The editor of the Raw Story has stuck a little preamble on Melinda Barton’s piece…the one I criticized yesterday. It makes it worse.
Editor’s note: If you’ve arrived here, it wasn’t through the RAW STORY main site, but rather one of several blogs that have latched onto this piece as an example of “religious intolerance.” I would ask readers directed by these blogs to take careful note of how many times Ms. Barton announces that she is not talking about all atheists, as her critics have claimed.
When I read this piece, I knew that some people would infer ideas from it that simply weren’t in the text. That this has happened does not surprise me; that the perpetrators seem to claim they are authorities in the field of logic, while arguing against an obvious straw man, does. I take particular exception with those posts that have changed her wording in the few quotes they provide. Whether this was intentional or simply lazy, I cannot say. I am not a mind-reader, though some of her critics seem to believe they are (apparently, she hates Jews and homosexuals–though she is a Jewish lesbian!) However they came to these misrepresentations, they are nonetheless irresponsible.
Shame on you for reading her article without going through the main page!
I think the reprehensible thing here, though, is that rather than admitting that Barton’s article was a piece of crap, they attack her critics. And attack them rather dishonestly. I noted that Barton claimed her article was not about all atheists; however, she also redefined secularism to only include atheists, and made a series of invented assertions about atheists that she was not able to support—a series of contrived claims that I say effectively meant that her diatribe was against no one at all, but the odious straw man she was shredding was boldly labeled “ATHEIST”.
All of my quotes from the Barton article were accurate and unmodified. I’ve seen the ones where the authors have pulled the “ATHEIST” label off of her tattered scarecrow and replaced it with “JEW” or “GAY”; this is a common rhetorical technique that is used to illustrate that when you remove the kneejerk contempt that the label elicits, the dependency of the argument on bigotry becomes more apparent. I’m surprised that the editor is unfamiliar with the idea, or that he doesn’t realize that it is most effective when the targeted group is one with which the author is sympathetic.
I’ve received a request from the editors to clarify that this piece was Melinda Barton’s, and does not necessarily reflect the opinions of the editorial staff at the Raw Story. I’d believe that more if it hadn’t been recently modified by the editors to include an accusation that the people criticizing the article are illogical and irresponsible liars.
I’m torn between sympathy towards the author for taking an incredible pummeling, and joy due to the fact that she totally deserves it.
Also, since the article itself contains a big strawman, I’m reminded of some analogy about not throwing black kettles at glass houses, or something.
Mel’s comment on your previous thread says it the best:
I too am surprised that they don’t seem to have thoughtfully read through the criticisms. Instead they suggest that the critics are being intellectually dishonest when the opposite is true for the vast majority of the comments including your smackdown PZ. I am embarrassed for Raw Story and for Melinda Barton. Religious people should not try to make rational arguments to support their faith. Rational arguments all lead back to atheism.
One time someone was ranting about Jews and “Clinton’s Jew Lawyers” I just sat there until he was done. Then I told him I was a jew, English surname (and your nephew) to the contrary.
After the incredulity wore off, he actually turned beet-red and tried that very lame appology. I told him not to worry about it. I was tired of the whole religious thing and was becoming an athiest. We haven’t spoken since.
Paul wrote:
“All of my quotes from the Barton article were accurate and unmodified.”
I especially liked this part, since it did apply to me at one time:
“The whackjob is a special sort of atheist, one so absolutely certain of the inerrancy of atheism and so virulently opposed to religion that he will latch on to any and all outrageous claims in defense of the former and against the latter. He will meet any criticism of atheism or positive representation of religion as a horrible attack on his way of life or as support for religious extremism and oppression. Just as the religious extremist holds that his belief in a supreme being alone makes him morally and spiritually superior, the atheist extremist holds that his belief that no such being exists and virulent opposition to the reverse make him intellectually and ethically superior. Finally, he will ignore any and all reason or evidence that refutes his claims.”
But I have grown older, wiser and more tolerant over the years.
Those of you who know me and have followed my postings around the web are well aware that I never argue with creationists. I never dispute their belief in the truthfulness of the Bible or their interpretation of their religion. I’m not inclined to regard a person as a fool because I don’t understand them or because I don’t accept their version of truth.
I hold to the view that we can understand ourselves better by identifying those traits and characteristics in others that most antagonize us. We meet ourselves every day in department stores, at school, in restaurants and in the pages of books (especially history books), magazines and on television. Each stranger that we meet is a reflection of ourselves, a portal to better self-understanding.
Both theists and atheists would be better served by not torturing those with whom they disagree, for certainly it is the tortured who soon enough turn into torturers. How quickly the worm can turn.
But a view that assumes that scientific understanding is the *only* kind of understanding that there is obscures and dilutes our insight and our harmony with the world. Science is a tool of the western mind, not all of mankind.
Now I certainly can’t prove that God doesn’t exist, nor can I prove that he does. But I am sure of the fact that the *impression* of God (the archetype?) exists in *every* person. Whether God actually exists is mostly irrelevant. What is important is that large numbers of people believe it.
I also believe that there is a huge advantage available to those who can locate this power, whatever its source, in their own individual self and use it for their benefit. Why should I deprive those who may have found this transforming energy in religion? What purpose does it serve me or them, to ridicule and condemn their beliefs as silly and unscientific as I might think they are?
This doesn’t mean, of course, that I will allow others to impose their beliefs on me. The teaching of religion, while acceptable in church schools, is wholly unacceptable in public schools. Likewise, ideologies of any kind, especially those ostensibly validated by the mantle of science, are likewise unacceptable in public education.
However, since religion is obviously an important part of my fellow citizens’ lives, I have no fear of sharing with them the joy and pleasure that they get from their mythologies, even though I’m a non-believer. I have no problem with a Christmas tree or a menorah in the town square or Christmas carols in the school concert or a moment of silence in a school day. These things do not threaten me, as they apparently threaten others. There’s little enough to feel good about in this uncaring and often cruel world; it seems a bit silly to deny people what comfort they may find, wherever they may find it.
For the umpteenth time, you can be a Christian, Jew, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Shinto, Confucian, animist, atheist, agnostic, whatEVER, and still be a secularist when it comes to the relationship between church and state. Barton would have saved herself much angst if she’d realized that in the first place.
(Of course I’m going to tweak her nose a bit by saying that as a very positive atheist myself, I do know that God does not exist and is just a creation of the human imagination. One need not engage in silly arguments about “well, how can you prove that, huh?” when I’m looking at the proof standing right in front of me, buddy… :-)
I have a theory that conservative arguments originate from a book of “Mad Libs.” The group of people they want to attack are simply inserted in blank spaces so the esay, speach, whatever, can be delivered to the public.
The article obviously refers to all the true atheists, not us mere pretenders.
I went back and read the preamble (and the article). You’re right, PZ. Besides, since when did the freedom to express one’s opinions preclude other people from criticizing them? The whole thing is very strange.
I find it amazing how many times I see people in science blogs (bloggers and commenters) who think that just because THEY believe in science as their religion that OTHERS see their religion as their science. You all have taken a math course! If -> then statments only work one way. A person is able to believe, on faith, one fact and on intellectual understanding another very contrary fact.
It’s alot like when someone treats their other ethnicity coworkers nice even though they a racist prick at home. They aren’t a prick at work because they’re AT WORK; it’s inappropriate.
BTW, some folks have *no* science in their life. Get over THAT, too. Not everyone cares about beautiful things like squid or mylenation or evolution. To be a secratary or assembly line worker, it doesn’t matter how we got here any more than it matters to most scientists how the pallets of food get to the grocery store.
PZ, I love ya, but you’re guilty of this, too, this “actor-observer bias” effect in science vs. religion.
For the record, my messiah is an atheist. That doesn’t mean I can’t notice large, gapping wounds in our argument as veiwed by the outside world.
::this comment originally posted, by me, on the northstatescience.blogger.com blog::
Oh, sorry Mr. Charlie Wagner. I was distracted mid-post and didn’t see your much more polite post between when I started and stopped typing.
This flap has reaffirmed for me the importance of stating openly that I am an atheist. One problem that became clear from Barton’s column is that she had no clue what atheists think or why they think what they think. PZ and others do a great service by publicly going through the arguments for atheism time and again. In the comments section of PZ’s earlier post on the column and in the comments section of Barton’s post were several people who said something like “Why do you bother even responding to this column?” It’s important to respond every time with well- reasoned arguments that will eventually sink in with those who are capable of understanding them. There are many good citizens in our country who are atheists. We have the facts on our side. It’s important to make that publicly known.
Mike Fox, how can you say, “science as their religion”??? That’s like saying a polo shirt is my favorite dessert.
One problem that became clear from Barton’s column is that she had no clue what atheists think or why they think what they think.
Yeah. Thank nobody that she didn’t get into that business about how atheists like to rape small boys, because then that would make atheism look really, really bad.
Oh… that’s right. It’s Catholic priests who do that.
(The BTK killer was a very religious guy and an important guy in his local church….)
“I find it amazing how many times I see people in science blogs (bloggers and commenters) who think that just because THEY believe in science as their religion that OTHERS see their religion as their science.”
I don’t think anyone here sees science as their religion. Is this the huge gaping hole in the argument that you are talking about? Why must people make these false assumptions? Who here has said “Science is my religion.” I don’t have any religion. As someone brilliantly put it in the earlier thread: If atheism is a religion, then “off” is a television station. It just goes to prove my previous point – that atheists need to be more public about their atheism so that people get exposed over and over to what atheists think and why they think it.
Taking a step further my comment above re: BTK killer, I wonder if anyone has ever done a study on notorious criminals (meaning, those whose crimes were shocking in their viciousness or victim count, rather than those whose names are well-known) and noted how many were somewhat or devoutly religious, and how many were avowed agnostics or atheists.
BTK was religious. Andrea Yates (the woman who drowned her five children) was VERY religious. David Koresh and his followers were very religious. As are the FLDS polygamists in northwestern Arizona/ southwestern Utah. And of course there are the scores of Catholic priests who raped children and the Church covered up many of their crimes.
That’s just off the top of my head. I have a hard time thinking of ANY notorious criminals who were/are avowed atheists.
Let me tell you guys what I told the author of this piece: There is no alternative to methodological naturalism, or as it is also known, science.
I’m not a philosopher, so I don’t know the history of methodological naturalism, but here’s how I approach the issue.
First of all, I assume that things exist. Fairly safe I’d say.
Second, I assume that things can be divided into two categories: Those with distinct characteristics and those without.
What I mean by an object having a distinct characteristic is that we can describe an object as having some attributes, and, therefore, lacking others. In other words, I have the characteristic of having two legs and lack the characteristic of having one leg.
Now, my third assumption is this; Characteristics can be observed. In other words, using certain processes I can determine which characteristics an object has and which it lacks.
To me, these seem like assumptions you simply must make if you want to talk about an external world.
Now, these are the basic assumptions of science. They say nothing about things being natural or supernatural. As a matter of fact, I believe that those two terms are meaningless (Why is, say, String Theory considered natural instead of supernatural?); The only distinction that matters is “observed” or “unobserved”.
Or, to put it another way, there is no alternative to methodological naturalism.
Mr. Renato and Mr. Raindog,
1)You may eat polo shirts. I don’t judge, I am just saying what I see. People have science as their religion.
2)Off is not a television station, but it is a mode of television. In place of TV, you have (for the sake of argument) books. In place of religion you have science. Books are your TV and science is your religion. It IS differant, and that is part of what I am trying to point out. Books, proper, and TV, proper, require two very differant angles of approach and (possibly) two very differant goals. Same with science and religion.
I’ll be back tonight around 6 or 7 o’clock.
