Someday, I’m going to have to get John Wilkins to explain to me why we still have universities with theology departments, and haven’t razed them to the ground and sent the few remaining rational people in them off to sociology and anthropology departments where their work might actually have some relevance. It’s terribly uncharitable of me, but after reading this interview with John Haught, a Georgetown University theologian, I’m convinced that the discipline is the domain of vapid hacks stuffed full of antiquated delusions. I also feel bad for the guy since he did testify on the side of reason in the Dover trial. On the other hand, he is one of Richard Dawkins’ fleas, and has a new book on the way complaining about those annoying New Atheists — which is another serious strike against theology. How is it that a book all the inmates in that moribund playroom full of pious god-wallopers despise has become the central focus of their academic careers? I could see it if they were actually addressing the arguments in The God Delusion, but they never seem to do more than squeal the same old arguments in favor of their tired dogmas.
This is an interview, so it jumps around awkwardly, which is too bad — the interviewer keeps interrupting with a change of subject as the absurdity builds. Here are a few of the rich and flaky highlights, though.
My chief objection to the new atheists is that they are almost completely ignorant of what’s going on in the world of theology. They talk about the most fundamentalist and extremist versions of faith, and they hold these up as though they’re the normative, central core of faith. And they miss so many things. They miss the moral core of Judaism and Christianity — the theme of social justice, which takes those who are marginalized and brings them to the center of society. They give us an extreme caricature of faith and religion.
Speaking for myself as one of those New Atheists (you do know there are more than four, right?), I have to admit he’s right. I don’t know what’s going on in the world of theology. And I don’t give a damn. Every time I read something by one of these credulous apologists for religion, I am further convinced that they are just making stuff up.
But also, they don’t seem to have much at all to do with modern religion. Huckabee is more of a representative of religious thought than Haught, yet somehow these theologians are so full of themselves that they think we have to pay attention to their enervated and irrelevant excuse-making.
Also speaking for myself, I certainly don’t regard the extremism as normative. I consider the feeble gullibility of, for instance, the average Lutheran church member to be the real problem — that our country and our culture as a whole endorses institutions that encourage credulity in the face of religious baloney. Even if the radical fringe weren’t throwing bombs, I’d still be asking people why the heck they believe in such patent nonsense.
The new atheists don’t want to think out the implications of a complete absence of deity. Nietzsche, as well as Sartre and Camus, all expressed it quite correctly. The implications should be nihilism.
Here we have yet another believer trying to tell us what the logical conclusion of atheism should be: in this case, nihilism. Doesn’t the fact that none of the New Atheists that I know of are nihilists matter? I guess if you’re willing to abandon any requirement for evidence, you can also ignore any evidence that counters your opinion.
How do we account for the courage to go on living in the absence of hope? As you move to the later writings of Camus and Sartre, those books are saying it’s difficult to live without hope. What I want to show in my own work — as an alternative to the new atheists — is a universe in which hope is possible.
NOT nihilists, ‘k? Complaining that the New Atheists is about hopelessness completely misses the point.
But in the new cosmography, it seems that mindless matter dominates the whole picture. And many scientists, like Dawkins and Gould, have said evolution has destroyed the notion of purpose. So one thing I do in my theology is to say that’s not necessarily true.
There is an apparent lack of cosmic intent in the universe; that’s simply the way it is. If anyone wants to claim that there is, then it’s up to them to provide the evidence for it. This, of course, is not the same as saying that humans lack any kind of purpose — as conscious, intelligent agents, we can certainly come up with purposes for our lives.
What do you say to the atheists who demand evidence or proof of the existence of a transcendent reality?
The hidden assumption behind such a statement is often that faith is belief without evidence. Therefore, since there’s no scientific evidence for the divine, we should not believe in God. But that statement itself — that evidence is necessary — holds a further hidden premise that all evidence worth examining has to be scientific evidence. And beneath that assumption, there’s the deeper worldview — it’s a kind of dogma — that science is the only reliable way to truth. But that itself is a faith statement. It’s a deep faith commitment because there’s no way you can set up a series of scientific experiments to prove that science is the only reliable guide to truth. It’s a creed.
I’m used to hearing people complain that atheism is a religion (at least Haught specifically denies that in the Dover transcript), but now science is a religion? Piffle. Science is pragmatic and operational. We don’t demand or expect proof of anything, but we do demand at least a little bit of evidence for any claim. Not as an article of faith, mind you, but simply because it has worked well before, and we’ve had a lot of mileage out of that expectation.
Is science the only way of knowing? It is a way, and it’s effective. I’ve noticed that those who complain about scientists always demanding evidence and material causes and testable hypotheses and such nuisances never seem to get around to telling us what their alternative method might be. Haught is no exception. Here he is, complaining about our elitist exclusivity and our “faith” in the scientific method, and he can’t be bother tell us how else he proposes we figure things out. Shall we pray for answers? Will divine revelation help us understand how, say, nerves conduct action potentials, or how genes specify body plans, or whether that girl likes us enough to say “yes” when we ask her to dance?
So tell us, John Haught, what is another reliable way to truth?
The traditions of religion and philosophy have always maintained that the most important dimensions of reality are going to be least accessible to scientific control. There’s going to be something fuzzy and elusive about them. The only way we can talk about them is through symbolic and metaphoric language — in other words, the language of religion. Traditionally, we never apologized for the fact that we used fuzzy language to refer to the real because the deepest aspect of reality grasps us more than we grasp it. So we can never get our minds around it.
Huh. I thought that mathematics was the way we talked about reality. It sure beats the useless language of religion.
And I think religion has been utterly useless in telling us anything about the nature of the world. If it were up to religion, we’d still be slaughtering goats to try and make it rain.
Let’s skip a lot of nonsense about neuroscience and evolution from this guy, and jump ahead to how he defines reality.
But let me get to my third understanding of religion. That’s a belief that this ultimate reality is at heart personal, by which we mean it is intelligent and is capable of love and making promises. This is the fundamental thinking about God in the Quran and the Bible — God is personal. Theologically speaking, personality is a symbol, like everything else in religion. Like all symbols, “personality” doesn’t adequately capture the full depth of ultimate reality. But the conviction of the Abrahamic religions is that if ultimate reality were not at least personal — at least capable of everything that humans are capable of — then we could not surrender ourselves fully to it. It would be an “it” rather than a “thou” and therefore would not reach us in the depth of our being.
I’m sorry, but that is an awful lot of bullshit. He demands a personal god because personal authority is all he understands…but that, of course, is no evidence for this god’s existence. It’s only evidence for why he has gone through all these silly rationalizations to convince himself that this being is real. It’s how he justifies nonsense like this:
Let’s take the example of prayer. You are a Christian. Do you believe God answers your prayers?
Yes, but I have to go along with Martin Gardner here and ask, what if God answered everybody’s prayers? What kind of world would we have? I also have to think of what Jesus said when his disciples asked him to teach them to pray. What he told them, in effect, was to pray for something really big. He called it “the kingdom of God.” What that means is praying for the ultimate fulfillment of all being, of all the universe. So when we pray, we’re asking that the world might have a future. I believe God is answering our prayers but not always in the ways we want. In the final analysis, we hope and trust that God will show or reveal himself as one who has been accompanying our prayers and responding to the world all along, but not necessarily in the narrow way that the human mind is able to conjure up.
Sometimes god answers your prayers, sometimes he doesn’t, sometimes he does something completely unexpected. There’s no pattern, no predictability, no rules — god is a cosmic slot machine. This is sophisticated theological thought?
And it just gets worse.
What do you make of the miracles in the Bible — most importantly, the Resurrection? Do you think that happened in the literal sense?
I don’t think theology is being responsible if it ever takes anything with completely literal understanding. What we have in the New Testament is a story that’s trying to awaken us to trust that our lives make sense, that in the end, everything works out for the best. In a pre-scientific age, this is done in a way in which unlettered and scientifically illiterate people can be challenged by this Resurrection. But if you ask me whether a scientific experiment could verify the Resurrection, I would say such an event is entirely too important to be subjected to a method which is devoid of all religious meaning.
Apparently, the resurrection happened, but it was just too darn important to be supported by that ghastly non-religious “evidence” stuff. Nice dodge. You’d have to be an idiot to fall for it, though.
Now are you ready for some real hilarity?
So if a camera was at the Resurrection, it would have recorded nothing?
If you had a camera in the upper room when the disciples came together after the death and Resurrection of Jesus, we would not see it. I’m not the only one to say this. Even conservative Catholic theologians say that. Faith means taking the risk of being vulnerable and opening your heart to that which is most important. We trivialize the whole meaning of the Resurrection when we start asking, Is it scientifically verifiable? Science is simply not equipped to deal with the dimensions of purposefulness, love, compassion, forgiveness — all the feelings and experiences that accompanied the early community’s belief that Jesus is still alive. Science is simply not equipped to deal with that. We have to learn to read the universe at different levels. That means we have to overcome literalism not just in the Christian or Jewish or Islamic interpretations of scripture but also in the scientific exploration of the universe. There are levels of depth in the cosmos that science simply cannot reach by itself.
Wow. The amazing disappearing camera. If something theologically significant were ever to occur, god would conveniently make all the evidence disappear.
This guy is completely batty. If this is an example of theological thinking, I’m entirely justified in dismissing this entire academic discipline — these guys are the equivalent of astrologers, still lurking in the spider-webbed corners of our universities.
“Sometimes god answers your prayers, sometimes he doesn’t, sometimes he does something completely unexpected. There’s no pattern, no predictability, no rules — god is a cosmic slot machine. This is sophisticated theological thought?”
Sounds like George Carlin except that George has a sense of humor.
Oh, the blithering wrongness!
This man is supposed to be a serious scholar, but he sounds like he had a run-in with a brick wall and an Orangina bottle. The upside is that with every breath, he proves his irrelevance to the megachurch mainstream of American religion.
I don’t think James Dobson would say that.
There are only “new atheists” because there are “new theists”, provoking new, deadly attitudes and dumb behaviour! For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. You have to have theists first, for any kind of atheism to have any meaning.
So saith the theologian:
So, you’re telling me that the Grand Canyon has to be a person in order for me to feel impressed when I stand on the rim of it? Utter frothing lunacy. The fact that it is much bigger and much older than myself or any other human — indeed, much older than human civilization — only makes it more awe-inspiring.
I remember being slightly swayed 10, 15 years ago with Haught’s type of arguments–not that a god existed, but that real religion was all this fuzzy symbolic “warm glowing warming glow” (as Homer Simpson once said of television) and that the fundies were missing the point with their childish literal-mindedness.
Yes, I was knee-deep in books by Joseph Campbell, Mircea Eliade, Elaine Pagels, Karen Armstrong, John Dominic Crossan, John Shelby Spong, etc. But after a couple years I just realized even this view of religion was too heavy to keep dragging around. It was after reading S.T. Joshi’s biography of H.P. Lovecraft in 1996 where Joshi showed how the Cthulhu mythos was actually a parody of religion. And it all suddenly made sense: “the transubstantiation of the Eucharist” or “There is no god but God” had as much explanatory power of reality, symbolic or otherwise, as “Ia! Ia! Cthulhu ftagn!” or “Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn.” That is to say, none whatsoever. And Lovecraft knew it. And then I knew it.
And so then I put away childish things–not fundamentalist religion that Haught seems to think atheists are obsessed with, but the liberal, “tolerant” and “symbolic” kind that reduces everything to everything else, a huge mish-mash of wishful thinking, truly an intellectual dead end. Now that’s nihilism.
I would actually love to see one of these asshats get booed off a stage at a megachurch. Or, Hell, even a nice, quiet Baptist church that seems perfectly sensible and serene — until he tells them that they don’t believe what they think they believe, that really Christianity is so much more sophisticated than to believe that the Resurrection actually happened. At which point, well, they’d probably burn him for a heretic or something.
That’s certainly what would have happened to a guy like this at my old church, anyway.
Yes, I see the same games being played with words, concepts, and categories which dance, jump around, and switch sides as they try to play tennis without a net. A nice, smug little scold which apparently fails to ever engage with any actual issues.
When religion contains something wise, profound, moving, and meaningful to atheists — and it often does — that means that the religion has encroached onto philosophy, psychology, ethics, art, or science. In other words, it has gone into secular territory — or else it would not have managed to make sense to people who don’t belong to the religion or believe in the God. Complaining that atheists don’t pay enough attention to those things misses the whole point. You can’t indicate common ground so you can establish that your ground is higher.
Haught said:
Reading what PZ quoted here, I would say that he really means that “we trivialize the whole meaning of religion when we start asking ‘Is it true?'” Who cares? It’s all symbol and metaphor and comfort and let’s pretend. Don’t take it literally for God’s sake. Except when we do.
Blake Stacey #4 wrote:
No, no, no — the Grand Canyon has to be made by a Person in order for you to be impressed when you stand on the rim of it. It has to be made by Someone just for you to feel impressed — or you’ll become a nihilist and throw yourself into it. I guess.
Someone get me some mustard for that brain pretzel.
I’m waiting for the day that the neuroscientists get around to proving that faith itself does not exist, that it is an ontological argument without a referent in objective reality. Only then will we be able to describe how it is that people come to believe this batshit.
Is it genetic, epigenetic, memetic, etc.? Believing in even the possibility of such a thing as faith begs questions in metaepistemology that the theologians need to address, e.g. In what situations should one use reason over faith, and vice versa. If one has a headache, should one pray, take aspirin, or both? What does the answer say about the ideas of non-contradiction and objective reality?
Until we know more about how our minds model reality and form beliefs, we will not be able to fully shake the opinions of people who believe that faith is real, and a viable form of cognition.
Re: “The new atheists don’t want to think out the implications of a complete absence of deity.”
I am an atheist, have been for 68 years, so I don’t know if I am an old one or a new one. But, PZ, I think he is right. I think that George Carlin’s analysis is correct: (paraphrase) Think how stupid people are who have an IQ of 100, and then realize that half the people in the world are stupider than that.
We the atheists, may be right about the non-existence of God. But, if there were no religion, most of the people in the world would feel hopeless, valueless and completely lost. I know that this doesn’t apply to the rest of the world, but, in this country we should spend less time trying to convince people about non-existence and more time enforcing the First Amendment. Let them have their “blankie” to snuggle up to for warmth and comfort, just don’t let them insist that everyone else has to snuggle up with them.
