is affected by physical events in our bodies, and those events alter it, shape it, and eventually destroy it.

My emphasis. Or, to put it more crudely, we don’t need no stinkin’ “god of the gaps”, thank you very much!
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Like PZ Myers, I have a strong, almost visceral reaction to the whole notion of transubstantiation. I can’t speak for PZ, but in my case it all goes back to about 1958. It would not be unreasonable to say that the doctrine of transubstantiation is what made me an atheist.
During the 1950s and early 1960s, I was raised as a Roman Catholic. (I got better.) I can’t remember exactly when I had my first communion, but by 1958 I was certainly being exposed to Catechesis in preparation for the big day. The woman who handled this class (not, I think, a nun, though they were in the vicinity) had the delicate task of explaining the significance of the Sacrament of the Eucharist without risking questions about (eeeew!) cannibalism. To do this, she relied upon the adverbs stressed by the Catechism (and originally by the Council of Trent): “truly, really, and substantially”. I think that she also used the technical terms “substance” and “accidents”, which was probably a mistake.
Up to this point, I’d been asked to believe a great many religious ideas “on faith”, and for most of them I didn’t see any reason to object. Souls? Sin? God? Holy ghost? Angels? Heaven? All very intangible, none of the ideas clashed with common sense. Jesus? Mary? The Gospel stories? Miracles? All a long time ago: many of the ideas seemed implausible, but I couldn’t refute them.
But transubstantiation was a direct affront to my 7 year old empiricist epistemology! I was reading everything about science that I could find, from articles in my encyclopaedia to books that my mother brought home from her work at the U.K. Atomic Energy Authority. In catechism class, I asked if a scientist in his laboratory could tell the difference between a consecrated and an unconsecrated host. I was bundled off to talk to the parish priest. I’m pretty sure that I would have been happy with a vague answer, whether metaphorical or mysterian in nature, but he stuck with the party line: even though all appearances and any kind of scientific investigation would show that the wafer was still made of bread, the underlying reality was that it was now the body of Jesus – and not just a bit of his body, but all of him: body and soul, human and divine.
And even though I would not then have used the term, I smelled bullshit. We use science to grasp the reality of everything in the world – rocks, turnips, giraffes, nuclear reactors. Why introduce this “underlying reality” stuff for just one thing: to explain away a bit of religious gobbledygook? Why (using the contemporary term) apply magical thinking to something so concrete and immediate as a wafer of bread in one’s mouth? It was all too convenient, too ad hoc – and completely unconvincing.
Over the next three or four years, my skepticism about transubstantiation spread to just about every claim of religion: to souls, deities, life after death, and the entire supernatural realm. Various writers helped: Shakespeare, of course; Roger Lancelyn Green with his magnificent retellings of the Greek, Egyptian, and Norse mythologies; Bertrand Russell; and finally Jean-Paul Sartre, through a couple of English expositions of his key idea that “existence precedes essence”. (I still haven’t read La Nausée.) Like Christopher Hitchens, it wasn’t so much a matter of conversion, or change, as of realization.
One reason why people stick with their religious beliefs is that they are able to compartmentalize their thinking. How else can they go along with creationism in church and yet trust that DNA testing can establish paternity or assess the risk of breast cancer (or as a plot device on CSI)? For me as a child, transubstantiation was one of those ideas that refused to stay in its compartment, and the result was that the whole edifice collapsed. And that was a good thing: reality is better than magical thinking.

