Category: Atheism

Over the last year, there have been three important books published on belief and non-belief ((Yes, I know that there have been many other interesting books in this genre – Stenger’s God: the Failed Hypothesis, Sam Harris’s Letter to a Christian Nation, and Onfray’s Atheist Manifesto. But let’s stick with the big 3.)) :

• Dan Dennett’s Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon
• Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion
• Christopher Hitchens’ God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

I’ve already written – appreciatively – about the Dennett and Dawkins books, and I must admit that I approached Hitchens with some trepidation. After all, people have been lambasting Dawkins and others for their “intemperate” and “disrespectful” attacks on religion, and that’s the kind of thing that seems likely to get Hitchens’ juices flowing (metaphorically and literally). But I needn’t have worried.
First, let me say directly and unambiguously: this is a really good book. Hitchens is a mercurial toper, and he may be (nay, he is) dead wrong on Iraq, but he is a great writer. I find myself reading all of the book reviews that he writes, even if I have no interest whatsoever in the book, just for the pleasure of his prose. He is a literate writer, and he assumes that his readers will recognize quotations and literary allusions without having to be spoon-fed. And he achieves this in an utterly contemporary voice, without retreating into anachronism. So please buy this book, to keep the author well supplied with the vodka which seems to fuel his muse. We need more of his work.
Enough of the style: what of the substance? I think that I can best describe my reaction to this book by considering the different uses to which I would put it and its two companions.
If a committed theist asked me why she should pay attention to the “new atheism”, I would give her Dennett’s book. I would hope that she would realize that the modern world provides clear evidence of the diversity of beliefs and non-beliefs, and that perhaps she would agree that this was a subject worth studying, worth considering from outside her (probably exclusive) world-view. What explains belief? Why has belief changed over the years? I wouldn’t expect to change her beliefs, but perhaps she could accept that belief and non-belief were legitimate subjects of inquiry.
If I met a curious man, embedded in a religious tradition but uncertain of whether (or what) he believed, or if he might actually be losing his faith, I would give him Dawkins’ The God Delusion. I’d be hoping that he could appreciate the role of science (and its stepchild, technology) in both understanding and creating the world in which he lives. It’s not just iPods and cruise missiles, but also polio vaccine, and clean water, and instruments like the Hubble Space Telescope that help us understand our universe, and DNA sequencing that allows us to diagnose disease but also to see our place in the web of life on this planet. And I would hope that he might come to realize, with Carl Sagan, that the realities of the universe are far more majestic and beautiful than the myths of religion.
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. ((Such things as Atheism: a Philosophical Justification, and the Moreland-Nielsen debate, and Mackie’s Miracle of Theism.)) 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.”
This is not a book that seeks to convert. Its purpose is, first and foremost, to explain. To explain why atheists are no longer willing to sit meekly on our hands when the President of the United States says that I don’t know that Atheists should be considered as citizens”, or when the Archbishop of Canterbury excuses the fatwa against Salman Rushdie, or when Catholic cardinals and archbishops preach that condoms transmit AIDS. Yes, Hitchens also explains why he is an atheist, and the things that he finds mad, bad, or ridiculous about religion. Individual believers will naturally snort, and say that he’s not talking about their belief, but that’s not the point. He’s not seeking to win a debate, or persuade the uncertain: he’s laying out facts about the world and his opinions of those facts. And I agree with most of what he says.
Perhaps because he is a student of history, and a former Marxist Trotskyite, Hitchens pays particular attention to what he calls An Objection Anticipated: The Last-Ditch “Case” Against Secularism. He’s talking (p.230) about the charge that “secular totalitarianism has actually provided us with the summa of human evil.” Hitchens’ response is lengthy and detailed, and rejects the simplistic lumping-together of the various dictators of the 20th century. He describes how fascism and National Socialism co-opted religious institutions, which responded with unseemly enthusiasm. On the other hand, Communism in Russia and China had more in common with the anticlericalism of the French Revolution. Obviously Communists wished to eliminate any competing source of ideology or loyalty; beyond this, their secularism was less an expression of ontological atheism than of hatred towards the religious institutions which had supported the previous autocracies or imperialists. In fact, Communists were not trying to negate religion, but to replace it, complete with saints, heretics, mummies and icons. It’s a complex topic that could fill an entire book, and Hitchens handles it very well.
As you may have gathered by now, I really like this book. I really think that it’s my favourite of the three, mostly because I learned more from it than the other two, and because it caught my mood so well. Of course there are many things to learn from Dennett and Dawkins, but I’ve been steeped in their works for the last twenty years, and I think I understand the world from their perspective. With his literary and historical bent, Hitchens provided an intriguingly different point of view. And, as I think I mentioned, the writing is simply superb.