Mike
Off is not a television station, but it is a mode of television.
Dude, you’re blowing my mind here. So I’m still watching television when the television is off? Whoa.
Avery Walker, the editor at “the rational alternative” (?) who okayed Melinda Barton’s vomitous piece, really screwed the pooch, and now he’s smearing his santorum all over the walls at Raw Story while trying to hide the fact of his beastial act.
I think he might have a “thing” for jewish lesbians too. He just can’t say “no” to them…
RE: Mike Fox –
Would you please define what you mean when you say “religion”?
“I am just saying what I see” means absolutely zip when you aren’t properly defining your terms.
In the common context, used by those of us who live in the rational world, “religion” is the practice of following a historical dogma or ideology based on supernatural principles; it also usually involves ritual worship of some kind or other.
If you’ve somehow expanded the definition of religion to suit your statement, then those of us living in the rational world think you’re an obtuse nimrod.
If, on the other hand, you’ve misconstrued the principles of science and are equating them with religious dogma and ritual, then you don’t properly understand science, your statement is simply wrong, and you’re an ignorant nimrod.
So… which is it?
People have science as their religion.
In what universe?
Umm, do you know that the Powers that be at Raw Story have de-linked Barton’s piece of shit from the site? It’s no longer available via any means other than the direct address.
Someone at Raw Story is trying to rewrite history.
Having once been an atheist myself, I’d say it definitely is very much like a religion. You use all the information you have and decide that a creator god is a rediculous concept dreamed up by primitive people who had little reason to know better, stirred on by a few people who considered themselves ‘special’. All the conclusions fit together nicely – ‘How can god be both all powerful AND loving, when there is so much suffering in the world’, ‘The concept of god makes
… it easier for weakminded people to accept the fact that when you die its all over for you
… it easier to deal with how unfair life is, how some people get away with x, y and z
… a better foundation for a society where people are good to each other
etc etc – and so of course these drive a conclusion and the conclusion drives further explanations for how religion came about as a product of man. Leading most recently to natural explanations of religion based on evolutionary advantage and the “god gene” etc. Its an ongoing un-moderated theology of sorts – perhaps that should be atheology :-) Its more honest for you (now that you’ve realised these things) to be honest and stand up for the ‘truth’.
But there have been many people, including many intellectual heavyweights, who have reached this conclusion and then changed. And its an almost quantum effect when it happens – so much that seemed a natural conclusion is suddenly seen from a different perspective. Everything makes just as much rational sense as before (whatever ludicrous rubbish the ID croud come about with!), but your conclsion is the opposite. To describe what causes the change is difficult, maybe impossible. Joy Davidman, the author who was an atheist and later married C S Lewis described the way it happened to her;
I don’t have any time for Pascals Wager – the opinion I had of it as an atheist has remained. However I do now agree with what he said here;
“My perception of God lasted perhaps half a minute.”
Sounds like she stood up too fast.
There is enough light for those to see who only desire to see, and enough obscurity for those who have a contrary disposition.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, God is one sadistic bastard. He must really enjoy sending all those innocent people to hell who had the misfortune to be brought up by their parents believing in the wrong god or whose rationality (which God gave them in the first place) kept them from seeing the truth.
Has it ever occurred to you though that those who desire to see are creating their own light?
Well, certainly Mike Fox is not *literally* correct (there aren’t temples of science where people offer sacrifices to effigies of Dawin and Newton), but there are certainly people who try to create a moral system out of science — they mistake the “is” of science to for the “ought” of moral teaching — I’m thinking of E.O. Wilson and his mystical “Biophilia” and “Consilience” — I suspect that that’s what Mike is referring to. On the other hand, while I think Wilson is daft, I don’t think his ideas are any *more* daft than those of Christianity.
Fideism, or the assertion that only faith is required to believe in God, is about the only arrow left in the theist’s quiver these days. It’s a clever little arrow that talks a lot about its great faith in hitting an imaginary target, but somehow never gets around to actually doing so. As such, it’s mostly harmless.
Personal revelation is unanswerable, although its similarity to delusion/psychosis may be informative. I would suggest that for the majority of religious practitioners this is not the case. It seems to range from a big social club to an excuse to hide from the “real world” of intelligent social responsibility.
There are always those who feel they have been touched by Jesus, Khrishna or FSM (creamy be his sauce) and all one can do is back off and hope they’re not armed.
I received a pretty strident response from the editor doing exactly the same thing. For “not reflecting” their views, they sure yell about it.
The sad part is the snide “smart adolescent” response….”the perpetrators seem to claim they are authorities in the field of logic”…jeebus, that reminds me of my fellow-nerds in academic decathalon. “You seem to be forgetting the core premise of darlythium crystals” or something…I can imagine the editor snickering uncontrollably at his riposte. Argh.
Well, I guess I don’t have to bother reading the Raw Story anymore.
Well I was brought up as an atheist (where’s the sticking out tongue smiley?).
But more seriously, this being you are talking of is the one (from this side of the quantum bridge) that ‘spoke’ the universe into existence, where our sun is just a minute spec, even our galaxy could be said to be a minute spec. As a little spec of molecules formed from elements made in that little spec, I’m hardly able to answer on his behalf! But from the new way I understand things, this being is spirit, and at some level so are we. As such some of the things we consider anthropic peculiarities, our own particular forms of sadness, joy, love etc, in some way resemble something of his nature. So he possibly has some right to set some dress code on the invitations to his (very long) party?
Mind you there are plenty of christians I wouldn’t want at my party – but who knows – apparently many of those with invitations don’t get in. Lots of beggars and tramps that weren’t expected I hear…
‘Books are your TV and science is your religion.’
Someone who watches no TV is just as likely to invest more time in their career, take up kayaking, cooking, gardening, etc. Volunteer work, college classes, and many other things are also possibilities. If you refer to anyone one of these activities as ‘a mode of television’, your readers and repliers will focus on the differences between television and each of these varied activities. Furthermore, some will be driven wonder about or comment on the billions of human beings who lived and died without ever seeing a television. People will say to you, ‘Max, what mode of television did the Natufians watch?’ . It might be a lot of fun to read dozens of comments ribbing you in this fashion, but the point you are trying to communicate will be completely obfuscated.
If you (Max) are trying to talk about some psychological or social role which is filled by television in some and books in others, you need to call it something other than ‘a mode of television’. To call it ‘a mode of television’ is to invite confusion.
In the same vein, if you feel there is some psychological or social role which some fill with science, and some fill with religion, you need assign it some name other than ‘religion’. Calling it ‘religion’ only confuses.
1)You may eat polo shirts. I don’t judge, I am just saying what I see. People have science as their religion.
I say the earth is the center of the universe. How do I know this? Because every day, the sun rises in the east and sets in the west. Duh. And don’t you dare mock me, I am just saying what I see.
/snark
You can call a hat a herpes blister, but that doesn’t necessarily make it so.
Ehem … okay I’m psychotic and delusional … I do often think the whole worlds effing mad which probably rates high on the DSM-IV scale!
But there’s the rub. At the extreme end of it, I’m considered crazy for thinking any kind of supernatural gamete could have been involved in christs conception. Science shows it just doesn’t happen, after all. Its just not the way sexual reproduction works and we know (for a large part) how it works. But thats why its called a miracle. I believe I have good reason for believing it, you think I’m a crazy nutter. But as I’ve already conceded that, I may as well just get back to wearing those jeans on my head with nice eye holes in the crutch… zoopedy doopedy dippy dee …. lala lala lalalala
Chuckie Wagner
I am sure of the fact that the *impression* of God (the archetype?) exists in *every* person. Whether God actually exists is mostly irrelevant. What is important is that large numbers of people believe it.
Translation: I’m a fucking retard and majority rules! DUH!
Ah Simon, it’s good to see you found religion. I’m sure it’s working well for you.
If you were an atheist and became a believer, my guess is that you’re probably doing what’s right for you. Most people are not cut out for unbelief. Fortunately, unlike gays or blacks or other demonized minorities, you can choose to join the majority. There’s no shame in it, and for you you’re trading in one ‘special and chosen’ group of people for another.
As for Joy Davidman, I don’t doubt that she had a personally profound experience. I’ve had several in my life, including the birth of my daughter and the first time I took psychedelic mushrooms. It would be easy to attribute such experiences to a supernatural force, because they were truly world-bending. If explaining things via magic works for one person better than another, more power to them.
As for atheism being ‘like a religion’, you’ll probably have to fine tune your definition of religion for the crowd here. There are all kinds of religion, not just yours, and the way people experience them vary widely. I am curious as to what you mean, but you may want to put a little more work into it. Perhaps a good place to start is to think upon how a Zen Buddhist experiences religion, and then compare this to how a Southern Baptist experiences it.
Simon: “I believe I have good reason for believing it, you think I’m a crazy nutter.”
Yes. Yes I do.
There was a woman at the bus stop the other day who was convinced that everyone who walked past her was going to kill her. I have to admit, with all that paranoid screaming she was doing, murdering her was more than a passing thought. Self-fulfilling prophecy? Hmm…
Anyway, I’m sure she had a good reason for believing everyone wanted to kill her, but we all thought she was a crazy nutter.
Simon, I think you’ve expressed yourself clearly:
You used to be an atheist… and now you’re crazy.
But the nice policemen won’t take you away like they did the lady at the bus stop.
Or will they…?
By all means, get back to wearing jeans on your head.
Get back to the “extreme end of it”, with your “supernatural gametes” and other “miracles”.
Leave the rational world to those of us that can deal with it like sane, intelligent people.
Bye now. Thanks for playing.
“God so regulates the knowledge of himself that he has given indications of himself which are visible to those who seek him…”
Hmmm…I guess I’m the exception…
Unlike you, Simon, I was brought up as a Christian, and spent half my life sincerely seeking that revelation. Took a long time to realize I no longer believed.
So I have to ask you; is my inability to perceive the existence of God due to some inadequacy on my part, a flaw in my character perhaps which you do not share, or is God arbitrary about revealing Himself?
Just curious to know what you think…
Sincerely
A Hermit
Simon, I have say I’m puzzled by what you’ve just said about having a good reason for believing in the immaculate conception. It strikes me as a very strange use of the phrase. You concede that we have good reasons to reject it, grounded in everything we know about the physiology of reproduction. But calling it a miracle doesn’t make it reasonable to suspend all of that evidence– it’s more like a label announcing that the suspension has been accomplished (for you). We know enough about the sociology of religion to predict that, had you been raised in a different culture, you would have accepted an entirely different list of ‘miracles’. (Which, as Hume pointed out, makes the case for miracles even weaker than it is when they are considered one at at time.) But people raised in entirely different cultures wind up agreeing on the biology of reproduction– the same standards of evidence (replicatability, agreement between independent observers, inductive and explanatory coherence) that ground common sense claims are upgraded and applied successfully in science.
It seems untenable to me for you to claim to have ‘reasons’ for such an odd and unfounded belief when these reasons apparently depend on a special private experience that you choose to read as evidence for your beliefs. After all, such experiences don’t occur in others who don’t already belong to your own particular religious community, or haven’t been converted by various kinds of persuasive evangelism…and these ‘methods’ work equally well for conflicting religious traditions.
I’ve received a request from the editors to clarify that this piece was Melinda Barton’s, and does not necessarily reflect the opinions of the editorial staff at the Raw Story. I’d believe that more if it hadn’t been recently modified by the editors to include an accusation that the people criticizing the article are illogical and irresponsible liars.
Absolutely right, PZ. Raw’s handling of the aftermath pisses me off WAY more than their original decision to run the column.
Its certainly no panacea, I still don’t understand the ‘comfort blanket’ idea of belief.
