There was an annoying interview with Richard Dawkins in Salon yesterday, which, unfortunately, I wasn’t able to read until today because…
…I was getting the story straight from the horse’s mouth.
The interview is annoying, not because of Dawkins, but because of the interviewer. It leads in with this comment: “Why are we here on earth? To Richard Dawkins, that’s a remarkably stupid question. In a heated interview, the famous biologist insists that religion is evil and God might as well be a children’s fantasy.” It also biases the argument in infuriating ways.
Not surprisingly, these kinds of comments have made Dawkins a lightning rod in the debate over evolution. While he’s a hero to those who can’t stomach superstition or irrationality, his efforts to link Darwinism to atheism have upset the scientists and philosophers, like Francis Collins and Michael Ruse, who are trying to bridge the gap between science and religion. Yet, surprisingly, some intelligent design advocates have actually welcomed Dawkins’ attacks. William Dembski, for instance, says his inflammatory rhetoric helps the I.D. cause by making evolution sound un-Christian.
To the author, bridging a gap between science and religion is apparently a virtue; to me, and I think to Dawkins, it’s like trying to couple sugar and shit on our dessert plate. Why should we make an effort to tie a rational, empirical, scientific world view to old foolishness about ghosts and deities? Why should we think Ruse and Collins are helping things, when their books are such dreary crap?
The comment from Dembski furthers the problem. First, Dembski is not a credible source for much of anything; the interviewer might as well have rushed out to get Ronald McDonald’s opinion of Dawkins. Second, I regard a creationist’s opinion as little more than a self-serving lie tailored to serve his ideology, so the subtext has to be understood when reading it. Of course a creationist like Dembski would love to split off an effective critic from the herd, and would like you to disregard Dawkins. I wonder…does Dembski invite Ruse to ID meetings and to make contributions to ID books because Ruse harms the ID cause? Third, science is un-religious and even anti-religious. It helps the cause of truth to make that conflict explicit; it harms that cause to gloss over and mask the differences, as Ruse and Collins do.
So ignore the interviewer. Read the article for Dawkins’ comments, which are clear and strongly stated—not heated. I can say from personal experience now that Dawkins doesn’t seem the sort of fellow to be “heated” at all: hospitable and charming are better terms for the man. As for what he says about religion in the interview, I have to agree with him completely.
I haven’t had a lot of free time to browse through the comments people have been leaving here, but I did pick up on this one in a quick scan, and it’s appropriate that I mention it here, I think.
…of course atheism is a philosophical position. So is creationism. It’s trivially true that they are both, equally, philosophical positions. To claim that belief is a position, while disbelief is not, is just ridiculous.
Atheism is not a philosophical belief. It is a consequence of a philosophical belief, I will grant you that: it is a philosophy that says evidence, observation, and a logical chain of reasoning are important, as is a healthy skepticism. Tunnel down through most atheists’ positions, and that is where you will find their philosophical foundation. I think it’s also why atheists sometimes find themselves exasperated with agnostics—we’re arguing for the same things, but the labels are different, and agnosticism gives far too much credit to purely hypothetical speculations about nebulous possibilities.
The funny thing is that most of the people you will meet on the street, unless they’re genuinely crazy, believe in the same philosophy that we atheists do. They would not buy a used car unless they drove it first, they test the water temperature with their hand before they step into the shower, they don’t expect that the sensible response to discovering a lump on their breast is to pray harder rather than going to the doctor for an examination. What they’ve done instead is to add an extra layer of weirdness (I can’t quite imagine what else to call religious beliefs—they are quite strange) on top. It is not a philosophy to find the invocation of a triune, dead-and-risen-again god peculiar, and it’s a misstatement of the situation to equate belief and not-belief as equivalent philosophical positions.
You could either state that atheism is built on an internally consistent philosophy, while theism is a set of irrational confabulations bolted on to a culture, or you could try to argue that magical thinking and semi-random traditions and rituals of religion are a “philosophy,” in which case I’ll feel comfortable in saying I want no part of this “philosophical” nonsense, and I would hope that most philosophers would also take offense.
One thing I cannot abide, though, is the implied false equivalence of calling both atheism and religion “philosophies”.
First of all, wonderful picture! There is still hope for civilization.
Second, I suppose Mr. Dembski is delighted to be quoted in any article about Mr. Dawkins as though they are thinkers of equal weight and merit.
You… you… you bastard!
Forgot to ask – was Larry there? I would give good money for a tape recording of that conversation…
I think the question regarding “Why are we here on earth?” (p. 3 of the interview) was the only one that Dawkins answered less than clearly. He said it was “not a question that deserves an answer” but the interviewer at least didn’t seem to understand his justification. What I think he meant is that the question “Why are we here?” is really both a statement and a question: “We are here for a purpose”, and “What is that purpose?”. By presupposing that we are here for some purpose, you are essentially presupposing that there is an intelligent designer.
Hej!
The photo of Meyers and Dawkins is indeed some good atheism porn!
Keep up the good work!!!
Johan, Sweden
“science is un-religious and even anti-religious”
The later in a broad sense perhaps, empirical vs nonempirical worldview. It is easier to find religion anti-science, broadly since nonempiricism isn’t rational and expecially when it makes incessant claims on science.
Religion is like the old geezer and crowdpleaser that never learned how to field the ball, and refuses to step aside for the young player of science who knows the rules and ways of the real sport.
“an extra layer of weirdness”
:-) Seems sort of complementary to quantum and relativity weirdness – religious weirdness is natural for a nonempiricist, while the later are natural for an empiricist. But religious weirdness is serious since it is permanent, while the later two are more odd due to unfamiliarity.
For a technical but explanatory example, I just learned something new and unfamiliar about relativity weirdness. Lorentz-Fitzgerald contraction is embedded in Penrose-Terrell rotation, so one never sees the famed object flattening. What one sees is a conformal rotation and shrinkage ( http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Relativity/SR/penrose.html ).
So it turns out Lorentz-Fitzgerald contraction is an urban legend! Now, that seems weird to me at the moment because I am not used to think about Lorentz transformations group properties. But not as weird as three-in-one alone-but-angels-and-devils died-but-alive sadistic-but-kind creator-but-destructor abrahamic gods. ;-)
pbg:
One can read many things in that answer, as you say it was less clear. Another common view is that “purpose” is a social construct, not an observed or theoretized property – so if you want one you construct your own. And I don’t think Dawkins sees a designer as a suitable support for a purpose. His sense of purpose seems to go in the opposite direction…
Ooops! Sorry for the extra “e”.
“…It is a consequence of a philosophical belief, I will grant you that: it is a philosophy that says evidence, observation, and a logical chain of reasoning are important, as is a healthy skepticism…”
I have to disagree there. While I suspect many if not most atheists have arrived through a similar philosophy, it is not a prerequisite. There are possible ways to arrive at atheism, both rational and irrational, not least among them ignorance (by ignorance I mean lack of exposure, not some lack or knowledge of religious “truth”).
Nor is monotheism (Christianity here) linked specifically to dogmatic creationism. I would bet, in fact, that a large percentage of professed Christians view the idea of strict creationism as a matter of fable; certainly I’ve never had a conversation with a Christian that argued for the Adam & Eve story.
Personally, I don’t think that a bridge between religion and science is relevant beyond the necessity of religious organizations’ recognition of the scientific body of knowledge. Beyond that, coming to terms with an incomplete world view–from whatever blend of science, theology, and philosophy is the responsibility of the individual. The baffling irony is the Catholic stance, considering the historic political gains they had made as gatekeepers of education and knowledge.
What we are seeing in the US are smallish vocal groups that are capitalizing on the relative lack of education and strong emotional uncertainty that the recent political climate has been feeding on for its own gains. Part of their strategy is to use this emotionalism to establish tribal security, us vs. them, dehumanizing the demons (or infidels, depending on which side you are on). And, of course, their job is easier without the intellectual perspective a solid education brings.
Acknowledging the distinction, embracing the standoff between camps, only adds to their power structure. Argue your points, expose their lies, but attacking the religious beliefs themselves is counterproductive, in my view, and will only rally people already on board, you won’t be convincing many theists to your view, if any.
I like to say that freedom religion necessitates freedom from it, but the intent behind the statement is my view that personal religious views (including agnosticism and atheism, semantics aside) are a deeply personal choice, and should be respected as such.
“So it turns out Lorentz-Fitzgerald contraction is an urban legend!”
Duh! I meant the object flattening, of course.
I think that the interviewer was really good.
You don’t want an interviewer that just laveshes someone in praise, or lets the talk about anything they want. The interview asked exactly the kind of questions that allowed Dawkins’ to show off the best of his elequence and reasoning, and asked all the types of questions that people will be thinking, or will want to hear Dawkins’ answers to.
Even if the interview questions themselves were a bit annoying, they helped create, as a whole, a very interesting and well done interview.
I know this picture will make it into your office :)
“hospitable and charming are better terms for the man”….that is why he is considered the voice of reason in biological matters. He is someone almost everyone can connect to and there are only few people of his caliber. I think the way Dawkins conveys biological themes is the major reason why so many people admire him.
PS: I think the mix-in of the comment into the article is kinda awkward and unfitting.
PSS: We all are believers due to our inherent neurological evolution. We live an illusion. At last i think science is the path of least resistent, or put otherwise people are born curious and destined to be discoverers and to question everything one perceives.
yeah a recording would be indeed great if there is one.
@”science is un-religious and even anti-religious”:
Science comes first. Just observe a newborn into his infant years and you will see exploring, questioning and insatiable curiousity till the age of 8, only then do major changes in personality show up. We have yet to observe infants ranting about god, bowing towards venerable gods, and seeking for spirtitualistic purposes or answers. In fact the only purpose they seek is to connect one theme to another. e.g. the hotplate is hot and causes blistering and a sensation of pain at touch, but why is the plate hot, why does skin blister and so forth.
Science in an abstract sense of is inherently antitheistic, however science adopted in an individual can very well reside beside all sorts of spiritualistic notions.
BTW: We know for quite some time that humans and even animals are inherently “mathematicians” yet only very few are actually enraptured by this knowledge. Why is that?
Actually babies are born mathematicians and scientists who have yet to be discouraged of using their innate abilities. And society does that very successfully.
But in the end religion is unnatural and is directed against the path of least resistance, requiring to invest force and power in order to sustain it. Just like a moderate form of capitalism is the most successful economical form since it is based on the survival of the fittest.
Religion`s very premise is blindness towards perception and ignorance in order to reach a state of blissfullness. But in reality this means that being religious is an actually quite selfish feature.
Actually, I’d doubt that very many atheists at all arrive to atheism by that route. Many embrace the “scientific world view”, etc. after they get there, but I’d think that most of us, honestly looking back on the time when they were losing their religion, realize that there was a whole emotional process going on there, just like there is in any major personal upheaval, whether it is religious, political, or romantic. But people are excellent at internal revisionism and one often finds it difficult to see how one ever believed differently from they way one does now.
For some reason, I’m flashing on my cat’s drinking behavior. She doesn’t *like* to drink from a bowl — instead, she hops up onto the bathroom sink and wants me to open the tap just a bit. Too much and she gets scared off, too little and she glares at me until I open it more. She also likes to stare at the falling water; I imagine that to her motion-oriented vision, it looks much more interesting than to my color/shade-oriented view.
Unfortunately, I and her former owner both indulged her in this (“cute kitty!” ;-) ), which didn’t help at all. For a while I thought of building her something she could swat for a drink, that would automatically close the tap afterwards, but I never got around to it. Does all this seem to you folks a decent analogy to the different attitudes to “truth”?
“Actually babies are born mathematicians and scientists who have yet to be discouraged of using their innate abilities. And society does that very successfully.”
That is a nice observation. Though mathematics and science is more than counting and trial-and-error empiricism, in the same manner that religion is more than attributing imagined agents to nature, it is hard to draw the lines.
That makes the perverting of the innocent that Dawkins is so upset over even more pernicious.
An atheist has a lack of belief in the existence of god or gods. A lack of belief, or no belief is not a belief in itself.
Theists wish to assume that not believing in something, automatically means that an atheist must believe in something else.
They kinda get stuck in the “either this or that” false dichotomy.
The only thing the word “atheist” in fact describes, is an individual’s position on god belief. There is nothing else which can be assumed from the definition.
It does not autmatically mean that an atheist accepts evolution, or that they are a naturalist, or a materialist or any other philosophical stance than can be mentioned.
The term “atheist”, does not describe what someone believes in, it simply describes what they do not believe in.
I thought the interviewer was fine, as were most of Dawkins answers. I think he lost an opportunity with this one:
“But it seems to me the big “why” questions are, why are we here? And what is our purpose in life?
It’s not a question that deserves an answer.”
It might have been more effective to turn that around and say, “Why are we here is a good question, because if you want to know why we are here, you have to understand how we got here, what we are and why we think and behave in the way we do. Genetics, modern biology and neuroscience within the framework of evolution have produced some amazing knowledge in recent years that really help us answer those questions and they will continue to do so in the years to come
“…certainly I’ve never had a conversation with a Christian that argued for the Adam & Eve story.”
Boy oh boy, you don’t know what you’re missing. I’ve had “conversations” like this at college, with adults (not 18-year-old freshmen kids from the sticks) in all honesty.
According to the polls I’ve seen, and which PZ has discussed here, roughly half of Americans doubt that humans evolved, much less any other life form. We’re what, last in the ranking of industrialized nations that accept evolution? It ain’t pretty.
Re: is atheism a belief in and of itself?
I like the answers given by Dr. Dawkins in the Salon interview, which is basically that we’re all atheists, atheists are just one god more atheistic. Christians are atheists about Apollo, etc. and don’t feel the need to call that a belief or have proof.
I also like the ascertain that even though to say that no one ‘knows for sure’ whether or not there is a god is true, since it’s an inherently unknowable thing. But it doesn’t mean we have to treat the likelihood of a god as equal to the likelihood of no god.
And my personal ‘atheist epiphany’ came about similarly to how Dr. Dawkins describes his (although I was about 10 years older than he was), which was to recognize how arbitrary my beliefs were, and that my being Jewish was due to my parents’ Judiasm. I realized that had I been born to a Christian, Muslim or Hindu house, I would have been just as devout for any of those religions, and that for a god to punish people for who they were born to doesn’t make any sense. But it was ultimately verbally slapped out of my by an ex-girlfriend, who when I was trying to explain how god fits into what’s known scientifically about the world, simply asked, “you don’t really believe that, do you?” And I realized I sounded ridiculous, defining god to the margins of knowledge.
Does a rock believe in God? No. It’s not a philosophical position, it’s the base-line.
I do not believe in ANYTHING unless I observe or experience something to make me believe it. I don’t believe in magical pink fairies in my garden because there is no evidence for such. I don’t believe in magic, or ghosts, or Nigerian finance ministers offering me money. Are these matters of faith? No. I don’t believe they exist because I have seen nothing to make me think they do exist.
I was born not believing in an infinite number of things. NOT believing is the zero state. As things have been shown to me, and as I have observed the world, I have created beliefs.
That I do not believe in god is not some decision I have made. Rather, it is a decision I have *not* made – I have never decided that god exists. There has never been any reason, any evidence, for me to make that decision.
Here’s the biggest difference: if there ever comes along empirical proof of the likely existence of god, ***I will believe***. But those who presently believe in god do so despite the utter lack of evidence.
Mine is not the blind philosophical position.
