Category: Atheism

There was a pretty good turnout for PZ‘s talk last night at the Pacific Science Center, and a significant proportion of the attendees (including yours truly) continued the discussion over beer at McMenamins.
I hadn’t realized this until a UW grad student pointed it out to me, but PZ’s talk was sponsored in part by the Forum on Science Ethics and Policy, which hosted the session by Nisbet and Mooney last October. The similarity and difference was striking. Both PZ and Nisbet/Mooney argue that scientists need to change the way they behave in public in order to communicate more effectively. The difference was that Nisbet/Mooney want scientists to deliberately frame the issues to achieve a particular effect, while PZ simply wants them to drop the mask of cool, cautious, measured objectivity and be themselves: let the excited, passionate, human side of science come through. Drop the weasel words. Be advocates. Be positive. And focus on the beauty of science, of the sheer delight in solving elegant puzzles and discovering the extraordinary. Forget about importance. (I’m reading Carl Zimmer‘s “Microcosm” right now, and the highest accolade that he bestows on experimental work is “beautiful”.)
During Q&A, I asked PZ what he thought had changed over the last 15 years, from the days when discussions of atheism and creationism were largely confined to alt.atheism and talk.origins on the Usenet. He gave the “endogenous” answer – a bunch of atheists got uppity, and eventually broke through into the cultural mainstream. Obviously that’s a part of it, but I strongly believe that we were reacting to a bunch of “exogenous” changes: a significant rise in fundamental religionist activity which provoked our responses. Everything from creationists in schools, to ten commandments in courthouses, to pharmacists refusing to fill prescriptions, to religious takeovers of military institutions, to Terry Schiavo. Yes, of course some of it had been going on for years – battles over prayers and “moments of silence” at school events, abortion rights, and so forth – and some of the increase might simply be explained by greater media attention (what happens in Kansas doesn’t stay there any more). But I’m convinced that there was a shift. Some of it was a consequence of the cynical exploitation of religious groups by the Gingrich and Rove Republicans. 9/11 undoubtedly had an effect.
The bottom line is, I think, that there was a great deal of stuff for atheists to get angry about. I’ve written about this before, in my review of Hitchens’ “God Is Not Great”. I wrote then:

But suppose that an old friend came to me and asked, “Why are you so fired up about atheism and religion these days? I remember you 15 years ago, and back then you were posting on alt.atheism, and having fun roasting creationists on talk.origins, and reading books on the philosophy of religion. But you didn’t talk – and write – about it all the time, and you certainly didn’t publically define yourself by your disbelief. So what happened?”
Instead of trying to explain all of my reasons, I think I’d simply give them Hitchens’ new book and say, “Read this. He puts it better than I ever could. I merely experience the occasional (but increasingly frequent) feelings of frustration, impatience, outrage, and even anger. Hitchens is an unequalled exponent of the art of the rant: he says what I feel, with passion, intensity and wit.”

Indeed.

This is going to be fun….
On Monday, PZ Myers (Pharyngula) is going to be speaking at the Pacific Science Center. Then on Tuesday, Carl Zimmer – author of “Microcosm: E. coli and the New Science of Life” – is at Town Hall Seattle. And finally on Friday the Seattle Skeptics have organized “An Evening with PZ Myers” – skeptical socializing, followed by dinner. (RSVP required.)
I’m still wrestling with one little problem, however: how do I get Carl Zimmer to autograph my Kindle edition of “Microcosm”?

Over at Debunking Christianity, John Loftus has published a list of books from Ed Babinski which illustrate the importance of skepticism about what we believe to be true. Here’s the short list which John hyperlinked; Ed’s list includes many others.

• On Being Certain: Believing You Are Right Even When You’re Not
• A Mind of Its Own: How Your Brain Distorts and Deceives
• Sway: The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior
• Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions
• The You You Don’t Know: Covert Influences on Your Behaviour
• Don’t Believe Everything You Think: The 6 Basic Mistakes We Make in Thinking
• Knowledge and Its Limits
• Problems of Knowledge: A Critical Introduction to Epistemology
• What We Believe but Cannot Prove: Today’s Leading Thinkers on Science in the Age of Certainty

I think that the last of these is the only one on my bookshelf ((Of course, I could be wrong about that!)), although I’ve dipped into others (including Dan Ariely’s excellent “Predictably Irrational”). I wonder how many of them are available in Kindle editions? This could get expensive….

One of my favourite bloggers, Greta Christina, attended a church service at which a friend of hers was being installed as a minister, and wrote up her reactions. She captures many of the feelings that I have had on similar occasions, although I don’t think I’ve ever experienced what she describes as “church envy”.