I can’t interpret his view on prayer as anything other than that god will give you anything you want, as long as you don’t ask for anything. And that seems to be the same kind of argument he uses for everything else as well. Is this actually convincing to anyone who thinks about it, even for a second? And this guy has made a career out of this? Along with countless others? Boy, did I choose the wrong thing to study.
And I’ve really got to buy that Lovecraft biography.
Wasn’t that a film?
The disappearing camera trick just blows my mind. The event sort of not quite really happened, in that it really occured in a not-literally sort of way, even though the events are portrayed accurately, and it just isn’t fair to ask questions that would make thinking about them less, err, transcendental and non-imaginary. But in a deeply meaningful and extremely sophisticated sort of way, obviously (did I get that about right?).
That’s some serious heavy duty doublethink going on there. Sorry, I mean sophisticated theological thought.
Theology is what you get when you try to rationalize the irrational.
It has to be made by Someone just for you to feel impressed — or you’ll become a nihilist and throw yourself into it. I guess.
Tsk, you’re not thinking like a christian; you’ll throw other people and puppies into it. ;-)
No no, you are not reading the fine print. Of course there’s a pattern! God answers serious prayers coming from respectable theologians like Haught, but not everyone’s prayers, it simply wouldn’t do if God got bogged down with all sorts of frivolous requests coming from the rabble!
I took a stab at tearing this thing apart last night:
http://scaryreasoner.wordpress.com/2007/12/18/john-haught-is-a-terrible-philosopher/
One thing I noted is that even if atheism actually did invariably lead to nihilism, this is not a good argument for the truth claims of religion. Complaining that atheism leads to nihilism is making an argument from consequences, — that nihilism is undesirable, therefore atheism is false — which is a logical fallacy.
Re: Disappearing Camera
I think he was saying that the camera would not record anything.
In other words, without faith there is no violation of rules. (This makes his beliefs in miracles kind of batty – would only he be able to see his healthy daughter while everyone else would think she died?)
Theology is a philosophy created solely by people in an altered state of consciousness. It is like a stoner that thinks his poetry totally kicks ass, if the bastard were to sober up, he would look at it and say… “Maybe I need to cut back…” But theologists never sober up, they just keep pumping out the Peace, Love and Understanding crap, while the Huckabees out there are jacked up on PCP going at the windows with a baseball bat.
We don’t need to read through the three book epic, Ode to a Bag of Cheeto’s, to know that all of it is crap.
Once upon a time, I was immersed in a fairly moderate christian environment and belief system. Speaking only from my n=1 perspective, I’ve found it a LOT easier to find optimism and hope in my own life as an atheist that I *ever* did as an aspiring christian.
At the risk of sounding like an echo, {hopelessness | depression} != atheism != nihlism.
“We trivialize the whole meaning of the Resurrection when we start asking, Is it scientifically verifiable?”
I don’t remember Doubting Thomas being struck blind in the Resurrection story when he asked for some damn evidence. Did Jesus say “Go ahead and finger my undead body, as long as you don’t make any repeatable measurements”?
I don’t think he’s saying that camera would have disappeared or that it would have failed to record anything. What he’s saying (if I’m reading it right; it’s awfully hard to tell) is that the theologically significant event didn’t happen in that room; it happened inside people’s heads. So there would have been nothing visible there for the camera to record, except a lot of blissful Apostles.
In other words, the proper interpretation of the Resurrection is as a case of the Emperor’s new clothes. Only a vulgarian would insist on an actual, physical Resurrection.
“You’d have to be an idiot to fall for it, though.”
Yup, that seems to be the way it works.
I once pointed out some obvious absurdity to my brother. He huffily replied that some very intelligent people have spent a lot of time thinking about these issues.
Right, starting from idiotic principles.
I understood Haught to be saying that a camera would not have recorded Jesus as physically present among the disciples, not that the camera would vanish. He is suggesting that these stories are symbolic, and that they encapsulate in narrative form experiences that were subjective rather than physical in nature. Why would you criticize him for admitting this?
I don’t see what the problem is. Plenty of things are studied at universities which I don’t particularly have an interest in or an appreciation for. Surely you aren’t suggesting that we should keep or cut departments and programs based on whether everyone appreciates them.
I wonder what you’d make of some appreciative comments about theology an atheist made on my blog recently. Do take a look – I have more to offer than just parody video games and critical reviews of O’Leary’s books! :)
PZ,
I understand why you don’t care what is going on in theology, but I still have to ask, why is it the religious always assume that those who aren’t religious simply “don’t know.” They all seem to think we, the non believers, grew up in a cave in Antarctica or something, if we simply knew then we’d believe. Every single conversation inevitably gets the the point where they say something to the effect of, “you should read/study the Bible.” To which I explain that I have, thank you, as well as the Koran, Talmud, Hindu Vedas, and Buddhist texts, and with the exception of latter, they’re all equally full of crap. The only one of the above I don’t find ridiculous is the school of Buddhism that effectively says whether there is a God or not is irrelevant, how you act is what matters.
Why is it they assume ignorance on their part, are they so arrogant as to believe that they’re qualified to “teach” us?
To my “narrow” mind, this is just a long way of saying, “Pray for things to turn out however they turn out,” which completely contradicts the meaning of the word “prayer”. I mean, when someone says, “pray tell…” are they saying, “I hope you end up saying whatever you end up saying in whatever way you end up saying it”?
And so then I put away childish things–not fundamentalist religion that Haught seems to think atheists are obsessed with, but the liberal, “tolerant” and “symbolic” kind that reduces everything to everything else, a huge mish-mash of wishful thinking, truly an intellectual dead end. Now that’s nihilism.
*applause*
indeed, just like with most of the religious, Haught projects his own unconscious realization of the intellectual dead end that is religious apologetics on to the rest of us.
they only are barely consciously aware that they are on a sinking ship, and assume that everyone else around them is in the same boat.
instead, the rest of us are sitting pretty on a nice yacht, wondering why in the hell these folks aren’t jumping off that ship.
They all seem to think we, the non believers, grew up in a cave in Antarctica or something, if we simply knew then we’d believe.
it’s not an uncommon thinking pattern to assume that if your audience only could see the things you have, or experienced the same things you have, that they would think the same way about them.
I used to think the same way about science. “If everyone could just see how selection actually does work to shape the direction of phenotypes in a population, they would of course see the value of the ToE”
rather naive thinking, now that I look back on it after 20 years of trying to convince the unconvincable of the evidences supporting the ToE.
the only difference between religious apologists and scientists in this matter, is that scientists have independently verifiable evidence to support their conclusions.
apologists don’t, and never will.
hence, logically, I have to agree completely with PZ that schools of theology are intellectual dead ends and a complete waste of time.
the positive contributions from theology are philosophical or sociological in nature, not actually theological (they simply can’t be – you’d have to have conclusions verified by a deity!), so while theologists might point to positive contributions they have made, they would have made the exact same contributions working within the framework of a dept. of sociology or philosophy.
I don’t remember Doubting Thomas being struck blind in the Resurrection story when he asked for some damn evidence. Did Jesus say “Go ahead and finger my undead body, as long as you don’t make any repeatable measurements”?
LOL
gotta remember that one.
All i can say is Wow. I love the concept that any religious miracle is indistinguishable from hearsay. I could use this man to testify while registering my local chapter of the pastafarian church.
Just yesterday I recall someone commenting on how atheists bend the definition of religion to include things not traditionally thought of as religious. I think this interview is a perfect example of the bending of the definition of science by the religious, mixed with a healthy dose of projection. Why do all their arguments come down to atheism is a dogmatic religion? You can see them moving in that direction before they even get there. And as usual, they never define this religion of atheism.
The guy is attributing religious connotations to things that are not such. If everything is a belief, then everything is religion. And if science is in fact a religion, it’s still the only one with any evidence of its existence. Science’s other key difference was that it was discovered, not revealed.
And when will someone point out the obvious, that if religion then exists only to provide “hope”, then is not its fallacy completely revealed? Is it not then the world’s oldest placebo?
Can Haught really not understand that his method of argument can be used to “prove” anything including both theism and atheism?
Theology, huh, yeah
What is it good for
Absolutely nothing
Uh-huh
Yes, I understand that the camera wouldn’t literally disappear — having apparatus mysteriously vanish would actually be weak evidence for the supernatural event. It just wouldn’t work, or wouldn’t record anything.
PZ,
I think you handled this article long before it was written, and in just two words: Courtier’s Reply.
This is nonsense. Science gives an account of every causative influence in your local environment. Unless you think knowledge gets into your head by way of magic or miracle, science is your only means of knowing anything about anything, as science has ably demonstrated through science. Haught’s “scientific experiments to prove that science is the only reliable guide to truth” amount to every scientific experiment ever performed from Galileo until now. Scientific imperialism didn’t have to be true – we started out with only the most mundane slithers of knowledge, nothing like the great systems of knowledge the philosophers and theologians laid claim to, and there was no reason to think it would consume everything in its path – but now it’s just a raw fact that science is “the only reliable way to truth.” We won. You lost. Get over it.
When I read Haught I’m reminded of (I think) Hitchens’s commentary that the intellectual contortions required to justify religion are themselves arguments against religion. I’m trying to comprehend his description of the great warm fuzzy that is “ultimate reality,” but it just bounces around in my head before flying out again. Just what is “ultimate reality” anyhow? It sounds to me like the kind of gibberish I would hear from Depak Chopra.
My great frustration is that I am fairly sure people like Haught are well meaning, but for the life of me I can’t figure out what that meaning is. Do we even speak the same language? This airy sort of religious talk is the background I grew up in. In it’s way it’s preferable to the more literal kind, but even as a small child it never made any sense to me at all. For years I wondered if there was something wrong with me that it all seemed so meaningless. Now I’m certain the problem is I just never learned to speak bullshit.
Haught’s worst argument, imo, is that it shouldn’t matter that we could never get scientific confirmation of Jesus’s ressurection. What!? Either it happened or it didn’t. If not, what great news for mankind! What powerful confirmation that all that love he ascribes to the early church is accessible to us at any time, without need for imaginary deities, ridiculous domgmas, or the abandonment of reason. That would indeed be a gospel worth spreading.
Why do all their arguments come down to atheism is a dogmatic religion?
i assume you meant that rhetorically, since the obvious answer drawn from the rest of your post is:
projection.
the more interesting question is:
what does it mean psychologically when the primary arguments coming from theologians (and all the religious, frankly), commonly start with such massive levels of projection?
projection and denial are psychological defense mechanisms.
are they just defending a worldview that subconsciously even they realize is undefendable, so end up reacting by putting up psychological defense mechanisms?
(long time in uffish thought he stood)
PZ, PZ, PZ. Haught, whatever his faults, is not claiming that science is a religion. He’s saying that the metaphysical stance adopted by many practicing scientists about the natural world, often incorrectly conflated with science, seems to go hand-in-hand with the enthronment of science as the ‘only way to Truth’. I think that’s a fair statement in and of itself, though one could certainly ask what concept of ‘Truth’ is being discussed, and whether it is coherent with the practice of science….
Anyway, Haught is in the business of constructing meaning for claims that can not, by definition, be tested. As long as there are people who feel that untestable claims must be made meaningful there are going to be jobs for theologians. And philosophers. And poets. And Tin Pan Alley tunesmiths, etc. Granted that all of this hemming and hawing by God-whallopers is vague and not terrible useful to the practice of science, do most of us really want to live in a Joe Friday Universe, devoid of everything but the facts, ma’am?
Besides, even if some of us really did want that, it would never happen. Secular society would continue to pursue metaphor and ambiguity for a number of reasons, among them aesthetic, and the scientific community would still have questions that not only lack answers, but which lack any confirmed correspondence with reality. You may not like to hear this, but many popularizations of science function very much like theology. That is, they employ metaphor and are often ambiguous about the sort of conclusions that can be drawn from them. I confess to feeling conficted about what this might mean. Certainly I would never say that science is religion, or that each ‘way of knowing’ is equally justified on logical grounds, or that each is equally effective at looking at the natural world. But I also feel impoverished by the idea that any thing by itself is a source of ‘Truth’ with a capital ‘T’. Not saying you’re saying that, mind, just demarcating my little hill of angst.
Speaking of that elusive truth, it seems plain to me that Haught is not congenial to atheists Old or New, and despite having been an ally of mainstream science in the creo/evo wars, he now has the cheek to be one of Dr. Dawkins’s fleas. And this grates on some, and now you’ve called him on it, and not just him, but his whole academic discipline, his preferred mode of thought, etc.
(trollishly) I’m not concerned or anything (wink wink), but don’t you think there might be a baby or two in all that bathwater?
PZ, PZ, PZ.
you’ve been here long enough to know that condescension doesn’t play well, Scott.
it’s a warning sign right off that you think your argument might be weak.
As long as there are people who feel that untestable claims must be made meaningful there are going to be jobs for theologians.
exactly the whole point of the thread, and exactly why logically theologians are in a dead end job.
trying to form a convoluted reasoning process to defend one’s position is logical, but the arguments themselves raised by Haught are not.
It’s also an argument from consequences. “But look, atheism makes you hopeless! Do you really want that?”
I completely agree that we don’t and can’t know if science is a reliable way to truth. Science is the only reliable way to reality.
Now, whether any truth exists behind reality is an untestable and therefore boring and time-wasting question. :-|
And how is theology supposed to answer it? By simply assuming an answer? How would it find out if it were wrong?
——————-
Interesting. That’s the opposite metaphor from what I use: it simply hangs in the air (without any connection to the ground of evidence). Iä! Iä! :-)
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windy for Molly.
It’s also an argument from consequences. “But look, atheism makes you hopeless! Do you really want that?”
I completely agree that we don’t and can’t know if science is a reliable way to truth. Science is the only reliable way to reality.
Now, whether any truth exists behind reality is an untestable and therefore boring and time-wasting question. :-|
And how is theology supposed to answer it? By simply assuming an answer? How would it find out if it were wrong?