Its always strange discussing these things on a board where (I assume) the majority are from the US. Things are very polarised there and you are the only country on the planet that has such a millitant, fundamentalist version of christianity as the mainstream. I ended up joining the Catholic Church, which is strange as its the one I disliked the most of a juvenile understanding of history, but its hardy an organisation that fits what you’ve said there. Sure it supports hetrosexual marriage, and expects priests to be celibate, but doesn’t condemn gays as some of the US christains do. They should hold themselves to every line of Leviticus if they are going to treat one statement in the OT as a reason for persecuting people. And as for minorities, the Church has well over a billion members that comprise every culture, race and tribe that exists. In African churches Jesus is often portrayed as black, in South American churches he often looks … South American. Its something the Church is very comfortable with, as it is with evolution. So it gets a bit strange discussing these things in the oven of US black and white reasoning.
Yes but I’ve had both kinds of experiences, and I admit magic mushrooms etc can be profound experiences. But with god its not as if you even can say you saw anything significant of him, a mere glimpse of a spec, but its enough to feel confident you know that his reality was far more substantial and real than tables and chairs. And its an ongoing thing, admitedly with dark dry patches, but it becomes more real – a relationship. I know that sounds crazy, I would have laughed at it before, at best. No amount of internal skepticism can get me back to that point where I was just wondering “Actually … what if …”
I don’t know about Southern Baptists – I don’t relate to them and those christian shows they (not even sure if they’re “southern baptists”) have on some of our Sky channels over here in the UK are enough to turn my stomach sometimes. It may just be a cultural thing though. But perhaps its best I leave them out of this – I’m far from perfect myself.
But to the Zen Buddhist his(her) religion is a method to attain realisation. Buddha himself didn’t reply on the question of the existence of god, but anyway, I don’t see a reason why anyone who achieves buddhist enlightenment should neccesarily know anyting of god. What they try to attain is perception untainted by the mental labeling of that perception, sounds simple but its consciousness percieving itself directly. In this way you are freed from the false conception of reality we develop as little babies, and as the Oracle of Delphi famously said “know thyself”. But that is to know your true nature in terms of the universe, but thats very different from knowing god. But its a religion in the loose way I’m using the term – rather than the strict ontological definition – in that it has a core set of loose ideas based on some central tennants.
As far as Islam goes, its wrong according to archeology, its internally inconsistent, it espouses already ancient ideas and history and changes them to suit itself. It has no desire for criticism or truth. But its still a religion. Even the gnostics that espoused christianity then changed it to suit its greek/egyptian roots, is a religion. It doesn’t make sense of any of the written evidence we have from the one or two generations after Jesus death – all of which ONLY see him as the fulfillment of the Judeo tradition.
But the gnostics kind of believe we are all part of god, that god is formed of us, the zen buddhists don’t believe in any explicit god, and the muslems do. All are religions because they have a core set of fundamentals. Likewise atheists believe explicitly that there is no creator god, believe that science is the best way to approach understanding anything (expect maybe in some cases humanities and sociology etc), and even that science is reasonably close to understanding the main elements of what we call life in this little corner of the universe. You may disagree with these, and I could spend longer defining it more accurately, but I’m sure you get the gist of the core principles. As with all religions there are different degrees of fundamentalism in atheism. Some completely accept Gould’s NOMA and verge on being agnostic, at the other extreme you have scientism where the current empirical scientific understanding has the best answers for all philosophical, ontological and epistemological questions.
My two cents anyway :-)
I think there are reasons in the timing of these things. If I’d stayed as most people I was at college were – a vague kind of agnosticism, rather than becoming an atheist, I don’t think I would have come to what I consider a rational understanding of it. My concepts were all tied up to some degree with unconsciously childish conceptions of god (though I’d like to think never as childish as those who take genesis to mean some old man with a grey beard made some mud sculptures etc).
There is what St John of the Cross called “the dark night of the soul”, and I suspect that many with an academic bent – considering the amazing sophistication of the broad horizon of science nowdays, find the spiritual dryness of this phase intellectually unsatifying. And so they turn away from god and remain spiritually in the dark night, unaware of how far they’ve travelled.
But of course I’ve no idea if thats the case with you. “The Dark Night of the Soul” is well accepted as perhaps one of the best christian books ever written, and yet you hardly ever hear of it. Us christians no longer understand our own religion, and spend to long on pointless arguments against the genuis of Darwin :(
They most definitly condemn gays. And they kinda support heterosexual marriage.
The billion is a vast overstatement, but there are are alot your correct.
Nothing like the pursuit of truth.
Or anyone who wears a pointy hat and remains celibate either.
Actually the Koran is considered more internally consistent than the bible which is one reason you see far fewer sects.
You mean like……….all religions?
You mean like a religion that sends people who have differing opinions to eternal damnation?
You don’t have a rational undertanding of it. You have an irrational faith. Which is fine. But you have no more a rational understanding of God than any other human. You have no evidence.
So what is God to you then? What does he look like? What is he doing now?
ahhh but there are always alot of folks like you willing to show the others where they went wrong. Nevermind that we could bring legions to this party to show YOU the error of your ways. And the ‘One true Scotsman’ fallacy appears again.
It sounds like Davidman had a transcendent/peak type of experience and didn’t have the metal/spiritual chops to understand it any more deeply than through the mythology of her tribe, i.e. a personal god.
I remember the first time I had such an experience. The only thing I came away sure of was that all I had been told and believed about the numen, which at the time was orthodox Protestantism, had nothing to do with its reality. Of course, I never use this as an argument against Christianity as I understand that it has little evidential weight outside my own skull. Please give us the same courtesy with respect to your revelation.
PS – I see that you are now criticizing other religions. I’d be careful about this path as your critique of Islam is identical to many peoples view of christianity:
I would like to see some good studies done to look for correlations between religious fundamentalism and mental illness. Schizophrenia at least, but also various flavours of bi-polar disorder and sociopathy.
Melinda Barton just posted this in the comments section of her post
[The follow was not requested by, nor does it, or the original piece, necessarily reflect the views of Raw Story or its editors.]
After the publication of my take on secular extremism on Raw Story, I received quite a lot of vitriol from many atheists who felt I was condemning atheism as a whole. While I feel that I made clear that that was not the case, I must admit that if so many people came away with this conclusion, then obviously the article was not as well prepared or well written as it should have been. This is due, in part, to the fact that I have struggled for quite some time with whether I should write it at all. Also, my use of the word “whackjob” was an intentional although perhaps badly chosen play on the common pairing of that word with the word “religious.” I apologize to any who felt that I was adding burdens to an already burdened minority in our country.
I’d also like to take a few moments to clarify some points here. The separation of church and state is and always has been vital to the functioning of liberal democracy. It contains both freedom of and freedom from religion and should continue to do so. I strongly support the right of all peoples to believe or disbelieve whatever they wish within the bounds of respect for human rights. In other words, if it’s not hurting anyone, go for it. I would defend to my death (yes, I’m aware it’s a cliche) your right to believe or disbelieve and am strongly opposed to prayer in schools, the use of the bible in a courtroom, laws based solely on religious precepts with no accompanying social necessity, the teaching of religious belief in public institutions, etc. Although I disagree with atheist precepts, I have respect for the logic and reasoning upon which it is based. This continues despite my acceptance of faith in my own life.
Finally, I do not believe that anyone should be silenced or purged, only that the progressive movement is not required to grant legitimacy to all leftist beliefs. I also believe that we should criticize ourselves with the same honesty with which we criticize others. I have regularly opposed religious extremism and have held it up to harsh criticism numerous times in my published work. I thought it only honest to take a look at the other side despite the fact that I consider religious extremism to be the greatest threat facing us today. If anyone came away with the impression that I consider secular extremism to be even an iota of the threat that religious extremism is, I apologize. I can only assure you that, I would hope, most of my work is better written and prepared and that I will take greater care in the future.
Shalom Aleichem,
Melinda Barton
Well that’s better. The only sticky point was here:
Although I disagree with atheist precepts, I have respect for the logic and reasoning upon which it is based. This continues despite my acceptance of faith in my own life.
Well I just looked up the word precept and it means principle or teaching. So she disagrees with atheist principles and teaching. I don’t think atheism really has precepts like religions do. I would say that logic and reason are the principles on which atheism is based. She doesn’t respect logic and reasoning enough to let them supplant her faith. That is the case with all religious people and is pretty much where atheists diverge from theists I guess. So she is still a little confused, but seems to feel pretty bad about the shitstorm she whipped up.
In comments, Melanie’s main evidence for the existence of “whackjobs” turns out to be a second-hand anecdote. But then whaddya know, our Resident Loon confesses to having been one:
I’ll grant that I may have run across one or two more candidates on a.a over the years.
All of which merely supports my hypothesis that every stereotype has at least one exemplar — though possibly not much more than that.
Simon said:
Actually, pick up a good book on early christianity (Bart Erhman has a couple good ones) and you’ll find there was actually a lot of diversity in first and second century christian traditions. All four of the canonical gospels have different takes on Jesus and only Matthew really embraces Judism and in fact the epistles of Paul actually reject a lot of the Hebrew traditions.
I suspect all faith is irrational. But so is atheism. There is no test for God, so there can be no proof of existence or non-existence.
That said, can all you evangelical atheists be a bit more respectful of those of us who do have faith that there is some kind of Power beyond us?
If anyone came away with the impression that I consider secular extremism to be even an iota of the threat that religious extremism is, I apologize. I can only assure you that, I would hope, most of my work is better written and prepared and that I will take greater care in the future.
There is no such thing as “secular extremism”, given that many Christians do in fact strongly support the principle of church-state separation. It would be nice if Barton would realize that and just stop smearing secularism. IMO, Barton merely comes across as a dumber Amy Sullivan at this point. She tried to pull a cute little ‘Sistah Souljah’ act in the name of “fairness”, but it backfired on her. I have no doubt that Barton will learn to be more polite as a result of this flap, but I doubt she really learned anything else.
So what I think we’d all really like to know is if Simon has prune hands, and, if so, do they really affect how he does his “drawrings”?
As someone else has said, tolerant yes. Respectful, no.
“I think there are reasons in the timing of these things…’ Simon
What kind of reasons would those be? If you and Pascal are right and “…there is enough light for those to see who only desire to see, and enough obscurity for those who have a contrary disposition.” where does that leave someone who certainly had a desire to see, and didn’t start out with a “contrary disposition” at all, and yet has been denied such revelatory knowledge of the deity? In fact it was the search for a deeper understanding of faith that eventually led me away from faith.
I’m always intrigued when I meet someone whose path took the opposite direction from mine, from unbelief to faith, and who proposes this idea that God can be known if one simply has the desire to know. The idea raises so many questions for me. Was I so inadequate that God decided to hide from me what you say He has revealed to you? Was I wrong to entertain the possibility that what I may once have perceived as revelatory experiences were something else? Would it have been better to have ignored the questions in my mind, denied my intellect and embraced a faith based entirely on feelings? Is your faith today in some way superior to the faith I once had? If not, was God playing games for his own inscrutable reasons by denying me the certainty you seem to possess?
Not that I’m complaining; I’m a lot happier, healthier and, I think, a much better person having shed my faith; nor do I really expect you or anyone else to be able to give me a real answer, but I find these kinds of discussions always seem to come down to this assertion of the revelatory nature of knowledge of God’s existence. To date I’ve never found anyone who could answer me why such revelation should be available to some truthseekers and not to others, like me. Usually it ends with assertions that my faith wasn’t “real” in some way.
