Category: Atheism

Sigh. Groan. Moan. I’ve just spent a couple of hours watching the video of the “debate” between Daniel Dennett and Dinesh D’Souza at Tufts University last Friday. I wanted to watch it because I always enjoy Dan Dennett, but it was a pretty painful experience. D’Souza is an odious little squirt: shrill, ranting, illogical, rude, discourteous, constantly haranguing the audience while completely ignoring the moderator’s attempts to remind him of time limits. Dan Dennett was polite, respectful, and moderate, but even he was getting visibly annoyed at D’Souza’s grandstanding.
I advise scientists of all stripes to steer clear of this video. D’Souza’s caricatures of cosmology, evolutionary biology, neuroscience, physics and psychology betrayed either monumental ignorance or a complete lack of principle. And logicians and philosophers should also stay away. I have never heard so many abuses of the concept of causality in one session. Nor can I remember when I last saw so many hoary old arguments dusted off and defended with so little craft: even Pascal’s Wager was wheeled out (twice!). And D’Souza had the nerve to attack Dawkins, and Dennett too, for venturing out of their areas of expertise. (However I must concede that he stayed in his own specialty all evening: unadulterated bullshit.)
And I’m not even going to get into his frequent references to atheism’s responsibility for Stalin, Hitler, and eugenics. Speaking of which, it was nice to see my old friend and colleague Jon Dreyer in the audience, asking D’Souza to explain how he justified the leap from a “first cause” to Christianity. It’s a shame D’Souza chose to completely ignore the question, but at least it gave him another excuse to bring in Hitler and the Nazis. Where’s Godwin’s Law when you really need it? ((Jon: if you read this, perhaps you add a comment about how the audience reacted to D’Souza’s curious move of attacking his hosts and audience as a bunch of north-eastern elitists? Was he simply rattled because almost all of the questions were directed at him, and many were distinctly hostile in tone?))
D’Souza is a nasty little man, and an intellectual midget. He didn’t deserve to be on the same stage as Dennett.

Here’s the latest from Pat Condell. Even more, er, robust than usual. I love it!

Here’s a fascinating piece from what’s becoming a favourite blog: Greta Christina wondering “If You Weren’t An Atheist, What Would You Be?” She considers four religions: the Quakers, Judaism, Baha’i, and Wicca ((But not Buddhism. Perhaps, like Sam Harris, she doesn’t really think of it as a religion.)), and realizes:

I’m finding this a fascinating exercise. For one thing, it keeps leading me back to atheism. Every religion I look at has some reason why it just doesn’t work.
But it’s also interesting because of the clues it’s giving me about what I’d like to see in the atheist movement — about what’s missing in my life that religion traditionally offers and that I’d like to find elsewhere.

Uh-oh – are we going to get Harvard-style humanism? I have very mixed feelings about that. But no. She looks at the kinds of things people get out of religion, and religious community, and realizes that she already has various ways of fulfilling each of them:

So maybe this vague yearning for some atheist equivalent of church doesn’t make sense. In the same way that I stopped trying to get all my emotional needs from one Capital R Relationship, maybe I should stop looking for one place to meet all my needs for shared epiphany and transcendence.
Maybe that one place is just my life as a whole.

Amen to that (if you’ll excuse the terminology).

Andrew Sullivan just posted a lengthy quotation from Burke. Sully obviously intended it to support his case for Obama’s candidacy, but to me it seemed an excellent argument for the coming together of “the new atheists” at this moment of history. (My emphasis.)

Whilst men are linked together, they easily and speedily communicate the alarm of any evil design. They are enabled to fathom it with common counsel, and to oppose it with united strength. Whereas, when they lie dispersed, without concert, order, or discipline, communication is uncertain, counsel difficult, and resistance impracticable. Where men are not acquainted with each other’s principles, nor experienced in each other’s talents, nor at all practised in their mutual habitudes and dispositions by joint efforts in business; no personal confidence, no friendship, no common interest, subsisting among them; it is evidently impossible that they can act a public part with uniformity, perseverance, or efficacy… When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.