——————-
Interesting. That’s the opposite metaphor from what I use: it simply hangs in the air (without any connection to the ground of evidence). Iä! Iä! :-)
—————-
windy for Molly.
(trollishly) I’m not concerned or anything (wink wink), but don’t you think there might be a baby or two in all that bathwater?
we’ve looked carefully.
nope.
safe to toss out the whole thing.
test
test
Well, you know what they say about dazzling with brilliance or baffling with bullshit.
Frito: In honor of your comment, I am going to start a thrashcore band and name it “Huckabee on PCP”.
test
test
test
test
test
test
1) All elephants are pink.
2) Bob (or Jesus) is an elephant.
3) Bob is Pink.
Theologians are people who spend millenia explaining all of the complex ways in which this syllogism can be interpreted. They write innumerable books with differing definitions of ‘pink.’ They burn one another at the stake over what constitutes an elephant.
And the one thing that causes them to close ranks and huff is we atheists, who keep telling them that elephants aren’t pink.
Steve “Garbage in, theology out.” James
The Bible is a symbol of stupidity and wishful thinking, nothing more.
There’s nothing wonderful about it.
Haught, you are purveying recycled, second-rate religious bullshit.
Stop conning people.
Stop wasting people’s time.
David,
Is it even an argument from consequences? Isn’t it more like, “what’s wrong with you guys? Don’t you know that Atheism is supposed to make you hopeless? Why aren’t you hopeless?”
And how is theology supposed to answer it? By simply assuming an answer? How would it find out if it were wrong?
there’s only one way, and “god” ain’t talkin’.
Theologians are people who spend millenia explaining all of the complex ways in which this syllogism can be interpreted. They write innumerable books with differing definitions of ‘pink.’ They burn one another at the stake over what constitutes an elephant.
well, you know what they say…
“idle hands are the devil’s playground”
:P
here is my Christmas prayer:
God it is the 21st century. we have Tivo, we have You Tube, We have 24 hour cable news. They have some great entertainment but they also show us jihad, suicide bombings, beheadings, and people who think Mike Huckabee would make a good president. Please stop asking 6+ billion people to leave the salvation of their eternal soul to the mistranslated ramblings of a few illiterate goat herders and camel jockeys.
God, please put in an appearance, take over all the networks, (not ESPN on Sundays, though), speak in all languages, post your eternal word online with a Creative Commons license. No burning bushes. No whispering to unwashed prophets living alone in a desert. I am asking for you to take an hour of prime time to set the record straight. We’ll still be able to sin, We’ll still have free will. we just won’t have a reason to kill each other over who is right and wrong.
Here’s what struck me in all the bibble:
He keeps going on about hope. How theism offers hope; how atheism doesn’t.
I assume that by “hope” he means “hope for immortality.” In my experience, that’s usually what Christian theologians mean when they talk about “hope.” And that is the main thing believers hope for that atheists don’t. After all, I have hope for lots of things. I hope my new book does well; I hope my baby niece will be healthy and happy; I hope global warming gets handled before the climate changes so drastically that civilization collapses. None of these hopes require God or an afterlife.
So basically, he’s saying that life is meaningless and hopeless unless you get to have it forever.
How unbelievably greedy.
To riff off of Dawkins’ “We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones” piece: The fact that we got to be born at all makes us impossibly, astronomically lucky. To complain about the fact that you get roughly 70 or 80 years instead of infinity… it’s like winning a million dollars in the lottery, and complaining about the fact that it wasn’t a hundred billion.
No, worse. It’s like winning a million dollars in the lottery, and complaining because it isn’t infinite access to all the riches and wealth in the world.
What a whiner.
I am extremely hesitant to dismiss an entire scholarly field, even the field of theology. However, I’ve got to agree that if this interview is representative of theology, then it deserves to be dismissed.
A few specific comments:
I caught him using the naturalistic fallacy to argue that the purpose of the universe is the “intensification of consciousness”. I suppose most of the rest of the universe outside of Earth is inherently evil, since it doesn’t promote consciousness?
I’ve argued that science is in fact the only way of knowing (under a broad definition of science). In brief, the only way to verify another “way of knowing”, is to compare its results to the scientific results.
Surely he should realize that the eyewitness accounts of Jesus’ resurrection, in principle count as scientific evidence, albeit very weak evidence?
Not relevant to theology, but this bit made me chuckle:
I guess he’s too busy theologizing to make his own damn tea.
No, I don’t think that’s what Haught meant at all. I’m guessing that what he’s saying (as many/most theologians do) is that Jesus was not physically present. Most people would characterise it as “mass hallucination”. But, presumably, it was a real enough experience that it motivated these people to go out and found the church. This isn’t some sort of ultra-liberal fringe view – it’s fairly mainstream.
This guy’s position seems very familiar – it’s essentially that of my parents, Catholic science graduates: Teilhardism, Vatican II and doublethink (naturalism + final cause). Consequently it seems, to me, to be mainstream (however rare) and the least wrong kind of religious belief. Nevertheless, it’s obviously a load of bullshit that can only tend to make the world safe for fundamentalism, as it always has.
One last comment:
Haught has a very confused perspective on what sort of meaning atheists find in life. First, he says atheism logically implies nihilism, and the new atheists refuse to admit it. Then he says the new atheists say “evolution destroys the notion of purpose”. Which is it?
The typical atheist opinion on these things is not to hard to state. There is no cosmic purpose, only a human-derived purpose, and that suffices. I hear this so often, I don’t know how Haught could have missed it when writing his book.
If you had a camera in the upper room when the disciples came together after the death and Resurrection of Jesus, we would not see it.
Suddenly this all makes sense to me. Jesus dies and comes back after three days, tells his followers that they can live forever by drinking his blood, and after his rebirth he doesn’t show up on film. Obviously Haught believes Jesus is a vampire. It’s the theology of Buffy.
As an atheist that spent two years in seminary, theology departments aren’t a waste. They tend to serve as a good source of education for people studying religion and not theology.
Unless you think knowledge gets into your head by way of magic or miracle, science is your only means of knowing anything about anything
I don’t agree.
There are alternate paths to knowledge, to awareness and new realizations–art is one. Listen to Schubert’s fifteenth quartet, or Brahm’s Op. 51, no. 1, or Metallica’s new Orion or watch a ballet choreographed by a master and done by great dancers, or poetry, or great cinema. Scientific knowledge isn’t the only kind of knowledge.
LOL. Not trying to be condescending here, just accurate.
“But if you ask me whether a scientific experiment could verify the Resurrection, I would say such an event is entirely too important to be subjected to a method which is devoid of all religious meaning.”
Is the walking on water thing also too important to be subjected to the scientific method?
Feeding thousands with a couple of loaves of bread? Is that in “no trespassing – important religious stuff” zone also?
Maybe he could tick off all the things in the Bible that he considers to be beyond the bounds of science.
Then we could all try to respond with our feelings to those things.
What a bullshitter.
The great thing about miracles is that even when they happen (snicker), they don’t. God created the Grand Canyon (but all the evidence says water erosion and time). Theologically ‘sophisticated’ arguments amount to God works VERY hard to hide evidence of his labors- both sophistry and nihilism.
Incidentally, many millions of cockroaches thrive on batshit. Funny thing about cockroaches, some of them aren’t even metaphorical.
Personally, I prefer the theology of that great thinker Bill O’Reilly: Namely, “Sun comes up. Sun goes down. Tide comes in. Tide goes out”. Repeat ad nauseam. Theology is a meaningless game played by people who are unwilling to accept reality.
Good timing, this. I was just reading Matthew Chapman’s book about the Dover trial, “40 Days and 40 Nights” and last night I got to the chapter on Haught. Chapman, while profesing to be an atheist, goes on at great length about how he adores Haught. He quotes Haught extensively and I could think as I read this chapter was, “So this is an impressive argument?” Except for the Haught worship I have enjoyed Chapman’s decidedly breezy account so far. Anyone else read it?
“‘m used to hearing people complain that atheism is a religion (at least Haught specifically denies that in the Dover transcript), but now science is a religion? Piffle. ”
Let’s make everything a religion. That way we’ll get more respect, and tax breaks!
So much stupid from one person. One could build a course on logic and rhetoric around the fallacies of this interview.
The Salon letters to the editor are encouraging, though; here’s one good one:
Along with eliminating “Theology” schools from public college campuses, we need to eliminate schools of “Economics” and “Political Science”, two groups composed of contradictory & conflicting religious beliefs, with minimal relevance to reality, masquerading as “science”.
In the same way that the real-world aspects of Religion belong in the Psychology, Sociology & Anthropology departments, the real-world aspects of “Economics” belong in the Accounting department and the real-world aspects of “Poli-Sci” belong in the History, Sociology & Psychology departments. The “theoretical” aspects of both belong in the Philosophy department.
We would also be better served if the Psychology, Sociology, Anthropology & History departments were combined into a single “Human Behavior” department. This would entail placing select aspects of the original “disciplines” into the Biology/Medical, Literature/Language, and Philosophy Departments.
.
Perhaps if this theme was demonstrated more frequently, it wouldn’t be so easy to miss. It seems to me that large and powerful elements of contemporary Christianity are working overtime to further marginalize the already marginalized.
I think that comes under the heading of “not even wrong”. I don’t see how any functioning human being could spout such drivel and think it makes any kind of sense.
The part I thought was most revealing was early on, when Haught insisted that atheism implies nihilism. It points to the central authoritarianism of even this kind of loose, ‘no we don’t mean that literally’ style of religion– if there’s no big daddy (not even a sort-of-metaphorical one) to tell us what the meaning of life is, then there just can’t be any meaning at all. What a silly, impoverished bit of ideological dreck.
Wait, this is the sophisticated theology that Dawkins
et alia have been neglecting to address? Color me unimpressed.
In other words, god answers prayers, but only in a fashion that is completely indistinguishable in every way from god not answering prayers. Got it.
Sheesh. There’s so much handwaving going on here that I’m surprised he wasn’t buzzing around the room like a hummingbird. Honestly, if you’re going to say nothing, at least have the courtesy to say it briefly.
I nominate Patrick for a Molly.
Actually, empty space dominates the picture. Trillions of cubic lightyears of it, to an approximation. Sure, there is some stuff in that space, but so little as to be hardly worth mentioning, and most of that stuff (dark energy and dark matter) is completely irrelevant to our immediate existence. So tell me again just how important humans are, and just how carefully designed the Universe is for us, and just why the hell a Creator would put all that cold vacuum out there?
(Yeah, I’ve been reading some astrophysics of late. Far from nihilism, it produces a profound sense of awe and wonder in me, that existence is so unimaginably vast and ancient, and that the processes that dominate it have so little to do with my mundane concerns in my tiny corner of a tiny part of a relatively solid and warm and unimaginably tiny portion of that ancient vastness.)
The content of theology is roughly equivalent to the content of books about Star Wars. It’s about something, but it’s about something that people made up.
Unless you think knowledge gets into your head by way of magic or miracle, science is your only means of knowing anything about anything, as science has ably demonstrated through science.
Some people seem to exist solely to provide validation to the fuzzyheads’ ridiculous claims about scientists or atheists. This absurd claim about knowledge goes way beyond the usual fallacious generalizations. In fact, we don’t know the meanings of words, that we are in pain, that modus ponens is valid, that there is a sun in the sky, who our parents are, that there are infinitely many primes, that ships disappear below the horizon, where we were yesterday, or any of a host of other things via science. It isn’t by magic or miracles that knowledge gets into our heads, unless you consider it magical or a miracle that evolution was able to produce senses and a brain that are capable of forming accurate models of the world and to reason correctly about them. Science builds upon the more basic layer of knowledge that the brain can produce more or less directly, to produce more indirect inferential knowledge.
Knowledge is true justified belief. Science is a mechanism for producing justified beliefs that are frequently true; thus, it is a generator of knowledge, but it doesn’t only generate knowledge, it generates some false (but justified) beliefs too, and it doesn’t generate all knowledge. Religion is a mechanism for producing unjustified beliefs, and thus these beliefs cannot be trusted and are generally false. Of course religion is not the only such irrational “belief system”. But science is a rational system for generating beliefs because it continually subjects those beliefs to scrutiny and demands that they be aligned with more and more evidence, rejecting those that aren’t and thus providing more and more justification for the remaining beliefs, more and more increasing the likelihood that they are true. Science can be likened to an interactive proof system. (Lest someone balk at the word “proof”, such systems aren’t really proof systems; there is always “some small probability” of reaching a false conclusion.)
Quoth PZ:
Hold on! Sociology is the science of society. We have no need for or room for theologians. Those of us who study the sociology of religion have nothing to gain from that nonsense. It is interesting to note that believers will kill each other over theological differences, but the study of that phenomenon doesn’t require theological training — the substance of the fantasy beliefs is not as important as the function of them.
I say stick them in the Literature departments with all the others who obsess over the meaning of “the Text.”
I prayed to God to cure my cancer–
God’s reply was “No”.
I’m blessed, of course, to get an answer;
Nothing, though, to show.
God says “No”, and God says “Yes”,
Or sometimes both, in tandem;
I’m glad I know, or, I confess,
I might just think it’s random.
God’s a cosmic slot machine–
A Holy one-armed bandit;
Life’s good, and bad, and in-between…
Exactly as God planned it.
Surely he should realize that the eyewitness accounts of Jesus’ resurrection, in principle count as scientific evidence, albeit very weak evidence?
Oh, much weaker than very weak. All we have is documents written by unknown authors, 70 years after the alleged event, claiming that there were eyewitness accounts. There are, in fact, no eyewitness accounts by any meaningful sense of the term.
Timothy, I think PZ was saying that theology is superfluous since there isn’t anything “supernatural” to study, and sociologists and anthropologists already have human behavior covered. Granted, I agree that any out-of-work theologians wouldn’t necessarily make good sociologists, and cramming them into your department would be inappropriate. Perhaps they could go mow the sports’ teams fields or something?
“If you had a camera in the upper room when the disciples came together after the death and Resurrection of Jesus, we would not see it. I’m not the only one to say this. Even conservative Catholic theologians say that.”
