Category: Atheism

Friendly Atheist poses a set of common questions for atheists, with the injunction to keep the answers short and sweet. ((Hat tip to the Barefoot Bum, who also provides a nice, but not so short, answer to the morality question.))
Why do you not believe in God? Define “god” and I’ll tell you. Every deity I’ve heard of is either logically incoherent, incompatible with the evidence, or unworthy of serious consideration.
Where do your morals come from? Evolution and socialization.
What is the meaning of life? A strange human obsession, to which the universe is totally indifferent.
Is atheism a religion? No. People only call it so in order to set up a false equivocation.
If you don’t pray, what do you do during troubling times? I can’t do better than what the Barefoot Bum said to this: Try to fix the trouble. (Add a Homer Simpsonesque “Doh!”.)
Should atheists be trying to convince others to stop believing in God? In general: yes. In particular: only if it’s likely to be worth the effort.
Weren’t some of the worst atrocities in the 20th century committed by atheists? And some were committed by men with beards. So what? None of them seem to have been motivated by their atheism…
How could billions of people be wrong when it comes to belief in God? Knowledge – justified belief – is not a popularity contest. Millions of people are wrong about evolution, and geology, too.
Why does the universe exist? If you mean “why” causally, we don’t (yet) know. If you mean it purposefully, that’s just that strange human obsession again.
How did life originate? We don’t know for sure yet, but it seems dumb to bet against the observed self-organizing powers of simple chemistry, coupled with lots of time, energy, lots of parallel experiments, and good old natural selection.
Is all religion harmful? Probably not – any more than all bacteria are harmful. But most of it is. As Dan Dennett has pointed out, we need to understand religion as a psychosocial phenomenon much better.
Is there anything redeeming about religion? Ultimately, no, I don’t think so.
Shouldn’t all religious beliefs be respected? Of course not. Respect should be earned.
Would the world be better off without any religion? Yes. The world is better for the fact that we replaced belief in demonic possession with the diagnosis and treatment of mental illness. Magical thinking is for entertainment, not for understanding.
What’s so bad about religious moderates? Ask an Episcopalian why s/he doesn’t rip the bits out of the Bible that endorse slavery, genocide, the subjugation of women, and stoning to death for trivial acts. Does s/he think that those ideas deserve respect?
What if you’re wrong about God (and He does exist)? Which god? If it’s Huitzilopochtli, we’re all screwed, aren’t we?
Are atheists smarter than theists? No – they’re just more realistic. (UPDATE: But there are good reasons why IQ tests might show a difference.)
How do you deal with the historical Jesus if you don’t believe in his divinity? Skeptically, of course. And since most of the New Testament is demonstrably false, there’s not a lot to go on.
What happens when we die? Recycling. First, organic chemistry; in the long term, stardust

This is going to be a great time-saver… rather than trying to understand a theist’s argument, I can simply ask him/her to read the list of Hundreds of Proofs of God’s Existence and tell me which one they mean. (Or I can respond, “Oh – you mean Proof Number…!”) Voila! Instant reductio ad absurdum.
(Hat tip to the Barefoot Bum.)

Excellent interview with Christopher Hitchens on BBC Radio Five… unusually intelligent questions for a radio show. (14.6MB MP3, 36 min.) Here’s Hitch on the metaphor of the shepherd and his sheep:

… and I have to remember why you people call yourselves a flock. Be like a sheep yourself if you must, but please leave me out of it. I’m not a sheep and I don’t need a shepherd and what shepherds do when they’re not actually messing around with their sheep is they’re keeping them around and alive so they can be fleeced and then killed.

Personally I never understood the appeal of the “Lamb of God” idea, except as a ghastly homage to the gruesome practice of animal sacrifice. Ughh!