Why are we here on earth?
Because earth is the planet with the conducive conditions?
Well, this at least proves that you aren’t one and the same person…
Brian writes, “There are possible ways to arrive at atheism, both rational and irrational.”
Religion is just one kind of irrational ideology, and there are plenty of examples of ideology that include atheism as a consequence, that are as irrational as religion, and that use much the same psychological mechanisms to acquire believers. Objectivism and Communism are two obvious examples. They are interesting in that both explicitly claim to reject faith and be based on Reason, appropriately capitalized for these ideologies to distinguish it from the more prosaic reason. That likely is why they include atheism as a part of their catechism. Perhaps they should be called post-deity religions. There’s a significant sense in which Catholicism is more honest, in that it admits to faith, and doesn’t try to hide its many assumptions in a kind of pseudo-logic, such as “reality exists” or “dialectical materialism.”
The fascinating thing is that people are constantly creating these kinds of ideologies. Deepak Chopra makes a living doing this, and if his half-baked fantasies survive his death, they will become a new religion/ideology. It’s easier, of course, to do this successfully by creating a sect off an existing ideology, as Mary Baker Eddy did.
In short, the supernatural is a trope that some ideologies exhibit, but not others. An atheism that stems from ideological belief is no more rational than a theism that does so. Of course, theism always originates in that, whereas with atheism, there is the kind that Dawkins discusses, that is simply the absence of god-belief in those who aren’t swayed by an ideology.
But a belief that the lack of belief is correct, or even merely reasonable and justified, is a belief.
Your ability to play word games far outstrips your capacity to understand them.
Yeah, what an absurd and unreasonable assumption that is! (rolleyes)
Zuckerfrosch,
“I like the answers given by Dr. Dawkins in the Salon interview, which is basically that we’re all atheists, atheists are just one god more atheistic. Christians are atheists about Apollo, etc. and don’t feel the need to call that a belief or have proof.”
If I really, really like beef and dislike all the other kinds of meat, is it reasonable to describe me as a “meat-hater with respect to” all those other kinds? No; I may be a veal-hater, a pork-hater, etc., but I’m definitely not a meat-hater. Is it misleading for a vegetarian to describe me as such in order to bolster their rhetoric on how natural vegetarianism is?
Of course it is. And of course speaking of people being “atheists about” those forgotten gods is a dubious strategy at best. It may be successful as polemic, but it’s misleading and false.
Woo-hoo! Way to go PZ!
There are possible ways to arrive at atheism, both rational and irrational, not least among them ignorance (by ignorance I mean lack of exposure, not some lack or knowledge of religious “truth”).
I arrive at atheism through theism. Theism is bullshit, plain and simple. Therefore I am an atheist.
Imagine a universe without any theisms.
In that case, no one is going to come up with an atheism.
Why?
Because theism does not exist, because no one made God(s) up and there would be no reason to come up with a philosophy that says he/they are non-existent.
Right?
Very good post PZ, thanks. Sorry I just got to it.
ConcernedJoe mantra (thanks for the unpaid ad space! But seems appropriate): All sane “BELIEVERS” with a modicum of intelligence and real world knowledge act as atheists would act in real world situations. Ergo they are for all practical purposes ATHEISTS. They would deny the label, but call a spade a spade. You are as you do, not as you profess. Eventually the societal forces that drive people to say “I am a [plug in any NON-atheist label]” will lose their grip. People will eventually admit to themselves and the world:
⢠we have nothing but ourselves,
⢠we must cooperate and respect ourselves and others to survive,
⢠good things happen because good people work hard to make them happen,
⢠bad things (things under human control) happen because good people fail and let them happen.
no god involved; no god necessary… thank you very much!
Wrong. ‘Atheism’ is a descriptive term – it applies even if no one ever thought of the concept whose negation the word refers to.
Anatoly, the idea is this: a Christian (for example) looks at all the other religions, and sees deluded people worshipping things that do not exist. They see the same evidence that any atheist sees, and the two people actually agree: these religious folk are worshipping a figment of their imagination.
The difference between an atheist and a Christian is that the Christian makes an exception for their own religion. From an atheist’s point of view – or, in fact, the point of view of a worshipper of a rival religion – the Christian is just as deluded, based on the exact same evidence that the Christian used to conclude the others were deluded.
That’s what is meant when it is said that religious folk are athiests-bar-one-god. They reject a thousand gods, while an atheist rejects a thousand and one.
@Jonathan Badger: Fully agreed. On a sidenote it is interesting to see how few have actually been spared by religion. However many newer generation will have the pleasure to be brought up by atheistic folks.
@Torbjörn Larsson: Gee Larsson you make it sound like i noticed that or something. This is based on countless of studies and functional brain imaging. I am just extremely fascinated with psychology and neurobiology, as should anyone be since every product and every bigger market or in fact any communiction via a broadband medium employs (social ) psychologists to some extend at its core. And we all are simply still human, even savants – or actually especially people with brain dysfunctions. In fact without the proper equipment and knowledge you won`t have access to the innate mathematical abilities of a several months old human being, but our distinct curiousity and urge to explore is visible to anyone. Of course neurobiology is rather interested in the speific neurogenesis during those stages and the evolutionary heritage. Also the biological need towards abstraction can be studies more or less in depth. Religion is the absolute abstraction, the reduction of everything into a single point. But obviously what results from that doesn`t make any sense because all information has been stripped. What really distincts us from other animals is our extreme social interaction on a conscious level. Together we can influence each other to reduce everything into a single “point”, thus stripping all information. Clearly this goes against nature because the premise of our survival is based upon the innate ability to further abstract thinking. A single individual CANNOT develop religiousness! This has been shown in several studies as well. I hate to not be able to refer to the specific links, but the truth is that it would take me as long as you to research them on google. In fact without the influence of a group we are much more like animals than we as modern humans could imagine.
@beepbeepitsme: A disbelieve is impossible. Only difference is how we weigh our believes. Scientists too are believers they just weight information based on their formulation in the absolute language of logic and empiricism. Neurologically it is impossible not to be a believer, as we live an illusion, whether this can be extended to exobiological entities as well – who knows.
At last i disliked the way Dawkins handled the questions “why are we here? And what is our purpose in life?” as well. He is right, those questions from the standpoint of how a religious person would ask it deserve no answer. But then again from a scientific standpoint the unicorn question and why it`s horn is hollow is just as viable and important within the confinements of evolutionary principles (which we know are universally applicable). So the question why the horn would be hollow is a complex one but one that would fortunatly be answered by evolution itself. I would surmise because it is not just used for defence but also as a sensory organ. I figure a biologists could theorize even more about that.
It should be noted that only now do we have the knowledge to even tackle such questions.
“why are we here?”
I would say this question could only be tackled from an astrophysical standpoint at the moment. Regardless, everything in nature strived towards a position of equillibrium, as does the universe. The universe is actually frenetic about increasing entropy, and it can do so as fast as it can depending on the masses and temeperatures pervailing. We are just a curious appearance of quantum mechanical processes but in the grander schemes of things we are just another neat way of increasing entropy. One shall not make the mistake of entangling the anthropogenic seeking of purpose in all of this however. And i think this is what Dawkins really meant.
And what is our purpose in life?
In the end this question too is based on the premise of the former one, but of course to reproduce and do so in an evolutionary fashion.
At the same time life`s purpose from our perspective is simply to get a mix of endorphines, serotonin, dopamin and other chemicals linked to the reward pathway. Even our way of thinking is guided by the reward pathway. And we certainly aren`t unique in enjoying life, animals do it as well.
However in the end we are just pawns in an infintesimally small part in natures striving towards an equillibrium state. There is just nothing special about us or to us and the universal laws of nature are the same everywhere (within the visible universe). So the strategies of nature too are always the same and are ultimately molecular. So nature does whatever it can in a certain part of the universe to get one step further towards equillibrium. When it has enough mass to start a fusion reaction, all the better, it has even more mass it can reach the state of maximum entropy (black holes) and in between the interaction of radiation with matter does the rest.
SmellyTerror: I understand that this is meant, but the words chosen to illustrate the meaning are deliberately dishonest, for polemical sake, and that is what I dislike. To be an atheist is to disbelieve in any god whatsoever, which is qualitatively very different from believing in one god and not another (just as being a committed vegetarian is very different from liking one kind of meat and not another). The difference is huge. To employ the word for the first while describing the second, in order to pretend that the second is really not so different than the first, is to deliberately mislead.
You and I both know that “athest-bar-one-god” is a contradiction in terms. It’s not a useful word for understanding what’s going on. It may be a useful concept for propaganda purposes, but that’s a very different kettle of fish.
Caledonian, on the Objectivist axiom that ‘reality exists’ writes, “Yeah, what an absurd and unreasonable assumption that is!”
It depends on what one means by it. In some senses it is trivial; in other senses, absurd. Of course, Rand didn’t really give it much coherence at all. For her, it was a rhetorical cover, into which she snuck various other assumptions needed by her ideology.
And what in the world does this mean: “belief that the lack of belief is correct”? Is that in any way different from the leap of not believing a claim, to believing that it is false?
It’s much easier than talking about aRamaism, or aChristism, or aAllahism. More to the point, Anatoly, you’re missing something: the word is not being used to describe a position, but an attitude – and the vast majority of theists do indeed use the same reasoning, and take the same attitude, that reasonable atheists do. It’s just that they make an exception for their deity. When you point out that they are identical to atheists (which many of them have been taught are evil, corrupt people) except only that they have made an exception in their thinking, the attitude spreads.
‘Atheist’ has many meanings beyond its strict denotation. Dawkins uses it in the fullness of all its connotations.
Anatoly: Well I think it nicely illustrates the irrationality of the position.
Your meat analogy is not complete. It would be more accurate to say the beef-eater thinks that people who eat pork are wrong to do so, and that people who eat chicken are wrong, and that people who eat lamb are wrong, and that anyone who eats any kind of meat, from any animal at all, is wrong… but it’s ok to eat beef. No just ok – it’s a good thing.
Why? Why is eating pork or chicken or lamb wrong, but eating beef is ok? Why is it wrong to eat all these other meats, and any meat that anyone else might come up with in future, but it is still right and good to eat beef?
No reason. Just faith.
No – it’s WORSE! There *is* a reason not to eat the other meats, but even though that reason applies equally to beef, the beef eater persists in his belief that beef-eating is right and good.
Now there’s a brilliant insight. “The interior angles of a triangle are guaranteed to add to 180 degrees if and only if the fifth axiom of geometry is held to be true” is absurd if by it I mean that hotdogs are Thursday. Thank you, Russel, for offering us this enlightenment!
I think that Richard Dawkins ought to have answered “Why are we here?” with “Ask your parents.”
And I do think that “atheists about all but one god” is legitimate. Someone who likes beef and no other kind of meat is someone who dislikes meat with the exception of beef.
Wrong. ‘Atheism’ is a descriptive term – it applies even if no one ever thought of the concept whose negation the word refers to.
If all theists stopped bullshitting the world, Dawkins and PZ could turn their attention to something else.
It’s a culture war.
Yes, atheism exists in the abstract, people would be de facto “atheists” if God had never been conceived of, but this is not a debate about abstractions, it’s about what is happening in the world today and about the concepts people use.
In other words, it’s about the god-intoxicated idiots, it’s not about the definitions that exist free of the idiots in some abstract space.
The important thing, I think, is that people who do not believe in various religions usually also disbelieve them. When most Christians hear about Hindu deities, they not only do not believe in them, but believe them to be invalid.
It’s rather as if the vast majority of people held that eating meat was wrong, and provided a variety of reasons with universal applicability to justify their position, yet made an exception for bacon. Saying that they were acarnists with the exception of one mean would be accurate.
I don’t see what was so annoying about it. Dawkins had plenty of space and addressed the questions well. The questions were obviously coming from a different perspective than Dawkins’, but they represented a point of view that might have been shared by a large segment of readers. It’s not as if Dawkins was being distorted or cut off by the interviewer.
Caledonian, the difference between Euclid’s axioms and Rand’s axioms is that Euclid defined his terms well and was consistent in their use. So much so that plane geometry is a formal system. We can prove it consistent, semantically complete, and provable.
Rand stands in sharp contrast to Euclid in the way she uses her “axioms.” In fact, she made a diatribe against the formalization of logic. Formalization, of course, is how you keep your axioms from turning into rhetorical rugs that cover whatever you want, in the argument of the moment. Rand did that even with an axiom that should be as rigorous as anything: “A is A.” For Rand’s arguments, it isn’t enough that man, for example, is man, as he is, but he has to be man qua man. And to Rand, that qua has a sort of a magical meaning, turning things as they are into things as they are in Rand’s universe. Same difference between reality and Reality. So when Rand says “Reality exists,” what she often means is that we should take her idealized Reality as if it were actual reality.
The emotional upheavel may be the impetus for losing one’s religion, but unless there is an underlying tnedancy towards empiricism/rationalism, the upheavel will likely not lead to atheism.
My mother lives in a near constant state of emotional turmoil, but, as a firm believer, her answer is always “needs more God”. Regardless of the fact that it’s her religious beliefs that keep her from solving most of her problems.
I turned away from religion as a teenager, when I was experiencing the usual teenage existential crises (i.e., my girlfriend dumped me). That turmoil made me rexamine a lot of the things I believed, or thought I believed, and it was because I started to look at my religion honestly and rationally that I ultimately became an atheist (also with the help of a hot, new atheist girlfriend).
People react to these situations in different ways. My mother saw Faith fail over and over and over again for her, and she believed the fault lay with herself, for not having enough of it. I watched it fail and came to the conclusion that Faith is a crock. We both had similar religious upbringings, but her parents systematically worked to make sure she never believed in herself, whereas mine (much to their later chagrin) raised me to question things and make decisions for myself.
Loren Petrich,
Someone who likes beef and no other kind of meat is someone who dislikes meat with the exception of beef.
Someone who dislikes meat with the exception of beef – someone who believes in no god with the exception of the Christian god.
A committed vegetarian who nevertheless eats beef and loves it – an “atheist about all but one god”.
The first pair of descriptions is fine and would probably be accepted by both beef-eaters and Christians as accurate.
The second pair of descriptions is ludicrous, false, misleading and can only be used in a propaganda attempt by a committed vegetarian or an atheist.
The interview with Richard Dawkins in Salon shows Dawkins for the most part getting things right. He certainly is right about it not being a virtue to believe without evidence, and right about the non-overlapping magisteria idea being bunk. On the flip side, there’s an interesting Ship-of-Fools article:
1-1/2 Cheers for Richard Dawkins
Of course, since Ship-of-Fools is a Christian website, errm, more or less, one can hardly expect unqualified praise of Dawkins from it. However, it does point out that Dawkins tends to make gross overgeneralizations about religion and often just plain gets his facts wrong. From the Ship-of-Fools article:
“Dawkins tells us that ‘nearly everybody in our society accepts… that religious faith… should be protected by an abnormally thick wall of respect’. Really? I don’t, and I’ve got one. And I should think the audiences of The Life of Brian and Jerry Springer: the Opera would be surprised to hear that they are in such a tiny minority.”
“He tells us that “theology – unlike science, or most other branches of human scholarship – has not moved on in eighteen centuries” – which invites scepticism from anyone who has heard of, for example, Protestantism.”