As for the idea that atheism is like a religion I’ll just say that it is in the same way that my hair colour is bald…
I like that one `cause in the same whay I’ve gone from a ponytail to hairlessness I went from an abundance of faith to atheism. Both happened gradually, finally getting to the point where I had to let go of the last pathetic, straggling remnants and make a clean break. The final cut was quite liberating in both cases…;-)
Yes and I used that example because it is just the weirdest thing to admit. And there is also the skeptical theory that it was due to a dodgey translation of Isaiah 7:14. But you know even a baby being born is a pretty amazing thing, we don’t call it a miracle because we understand some of it and how the processes came about. However advanced our understanding of the way certain types of genes switch on and define the function the cell will perform etc, there are still some massive questions about say, consciousness, that are a long way from our understanding (eg. Chalmers). There are of course people like the late Crick, or Hameroff, who think there is some potential for a mechanistic explanation of will that allows free will etc etc. But there are some real philosophical problems if you don’t already have the empirical epistemological starting point where ‘the mind is the brain which is a very complex machine’. But even if we do eventually understand them – we have been studying them. What we have not been doing is studying god scientifically. We simply wouldn’t know where to start. These studies on prayers are just rediculous – they treat god as some kind of muppet clicking healing credit buttons every time someone says a prayer for someone.
Or take the start of the universe, if you accept red-shift (which is pretty solid), space and time emerged from a ‘minute’ point. You can then invent branes and say two collided, but you are coming up with highly speculative theories with no kind of evidence according to any science we know and have tested. With the “fine tuning” issue, the common solution is to invent billions of extra universes. There is no evidence for them whatsoever. Its like coming home and finding someone has broken into your house, and saying “no one would have broken into my house – someone must have swaped mine with someone elses that looks the same.” Thats the kind of level of empirical reasoning (though I’m sure you will disagree :-) ).
I’ll admit what I’m doing is significantly different from that. But where I am now I believe god exists, and believe he does now and then do things in the universe, even on earth. Yes from personal experience, and sometimes I do feel his presence, as do millions of others that are in all other ways rational and even skeptical types to a large degree. Rationality seems to have a different perspective depending on your starting point. Is it really reasonable that a people who had things like Isaiah 53 in their scriptures, and all kinds of stories of the messiah, would allow people to make up stories that exactly fitted all these old prephesies, without everyone going WTF ? Its simply not credible that the Romans would not have mentioned any controversy like that.
Anyway I’m rambling on – because its part of a bigger story. It was one of the last things I came to believe, and I certainly don’t expect any of you to accept I’m being reasonable in accepting it. But I insist that from my perspective it is. There are good reasons why science and religion were seperated around the enlightenment. Scientists (not that they were called that then) had too many times filled a gap in their theories with some version of a concept from the bible. But now that science has become so successfull, the fact that god is explicitly non grata in science is sometimes taken to mean science says there is no god. It doesn’t. At best science can be agnostic and say normally conception happens like this, and we have no reason to expect it happened differently in that case. And I say I do have reason, that it was not a normal conception, that it was the incarnation in human form of the same agent through which the universe was created. Obviously to you thats nonsense – because you don’t think this creator god exists. But looking hard at the little details does not always let you see the whole picture. A great masterpiece just looks like a splodge of blue and a splodge of green.
No.
Seriously, you support that with a false equivalence. There is a difference between proposing the existence vs. non-existence of god: the former is a demand for belief in an entity without evidence, as you yourself admit; the latter is an expectation that believers will provide some minimal level of support for an idea (especially one as extravagantly absurd as a god!) before we’ll bite. One is a reasonable habit that has served us well in the advancement of science and that we routinely use in our daily life, while the other is a looney departure from reasonable expectations.
I’ll let you puzzle out which is which.
Exactly the weak atheist point. No evidence means irrational faith and certainly the irrationality of religion.
I read through all that crap yesterday from your link and the one thing neither the editor nor the writer seem to understand is that, even though they use the caveat that it is not all athiests they are talking about, the article reads nonetheless as an indictment of all athiests. Ms. Barton goes on and on about these “extremist” athiests but can’t name a one of them. Who are these “extremists” we should be fearful of? Without actually explaining WHO they are saying the left needs to distance itself from, they leave only the conclusion that they are talking about ANY athiest who apparently has the gall to challenge the religion and its many, many shortcomings.
“can all you evangelical atheists be a bit more respectful of those of us who do have faith that there is some kind of Power beyond us?” – P J Evans
I do have respect for those with an honest, heartfelt faith; I’m willing to accept that you may have had some revelatory experience which has so far been beyond me (I don’t think it’s likely, but if that is the basis of your faith I know of no way to refute it), but I’m afraid I don’t have much respect for arguments like this one:
“I suspect all faith is irrational. But so is atheism. There is no test for God, so there can be no proof of existence or non-existence.”
There is no test for Leprechauns, either. Is it therefore irrational to not believe in them?
Simon,
I didn’t mean to say that wherever you live is the same as my community – of course there is a wide range of acceptance within the world, even within the US. What I meant to say is that you’ve moved from a minority view to a majority view, which for many people is a relief. Perhaps gays and people of ‘color’ are welcome in whatever community you live in, but my intention was to draw a parallel to minorities that have suffered discrimination historically. I personally know several atheists who have admitted that they would cheerfully join a religion if only to rid themselves of the critique they’re constantly engaged in. It’s exhausting.
As we seem to be dancing around the actual definition of ‘religion’, go ahead and Google this: define:religion. While there are certainly a few sources that define religion as a generalize belief system, the vast majority make reference to a supernatural agent. THIS is where you’re getting hung up, and this is where most athiests will draw the line. If you want to say that many atheists are dogmatic, you’ll probably get less flak.
The point is, reusing a word normally reserved for discussion of the belief in supernatural entities to describe a group of people who very much do NOT believe in the supernatural is disrespectful. I’m not sure how much you actually care about the feelings of others, but taking a label, stripping out cultural nuance, and tacking it onto another group is simply ignorant. Find a better word; the English language is full of great words to describe people with forceful un/belief systems.
Let me know where my point isn’t being made, because I think it’s pretty simple. I understand that you see parallels between fundamentalist Christians and noisy atheists, but that’s like calling every politician with a moustache Hitler. People with strong beliefs are not suddenly in a religion, even if you can draw a few superficial parallels.
i especially thought the “i eagerly await your vitriol” snark in the editor’s preamble was telling.
it was telling me exactly where raw story stood on the subject.
i had heretofor held raw story in a semi-high regard for getting to the truth, but this false equivalency of “equal time for the conservatives” crap is done better and more entertainingly by faux news.
I have a friend who is an athiest who has very little interest in science beyond general understanding of current knowledge, so his athieism isn’t based on science worship, but rather that in his 55 years he has not seen or heard of any ” credible, scientific or factually reliable evidence for the existence of a God, god/s or the supernatural.”
I basically had that posistion as a youth, then used “higher power” praying as part of a system for turning around an off track personal life as a young adult, and then gradually came back to my original athieist position. The rise of the religeous right has compelled me to be even clearer about my posisition. 25 years ago science and secular society seemed to be able to bop a long happily with lots of wiggle room for individuals trying on faith-based belief systems. I now feel these systems are potentially harmful to the long term sustainability of humans as inhabitants of this planet because they promote fantasy based thought. More and more I feel obliged to ask if there is any evidence.
Individually, I believe that prayer can be a powerful tool for living a better life and being a better citizen. I do not believe prayer connects with any external deity or supernatural powers, but rather that it can be a way of finding strength within oneself, as a kind of psychological tool.
Well, the author backtracks, and the editors gleefully plow ahead…
“I offered no apology, and you will receive none from me. This piece has flaws, but it is not an attack on all people in any one group and we will not pretend it is simply to quiet a very small and very vocal group of mistaken people. It is an attack on logical flaws, not an act of bigotry. Attempts to classify this as persecution of people of a particular belief system are purely delusional straw men, ignoring the content of the piece to place themselves in the preferred position of victim.
Is an attack on drunk drivers an attack on all drivers? No, it is on a small group of them. Surely the many self-proclaimed students of logic on this thread have heard of a vin diagram. Those who infer it to be such should argue with the machinations of their imagination in private.
As for the repeated claim that she’s using nothing more than straw men, well, that’s also just flatly false. She provides two written examples of arguments she refutes; she cites a well-known historical example for another; yet another is provided through anecdotal evidence (this is an opinion column, after all). The people making this claim are either incapable of comprehending the content of the piece, simply didn’t read it, or are applying a flaw in one point to the entire piece–a habit often cited as common to all types of fundamentalism. Are we really to believe that an answer to documented arguments, preceded and followed by acknowledgments that this is not the thinking of the majority, is an act of bigotry? That’s absurd.
Demands for an apology are just another example of the level of arrogance sadly common in this feedback thread. Just because someone disagrees with you does not mean you are owed an apology. Attempts to classify Ms. Barton as an undergraduate at a “third tier school,” and one reader’s compulsion to define “disingenuous,” (hardly a $25 word by anyone’s standard,) also betray shocking levels of conceit.
What truly shocks me is that no one–not a single reader–referred to us by certain blogs has bothered to check the content of the piece against the quotes provided. They don’t match, and they never did. Period. And, no, I will not provide links or name names for the same reason I pulled this version from the main page: These people will not receive the attention and advertising revenue from Raw Story’s readership. If you wish to assume other motives, so be it.
As one who does not share Ms. Barton’s beliefs, but who is humble enough to know that I am not capable of fully understanding how the universe came to be (beyond a single nucleus and a big bang, most generally agree,) I’m far more embarrassed by the claims and invective spewed by the atheists and agnostics in this thread than I am by any of her words. They don’t represent my views, or those of any rational person, any better than this column.
Perhaps Einstein said it best: “Before God we are all equally wise – and equally foolish.” I suggest that the people here professing to understand this subject better than Einstein think twice before attempting to prove their negative in such a gleefully vicious, and patently dishonest, way.
-Avery Walker”
Personally, I just love the reference to the “Vin diagram”.
So they claim fabricated quotes and at the same time pull the original so it can’t be tested? Nice.
If atheism was a religion, what would it look like? What would you do? And how would the non-gods punish you for disobeying them, or reward you for obeying them?
I suppose I could be said to praying to the gods of science every time I use my faith and press the light switch, and that I am rewarded by the gift of light, but it’s a bit of a stretch — and would cause some problems to the ‘thou shalt have no other gods before me’ tribes, who presumably would also like to use light switches (except on those days when forbidden to do so, naturalicht). Ditto stuff like agriculture and analgesics.
Presumably the fervent monotheists who think atheism or science is a religion (and is there anyone else who thinks that?) can fill us on what they do to avoid the sin of polytheism while doing what the rest of us do all the time?
And is there any name for the logical fallacy that the absence of an item from a set constitutes an item in the set? It has to be a logical fallacy, because it makes set theory inapplicable to religion and despite all the special pleadings I’ve seen for religion I’ve never seen that one.
It’s not totally unbelievable – it reminds me of the business of holes in semiconductors (most recently extended to the idea that you can entangle two bits of empty space if they mark the absence of photons, but I must admit that’s a bit beyond me, so I don’t know if believe it or not in the absence of evidence), but at least there there’s maths behind it. And working transistors!
R
Just to step back to the original impetus for this discussion: I don’t accept for one minute that this is about Melinda Barton’s strongly held beliefs about anything. I think that a group of Democrats, who may or may not have deep religious beliefs, believe that the Democrats are losing national elections because Democrats are perceived as being too “secular.”
And so, your Amy Sullivans and your Melinda Bartons, et al, are out there blogging and essay-writing in a furious and cynical ploy to “frame” the political debate in such a way that the god-botherers can feel more at home voting for Democrats.