There were many wonderful things about the service, and it clearly offered something of value to the members of the church. There was joy, community, celebration of life, transcendence and ecstasy, wonderful music (really — the choir was something special), a shared sense of purpose and meaning, etc. etc. But all the things that I liked about the service, all the things I found meaningful and moving, were all things that I can and do get from other areas of my life. I can get them from dancing, from music, from good food, from good conversation, from reading, from writing, from nature, from art, from sex.
And the things I didn’t like… well, those were all the actual religious parts. And I don’t want them. I found them alien, and alienating. They didn’t make sense to me — not intellectually, not emotionally, not viscerally, not in any way. I found them baffling and mysterious, and not in an enticingly mysterious way. (Or, obviously, in a “beautiful holy mystery” way.) They weren’t unpleasant, exactly. They just completely failed to strike any chord in me whatsoever. If there’s an opposite to striking a chord, that’s what they did.

Greta Christina’s Blog: Going to Church

Paul Kurtz introduces a new term: “Multi-secularism”: “adapting secular ideas and values to the societies in which they arise.” Will the idea catch on? Watch this meme…

The Barefoot Bum does a nice job of nailing the “Argument from Fine Tuning”. In the spirit of Douglas Adam’s Total Perspective Vortex,…

The mold in the grout in my bathtub is more “significant” by many orders of magnitude to all of human civilization than is terrestrial life to the ~9.2×10²¹ light-year³ observable universe: that specific patch of mold has more justification for believing that all of human civilization has been created specifically and intentionally for its benefit than we have for believing that the entire observable universe has been created for the benefit of all terrestrial life.

Indeed.

Via Greta Christina, here’s a nice piece by the Chaplain entitled: What’s So Bad About Religion?. Here’s the central idea:

Even though the vast majority of believers apply rational thought processes in most areas of their lives, there is a corner of their minds, especially for religious conservatives, in which they refuse to shine the light of reason. Every scrap of information they process is run through religious filters. If it does not threaten to undermine the religious scaffold around which they’ve built their lives, then normal reasoning processes can be applied safely. If a bit of information contradicts the scaffold, then it must be rejected. Religious liberals, on the other hand, frequently bend the scaffold so that it will accommodate new information. Whatever process one applies, the fact remains that there are points at which reason and religion conflict. How one handles those conflicts determines the extent to which religious belief is harmful.

The Chaplain cites the case of a (presumed) schizophrenic who wound up killing his daughter; his fellow believers thoughts the voices and delusions that afflicted him were of divine origin, rather than the the result of deranged brain chemistry. But this kind of poisonous thinking is not restricted to small, inbred groups, as Johann Hari shows in his devastating piece on contemporary exorcism.
One blog that I read religiously(!) is Father Jake Stops The World. Today he had an interesting piece about a meeting with the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church:

Bp. Katharine reminded us that there are two stories of creation in Genesis. One begins with the creative act of God, after which we are told that God looked upon creation and declared that “It is very good.” The other creation account focuses on the fall in the garden.
The divisions among Christians today can be seen to be loosely along the lines of which of these stories we choose to emphasize. Do we begin with recognizing that we were created “very good,” that the intention was always for us to be “God’s beloved,” or do we begin with the story of the fall, beginning our relationship with God with the idea “I am a miserable sinner.” Where we begin influences the nature of our conversations, not only among other Christians, but with the world, and with God.
Another way to sum up these differences among Christians today would be to suggest that there are those focused on “the depravity of man” and those who choose to focus on “the glory of God.”

Now obviously I don’t believe that either story is true. Nevertheless I think that any wise person – and certainly anyone who has had children! – will recognize the distinction between, and the consequences of, these two broad types of beliefs; between “I am loved” and “I am evil”. On the one hand, we have self-confidence and optimism; on the other, fear and self-doubt. It’s the fear that causes people to erect what the Chaplain calls “the scaffold”. ((Although to English ears, “scaffolding” would sound less… terminal!)) Fear of the world, fear based on their indoctrinated sense of weakness and worthlessness, and above all fear of being excluded.
All of this will be familiar territory to regular readers of this blog. I wrote a couple of weeks ago about the idea that (dis)belief in God might be less significant than (dis)belief in eternal punishment. Almost four years ago I wondered.…

why do Christians not cut out all of that blatantly un-Christian stuff from the Bible? Cue Thomas Jefferson…

And I guess I find it unfortunate that a kind, compassionate, thoughtful person like Jake still has to sign on to the Death Cult bits of Christianity. Fear and guilt make a lousy basis for a worldview.

This sounds promising:

Welcome to Secular Philosophy, a site dedicated to the exchange of ideas and debate relating to all things secular with an emphasis on philosophy. Here you will find exclusive films, books and blogs by Daniel Dennett, Colin McGinn and Massimo Pigliucci, as well as the Center for Inquiry’s Point of Inquiry podcast every Friday evening.

[Via the Leiter Reports.]