It’s this shallow, broad-brush treatment of his adversaries–which is rather characteristic of fundamentalists–that invites the charge that Dawkins is a essentially a fundamentalist himself. That may be a misreading of his mindset, but given that his grasp of the facts outside his own field is often at the level of a fundie, it is an understandable misreading.
Caledonian,
‘Atheist’ has many meanings beyond its strict denotation. Dawkins uses it in the fullness of all its connotations.
‘Vegetarian’ has many meanings beyond its strict denotation. Therefore using it to mean someone who only enjoys one kind of meat, but eats lots of that and loves it, means using it in the fulness of all its connotations.
‘Illiterate’ has many meanings beyond its strict denotation. Therefore using it to refer to someone who’s perfectly literate in one language, but not any others, means using it in the fulness of all its connotations.
Is it clear by now how ridiculous Dawkins’s abuse of the word is, or should I continue?
lo:
“Gee Larsson you make it sound like i noticed that or something.”
Sorry if I was clumsy, it was meant as a serious homage. First I thought it was a ridiculous idea, but then I considered the obvious demarcation problems and found it reasonable. Since it wasn’t an obvious idea to me I found it interesting too. Perhaps my initial confusion shone through.
“In fact without the proper equipment and knowledge you won`t have access to the innate mathematical abilities of a several months old human being, but our distinct curiousity and urge to explore is visible to anyone.”
What I find fascinating here is that the new methods help unravel the connections between mathematical abilities and language formation. For example, verbal labeling input induces groupings in sets among babies who can’t do it on their own yet. ( http://develintel.blogspot.com/2006/10/labels-as-accelerator-of-ontological.html )
“Religion is the absolute abstraction, the reduction of everything into a single point.”
I think of it rather as the ultimate agent device, and as a single mechanism to explain anything. Of course explaining anything collapses into explaining nothing. Religion is like stupidly pointing at something, give it a name and then declare that it is explained. It is a child’s game, really. ;-)
Dawkins is getting awfully good at these interviews. I love the way he just responds by saying “yes” and “exactly right” to such disingenuous rhetoric. He’s always been good on this topic, of course, but his arguments have been getting sharper and more forceful of late.
I too didn’t like his answer to the question of human purposes though. “Purpose,” as most people use it, can be identified, in my opinion, with biological functions concerning behaviour (i.e., the function of a wing is to fly, the purpose of a wing is to flee, migrate, etc). The purpose of an organism is not to reproduce; purposes lead to greater reproductive success but shouldn’t be confused with it. To say the purpose of an organism is to reproduce is to endow evolution rather than the organism with purpose.
In the case of humans, with the development of language and culture, we seem to have a sort of evolutionary-constrained-contructivism of purposes. I don’t think much can be said about it at this point in time but I don’t think it’s true to say we’re without purpose or that we simply “make our own purposes” either.
lo:
“A single individual CANNOT develop religiousness! This has been shown in several studies as well.”
BTW, that I have to wrap my head over for a while. I need to find these studies first. Intriguing.
If that proof ever comes to light, you wouldn’t have to “believe” at that point: you’d know. If there was empirical evidence of God, faith would be unnecessary, as God’s existence would be fact.
Why acknowledging God’s existence is supposed to make me beholden to him(it?) in any fashion is beyond me, but I’ll worry about that after someone proves God exists. ;-)
I am uncomfortable with the aggressiveness of your attack on religion. I agree that science and religion cannot overlap and therefore we must exclude religion from all considerations of the physical universe. But I am not willing to dismiss entirely the spiritual element of human existence. I do not myself entertain such an element, but I am unwilling to deny any other person the philosophical validity of that element. In other words, if my friend claims the existence of a spiritual life that has no physical manifestation, then I have no rational basis to deny it.
Dawkins himself indirectly touched on this when he noted that there is no scientific basis for the concept of human purpose. Therefore, any discussion of human purpose must necessarily exclude all scientific considerations — they are irrelevant. You are correct to assert that the concept of human purpose has no scientific foundation — but that only disenfranchises science from inclusion in such discussions. If somebody wants to discuss human purpose, then they must leave the realm of the physical reality and discuss it from a spiritual point of view.
The whole idea was summed up quite cleanly a few thousand years ago: “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s.” Our dispute is over where to draw the dividing line, not whether that dividing line exists.
J.J.Ramsey,
It’s this shallow, broad-brush treatment of his adversaries–which is rather characteristic of fundamentalists–that invites the charge that Dawkins is a essentially a fundamentalist himself. That may be a misreading of his mindset, but given that his grasp of the facts outside his own field is often at the level of a fundie, it is an understandable misreading.
Or, as Einstein (whom Dawkins labours hard at mischaracterizing as an atheist) once wrote,
“I was barked at by numerous dogs who are earning their food guarding ignorance and superstition for the benefit of those who profit from it. Then there are the fanatical atheists whose intolerance is of the same kind as the intolerance of the religious fanatics and comes from the same source. They are like slaves who are still feeling the weight of their chains which they have thrown off after hard struggle. They are creatures who–in their grudge against the traditional “opium of the people”–cannot bear the music of the spheres.”
Anatoly: no.
A Christian does not “prefer” his god, he does not “dislike” other gods. He believes the other gods do not exist. He believes that the other people are wrong to believe what they believe. He believes these gods DO NOT EXIST – exactly as an atheist believes, if only in the case of those religions.
A beef eater, who “prefers” beef does not believe eaters of other meats are wrong. He does not think they should all stop eating their other meats and come eat beef. He does not agree with a vegetarian that those other meats should not be eaten.
Your analogy is false.
Wasn’t the basis of Protestantism to undo a lot of the “progress” the Catholic Church had made in the intervening 1300 years? E.g., championing stances like: “the Holy See shouldn’t be authoring doctrine; we need to get back to basics and do what 2000-year-old shepherds were doing in the desert” and “the Church isn’t anti-Semitic enough; they let most Jews keep breathing”? Why are so many widesweeping theological movements basically founded upon: “our faith has become too decadent and permissive; we need to return to the faith of our barbaric, misogynist, homophobic, racist forefathers?”
Dawkins was wrong on that point: religion has moved on in the past eighteen centuries. One step forward, three steps back.
Most of the christians I’ve known believed that the gods of other religions existed, but that they were actually demons who deluded their followers into believing in them.
Someone at Ship-of-Fools wrote, “He tells us that “theology – unlike science, or most other branches of human scholarship – has not moved on in eighteen centuries” – which invites scepticism from anyone who has heard of, for example, Protestantism.”
Change is not the same as progress. I can explain why Newtonian mechanics isn’t just different from Ptolemaic astronomy, but more accurate and more broadly explanatory. No one today uses Ptolemaic astronomy, except as an example of early physics. Plenty of guidance systems and real-world engineering is based on Newtonian mechanics despite the fact that it has been superceded by newer theories. (In saying this, I don’t want to demean ancient Greek astronomy. It was a remarkable scientific advance. But science progresses.)
Theology doesn’t progress. There is no objective basis for thinking Protestantism is more accurate than Catholicism. No experiment will show this. It’s just different. There is no object sense in which one can describe the history of religion as progressive, that Islam is better than Christianity, Christianity better than paganism, etc. Catholics and Protestants can either respect each other, or go to war against each other, but they cannot intellectually refute one another. Or when they do figure out how to do that, they realize they are refuting theology as a whole, and that both are pretty damn silly.
False Prophet: normally I’d agree, BUT!
…I really don’t have absolute certainty in anything. Normally I use the linguistic shortcut of saying that a thing is certain (eg. our planet orbits its sun), but in a discussion like this I like to be more precise.
I “believe” that the Earth orbits Sol. Sure, it’s as good as certain and we can happily act on the assumption it’s correct, but I will always be open to the possibility that this is flat out wrong. The crucial point (see, this does get back to the topic at hand) is that I believe this thing based on evidence, just as I believe all the things I believe. No evidence, no belief.
Your friend doesn’t exist in the physical universe? His claim doesn’t exist in the physical universe?
Erasmussimo:
“If somebody wants to discuss human purpose, then they must leave the realm of the physical reality and discuss it from a spiritual point of view.”
It can be studied as a social construct, as much as spiritiual views are studied. Or, as poke considers, as a property for individual agents.
You can’t hide activities from science or philosophy. At worst, you can try to make them so complex that they are hard to study.
I’m not up to commenting on atheism or Dawkins this morning but I thought you were being terribly unfair to Ronald McDonald to compare him to Dembski. Ronald actually does some nice work with kids. Dembski harms them.
In fact, I know several self-described vegetarians who eat fish; and I met one once who insisted she was vegetarian because the only meat she ate was chicken, and “everyone knows that’s good for you!”
PZ:
“I think it’s also why atheists sometimes find themselves exasperated with agnostics–we’re arguing for the same things, but the labels are different, and agnosticism gives far too much credit to purely hypothetical speculations about nebulous possibilities.”
I disagree. I consider myself to be agnostic, yet give absolutly no credit to purely hypothetical speculations about nebulous possibilities. I think in all likelihood atheists have it right, I just have no proof of this. I KNOW the sun will rise in the east, but the origin of all the matter in the universe has yet to be explained by science. I AM certain that every theistic explanation ever conceived on earth since our bipedal forebears first looked for answers is wrong. I believe in everything that has been scientifically proven, and quite a bit that are merely well substantiated theories. However, I do not have all the answers and until I do I have to consider myself agnostic. For many years I felt I was an atheist, but “the more you know, the more you know you don’t know.” I feel “agnostic” is a better label for me. If I had to choose sides I would play on your team any day. In the meantime I will recognize the fallibility of ANY belief that has room for doubt and stand on the sidelines. I am speculating on nothing. (Where DID all those protons come from? Scientists, find me answers!!)
“Formalization, of course, is how you keep your axioms from turning into rhetorical rugs that cover whatever you want, in the argument of the moment.”
Yes, if you by that mean the whole process of making a syntax and semantics. (See for example the section describing logics in http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/week227.html .) Otherwise the crucial point is to find a model for your axiom set. If you can’t, you can not be assured that you can’t prove anything. (See for example http://goodmath.blogspot.com/2006/04/more-logic-models-and-why-they-matter.html )
The problem with objectivist philosophy is of course exactly what Russel says, there is no model and no assurance to its pseudo-logic. I liked the term post-deity religion.
William Dembski, for instance, says his inflammatory rhetoric helps the I.D. cause by making evolution sound un-Christian.
Here we go. (And Dembski isn’t inflammatory?)
Considering that Dembski’s father was (is?) a biology professor who taught (teaches?) evolution, I think there’s something to the idea that Dembski “hates” Dawkins with a kind of love–it’s weird and, shall we say, complex. Dawkins doesn’t talk about Dembski at all (and why should he?), whereas Dembski is always mentioning Dawkins! I see a little green monster on Bill’s shoulder.
Anyway, great pic.
I get to finally meet Dawkins on the trip to the Galapagos next year, ha ha ha.
I don’t believe in magical pink fairies in my garden because there is no evidence for such.
But it would be very pleasant to believe in them. And God too.
Maybe the difference isn’t philosophy. Maybe it’s having the strength to resist the propensity most people have to believe things just because you want to believe them.
SmellyTerror: the analogy is not false, it’s simply imperfect, as all analogies are. Yes, meats are not gods and eating is not the same as believing, doesn’t make the analogy wrong.
The point is, if there’s a word that says “I don’t do any X”, that in fact captures the idea of not doing any X, using that word to describe someone who very much does one specific X, for whom doing that X is very much part of their worldview, even if they’re not doing any other Xes, is misleading and false. If you’re a propagandist who wants to convince an X-doer to give up their X-doing ways, I guess you’ll want to use it. But there’s no hiding that its use is intellectually dishonest, and inappropriate for anyone who cares about honest reasoning.
Caledonian: you’re talking about “meanings” without offering any specific one. You’re accusing me of “word games” without any justification. It’s not me who’s abusing the word “atheist” by trying to stretch it to cover someone who’s very plainly not, for propaganda purposes. It’s Dawkins.
Wrong. An analogy can perfectly demonstrate the equivalence of two relationships.
Poke writes:
“Your friend doesn’t exist in the physical universe? His claim doesn’t exist in the physical universe?”
Yes, the friend and the claim both exist in the physical universe — but not the purpose. You are here denying human spirituality. I can agree that spirituality cannot be proven to exist, but neither can its existence be disproven. I don’t believe in it, but if my friend chooses to believe in something that has no physical manifestation, then I have no rational basis for arguing with them.
Torbjörn writes,
“It can be studied as a social construct, as much as spiritiual views are studied. Or, as poke considers, as a property for individual agents.
You can’t hide activities from science or philosophy. At worst, you can try to make them so complex that they are hard to study.”
It can be studied indirectly as a social construct. In other words, you can compile statistics on how many people have spiritual beliefs, and those statistics represent real-world entities. My point is that the beliefs themselves cannot be countered by real-world arguments. Because it’s make-believe, they can make it be anything they damn well want, and we have no rational basis to deny their belief. Render unto Caesar.
Larsson thx for the link.
I`ll try to find the link it was some peer reviewed mag, i think it was journal of child psychology or was it something about neurotheology. Anyway i have read several studies indicating religion to be a group dynamic phenomenon and one that specifically concluded that religiousness doesn`t arise in isolated children based on psychological tests and brain imaging between two test groups. Moreover there are several established books which are useful if you are more inclined:
e.g.
http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0007-1005(199111)39%3A4%3C437%3ARICAAA%3E2.0.CO%3B2-A
Another way to consider it would be that religion was necessitated by our mental evolution: It was the alpha-male status and social sense of authority put to the next level. The evolution of religion probably stems from the need to control large populations which can be done easiest through the impression of superhuman force (fear). Therefore it was probably just a straightforward step for someone already in control to proclaim himself as a chosen one in communication with “the invisible” which controls thunder, lightning, quakes and other environmental phenomena. People are controlled primarily by two means fear and desire. Every religion is based upon the same principles. Most of them instill fear (hell,..) and desire (100+ whores, heaven,…).
Funny thing is that ultimately it boils down to a neurological basis and nothing has changed in our modern societies or put differently in our biological basis. This innate feelings are still very much what shape our modern societies and what shapes our lives.
Nowadays this control has been replaced by (far more effective) technology for the most part. Religion is mostly separated from state and the state itself enforces lawefulness through devices of of superhuman strength as well as through high tech media created with the help of savvy psychologists. Religion these days is mostly part of a business, but no state proclaims superiority over another just based upon their choice of god but rather on their nuclear stock and other fear instilling weapons.
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But there are many ill-believes set in our societies. Another is for instance that intelligence is something innate for the most part and that genuises are born. There was even a freak who tried to get nobel laureates to donte sperm and offer it to willing couples free of charge. Kinda sweet but really dumb.
First of all it is based on a wrong increasingly prevailing idea of the nobel price itself, which is not an accolade of the most incredible, intelligent most dilligent but actually an award that merits whoever made a discovery that advanced science. In other words the nobel price is a chance-based-award not a performance-based award.
The notion itself to directly associate the scientific throughput of a country by the mere number of nobel laureates per year is more than flawed.