I just noticed an atheist blog-meme over at The Barefoot Bum. I’m shocked, shocked that nobody has tagged me with it, but never mind: I figure that I can always tag myself. So here goes.
Q1. How would you define “atheism”?
Atheism is the opposite of theism: the belief in god. This may seem to be a cop-out, but in fact it’s inevitable. People have used the word “god” to label many different (and incompatible) concepts; and what they mean by “believe in” usually depends on the type of god involved. At its simplest, atheism is just a psychological state in which one has no kind of “belief in” anything that one would label “god”. ((Most theists (and a few atheists) only recognize the use of “god” to refer to their own, preferred deity. This is why the Romans called the early Christians “atheists”, because they denied the divinity of the Roman pantheon. It has been said (by whom I’m not sure) that in a world of N gods, we are all atheists with respect to N-1 of them; atheists simply choose not to make an exception for the Nth.))
Q2. Was your upbringing religious? If so, what tradition?
My mother converted from the Church of England to Roman Catholicism when I was about 6, and I attended various RC churches until I was about 13. I was an altar boy (but never abused), and I sang in the choir. I loved the Latin of the Mass, and the antiphonal church music of the time. ((I can still sing through Asperges me and the Credo in my head, though my former alto voice is long gone.)) I read the Bible from cover to cover, which was an eye-opener.
In spite of all this activity, I never had any kind of strong religious feelings, and by about the age of 12 I realized that I was an atheist. It was pretty clear to me that conventional concepts of god were simply contradictory or incoherent, and that there were perfectly good natural explanations for everything that religious people ascribed to the supernatural. I hung around the church for a bit longer, just for the chance to sing in the choir, and then I quit. ((My mother stayed with the church until 1968, when Humanae Vitae was published.))
Q3. How would you describe “Intelligent Design”, using only one word?
Devious.
Q4. What scientific endeavor really excites you?
Neuroscience.
Q5. If you could change one thing about the “atheist community”, what would it be and why?
Make it larger! Otherwise, nothing. It’s a stretch to refer to it as a “community”, anyway; the only thing that really brings them together is dealing with the prejudice of theists.
Q6. If your child came up to you and said “I’m joining the clergy”, what would be your first response
Well, he did! (And he’s well on his way to achieving his objective.) I can’t remember what my first response was, but I think that I hoped for his happiness at the same time that I worried about how he’d cope with the turmoil in his denomination (the Episcopalians).
Q7. What’s your favorite theistic argument, and how do you usually refute it?
No, not design, or first cause, or evil, or anything like like. My favourite is the “argument from personal experience”, which I enjoy because it lets me go after the dualism which is, I think, at the root of most of this nonsense. Side-trips can include the synthesis of religious experience using drugs, the gradual re-interpretation of demonic possession as mental illness, mental causation, and Descartes‘ infamous pineal gland.
Q8. What’s your most “controversial” (as far as general attitudes amongst other atheists goes) viewpoint?
I’m vehemently opposed to religious schools of any kind. I think I was strongly influenced by the conflict in Northern Ireland, and the way denominational schools were used to inflame sectarian hatred. (See Stephen Law’s “The War for Children’s Minds”.) But there’s probably a personal element in her as well: I remember when I was a student at the Royal Grammar School, High Wycombe, how I had to stand outside the morning assembly with other non-members of the Church of England until they’d finished the hymn and the lesson. (Remember Monty Python’s “The Meaning of Life”?) Then we would all walk in and stand at the back for the secular part of assembly – announcements, awards, that kind of thing.
Q9. Of the “Four Horsemen” (Dawkins, Dennett, Hitchens and Harris) who is your favourite, and why?
Dennett, but only because I count him a friend. Three of the four are wonderful, each in his way: Dennett’s robustly naturalistic philosophy, Hitchen’s exquisite prose and biting wit, and Dawkins for one of the greatest books of science ever written: “The Ancestor’s Tale”. Harris is OK, but I wish he wouldn’t get all dewy-eyed about Buddhism.
Q10. If you could convince just one theistic person to abandon their beliefs, who would it be?
Tony Blair. No, that’s too easy. The Pope – just for the theatrical possibilities.
Hmmm. What happened to the last three questions?
Beats me. Although one participant suggests that the name was chosen for Friday 13th, the day this got started. That’s consistent with the alternative title of Triskaidekatheism.
Now name three other atheist blogs that you’d like to see take up the Atheist Thirteen gauntlet:
No thanks. I think I’ll let them select themselves.

Yesterday evening I completed my trifecta of PZ events by attending the meeting of the Seattle Skeptics (otherwise known as the Society for Sensible Explanations). PZ Myers was the guest speaker, and after we’d socialized and eaten he educated us about the evolution of eyes. Rather than trying to summarize, I’ll point you at the posts by PZ himself and PvM (at Panda’s Thumb). Hopefully PZ will post the slides to his site; I definitely want to get another look at some of the diagrams, and to check out the links he mentioned.
The Seattle Skeptics seem like a nice bunch; I think I’ll get involved.

During the Q&A at Pacific Science Center on Monday, someone asked PZ to recommend a good children’s book on atheism. At the time, the best that PZ could suggest was that someone needed to write such a book; there was then a brief discussion of books on evolutionary science for kids. I didn’t have anything to offer: I dimly remembered a book by the philosopher Michael Martin called “The Big Domino In The Sky”, but that was about it. The subject came up again last night (E.coli for kids?), and so I decided to do a little digging.
Prometheus Books has published a number of children’s books on humanism, origins, evolution, and skeptical thinking. They include:

• “Humanism, What’s That?: A Book for Curious Kids” by Helen Bennett
• “The Tree Of Life: The Wonders Of Evolution” by Ellen Jackson
• “Born With a Bang: The Universe Tells Our Cosmic Story” and “From Lava to Life: The Universe Tells Our Earth’s Story” by Jennifer Morgan
• “Maybe Yes, Maybe No: A Guide for Young Skeptics” and “Just Pretend: A Freethought Book for Children” by Dan Barker

I have no idea how good these are, in part because such books often attract contrarian reviews at Amazon. It does appear, however, that there’s an opportunity for someone to come up with a children’s (or “young adult”) book on atheism: what it is, what it isn’t, an account of the natural origins of supernatural beliefs, how to respond to some of the common arguments against atheism, and a resource guide. Any volunteers? And any other suggestions and recommendations? (For or against!)