This discussion is not about religion at all; it’s about politics. The theism/atheism debate is just a handy rhetorical trope they’re throwing around trying to score cheap political points. Raw Story gets all pissy because when we take the story at face value, and pick apart the logical flaws and straw men, we’re blunting what they see as their most potent political weapon. By addressing Barton’s arguments, we’re missing the whole point of the essay.
After all, Barton’s essay was no more incompetent and irrational than countless conservative screeds that are uncritically passed around the right-wing-o-sphere as the latest instruction set from Minitrue. What Raw Story and others keep forgetting is that liberals are, after all, not conservatives.
“Surely the many self-proclaimed students of logic on this thread have heard of a vin diagram.”
Priceless. Obviously, the guy doesn’t have a clue about what he’s talking about, which makes his arrogance all the more ridiculous.
HP:
You really got to the crux of the matter!
The strategic sense here is so messed up: “Repubs are diverting attention from the issues at hand by attacking gays and immigrants, so Democrats should counter them by attacking athieists!”
I’m in a liberal core city and I see not one scrap of evidence of any regional Democrat or noteworthy progressive saying anything about athieism or attacking religion.
On the other hand stupid opinion pieces like this incite and inspire ME to be more vocal about my athieism. Next time that other parent on my son’s little league team spontaneously starts telling me about his bible reading I’m gonna tell him politely that I am an athieist so he might as well be talking to me about a very important golf ball collection.
New editor’s note at Raw…
If you’ve arrived here, it wasn’t through the RAW STORY main site, but rather one of several blogs, many of which have latched onto this piece as an example of “religious intolerance.”
There are many legitimate criticisms of this piece to be made. Sadly, they have become lost in a crowd of straw men. So, this link has been removed from the main page. It will reappear on the front page, along with two rebuttals of its content at a later date.
–Avery Walker]
PZ,
Are you one of the rebuttals?
Lastly,
HP is correct. This is about politics. Ms. Barton is staking her claim as a equal opportunity critic. No one’s going to tell her she’s one sided! Gee…good for you Melinda.
Actually…yes.
The Barton/Raw Story link now says:
Pee Zed, have you offered them a rebuttal yet?
“Why face off with the atheist whackjobs? Because extremism is extremism is extremism.”
Atheism is just plain common sense. There is nothing extreme about it. Once a person accepts that he/she is an atheist, I think temperament largely determines whether one will tolerate those who adopt a religious perspective.
It’s sort of like quitting smoking. To the non-smoker, the smoker may seem a tolerable nuisance, or represent a real threat (perhaps for health reasons) that MUST be addressed.
As I grow older, I find myself becoming less and less tolerant of religiously-minded people. Sometimes this becomes overt hostility, sometimes not, but I don’t appreciate being labelled a whackjob or extremist because I sometimes express hostility towards religion.
Personally, I just love the reference to the “Vin diagram”.
That would be a diagram with two big circles labelled “red” and “white” (would blushes get their own circle, or be an intersection set of the other two?), and inside those: smaller circles with labels like “Cabernet”, “Merlot”, “Sauvignon”, “Burgundy” and “unidentifiable cheap plonk to drink a whole bottle of before blogging”.
I haven’t read through all the comments here yet, but in written discourse there is responsibility on both sides– the writer’s and the responder’s.
The writer, if putting forward an argument, would have to do his/her homework in order to come across as logical, responsible, and researched; for example, redefining words and using words such as “whackjob” isn’t responsible, it’s arbitrary to the argument itself. Organization, making sure you know what you’re talking about, empirical evidence, etc. are also factors for a good publicly stated argument. Listing reasons by itself is not all organization is; each paragraph under each reason should be as logically cogent as the whole.
On the counterargument end, it’s responsible to not twist the words and meanings, rewrite sentences, hastily generalize, etc. in order to refute the argument. The counterargument end is best when it’s focused on the argument itself.
The editor’s response was a giant tu quoque; instead of addressing the article (within the confines of the office or publicly) s/he tried an ad hom on the commentators. This move does not support the validity of the article writer’s arguments (no matter which atheists she’s talking about).
Anyway, here’s some good fallacy sites:
Wikipedia’s list
Fallacy Files
Logical Fallacies
I’m not an expert, argumentation theory is a side interest. I only did debate, once, in elementary school. Also, if I’ve said what’s already been commented, I’m sorry. I didn’t have time to read all the comments, yet, even though I know Dr. Myers gets a lot of great comments– I’m responding to his post and the topic of argumentation in what comments I did (quickly) read.
That’s not true! Leprechauns are magically delicious. So, if you taste something that is magically delicious, it is probably a leprechaun.
I’ll try asking once about these ‘reasons’ Simon is refering to. My worry is that they are so vague and tenuous. Simon lists a suspicion that there should have been some obvious historical trace of a reaction to the gospels’ interpreting Jesus’ life in the light of Old Testament prophecies, an equation (pretty strained, in my view) between the most tenuous hypotheses in cosmology (brane collision as the cause of the big bang, multi-verse solutions to the fine tuning ‘problem’) and the (untestable) hypothesis of a creator-God, and personal feelings of conviction.
But the Romans might well have ignored local religious disputes (when they posed no threat to governance and tax-collection). The obscure writings of a messianic cult (in a context where similar cults had arisen around other figures) were, I suspect, of very little interest to them. True, the physics of brane collisions and the multiverse is, as yet, highly speculative (unlike the basic physics of big bang cosmology). But fine-tuning may or may not be an issue; inflation provides a testable (and so far successful) account of why omega=1, and similar developments may provide accounts of the other important constants. Or maybe we will arrive at a testable physics that really does entail a multiverse. Or maybe the issue will remain open– but saying ‘God did it’ seems to be just an empty label for ignorance, or a repetition of the known facts (as Darwin saw in a similar context). As for the personal experience stuff, this is just not helpful– personal religious experiences occur in all traditions that I know of, and are taken by devotees to confirm particular doctrines that, taken together, are irreconcilable. As reasons they just don’t count for anything.
But what worries me most is that this kind of straining to count as evidence points that are so vague and weak (and utterly unconvincing to anyone not already ‘on board’) reverses the ordinary burden of proof– reasons for such extraordinary, significant and highly contested claims surely should meet higher standards!
The conversation has gone quite past what I was talking about this morning. I am barely competent enough to discuss what I was writing. I am certainly unable to comment on many of the things said since then. I apologize to anyone that is offended that I do not address the things I do not address. I assure you, my comments would be of no value.
But, it was asked what I think religion is. I will get to that There were also several propositions as to what I may think religion is and is not. I disagree with many of them, but concede to MoeHammered’s early comments that I may be an ignorant nimrod. And I never would deny being obtuse.
What is religion *to Mike Fox*? (note the emphasis)
I don’t know. Let’s explore together.
Religion, first, is different than spirituality in that the latter is internal feelings and the former is external. This means that one can have religion and not believe it in faith. This is paramount, so I say it again: religion is outside one’s mind (or soul, if you’re the type). If one thinks a prayer, it is spiritual. If one gets on one’s knees and speaks a prayer, it’s religious. (Rather, it MAY be religious. There are additional comments on what religion is later.)
That said, what is science? Science is a way of looking at the world. Question, hypothesis, (grant,) experiment, understanding, sharing. This a way of acting in the outside world. … hmmm… well, driving is an action, too and that’s not religious. There must be something IN ADDITION to religion being external.
Religion is often motivated by a desire to help other people join our religion. This is NOT universal, but I think it suits my purposes very well and is true enough for the USA. It is important to notice the value judgment. “Help”. It should bring to mind images of Christians (not all of them) killing, enslaving, occupying, etc. all in the name of “helping”. Jenna would probably point out at this point that the term “help” is a form of “actor-observer error” and go onto some mumbo-jumbo about how each person has a perspective of what help is and blah-blah-blah. The point is that religion has its own idea of what is and isn’t “correct”, usually based on how that point interacts with the culture the religion is in.
Science SOOOO does that. I have often hear, “You need to be more objective.” Or “What a whackjob.” Both comments are attempting to be helpful. Both are making the actor-observer error. Maybe the actor is TRYING to be objective (survey?) or is OKAY being a whackjob (George? (the commenter above or President Stinky – whoever)).
So, okay, we have that science is external of the mind (PZ, don’t bring out the big neuroscience stick – please!) and it has a point of view. Hmm … seems like we’re missing one more thing. ::scratches beard-less beard:: This thing has got to deal with transmission. But religion is not an ORDINARY meme… It’s has to be transmitted in a certain way.
Maybe the above can only be religion iff the belief driving the action is accepted on indoctrination of fact (or “fact”, take your pick). I like that because indoctrination shows a lack of critical thinking when obtaining these facts. Like … hmm … high school! Which is where many get their base of scientific information. Amazing, 12 years of school and not a critical thought (remember, this is OUT of the mind, not IN the mind we’re concerned with – it’s only science if it’s SHARED critical thought)
Okay, all at once now: Religion is external manifestations of one’s own mind that has a point of view as a result of indoctrination of fact. Well … I don’t like the wishy-washy-ness of the word “manifestations,” but it’s good enough for me.
Mike Fox
“Or maybe we will arrive at a testable physics that really does entail a multiverse.”
AFAIK they are at least falsifiable. The original cyclic colliding brane (ekpyrotic) model is apparently ruled out by the latest WMAP data (by not having scale-invariant spectrum, which inflation has). The remaining ekpyrotic models may be ruled out once the spectral index predictions are firmed up. So we may be able to choose a set of viable multiverse cosmologies.
In African churches Jesus is often portrayed as black, in South American churches he often looks … South American.
This makes no sense. There’s no “South American” category that could include all those living here. Colombia is quite different from Chile, which is different from Bolivia, and Suriname, and so on, and Brazil is completely different from all of then – the language is different, just for starters.
Second, what is that about “South American looks”? The main reason why Brazilian passports are a favorite for counterfeiting is that anyone can pass for a Brazilian – whether they come from Korea, Sudan, Syria or Sweden.
And third, the Catholic image of Jesus is that of a blonde, blue-eyed Nordic man.
“Willing to appear openly to those who seek him with all their heart, and to be hidden from those who flee from him with all their heart, God so regulates the knowledge of himself that he has given indications of himself which are visible to those who seek him and not to those who do not seek him. There is enough light for those to see who only desire to see, and enough obscurity for those who have a contrary disposition.”
I am SO TIRED of hearing this shit.
Last time I was at a Christian church I saw the Enemy, Tezcatlipoca, dancing on the pulpit, smiling as he tore the world apart with a false religion. It was hard to keep myself from throwing myself on the floor and flopping about like a fish.
It was one of the strongest religious experiences I’ve ever had, and it completely contradicts the Christian one.
The Aztec histories that I’ve read are full of supernatural happenings, and are probably a lot more accurate then the bible (Incidentally, the bible itself tells us that huge numbers of Jews thought Christ was a big fat faker).
Anyway, what am I to make of this? Either I’m wrong, or Christians are, or neither of our religions are right.
So how the fuck do I figure this out? Hey, maybe science? The art of deciding which observations are accurate? Yeah, that could work!
So how … do I figure this out? Hey, maybe science? The art of deciding which observations are accurate?
Christopher,
That is exactly the indoctrination I’m talking about. You believe that the way in which science observes the world is the correct one. The article before “correct” is important (and before “art” in your quote). It shows your bias the same way that the term “darwinism” shows bias today.
I would like to contend to you, Christopher, to tell me why science is a better way to define the accuracy of an observation than history or fable or estimate or imitation? PZ could probably write a book on the last two in the brain. History often tells us what the victors believed – which can be a much more accurate description of what drove them then the scientific facts. Fable tells us morals; personally, I think morals are really stupid, but they are, to a degree, a way of observing the world. I happen to think “the slow and steady wins the race” is an excellent moral on observation as well as shows what is important to observe.