This itself has been shown in several studies, one of them based on the scientifically accurate and reproducible result of chess. On of them is mentioned briefly in Sciam. Best search for Scientific american chess….ah what the heck i found it for you…http://scientificamerican.com/print_version.cfm?articleID=00010347-101C-14C1-8F9E83414B7F4945
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PS:Religion these days is more troublesome than ever, because now that it has become obsolete we still have those religious fanatic relicts present throughout all ranks and professions. Especially when married to technology this is becomes a very distrubring view. Ultimately evolution will dictate that religion will gradually recede, because lifespan also equates to intelligence. But this is something you can search for yourself -coz there are at least a hundred studies concerning this topic :)
Anatoly:
One can certainly discuss Einstein’s beliefs. Some label him atheist, Dawkins is by no mean special in this, some label him a spinozan pantheist. He was definitely a humanist. The rest seems to be a judgement call, and it is wrong to mischaracterize Dawkin’s as mischaracterizing.
You quotemined Einstein. The whole quote is:
“I was barked at by numerous dogs who are earning their food guarding ignorance and superstition for the benefit of those who profit from it. Then there are the fanatical atheists whose intolerance is of the same kind as the intolerance of the religious fanatics and comes from the same source. They are like slaves who are still feeling the weight of their chains which they have thrown off after hard struggle. They are creatures who–in their grudge against the traditional “opium of the people”–cannot bear the music of the spheres. The Wonder of nature does not become smaller because one cannot measure it by the standards of human moral and human aims.
— Einstein to an unidentified adressee, Aug.7, 1941. Einstein Archive, reel 54-927, quoted in Jammer, p. 97 ”
He is opposed to letting other human aims impose on nature and his science.
I think I agrre with Dawkins about the purpose issue.
There is no purpose for our existence. Asking teleological questions is somewhat ridiculous when the larger context of our existence – as one species on a planet in a solar system in a universe – is considered.
Yes, there’s reason to have pride in our existence, like Joyce’s Dedalus:
“Stephen Dedalus / Class of Elements / Clongowes Wood College / Sallins / County Kildarel Ireland / Europe / The World / The Universe.”
We feel special, but when all is said and done, we can be reduced to the imperative to keep (our genes) going.
Our egos make us feel self-important and help us continue on with existence.
Our appetites keep us unfulfilled and we go in search of ways to satisfy them.
Life goes on!
“An analogy can perfectly demonstrate the equivalence of two relationships.”
If it is a model. Not if it is a similarity, as in biology.
Torbjörn Larsson approves my comments on formalization, “if you by that mean the whole process of making a syntax and semantics.”
Yes, of course. But even beginning that process is a large step forward in giving clear meaning to the terms involved. If it turns out a system isn’t quite right in one way or another, it often can be adjusted. When Russell showed a paradox in naive set theory, that didn’t shut down work on set theory. And when I point to Euclidean geometry as a system that has all the nice logical properties, except expressiveness, I have to mean later versions of it that are cleaned up a bit. Euclid didn’t quite get it right.
In contrast, Rand didn’t try to get it right. There’s really no sense in which her axioms are axioms, or her logic is logic. It’s really just bad rhetoric dressed up as if it were logic. Which irks everyone who knows logic.
Wrong. The fact that it IS make-believe is a rational basis to deny their belief.
“My point is that the beliefs themselves cannot be countered by real-world arguments.”
As Dawkins says, there is no need.
Torbjörn,
I didn’t quotemine Einstein: the last sentence I omitted further supports my point, rather than undermines it. What it says is that just because “fanatical atheists” cannot appreciate “the music of the spheres”, because they insist on cutting everything down to their size (to “human moral and human aims”), that doesn’t mean it’s not there.
Einstein explicitly said, several times, that he didn’t consider himself to be an atheist, and registered his disgust at people who falsely claim he was an atheist in order to further their views with an argument from authority. He also, of course, said the same things about people trying to quote him in support of a specific organised religion or a personal God.
In view of this, it’s not wrong to say Dawkins mischaracterizes Einstein – that’s exactly what he’s doing. And it is Dawkins who’s quotemining Einstein for quotes that support his (Dawkins’s) mischaracterization, ignoring quotes such as above. Sure, Dawkins is far from being alone in that.
Einstein didn’t believe in a personal God, nor was he an atheist. By his own characterization, repeated many times, he was somewhere in between, definitely believing in God, definitely not considering God a person, definitely not considering God just a metaphor, either. Plenty of people tried to enlist him to their camp – whether it be the camp of one of the major monotheistic religions, or the camp of atheism. Plenty of people quoted him selectively and dishonestly, for that purpose. Dawkins joins this group with his book. His attempt at this is just as sleazy as the rest of them.
On the issue of how parents pass along the religion meme, there was an example which I saw on the “Rosie O’Donnel talk show years ago, in an interview with Renee Russo. Ms. Russo was describing the cute sayings of her young daughter, which were something like this: “She knows of course that we all have guardian angels watching over us. One day she asked me, Mommy, when I throw my ball to my angel, why doesn’t he ever throw it back? Ha ha!” And another: “She asked me, Mommy, when I talk to God, how come he never talks back? Ha ha! I told her that she had to learn to listen with her ‘spiritual ears’.”
Could you come up with a better way of brain-washing a young child then to tell her that she lacks some mysterious ability which others have, making it her own fault that she perceives a different reality? The term “child abuse” may be too harsh, considering all the other ways some children are abused, but I think “brain-washing” is apt.
lo:
Thanks!
“In other words the nobel price is a chance-based-award not a performance-based award.”
Umm… There are correlations between the price and performance, and between performance and intelligence. But it is certainly a long chain.
“Ultimately evolution will dictate that religion will gradually recede, because lifespan also equates to intelligence.”
I wouldn’t be so sure. BTW, lifespan correlates, not equates, to intelligence. (AFAIK, specie-wise and individually.)
No – an analogy can be perfect if the two relationships it compares are in fact identical in the properties compared. Not all comparisons are equivalancies, but some are.
Could you cite a source, please? I have not heard this and would like to explore further.
Thanks!
Ah, but that’s the beauty of it. Not perceiving this “spiritual world” then becomes associated with a sense of one’s own defectiveness, with fear, and with failing one’s parents. Eventually this association becomes so strong that people will reject others speaking the plain truth that the spiritual world doesn’t exist and that no one can sense it.
Sooner or later, people will learn to see five lights where there are only four. If external pressures try to force them, they will often resist, but precious few people will resist internal, pressures. The religious meme doesn’t just damage minds, it induces minds to damage themselves.
Belathor,
My understanding is that this site is very comprehensive and well-sourced. There’s lots of stuff there. On the specific issue of being disgusted by the misuse of his words in support of atheism, nothing is clearer than
“In view of such harmony in the cosmos which I, with my limited human understanding, am able to recognize, there are yet people who say there is no God. But what really makes me angry is that they quote me for the support of such views.”
— Prince Hubertus zu Löwenstein, Towards the Further Shore (Victor Gollancz, London, 1968), p. 156;
In fairness I’d have to add that this is apparently a recollection of something Einstein said in a conversation, and not a written quote. But it does agree rather well with the other things he’s saying about his religion, atheism, science and religion etc. (if we understand, as I think we should, “there is no God” in the broad Einsteinian sense of God and not a personal God).
Rand was always very annoyed by people who let their ability to reason in natural languages atrophy. Rather like Marx, her social critique and analysis of the past was excellent – and her application to predictions and prescriptions was deeply lacking. Also like Marx, many people reject her outright without actually possessing any knowledge of the things she said, the merits and flaws of her arguments, or the things she got right as well as that which she was sadly wrong about.
But pontificate away, Mr. Russel.
You are quibbling over semantics. Einstein’s “God” has virtually nothing to do with what is generally meant by the term. It is not an entity. It is not a person. The only thing the concepts have in common is that both are ultimately responsible for the existence of the universe as we know it – but the generally-understood meaning includes the idea that ‘God’ created existence, while Einstein’s is the nature of reality itself.
But that misses the point, which is that Dawkins’ choice of words implied that theology had been largely static for eighteen centuries, which is certainly not true.
This is the sort of sloppy overgeneralization that I was talking about, though you seem to be even more unfactual than Dawkins here.
IIRC, the Catholics were just as capable of putting Jews through hell as the Protestants. Spain was Catholic, and the persecution of its Jews led to the Marranos, secret Jews who practiced their rituals underground (and unfortunately often forgot their meaning). Last time I checked, Martin Luther’s beef with Catholicism was about indulgences, not about the Church not being anti-Semitic enough. Martin Luther certainly was anti-Semitic, but the Protestants and the Catholics (and the Eastern Orthodox, for that matter, with the Cossacks) were about even in making Tom Lehrer’s line “everybody hates the Jews” all too true.
Look, if you want to blast religion, use the facts as they are, which is usually a mix of the good, bad, and ambiguous. Leave the gross distortions to the fundies.
Theology hasn’t changed in any of the important particulars. It was a collection of made-up nonsense, and it’s still a collection of made-up nonsense.
Caledonian, Russell, others interested in ‘atheism’ as such:
It seems to me that it *is* appropriate to distinguish between mere atheism and many other belief systems, inasmuch as the former does not assert that in and of itself it has explanatory power, but the latter does. To take a trivial example, the literal-minded are inclined to regard rainbows as a sign from Yahweh that he will not reenact the Noachian flood, and thus rainbows are ‘explained’.
In contrast, mere atheism does not offer any sort of functional explanation for rainbows or other natural phenomena. It might be technically correct to describe the absence of belief as something which could be ‘taken on faith’ (and hence “believed”), but this seems to render the entire notion of ‘belief’ almost trivial. And, even if we concede this point, we are forced to concede that atheism in and of itself does not constitute a belief system….SH
It’s important to condemn religion broadly and not get wrapped up in the minor differences betweeen them. When you look at the big picture, they all look the same.
The basic underlying deceptions – fantasy God, heaven, false promise of immortality – don’t change even though we can say the Protestant faith is a little more progressive than the Catholic faith.
One day, we are going to be laughed at for stuggling so mightily with an issue future generations will look at and wonder what all the fuss was about.
I don’t have anything particularly useful to add to this already-long comment thread, but I will chime in to say that I’m incredibly, incredibly jealous of you, PZ.
I’d also point out that I like to consider you to be Dawkin’s American counterpart, so seeing the two of you together is inspiring—the Dynamic Duo of Darwinian Evolution.
George writes, “The basic underlying deceptions – fantasy God, heaven, false promise of immortality – don’t change even though we can say the Protestant faith is a little more progressive than the Catholic faith.”
Religions vary quite a bit more than that. Many religions don’t offer immortality. Some promise reincarnation. Scientology has neither a god nor a heaven.
@Larsson: yaya absolutely but the premise of the very Nobel Prize, lemme quote is to bestow it upon: “people who have completed outstanding research, invented ground-breaking techniques or equipment, or made an outstanding contribution to society”.
Ultimately this usually amounts to new discovieres in the fields of sciences. There are hundreds of prizes and many are more or less performance based awards, especially in maths. There are some who got it because of decade long work e.g. B.McClintock and others because of the timing e.g. James Watson.
On the contrary there are many mathematical and prizes for all sciences which can be directly correlated to performance.
@equates: yep noticed it right after i scanned over my post – but by then it was alread sent. It`s a blatantly obvious mistake so i saved myself the correction-post – since there is no edit option.
—
reg. Dawkins and the notion of child abuse: I fully agree. IMHO a child can live past a childhood induced trauma but not past an early childhood dumbening.
I consider it even a crime not only against the child but also against society. Moreover opportunity creates desire.
It is not a coincidence that all sorts of clerics have also sexually abused children throughout the ages. And if that wasn`t bad enough it is even amplified by the unnatural teaching to suppress one of biologies strongest urges: sex. It is known for many decades that this often leads to sexual perversion. (again countless of peer reviews psychological studies!)
This insanity alone can give a clue as to what is going on worldwide in all sorts of religious cults, since no religion allows its doctrine to be considered inferior to the natural urges of humans. Yet these urges ultimately emerge no matter how brainwashed an individual might be.
Parent`s should want for their kids to aspire and reach for the stars not to make them into mindless zombies.
Ask your parents.
Heh.
Then ask theirs. And theirs. and so forth and so on. Give it a while and you’ll be asking the ancestor of chimps, bonobos and humans. Then all primates. Repeat as needed.
“Actually babies are born mathematicians and scientists who have yet to be discouraged of using their innate abilities. And society does that very successfully.”
Reminds me of the Islamic theory that all children are born Muslim and remain so until corrupted by their parents. The above idea is just as absurd – science wouldn’t be just four hundred years old if babies were born scientists. The case for mathematics is only a wee bit stronger.
On the whole, I thought the interview was fair, and very well done. As someone else pointed out, Paulson (the interviewer) asked the kinds of questions the general public — and the “spiritual but not religious” — would like to see answered.
However, my understanding is that Steve Paulson is currently being funded in part by a grant from the Templeton Foundation, one of the organizations trying to encourage “progress” in reconciling science and religion. Since their studies and research projects don’t seem to be confirming what they hoped to confirm, it looks like they will be putting more and more emphasis on bringing science and religion together by looking for scientists who are religious, and asking them how they “reconcile” this.
The fact that Dawkins doesn’t encourage calling wonder and mystery “spirituality” doesn’t make them happy.
Arun writes, “science wouldn’t be just four hundred years.”
Science is 2,500 years old. What happened five centuries ago was its restart, after a rather long slumber. Read Ptolemy’s Almagest. It likely is not the oldest science textbook, but perhaps the oldest that has been wholy preserved. It was written about 150 CE. Ptolemy learned from the work of Greek astronomers centuries older. At a time when the ancient Hebrews were still redacting the stories of prophets, Aristarchus was calculating the relative sizes and distances of our solar system, and Eratosthenes, for whom the sieve was named, calculated the circumference of the earth. Isabella’s experts knew of Eratosthenes’s calculations, which is why they opposed Columbus’s plan. As with all financial ventures, it is better to be lucky than right. The remarkable thing is that in 1490 CE, the best calculation of the earth’s diameter had been done over 1600 years previous! That speaks to science’s long slumber. The fact that astronomers were capable of making this calculation to reasonable accuracy demonstrates the significant science that was being done by the ancient Greeks.
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Let’s not forget the Antikythera Mechanism.
Wouldn’t it be interesting to hear Rick Warren and Richard Dawkins discuss philosophy together?
Frgt Rck Wrrn, h ds nt ct t. Brng hm t my ktchn.
BTW
Myb PZ Myrs shld ntrvw L Frnkn s w cn knw why rmrc s gng bnkrpt.
I suspect the only two groups who care about Air America are its owners, and the various people who have a stake in conservative radio. That’s also why it is going bankrupt. Radio shows that feed an audience ideology just aren’t that interesting, except to those who hunger for that kind of pablum. It makes sense to have Christian radio. And conservative radio. And even UFO-and-black-helicopter radio. But liberal radio? Not a prayer.
So did you get to meet Lalla?
pbg: A way to look at it is to think of it as being like the famous “Have you stopped beating your wife?” question. A good feature we can borrow from Buddhist philosophy of language is the pragmatic use of “mu” as a good answer to both questions.
David Harmon: As much as I love cats, they do tend to be narrow pragmatists for the most part, not caring much for investigating the world beyond what they can use or sleep on.
“reality exists”. Actually, in some ontologies, that’s false if exists is taken to be a factual existence predicate. Instead, what is exists (are real) are things and their changes whereas reality is a set, whence a construct and hence ideal if pretended to exist idependentely of us.
Kristine: Dembski’s father teaches biology? This is new to me. Source, please?
Anatoly et al: The way I express the matter is that Einstein was religious but not theistic, which puts him in the company of Ayn Rand, perhaps Stalin, Gene Roddenberry and a whole bunch of other people of both dubious and meritorious conduct.