Do conservative Catholic theologians really say that? I was raised Catholic, and that sure ain’t what I was taught at Sunday school. The frickin’ tomb was empty, i.e., the physical body was gone. Did it get stolen at exactly the same time ghost Jesus came back? And what would the point be of Jesus telling Thomas to poke the wounds in his hands if they weren’t the same ones that had hung up there on the cross? Was he pulling a practical joke on him?
Sorry, Haught can spin all he wants, and avoid the silliness and downright ookiness of zombie Jesus, but to the extent that one is actually going to “do theology”, a physical resurrection is the only way the story makes theological sense (admittedly that phrase is an oxymoron, but whatever). It’s as if Haught is uncomfortable with the notion that the major events in his religious belief could actually have been so gauche and declasse as to be real.
I get it. Hope trumps evidence and reason. There must be a sky fairy because we hope there is one. Similarly, if you conduct an experiment, the hypothesis will always prove to be true because we hope it will. If it seems to be disproved, then saying so is a just a faith statement – a deep faith commitment. Why can’t scientists think out the implications of the hopelessness of failed experiments.
“I believe God is answering our prayers but not always in the ways we want.”
Theist: God please help my sick child. She is so young and helpless can’t you just make her better so she doesn’t have to suffer?
god: No.
Theist: Well, thank you for answering my prayer.
I would love to watch one of these theologians address the congregation of any random church on Sunday morning, and tell them that what they believe is simply nothing more than a metaphor, and the details of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus really aren’t so important, and may or may not have actually happened.
And they think it’s the atheists who are out of touch with what the average person believes.
Looks like someone needs to go back and read Daybreak, #103…
http://tinyurl.com/2odknr
(Scroll down a little for the actual citation.)
The basic distinction between what a xian would think and what free spirits would think is completely lost on this idiot. What a putz…
What a whiner.
Folks like Haught are such cowards that they justify believing things not because they are true but because they allay their fears. Beyond the wrenching stupidity of offering a fallacious argument from consequences is the immense intellectual dishonesty.
But the essential difference between such reality based ambiguities and theology is the same as the difference between David Copperfied and Uri Geller: both operate on the basis of incomplete information being available to the audience, but one of them claims that those unseen spaces are filled with actual magic.
I sort of understand what he’s trying to say with the “Camera at the Resurrection” hypothetical.
Somebody once asked Douglas Adams which model of Apple computer Arthur Dent was using in one of the “Hitchhiker’s Guide” books. Adams response is here:
http://douglasadams.com/cgi-bin/mboard/info/dnathread.cgi?1546,2
In summary, Adams wrote the books to tell us something about the human condition. So we’re missing the point of the book if we ask questions like, “What model of computer did Arthur Dent have?” Or, “If you had put a video camera in the building at Arthur Dent’s address, what model of computer would have shown up on the film?” Or, “If there’s never been a building at Arthur Dent’s address, does that mean that the whole book is just a worthless pack of lies?”
I’ve got to say that I like Adams’ answer better than Wilkins’. Adams doesn’t waste time; he goes right to the heart of the matter and points out the absurdity of the question. Wilkins seems like he’s dancing around the answer, almost like he doesn’t want to say it flat out. I’m not why that is.
Hold on! Sociology is the science of society. We have no need for or room for theologians.
I think your own misunderstanding here is evidence that you are in need of rational people.
I found this to be very condescending.
“And whatever happiness Camus thought we could attain comes from the sense of strength and courage that we feel in ourselves when we shake our fist at the gods. But none of the atheists — whether the hardcore or the new atheists — really examine where this courage comes from. What is its source?”
Why do I need courage to shake my fist at gods which don’t exist? Should I fortify myself with a pint of courage before I pen a strongly worded letter to Santa because he ignored my list and brought me crap for Christmas? No, that sounds scary.
“How do we account for the courage to go on living in the absence of hope? As you move to the later writings of Camus and Sartre, those books are saying it’s difficult to live without hope. What I want to show in my own work — as an alternative to the new atheists — is a universe in which hope is possible.”
How do we account for courage? WTF. How do we account for anger because this tripe is pissing me off. But he wants to show that hope is possible. Good. I hope he pulls his head out of his ass ’cause I can’t make sense of what he’s saying.
“But why can’t you have hope if you don’t believe in God? You can have hope. But the question is can you justify the hope?”
How can you justify hope based on lies and make believe. That’s what I’d like him to explain especially in light of his explanation of how prayer works.
“I don’t have any objection to the idea that atheists can be good and morally upright people. But we need a worldview that is capable of justifying the confidence that we place in our minds, in truth, in goodness, in beauty. I argue that an atheistic worldview is not capable of justifying that confidence. Some sort of theological framework can justify our trust in meaning, in goodness, in reason.”
This is utterly bullshit. As an atheist I can’t have confidence in my mind or my concept of truth, goodness or beauty because I don’t have a theological framework to justify it? There’s so much wrong with that. What a total turd. You mean I can be moral and good but not be able, without God, to think clearly, and recognize goodness even though I’m a good person? Like I said, what a total turd and a moron.
My last sentence should have been “I’m not sure why that is.”
In summary, Adams wrote the books to tell us something about the human condition.
You had to try very hard to get this so wrong. Adams’s point, which has been discussed at length by philosophers, is that “The book is a work of fiction” and such questions are meaningless when applied to fiction; there is no fact of the matter concerning Arthur Dent’s PC. But Haught maintains that it’s not fiction, that Jesus and the Resurrection and all the rest of the rot is real.
truth machine,
Regarding mathematics, almost nobody is a Platonist nowadays, and mathematics is considered formal or logical manipulation. As for the other things: if you need a correspondence to reality to know who your parents are or where you were yesterday, you have bigger problems than mere philosophical ineptitude. (“The meaning of words”–really? I think I’d really be lost in crushing anomie if I couldn’t grasp the ultimate reality of the Oxford English Dictionary.) I’ve never understood the philosophers’ love for redeeming common sense; it’s overkill. I can go about my daily tasks perfectly well without any genuine knowledge of the world.
I take it you’re using “that ships disappear below the horizon” as an observation explained by science; in that case, science redeems the observation, the observation doesn’t redeem science. It turns out the Sun does not rise or set; you may have heard. This is close to a maxim in science: the weight of cases is of science not redeeming observation. Aristotelian physics conformed to observations of motion and was wrong, wrong, wrong; Galileo’s physics was counterintuitive, Newton’s more so, Einstein’s really took the cake. Observation kind of gets the shaft in science; it’s why we take measurements with all sorts of apparatus external to our heads.
Well, yes, if that were true it would be something of a miracle. Why would evolution produce senses and a brain capable of forming accurate models of the world and reasoning correctly about them? I think you’re just putting your miracle back a few million years. All I need is a correspondence between behavior and outcome and between your behavior and my behavior and I’ve got the whole human experience wrapped up.
I’ve got to say that I like Adams’ answer better than Wilkins’. Wilkins seems like he’s dancing around the answer, almost like he doesn’t want to say it flat out. I’m not why that is.
Um, what the heck are you talking about? The only reference to Wilkins here is PZ’s desire to have him explain why we still have universities with theology departments. If by “Wilkins” you actually mean Haught, you’re the only one here who doesn’t understand why Haught “doesn’t want to say flat out” that “The book is a work of fiction”.
The really definitive proof of Haught’s cluelessness is that he’s still toiling away at a deadend field like academic theology when stuff like this shows that he could have a highly successful career as a medical quack. They all pull this “other ways of knowing” schtick. Just change a few nouns in the quote above and you’ve got the standard excuse for why homeopathy never shows efficacy better than placebo in properly controlled, randomized, double-blinded clinical tests.
Just run that quote past Orac. I’ll bet he finds it awfully familiar sounding.
Thank you, thank you, James McGrath (12/18 @ 7:21PM): “I wonder what you’d make of some appreciative comments about theology an atheist made on my blog recently. Do take a look….”
That post helps to reconcile my Christian faith with a simultaneous belief that science will ultimately explain religion.
(Previously, my only refuge was Oliver Wendell Holmes: “It is a mark of a great mind to be able to entertain simultaneously two completely contradictory ideas without having to decide in favor of either.”}
I also have to think of what Jesus said when his disciples asked him to teach them to pray. What he told them, in effect, was to pray for something really big. He called it “the kingdom of God.”
Yeah but Jesus also said you could pray for other stuff too. For some reason Haught is forgetting about all the other verses about praying for other stuff.
Gee I dunno why he would forget about other parts of the Bible like that! I don’t know!!
Wilkins has no answer because Wilkins doesn’t even think there’s a question. All the rest is a matter of human behaviour. Wilkins is feeling a bit Bob Doleish too…
Regarding mathematics, almost nobody is a Platonist nowadays, and mathematics is considered formal or logical manipulation.
I said nothing about Platonism. The knowledge that there are infinitely many primes is relative to the Peano Axioms. Our knowledge that PA -> Euclid’s Theorem did not come from science. Sheesh.
As for the other things: if you need a correspondence to reality to know who your parents are or where you were yesterday, you have bigger problems than mere philosophical ineptitude.
You claimed this knowledge can only come from science. You seem to have forgotten already.
“The meaning of words”–really? I think I’d really be lost in crushing anomie if I couldn’t grasp the ultimate reality of the Oxford English Dictionary.)
But your grasping it isn’t a result of science, contrary to your claim. You make my argument as if it were your own. As I said, clowns like you seem to exist only to validate the worst stereotypes.
I can go about my daily tasks perfectly well without any genuine knowledge of the world.
“genuine knowledge”? So you’re saying you’re wrong about who your parents are where you were yesterday?
I take it you’re using “that ships disappear below the horizon” as an observation explained by science; in that case, science redeems the observation, the observation doesn’t redeem science.
This is meaningless drivel. We know that ships disappear below the horizon because we observe them to do so, not because of science, contrary to your idiotic claim. The observation is in no need of “redemption”. Scientists used the observation as evidence supporting an inference about the shape of the world.
It turns out the Sun does not rise or set; you may have heard.
I said nothing about the sun rising or setting, silly, I referred to your knowledge that there’s a sun in the sky. Aside from that, you’re wrong, since the rising and setting of the sun refers to an observation relative to a reference point, and has nothing to do with heliocentrism vs. geocentrism.
Observation kind of gets the shaft in science; it’s why we take measurements with all sorts of apparatus external to our heads.
And how do we know what measurement was recorded on the apparatus? In any case, you’re blathering irrelevancies that in no way support your absurd claim that knowledge can only come from science.
Why would evolution produce senses and a brain capable of forming accurate models of the world and reasoning correctly about them?
Oh dear, are you a Plantingan? That would make you even more stupid than I had realized. The answer to your question is, of course, to be found the theory of Darwin.
Scott Hatfield:
That’s because (a) sometimes ambiguity is really there. For example, from the evidence currently available, we cannot tell whether or not supersymmetry is truly present in physical law, though we will hopefully have the data to answer this question within a few years’ time. We do not know the composition of dark matter, or the number of Earthlike planets in the Galaxy, or whether cephalopods live on Europa. Any competent popularization of science which addresses an area containing significant open questions will necessarily be “ambiguous” about the conclusions which can be drawn from currently known facts. I think it’s fair to say that this is not particularly “theological”; it’s the analogue of trying to figure out why your car won’t start in the morning, given the state of the dashboard and the sounds the engine is making.
Also, (b) all too often, science popularization just ain’t competent. For example, it may employ metaphor instead of mathematics, which is a sure way to generate ambiguity — extra vagueness which is not present within science proper.
To my mind, the latter is what resembles theology, and to the extent popularizations of science follow that option, they are failures. They are mistakes to be corrected.
They miss the moral core of Judaism and Christianity — the theme of social justice, which takes those who are marginalized and brings them to the center of society.
Ah, that’s precious, but I grew up with religion and I can tell you that un-marginalizing people is not the moral core of religion in America–getting them “Saved” is. All other concerns, social or otherwise, are peripheral.
Haught is living in la la land.
Literalist fundamentalists are more intellectually coherent and consistent than John Haught’s take on the Resurrection. Kind of like how Mormonism’s notion of three distinct gods in the Godhead makes more sense than the fractal wooliness of the Trinity. Of course, not believing any of these affronts to common sense makes the most sense of all.
A purported event, such as the bodily resurrection of Christ, is either symbolic – that is, a candidly fictional representation of how much his disciples yearned for his return (or some other concept) – or it’s real. It can’t be in a wispy shadow realm where it’s simultaneously both. Shrodinger’s Christ?
I recently berated the folks at Uncommon Descent for doing in relation to evolution precisely what most of those participating here are doing in relation to theology: speaking outside their area of expertise. The vast majority of the comments buy into the way fundamentalists understand the Bible – a self-proclaimed literalism that is selectively literal and unreasonable. Most theologians (unless they sheltered themselves in the seminaries of conservative denominations) would agree with the criticisms made here of this all-too-popular form of piety, but would also object that it isn’t what we’re talking about. In other words, many of the comments here are the theological equivalent of asking “If we evolved from monkeys then why are there still monkeys?” There isn’t even the most basic understanding of theology, and so the questions themselves end up being off target.
With respect to literalism, let me share another snippet from my blog, where I paraphrased John Dominic Crossan:
“perhaps these are a different sort of story altogether.”
Do you mean (as I wrote above) “symbolic – that is, a candidly fictional representation of …”?
No, there’s no confusion. Literalism is different from this nebulous metaphorical nonsense, and both are bullshit. Tis is another familiar ploy from the theological playbook; if you criticize them for the BS they are saying, their rejoinder is “oh, no, you’ve confused me with that other religious point of view, which is wrong.”
No, we haven’t. Haught is not a Southern Baptist, and we can tell, but that doesn’t make him any more sensible.
most of those participating here are doing in relation to theology: speaking outside their area of expertise.
This is a particularly stupid ad hominem argument. Unless you can demonstrate some error in anyone’s claim or argument, you should shut your yap. Or to put it in terms you might understand, logical argument is outside your area of expertise.
Sastra writes:
become a nihilist and throw yourself into it
Hey, hey, we nihilists aren’t that stupid. Just because we don’t think anything matters doesn’t mean we can’t enjoy a nice landscape, or a good bowel movement, or some Ben and Jerry’s. By the way, nihilism is a really liberating point of view. You can jump off a cliff to see if you bounce. Or shove that annoying jerk next to you. Just because nothing matters doesn’t mean you can’t have fun.