Also, if you are a believer in Aztec religion – share with us more of your view! The imagery in your post is very strong. I would love to hear about you, a follower of White Tezcatlipoca, and how your ideas of the conflict of good and evil color your everyday life. Thank you!
Mike Fox
“tell me why science is a better way to define the accuracy of an observation than history or fable or estimate or imitation?”
Because these later are unreliable and science asserts reliable observations and theories beyond reasonable doubt. You can check them repeatedly and they are stable. Believing that for examples dreams or fantasy is as reliable as verified science is … a fantasy. You can’t build planes with them.
A correct one? Science doesn’t pretend to hold an absolute truth: it is a method for evaluating the accuracy of claims about the world. It isn’t bias to say that a process the encourages criticism and constant assessment and measurement and replicability is a far, far better way of doing things than merely accepting dogmatically the declarations of religious authority.
PZ Myers – Yes, it is bias to say that. It is placing a value on freedom and critical assessment by saying it is “better.” I could argue that the other side of that coin is instability and doubt/skepticism. A non-critically evaluative approach to information is secure and allows confidence regardless of the truth, while obviously lacking freedom or assessment. Confidence is very valued in religion.
I’m not positive about the following, but I am compelled to say it: I feel that science attempts to not BE absolute truth, but it does attempt to approach absolute truth via it’s methods. I also feel that science thinks that, out of all schools of thought, it is the closest to the absolute truth. These* may be philosophically very similar.
Mr. Larsson – I didn’t say reliable. I said better. Why do you think reliable is better? I am saying that it is because you value reliability. I am also saying that reliability is a value of science and NOT of all other religions (e.g. miracles are inherently unreliable).
Mike Fox
*”These” being “absolute truth” and “closest to the absolute truth.”
After a certain point in an argument, the Mike Foxes of the world start saying things like: “I am also saying that reliability is a value of science and NOT of all other religions.” God talk often ends up being about making coherent arguments that have nothing to do with anything in the world or can’t possibly be evaluated. To use a favorite expression, it becomes a “frictionlesss spinning in the void.” (John McDowell). At that point, the audience heads for the doors, looking for a few hard facts or a good, reliable science lecture.
Woah, George, I don’t think clarifying when people don’t understand something is quite the same as believing in a “water vapor canopy” or some other loony thing. My message is pretty simple, I think. [added after previewing: simple, but evidently really long. I edited it down some, really.]
Religion is external manifestations of one’s own mind that has a point of view as a result of indoctrination of fact.
I clam that, by my definition, science is often used as a religion. Why? Science is external of the mind. It is often the result of indoctrination of fact (don’t tell me you haven’t just read the abstract of an article and accepted it or heard a fact and not questioned it as critically because you believed it was science. Also, I believe that our schools now teach fact/trivia more than they teach process. These are both evidence of indoctrination). I believe these two aspects of religion are inherent in science today.
The only thing left in order for science to be religion, again by my definition (which no one has contested or presented modifications to), is for it to be a point of view. This means that as soon as one believes that the value science is inherently greater than other ways of looking at the world, science becomes a religion. This means that when, for example, scientists and their followers value the turbulence of critical thinking as opposed to the security of fiction they are using science as religion.
I believe that this is not necessarily true. I believe that it could be testable. I believe that it is to science’s detriment to not listen to this sort of message. I believe that it is very much so something that needs to be thought about in school settings (read: I think schools need to be more aware of point of view and it’s effect on the interpretation and evaluation of fact). I am NOT suggesting that this is a panacea. I am not suggesting that we radically alter the foundations of science. I AM suggesting that science places inherent value on certain modes of thinking and unduly rejects others. I am suggesting that there aren’t enough PZ Myers in the world, going to ID conferences even though they think it’s gonna be crap, just so they can examine all points of view on a subject. I doubt PZ evaluates all of science that way, however.
Sorry, George, I think you hit a button. I am not presenting from the aspect of a god-fearing man. I am trying to be a neutral, actual scientist. I say this because I am an atheist who is going to go into science teaching. When observing classes, something I’ve found to be universally frustrating to students is when teachers assume inherent value to their mode of thought and force the students to agree at risk of their grade. This forces, by the nature of the situation, for all information presented by the teacher to become suspect BECAUSE it lacks the value of the students and therefore lacks value to the students.
This lack of value is the same in style and magnitude as myths of religion have in science. This means that when you hear, “Jesus took his Jesus stick and whacked a cup of water and then it was alcohol and it’s magic. Jesus is great because of that.” you respond with the same, value-based gut reaction as when you say, “Evolution is apparent because we can see changes over time. Speciation is a construct of man and, in some isolated populations, there is large genetic diversity but no distinct specie boundary. This indicates that all life may be the same way, but the intermediates have died and now we see species.”
Now it is important to ask what we can do about this. I don’t honestly know. I hope that being frank and honest about our biases and teaching what those biases mean for science and for the rest of the world could help. I also think that it’s high-time that science started listening to the values of the rest of the world again and not be so bullheaded about being “correct” that is stops seeing value in other ethical modes of thought.
Heck, I’m trying to tell you guys my way of looking at things has more value. I need to be aware of that and what that means. I have to make my message relevant to the audience that is receiving it. It gives me responsibility of respecting you. Ultimatly, I think science is losing that responsibility and respect and is becoming another religion. This is not a radical change to science and science’s approach. Just an important one if it wishes to remain truely an independent form of thought.
Good Morning! I’m off to life. Be back in a while (tonight?)
Mike Fox
P.S. to PZ : sorry to slander you earlier. I must admit, I do hold you in very high esteem. You’re just a very conveniant example of an intellegent scientist that everyone reading this blog knows.
Mr. Fox, please do yourself a favor and don’t go into science teaching if your primary motivation is to tell your students what your personal philosophy of science is. Stick to making comments in science weblogs instead.
Jonathan Badger: What is daft about Wilson’s _Consilience_? He’s trying to articulate what is IMO the hardest to understand and articulate part of how science works. To the layperson, seeing a scientist say, “that can’t be right, that’s ridiculous” sounds dogmatic and closed-minded. But it often isn’t, because it is based on the “mutual support relations” that exist between different hypotheses in science. Trying to articulate how this support works is extremely difficult, and I don’t think Wilson (or anyone else) has quite got it right, except in outline, but he shouldn’t be falted for trying?
P J Evans: If you are claiming there is no test for god, then you are also claiming there is absolutely no warrant whatsoever for your belief! That’s surely not what you want – all creeds that I am aware of claim certain evidence in their favour or occurences that are taken as absolutely historical. For example, even if you “psychologize” the Resurrection in Christianity, one still is still living with the assumption that “if he has not risen, our faith is in vain”. On the other hand, if you really are sincere, then may I ask why you are X rather than Y, and how you’d change your mind to Y rather than X?
It’s times like this that I despair to see how stoner philosophy has now become the right’s favorite beating stick. There’s a guy on another forum I frequent putting on a one-man-stand about how science must be a faith-based endeavor because it requires faith to believe that causes have effects, and it requires even more faith to believe that a human brain can actually know things.
Mr. David Wilford,
Are you suggesting that one shouldn’t teach students to think about how they critically evaluate and to examine sources of bias of their (and any) education? Or are you intentionally slandering me by suggesting that I would teach for any reason but to help kids? Either way, I find your comments presumptuous and offensive. Please email me directly with any future insults you have.
Mike Fox
oien0017(at)umn(dot)edu
Mr. Fox, I’m merely noting what you’ve been going on about here for sometime now, which isn’t about teaching kids science, but about how scientists are somehow philosophically incorrect in your eyes. Trust me, you aren’t going to be doing kids any favors by indulging yourself when going off on such tangents in actual science classes. BTW, what science or sciences are you interested in teaching?
Mike,
“Why do you think reliable is better?”
Believing that for examples dreams or fantasy is as reliable as verified science is … a fantasy. You can’t build planes with them.
Mr. David Wilford,
I am not suggesting that the philosophy of science is wrong. I am saying that science is often treated as religion, by scientists usually to a nearly irrelevant degree, but by teachers of science to a very high degree. This means that most people, in our culture who have any science knowledge less than an expert level likely are only able to understand it the same way non-priests follow and understand religion.
This has little to nothing to do with science the philosophy and everything to do with science as a value system. SCIENCE OUGHT NOT HAVE VALUES if it is to remain non-religious. This doesn’t mean it can’t have conclusions. It doesn’t mean anything except it cannot value anything. It can’t value methods of interpretation, different paths should lead to the same answer. It can’t value particular outcomes, non-provable are non-provable. Belief in no god is not a result of science – lack of evidence for or against god is science. People put value to that and choose one or the other, that’s a choice that, if acted upon, is religious.
I am hoping to be a high school biology teacher. I’m hoping to work inner city, but not New York style inner city. Most of that is dealing with behaviour problems, but it’s definitely more rewarding. Funny thing about teaching is that there is so much curriculum that, without being deceptive, its very difficult to radically alter what you must teach. And, anyway, this is just part of my developing teaching philosophy. I also think that students need to learn what a deadline is and how to actually work in a group, if they don’t already know. But that is more HOW to teach than WHAT to teach; how to teach is where I place my understanding of the philosophy of science. How do you relate to science or teaching?
Mr. Larsson,
Okay, why do you think planes are better? Why do you think the answer to that is better? And that? Do you see horror of this logic? Nothing is intrinsically better. Things are or are not. We place value on them in our mind, to mold our concept of them to best fit us. When we stop saying “science makes airplanes. Dreams do not make airplanes” and start saying “reliably making airplanes is better than not reliably making airplanes.” The later is a value judgment and, therefore, could qualify for religion. It is also a value judgment to say that “making airplanes reliable is better than making airplanes unreliable.” It is not a value to say “science makes more reliable airplanes than dreams.”
…I just realized you may have been talking about 2D surfaces, planes – which CAN be dreamt and CAN’T reliably be made with science. Can they? But that really isn’t here or there.
Mr. darukaru,
I, unlike you’re friend in the other forum, am not telling you that it takes faith to accept fact. I am suggesting that the way in which those facts are interpreted can lead to religion, particularly if they are given value. Cancer ought not be “bad” to scientists. “Cancer is.” “Cancer kills.” “Cancer occurs this way or that way.” Are all non-valued statements. That is what science should be showing the public. I do see how this can be easily mis-understood to mean cause and effect aren’t related, but I’m saying fact and value on the interpretation are not related.
Thank you, Mr. darukaru, for your understanding my burden of explanation as well as your burden of questioning. So often, people ignore how difficult it is to go against popular opinion and still remain as open-minded as possible. You are a gentleman for recognizing and congratulating my one-man-banded-ness in this conversation. However, I like to think of this more as a conversation where everyone involved is learning from everyone else involved. I am having good learning from everyone else here, that’s for sure!
Mike Fox
Be back on again around 6 or 7, so please don’t think I’m snubbing you!
Mike Fox
(1) as someone said waaaay back up there, the word “religion” requires a supernatural aspect to a worldview. You appear to be using the word to mean a worldview with a value system (whatever that means). I cannot see at all how this is a useful re-definition. Is you view any different from saying “Science is a worldview that is based on a belief that induction is the best – or most useful – way to find out about the world”?
(2) One answer to your question to Tjorborn Larsson about why reliability is “better” (cf my “best” above), is that, in many arenas of human endeavour, it allows us to make decisions and choices which affect our future with the highest probability that we will be pleased with those decisions and choices in hindsight. This strikes me as a fairly basic human aim. It is true that “reliably making airplanes is better than not reliably making airplanes” and “making airplanes reliable is better than making airplanes unreliable” are value judgements, but they are value judgements shared, I would argue, by most of humanity, especially if we replaces “airplanes” in the first sentence with, say, “clean water”, which example TL might just as well have used.
