The "village atheist" strawman

Jason Rosenhouse takes on the “village atheist” criticism of Dawkins et al that Pagels and others are fond of using. (I personally encountered it several times in the last month.) In Wilkins vs. Myers, he lets John Wilkins erect the strawman:

Of course there are people who have a simplistic and literal view of God and religion. That is not at issue and never has been. But what Pagels is saying is something that the uppity atheists always seem to slide over – that there is a more sophisticated view of God that is not so easily knocked down as the idea that God has a backside. And what is more, there always has been (which is the point of studying the Gnostics)….

Rosenhouse’s rejoinder:

Of course, the more sophisticated view to which Wilkins refers is harder to knock down only because it asserts almost nothing in the way of empirical claims…. We uppity atheists do not slide over the possibility of such a God, we merely find it vacuous and irrelevant, and not the kind of God the large majority of Christians profess to believe.

In fact, Elaine Pagels herself (in the Salon interview in which she sneered at Dawkins) provides an excellent example of “sophisticated” beliefs that don’t really say anything:

So when you think about the God that you believe in, how would you describe that God?
Well, I’ve learned from the texts I work on that there really aren’t words to describe God. You spoke earlier about a transcendent reality. I think it’s certainly true that these are not just fictions that we arbitrarily invent.

WTF? Exactly how does Pagels expect an atheist (village or otherwise) to “engage with” this kind of vague handwaving? But she’s not alone. Here’s Terry Eagleton, as quoted by Sean Carroll:

For Judeo-Christianity, God is not a person in the sense that Al Gore arguably is. Nor is he a principle, an entity, or “existent”: in one sense of that word it would be perfectly coherent for religious types to claim that God does not in fact exist. He is, rather, the condition of possibility of any entity whatsoever, including ourselves.

Feels like classic Spinoza. But where did the “he” come from? Anthropomorphism alert…. As Carroll puts it:

The problematic nature of this transition — from God as ineffable, essentially static and completely harmless abstract concept, to God as a kind of being that, in some sense that is perpetually up for grabs, cares about us down here on Earth — is not just a minor bump in the otherwise smooth road to a fully plausible conception of the divine. It is the profound unsolvable dilemma of “sophisticated theology.”

(I’m quoting from a mammoth posting which does a wonderful job of analyzing the history of these two distinct conceptions of God.)
I’d like to see one of this Pagels/Eagleton/Wilkins/Collins/Jeffries crowd point us “uppity atheists” at one or two books that present the “sophisticated” arguments that we’re supposed to be addressing. While I personally agree with Rosenhouse that such arguments are unlikely to be recognizable by the average Christian in Kansas, I’ll be happy to spend some time on them. I’d prefer to see something that actually “connected the dots”, rather than jumping straight from the Kalam cosmological argument (or a “condition of possibility”) to the Nicene Creed, but whatever….
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[Via PZ.]

A classic Grand Prix

The Malaysian Grand Prix turned out to be a classic. First we had a nail-biting down-to-the-wire qualifying session, with the top four drivers duking it out until the last second. This produced a finely balanced grid, with a Ferrari alongside a McLaren on the first and second rows, and with the mercurial Massa on pole. Of course we all knew that the Ferraris were going to be quicker, after Raikkonen’s domination of the Australian Grand Prix.
Except it didn’t turn out that way. Raikkonen chasing Hamilton.Fernando Alonso and Lewis Hamilton forced their way to the front at the first corner, leaving Massa stuck in third. While Alonso raced away, Hamilton held back, holding a precise line and speed so that Massa couldn’t quite get past. On lap three, Massa outbraked Hamilton, but he was carrying too much energy into the corner and Hamilton slipped past. Three laps later Massa tried again and made the same mistake, but this time he wound up in the gravel trap. He rejoined in 5th, which is where he finished. (Perhaps Massa’s car was damaged, but I must say that I found his subdued driving after the off-track excursion very disappointing.)
For most of the race, Raikkonen remained a distant third; he was nursing an engine that had been damaged in Australia. But towards the end he decided to throw caution to the winds and attacked Hamilton. The Englishman was having troubles of his own – his water bottle was empty, and the track temperature was over 130F – and Raikkonen was running about half a second a lap quicker. That doesn’t sound much, but with a couple of laps left the gap was down to about one second. But Hamilton kept his nerve, and came home in second place. Two Grands Prix, two podium finishes – not a bad start to his career!

Fearmongering and word games

The media has been all a-twitter about a new report entitled Extensive usage of ‘Web 2.0’ sites opens new business data leakage risks. My first thought was “WTF does this have to do with Web 2.0?” (And of course my second thought was “Oh no, here with go with that stupid Web 2.0 meme again…”) Fortunately Alec has fisked this comprehensively, by playing the word substitution game. As The Who might have put it, “Meet the new vulnerability/Same as the the old vulnerability.” Or perhaps not. Anyway….

The opiate of the masses….

Matthew Parris shares my indignation:

A nun has apparently been cured of Parkinson’s disease through writing the name of John Paul II on a piece of paper.
[…]
Where are you, intelligent Christians? Where is your voice, your righteous anger? Where is your honest contempt for this nonsense? Take that claimed recent miracle, for instance. I know lots of nice, clever Catholics — friends, thoughtful men and women, people of depth and subtlety, people of some delicacy, people who would surely cringe at the excesses of Lourdes. Do they believe that John Paul II may have cured this nun from beyond the grave? […] I have a theory about their reticence. I think they know this stuff is the petrol on which the motor of a great Church runs; that without these delusions to feed on, the unthinking masses would falter. And they may be right. But what a melancholy conclusion: that the thinking parts of a religion should be almost extraneous to what moves it; far from the core; just a little fastidious shudder; a wink exchanged between the occupants of the reserved pews.

Of course it is these “occupants of the reserved pews”, these representatives of “the thinking parts of a religion”, who excoriate Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris for the “crude” conception of God which they attack. “Dawkins is merely betraying his ignorance of the sophisticated aspects of theology,” they sneer. “If he is going to criticize religion, he should engage the best arguments, and not these crude populist forms.” But their silence in the face of arrant superstition exposes their hypocrisy. Either they disbelieve this nonsense, in which case they should join the secular world in calling it by its proper name, or they actually believe it, in which case their criticisms of Dawkins are inexcusable. Damned if they do, and damned if they don’t.