“We would also be better served if the Psychology, Sociology, Anthropology & History departments were combined into a single “Human Behavior” department. This would entail placing select aspects of the original “disciplines” into the Biology/Medical, Literature/Language, and Philosophy Departments.”
Why should we tell these disciplines how to work? Do you know the differences between anthropology and history? As an archaeologist (anthropologist) my work is closer to the physical anthropologists in my department than it is to many historians, especially in methodology. Not to mention all the specific skills I need to learn as oppose to any of these other disciplines you list. I don’t exactly see the need for anyone in the psychology department to be working on faunal analysis with me next semester.
“I recently berated the folks at Uncommon Descent for doing in relation to evolution precisely what most of those participating here are doing in relation to theology: speaking outside their area of expertise.”
Ok, talking from my expertise, theologians base their work on religious belief, no matter how liberal they are. There is always some literalism too it that forgets actual fact. At seminary, I cannot tell you how often I had to hear the claim that Isaiah has Christology in it. This from people with scholarship that should tell them otherwise.
Atheism leads to nihilism, evolution leads to (eugenics, genocide, communism, ect.). In other words, never mind what’s true, teach what’s convenient, (or comfortable)
Why is everyone crapping on nihilism?? Sheeeeesh, it’s getting tossed around like a naughty buzzword. Accepting the nothingness simply means you can relax and be a meat robot. Enjoy the ride. It feels good because evolution gave you a sensory apparatus that records some stuff as “aaaaah!” (and other stuff as “ow!”) and you may as well enjoy the “aaaaaah!” because it’s going to be gone soon enough.
Personally, I see religion as just a particularly silly path along the quest for meaning and purpose. But, you know what? We’re a blog full of people trashing the faithful for coming up with ridiculous rationalizations to preserve their sense of meaning and purpose and self-importance. We trash them for their utter lack of evidence, but very few of us seem to see that there’s also an utter lack of evidence to there being any meaning or purpose no matter what. The faithful waste their time banging their heads on the ground to the sky fairy but the majority of atheists don’t do a good job of coming to grips with the consequences of unbelief.
The existentialists arrogate self-importance to justify their being (“because I think it’s important – it’s important”) *waaah* *waaah* *waah* that’s just as silly as assuming meaning and purpose comes from the sky fairy. And then there are the atheists who nearly flirt with nihilism – evolutionary pressures, reproduction, blah blah – yet that “meaning” is a temporary joke with an inevitable curtain-call in a few hundred million years. We worry about meaning and purpose because the meat robot is programmed that way. Consider the dog or the horse or the other meat robots around us, who aren’t particularly bothered with bullsh*tting themselves. They are the real atheists.
Don’t trash nihilism. When you peel away all the attempts to jolly yourself along, it’s all that’s left.
Ichthyic:
Just for the record, the tone I was attempting to adopt was not a patronizing one, but one of friendly banter. Where PZ is concerned, in many ways I am not worthy to unlatch his tangled tentacles…
Blake Stacey:
I agree with both your points (a) and (b), but let me add another reason why popularizations deal in metaphor, etc. It’s because most of us aren’t smart enough to deal with the unambiguous equations—including yours truly. At the risk of sounding condescending, ‘Blake Blake Blake’. (This is friendly banter with a rueful smile). Again, where the math is concerned, I am not worthy to unlatch…..but I’ve said this before.*
Anyway, a certain amount of metaphor and ambiguity does appear to be inevitable, and this is always going to give the credulous sheep in the pews problems. Small wonder that they read a few passages out of context from Mayr, or Simpson, or Huxley, and conclude (usually, but not always falsely) that what is being expressed is a personal expression of faith in Dame Nature, etc.
Colugo:
If by consistent, you mean that which is the hobgoblin of little minds, I agree. If scientists aspired to the kind of enforced dogmatic consistency of the fundamentalists, then science would quickly stop, would it not? I grow weary of theists who proclaim false equivalencies (atheism = nihilism, etc.), but a close second in the Ennui Parade is surely the non-believer’s claim that they find the naive fundamentalist position more logical, more consistent etc. When I hear somebody make this argument, I can’t help but wonder if what they mean is that they prefer the former as a target. The naive fundy is easy to dismiss, easy to ridicule, easy to marginalize. Someone like Haught is a more difficult target—though I have to say that some of you here have landed blows.
* BTW, Blake thanks for providing links at your blog to physics and astronomy lectures on-line. I will profit from them.
do most of us really want to live in a Joe Friday Universe, devoid of everything but the facts, ma’am?
Assuming we didn’t live in such a universe, how would you be able to tell?
“We don’t demand or expect proof of anything, but we do demand at least a little bit of evidence for any claim. Not as an article of faith, mind you, but simply because it has worked well before, and we’ve had a lot of mileage out of that expectation.”
I’d be a little more careful there. Right at the root of science is the principle of induction, a profound bit of circular reasoning whose only justification is itself: that “it has worked well before”.
“The new atheists don’t want to think out the implications of a complete absence of deity.”
I’m sorry to say that I don’t sit around crying in my breakfast cereal because of my atheism.
But maybe I’m shallow and don’t have the guts to plunge into the scary depths of my belief system. I guess I’m one of those inauthentic atheists.
There is one thing that brings out the nihilist in me: thinking about a planet populated by morons like John Haught.
Now there’s a reason to despair.
Jesus was not physically present… This isn’t some sort of ultra-liberal fringe view – it’s fairly mainstream.
Dude, where do you live, because it clearly isn’t the US.
I’ve gone to church my entire life, and sunday school for years (taught by my mother no less), and I have never once heard anyone but an athiest suggest that the big-R Resurrection was a “mass hallucination”, or anything but a literal, factual, historical event. You are the first. Obviously I don’t read theology, though, but even Wilkes won’t come out and just say it.
-Kevin
truthmachine,
You’ve made an error of reading comprehension. I said those things are not knowledge.
Niave (circa 18th Century) Empiricist is not a good account of scientific practice.
You can achieve that part even if perception has an entirely arbitrary relationship with the world. All you need is that you share that relationship with your past and future self and with other scientists; that way measurements will be recorded the same way and can be related to one another.
The argument originated with the Churchlands; Plantinga just added the “and then God part.” I do think it’s sound (although not in the form Plantinga gives). The main thrust of my argument, though, would be: (1) My brain doesn’t need to give me justified true beliefs about the world for my behavior to advantageous. (2) The connection between perception and reality can be entirely arbitrary and I can still read off measurements from apparatus, etc. (3) Science does not need my experience or observations to conform to reality. (4) The whole clunky apparatus of Empiricism is unnecessary to explain science. (5) Scientific practice does not proceed in a way that conforms to the Empiricist account. (6) Scientific ontology does not contain the sorts of things you need to make the Empiricist account work (i.e., magic).
“Dude, where do you live, because it clearly isn’t the US.”
I think you’ve stumbled upon the indispensable axiom of non-literal religion: the notion that these desperately convenient apologetics to ultimate vaguery and content-free supernaturalism is anything anybody on earth, theologians most especially included, has ever actually believed. These are fairy stories made up to shield more treasured fairy stories. All theology is apologetic to its very core. Some of it is just apologetics for a more educated audience. The rubes fall for Josh McDowell. The more refined set need their John Haughts.
symbolic and metaphoric language — in other words, the language of religion
No, no, no! Haught, you can not have metaphors! To get it out of the way for the trolls in the crowd, metaphorics is my area of expertise, or one of them, anyway.
To claim that metaphors are “the language of religion” is a little bit like claiming that joual is “the language of French.” Religious people use metaphors to describe things, but then again, so do secular people. So does everyone. A lot of metaphors are (analogically speaking) hard-coded into human languages, and there’s even some pretty solid evidence to suggest that human beings have evolved to think analogically because it helps us comprehend time (and from there, cause and effect), use language, and perform all kinds of other complex symbol-manipulation tasks. (Once again, I’m going to plug Mark Turner’s book The Literary Mind here, and suggest that anyone who’s interested in some extracurricular work look up Andrew Ortony and/or Gilles Fauconnier.)
It’s very nearly impossible to escape from (a metaphor!) using metaphor even in scientific writing. If you’re using non-mathematical semiotic constructs (like natural languages, for instance), you’re going to be using metaphor, whether you realise it or not. In that sense, metaphor is every bit as much “the language of science” as “the language of religion” because the key term there is language. If you have language, you have metaphor. Whatever else you do with it is largely irrelevant to whether or not it contains analogical constructs.
Once again, as I mentioned in a previous comment thread, we have religion piggy-backing on what seems to be an essentially human quality and attempting to claim that without religion, that human quality wouldn’t exist, when it’s more likely the other way around — without that human quality, religion wouldn’t exist.
Metaphorically speaking, kiss my ass, Haught.
I’ve been reading pharyngula for a while now, but I have never posted. However, the last line of this post by PZ literally made me laugh out loud and I just had to say that this is pure genius
“still lurking in the spider-webbed corners of our universities.”
Brilliant.
You’ve made an error of reading comprehension. I said those things are not knowledge.
Sorry, again I had underestimated your stupidity.
My brain doesn’t need to give me justified true beliefs about the world for my behavior to advantageous.
Lovely fallacy of denial of the antecedent. The issue wasn’t what is needed (hell, evolution didn’t give numerous organisms such brains), but why evolution would produce such a brain. Denial that your brain does give you justified true beliefs verges on the insane. But such denial further undermines your own claim that only science provides knowledge — a claim that is neither true nor justified (certainly not by you).
I’ve been studying philosophy for twenty-odd years, and I have this to say: No it hasn’t. That is, “philosophy” has maintained no such thing. Whatever it could possibly mean to say that philosophy as a discipline rife with disputes could somehow collectively endorse any single idea, Haught is wrong wrong wrong to claim that they endorse this bit of poorly stated nonsense (or any similar sentiment stated in clearer terms)! In fact, I don’t know of a single living philosopher who has advanced or defended any such position. Theologians may say that sort of thing, but I guarantee you that philosophers don’t. Of course, theologians feel free to say such things because they are always talking out of their asses (because that’s where their heads, and therefore their mouths, are located).
The argument originated with the Churchlands
Unsurprisingly, this is utter bullshit. From http://www.researchintelligentdesign.org/wiki/Alvin_Plantinga
Only a moron would take that as an argument denying that evolution produces faculties for accurate modeling.
P.S.
In http://fitelson.org/plant.pdf we find
Which is another way of saying that poke and Plantinga are idiots.
The more I listen to theologians, the more I think that they’re actually the ones that have got it wrong. If you take the life of Christ, and most importantly the resurrection, as nothing more than a metaphor, you’re pulling out the basic tenent of Christianity. You’re turning it into just another feel-good philosophy.
Sorry, but it’s not the theological faculty who gets to say what religion is about. That is the job of the church(es), the priests and the believers. Because they are the religion. And when it comes to Christianity, the founders of the Church (and those who followed after them, at least in Roman Catholicism) have made it crystal clear that the resurrection is to be taken literally. If you don’t believe it actually happened, you’d better look for a religion, or maybe a philosophy, that suits your intellectual needs better.
James McGrath’s quote about Aesop’s fables is cute, but it does not do the work he thinks it does.
By the analogy in the quote, the person espousing the “other option” is Haught, and the quote implies they would write Haught’s essay (wrt Aesop) by way of exposition.
But what would a person who really knows the meaning of Aesop’s fables – and not the two naifs caricatured in the quote – actually write? Surely it would be something along the lines of “The story of the fox and the sour grapes can be seen as an allegory of the human foible of cognitive dissonance. But there was never a fox who thought such things to himself. Foxes don’t even eat grapes to begin with.”
(Even if this isn’t what a person would write unprompted, any rational person would readily agree with this; and they would wonder what possessed you to ask such a simplistic question in the first place. Of course foxes don’t eat grapes!)
The thing that has us New Atheists riled up is that Haught does not have the intellectual fortitude to write even this. No: when it comes to the tenets of Christianity, clear statements like “The resurrection did not happen” must be replaced by a grandiloquent obfuscated circumlocution about the limitations of “Science” with a capital S. This is pure cowardice – although in Haught’s defense, I would say that he is the victim of a long tradition of intellectual bludgeoning carried out in the defense of mother church.
In the end, what Haught ends up saying is that he is a fan of Christianity. In this respect he is no different from a fan of Star Wars or Harry Potter. But he is one of those sad, pathetic fans who can no longer (or who perversely refuse to) distinguish the fantasy from reality.
Here is another article illustrating the immense stupidity of poke and Plantinga’s misinterpretation of what Patricia Churchland wrote:
Do these cretins really think that Churchland was arguing that evolution is equally likely to create organisms with any of those thoughts??? Evolution doesn’t pick the most adaptive from every possible set of beliefs, treating all such sets equally, wiring such beliefs into nervous systems, it produces mechanisms that generate behavior, and among such mechanisms, some are more likely than others to be adaptive. A brain that produces beliefs like “ah, a big orange thing! If I run away from it, maybe it will be my friend” or “gosh, maybe now would be a good time to work on my mile time”, while those beliefs may happen to produce adaptive behavior in that precise circumstance, is likely to produce a lot of non-adaptive behavior in other circumstances … certainly relative to a brain that does accurate modeling.
Haught derides ID for its self-defeating god-of-the-gaps theology, but doesn’t his Teilhardism fall into the same trap? Because we don’t fully understand (yet) how mindless matter can give rise to first-person subjectivity, therefore there must be a transcendent dimension to reality that science can’t touch. Sounds like god-of-the-gaps to me.
I’m also not buying the notion that Teilhardism represents some sort of breakthrough synthesis of science and religion. As far as I can see it’s just another flavor of the same old stubborn teleological anthropocentrism: the Universe meant for us to exist, therefore the purpose of evolution is to produce us. Poppycock.
@Jaycubed #68
Theorising in Pol Sci and Economics is about the real world.
Asking questions about the impact of fairies on our world is not equal to theorise on optimal currency areas or the differences between majoritarian and proportional election systems.