In a world in which the politics of intolerance and violence is increasingly fuelled by fundamentalist religion, the non-religious among us (atheists, humanists, “brights”, freethinkers, agnostics, et cetera) need to stand together for reason and tolerance and against superstition and bigotry. And we are not, in general, as organized and obedient as church- and mosque-goers, and so it takes a lot of energy and passion to rouse us out of our comfortable seats. Those who disagree with us may call this intemperate, strident, or angry; ignore them, because this is about organizing ourselves, not selling our ideas.

In this month’s Atlantic, there’s a piece by Hanna Rosin called How Hollywood Saved God. In it she describes the making of the film of “The Golden Compass”, based on the first book of Philip Pullman’s famous trilogy. I loved the novels, and like many other fans I was worried about how New Line Cinema would treat the strong anti-religious themes of the books. Sadly, it appears that they have eviscerated the story, eliminating religious references and transforming the Magisterium into a cross between the Third Reich and George Lucas’s Evil Empire.
I can’t say that this was unexpected. Nevertheless, I had consoled myself with the thought that at least the films would be a ‘gateway drug’, taking advantage of the Potter-fuelled enthusiasm for children’s literature to get people of all ages reading Pullman’s novels. I hadn’t taken account of the pusillanimous nature of American publishers. Here’s Rosin; the emphasis is mine:

In The Amber Spyglass, a former nun turned physicist guides Lyra to her destiny using clues from the I Ching. The physicist divines that she should tell Lyra the story of when she was 12 years old at a birthday party and a boy “took a bit of marzipan and he just gently put it in my mouth,” and she fell in love.
This simple story sets off salvation. When she hears it, Lyra “felt something strange happen to her body. She felt a stirring at the roots of her hair: she found herself breathing faster.” (At least that’s what she felt in the British edition; the American version leaves these lines out.)

Aargh! What else have they left out or bowdlerized? Sometimes this totally screwed-up American attitude towards sexuality just makes me want to spit! I guess it’s time to place an order with Amazon.co.uk for a set of the original editions, just like I had to do with the early Harry Potter books.
I’m still looking forward to seeing the film: I hear that Nicole Kidman’s performance is almost perfect. I just know that when I’m sitting there in the cinema, I’ll be thinking about a slightly different story from most of the rest of the audience…

Over the years I’ve posted a number of pieces about the philosopher Antony Flew, and his flirtations with theism. Back in May I wrote (under the heading The longest running soap opera in the philosophy of religion) that:

You can now pre-order There Is a God: How the World’s Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind, authored by Antony Flew and Roy Abraham Varghese. It’s scheduled to be published in November, 2007.

Well, it’s now November, and the notorious book has been published. And in today’s New York Times Magazine, Mark Oppenheimer has pulled together the whole story in a piece entitled The Turning of an Atheist. It’s a rather sad tale of an old man in his dotage, allowing himself to be exploited by others, to the point where he allowed his name to be put to a book which he didn’t even write:

In August, I visited Flew in Reading…. I visited on two consecutive days, and each day Annis, Flew’s wife of 55 years, served me a glass of water and left me in the sitting room to ask her husband a series of tough, indeed rather cruel, questions.
In “There Is a God,” Flew quotes extensively from a conversation he had with Leftow, a professor at Oxford. So I asked Flew, “Do you know Brian Leftow?”
“No,” he said. “I don’t think I do.”
“Do you know the work of the philosopher John Leslie?” Leslie is discussed extensively in the book.
Flew paused, seeming unsure. “I think he’s quite good.” But he said he did not remember the specifics of Leslie’s work.
“Have you ever run across the philosopher Paul Davies?” In his book, Flew calls Paul Davies “arguably the most influential contemporary expositor of modern science.”
“I’m afraid this is a spectacle of my not remembering!”
He said this with a laugh…. But he forgot more than names. He didn’t remember talking with Paul Kurtz about his introduction to “God and Philosophy” just two years ago. There were words in his book, like “abiogenesis,” that now he could not define. When I asked about Gary Habermas, who told me that he and Flew had been friends for 22 years and exchanged “dozens” of letters, Flew said, “He and I met at a debate, I think.”… And he seemed generally uninterested in the content of his book — he spent far more time talking about the dangers of unchecked Muslim immigration and his embrace of the anti-E.U. United Kingdom Independence Party.
As he himself conceded, he had not written his book.
“This is really Roy’s doing,” he said, before I had even figured out a polite way to ask. “He showed it to me, and I said O.K. I’m too old for this kind of work!”

