elfs | Entries tagged with atheism

Conservative talk show host Dennis Prager has two questions for atheists:

1. Do you hope you are right or wrong?
2. Do you ever doubt your atheism?

I respect atheists who answer that they hope they are wrong. It tells me that they understand the terrible consequences of atheism: that all existence is random; that there is no ultimate meaning to life; that there is no objective morality — right and wrong are subjective personal or societal constructs; that when we die, there is nothing but eternal oblivion, meaning, among other things, that one is never reconnected with any loved ones; and there is no ultimate justice in the universe — murderers, torturers and their victims have identical fates: nothing.

Prager's "respect" is something I can heartily live without. I'm happy with the notion that there's no "ultimate" meaning to life, that the assumptions Prager's tribe have made about what is "meaning" are the best and only, and those who don't hew to them, who don't grant power to traditions cast by goat herders and those who mouth their platitudes, deserve punishment. Prager's "punishements" include never being reunited with loved ones, at least the ones who likewise didn't earn the punishments.

But more than that, I've always found the very notion of God to be fundamentally diabolical. Do it as a thought experiment: there exists an entity with immense power, who can reach in and raise your life or throw it down with a mere thought. That entity either (a) helps you reach its state, or (b) thwarts you in reaching its state. Everything in the God story points toward answer (b): the misdirection, the hiddeness, the arbitrariness, the entire kit and kaboodle of excuses for why "god" is hard to understand is just that: excuses.

Give me Buddhism Without Beliefs, a systemic appreciation for human suffering without supernatural reasons, victim blaming, or excuses. Give me Stoicism, a basic, eudaemonic approach to life that likewise doesn't blame victims, has no supernatural reasons, and makes no excuses for its own failings.

How is it that when you see a baby born or a spectacular sunset, or hear a Mozart symphony, or read about the infinite complexity of the human brain — none of these has ever prompted you to wonder whether there really might be a God?

How is it you see a child born with microencaphly and not wonder about the infinite cruelty of a being who could make that stop happening, but chooses not to? I'm comforted by the knowledge that there is nothing out there with power over and interest in my life, or yours, or Dennis Prager's.

Current Mood: amused
Crossposts: http://elfs.livejournal.com/1607368.html

The atheist community has been passing around Pastor Alin's sad little The Misery of Atheism: Who Does an Atheist Thank? blogpost and answering him.

When I first read it, what struck me is this bit:

God has been very gracious to me. I have a wife, I have a house, I have food and a computer, I have a bed and clean water. And when I think on these things I am thankful.

It reminds me of the always-relevant, always-trenchant point made about folks who survive disaster ending their stories with "Thank God." Other, fellow human beings didn't survive. The message that always came across to me was "Thank you, God, for sparing me, unlike those other people." Why didn't God save them? What did they do wrong? Surely not all the sinners were killed, and all the saints preserved, after that plane crash or tornado or tsunami. Pastor Alin is thankful to God for giving him those things, but seems utterly unable to consider what North Koreans, or Somalis, or Guineas suffering with Ebola, should be thankful for.

I'm very thankful, to other human beings. I'm thankful to my wife of 25 years for her love and affection, and for putting up with me. I'm thankful to my employer for seeing my contributions and helping me make them valuable. I'm thankful to my friends for their sometimes fascinating, sometimes vexing contributions to making my life interesting. This week, I'm thankful to my older daughter for making her younger sister's transition to high school so easy and successful. I'm thankful to the younger kid for toughing out that difficult transition. I'm thankful to my parents for giving me a ton of educational opportunities they didn't really understand or appreciate at the time, but which gave me the tools to make it in the 21st century.

That last one has an asterisk beside it. Because my well-being today was contingent upon theirs. And theirs upon their grandparents. And theirs upon a whole host of events, some serendipity, some atrocity, that add up to comfort and wealth and privilege. I'm distressed that we have yet to address our inequality, and ashamed that Pastor Alin shows no interest in the essential humanity of those who aren't with him.

When it comes to privilge, contingency, and humanity, poor Pastor Alin is blind. Motes, beams, eyes and all that. Also: whales. Pastor Alin, like Jonah, would never have gone to Nineveh; he's content to stay in his comfortable home, put distance between himself and suffering, only to rant from afar about the wickedness he sees.

Let us be thankful to Pastor Alin, for being a bad example.

Current Mood: amused
Crossposts: http://elfs.livejournal.com/1564939.html

So, the irresponsible Terry Eagleton has taken out his droll pen to criticize Alain de Botton's Religion for Atheists. Botton's essay, if there's anything to be said for it, is a rather entertaining and pointless book, but Eagleton makes a tragic category error early in his evicerations look less responsible than he promises with his chosen tone:

The book assumes that religious beliefs are a lot of nonsense, but that they remain indispensible to civilised existence. One wonders how this impeccably liberal author would react to being told that free speech and civil rights were all bunkum, but that they had their social uses and so shouldn't be knocked. Perhaps he might have the faintest sense of being patronised.