Interesting talk by Wilfred DeClay of the University of Tennessee from the Pew Center’s colloquium on Religion and Secularism. Here’s the thesis:

Alexis de Tocqueville was very impressed by the degree to which religion persisted in the American democracy and that religious institutions seemed to support American democratic institutions. What Tocqueville was describing, in fact, is a distinctly American version of secularism. It points in the direction of a useful distinction, which I made briefly at the outset, between two broadly different ways of understanding the concept of secularism, only one of which is hostile or even necessarily suspicious of the public expression of religion.
The first of these is a fairly minimal, even negative, understanding of secularism in the same way that Isaiah Berlin talks about negative liberty. It’s a freedom from imposition by any kind of establishment on one’s freedom of conscience. The second view, what I called the philosophical view or positive view, is much more assertive, more robust, more positive by affirming secularism as an ultimate and alternative faith that rightly supersedes the tragic blindnesses and, as [Christopher] Hitchens would have it, [the] “poisons” of the historical religions, particularly so far as activity in the public realm is concerned.

I would prefer “world-view” to “faith”, but no matter. It would also be good to find a different word for the second kind of “secularism”, but no single term seems to fit. It would need to cover atheism, agnosticism, and probably various pantheistic and deistic positions.
In any case, I believe that the rise in prominence of this second kind of secularism is directly related to the increasing attacks on the first kind of secularism which we’ve seen over the last 20 years. When (e.g.) evangelical Christians try to smuggle religion into schools, a response of “You are infringing on my personal beliefs” is seen as more effective than “You are upsetting a historical consensus about the interpretation of the First Amendment.” (Christians, even when culturally dominant, are attracted to a mythology of persecution that goes back to the Romans; ironically, this makes them more susceptible to protests about “religious persecution” than on arguments about political rights.)

I’ve just finished reading “Who Knows?: A Study of Religious Consciousness” by the philosopher and inveterate riddler Raymond Smullyan. It’s less of a “study” than a collection of thoughts on three topics, loosely inspired by his reading of Martin Gardner’s “The Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener”. The first part is about the relationship between belief in God and belief in an afterlife, and for me it was spoiled by the casual and uncritical assumption of dualism. (How can you endorse the idea of life after death without taking a look at the arguments for and against dualism?) The third is all about “Cosmic Consciousness”, and my instinctive reaction of “Woo” was exacerbated by random nonsense about “planes of existence” and the supposed directionality of evolution. Ugh!
But in chapter two, Smullyan takes on Hell, and this is worth the price of admission.
Martin Gardner argued that the question of (non-)belief in god was “the deepest, most fundamental of all divisions among the attitudes one can take toward the mystery of being.” Smullyan seems to argue that a more important dichotomy is between those who believe in ((And “endorse”, to eliminate belief based on fear.)) the doctrine of eternal, infinite punishment and those who reject it. Obviously, most atheists reject the doctrine ((“Most”, because theism and life after death are logically independent, and I’m no expert on the consequences of beliefs about reincarnation and karma.)), but so do many Christians. Smullyan distinguishes four groups of Christians: ((He doesn’t have much to say about Judaism, and even less about Islam.))

• An ultra-soft Christian believes that there is no such thing as eternal punishment.
• A soft Christian believes that God is unable to prevent the sufferings of the damned.
• A hard Christian believes that God is unwilling to prevent the sufferings of the damned.
• An ultra-hard Christian believes that eternal punishment is good and just, and that a truly good person will take pleasure in the sufferings of the damned.

Smullyan introduced an amusing approach to the question. “If God asked you to vote on the retention or abolition of Hell, how would you vote?” Not surprisingly, many of the believers that he asked were strongly conflicted about their responses!
For me, the most depressing part of the book was reading the poisonous language of “ultra-hard” thinking. Most of Smullyan’s quotations date back to the 18th and 19th century (Jonathan Edwards, for example), but we have all encountered plenty of contemporary examples. They believe that the “suffering of the wicked” is good in itself. And these beliefs have consequences in the real world. As Smullyan says:

I firmly believe that all of us – the best of us! – have cruel and sadistic tendencies; that is part of our animal heritage. And the one socially acceptable outlet for our sadistic needs is retribution. I cannot fault a person for feeling retributive – that is only natural, as I have indicated. I fault only the approval of retribution. I believe that retributive ethics is one of the main forces – if not the main force – that is holding back our civilization. I predict that as we become more civilized, the decline in retributive ethics, the decline in the belief in hell, the decline in the approval of capital punishment, the decline of war, the decline in crime – all these things will come to us hand in hand.

It seems to me that the emergence of a vocal atheist “opposition” has in large measure been provoked by a “hardening” of the religious population. “Hard Christians” (and, presumably, “hard Muslims”) seem all too ready to appoint themselves as the agents in this world of an uncompromising, and essentially sadistic God. In this confrontation, it seems to me that “ultra-soft Christians” should logically be allied with the atheists. (Smullyan argues, and I agree, that the “soft Christian” position is incoherent.)