“It is not a value to say “science makes more reliable airplanes than dreams.””
The original question I am answering is “tell me why science is a better way to define the accuracy of an observation than history or fable or estimate or imitation?”
You can’t build planes with faith, it is reality impotent. A plane is of value since it takes one from A way over to B.
But “shared by most of humanity” is merely an argumentum ad popularum. (If this were a different thread, we’d be full circle.)
You can’t make a value judgment without values, I think that’s Mike’s point.
You may value life over death, I may value life over death, and Mike may value life over death. But science as an intellectual endeavor *has no rational reason* to value life over death. A purely empirical system can’t make value judgments because it doesn’t have any values. Introducing values into a system makes it non-empirical.
I think it’s an important point about the philosophy of science. It’s easy to wrap up science (a body of empirical statements about the world), some commonly shared (and often unexamined) value judgments, and their consequences and call the resulting amalgam “science”, but if someone else does the same thing with different unstated value judgments, they get different results and it isn’t always clear why.
I can’t avoid the conclusion that you have to have some number of moral axioms – that, by their nature, can’t be justified by reason – or you can’t build any moral system whatsoever. Axioms are unfalsifiable – by nature – so you have to be very careful about introducing them.
I think that Chris has said more in a dozen sentances than I said in all my blather. I have nothing more to add to what has been said. I would love to read more thoughts from both sides.
Mike Fox
A process of elimination, essentially. The non-science methods you’ve talked about don’t lead to consensus;
Aztec and Christian fables are in direct opposition, and have never really found a way to mesh; If we admit that they only refer to imaginary beings, no different then, say, Spider-man, then that makes us atheists.
On the other hand, if we assume that god exists as an outside force, as a real thing, then we can only conclude that fables et al don’t fully observe that being, because they’ve come to opposed conclusions about its character.
Now, if god is, paradoxically, a being with diametrically opposed characteristics, if he is both entirely good AND entirely evil, then we can’t really talk about him in a meaningful way; Anything we say about him will be both false and true, and thus impart no meaningful information.
Again, this leads us to a position of atheism, becuase we’ve admited that god doesn’t interact with the world in a meaningful way; he might as well not exist.
Now, if we don’t take either of those atheist positions, we assume that god has distinct characteristics. This means that some Fables, estimations, etc. are wrong.
But why? The fables themselves provide no clue as to which are right and wrong, nor do any of the other non-science methods. We’re left with using those observational techniques that have yielded consistant results in the past.
Speaking of, I believe that consistancy is neccesary to talk about things. If we can’t decide on a consistant characteristic for an object, what can we say about it, besides that it’san object?
Christopher,
Name me one civilization that has started without the aid of religion. I know of none. That is the consistancy of god from a non-science perspective. God is socially, not scientifically, valued. Science has a value system today. That means it is bias and is capable of being a religion (see earlier comments).
Mike Fox
Okay, now re-read Chris’s post on value:
But “shared by most of humanity” is merely an argumentum ad popularum. (If this were a different thread, we’d be full circle.)
You can’t make a value judgment without values, I think that’s Mike’s point.
You may value life over death, I may value life over death, and Mike may value life over death. But science as an intellectual endeavor *has no rational reason* to value life over death. A purely empirical system can’t make value judgments because it doesn’t have any values. Introducing values into a system makes it non-empirical.
I think it’s an important point about the philosophy of science. It’s easy to wrap up science (a body of empirical statements about the world), some commonly shared (and often unexamined) value judgments, and their consequences and call the resulting amalgam “science”, but if someone else does the same thing with different unstated value judgments, they get different results and it isn’t always clear why.
I can’t avoid the conclusion that you have to have some number of moral axioms – that, by their nature, can’t be justified by reason – or you can’t build any moral system whatsoever. Axioms are unfalsifiable – by nature – so you have to be very careful about introducing them.
“Christopher,
Name me one civilization that has started without the aid of religion. I know of none. That is the consistancy of god from a non-science perspective. God is socially, not scientifically, valued. Science has a value system today. That means it is bias and is capable of being a religion (see earlier comments).
Mike Fox”
I guess I don’t see your point. God is a social construct? But again, as I pointed out, we can’t make a statement about god without hearing a contradictory one that’s just as valid. It’s hard to see how a statement as simple as “god exists” can influence society at all. You need additional info, like what god likes and dislikes.
And once we have a set of characteristics, we need a way to evaluate them against other posited characteristics. Inter-faith conflicts have as yet failed to provide this information. So we must turn to other sources.
I don’t see what values have todo with it.
Agreed (Chris) that science as an intellectual endeavor *has no rational reason* to value life over death. But we humans have a reason to value science. These are two different things. The statements “science is good” or “science is valuable to people” or “science is the best way of knowing” are indeed not themselves part of science.
Why is an argumentum ad popularum necessarily “merely”? I would argue that, of ways of knowing, science has most consistently and universally produced outcomes which are valued by people. Other “ways of knowing” can only be judged to produce a valued outcome by introspection by the person experiencing the outcome, and there is room for doubt that the cause of the valued outcome being the “way of knowing”.
I guess the unstated axiom (although I am not too sure it is moral, BTW, that’s the problem with the word “better”) is that “ways of knowing are better the more likely they are to produce results which are valued by people” or something like that.
So,
Ways of knowing are better the more likely they are to produce results which are valued by people
Of ways of knowing, science has most consistently and universally produced outcomes which are valued by people
Of ways of knowing so far explored by people, science is the best.
(I’ve just deleted a lot of stuff about the circularity of induction (see Hume) and where moral axioms might come from, as being tangential if interesting. I do hope some of you look at this thread again on your Wednesday; I was asleep in Scotland whilst you were talking *sigh*).
(I don’t get the point about whether any civilizations started without religion either, in relation to this context. Also, even if the contention is true, I think we may have a cause-and-effect problem. Until an economy got going which supported some specialised division of labour, there wasn’t “religion” because no-one had time to be a priestly class, IMHO).
Mike: I think all civilizations started with the *hindrance*, not aid, of religion. Although I admit this is based on a kind of backwards induction – based the observed foot-dragging of religions throughout recorded history, I expect that they did the same thing for agriculture, city-building, etc.
Short of time travel, I don’t see how we can know, though. When and where people actually built cities can be resolved by archaeology, but without writing, I don’t see how we can know what anyone’s opinion of the practice of city-building was. (Other than guessing that at least some people must have supported it, or they wouldn’t have done it.)
Potentilla: you don’t need much of an economy to support a shaman. Division of labor probably goes back to the guy who makes the flint spearheads for the rest of the tribe – at least. I think it’s entirely likely that religion predated civilization.
And the problem with “good is what people value” systems is what happens when the majority approves of torture, or slavery, or mutilating the genitals of infants, or burning heretics at the stake… I could go on, but you’re probably already wishing those were made-up examples. I know I am.
If any statement about good or evil can have a well-defined truth value, then people can be wrong about it; then lots of people can be wrong about it, just like lots of people were once wrong about the shape of the earth, and some people still are wrong about the age of the earth. You can’t trust popular consensus to be right about good and evil any more than you can trust it to be right about geology, astronomy or medicine.
Chris,
“A purely empirical system can’t make value judgments because it doesn’t have any values. Introducing values into a system makes it non-empirical.”
I don’t see that at all. Perhaps you must define what a value is.
Science already as a method put value on observations, data, theories, verification, falsification, at least values like useful, stable, explanatory power, parsimonious, et cetera. Perhaps that is part of a utilitarian philosophy, but I don’t see how it is avoided in real life.
And then of course you have values used by the area of science, which is still mainly an empirical area. You assume the results of science, the method of science and the area of science are somehow separated while in reality they are integrated. How can you disconnect the results from the area, the method from the results, and how do you clear out all values used in the method?
Chris, I agree that the religious impulse predates “civilisation” (assuming this means complex societies) but I think organised religion postdates it. It’s not very important; I was just taking issue with Mike Fox’s contention that religion was a CAUSE of civilisation. In fact, economics caused “civilisation” and rise of “civilisation” allowed changes to religion and the way it was organised. (BTW, on a tangent, do you have any evidence that there WAS ” a guy who makes flint spearheads for the rest of the tribe”?)
More importantly; where, in your view, do truth values of statements about good or evil come from? In my view, the morality of human beings arises from a number of evolved behaviours (such as kin and reciprocal altruism and various things to do with sex); because we feel so passionately (if often vaguely) about these, we have invented “ought”. The rest is argument – and legislation – about the detail, often caused by more than one evolved “moral proclivity” being relevant to the question in hand. The major clash here is that between the various sorts of altruism and the evolved tendency to recognise an in-group and thus an out-group; this clash gives rise to most of the things, such as slavery, that you deplore. I share your emotional distaste at the list you adduce, but unfortunately I don’t believe I have any “moral authority” to say that my reaction has any more validity than emotional distaste.
In any case, I didn’t say “good is what people value” in a general sense but rather in a limited sense, referring to ways of knowing. How else might one judge a way of knowing, other than whether it consistently produces results that people value?
Hi all
Some great discussion going on here, though I do find the non-threaded format unhelpful. I should point out I have no idea who Melinda Barton is and certainly had no idea there was a political agenda going on. From a British POV your two parties have exactly the same policies so it all gets kind of confusing and cultural, although we now have a similar position with very little between our two credible parties. Maybe that’s the way democracies go in the end – with exoteric policy driven by opinion polls and thus the views of the average mainstream media editor.
This argument about the meaning of religion seems fairly simple to resolve. In the tightest definition it probably does have some kind of supernatural connotations, although it would be difficult to argue that with say, Zen Buddhism – which most people would happily concede as a religion. But in a looser sense, atheism is like a religion. Get a bunch of atheists together and claim that your belief in Christianity reasonable, and you get the same old tired comments about myths and fables and using religion to build aeroplanes etc. It can often seem like a gut reaction where no attempt has been made to realise the actual Weltanschauung involved. As a Christian I believe god has hidden himself from his creation deliberately, I believe there is a reason for all the terrible suffering that affects so many peoples short lives here. “I shall refine them like silver in the fire”. There is a way of understanding these things that is not about empirical logic alone, and it often gets confused by people with simple faith that have experienced god but have little education, or by people with plenty of education who have an agenda to fight scientism that has become separated from the search for truth. These people are not some kind of inevitable result of faith – atheism has its own equivalents like Dawkins -> http://users.ox.ac.uk/~mcgrath/Lecture%20Text/Salisbury%20Dawkins.pdf
PZ Myers makes a good point here;
Sure science has loads of good qualities. But it’s investigating a certain portion of the realities of existence, namely physical ones broken down into constituents (a valuable process for investigating physical things). And yes – sure – we can build an epistemology out of that. The reason someone ‘loves’ a sexual partner is a delusion based on selfish genes that need to spread themselves. The reason we stand up to someone that attacks our family is a product of evolution alone – the inbuilt need to ensure our selfish genes replicate.
But this whole vision of memes that become so sophisticated such that any qualities of man can be attributed to natural selection fails in so many areas. The first is of course the fine tuning issue, which can be resolved by all kinds of theories that create infinite (in the ridiculous Cantor sense) realities. We need some child like the kid that said the emperor had no clothes. People who study science as geeks rather than rebels are missing the whole essence of science. Basically its not reasonable to invent countless billions of universes when the only reason for doing so is specifically to prove that there is no creator god.