AC Grayling in CiF:

The magazine Publishers Weekly reported earlier this year that the member publishing houses of the Evangelical Christian Publishers Association between them produced 13,400 new titles in the two years 2005-6 alone. This is just one segment of the religious publishing industry in just one wing of one of the world religions…
Yet a mere half dozen anti-religious tomes have stirred up all the hornets in their nests, have offended and outraged the devout… To me this suggests a profound insecurity among the religious.

Part insecurity, part role-playing. The idea of Christians as a besieged minority, suffering for their faith, is at least 1700 years old, and many of them cling to it even when it’s clearly absurd.

I’m re-reading Ludovic Kennedy‘s book All In The Mind: A Farewell to God. Many of the childhood experiences that Kennedy writes about in the first chapter remind me of my own formative years. For example:

Another puzzlement was the assertion in sermon after sermon that Jesus had died for our sins. Although my mother had proved something of a broken reed in my previous enquiries, I decided to tackle her again. For whose sins, I asked? She looked pole-axed. “Well,” she said after a long pause, “everybody’s, I suppose.” I said, “Yours and mine?” and my mother said, “Well, yes,” so I then said, “What would you say yours were?” She gave a little embarrassed laugh, a pause for thought and then with an air of triumph said, “As you know, I’m very unpunctual.” I said, “That’s hardly a sin,” but my mother insisted it was. “You see, it’s being very inconsiderate of other people, making them wonder if you’re coming or not.” I said, “Hardly something Christ died for?” She looked deflated. “No,” she had to agree, “I suppose not.” And as she presumably had no major sins in her locker like defrauding the railways or grievous bodily harm, and wasn’t going to admit to any other minor ones, that was really that.

I had a similar conversation, though not with my mother, and I remember that it all seemed rather silly. Soon afterwards I learned the official explanation, the “original sin” nonsense concocted by Ambrose, Augustine et al. That idea wasn’t just silly, it was offensive. This happened while I was growing up in England, just 12 years after the end of the Second World War. Anti-German sentiment was still a staple of English culture, ((perhaps it still is)) and I remember that a German boy came to our school one day. Our teachers emphasized that we were to treat him politely, because it would be unfair not to: children aren’t responsible for the actions of their parents. I agreed – it was “obviously” a matter of natural justice.
A few years later I would cite this issue of the fundamental injustice of the core of Catholic dogma during my farewell conversation with my parish priest. And like Ludovic Kennedy’s mother, his relectant response was embarrassment. “No, I suppose not.”

Jeffrey Shallit surveys the press coverage of books on atheism and wonders why atheists are always described as “militant”:

From the meaning of “militant”, you might expect that Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens are burning down churches, or at least leading protests, stirring up crowds with their fiery rhetoric. You would be disappointed, of course. What Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens have done is write books. Hitchens is more of a curmudgeon than a militant, and Dawkins and Harris are both rather mild-mannered. Nobody is leaving their public events carrying torches and singing the atheist analogue of the Horst Wessel song.

Over at Pharyngula, Jurjen has an historical explanation for the origin of the term. Of course this doesn’t explain why “militant” is always used with public atheists and rarely with (far more militant) advocates of religion.

Regular readers of my blog will remember that a couple of years ago we were discussing the supposed “conversion” of the English philosopher Antony Flew. Here’s how I summarized it a year ago:

The Anthony Flew brouhaha
Of all the subjects I’ve blogged on, the one that has generated the most discussion is the sad case of the English philosopher, Antony Flew. The short version: eminent atheist philosopher (Antony Flew) gets taken in by a charlatan (Gerald Schroeder) peddling an “irreducible complexity” argument about DNA; eminent philosopher concludes that this may be evidence for a designer; triumphalist creationist huckster (Roy Abraham Varghese) persuades Flew to go public at a conference; creationists crow about the “conversion of the most famous atheist”; Flew talks to some real scientists, and makes a half-hearted retraction, apologizing that he doesn’t know what he’s talking about.
This first piece attracted 53 comments; later entries included More on Antony Flew, Carrier on Flew, and Antony Flew: at last, the book. The discussion ran on from December 2004 until May 2005, and I was still getting email months after that.