If you prefer we can leave the Theology departments intact and just get rid of those who spend their time thinking about the human relation with leprechauns. The Theo in Theology is the problem.
Everybody celebrate!
God retreated from the mountaintops when people climbed them, and from the literal heavens not long after that. We’ve pushed him out of the weather and we’ve mostly pushed him out of biology; I know we’re still fighting battles on that front, but c’mon, from a global historical perspective they are just fighting one heck of a rearguard battle.
Now we see a retreat so far from making any claims about anything it’s practically a retreat up their own arseholes. Maybe we should stop railing at it for just long enough to celebrate our victory?
I apologize for the language, and understand this might not get posted. But the following exchange is this guy’s entire argument.
“Hi John.”
“Hey-a Fred. What’s cookin’?”
“I heard you saying that it’s ridiculous to ask for evidence when claims are dear to your heart.”
“That’s right, Fred. I don’t want scientific proof of the Resurrection or any of the other great Bible stories. They are too important to the spiritual meaning of my life. I believe they happened. Evidence is not the only way of knowing things, you know.”
“That’s outstanding, John.”
“Thank you Fred. I’m happy to hear you say that.”
“Tell me, John, how did you come to know that story? I mean, how do you know it’s true?”
“Well, Fred, it’s written in the Bible. Which is God’s testament to his creation.”
“And you have no evidence that this book is actually the word of God, right?”
“For the last time, Fred, faith is about believing in something. It’s about taking that leap because something is moved inside you.”
“I completely hear you, brother man.”
“Really?”
“Most definitely.”
“Wow. I’m so glad to hear that.”
“Yeah. So I totally boned your wife last night.”
“What?”
“Seriously. Totally bonage. I was all like ‘Uh! Uh!’ And she was like ‘Oh yeah! Do me Fred! You’re totally better that John!'”
“What the fuck, dude?”
“Prove me wrong, bitch.”
“Um, I was with her all evening yesterday. I was with her from yesterday afternoon until this morning.”
“Nuh uh, son. See, in a moment of revelation, time totally stopped, and your wife and I had a cosmic experience.”
“Ha ha. You’re very funny.”
“Seriously, man! And it was totally foretold. Check out this writing:
And ye, the earth was parted from the sea, and then God made some animals and stuff. Then like four billion years of evolution happened, producing, among the insignificant masses, a god among men, by the goodly name of Fred. And Fred didst knoweth a stupid douchebag named John, who had a most bangable wife. And the Lord dideth giveth John’s wife to Fred in a most time-warping and cosmically fulfilling night of lusty passion. And the Lord did see his creation. And it was good.”
“You are an asshole.”
“No, seriously John. I totally get what you’re talking about. Something definitely moved inside your wife, and then something moved inside me too! We’re for sure on the same page, bro!”
Thus endeth the lesson.
The reason Haught insists that atheism is a religion is he has to, if atheism is not a religion then it is not within his province as a theologian discussing it. IOW he is sniping at Dawkins not being a theologian so not qualified to write The God Delusion. It is standard, boring academic turf grabbing.
One argument for Theology departments and theologians teaching ministers: Fred Phelps. No education at all, ordained at some ridiculous age by another minister in the boondocks. Can you imagine someone who believes what Haught does being a violent extremist?
Yes there is merit in the idea that moderate religion succours the extremists, but in the interim surely we should not be pushing all the believers into the extremist camp by martyring the wishy washy liberal theologians? Once the vine they feed on has been withered, that is the time to pension them off, in the meantime let them feed.
Just like I don’t think Anglican bishops here in the UK should be fired from being bishops, just disestablished so they have no political influence. I am happy for them to preside over a dying institution and watching the two wings arguing over the diminishing spoils is actually quite funny. Especially since they are doing our jobs for us by showing the world how intolerant they can be.
Oh and Greta Christina, great post.
“I recently berated the folks at Uncommon Descent for doing in relation to evolution precisely what most of those participating here are doing in relation to theology: speaking outside their area of expertise”
But isn’t that what the internet is all about: people pontificating about things that they know very little about, but *think* they understand completely? ;-)
I’ll second the defence of nihilism. I believe it is a useful exercise to descend into the depths of the meaninglessness of existence, and acknowledge that nothing has any purpose, or value, outside of what each of us ascribes to it. There is no master designer who planned out reality, so how could there be some ultimate purpose to existence? It’s not for everyone, but if you don’t do it, you may find later that you have simply substituted some other irrational beliefs for god.
Nihilists usually are angry when they first realize the foundations of their most cherished values are built on sand, and they feel deceived and lament the lack of any single fixed point. Eventually, they realize that this anger and feeling of loss is ridiculous because nothing has in fact been lost, except a delusion. Existence continues as it always has. The only difference is that it is now clear that the only meaning life can have is whatever the individual can fabricate for themselves.
I think nihilism is somewhat dangerous for society, because there is no moral authority, not even an illusory one, to prevent the nihilist from becoming a destructive force. Fortunately for society, most of us have acquired a feeling of sympathy for others from our upbringings and so we lack the inclination for random harm. But it does seem to me that if religion was to be entirely banished from society some other form of absolute moral authority would have to be created to hinder the reactive violence of the damaged and deranged. Or we could just stop abusing children. Whatever’s easier, I guess.
I apologize for the language, and understand this might not get posted.
You must be new here.
The connection between perception and reality can be entirely arbitrary
If it’s “entirely arbitrary”, what we perceive as food should have no correlation to whether it’s actually edible or even existent. How would humans survive in such a world?
You can always offer Matrix-like illusions or solipsist fantasies as alternatives, but then it’s sort of pointless to talk about evolving to such states.
I think any article that starts from a background of pure ignorance to the origins of one’s cherished beliefs is going to end up bad. And this one does. And, what’s worse, is just how is that it’s rife with cliche’s and dogma. Blech.
Sorry, but it’s not the theological faculty who gets to say what religion is about. That is the job of the church(es), the priests and the believers. Because they are the religion. And when it comes to Christianity, the founders of the Church (and those who followed after them, at least in Roman Catholicism) have made it crystal clear that the resurrection is to be taken literally. If you don’t believe it actually happened, you’d better look for a religion, or maybe a philosophy, that suits your intellectual needs better.
you really don’t see that you invalidate your own argument by bringing up the catholic church, do you?
you don’t think the CC employs theologians to formulate dogma?
as mr. T would say…
I pity the fool.
You can always offer Matrix-like illusions or solipsist fantasies as alternatives, but then it’s sort of pointless to talk about evolving to such states.
Indeed. poke and Plantinga seem to think that evolution can produce an organism with a totally arbitrary set of beliefs, as long as the set is, as a whole, adaptive. Well, if poke really is such an organism, there’s no need to pay any attention to what he says, its truth value being completely arbitrary. (Even Plantinga isn’t as stupid as poke; he doesn’t think that our beliefs actually are arbitrary, just that naturalism would imply that.)
If it’s “entirely arbitrary”, what we perceive as food should have no correlation to whether it’s actually edible or even existent. How would humans survive in such a world?
Plantinga’s argument is that we could be radically mistaken about the world, as long as our beliefs produce adaptive behavior. Perhaps, for instance, there is no food, but the action of reaching for what seems to be food moves us out of the way of predators. Of course, we might also not be reaching or moving; we might not have limbs or be capable of locomotion — all our beliefs are up for grabs, in this view. In addition to this nonsense, we have the absurd charge that what Patricia Churchland wrote implies it (and if it did, that would simply invalidate what she wrote). Plantinga has the excuse that he is a Christian apologist and thus will cling to any dreck that supports his religious beliefs. poke has no excuse at all.
http://capitalistimperialistpig.blogspot.com/2007/12/bully-boy.html
Quoting in full (because I agree in full):
Bully Boy
There is a certain type of schoolyard bully whose stock in trade is standing around pointing out other people’s actual or possible defects: “Mary Jane is Fat,” “Bart is stupid,” “Your Dad’s a religious nut.” I always picture him as Nelson Muntz from The Simpsons, complete with “Ha, Ha” laugh.
Perhaps it’s just my bad memory, but I think I remember a time when PZ Myers wrote an interesting blog about evolution and development. Now, though, it seems to be all religion bashing, all the time.
Now I understand a bit about obsession – I personally have been driven into shrill unholy madness by Republican mendacity and criminality – but enough is enough. I will try to resist speculating on what childhood trauma or oedipal conflict pushed PZ into whackjobhood, but he got there somehow, and it’s a nasty, mean-spirited whackjobhood at that.
It does seem successful as a blogging tactic though. Every bully seems to attract a crowd of likeminded thuggery, there for the schadenfreude. A classic example sticks in my mind. PZ bashes some witless television personality for being clueless as to religious history, and his sychophants jump in to pile on. One particularly nasty piece of work suggested mail bombing the target with the crudest and most vulgar possible sexual epithets.
It’s to make philosophers look useful.
Bob
Allienne Goddard wrote…
“Fortunately for society, most of us have acquired a feeling of sympathy for others from our upbringings and so we lack the inclination for random harm.”
We have evolved into being social animals, so I think at least some of our feelings of sympathy for others is innate in a person with a normally developed brain.
Compact disproof of contentions that science+atheism don’t offer a sense of our meaning and place in the universe:
Religion: We’re here ’cause this undetectable but humanlike God entity blew on some dust.
Science+Atheism: We’re here because of incredibly powerful explosions in the hearts of stars.
Religion: Our purpose is to be found in the interpretation of a book. So you’d better be sure you have the correct book and correct interpretation. What’s the correct book and interpretation? Ask two people, get three answers.
Science+Atheism: You make your own purpose, so try to make it a good one. What’s good? Smiles on the faces of nearby children are as reliable an indicator as any.
PZ wrote: It (camera) just wouldn’t work, or wouldn’t record anything.
_____
Damn that hypocrite God, He can watch us but we can’t watch Him? I demand 2-way voyeurism.
Interrobang, thanks for your superb comment #118 which begins:
No, no, no! Haught, you can not have metaphors!
Religites are so greedy and oppressive, they claim to have the monopoly on morality and spirituality; now they want to own metaphorical language?
I believe in pre-Christian times in Europe, “superstition” referred to an excess of religion; and was frowned upon. Christians changed the meaning and put religion and superstition in opposition – their true religion versus everyone else’s superstition. Today’s western atheist equates religion and superstition.
The matter of fact is that while human comprehension of the universe has changed over time, the nature of the universe hasn’t. There is birth, death, destruction of things on a larger scale – from one’s house, to one’s city, civilization, which are part of human experience – and extended by human imagination to the universe itself. There is happiness and sorrow, joy and pain.
Religion offers a way with dealing with all of this; and this remains pretty much the same regardless of all the scientific knowledge humanity may gain. Oh, yes, science may help reduce the tragedies – no one need die of smallpox – but science cannot abolish tragedy.
The modern atheist scoffs at all this, and says, I can get along with all this superstition. When I’ve discarded religion, I still get along fine.
The truth of the matter is that the atheist has **not** invented any new way of dealing with the universe. His methods of coping with these human invariants are, every one of them, smuggled in from one or other religion. He would not even have a vocabulary to deal with these otherwise. Such is the ignorance and dishonesty of the atheist.
The honest atheist would, while abandoning theology and christology, also acknowledge his debt to religion.
That is why I endorse the blistering criticism that I copied and posted above.
John Haught is the Landegger Distinguished Professor of Theology at Georgetown University, author of many books, frequent lecturer and consultant. He is not the playground punching bag. And somehow, one cannot now criticize his foolish ideas without being a bully? What kind of stupid perspective is this to take?
Would you care to make a list of other idiotic ideas we should avoid attacking, lest we look like bullies?
@Ichthyic: ouch, got me there. Yes, the CC’s priests have also, for the most part, studied theology. I guess I’m just a bit bewildered by how little trouble some theologians have with cutting out/obfuscating what I (back in the days when I was still Catholic) had been tought was one of the basic tenets of my faith: the bodily – not metaphorical, spiritual, but bodily – resurrection of Christ. What’s next, that he wasn’t really crucified? It’s a shame, really, how they cling to the idea that they’re still Christian. Instead of doing the honest thing and abandoning that particular set of ideas for one that fits them better. There’s hundreds of different beliefs and philosophies out there, and no rule saying that you have to cling to the one you were brought up in. But then, of course, there’s always the fear of hell(tm)…
My chief objection to the new atheists is that they are almost completely ignorant of what’s going on in the world of theology.
Fact. Your time would be much better spent objecting to the religious folks who are completely ignorant of what’s going on in the world of science.
Of course theology is bullshit. It’s a total non-subject. I think even most of academic philosophy is vacuous; theology is necessarily even worse.
I assume that’s a reference to this thread. Describing said witless wonder as ‘clueless as to religious history’ is what you might call an understatement. I note also that those comments which were critical of the use of sexual epithets go unmentioned. One might almost think the author is eliding significant details to strengthen his ‘case.’
“His methods of coping with these human invariants are, every one of them, smuggled in from one or other religion”
You’ve been to my head lately, or how the hell do you know how I deal with tragedy?
Here’s a shocking idea: maybe all humans deal with tragedy in certain ways because that’s just human nature, and religion built up a framework of mythology with which to explain human nature?
Weepy confusion of criticism with of “bullying”, and restatements of the Courtier’s Dilemma. Yup,same old same old- seems to be all they’ve got. Sad, really.
I don’t get it. So we’re not supposed to point out the stupidities of high academic muckety-mucks like John Haught, and we’re not supposed to point out the stupidities of brainless media personalities like Sherri Shepherd…so those people simply get a free pass? Why?
And Darwin’s Minion has it right. Those are human ways of coping with tragedy; religion just stole the credit long ago. I do not deal with the ordinary griefs of normal human living with the lies that are religion’s sole stock in trade; I propose that we face them honestly, without religious denial and superstitious fantasies.
Bob O’H wrote:
Reminds me of that line from The West Wing about economists existing to make astrologers look good…
One thing that struck me recently: scientists are often surprised by their findings, but theologians (and other mystics) never seem to be.
Every few months, it seems, I read a science news story that quotes a scientist saying, basically, “we thought this wasn’t possible, but that’s what the data shows. We might have to rethink our ideas in this area. No one really understands what’s going on here. This is so exciting!” This includes PZ and Phil Plait.