Free speech and civil rights are categorically different from belief in the supernatural, so much so that it's hard to see how Eagleton leaps from one to the other with any responsibility. The first two are civil issues, the latter personal. Debates about whether people should have free speech (which are real, and ongoing; see SOPA, PIPA, and PCIPA) continue to this day, and one is not "patronized" when the question is engaged: passionate about either granting that right, or restricting it for ideological reasons, but hardly "patronized."

Current Mood: annoyed
Current Music: Alizee, Hey, Amigo!
Crossposts: http://elfs.livejournal.com/1480481.html

So those of you who don't have regular access to the Evil Atheist Conspiracy (our motto: "What Black Helicopters?") have probably not heard about the great Jerry Coyne / John Haught kerfluffle. Haught is a famous theologian who has made his reputation by arguing for (that's important) the validity of evolution, but then turning around and arguing that philosophical naturalism (the premise that there is nothing "supernatural" with interest in our universe or with the capacity to meddle in it) is a limited point of view. He argued for the plaintiffs (i.e. against the so-called "intelligent design" proponents) in the infamous Dover Board of Education case, the one that ruled "intelligent design" to be a religious belief and not a valid topic for public [school] funding.

Jerry Coyne, on the other hand, is a well-known evolutionary biologist with more than a dozen books on the topic, as well as the various peer-reviewed papers and popular magazine articles by the score. He, too, argued on behalf of the plaintiffs in Dover.

Coyne and Haught agreed to have a debate (it was more like two lectures side-by-side, in which each knew in advance the position the other was going to take) on the validity of religion.

Haught's half hour is, well, to my untrained ear, blather. It's new-age blather about ultimate truths (which you can't know), and levels of reality, and the excuse that a dog can't understand a book, but a child can understand the words and narrative, and an adult can understand theme and nuance, and Haught makes the point that maybe (maybe!) there's more to reality than we can understand.

After the video was taken (wait, I hear you say, what about Coyne? I'm getting to that.), Haught refused to release it. After a loud protest from the interwebs, Haught relented, but not before saying,

I’m still in shock at how your presentation ended up. I was so offended both personally and as an academic by the vulgarity of it all that I did not want other people to have to share what I witnessed that night in October. Rather than answering my point that scientism is logically incoherent–which is really the main issue–and instead of addressing my argument that the encounter with religious truth requires personal transformation, or for that matter instead of responding to any of the other points I made, you were content to use most of your time to ridicule several isolated quotes from my books. I was absolutely astounded by your woeful lack of insight into, or willingness to grapple with, the real meaning of these passages.

That's some grade-a clutching of the pearls, and I can understand why.

Because Coyne didn't come with an acceptance of Haught's premises. He was "pugnacious" but hardly vulgar. I think the closest he came to a vulgarity all night was "whit." Instead, he starts out with two premises of his own: first, In religion, faith is a virtue. In science, faith is a vice., and second, When one method of discerning reality does not work and has never worked, and another not only consistently works but extends your grasp, you tend to favor one over the other. Philosophical naturalism, Coyne argues, is the logical outcome of the efficacy of methodological naturalism. Coyne makes points about the incompatibility of faith and science, and yes, they can have a monologue-- faith can sit there and listen to science tell it time and time again how it gets things wrong, but faith can't point to anything concrete and say, "Here's where I get things right that you can't grasp."

Basically, Coyne walked in as a scientist into a lecture that was supposed to be between theologians. They have different standards. For theological debates, you can disagree about particulars, but you never, ever attack the premises. Coyne showed that Haught's premises depend upon what he's trying to say and when he's saying them. Haught has no intellectual honesty behind his words. Of course he's horrified. Coyne vilified him in the public square, called him a liar to his face-- albeit politely.

Watch for yourself. You'll see what I mean.

Current Mood: satisfied

Josh Rothman at the Boston Globe writes:

There's a name for that strange mixture of admiration, guilt, and defensive dismissiveness you feel when you encounter someone better than you: it's called "anticipated reproach," and Benoît Monin, a psychologist at Stanford, has studied it in a number of fascinating experiments. His essential finding: The more we feel as though good people might be judging us, the lower they tend to fall in our regard. As he explains in a recent paper, coauthored with Julia Minson of Wharton, "overtly moral behavior can elicit annoyance and ridicule rather than admiration and respect" when we feel threatened by someone else's high ethical standards.