He continually expressed admiration for and agreement with Spinoza, who realistically can be described as an atheist, since to say god is identical to nature is heretical in effectively every traditional source of theism there is.
This is weasely language. “Collection of made-up nonsense” covers a lot of ground, and theology can change radically and still be a “collection of made-up nonsense.” I also noticed that you didn’t explicitly say what the “important particulars” were, which also allows for a lot of wiggle room.
Keith: Here you go, straight from the horse’s mouth!
“In my own case, I was raised in a home where my father had a D.Sc. in biology (from the University of Erlangen in Germany), taught evolutionary biology at the college level, and never questioned Darwinian orthodoxy during my years growing up. My story is not atypical…”
Also here. You may also check Wikipedia on Dembski.
Interesting, isn’t it?
The one-less-god argument is also used by Sam Harris, and, of course, is imperfect as several here have pointed out. It does have the advantage of setting up the idea that ‘your’ ancestors used to believe in Odin or Zeus or …, but a some point your culture changed its position. This illuminates the possibility that you could be even wiser than your ancestors who made the last change by considering changing your position on Christianity; or the superstition of your choice.
That course in Greek Mythology I took at Bend Senior High did a great deal to reinforce my already well formed stance that Christianity/religion was silly. And I thank Dawkins and Harris and Myers for their continued efforts to shine light on this silliness, because in the end it is dangerous stuff for our culture to be hanging on to.
Save Civilization, Convert a Christian today.
http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2006/10/professors_and_.html
And now we have economists trying to get in on the act….
Is religion == theism?
Wow! It’s like Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie!
New TV show: Simply Life
Paul,
It’s probably not such a good idea to carry your passport in your shirt pocket!
I’m doing some early Christmas shopping and I’m going to buy you some new shirts.
Which do you prefer, this:
tinyurl.com/y9se93
or this:
tinyurl.com/yfe5dg
?
Paul,
I really don’t know what to make of Dawkins. On the one hand he is absolutely correct in everything he says about religion as he explains in “Root of All Evil”. Religion is certainly one of the most destructive forces on earth and its complete elimination would go a long way for the benefit of mankind.
On the other hand he is equally wrong about evolution and cannot recognize the simple fact that is right in front of his eyes: Darwinism is pseudoscience.
It’s clear to me that he has, having rejected conventional religion, adopted darwinism as the philosophical and metaphysical equivalent of everything he despises. A creation myth that he can live with.
Considering that you are there, further befouling of the campus is logically impossible. And I’m quite sure the only “point” related to your comments will be the one that crowns your silly head.
Yeah, that’s it. All those hundreds of thousands of scientists failed to notice that the Theory of Evolution is pseudoscience. (What’s with all this “Darwinism” stuff?) Charlie Wagner is in fact more qualified to determine what is valid science than the scientific community.
every traditional source of theism there is
Since “tradition” means bubkis, your argument means bubkis. Study Christian history, and you may be shocked (SHOCKED!) at how much dogma is flat out made up and baseless on anything but the fact that those who held the belief killed or intimidated all the people who didn’t.
I hope Dawkins is ready for some pointed comments when he befouls my campus with his presence come November.
Pointed criticisms, from O’Brien?! That’ll be the day. (BTW, PZ. This guy is Holy Groundhog. He outed himself as such at Pandagon. Just thought you should know.)
Blessed are the bug-a-boo, for they shall inherit the earth.
Why, f t sn’t Gl Grssm! Why dn’t y mk yrslf sfl nd pply yr frnscs t th cs f Pz’s mssng rsrch?
md tht knwn hr t, hysd.
I would not characterize the activities of the Greeks 2500 years ago as science in the sense we know it. But this is not the place to argue it. Let’s assume you’re right. If modern humans emerged 30,000 years ago, then how did the natural born scientists not emerge till 2500 years ago?
Let it not be said that O’Brien has no sense of irony. I assume you made your comment in order to show you understand the hypocrisy behind it. I like to give people the benefit of the doubt, even if that have proven time and time again that they don’t deserve it. To call me an ignorant bumpkin while you yourself have shown repeatedly that you hate science and scientific thought…that’s hilarious. You should seriously consider work on some comedic circuit or something. Just make sure it’s as far away from an internet connection as possible.
“that” = “they”
‘slate.
“Natural born scientists” didn’t emerge until at least 2500 years ago because, before then, Civilization had yet to create opportunities for people to observe various phenomena of the natural world for their own sake, in that, before then, people were too busy serving their rulers in other tasks, such as creating arts and crafts, farming the land, tending livestock, tending to the ill, serving in the priesthood and or local administrations.
It wasn’t until the “Classical” ancient Greeks, and the Chinese both invented hobbies that people started to find time to philosophise about stuff, though, the Greeks leaned towards observations of the natural world, and mathematics, whereas the Chinese stuck with painting, poetry and calligraphy.
JackGoff said:
Since “tradition” means bubkis, your argument means bubkis. Study Christian history, and you may be shocked (SHOCKED!) at how much dogma is flat out made up and baseless on anything but the fact that those who held the belief killed or intimidated all the people who didn’t.
You mean like the way Arianism went *blip* after Arius had a spectacularly fatal, un, bowel movement after a suspicious audience with Emperor Constantine I?
That’s news to me.
If it’s not true that you have a profound distaste of science, Mr O’Brien, then, what’s your opinion of the study of placoderms and the attempts of paleontologists to unravel their phylogeny?
Arun, you’re right that my comment on Greek science was irrelevant to your argument. I should have made that clear. I also agree that current science is different from ancient science. Science does progress, not only in its findings, but also in its methods and analyses.
There are two things I would press about the science done by the ancient Greeks. First, they invented quite a bit of what we would recognize as science, even if they didn’t call it out quite as we do: the idea of axiomatizing math, the use of math to model astronomy and geography, the calculation of astronomical and geographical features from those models, the understanding that those models have to fit measurement, the expression of those models in mechanical computers, the discovery of basic mechanical laws, and much more. Second, there is no qualitative leap from the science that was being done by the ancient Greeks, and the science that was restarted in the Renaissance. You can, in the classroom, move from Greek astronomy to Kepler and Galileo, as if there were successive chapters. Indeed, the Almagest was still the standard text in Galileo’s time. That’s why I object to the notion that there was a “birth” between the two. Yes, modern science is different from ancient Greek science. It’s also different from Renaissance science. But they all are part of a continuum. The change in physics and astronomy from Galileo to Newton is larger than the change from Ptolemy to Galileo. Newton was born the year after Galileo died. Galileo was born 1400 years after Ptolemy wrote. Science, which had progressed tremendously between the 5th and 2nd centuries BCE, and which would progress even more quickly in the modern era, made only glacial progress between the 2nd and 16th centuries CE. That is a historical puzzle about culture and its support for science.
Speaking of Religion bug a boo. Michele Bachmann now says the Foley scandal has caused God to focus like a laser beam on her race. She’s on tape:
http://dumpbachmann.blogspot.com/2006/10/michele-bachmann-you-are-looking-at.html
So Dembski is scratching his Oedipal itch when he attacks evolution and shills for the DI. That could explain so much…
Russell:
“When Russell showed a paradox in naive set theory”
Self-referal makes things messy. :-)
“In contrast, Rand didn’t try to get it right.”
Agreed. There is course-papers on category theory over on n-category café there they try to show the students how much effort it is to make it right.
Anatoly:
“I didn’t quotemine Einstein: the last sentence I omitted further supports my point, rather than undermines it.”
I don’t think so. Both the expression “music of the spheres” and “Wonder of nature” is ambigious, but Einstein is known for using such euphemisms to express his appreciation (or pantheism) about nature and science. (Unfortunately I have not succeeded in accessing the original text.)
With such an interpretation what Einstein says is that he is opposed to letting other human aims impose on nature and his science. You try to forget the parallel reference to religion and religious fanatics. “I was barked at … Then there are the fanatical atheists whose intolerance is of the same kind as the intolerance of the religious fanatics and comes from the same source.” [Bold added.]
“Einstein explicitly said, several times, that he didn’t consider himself to be an atheist, and registered his disgust at people who falsely claim he was an atheist in order to further their views with an argument from authority. He also, of course, said the same things about people trying to quote him in support of a specific organised religion or a personal God.”
Again, based on the quote, he seems to discuss his views of science and nature more than his own views. So there is an open window for people to argue atheism. I have gone on record as claiming he was a pantheist. But the more quotes I see the more ambigious they become, so I have no longer any firm support for my earlier claim.
“In view of this, it’s not wrong to say Dawkins mischaracterizes Einstein”
Ambigious quotes can’t be made to support such a claim.
To come further one must unambigiously see that Einstein somewhere adresses his own beliefs, not his view of nature and science. Meanwhile one must abstain from such claims you do about Dawkins. At most one can note that Dawkins isn’t sufficiently concerned about the ambigiosity in Einsteins utterances.
The fact that Einstein was so deliberately ambiguous sends its own messages.
Caledonian:
“Not all comparisons are equivalancies, but some are.”
It seems we agree.
Anatoly:
“But what really makes me angry is that they quote me for the support of such views.”
BTW, this is an excellent example where the interpretation that Einstein is concerned about the use of his science seems the most natural. He is obviously not discussing his own views.
Arun:
“Is religion == theism?”
This is probably as hard a demarcation as what mathematics or science is. (“I know it when I see it…”)
My preference is to focus on the dualisms, expecially supernaturalism. (But certainly there are ‘believers’ that more or less only uses the ritual and/or social praxis of a faith.) With such an attempt of criteria, deists and pantheists are also religious AFAIK.
On the Positive Liberty blog, Timothy Sandefur links to an episode from Jacob Bronowski’s superb series The Ascent of Man called “Knowledge or Certainty” which is to be found on Google Video. No doubt most people here have seen it before but it’s worth seeing again in the context of this discussion.
In one sense, T H Huxley coined the term ‘agnostic” to emphasise the distinction between the scientific view that all knowledge is provisional and all others that pretend to absolute certainty.
Rightly or wrongly, atheism is perceived as a certainty that a god or gods do not exist and, as such, is the polar opposite of the conviction of the faithfull that a god or gods do exist. The fact that some atheists frame their views so as to be little different from Huxley’s agnosticism but still insist on calling themselves atheist is, to that extent, misleading.
Both Huxley and Bronowski and others before them held that the strength of our belief in something should be in proportion to the weight of evidence by which it is supported. Where there is no evidence for something, therefore, we are not required to believe in it. There is no evidence for the existence of gods so we should not believe in them.
A lack of belief in something, however, is not the same as a certainty that something does not exist. Absence of evidence, as they say, is not the same as evidence of absence. Some seem to think that this is a trivial distinction, a mere quibbling over words.
But is it?
Both Huxley and Bronowski clearly thought that awareness of our fallibility, of the uncertainty or ‘tolerance’ of our knowledge, was essential to science and to our humanity.
I have yet to read The God Delusion but I have read much else of what Richard Dawkins has written about religion and I agree with it. My only quibble is that his focus is too narrow. The problem is not just religion but unjustified certainty or absolutism however it might be embodied, whether as the Spanish Inquisitor, the Cromwellian Puritan, The Islamic jihadist, the American creationist, the Nazi stormtrooper, the Stalinist commissar or the Maoist guerilla.
The problem is to persuade those who crave certainty in the face of a very uncertain world to embrace the very uncertainty that they fear.
As an aside, having just watched the episode of the new Dr Who where Liz Sladen reprises her role as Sara Jane Smith, one of the Doctor’s previous companions, it occurs to me that, if the Doctor regenerates again so they need a new actor to play him – and they want to re-unite him with another of his previous companions – they need look no further…
TL:
I argued earlier on this thread that atheism might constitute a belief, but it is not in itself a belief system. I concur that deists and pantheists etc. fit the latter category because (as I previously argued) these positions seem to inherently claim to offer some sort of explanatory power, right or wrong, whereas atheism per se simply denies that such claims explain anything. Dawkins himself has said something to this effect as a rejoinder to Hoyle when he calls God ‘the ultimate Boeing 747’.
Comments?…SH
All of the apologists wringing their hands about how ‘strident’ and ‘broad brush’ Mr. Dawkins atheism is should really do themselves a favor and read The God Delusion.
It will answer all of their remaining questions about why their delusion isn’t worthy of any special respect or deference in the marketplace of ideas.
charlie wagner:
Indeed, “Darwinism” [sic] is pseudoscience. This explains, of course, why only creationists and other assorted religious nutballs ever talk about it.
What is “clear” [sic] to you is, obviously, irrelevant.
Because as we all know, if you don’t know what you’re talking about, your opinion doesn’t count.
@Arun:
“Actually babies are born mathematicians and scientists who have yet to be discouraged of using their innate abilities. And society does that very successfully.”
Reminds me of the Islamic theory that all children are born Muslim and remain so until corrupted by their parents. The above idea is just as absurd – science wouldn’t be just four hundred years old if babies were born scientists. The case for mathematics is only a wee bit stronger.
Re:
Don`t misquote me. This was meant metaphorically. Science is the curitosity towards nature which is innate and placed us on top of the food chain of land mammals. In the end the brain is just a very energy-costly organ, which evolved to this state because our prevalence neccessitated it. The energy distribution and requirments in the deep sea are way different, and within this envrionment having such a sophisticated brain is everything but preferential. In fact cephalopods could probably be recognized in the oceans what we are on the land.
Anyways with mathematicians I referred to the innate ability to assess numbers, estimate them and substract, add and even multiply. But don`t confuse this with our abstract formulation of modern mathematics.
2.) Religion = theism.
Well if you wanna found a religion you gotta make sure the cult makes it to the status of a religion, that is you must ensure success! The only way to do achieve that is via instilling fear and desire within your members. The same psychology and neurotransmitters that bound members thousands of years ago to a cult are just as involved in todays cults as they were back then. A special form of cult is society, which especially in modern worlds are way more complex and sophisticated than ancient societies which would now be recognized as cults. But the principle of desire and fear is innate, and is the foundation of actually any group.
Human group dynamics is a comprehensive theme, but there are many books covering this topic with frequent revisions convering bleeding edge studies. Especially since 9/11, the studies in that field tripled, as did the fundings.
Anyways the point is that you have to create a central figure, an entitity of superhuman strength – be this by purporting imaginative properties of this entity to the cult members or simply by outfitting these entities with lethal weaponry. The entity itself can be complex even spanning over several members with a complex hierarchial order – itself creating a sub-group. But let´s not go there.
So yeah religion – no matter what is by definition a large cult which itself neccessitates (without exception) a central entity. And religion is not spiritualism. Spiritualism like for instance transcendental feelings have been studied extensively with recent breakthroughs in locating the regions in the brain that are responsible for the feeling of transcendence.
Or remember this: Religion = group dynamics, Spiritualism = individual
PS: Many religions use spiritualism as one form of desire, linking it to their religion even though it is a neurological phenomenon tackled for decades now by means of (perfusion/diffusion) brain imaging and psych. studies.
3) At last and this is important, the question of why only now science started to emerge in its modern form is way more complex. It is a very interesting question which i too asked myself but only now do we actually gradually accumulate the answers to this complex theme and have the required numbers of specific studies. The answer lies primarily in the gene expression of the brain. I can list several studies for those more inclined. Just lemme know -coz it takes me a while to gather the links.