In contrast, when’s the last time a theologian, astrologer, mystic, etc. was similarly surprised?
So my atheism meant I had no mechanism for dealing with my Father’s death than those the religious members of my family had? Hmm, I got no comfort from the idea that he might have lived after death, like my Mother seemed to get. I certainly didn’t have the simplistic ideas of heaven my younger sister got by with. What did I do? I celebrated him by speaking his life at the funeral, I did not mention any deities at all, not even once, even by allusion. I have a video of it somewhere if you don’t believe me.
You are like those people who tell me that without a god belief I somehow cannot love my children properly, that the wonderful joy I felt at their births was the mere shadow of what I could have felt. Sorry, but even if I know about oxytocin and other bonding hormones, does not change how I feel. Get over yourself.
Oh, yes, science may help reduce the tragedies – no one need die of smallpox – but science cannot abolish tragedy.
Neither can religion, moron.
The honest atheist would,
What could a transparently dishonest person like yourself you possibly have to say of any value about honesty?
That is why I endorse the blistering criticism that I copied and posted above.
All the more reason to ignore it. The fact is that your posting that garbage is itself hypocritical bullying. Fuck off and die … we nihilists won’t care and are incapable of mourning you.
Theology: The art of making up new excuses to believe the same olde shite your grandparents believed.
Question: Why does a totalitarian cosmology = hope?
“a further hidden premise that all evidence worth examining has to be scientific evidence.”
All observable evidence is the business of science. Unobservable evidence is not evidence.
“But let me get to my third understanding of religion. That’s a belief that this ultimate reality is at heart personal, by which we mean it is intelligent and is capable of love and making promises.”
But is somehow incapable of giving any two cultures the same message twice (unlike science, which is notably convergent, no matter who is doing the research or where)
“If you had a camera in the upper room when the disciples came together after the death and Resurrection of Jesus, we would not see it.”
I’ll take true/unfalsifiable for $500, Alex.
Seriously this is like those Christians last year who said it didn’t matter if those were Jesus’ bones they found, because he “ascended spiritually”. Yeah, well, so did my grandma, if that’s the standard for theological “evidence”.
I didn’t engage in an ad hominem argument. When someone writes
they may be accurately depicting what some fundamentalists believe, but certainly not what a theologian like Haught thinks.
Theologians, by the way, are surprised all the time by discovering new insights into classic texts, new metaphors to point to transcendence in light of our current understanding of the world. Once again, it is only fundamentalist theologians that would rarely if ever be surprised, because they have their minds made up in advance. But such individuals should be called ‘apologists’ rather than ‘theologians’, if you ask me.
Arun,
There is much too much crap in such a short post to be critical of so I’ll leave that to those who will do a much better job of tearing you a new one.
However,
“The honest atheist would, while abandoning theology and christology, also acknowledge his debt to religion.”
So it’s alright to abandon religion as long as we tip our hat to it when we leave? Kind of like, *Thanks, I appreciate all the fear and loathing you created in me during my formative years.* or, *The fear of hell really stunted my growth real good, thanks.* And one tip of the hat that pertains to this thread, *Thanks for giving me a sense of hope for eternal life that was based on nothing but horse crap. It was a very exclusive belief that alienated me from those whose beliefs differed from mine. Thanks religion.*
There, I can be an honest non-believer now that I’ve tipped my hat to religion and acknowledged my indebtedness.
Nobody can be certain either what or whether a theologian like Haught thinks. He and his peers emit clouds of obfuscatory verbiage as naturally and copiously as a squid emits ink.
Darwin’s Minion and PZ already addressed the incredible stupidity of this statement, but I have to give it my vote for the anti-Molly award for the month.
I didn’t engage in an ad hominem argument.
You certainly did, liar, the very one I identified: “most of those participating here are doing in relation to theology: speaking outside their area of expertise”.
When someone writes … they may be accurately depicting what some fundamentalists believe, but certainly not what a theologian like Haught thinks.
Your statement wasn’t about “someone”, but about “most of those participating here”, you dishonest git. Offering a non ad hominem argument now noting that someone made an inaccurate statement doesn’t make your prior argument any less ad hominem.
But such individuals should be called ‘apologists’ rather than ‘theologians’, if you ask me.
All believers are apologists. Certainly inane garbage like “new metaphors to point to transcendence” is apologetics.
There is much too much crap in such a short post to be critical of so I’ll leave that to those who will do a much better job of tearing you a new one.
The most amazing thing is that he thinks that, by posting that and calitalistimperialistpig’s raspberry, it would convince anyone of anything other than that he’s an asswipe.
They miss the moral core of Judaism and Christianity — the theme of social justice, which takes those who are marginalized and brings them to the center of society.
Social justice?
Atheists are only 5-10% of the U.S. population.
Don’t we qualify as marginalized, John?
Haught – good Christian that he is – is actively trying to marginalize us even further.
Thanks a lot.
Indeedy. McGrath gets his certainty on this matter from the same place he gets the rest of his inanity. He actually seems to think that “new metaphors to point to transcendence” is more intellectually respectable than “We’re here ’cause this undetectable but humanlike God entity blew on some dust”.
Arun writes:
The honest atheist would, while abandoning theology and christology, also acknowledge his debt to religion.
Oh, please. That’s like saying “you ought to be thankful for the way cold viruses have helped you evolve a useful immune system.”
Religious thinking’s notable contribution to dealing with life is best measured by the amount of effort it takes to get over it or around it. We’re still struggling with the fallout of “goddiddit” as the “explanation” for, well, everything. And we’re still trying to cope with the “without religion there can be no values, or beauty” nonsense.
You’re right, in the sense that many atheists try to re-incorporate the comforts of religion by replacing god with the self (e.g.: existentialism) but that’s silliness, not great thinking (sorry, I’m not French; I don’t even own a beret). Trying to salvage scraps of usefulness out of theology, after generations of idiots arguing about angels on the heads of pins and 3 who are 1, is tedious recycling at best.
Theologians have a wonderful gig: they can argue about the properties of something that has no measurable properties. They can debate the aims and intentions of the nonexistent. They can pontificate (an entirely appropriate word, in this context) about the unknown, without the tedium of having to actually try to know anything about it. In the long run, theology is like Heian period Japanese court-poetry: an elaborate social structure in which you’re expected to know enough about everyone else’s poems that you can make yours fit into the right niche in an elaborate castle made of hot air. It’s the raw stuff of academic pissantery, in other words. Academics must love it – what other field can you argue so much about, with no fear that your opponent will blind-side you with actual evidence?
So a theologian could “discover” that, for example, God is not omnipotent? Or that Jesus didn’t exist? Or that there isn’t a Trinity?
So a theologian could “discover” that, for example, God is not omnipotent? Or that Jesus didn’t exist? Or that there isn’t a Trinity?
No, nothing like that. McGrath apparently means that theologicians surprise themselves at their own capacity to invent new bullshit apologetics.
Of course this is wrong. We can explore this with mathematics. Since there is no evidence of any gods, What is the probability that any one proposed god is a correct one? There have been tens of thousands of gods worshipped in human history. What is the probability that any particular brand of religion is correct? Once again, the odds are very low, since there are so many different and incompatible creeds.
contradictory & conflicting religious beliefs
This describes badly done economics, of which there is much (as a recovering economist, I know all about that). There is a small amount of worthwhile social science being done under the economics banner, however, and it’s certainly orders of magnitude more than what’s going on in theology.
The problem is not with economics as much as it is with economists. Many get into the field for ideological reasons, and then spend their careers trying to prove their pre-existing biases are valid.
the real-world aspects of “Economics” belong in the Accounting department
They most certainly do not. Other than the facts that both involve numbers and use the word “firm” a lot, the two fields have almost nothing to do with each other.
IMO, because the most valuable and interesting research in economics generally studies questions of why people make decisions the way they do, if you had to move it the most appropriate place for it would be in the psychology department.
The whole “consistent atheists must be nihilists” theme baffles me. Imagine if someone asserted “Consistent Catholics should murder people as they emerged from the confessional, as the murdered people would immediately ascend to heaven. If they lived, they might commit a mortal sin and die before receiving absolution, and thus go to hell.” This seems to me a reasonable course of action if you actually believed Catholic doctrine. Most people would say that the fact that no Catholics do this indicates my logic must be flawed. So why doesn’t the fact that there exist non-atheist nihilists not point to a similar flaw?
Shorter John Haught:
“Religion is true, for some value of true.”
There are theologians, even fairly conservative Evangelical ones, who have concluded that God is not omnipotent in anything like the traditional sense in which that term is used. Again, I don’t think I misjudged the majority of contributors here as not having sufficient background in theology to know that. So thank you for illustrating my point.
You are welcome to call me any names you like. But do at least consider that it contributes to the perception of your point of view as being one of intolerance and hate rather than rational discussion. Personally, I believe I have learned much from discussions with atheists who were capable of insightful yet polite analysis of my views. For an extended example, check out this discussion I had on my old blog which I’ve reposted for anyone interested.
My goodness, there are an unbelievably good number of pointed, substantive comments on this thread. Can’t reply to them all.
JimBOB: If I gave you the impression that I was talking about nature as it is, sorry. The brief ‘Joe Friday Universe’ was meant to suggest a sort of stolid, dull personal response to our conceptualization of nature, not nature itself.
Interrobang: I strongly agree that it is almost impossible to avoid the use of metaphor, even in science. Which means, I suppose, that it is all but impossible to avoid giving the impression of a competing belief system to the literal-minded believer, right?
poke: Wow. Somehow I think that your endorsement of a critique of empiricism (#116) is being perceived on this thread as sympathy for Plantinga’s ID-friendly views. Care to comment?
Paul: Welcome to the party! A funny and pointed post, well done.
Arun: I don’t think either of us are in a position to tell PZ what to post about on his own blog. If we don’t like it, we could just quit coming here, right? For my part, if PZ is popular, I think it’s because he often speaks up for a point of view that is bigger than most people think, but which is underserved in the popular culture, and I don’t think he needs to apologize for that.
I’ve often said that I consider this place a haven for non-belief, and that I’m a guest here, and that I need to act like a good guest. You may not feel so constrained, of course, but I’m just letting you know, in a nice way, that this theist thinks you go to far in describing our host here as a whackjob. Think of him as a pop star who is expected to occasionally reprise his greatest hits.
Peter Ashby: Right on.
Truth Machine: Sorry, but I don’t see how McGrath’s true statement, that most of us here are not theologians, is ad hominem. It is, at worst, an appeal to authority. You are correct when you remark that all believers are apologists. Perhaps people like McGrath and myself should quit giving the impression that we are apologizing for that?
What rational discussion can one conceivably have about a pile of meaningless, evasive tripe like that Haught interview? Only something from which some kind of reasonably stable semantic content can be recovered can be rationally discussed.
The “atheism = nihilism” trope is silly, precisely for the reason that the philosopher Thomas Nagel identifies in his essay “The Absurd” — if nothing matters, then that very fact doesn’t matter. Nagel argues that a lack of objective meaning simply means that we have to approach existence ironically, not that we have to despair.
As an analogy, if one were a big Milli Vanilli fan, and then later discovered that they didn’t in fact sing their own material, one could respond with despair that meaning had left one’s life, or one could realize that demanding meaning from a singing group was itself silly, and just get on with life.
In my view, the only atheists who would be attracted to nihilism (at least in it negative connotation) are those who still haven’t gotten over the religious need for external meaning, and are feeling somehow betrayed by a meaningless universe. For those of us who realize that the universe doesn’t exist for our benefit, and that we are just one infinitesimal part of it, lack of some objective, externally provided meaning isn’t an issue.
In any case, I don’t see how having an externally provided meaning necessarily helps. Beef cattle have an externally provided meaning, but I doubt that would give comfort to an intelligent cow (Douglas Adams notwithstanding). If we found out that all of humanity had been seeded on this planet as an experiment by hyperintelligent aliens, I doubt that nihilists would suddenly be relieved. It seems to me that the only “meaningful” meaning is that which one provides for oneself, and not that provided by an outside agency.
Your claim was that theologians discover new facts — have the theologians you identify above actually discovered this about God, or is it just their opinion? In other words, is what they are doing any different from literary criticism?
/you’d better look for a religion, or maybe a philosophy, that suits your intellectual needs better./
I believe the correct wording should be “that suits your emotional needs better.” Religious intellectualism is psuedointellectualism.
Sorry, but I don’t see how McGrath’s true statement, that most of us here are not theologians, is ad hominem.
Well I didn’t call that statement ad hominem, now did I? And I didn’t because he didn’t make it. Quit your misrepresentation and pay attention to what he did state: “I recently berated the folks at Uncommon Descent for doing in relation to evolution precisely what most of those participating here are doing in relation to theology: speaking outside their area of expertise”. The bozos at UD aren’t wrong because they aren’t experts on evolution — that’s argumentum ad hominem — they’re wrong because they make erroneous claims. Why should anyone be berated for speaking on a matter on which they are not experts? It takes a rather arrogant ass to berate people for that. What people are speaking about here is what Haught wrote, and we all have at least as much expertise on understanding and reasoning about it as does McGrath — in fact, as I noted, considerably more so, since he is clearly logic-challenged.
You are correct when you remark that all believers are apologists. Perhaps people like McGrath and myself should quit giving the impression that we are apologizing for that?
So you suggest no longer apologizing for being intellectually dishonest? Wouldn’t it be better just to stop being intellectually dishonest? (That’s what apologetics is.)
Colugo #101 wrote:
This is an excellent point, and I love the analogy. Modern theologians seem to be trying to claim the “language of metaphor” and disparage atheists for being so bloody literal-minded, while simultaneously claiming that God exists, is a person, has a mind, created us for a purpose, and so forth. If you believe God is real the same way that Santa Claus is real — and that the Resurrection is like the Fox and the Grapes — then you’re an atheist. Waving one’s hands around and trying to focus attention on how it all speaks to us of truths in the human condition won’t get you into some magic area between theism and atheism where you get all the respect you think is due to both.
Atheists think its all metaphor, symbol, myth, and story. Theists think it’s true. They have to be more literal than atheists or they are atheists. Far from being the language of religion, metaphor belongs to us.