There is also Mafisto, who said;
I don’t think I was being disrespectful at all. And I don’t think I was being ignorant. The fact remains that atheists claim some kind of superiority of beliefs, purely because their belief are based on solid evidence that by definition seeks to refute itself. I’ll quote PZ Myers earlier;
So how did a method for investigating the four dimensions of physical, material, reality we experience become an absolute epistemology where my insistence that god is more than the reality of tables and chairs, become some kind of definition of my psychiatric condition ?
What IS matter ? What IS energy ? What IS time ?
I don’t “demand” anyone believe in the existence of god without reason to. I just know now that many of my reasoned, heartfelt and honestly held beliefs that religion was a load of crap were based on false assumptions in myself. I had challenged all the claims of religious people and found them to be wanting. But my conclusions were based on assumptions of what is real, and were aided heavily by my vast sexual appetite (Christians made me feel bad with all their flowery or zealous holier-than-thou stuff – so I suggested they go off and praise their arrogant god, one that needed praise more than he needed his followers to go and do something useful for the suffering people of this planet).
There are a few people who have replied to me directly, and I’d love to continue those discussions in threaded format here -> http://phorum.internalspace.co.uk/list.php?2 . But there is one I feel I should try to answer here, from “A Hermit”;
Certainly not.
Again – no.
Not at all. But what do you mean by “feelings” ? When a friend of yours annoys you for some minor reason, do you say to yourself you could easily find a friend that doesn’t annoy you, and so get rid of that friend on that basis alone ? Usually you have some kind of ‘feeling’ for that person and so you act in a way that’s not dictated by empirical logic alone. And sometimes you tell them to ‘piss off’, which is also not dictated by logic alone. If you are going to talk about ‘faith in god’, then you must also realise that it’s a relationship as much as an intellectual philosophy. And we very rarely treat relationships in pure, reasoned and empirical ways. The various peoples that Christianity came across when it was new were used to thinking of religion in terms of relationships. The harvest relied on the weather, for example, and if it failed it was a failure of the relationship with the gods. So when Christianity came along, that aspect of it was not difficult to understand – it was the spiritual authority which convinced them to throw away their ancient beliefs and philosophies. But now days our faith is in empirical evidence – and yet we don’t have an empirical description of life – we use its effects as a description of it. The whole concept of a relationship with something unseen that is not referenced in any papers, makes Christianity seem just as ridiculous as any old wacky ancient or new age belief.
So your questions based on intellect must also use the same intellect that remains present when you calmly evaluate situations in your real life, not just in the necessary objectivity that is required for scientific endeavours.
In a way – yes. I’m in no way saying that I’m a better person than you were. Far from it. Here’s a part of something I wrote when I first changed from being an atheist;
It’s a question of whether you consider it rational to start building (uncovering) a wall of truth with pebbles, or with solid foundation stones. Scientifically, in the Occams Razor tradition, the best solution to the fine tuning ‘problem’ is something that science (for good reason) denies space for – namely “god did it”. But science by definition excludes that possibility. So when you look to science as a complete philosophy in epistemological and ontological terms, you are starting with pebbles and coming out with a conclusion that everything is lots of little stones. It’s a starting point where god doesn’t have a chance of appearing – by definition.
So when anyone starts seeing the beauty of the scientific process, and realises the value of that approach, it seems like a safe bet to put your faith in that over some mystical mumbo jumbo derived in times when such things were not available to people. But as Stephen Jay Gould insisted, “the natural sciences simply cannot adjudicate on the God question. If the sciences are used as the basis of either atheism or religious beliefs, they are misused.”
You seem to have a low opinion of god. I suggest you find a part of this planet where light pollution has not stolen our view of the skies above us. Imagine, just for one moment, the nature of the god I’m suggesting exists. Look up, pause, and imagine how little and insignificant we are next to the creator of the universe. We are like ants walking up the walls of a cathedral debating why this bit is painted stone, and the other bit is varnished wood. Why do you assume god is playing games for twisted reasons ? There is no philosophy in the original Christian tradition, passed from Jesus to Peter to the early church fathers in a direct and evidenced way, of anyone suggesting some kind of “God playing games” as you suggest. That god is an invention of your mind, and its not a surprise you rejected that god.
I’d love to reply to the other comments directed at me, “Uber” had some particularly militant knee-jerk points that are easy to answer, and I’ll do so if he posts them somewhere with threaded messages. Discussion on things like this are by nature tree like – and I can’t understand this love of flat format discussions. “JP” has some comments on the early church, but he misses the fact that there was broad consensus across all the people that had a direct succession from the apostolic stone of Peter. His argument is far less logical than saying Lord Kelvin, who discovered one of the most central scientific principles, yet also claimed the earth was ridiculously young, proves that science is a load of old tosh.
I’ll check back here for comments, but it seems so primitive using a flat view for discussions like this. It ends up like an apple tree with one branch complaining that the other has more leaves than apples, and another branch complaining it has more apples than leaves. No one really knows which discussion is going in which direction.
Simon, there are so many things I take issue with in your lengthy post that I certainly don’t want to hijack PJ’s blog further by doing it here. If you’ll post a summary of your effusion about on phorum, I’ll come over and debate it. (Threaded views are good, but I can’t say phorum is a great example, as you can’t conveniently scroll between comments).
BTW, there is more than one “British POV”. And, are you the same Simon who commented here
http://psom.blogspot.com/2006/01/root-of-all-evil-part-2-virus-of-faith.html#links
or just a coincidental Simon?
Potentilla, yes that was a bit of a late night effusion. As for summarising it – “There is a perfectly reasonable philosophical/epistemological perspective where skeptical science and christian belief sit happily together, whereas atheism based on science alone is a complete non starter. Science can only ever be agnostic on the existence of a hidden creator god” . But there is a thread recently started “Dawkins’ God: Genes, Memes, and the Meaning of Life” which is probably suitable ?
As for the scrolling between comments, if you are logged in there is a “Switch View” option when reading the threads, that allows you to switch between flat and threaded views. And that Simon is not me.
Should I take the silence from the thread to mean a general acceptance that a being we cannot possibly comprehend spoke the universe into existence?
:)
Simon,
If your wondering if silence implies someone spoke, you have a very interesting philosophical argument coming your way – the likes of which may have been epic. Fortunately for you, I am nipping it off at the bud. This post is officially over. Anyone reading it: go home or go to
http://psom.blogspot.com/2006/01/root-of-all-evil-part-2-virus-of-faith.html#links
That said, I recommend to anyone the book Spoke by clairvoyant writer Hannah Weiner. This is her reading a selection:
http://mediamogul.seas.upenn.edu/pennsound/authors/Weiner/Weiner-Hannah_from-Spoke_10-10-83_Live@Ear_10.mp3
I know I’m feeding a verbose troll, but what the heck – it’s holiday free for all.
“This argument about the meaning of religion seems fairly simple to resolve. In the tightest definition it probably does have some kind of supernatural connotations, although it would be difficult to argue that with say, Zen Buddhism – which most people would happily concede as a religion.”
In the loosest sense, religion is practises.
“But in a looser sense, atheism is like a religion.”
Which is why atheism, or rather secularism, is not like a religion.
“an agenda to fight scientism”
Science isn’t scientism.
“So how did a method for investigating the four dimensions of physical, material, reality we experience become an absolute epistemology where my insistence that god is more than the reality of tables and chairs, become some kind of definition of my psychiatric condition ?”
Because it is about what we can observe and it works. The abstract of religion, and much of its practises, doesn’t.
“Scientifically, in the Occams Razor tradition, the best solution to the fine tuning ‘problem’ is something that science (for good reason) denies space for – namely “god did it”.”
The “god did it” showstopper isn’t the solution to any fine tuning problems (there are several). Some have the status “we don’t know yet”, which is a perfectly acceptable scientific position. (Compare with abiogenesis – evolution works perfectly without that answer.) Some is explainable with the weak anthropic principle applied to a multiverse.
“It’s a starting point where god doesn’t have a chance of appearing – by definition.”
Science is about observations. During its history dualisms like machanical sprits or souls have been dropped since they have no explanatory power. It wasn’t an a priori suggestion.
“But as Stephen Jay Gould insisted, “the natural sciences simply cannot adjudicate on the God question. If the sciences are used as the basis of either atheism or religious beliefs, they are misused.””
Gould proposed a dualistic view – dualisms have always yielded to science. The proper view is that science is secular, without accepting Gould’s dualism.
Gould, IMO, was expressing an opinion that will eventually fade in the natural progression of the collective human conscious. There is an evidence based belief system and a non-evidence based belief system. Non-evidence based beliefs are often given labels such as ‘faith’ based, as if there was something unique about faith vs other forms of non-evidence.
Likewise there are a number of additional rationalizations for why god beliefs are ‘special’. “Science looks at how and religion looks at why”. “Religion provides morality”. “Science cannot answer the ‘god’ question”.
Nonsense! The ‘why’ question supposedly answered by religion falls apart with closer scrutiny. What kind of purpose to life is worshiping some ego-maniacal tyrant? If I need a purpose I think I’ll find one a little more beneficial to humanity and my heirs.
That people depend on god beliefs for their morality can be discredited by a simple look at the evidence. There is no evidence the vast majority of human morality decisions are influenced by such things as the threat of burning in hell for all eternity. Evolution of a gregarious species explains primate morality quite sufficiently. Moral behaviors are observable in non-human primates and predictions such as, children will exhibit a sense of morality without having been taught, have been tested. Such test outcomes verify the hypothesis morality is as much nature as nurture.
The “science cannot test for gods” is another fallacy that even most scientists believe is true. The only gods science cannot test for the existence of are gods which either cover their tracks or which don’t interact with the Universe. First, I doubt you could find any early god beliefs describing such a god. And second, if a god really met the definition of not interacting with the Universe, then there would be no reason for humans to have any awareness of such a god.
It boils down to a semantics argument. If you define god as untestable, well, d’uh, you cannot test for such a god. But a god defined that way is by definition irrelevant. Other than specifically defining god as untestable, no other god beliefs are consistent with such a god. But whatever one claims one’s god does, is testable.
But let’s take that science methodology argument one step further. Proper methodology is to follow the evidence to its conclusion, not start with the conclusion (in this case that gods could or do exist), and fit the evidence to it. If you follow the evidence you find the best explanation for god beliefs is that as humans evolved, they created god beliefs as a way of explaining and attempting to control the natural world. And, there are a few additional complex social consequences of group religion which the evidence supports as the reason god beliefs developed. But the one thing the evidence does not support is the hypothesis that god beliefs developed because early humans actually encountered real gods.
Getting back to Gould and my statement his ideas are a step along the way to a true rational collective human conscious, I think history in the far distant future of the human species will show that. Not just Gould, but many other rational thinkers today are close to letting go of gods. But they still find the need to accommodate something that is still so pervasive among people in the world. How can you say the vast majority of the humans on the planet are wrong and you know better? And there’s the issue of ‘accommodate or lose god believers altogether’ when you try to increase rational thinking in a society. On that one even I can put up a facade of accommodation of faith beliefs alongside evidence based beliefs.
Gould may have believed what he said about the importance of god beliefs, or he may have just taken that position to avoid confronting theists head on. Progress in science, however, is unlikely to cease as long as the human species survives. The arguments for maintaining god beliefs are fallacious as I have pointed out above. The arguments for accommodating god beliefs, while likely to be long term, should still be temporary. The evidence for the natural Universe remains at the end of the day. There is no other outcome probable than that eventually the evidence will resolve the god question. How can I say that? Because science based, aka evidence based beliefs, lead to successful outcomes. Faith based, aka non-evidence based beliefs, other than uniting people behind a cause, do not. And we have overwhelming evidence that evolution favors success.