What a pity.
UPDATE: Richard Carrier has a fairly complete account of the background to, and authorship of, that bloody book. As Oppenheimer reported, Flew admitted that he didn’t write a word of it. Digging further, Carrier reveals that even the ghost had a ghost:

In my opinion the book’s arguments are so fallacious and cheaply composed I doubt Flew would have signed off on it in sound mind, and Oppenheimer comes to much the same conclusion. It seems Flew simply trusted Varghese and didn’t even read the book being published in his name. And even if he had, he is clearly incapable now of even remembering what it said. The book’s actual author turns out to be an evangelical preacher named Bob Hostetler (who has also written several books with Josh McDowell), with considerable assistance from this book’s co-author, evangelical promoter and businessman Roy Abraham Varghese.
However, I don’t completely believe the story they told Oppenheimer. The style of the chapters attributed to Flew differs so much from the portions explicitly written by Varghese (such as a lengthy preface), that I suspect Hostetler was responsible for much more than the publisher claims. Whether that’s so or not, this is a hack Christian tract, not formal or competent philosophy, nor anything from the mind of Antony Flew.

And that’s the thing that really bothers me. Unlike Carrier, I actually think that Flew was ((Tense deliberately chosen.)) a genuinely interesting philosopher, and I’m happy to have some of his books on my shelf. But in years to come, when all this tawdry mess is forgotten, Flew’s bibliography will include this ghastly little book which contains none of his ideas and none of his incisive prose. I’ve actually seen the book, on the shelves of the local chain bookstore. Varghese’s name appears in small print on the front of the book, but the spine and back flap simply identify Flew as the author.
Amazon.com has a “review” by the literary agent for the project, Steven Laube. He cites a press release from the publisher, responding to the NYT piece, which quotes Flew as saying:

“My name is on the book and it represents exactly my opinions. I would not have a book issued in my name that I do not 100 percent agree with. I needed someone to do the actual writing because I’m 84 and that was Roy Varghese’s role. The idea that someone manipulated me because I’m old is exactly wrong. I may be old but it is hard to manipulate me. This is my book and it represents my thinking.”

Well, he would say that, wouldn’t he? But the evidence is against him. I’ve read Flew’s work: he is (or was) the kind of nit-picking writer who couldn’t abide to leave any loose ends or contradictions. Here’s Richard Carrier again:

For example, the author pretending to be Flew claims there hasn’t been enough time for abiogenesis. The real Antony Flew knows this is false. In fact he conceded it was false to me in writing, and I quoted him on this fact in my online article. You would think that even a forger who wants the world to think this is Flew’s response to his own critics and that Flew remains a theist for sound reasons, would at least have his fictional Flew explain his retraction and re-retract it somehow. Instead, the author appears not even to know that Flew publicly retracted the claim that there hasn’t been enough time for abiogenesis. The author is also clearly unaware of the fact that Flew had radically changed earlier drafts of his preface to God & Philosophy to reflect exactly this change of position, even though this was also a matter of public record. Thus no explanation is given for his sudden (though apparently fictional) re-reversal.

Varghese and Hostetler have clearly put words into Flew’s mouth. I see no reason not to believe that they, or the publisher, have also supplied him with the text of this disclaimer.
To summarize: I do not doubt that Flew now holds some vaguely deistic belief. However, he has demonstrated such lapses in memory, confusion, contradiction, and loss of his distinctive critical style that it seems virtually certain that he had nothing to do with this book and is unaware of most of its contents. And that’s outrageous.
UPDATE 2: Well, here’s a strange twist: Flew as a possible defender of eugenics. Curiouser and curiouser.