What it’s like to be an atheist in America, I mean.
[Via the Barefoot Bum.]

While reading a piece by Stephen Law on Clarity, continental philosophy, and bullshit, I came across this delightfully succinct analysis by Larry Hamelin:

Your friend is dancing the Postmodern Twist, so beloved by such as Camille Paglia.
Step 1: Invert the narrative and deny the implicit privilege of the original frame (legitimate enough)
Step 2: Since the original frame is not The Truthâ„¢, it must be false.
Step 3: Since the original frame is false, the inverted frame is true.
Voila! Black is white, day is night, the oppressor is the oppressed. You can say anything you please this way: Just find someone who disagrees with you and your point is proved!

Of course it doesn’t actually help in dealing with these types, but then what can? In the meantime, having found Stephen’s blog (via Butterflies & Wheels), I’m now working through the last few months’ entries. I like the elegant way in which he deals with the tedious “atheism is just a matter of faith” argument, here, here and here. Highly recommended.

Anyone know what happened to The Happy Heretic, the blog by Judith Hayes. She’s the author of the book by the same name, and of the great quotation: “If we are going to teach creation science as an alternative to evolution, then we should also teach the stork theory as an alternative to biological reproduction.” The domain name is (still) reserved, but the site is down, or perhaps just unreachable.

From Sam Harris’s final contribution to his debate with Andrew Sullivan at Beliefnet:

You want to have things both ways: your faith is reasonable but not in the least bound by reason; it is a matter of utter certainty, yet leavened by humility and doubt; you are still searching for the truth, but your belief in God is immune to any conceivable challenge from the world of evidence. I trust you will ascribe these antinomies to the paradox of faith; but, to my eye, they remain mere contradictions, dressed up in velvet.

Indeed.

Just read it.

David Barash, professor of psychology at the University of Washington, has just published a comprehensive survey of the debate between critics of religion and its apologists. On the one hand, we have “[t]he four horsemen of the current antireligious apocalypse… Dawkins, Harris, Dennett, and Carl Sagan”. On the other, Barash spotlights those who would seek to reconcile the irreconcilable. Francis Collins, the geneticist and head of the Human Genome Project, comes in for some probing questions:

What, then, is his basis for accepting some Bible stories and not others? If Collins is simply clinging to those tenets that cannot be disproved, while disavowing those that can, then isn’t he indulging in another incarnation of the “god of the gaps” that he very reasonably claims to oppose? What about, say, those loaves and fishes, or the Book of Revelation? And does the director of the Human Genome Project maintain that Jesus of Nazareth was literally born of a virgin and inseminated by the Holy Ghost? If so, then was he haploid or diploid? Is it necessarily churlish to ask what it is, precisely, that a believer (layperson or scientist) believes? In the devil, angels, eternal hellfire, damnation, archangels, incubi and succubi, walking on water, raising Lazarus?

Well worth reading in full.

PZ tears into Nisbet and Mooney for their op-ed in the Washington Post, in which they argue that scientists should shut up and make nice with those who prefer Biblical fairy-tales to evolution. I fully agree with PZ’s “uppity” stance.
Nisbet and Mooney ask:

Can’t science and religion just get along? A “science and religion coexistence” message — conveyed in Sunday sermons by church leaders — might better convince even many devout Christians that evolution is no real threat to their faith.

PZ’s response:

No, science and religion cannot get along. They offer mutually contradictory explanations for the world, and it is bizarrely naive to pretend that people who believe that the literal events of Genesis are an account of the original sin of which we must be redeemed by faith in Jesus can accept a scientific explanation of human origins. The ‘frame’ there is that one side has an account of chance and complexity and an oh-so-awkward affiliation with ancient apes that is based on evidence, and the other side has threats of hellfire if you don’t believe in an Eden, a Fall, and a dead god reborn. Evolution is a strong and explicit threat to that faith.
If Nisbet and Mooney think a non-literal religious faith that allows that humans evolved from apes and are apes is going to be acceptable to every church-going Christian in America, they aren’t very familiar with what we are combating. Proposing that we can sneak support for science into the public’s mind by advocating a lesser heresy than atheism is ludicrously absurd.