In the end it amounts to this: whilst we all use our brains to pretty much the same extend, its potential hasn`t even been scratched. Especially newer generations can, do and will potentially outperform even me or you BY FAR, and i am someone who grew up as a kid with computers and actually even internet when hardly anyone had access to it due to the academic background of my dad which required the internet connection when the internet was virtually still unkown in society. Anyhow Kids these days will be AND ARE in contact with computers from 3 years onward, having access to bleeding edge media, worked out with the help of child psychologists, 3D animations and whatnot. Since neurogenesis is extremely rapid throughout the first several years of a newborn the influence of such an learning friendly and learning targeted environment is enormous. Sadly we cannot look at the gene expression from an historical athropological or paleantological standpoint due rapid degredation of biological matter. (Anyways we still have the brain-bank housing at least three to four generations of brains of our societies.)
The fundamental claim is actually this: we can evolve mentally from one generation in quantum leaps, simply due to the enormous flexibility which this organ exhibits. Just look around you – you will find people who are mentally indifferentiable from people who lived thousands of years back and newer generations who write their own programming languages at the age of 14 to tackle mahematical problems on par with those done by top notch learned mathematicians. This sounds unimaginable and exaggerated but i am sticking to the facts here. The increase in mental peformance has been assessed quantiatively. (One of the links can be found above in a prev. post). But there are many studies dealing wiht this central theme.
Moreover i must discourage to read too much into philosophy which would deal with the question “why hasn`t there been more scientific progress in the last hundred of years” just they way some of you guys put it – mixing some notions of religion, and society into it. Nowadays you mus tackle such/any question from both/all sides – that is bottom up and top down until the converge. Bottom up would be physics (molecular sciences) and bottom down the classical studies. For instance when it comes to a disease you must tackle it from a molecular biological standpoint as well as the ramnifications and overall expression on a macroscopic scale which we know as classical medicine.
—
Darwinism being pseudoscience? I really don`t get that. It may be right depending on the standpoint. If one views darwinism as a cult or religion than yeah it is pseudoscience, because science itself is neutral. I certainl y wouldn`t see myself as a darwinist coz for me there is no argument but for someone who involves himself politcally like Dawkins, PZ,… one has to brand himself as a darwinist as everthing becomes polarized from that point on. I`d say Darwinism is politics about evolution, because within since there is no opposition. Within sience there is just evolution bearing the name of tens of thousands of scientists and millions of scientist and people grateful of those figures.
Darwinism is what netwon mechanics is to physics. We usually just say (classical) mechanics. We don`t say Darwinism we speak of evolutionary principles as a whole. We don`t say quantum darwinsim we say quantum evolution. We speak of relativity and not Einsteinism. Darwinism is a word necessitated by a mere political argument that has been going on for over a century for one good reason.
As stated above the prerequisite for religion is a central entiity. If people start to see the world from an evolutionary perspective suddenly supernaturalism isn`t tenable anymore.
Religion however is the poor man`s version of a dictatorship that works on the same psychological level but imaginary by means of supernaturalism and instilling fearful and desirable imaginary scenarios in young generations, whereas the upkeep of totalism is enforced by means of superhuman strength. Such a weapons stock is costly, requires thousands of experts must be maintained and gradually becomes obsolete. Of course this shouldn`t be overgeneralized but IMHO it`s a nice simplification.
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Ys, tllngs ppl hw gnrnt, stpd, nd nsn (r vl) thy r slly lds t “ndrstndng”.
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fnd t s rnc tht Dwkns s th Prfssr f “Pblc ndrstndng” f Scnc.
Ys, tllngs ppl hw gnrnt, stpd, nd nsn (r vl) thy r slly lds t “ndrstndng”.
Thts th typ f thng mny f th pstrs vr t Knss Ctzns fr Scnc sy, wh ncdntlly wll b wlcmng Dwkns t Knss ths mndy.
Jst n tm fr th lctns hr!
“Yes, tellings people how ignorant, stupid, and insane (or evil) they are usually leads to “understanding”.
Public undedrstanding comes through education, discussion, and understanding. If you go look at the reader reviews of the God Delusion, and all the discussion EACH review has generated, I think you would agree Dawkins has been very effective at stimulating a discussion.
Silverstein:So what you are saying is that beating around the bush and euphemizing everything is a better strategy?
Well it is when you are about to manipulate people and have massive influence to such an extend as to actually manipulate the language of a society. The US administration is leading currently when it comes to euphemism and political corrected wording in which every second speech he broadcasts is more like a parody for an outsider.
I figure since what Dawkins stands for is to tear down this scaffold of lies and betrayal called religion it isn`t in his best interest to use the same strategies that political/social psychologists meticulously worked out, nor does he have the influence that a political leader commands.
I and many others actually like Dawkins because he comes over as sane, rational, humane, valuing the same basic joys and needs we all exhibit and really above all is a very good speaker who is well versed.
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Describing someone as being “ignorant, stupid, or insane” if they don’t believe in evolution is not necessarily an insult.
It only becomes an insult when an evolution-denier assumes they’re in the “stupid” category.
And even then – even if the statement is taken as an insult – it doesn’t mean it’s wrong. Sometimes the truth hurts.
Speaking as a Christian who has read and briefly corresponded with Dr. Dawkins, I do *not* find his criticism of religion to be in any sense disrespectful and I find the aggrieved tone of many who criticize *him* increasingly incredible.
Clearly, his critique of religion is general, rather than specifically aimed at any creed, much less mine. It doesn’t constitute a personal attack, nor even a peculiar assault against my own personal beliefs, which in any case are not privileged in this sphere. Why, then, would I take it personally or believe that his critique is somehow disrespectful? What an utter waste of time! I might as well wag my finger ominously at David Hume.
It is true that the common enemy of many folk here, the creationist, is inclined to use Dawkins’s words against the cause of evolution. What of it? They routinely abuse scripture as well, and yet I see precious few of my fellow Christians howling about their disrespect for holy writ.
People who can’t distinguish between a general critique of religion and evolutionary biology deserve our scorn, whether they are believers or not. Conversely, anyone (such as Dawkins) whose critical analysis of both religion and evolutionary biology leads us to think more deeply about those topics deserves our attention and admiration, whether they are non-believers, or no.
Respectfully submitted…SH
gregonomic writes, “Describing someone as being ‘ignorant, stupid, or insane’ if they don’t believe in evolution is not necessarily an insult.”
Suppose a logician were to say that everyone who doesn’t believe in quantum mechanics is either “ignorant, stupid, or insane.” The technical argument for that statement is that the vast majority of people are indeed ignorant of quantum mechanics. As you point out, that is not an insult. We all are ignorant of most things. It’s an insult only if we were to expect most people to know QM and the depth of experiment that validates it.
There’s an interesting question why there seems to be a greater expectation of that regarding evolution than regarding QM. My own guess is that the vast majority of Americans, if asked to explain what evolution is, would make a terrible hash of it. They are ignorant of it, in quite the innocent sense that most are ignorant of QM.
Of course, we teach school children a variety of facts related to both of these theories. Even in elementary school, a bright child might “know” that the dinosaurs lived hundreds of millions of years past, and that the electrons don’t so much orbit the nucleus as form a “cloud” around it.
Politically, the difference between QM and evolution is that there is a large part of the population who reject evolution, simply because it conflicts with their religious belief. The problem isn’t that they are ignorant. It’s not clear why we should expect most people to know and understand evolution, any more than we expect most biologists to know and understand Gödel’s theorems. What we would like is that they don’t use their ignorance as a base for attacking science. But they, of course, don’t think they are ignorant. They think they are knowledgeable about something where we are ignorant, to wit, God’s truth. Which brings us to the core of the conflict that Dawkins has engaged: faith vs. reason. The problem isn’t ignorance. People are ignorant of Gödel’s theorems, and that doesn’t bother logicians one whit. The problem is people thinking their faith makes them knowledgeable.
Curiously, there are cranks who would correct every field, people who have a personal belief or faith that makes them think they know what they don’t. When I was a graduate student in mathematics, there was a fellow who hung out at Angels hall who thought he could square the circle, and would bend your ear with nonsense for hours, if you were willing to listen. In mathematics and physics and most fields, such cranks are mostly ignored or quietly pitied. What religion has done is turn millions into biology cranks. So it is understandable when biologists pick up the thankless task of explaining why belief is not knowledge.
Of course belief about science isn’t knowledge. But belief about religion isn’t knowledge, either. What I object to about Dawkins is that he is insufficiently scientific — in this respect Dennett is clearly better — when he writes about religion.
It is perfectly possible, if you study religion from an anthropological perspective, to be scientific about it. The kind of wild generalisations that Dawkins enjoys are not scientific, and they are often not historically true, too.
Why are we here? Because we’re not there.
What is the purpose of our existance? None but what we make of it.
Andrew, it’s difficult for me to scry your criticism, because you give no examples of the “wild generalizations” you find in Dawkins. I don’t believe that one has to approach religion anthropologically in order to be scientific about it. We live in our own culture, and it’s perfectly reasonable to take the claims of the religious head on.
I think Russell nails it: people who would normally never venture to disagree with mainstream science in areas where they are admttedly ignorant feel as if their religious beliefs give them scientific authority where they sense a conflict.
There is something else I have wondered about that oft-cited Dawkins quote on people who reject evolution being either “ignorant, stupid, or dishonest.” Might there be a slight problem with cultural differences in the way the British use the word “ignorance” and the way Americans use the word “ignorance?”
From what I can tell, most British (and most educated ppl in the U.S.) interpret the word “ignorant” as meaning “lacking knowledge, not knowing.” “You do not know how a radio works: you are ignorant on that subject.”
But in the U.S., the word almost always seems to carry negative baggage. If you say that someone is “ignorant,” you mean he is backwards, stupid, knows nothing at all. It’s an accusation, not a description. You can only really get away with calling someone “ignorant” if you bend over to make it clear you mean that there’s something specific he doesn’t know or understand. Otherwise, it’s a general slur on character.
Interesting to think that perhaps some of the charges against Dawkins being unnecessarily insulting would abate if he just learns to “speak American.”
f by “vltn” n mns ” chng n lll frqncs vr tm,” thn gr tht nyn wh dspts tht s gnrnt, stpd r nsn. f hwvr, n hs n mnd th cmmn dscnt f hmns nd ps, thn wld sy nyn wh thnks tht s n th sm pstmlgcl ftng s Gödl’s thrms r qntm mchncs s gnrnt, stpd r nsn; y cn’t d bttr thn mthmtcs.
Quantum mechanics was derived from experiment and observation, not pure mathematics.
You don’t seem to know what you’re talking about, Mr. O’Brien. So: stupid, ignorant, or insane? Nah, that’s a false trilemma – it’s probably all three.
Thnks fr sttng th bvs, lnkhd. Th fct rmns tht qntm mchncs s dply rtd n mthmtcs.
O’Brien writes, “If however, one has in mind the common descent of humans and apes, then I would say anyone who thinks that is on the same epistemological footing as Gödel’s theorems or quantum mechanics is ignorant, stupid or insane; you can’t do better than mathematics.”
Two comments. First, QM is physics, not mathematics. There is every likelihood that future physicists will find holes in QM, in the same way that they have found holes in physical theories past. If I were placing a bet on whether physicists 500 years from now have a theory that supercedes QM, or whether biologists 500 years from now no longer believe in the common descent of humans and apes, I would be the former is more likely.
Regarding the “epistemological footing” of Gödel’s theorems and the notion that “you can’t do better than mathematics,” I would question for just what statement you are claiming certainty. In particular, consider two different possibilities, with no pretense that they are exhaustive:
(1) There are some theorems that logicians and mathematicians teach, which they credit to Gödel.
(2) Gödel’s theorems are true.
The first is a cultural statement, about logicians and mathematicians. The second is (almost) a mathematical statement in its own right. They both sort of beg the question which set of theorems, precisely, is meant by the phrase “Gödel’s theorems.” He did prove quite a few. Do you think he never put forward a proof that was later retracted? That vagueness starts to become an issue.
It might not matter so much to the first claim. Someone in our culture acquires knowledge of it by reading magazine articles, reading non-technical history of mathematics, and listening to folks who count as logicians or mathematicians. “Yea, verily, they teach something called Gödel’s theorems.” Any belief that these are therefore true is not based on knowing the theorems or having reviewed their proofs, but on how that individual views the current practice of mathematics.
The second claim is the mathematical one itself, given some precision about which theorems are meant. But who legitimately can claim this knowledge? I would assert that the only people for whom this rigorous epistemological footing applies are those who actually have studied the subject matter. If you can correctly state one of Gödel’s theorems, correctly apply it, and correctly prove it, then I would say you are on that solid epistemological footing. That’s not a trivial thing. Metamathematics is a subtle field. I suspect most graduate students in mathematics would have a hard time explaining why the theory of the reals is complete (provable), while the the theory of the integers is not. I suspect few in this thread have the “epistemological footing” you reference.
There is a similar issue regarding biology. Few non-biologists are familiar with the breadth of evidence for evolution. I’m certain my own knowledge regarding that pales compared to PZ’s. Which means, of necessity, that we have different epistemological footing on the topic. In other words, epistemological footing isn’t something a topic or claim has in its own right, but something an individual has regarding a topic or claim.
Scott, very well put and interesting to get some input from a normal(=moderate) Christian.
Russel, Religion itself has a evolutionary heritage, and in fact was necessitated by our neurological evolution. And no, people are not ignorant about QM, they are uneducated at worst – whereas when it comes to biology religion requires to teach to ignore evolutionary texts and refer to preachers and clerics for consultation when one is in conflict with himself. On a sidenote evolution on the macrosocopic, biological scale is so simple that a kid can grasp it`s full scope within a week, whereas some religious books are incomprehensible to even the most advanced clerics. That`s why they regularly have interpretation sessions of how to alter their stance on various fields in accordance with the current political weather.
The problem with evolution is that in fact biology is just the simplest most visible example of “directed change”. If we go out there into nature we have a whole 4D-museum of our ancestors, still doing well and as beautiful as it gets – so beautiful that it often instills a feeling of spiritualism in us.
All of science is underlying evolutionary processes, but whereas the universe is by mere scale comprehensible only in a very abstract sense for us humans, biology is not! Yet if you see this beautifuly simple notion of evolution right in front of you – in fact at work for everyone to see, you start to loose sooner or later interest in supernaturalism. Because all humans merely strive to understand the world and this is what motivates one to believe in supernaturalism.
But they longer one looks the more one will observe evoltutionary principles acting everywhere. But without supernaturalistic believe the influence of any religion ends right there. Religion will gradually decline but never completely recede since humans (v1.2006-v1.200x) will always form groups. The cheapest form of control over larger groups (whilst anti-economic in todays sense of economy ) is to instill a notion of supernatualistic desire and fear.
Also when we speak of our ancestors and humanity as such we all have our very own ideas and visions of how everything played out but the truth is sociology in a modern context is probably the most complex theme that one could pick up.
Heck it might even be that religion advanced us back in the day – in the end over time everything in nature goes the path of least resistance. The truth of the matter is that unless we have sophisticated enough models we cannot even surmise what influence group dynamics really had on us.
One thing is for sure: our social interaction on a large scale basis created the phenomenon of civilization!
When we speak of religion we as rational people have to learn to get rid of the notion of manifested cults and bring it into the context of neurobiology, psychology and sociology. Religion is a group-dynamical phenomenon arising in humans once a group has reached a large enough scale.