Greta Christina’s posted a long, passionate piece entitled Atheists and Anger. I’ve been thinking about writing something like this for a couple of months, but now I can just endorse her magnum opus.
The bottom line:

I’ll acknowledge that anger is a difficult tool in a social movement. A dangerous one even. It can make people act rashly; it can make it harder to think clearly; it can make people treat potential allies as enemies. In the worst-case scenario, it can even lead to violence. Anger is valid, it’s valuable, it’s necessary… but it can also misfire, and badly.
But unless we’re actually endangering or harming somebody, it is not up to believers to tell atheists when we should and should not use this tool. It is not up to believers to tell atheists that we’re going too far with the anger and need to calm down. Any more than it’s up to white people to say it to black people, or men to say it to women, or straights to say it to queers. When it comes from believers, it’s not helpful. It’s patronizing. It comes across as another attempt to defang us and shut us up. And it’s just going to make us angrier.

My friend Kevin just forwarded me the link to Dan Dennett’s recent talk at AAI. I’m embedding the two halves of the video below. If you want to skip the preamble, Dan starts talking at around 17:20 16:34 into the first clip.

Pharyngula responds to Sam Harris presentation to the Atheist Alliance:

Like you, I look forward to a post-theist future when the term “atheist” is a quaint relic that lacks any contemporary context, as silly as saying that one is an a-Zeusist or an aleprechaunist. That time is not now, and you are ignoring reality to pretend that it is. We do have a context that makes atheism relevant and appropriate: we are immersed in a deeply irrational religious culture. Those labels you denigrate — “atheists,” “humanists,” “secular humanists,” “naturalists,” “skeptics,” “anti-theists,” “rationalists,” “freethinkers,” and “brights” — are useful rallying cries for the tiny, scattered bubbles of rationality drifting in the sea of superstition and ignorance. It’s how we find each other and grow. It’s how we build whole communities working for a common cause, rather than acting as isolated individuals.

+1 (geek for “I strongly agree”)

You can always tell when Andrew Sullivan is going to talk about religion, because he sticks a nice picture of clouds, or water, or rainbows, or some photogenic bit of nature at the top. I’m guessing that he was exposed to “All Things Bright And Beautiful” one too many times as a child.
Anyway, today’s piece was pretty much par for the course. A nice picture of rippling water, and then a correspondent talking about an autistic child:

The example of Jessica shows us how our own view of the world might be equally skewed. There may be many essential features of the world to which we are blind, just as she is blind to other people’s thoughts and feelings. So our theology also reflects our possibly skewed view of the world.

And Sully plunges in:

It has to, of course, because we have no other way of knowing God. But that is surely the point: anyway to understand God that is not God will misprise the divine in some way. Which is why the Incarnation remains our best hope; and why he spoke in parables. The most we can understand is stories and analogies. The rest is more distant from us than an autistic mind is from a normal one.

WTF? What the hell does that bold text actually mean? First there’s the obscure “misprise”, which even Google can’t define. (It means “mistake”, of course.) But even then… Is “anyway” meant to be “any way”? No, it still doesn’t mean anything. Won’t parse. The last time I saw that kind of woo was when I mistakenly read some Deepak Chopra over at HuffPo.
Coincidentally, the Barefoot Bum ((I thought you’d renounced blogging?)) just posted my favourite quotation from Frederick Crews’ book Follies of the Wise. It’s a wonderfully refreshing antidote to woo of all kinds:

“The human race has produced only one successfully validated epistemology, characterizing all scrupulous inquiry into the real world, from quarks to poems. It is simply empiricism, or the submitting of propositions to the arbitration of evidence that is acknowledged to be such by all of the contending parties. Ideas that claim immunity from such review, whether because of mystical faith or privileged ‘clinical insight’ or the say-so of eminent authorities, are not to be countenanced until they can pass the same skeptical ordeal to which all other contenders are subjected.”

And if Andrew feels that this doesn’t apply to theology, then he’s really saying that his theology doesn’t involve the real world. It’s unreal. In which case it’s time for Dawkins’ suggestion.