Yes, of course there is a minority of religious believers who have found a way to reconcile their faith with science, usually by adopting a symbolic or metaphorical interpretation of their holy texts. If they were in the majority, it might make sense for Dawkins et al to moderate their language, to avoid asking questions about the limits of this symbolism. But according to all recent surveys, they are not in the majority, at least in the USA. And for these people, there is no science – not evolution, not geology, not astrophysics, not biochemistry, not even physics – that is not a threat to their faith.
Evolution is a fact: it is observed every day. The earth is not 6,000 years old. There was no global flood, and no ark: one is incompatible with (literally) mountains of evidence, and the other is logically incoherent. There was a place called Jericho, but in the unlikely event that a person called Joshua actually stood outside it, shouting, the earth did not stop rotating. That’s just for fundamentalist Christians and Jews. For Moslems: every ear of corn does not have 100 grains. Ants do not talk. Semen does not come from between a man’s backbone and ribs. The earth is not flat, and the sun does not set in a small pool of water near the edge. Like the Bible, the Koran contains many statements which are incompatible with science. That’s just a fact.
Politicians in this era are fond of asking what kind of message an action sends. So to Nisbet and Mooney and their pandering ilk, I would ask this: what kind of message does it send to a bright young student in his or her early teens, who is trying to decide whether to embark on a career in science or medicine, if we urge scientists to suppress the facts in deference to mythology? Do those esteemed op-ed writers want more or fewer children to grow up to be physicists, cancer researchers, and geneticists? They talk about the importance of global warming, and presumably they know that renewable power sources such as solar, geothermal, tidal, and wind are going to be critical to addressing our energy problems. Do they want potential geologists to be frightened off, because scientists are discouraged from challenging the biblical accounts of the flood and the age of the earth?
They want to have it both ways, of course. But how do they propose to achieve this? They write:

Simply put, the media, policymakers and members of the public consume scientific information in a vastly different way than the scientists who generate it. If scientists don’t learn how to cope in this often bewildering environment, they will be ceding their ability to contribute to the future of our nation.

But why on earth is this the sole responsibility of science? Do not the media and policymakers and and priests and teachers – yes, and even a professor in the school of communication – all have a moral obligation to educate themselves, to become less scientifically illiterate? Expecting science to do all the work needed to bridge the gulf seems like an abdication of civic responsibility.

There’s a fascinating thesis advanced in Unsettling History of That Joyous ‘Hallelujah’ in today’s NYT. Far from being a celebration of the Christmas season, it seems that Handel’s Messiah was intended as a Lenten attack on deists, as well as the Jews who supposedly inspired them. The research seems thorough, and the conclusion inescapable:

To create the “Messiah” libretto Charles Jennens, a formidable scholar and a friend of Handel’s, compiled a series of scriptural passages adapted from the Book of Common Prayer and the King James Version of the Bible. As a traditionalist Christian, Jennens was deeply troubled by the spread of deism, the notion that God had simply created the cosmos and let it run its course without divine intervention. Christianity then as now rested on the belief that God broke into history by taking human form in Jesus. For Jennens and others, deism represented a serious menace.
Deists argued that Jesus was neither the son of God nor the Messiah. Since Christian writers had habitually considered Jews the most grievous enemies of their religion, they came to suppose that deists obtained anti-Christian ammunition from rabbinical scholars. The Anglican bishop Richard Kidder, for example, claimed in his huge 1690s treatise on Jesus as the Messiah that “the deists among us, who would run down our revealed religion, are but underworkmen to the Jews.”

I imagine that I will continue to enjoy The Messiah just for its music; the religious content has been largely irrelevant to me for nearly 50 years. But who knows? Will I find myself paying attention to certain passages, and will that affect my experience? It’s hard to tell….
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[Via Robert Elisberg in HuffPo.]

While his predecessor was fairly restrained and sensible about the subject, Pope Benedict is starting to sound unfortunately stupid, claiming that “the theory of evolution is not a complete, scientifically proven theory.”. Of course this simply reveals that he doesn’t understand what a scientific theory is. One could argue that he’s just abusing the concept of “proof”; a lot of philosophers and theologians expect science to be like (pre-Gödel) mathematics or logic, proving theorems rather than testing hypotheses against data. From this standpoint, one could substitute any scientific theory for “evolution” in his statement – gravity, relativity, thermodynamics, whatever. Sloppy, uneducated, but not necessarily malicious.
But that’s too charitable an interpretation:

Benedict added that the immense time span that evolution covers made it impossible to conduct experiments in a controlled environment to finally verify or disprove the theory. “We cannot haul 10,000 generations into the laboratory,” he said.

So not only does he really not understand science, but he’s using the kind of fallacious argument beloved of the ID crowd. Or perhaps he understands this stuff really well, but wants to pander to the gullible. Either way, it’s a load of Papal bull…….