But historically, religion really was just the path of least resistance it was yet another exhibition of nature`s principles of self organization. But people have to realize that our modern cultures instill fear through law enforcement and restriction of liberties and desire through capitalism and that societie`s backbone is infrastructure.
Religion is detrimental to society in EVERY way as it conflicts with modern society. In the end what members of modern societies strive for is: quality of life, healthiness and to live as long as possible. Religion is a hindrance in achieving these goals.
lo writes, “If we go out there into nature we have a whole 4D-museum of our ancestors, still doing well and as beautiful as it gets.”
Actually, our cousins.
Perhaps one may want to comment on a religious happening in one’s neck of the woods:
http://www.danielpipes.org/article/4046
Russell:
Re: Gödel’s theorems, I was just reproducing your language. When I think of Gödel, his incompleteness theorems as well as his proof of God come to mind. (By the way, I love how he turned pugnacious Bertie Russell on his head.) Logic is not my area, but my background is in mathematics and statistics and I completely trust mathematical reasoning.
In another vein, why do you slum it with such a mediocre academic as Peezee Myers and his chamchas? A mathematician should keep better company.
The term “atheist”, does not describe what someone believes in, it simply describes what they do not believe in.
Exactly. I “arrived” at atheism the same way I arrived at my lack of bubonic plague. The same way I arrived at my lack of an opium addiction.
I arrived at atheism the same way that every other human being that has ever lived did – I was born.
The question should be, how (and why) did some people arrive at superstition.
Vcs nlgs bnd.
O’Brien, I enjoy PZ’s blog. I would point out that this coop has no fence. Any chicken who wants to leave need only exit stage left.
Wll, n n s prfct. My x ls njys ths blg. (ls, tht sh ws ntrdcd t ths ntllctlly-nbrd csspl v my blg.)
Religion will gradually decline but never completely recede since humans (v1.2006-v1.200x) will always form groups.
Probably true. One encouraging sign is that no new gods are being created. Hopefully natural selection will weed the remaining ones out :)
Religion is detrimental to society in EVERY way as it conflicts with modern society.
Well, maybe 97% detrimental. Some do real charity work (albeit with strings attached), and it is an organizing force that keeps stupid people in-line. It is also the primary social life for millions, and for this reason alone, will not fade quickly.
Scientology, anyone?
And while not exactly “gods”, one might note a certain uncomfortable resemblance between religions, and Stalinism, Nazism, and more generally, nationalism and similar ideologies. State religions, as it were.
There seems to be a sad tendency for humans to make up some idea, and the use that idea as an excuse to hurt others.
So, R O’Brien. I don’t have the time to burrow through the archives of your blog. Could you please explain why you accept only “change of alleles within lineages” (please correct if misquoted) but not that lineages may split in two?
On another topic, I think it’s obvious that Einstein was a devout pantheist or something like that, and here is the first time I read anyone saying anything else. I also don’t see why this matters for anyone except him and for people who believe in arguments from authority.
Douglas Adams had it naield on the asking of pointless questions: “Why are we here?” “42”.
John Wilkins asks,
Of course I was there! Who do you think took the pictures? :-)
We had a good talk. We agree about religion and I was able to set Richard straight on evolution. Let’s negotiate a price for the recording. How much is “good money”? :-)
Well, no one is perfect. My ex also enjoys this blog. (Alas, that she was introduced to this intellectually-inbred cesspool via my blog.)
funny how nobody seems to enjoy your blog, eh?
maybe it’s all those lackwit one-liners you constantly spew?
give it up, already.
You’re equivocating theologists with religious adherents. The original Ship of Fools article took issue with Dawkins saying there had been no progress in theology in eighteen centuries. I tend to agree that theology is not a progressive discipline, and sweeping movements in theology are often, in fact, regressive. As of yet, it has not been demonstrated to me that theology is a progressive field of human endeavour.
That religious people have done good in the past (and continue to do so) is beside the point. A lot of people who believed in a flat earth did good and bad, but that doesn’t change the fact their belief system was in error.
Regarding the “why” question in the interview:
I had some thoughts that might perhaps be additional better responses than Dawkins’, or perhaps at least somewhat more satisfying responses:
First of all, religion doesn’t have a good answer to “why” either. It has a collection of traditions and texts, but no satisfactory explanations. So while it’s all very well to say that religion might, for example, answer the questions “why are we here? And what is our purpose in life?” with “God made us; our purpose in life is to do what God wants”, there is no answer to the next obvious questions: “Why would God make us? Why would he need for us to do what he wants?” Ultimately, the answer to “why?” is forever bounded by the limits of knowledge. At least science is honest in pointing out that outside of what can be discovered physically and logically, the question is meaningless; religion, in retreating to “Well, God knows”, avoids acknowledging that the querent will never receive a meaningful answer.
And secondly, while science can’t answer the “why?” question itself, perhaps sufficient advances in neurology and psychology will someday be able to answer the question of why people ask “why?”. We know that pareidolia and apophenia exist; it seems reasonable to conclude that the ability to find patterns in random visual accidents and random data might result in the desire to find some overarching meaningful cause of the otherwise mindlessly chaotic events of reality. After all, science itself arises from the same desire — it’s just that science makes repeatable measurements to find the real patterns that are there. Including, of course, the biological pattern that is evolution.
Well, no one is perfect. My ex also enjoys this blog.
Are you bragging, or complaining?
Little green monsters all over the place!
No, I’m talking about what Dawkins actually said about the history of theology. What Dawkins had said was that theology had not “moved on” in eighteen centuries, which not only implies a lack of progress, but also a lack of change. Indeed, if Dawkins’ position is that theology cannot really progress but only change–which certainly fits with his overall opinions on religion–that would explain why Dawkins wrote “moved on” and not “progressed.”
Indeed, and I have not argued otherwise. The good the religious do is beside the point that I was making, which is that Dawkins is careless with the facts in his arguments against religion. For more problems, see the post in Dispatches from the Culture Wars where in the comments, it is pointed out that his quote from John Adams is selective. Dawkins quotes him out of context as saying, “his would be the best of all possible worlds if there was no religion in it,” when Adams really wrote,
Either Dawkins quoted someone else’s misquote of Adams, in which case, he was selectively credulous, or he pulled the quote out of context himself, which is an act of intellectual dishonesty.
The link to Dispatches didn’t come through right. Here it is again:
http://scienceblogs.com/dispatches/2006/10/is_this_true.php#comment-240061
Sorry for a triple post, but I wonder if your claim, “You’re equivocating theologists with religious adherents” is tied to your response to your comments on Protestantism:
I pointed out in reply that as far as I knew, a lack of anti-Semitism was not Luther’s beef with the Catholic Church and that the Church, in fact, had been about as nasty as Luther on the matter.
Mr. O’Brien: I grant that (as a claim) the common descent of all extant primates does not enjoy the epistemological status of something like quantum mechanics.
That does not mean, however, that the claim is poorly-supported. In fact, at this moment that claim is stronger than any point since Darwin first hinted that ‘light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history.’ The publication of the chimpanzee genome last year provides a striking illustration, in which the reduction of chromosome number between chimps and H. sapiens can be shown to be due to the recombination of particular chromosomes in particular locations. This appears to be all but bulletproof: no credible alternative explanations invoking natural causes are likely to explain why two separate chromosomes on chimps just ‘happen’ to match two separate regions on a single chromosome in humans.
So, I would say to you that nattering about the nature of the claim’s epistemic status is barring the door after the horse has left the barn. The claim *is* well-established, and reifying the epistemic status of another discipline (mathematics) seems beside the point.
After all, we know darn well that much of what mathematics describes doesn’t exist in nature; why, then, would those of us who investigate what actually exists regard mathematics as anything other than a means, rather than an end? Mathematical descriptions are to be desired because they fine-tune the testability of our models, but it does not follow that because such a description is possible that it is either necessary or sufficient to the task of actually doing science. Indeed, some possible descriptions (even if accurate) are likely to prove unhelpful; the map, after all, is not the territory.
Cordially…SH
Wll, nlk Pz, m nt tryng t mk nm fr myslf by pplng t th bttm f th ntrnt brrl.
Hv y fgrd t wht rbzd mns yt?
“Arabized” being jargon for “something made to resemble something Arabic”?
Also, you never did answer my question.
We are all painfully aware that logic is not your area, Robert. That is one thing you make eminently clear with every post.
Well, unlike Peezee, I am not trying to make a name for myself by appealing to the bottom of the internet barrel.
no need for you to appeal to that which you so visibly represent.
done yet?
Thnks Gmr. hv trd t mk t clr tht prbblty & sttstcs s my r.
Stntn:
d nt hv n pnn n th qstn y psd t m.
Thanks Gomer. I have tried to make it clear that probability & statistics is my area.
what’s the exact probability you would actually spend more time posting on your own blog than these “cesspools” you spend most of your time on presently?
hypocrite.
“One encouraging sign is that no new gods are being created. Hopefully natural selection will weed the remaining ones out”
FSM seems pretty new to me and very popular.
“I grant that (as a claim) the common descent of all extant primates does not enjoy the epistemological status of something like quantum mechanics.”
I wouldn’t grant that claim. Quantum mechanics is obviously a lot more mathematical than evolution. Both theories, however, are supported by lots of little bits of circumstantial evidence. Arguably, the empirical case for evolution is a lot easier to make, since we’ve been collecting evidence for it for a lot longer, from a lot of different places, and even the kinds of evidence are varied, from fossils to protein and DNA molecules. The latter is, IMHO, even better evidence than the former, since it is more direct evidence of common descent, and curiously enough, it was discovered long after Darwin had died.
When you consider that the divergence of humans and apes happened in the distant past, and that quantum mechanics is about the workings of the world which we can examine right now, it’s remarkable that we can be nearly as confident about the first as we are about the second. Given the inherent handicap, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to say that we’re as sure about common descent as QM.
Bitch please. Unless/until common descent achieves that level of mathematical rigor it will never be on the same plane.
Unless/until common descent achieves that level of mathematical rigor it will never be on the same plane.
Observation trumps math. Fossil record shows common descent. Lab experiments show common descent.
FSM seems pretty new to me and very popular.
He’s ok, as long he doesn’t start hanging around that low-life yahweh dude, who was a really nasty influence on the others (including thor, hades, and shiva).
Bitch please…
Your “jive” is as lackwit as the rest of your one-liners.
at least you’re consistent.
Caledonian writes, “When you consider that the divergence of humans and apes happened in the distant past, and that quantum mechanics is about the workings of the world which we can examine right now..”
Actually, the scope of QM is quite a bit broader than that. It allegedly describes not just “workings of the world which we can examine,” but also the workings of the world at all times past, and at all times forward, and in all corners of the universe, of which there are many more we haven’t examined than those that we have. The claim of common descent has much more restricted scope. Which is one of the reasons I said above that it is more likely that physicists in 500 years have superceded QM, than that biologists have changed their claim that humans and apes descend from a common ancestor.
O’Brien writes, “Unless/until common descent achieves that level of mathematical rigor it will never be on the same plane.”
The claim of common descent is every bit as rigorous as QM. Perhaps moreso. The claim can be expressed in terms of mathematics: graphs of descent relationships. There are a variety of bioinformatic programs that in fact do statistical calculations from that notion, which can be used to determine such things as probable distance of a most recent common ancestor, given measurements of genetic difference. But for the simple expression of the theory, it’s hardly necessary to haul out graph theory, because people understand genealogy well enough.
In contrast, QM suffers in that there is considerable issue over the interpretation of the mathematics. If I draw a genealogy, everyone understands precisely what that graph expresses about the world. But the Schrödinger equation? There are volumes written on the various interpretations of that, and the related issue of measurement. When I was a student, John Wheeler taught an entire graduate course on that topic. Despite that course of study, I will not pretend expertise in it. Still. Read the alternatives presented by Bell’s theorem, some papers on the Copenhagen interpretation, a few more on the many-worlds interpretation, and one on instrumentalism, and then tell me that QM as a theory is as rigorous as the claim of common descent.
My jv? Dd, stp n frm th 80’s. (n cs y wr nt wr, Rgn s n lngr prsdnt nd th -Tm s ff th r.)
My jive? Dude, step in from the 80’s.
funny, that was exactly what i was thinking about you when you wrote “bitch, please”
nice bit of projection there, lackwit.
are you having fun spending so much time in the “cesspool” yet, moron?
it’s just so fun to poke you. It’s like pulling the string on one of those talking dolls to see what lines it will spout next.
haven’t you figured out you’re hopelessly addicted to this site, just like people who say they hated Howard Stern listened to him more than those who say they liked him?
nobody cares what you have to say, Robert, otherwise you’d be busy on your own blog.
simple math, right?
LOL
Ah, but the question is not the scope of the claims, but their epistemological footing. We can generate new experimental tests of QM virtually at will – it’s on very solid footing. What is remarkable about human-simian common descent is that it’s far harder to justify statements about the distant past, yet we have managed to produce such compelling justifications for the theory.
In which bizarre alternate universe is “mathematical rigor” the be-all and end-all of existence?
And how stupid do you have to be to think that we live there?
What a picture!
Before you decide whether or not atheism is philosophy, start by defining “god” or “gods”! I think the conflict comes down to defintions. Hardly anyone bothers to define “god” or “gods” before launching into these tirades. If one defines god deistically – as inpersonal agency/agencies that underpins and EXPLAINS the reality that science explains – then there’s no conflict between science and beliefs in such agency/agencies which explain science itself (e.g. why anything exists at all for science to describe, why THIS reality and not another)…
Science is by definiton the study of the physical world: all of spacetime and matter and energy. But if god or gods are said to exist in some sense BEYOND phsyical reality, then science can tell us nothing about it/them.
Pete K: “But if god or gods are said to exist in some sense BEYOND phsyical reality, then science can tell us nothing about it/them.”
Nor can any other discipline. Religion is as incapable of telling us anything about what is beyond all empirical ken as is science. Of course, anyone can make stuff up. But that’s not telling us anything. It’s just make believe.
Russell: yes that’s true…It’s all just interpretations…one could equally ask “Where did god(s) come from?” or “Why that god or goddess, and not any other?” Just because something is supposed to be beyond science, doen’t mean religious ideas are validated.
Isn’t it the case that QM even supports evolution? Since one of the underpinnings of understanding common descent is evolutionary sequences, which are made clear by radiometric dating, which is in turn based on radioactive decay — a quantum-mechanical effect.
I suppose it might be possible to get a rough idea of evolutionary sequence just from geological strata, but is there any other way to determine that, say, the Cambrian was about half a billion years ago, besides from radioactive decay?
R O’Brien: With respect to your earlier comment, Dan writes: “In which bizarre alternate universe is “mathematical rigor” the be-all and end-all of existence?”
Perhaps less confrontationally, I earlier opined that “we know darn well that much of what mathematics describes doesn’t exist in nature; why, then, would those of us who investigate what actually exists regard mathematics as anything other than a means, rather than an end?”
Since I was willing to consider the possibility that QM and common descent might have different epistemic status, and since unlike others I apparently have no personal bone to pick with you, do you think that you could favor me with a reply, perhaps off-thread as before? I can be reached at: epigene13@hotmail.com
Cordially…SH
Caledonian, J.J. Ramsey: While I wrote that I conceded the point that QM and common descent have different epistemic status, I did not mean to imply that one enjoyed more or less support than the other, only that the means by which these ideas were developed differ in method and in scope. Please excuse my clumsy language.