Rothman goes on to quote a study that shows that hearing contrary moral leadership in the face of having made a moral decision threatens the listener's social standing: if he admits he was wrong, his position within the community is weakened.

Rothman's article is interesting, but I think it points to something else: contrary epistemic certainty is just as threatening to someone else's social position as moral certainty. Pointing out to a religious person that their religion has no basis in reality-- that there are no talking snakes or ants, that the world is much more than 6,000 years old but not eternal, that there is no record anywhere of someone spontaneously giving voice to a culture with which he has no exposure, threatens their social position because they've based their lives on that falsehood, and so has everyone else in their social circle.

These are the same people, however, that depend upon a materialistic epistemology to support their lives: medicine, agriculture, even geology and physics all depend upon the arbitrary premises of any given theistic commitment being wrong.

Current Mood: confrontational
Current Music: Universe Zero, Part D'Abdallah

There are few things that annoy me more than smugness. Terry Eagleton reviews The Joy af Secularilsm, a collection of essays about the slow secularizing of the world. Eagleton is a theologist of some stripe who reacts with appropriate British horror to the the American popular notions of a God incarnate and interventionist, but who is equally horrified when philosophers misidentify God as "a being" and somehow responsible for this world. His reviews of Gnu Atheist books are among the finest examples of The Courtier's Reply ("Who are you to say the Emperor has no clothes? Have you studied fashion?") ever devised.

So when Eagleton writes, "Here, there is no callow and triumphalist rationalism, which in any case is simply the flip side of evangelical fervour," he is, with a wave of his blessed hand, dispensing with the most critical issue in the entire debate: one side has evidence. One side has tools with which we can examine the emperor and can say, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that there isn't a stitch on that man.

If only Terry Eagleton were actually willing to look through a microscope. Despite his sneering, "The history of modernity is, among other things, the history of substitutes for God. Art, culture, nation, Geist, humanity, society: all these, along with a clutch of other hopeful aspirants, have been tried from time to time," theology still offers us nothing but a veneer for community that, sadly, discourages critical thought when it is most needed.

Current Mood: annoyed

You know, normally, Francis Collins isn't that bad a guy. He's the original head of the Human Genome Project, and that's got to be for something. But he's also a committed Christian, who has spent a lot of his time trying to reconcile science and Christianity. He's even written a book, The Language of God : A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief^{(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll)}, in which he admits he was convinced by C.S. Lewis's Mere Christianity, and by the "remarkable strength" faith had given his dying patients, and by the entire "beauty of nature" argument.

I think it's a load of bull, myself. Of course, given a choice between existential horror and a mythological promise of bliss, only those actually earnestly commited to reality will reject the premised promise. Of course we find some aspects of nature beautiful; nature is beautiful when it's aligned, or seems to be aligned, with our evolutionarily instilled goals of survival, sustenance, and reproduction. That's mostly what beauty is: it's an emotional reaction to the perception of furthered well-being.

Collins has an interview at BigThink, a sort of theistically-oriented version of Butterflies & Wheels (or so my limited experienced has led me to believe), and Francis goes off into the typical shallow reeds when he leads off by saying that faith is important because it asks "a different set of questions:"

Why are we all here? Why is there something instead of nothing? You either have to say, well those are inappropriate questions and we can’t discuss them or you have to say, we need something besides science to pursue some of the things that humans are curious about.

But I have to disagree with Collin's line of argument; his very premises are tragically flawed. When he asks, "Why are we all here?" the answer is, well, because in this tiny, infinitesimal fraction of the universe, conditions exist such that complex biochemical processes that support conscious thought can continue. A better question to ask would be, "What conditions would lead to a superior support structure for conscious thought?" and "What context, what supra-universe, has to exist such that the conditions for supporting biochemistry in our universe came about? Does that context support a vast probalistic array of universes, or is ours the only one?" Until and unless that last question can be answered, to lay down and start talking about the probabilities of life emerging are pointless. Even in our own universe, there is such a diversity of possible niches that our emergence is unremarkable. We are not privileged; we are simply the outcome of a universe that is, for the most part, utterly hostile to our existence. To claim that such persistence in the face of anything other than probability-- to ascribe it to the work of a loving god-- is to descend into a kind of narcissistic madness in which the rest of the universe, the other 99.999999999999999% of it, cold, irradiated, vaccuum-ridden, and so distant as to be almost unfathomable, exists just for your viewing pleasure.

Francis Collins is a shallow puddle, pleasantly surprised to discover he fits the hole in which he finds himself, and sure that somehow, somehow, the fit is the deliberate act of a conscious being, and not merely the accidental result of natural forces.