When this whole, messy business subsided in early 2005, I didn’t expect to hear any more about it. After all, as Flew wrote to Richard Carrier, “I am just too old at the age of nearly 82 to initiate and conduct a major and super radical controversy about the conceivability of the putative concept of God as a spirit.” And it seemed unlikely that Flew would want to revisit a topic over which, in his own words, “I now realize that I have made a fool of myself”, and “I have been mistaught” by a charlatan who “appeared to be so well qualified as a physicist (which I am not) that I was never inclined to question what he said.” One would expect that Flew would prefer to draw a discreet curtain over a painful and embarrassing episode.
Well, it seems that one would be wrong. You can now pre-order There Is a God: How the World’s Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind, ((I have to confess that I first read the subtitle as How the World’s Most Notorious Atheist Lost His Mind. My bad…)) authored by Antony Flew and Roy Abraham Varghese. It’s scheduled to be published in November, 2007. So far it’s attracted little attention, apart from one rather triumphalist blog entry.
It will be interesting to see what Flew has to say for himself at this point. Back in 2005 he was emphatic that he was tentatively embracing a form of deism, and he vehemently rejected any traditional Christian conception of God:

Q But there’s also, Professor Flew, a great yearning to have someone of your previously held scepticism on board for a Christian God, a participating God, a God of goodness, and so on. Now can you tell me what your reaction is to that?
A Well I don’t think I have offered the slightest reason for believing in a good God. You know, if that’s what they want – a good God in any ordinary sense of the word ‘good’ – it seems to me it is inconsistent with what they believe this good God is going to do. I mean to torture anyone eternally is a violation of the most fundamental principles of merely human justice.
Q So this is the tortures of Hell, which you would reject entirely?
A Well this appalling nightmare, you know. If it was proved that I was wrong in this book ‘The Logic of Mortality’ I would myself get worried because it seems to me entirely possible that the universe around us was created by an evil figure who would do this sort of thing.
Q So you reject the Christian concept of God?
A I follow what has become the universally accepted definition by Richard Swinburne of the entire English-speaking philosophical world which includes a very large part of the philosophical world.
Q So you don’t believe in life after death?
A Certainly not, no….
Q What view do you take of what is happening in America – where presumably you’re being hailed now as … one of them?
A Well, too bad (laughs). I’m not ‘one of them’.

It’s hard to imagine a huckster like Varghese being associated with a book that rejects Christianity. We’ll just have to wait and see. Of course, none of this has any effect on anything except Flew’s reputation: most atheists that I know have little respect for arguments from authority.

Charlie Rose interviews Christopher Hitchens about Iraq, religion, and Jefferson.

You scored as Scientific Atheist, These guys rule. I’m not one of them myself, although I play one online. They know the rules of debate, the Laws of Thermodynamics, and can explain evolution in fifty words or less. More concerned with how things ARE than how they should be, these are the people who will bring us into the future. Scientific Atheist 92% Militant Atheist 75% Spiritual Atheist 58% Apathetic Atheist 50% Angry Atheist 33% Agnostic 25% Theist 17%

What kind of atheist are you?
created with QuizFarm.com

(What about you, Clive?)
[Via PZ, who scored 100% Sci Ath.]

The staff at Beliefnet emailed me (and, presumably, a bunch of other bloggers) to invite us to link to an interview with Christopher Hitchens. ((Do others bloggers get spammed with suggestions as to what they should blog about?)) I read it, and I’m happy to do so: he’s in good form. They also suggested that “my readers” (hello out there!) might enjoy their “Atheist or Believer” quiz. Hmmm… didn’t I take this one a couple of years ago? Let’s see… yep, same questions, including the ridiculously equivocal ones. Anyway, my result was unchanged: Adamant Atheist. What a surprise.