I agree with both of you in terms of the general confidence we should have in common descent, and as I hope my earlier post makes clear, the evidence for common descent is far stronger now than at any previous time. And, while the details of *how* common descent was realized here on Earth is likely to change as our knowledge improves, it is much less likely to be replaced by any subsequent theory than QM, which (like Newtonian mechanics before it) is likely to be regarded as a limiting case for the more comprehensive future model.
Regards…SH
hi all…just got here. 200 comments!? This is starting to look like one of Davison’s posts. Blogs. Same thing.
May I quote-mine (from memory, but it’ll be pretty close)? My favorite, by ur-ecologist Robert MacArthur: “The only requirements of a scientific method are honest observation and accurate logic.”
Evolution–common descent, limited common ancestry, speciation, natural selection as the mechanism of adaptation–is an inescapable conclusion from such an approach. To deny it is to ignore honest observations and to eschew accurate logic.
God(s) and other supernatural beings–not so much.
“The fact that some atheists frame their views so as to be little different from Huxley’s agnosticism but still insist on calling themselves atheist is, to that extent, misleading.”
However Huxley developed his concept it has become synonymous to “don’t know/not sure”. You can’t know anything based on observation in a stronger sense than science, so even if you have a theory supported beyond reasonable doubt it isn’t outside revision. Atheists like Dawkins may think their justifications approach this strength.
Scott:
I agree.
Russell:
“why the theory of the reals is complete (provable), while the the theory of the integers is not”
Hmm. IIRC, reals are complete as a topology (metric space). Dedekind cuts, I believe. But as a theory…? (On integers I cheat and plead Gödel’s second incompleteness thm to be more certain, but simpler it should be demand for infinite/transfinite induction, shouldn’t it?)
“then tell me that QM as a theory is as rigorous as the claim of common descent.”
I believe theoretical physicists call QFT more rigorous, or at least wellfounded and verified. (Though the quantisations seem still lack mathematicians rigor/rigour.)
On your excellent point of QM vs evolution scope and so risk for revision, I fully agree.
That’s probably because everyone has a reasonable idea of what one is talking about when one refers to God or a god. Depending on the discussion, one tends to be talking about the God of the Bible, or the God of Deism, or a little “g” god like Zeus, Odin, or Shiva, or several of the above. Yes, one could be talking about an impersonal being, but in practice, that is rarely the case, and it is certainly not the case when arguing against the content of most religions.
The idea of not teaching children to respect those who have faith threw me for a loop. Mainly because even when I dropped out of religion, I still respected a few who seemed so devout and dedicated and I even still loved the episcopalians, who seemed to understand the love and fellowship part of christianity (never was one, just knew alot who were cool). I guess I still like the episcos, but the anglicans can go f*** themselves. Anyway, I understand the argument Dawkins makes about this (faith allows for extremism, which can lead to harm), but what about the desire to teach my kids that everyone deserves respect on a basic level, no matter what they believe? As non-religious as I am, I don’t want my kids to write someone off just because they’re “stupid” enough to believe in gods.
And just out of curiousity, what’s with the anti-vowel guy?
Gd fr y.
Pz ss prgrm tht rmvs th vwls frm psts h ds nt lk.
gigantically OT, of course, but I should comment that I’ve seen something like this behavior in my dog. I’ve always assumed, rightly or wrongly, that it’s some buried animal instinct to seek out running water.
Running a bath drives her crazy; on opening the tap, I’ll hear the desperate scrambling of paws and claws on wood floor from the other end of the house, and she’ll come belting into the bathroom to bark at the running water, looking up occasionally as if to say “look master, I found some running water”. She reacts similarly to hosepipes and sprinklers.
Anyway, apologies for the interruption. Just an observation. Normal service resumes…
People deserve respect and basic human rights because they are people. Beliefs or belief systems are not people – or any kind of living things – and don’t deserve any respect unless they earn it.
A good person who holds some beliefs not supported by evidence would probably be a better person if you could convince them to abandon those unreasonable beliefs. At least, their attempts to do good would be more effective if they used methods that worked; the amount of well-intentioned charitable efforts that are wasted on ineffective prayer and superstition is a tragic waste. To say nothing of the people who think they’re doing good by, say, keeping adolescents ignorant about sexuality, or trying to separate lovers because they are of the same sex, or promoting the teaching of religious dogma instead of facts supported by evidence.
“And just out of curiousity, what’s with the anti-vowel guy?”
PZ disemvowels obnoxious and/or fixated trolls when neccessary to keep the thread focused – there is a lot of sick puppies out there and it is hard to be impassive at times for a normal person. If I remember O’Brien’s behaviour correctly he constantly slanders people.
Respect meaning nothing if it is not conditional. As a courtesy, it’s a good idea to grant people a certain level of automatic respect – but if they burn through it without earning more, so be it.
Torbjorn Larsson:
This is just about the reals and the natural numbers, completeness and incompleteness. This is a little sloppy but I hope clear enough to answer your question.
Suppose we have a domain and a language; the theory of the domain in the language is just the set of sentences true in the language when interpreted over the domain (assuming the primitive signs of the language to have their usual meaning).
A theory is said to be completely axiomatizable if there is a recursive set of axioms (this means that the set of axioms can be generated by an algorithm) from which every sentence in the theory can be deduced (using the usual rules of logic).
Whether you have a complete theory or not depends on the vocabulary of the language with which you are working, as well as the domain over which you are quantifying.
Working in first-order logic, with primitive signs +, * (multiplication), ^ (exponentiation), 1, 0, <, the theory of the natural numbers is not completely axiomatizable (this is one of Godel's theorems). However, the theory of the real numbers given the same vocabulary is completely axiomatizable. It turns out to be exactly the same as the theory of the algebraic numbers (numbers which are real solutions of polynomial equations with integer coefficients). (The fact that this theory is completely axiomatizable is a consequence of the fact that any two countable models of the theory are isomorphic. This implies the completeness of the theory by something called Vaught's test (a test for completeness). Vaught was a student of Tarski's and together with Tarski was a founder of model theory.) (One lesson of this is that using the vocabulary above and the usual first-order logic, you can't "capture" the difference between real numbers and algebraic numbers. In the other sense of "completeness" -- Dedekind's sense -- you can't say in first-order logic that the reals are complete. To get at this you have to do something like bring in SETS of real numbers, or SEQUENCES of real numbers, rather than just quantifying over individual reals.) But note this: if the primitive vocabulary contains only +, <, 1, 0, then the theory of the natural numbers in this reduced language turns out to be completely axiomatizable. (The axioms were given by Presburger in 1929.) This is all 1950's logic and now upper-level undergrad/beginning grad math logic stuff. So there's nothing special in my knowing it. I just happen to teach this stuff to philosophy students.
Somehow part of my message was cut out. So here goes again.
Torbjorn Larsson:
This is just about the reals and the natural numbers, completeness and incompleteness. This is a little sloppy but I hope clear enough to answer your question.
Suppose we have a domain and a language; the theory of the domain in the language is just the set of sentences true in the language when interpreted over the domain (assuming the primitive signs of the language to have their usual meaning).
A theory is said to be completely axiomatizable if there is a recursive set of axioms (this means that the set of axioms can be generated by an algorithm) from which every sentence in the theory can be deduced (using the usual rules of logic).
Whether you have a complete theory or not depends on the vocabulary of the language with which you are working, as well as the domain over which you are quantifying.
Working in first-order logic, with primitive signs +, * (multiplication), ^ (exponentiation), 1, 0, the theory of the natural numbers is not completely axiomatizable. This is one of Godel’s theorems. But working with the same vocabulary and logic, the theory of the real numbers is axiomatizable. (This is a consequence of Vaught’s test, due to Tarski’s student Vaught, which states that if a theory has infinite models, and if any two countable models of the theory are isomorphic, then the theory is completely axiomatizable. It turns out that the theory of the real numbers is the same set of sentences as the theory of the algebraic numbers — numbers which are solutions of polynomials with integer coefficients — and any countable model of the theory of the reals is isomorphic to the algebraic numbers. There are countable models of the theory of the reals by the Lowenheim-Skolem theorem.)
(One lesson of this is that using the vocabulary above and the usual first-order logic, you can’t “capture” the difference between real numbers and algebraic numbers. In the other sense of “completeness” — Dedekind’s sense — you can’t say in first-order logic that the reals are complete. To get at this you have to do something like bring in SETS of real numbers, or SEQUENCES of real numbers, rather than just quantifying over individual reals.)
But note this: if the primitive vocabulary contains only +, 0, 1 and <, then the theory of the natural numbers is complete as well. This means Godel's theorem doesn't apply here (and implies that * can't be defined in terms of +, 1, 0, and < alone). This is all 1950's logic and now upper-level undergrad/beginning grad math logic stuff. So there's nothing special in my knowing it. I just happen to teach this stuff to philosophy students.
Mysteriously bits of my message were cut out again. Oh, and now I see perhaps why — I was typing the less-than sign and that looks like part of a bit of HTML code? So here it is again.
Torbjorn Larsson:
This is just about the reals and the natural numbers, completeness and incompleteness. This is a little sloppy but I hope clear enough to answer your question.
Suppose we have a domain and a language; the theory of the domain in the language is just the set of sentences true in the language when interpreted over the domain (assuming the primitive signs of the language to have their usual meaning).
A theory is said to be completely axiomatizable if there is a recursive set of axioms (this means that the set of axioms can be generated by an algorithm) from which every sentence in the theory can be deduced (using the usual rules of logic).
Whether you have a complete theory or not depends on the vocabulary of the language with which you are working, as well as the domain over which you are quantifying.
Working in first-order logic, with primitive signs +, * (multiplication), ^ (exponentiation), 1, 0, and less-than, the theory of the natural numbers is not completely axiomatizable. This is one of Godel’s theorems. But working with the same vocabulary and logic, the theory of the real numbers is axiomatizable. (This is a consequence of Vaught’s test, due to Tarski’s student Vaught, which states that if a theory has infinite models, and if any two countable models of the theory are isomorphic, then the theory is completely axiomatizable. It turns out that the theory of the real numbers is the same set of sentences as the theory of the algebraic numbers — numbers which are solutions of polynomials with integer coefficients — and any countable model of the theory of the reals is isomorphic to the algebraic numbers. There are countable models of the theory of the reals by the Lowenheim-Skolem theorem.)
(One lesson of this is that using the vocabulary above and the usual first-order logic, you can’t “capture” the difference between real numbers and algebraic numbers. In the other sense of “completeness” — Dedekind’s sense — you can’t say in first-order logic that the reals are complete. To get at this you have to do something like bring in SETS of real numbers, or SEQUENCES of real numbers, rather than just quantifying over individual reals.)
But note this: if the primitive vocabulary contains only +, 0, 1 and less-than, then the theory of the natural numbers is completely axiomatizable (proved by Presburger before Godel’s theorems, I think). A consequence of this is that Godel’s theorems don’t apply in this case. Another consequence is that multiplication over the natural numbers can’t be defined in terms of +, 0, 1, and less-than.
This is all 1950’s logic and now upper-level undergrad/beginning grad math logic stuff. So there’s nothing special in my knowing it. I just happen to teach this stuff to philosophy students.
Sorry for the three posts of interest to only one person besides me (or maybe only me).
I am sure that PZ is much smarter than I am, and that is what makes me bring this up.
I don’t understand- why play ball with the ID people at all?
CCP: Your source is missing a few things. Most notably, hypotheses and the ideas of various sorts that make them possible. Darwin himself pointed this out when he said how an observation has to be for or against a view for it to be of any use.
Michael Kremer:
If you want to use the characters “>” and “< " in an HTML posting, you need to escape them as HTML entites. Thus: ">"=">“, “<“=”<". The ampersand character itself is escaped as "&"="&"
Well, damn. One more time:
Michael Kremer:
If you want to use the characters “>” and “<” in an HTML posting, you need to escape them as HTML entites. Thus: “>”=”>”, “<”=”<“. The ampersand character itself is escaped as “&”=”&”.
And an addendum, after the fiasco of the previous post:
However, you have to be very, very careful because the “preview” mode of the comment posting form will translate HTML entities in the original post, and posting after previewing will end up with the original characters messing things up. So maybe spelling things out is better after all.
I wouldn’t praise quantum physics too much. Sure, the math is impressive, and the precision with which its prediction match the experimental results is breathtaking, but we already know that something must be wrong with it — because it doesn’t contain the theory of relativity. The search for just what is wrong with it is what all the string theory (sorry: p-brane) hype is about.
Owlmirror wrote:
No.
Before radiometric dating was developed, people sometimes tried to estimate time from the thickness of sediments. But sedimentation speeds vary widely, and you can always have periods of no deposition or periods of erosion, so the results people got were completely laughable — like the Cretaceous ending three million years ago instead of 65.5.
Still, I wouldn’t say quantum mechanics supports evolution. It is merely irreconcilable with YEC, and what is not.
Owlmirror: Thanks!
As to the Cambrian specifically, and “about half a billion years ago,” you might be able to do a workaround with molecular clocks, suitably calibrated and cross-checked, based on some of the divergences in phyla evidenced in the fossils.
Of course, calibrating the molecular clocks is, in turn, would be dependent on radiometric dating of bracketing timeframes.
But there are various independent lines of evidence which do support each other to a greater or lesser extent–independent radiometric methods, the fossil and geological sequences, the molecular data…
Haven’t read the entire thread since the last time I peeked, so apologies if I’m repeating something already pounded into the substratum.
David MarjanoviÄ:
I think it can be said, although it’s too vague as a statement to be useful other than to respond to those who accept QM but not common descent – which was the argument made above that I was responding to.
That is, I think it’s obviously more accurate to say that radiometric dating supports evolution. It’s just that radiometric dating is (one of the many things that is) derived from QM.
It’s sort of like saying “mathematics supports evolution”, rather than the more specific “statistical analysis and comparisons of blood proteins and DNA supports evolution”.
Keith Douglas:
In my view, hypotheses and the testing thereof are an extremely powerful form of “accurate logic,” and experiments are especially powerful in that they build the logic into the observation process, and measurements are especially useful observations. But perfectly good science can be done that does not test an explicit hypothesis. Collecting observations and drawing logical conclusions from them is, I still think, all that “science” entails…Darwin’s point was, I think, that you need the “logic” part AND the observations.
IMO.
“like trying to couple sugar and shit on our dessert plate.”
So if science and religion are, respectively, the sugar and the shit, what’s the dessert plate? It can’t be our lives because having a “dessert” plate implies other plates. But why would science go with dessert? Is it that inessential? I don’t much care about the tired comment (Dawkins has said it all much better), but I am troubled by the thoughtless simile.
Michael:
3 x thanks!!! The completeness with algebraic numbers seems vaguely familiar. (Though this makes me suspect I’ve never seen the proof.) I see that in a sense there is indeed a connection between topological and numerical completeness, depending on what objects we are discssing.
I’m not so sure about all the details. It would be easier if we were discussing (commutative) rings on integers and reals. For example, the exponentiation seem to be superfluous here.
That multiplication can’t be defined in terms of addition is a surprise to me. I thought the formal definition of multiplication in a ring was for convenience, since it seems to be possible to compose multiplication. OTOH I have never attempted the feat.
RICHARD DAWKINS WAS JUST ON THE COLBERT REPORT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I totally pooped my pants. I hope everyone else did too.
Safe home, PZ.