Current Mood: happy

When we engage in quiet, moral reasoning about what we would do under certain situations, a particular pattern appears in our brains under functional ("live") magnetic resonance imaging. fMRI records what parts of our brain experience a jump in glucose consumption, indicating what parts are doing work. Whatever the underlying mechanism, the pattern is reliable across individuals and across cultural differences: when you think about what you would under a giving circumstance, the same parts of your brain light up, regardless of age, national origin, or ethnicity.

When we engage in quiet, moral reasoning about what other people would do under those same circumstances, other parts of the brain light up. The mental toolkit for modeling what other people might think, do, and how they might behave, is maintained in different locations of the brain from how we reason about ourselves.

Now comes a study out of Stanford that indicates that when we reason about what God might do, the first section lights up: we reason about what God might do by first assuming that God would do what we would do. Unlike "other people," who we know do not have thoughts aligned with our own, our brains operate as if God's thoughts are aligned with our own.

Current Mood: amused

Mikey Weinstein

Last night, I went to listen to Mikey Weinstein, head of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, an organization aligned with Americans United For Separation of Church and State. Weinstein is head plaintiff in a court case which seeks to prove that there is a pervasive and pernicious pattern of proselytising within the U.S. Military. His basic premise is that even though the Premillenialists, Dominionists, and Reconstructionists make up only 12% of the population, they make up a higher percentage of soldiers because they're encouraged to join the military where existing organizations teach them to be "soldiers for Christ" first.

Some of the examples Weinstein claimed to have documented include:

A Lieutenant in Iraq telling his troops after one was killed by an IED that the death was the fault of "the unsaved among us," because they threaten unit cohesion
Assignments with the highest likelihood of combat fatalities going to soldiers who refuse to fall in-line with the evangelical leadership
A sergeant (who was later busted, and reported in the media) who was passing out "When Americans are killed they go to Heaven with Jesus, but when Iraqis are killed they go to Hell" Chick-style tracts on the streets of Baghdad
The Air Force's official policy is that it "reserves the right to evangelize the unchurched." (Quote from the Air Force head of Chaplaincy, Sep 17, 2005 NYT "Religion" column)
The same Chaplain gives a "voluntary" church service in which he orders those present to "get in the face of your fellow soldiers who are not here and make them bow their knees before Christ"
The "Crusaders," an F-16 wing, operated over Iraq airspace for a year before anyone complained about their name or their flight patch: a crusader's cross, helm, and sword, with three stars they admit is for the Trinity
A Pentagon-sponsored officer's organization with the stated purpose of "creating a military empowered by the holy spirit"

That's just what I can remember; the list of examples he had went on and on and on. It was terrifying; if even one-tenth of what he says is true, our nuclear arsenal is more or less in the hands of the people who really do believe that Jesus needs just a little more help to make it back to Earth.

Current Mood: scared
Current Music: Threshold, Hollow

On NPR last week, Penn Jillette was asked to write on their series, "This I Believe." And he chose to toss a grenade into the blogosphere with his essay This I Believe: There Is No God. And I have to agree with him when he writes:

I'm not greedy. I have love, blue skies, rainbows, and Hallmark cards, and that has to be enough, but it's everything in the world and everything in the world is plenty for me. It seems just rude to beg the invisible for more. Just the love of my family that raised me and the family I'm raising now is enough that I don't need heaven.

Looking through technorati, I find both strong support for Jillette's essay, and lots of backlash. The backlash is saddening because it's so malinformed; one author goes into the adhominem fallacy that "the largest avowedly atheistic endeavors were calamaties," citing Stalin and Mao, and then asking, "Do we really want people who believe like Penn Jillette running things?" and then argues from authority by quoting Einstein's theism as if somehow that closes down all debate.

Another says she's "saddened" by Jillette's article because her faith is the only thing that gives her hope: that this is all for a purpose. AIDS, earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes, drought, famine all begging the question, "Couldn't this have happened some other way?" A third called Jillette "nothing more than a modern-day socialist"; funny, the man seems thoroughly capitalistic to me.

But more than that, over and over there's the smarmy "I feel sorry for Jillette because he can't see it." Well, y'know, I don't see it either, and if there is a God, that's His moral failing and not mine. If there are consequences for not believing, and God dictates who gets sufficient evidence and who doesn't, then the consequences are arbitrary. We have a word for someone with responsibility who doles out punishment from whim: evil.

When it comes down to it, which, really, is harder: to believe that a super-simple universe, emergent from nothing, iterating simple physical properties billions and billions of times, brought about all the wonderful complexity you see around you, or that a super-complicated and mightily all-powerful God built a simple and undignified little universe of pain and sorrow, leaving behind no coherent explanation whatsoever?

Current Mood: thoughtful
Current Music: The Circular Ruins, The Remains of Summer