And nice of Arun to once again forget about the area of human knowledge called philosophy. Strip superstition and pseudoscience from religion, and what’s left is called philosophy and ethics and psychology and history and art. And we get to use that. We didn’t “steal” it from religion. They stole it from what it means to be human.
poke: Wow. Somehow I think that your endorsement of a critique of empiricism (#116) is being perceived on this thread as sympathy for Plantinga’s ID-friendly views.
You don’t read very well, do you? poke wrote The argument originated with the Churchlands; Plantinga just added the “and then God part.” I do think it’s sound (although not in the form Plantinga gives). I said nothing about poke having any sympathy for ID, which was never mentioned; my critique was entirely of the stupidity of the argument — originated by Plantinga as a misinterpretation of Churchland — that evolution wouldn’t favor organisms with false beliefs over organisms with true beliefs.
James McGrath wrote:
There are theologians, even fairly conservative Evangelical ones, who have concluded that God is not omnipotent…
Do you have any examples of this rather unusual claim?
the stupidity of the argument … that evolution wouldn’t favor organisms with false beliefs over organisms with true beliefs.< ./i>
Er, I meant that v.v. of course.
We make that claim because it’s the one thing Fundies get right. If your only justification for your religion is what’s put down in your religious book, you don’t get to pick and choose which parts you want to believe. If you’re going to believe one absurd claim (god exists…), then you have to believe them all (…and he hates gays and figs).
If, all on your own, you can come up with a moral code superior to the bible’s, then you don’t really need the bible. If you can apply logic and history to say that the central factual events of your religion didn’t happen (other than metaphorically), then why believe it?
Also, I’m pretty certain Camus was an absurdist, not a nihilist.
Interrobang: I strongly agree that it is almost impossible to avoid the use of metaphor, even in science. Which means, I suppose, that it is all but impossible to avoid giving the impression of a competing belief system to the literal-minded believer, right?
Why can’t you Xtians be honest? As Colugo notes and Sastra echoes, you’re either a literalist or you’re atheist, and the fact is that you’re all bloody literalists about some piece of irrational woo.
I do not think the word “metaphor” means what these people think it means…
a close second in the Ennui Parade is surely the non-believer’s claim that they find the naive fundamentalist position more logical, more consistent etc. When I hear somebody make this argument, I can’t help but wonder if what they mean is that they prefer the former as a target.
Gee, I wonder if that ad hominem has anything to do with the fact that you take the claim to be an “argument” and ignore the actual argument:
You are welcome to call me any names you like. But do at least consider that it contributes to the perception of your point of view as being one of intolerance and hate rather than rational discussion.
A common arrow in the quiver of theistic tripe — atheists are rude, so God exists.
Tulse wrote,
In my view, the only atheists who would be attracted to nihilism (at least in it negative connotation) are those who still haven’t gotten over the religious need for external meaning, and are feeling somehow betrayed by a meaningless universe.
I think that’s precisely right. I think that’s also why I’m no existentialist in the classic manner of “God is dead, we are doomed, woe is us, condemned to be free.” No, thank fucking goodness that God is “dead,” hallelujah! No celestial despot!
I have indeed been told by a well-meaning and intelligent theist that atheism leads to nihilism. But, even if that were true, so what? That’s evidence for God now? And if nihilism is the result, why should I then be “forced” to rape, murder, etc.? In a meaningless universe, why couldn’t I just as easily volunteer down at the soup kitchen?
I’m reminded of what G.B. Shaw said: “Suppose the world were only one of God’s jokes? Would you work any less to make it a good joke instead of a bad one?”
There are theologians, even fairly conservative Evangelical ones, who have concluded that God is not omnipotent in anything like the traditional sense in which that term is used.
Why should any of us care what some theologicians have concluded? And how is it relevant to what one particular theologican stated in an interview?
Again, I don’t think I misjudged the majority of contributors here as not having sufficient background in theology to know that.
That isn’t theology, it’s the sociology of theologicians.
So thank you for illustrating my point.
That wasn’t your point, liar. Your point was that we are out of line (deserving to be berated) for speaking about Haught and what he said because we aren’t theologicians.
Frankly, Mr. McGrath, I read statements like the above and am incapable of differentiating such so-called theological insights and those of, say, a sommelier waxing rhapsodic over the hints of citrus, blueberry and cat’s pee in a cheap bottle of plonk.
Sastra: “Waving one’s hands around and trying to focus attention on how it all speaks to us of truths in the human condition won’t get you into some magic area between theism and atheism where you get all the respect you think is due to both.”
Exactly, Sastra.
I think the “sophisticated” faithful are playing a mental game with themselves. First, they define supernatural stories (AKA doctrines) as metaphors – in which case we can all agree that a metaphor is not false for the very reason it is not intended to be literal. The mind’s “falsehood detector” is turned off. But they don’t stop there; they point to the non-falsity of the metaphor to suggest that there is some transcendent truth to these stories beyond its status as mere metaphor. So these stories (doctrines) exist in two mutually incompatible states simultaneously – metaphor and “reality.”
(Even fundamentalists accept some metaphor – the authors of Left Behind don’t believe that a sword literally issues from Jesus’ mouth. But religious doctrine cannot be entirely metaphorical – otherwise, as Sastra writes, it’s atheism.)
I suppose they could suggest that the realm of metaphor is just as “real” and “true” as the material realm. In which case they arrive at a form of pantheistic solipsism – and somewhere, somehow, in some way, that fox really is trying to get those grapes and Jesus really was resurrected.
As some have pointed out, perhaps the real God of the gaps is the gap between the nebulous Schrödinger’s cat/Cheshire cat God-concept of progressive theologians and the plainspoken concept of God’s existence and miracles held by most of the faithful.
Scott Hatfield: Sure, why assume consistency? Just our senses may be deceiving us (per Plantinga’s distortion of Churchland) perhaps our common sense deceives us as well. That may be so. But in that case, we may as well give up this business of trying to rationally comprehend our universe.
So the NT tells us that our lives makes sense and that averything works out for the best?
Who needs theology – you can get that message from any episode of South Park. And it’s a hell of a lot more fun than reading the awful dreck in the bible.
“It seems to me that many philosophers believe that, like mathematicians, they can actually prove the points they believe in, and to that end, they often try to use highly rigorous and technical language, and sometimes they try to anticipate and to counter all possible counter-arguments. I admire such self-confidence, but I am a bit less optimistic and a bit more fatalistic. I don’t think one can truly prove anything in philosophy; I think one can merely try to convince, and probably one will wind up convincing only those people who started out fairly close to the position one is advocating.” — Douglas Hofstadter (“I am a Strange Loop,” Basic books, 2007, p.xvii)
Regarding the bit about photographing the resurrection –
So now this guy is making empirical claims about the physical properties of light, film, etc, etc?
God can suspend physical law on a whim? Kind of like when the appearance of light preceded the creation of stars (at least according to some creationinsts)?
Well, I suppose it’s possible, though not exactly a scientific proposition. Oops! There goes that damn scientific insistence on evidence again, trampling on religious fantasy.
Wow, this guy is on about the same level as Ken Ham.
Colugo wrote: But in that case, we may as well give up this business of trying to rationally comprehend our universe.
Exactly what every theist, without exception, has done.
Tulse (#179),
John Allen Paulos has some nice silliness about this point in Beyond Numeracy. If nothing we do now will matter in a hundred years, then why should the fact that nothing will matter in a hundred years matter now? And round and round the head does spin. . . .
One could probably cook up a hierarchical scheme of meaning assignment, along the lines of the higher-order logic stuff invented to make sense of various paradoxes. If you have first-order sentences, which directly refer to the world, and second-order sentences, which can make statements about first-order sentences, then you don’t need to worry about some Greek philosopher jerk standing up and saying, “This sentence is false.”
Epimenides the Cretan says, “All Cretans are liars.” This parses to the assertion, “All statements made by Cretans are lies” — but the claims of the Cretans (about the price of olive oil, or whatever) are first-order, but the claim that “all first-order statements of the Cretans are cretinous lies” is a second-order sentence, so all is good.
So, if you find a Cretan cynic saying, “Nothing matters,” then that’s really an existential complaint of the second order. . . .
Particularly because the whole point of the civilization which those hyperintelligent aliens seeded and directed was to build a replacement part for a flying saucer stranded on Titan.
So what does “omnipotent” mean in their definition? Or are you saying that they’re saying God isn’t omnipotent, period? It would be informative. It would also be informative to see why they say that.
Of course, it would be informative in the same way that learning whether it was Paracelsus’ followers or opponents who insisted that raising the Green Lion was a necessary step in creating the homunculus would.
Pete @ #126: Foxes certainly do eat grapes. They’ll eat damn near anything — at least the fox species I’m familiar with, the North American gray and red. Is there a good reason to think that whatever species Aesop was familiar with would be choosier?
Can you explain what that means in words whose meaning most English-speakers can be assumed to agree on?
That is one advantage of the concrete and verifiable. It’s harder to turn it into one of those “A word means what I say it means” discussions.
Particularly because the whole point of the civilization which those hyperintelligent aliens seeded and directed was to build a replacement part for a flying saucer stranded on Titan.
I’m not clear on how that’s worse than the sort of purpose that Christians seem to cherish, that of being adulators of their creator (or else suffer eternal torment).
truthmachine,
Before you post about something eight times it would be useful to know what you’re talking about. Plantinga isn’t distorting Churchland, in fact, Churchland goes further than Plantinga by explicitly rejecting the concept of truth entirely. The Churchlands claim to be “Scientific Realists” because they believe items of immediate experience have the same status as “unobservables” in Empiricism; i.e., all our experience is mediated and is therefore on the same ground (obviously theoretical objects cannot then be grounded in observation). They endorse a connectionist account of the brain as giving an explanation for how science works but reject terms like “truth” in relation to it; they endorse van Fraassen’s pragmatist “theoretical virtues” and Feyerabend’s anarchistic account of science (I don’t endorse this account before you get all excited).
I don’t think our commonsense beliefs need to be grounded. To take one of your examples, whether “who my parents are” is a case of paternity or who raised me isn’t the sort of question you can answer through establishing a correspondence with reality, it’s a matter of arbitrary social convention. This view isn’t nearly as controversial as you seem to think it is. On the other hand, “‘F = ma’ is true” fits the philosophers intuition of what truth is quite nicely; it does so exactly because it isn’t a product of mere observation. We carefully build scientific theories in such a way that they’re grounded externally to us; related by standards of measurement and manipulated through mathematical formalism. What we supply is ingenuity and not truth. The conflation of philosophy and psychology has, I think, been unfortunate for both philosophy and psychology.
Why would we need to invent new ways when mere human nature provides many viable options?
An atheist could certainly choose to use a method invented by religion, but he just as certainly need not. Once again, why not use basic human methods? And what is this vocabulary you speak of? Are you suggesting that religion is inherent in the basic human experience, or that the basic experience is inadequate if not augmented by religion?
I guess your point just isn’t clear to me. Religion is not necessary for success coping with tragedy, etc. The fact that some people use it for that purpose doesn’t contradict this fact.
Scott Hatfield:
You are certainly slipping in the strength of your arguments. I have noticed this over more than a few of your comments.
In truth the naive fundie as you call them is much more consistent in their arguments than anything Haught says above. The fact you make the above comment tends to make me think you prefer the vapid nonsense that lacks any real grounding.
The ‘naive’ fundy is often harder to dismiss than any theologian just because of the ground up nature of their belief. Theologians can and do believe just about anything.
They are harder to marginalize simply because there are so many of them and they are so vocal. The relatively few people like Haught say such ridiculous things that even a fundie knows they are nuts.
James McGrath (#102),
Unlike the theory of evolution, James, theology is not an area of expertise.
I’m just a simple cab driver, born and raised in San Francisco, who can summarize religion and theology in one word: gobblegook. Not fancy but maybe I’ve driven up and down too many hills.
“We would also be better served if the Psychology, Sociology, Anthropology & History departments were combined into a single “Human Behavior” department. This would entail placing select aspects of the original “disciplines” into the Biology/Medical, Literature/Language, and Philosophy Departments.”
Why should we tell these disciplines how to work? Do you know the differences between anthropology and history? As an archaeologist (anthropologist) my work is closer to the physical anthropologists in my department than it is to many historians, especially in methodology. Not to mention all the specific skills I need to learn as oppose to any of these other disciplines you list. I don’t exactly see the need for anyone in the psychology department to be working on faunal analysis with me next semester.
Posted by: thadd
My educational background is in Sociology, which I used professionally in Psychiatric Nursing. Of course I know the differences between Anthropology and History.
Physical Anthropology belongs to the discipline of Biology, not human behavior. Is is our desire to place humans above other animals that lead to our making a special classification for our own biological history. Cultural Anthropology is History, in fact a more scientifically based form of History than is generally taught in History classes.
If you are doing “faunal analysis”, then you are doing Biology. Your “specific skills” have nothing to do with Human Behavior: your “specific skills” are a subset of those of a Botanist. Other aspects of Archeology really belong in Engineering.
It is a similar arrogance that causes us to separate Sociology, the study of ones own social structures, from Cultural Anthropology, the study of other “primitive” social structures. There is an academic taboo against applying insights gained in Anthropology to Sociology. This taboo is even stronger for applying Biological insights into Sociology as the experience of E. O. Wilson illustrates.
As for your first statement, “Why should we tell these disciplines how to work?” Why not? Is there something sacred about the way we categorize disciplines in our colleges/universities? Departmental identities and interdepartmental rivalries appear to me to have vastly more of a negative impact on learning/teaching than any benefit. Competition between disciplines over areas which naturally overlap benefits nobody.
To continue doing something just because it has been done that way previously sounds more like the justification of a religious conservative than a scientist.
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James McGrath said:
Good, because I’m going to politely respond to your reply to me above:
You’ve misinterpreted what I was trying to say. I see constant references to the value of religion in conveying awe, hope and solace, and a perceived corresponding deficit in the ability of science plus atheism (rationalism, if you like) to convey the same. Haught’s atheism=nihilism is yet another in a long line of such characterizations.
To me such comparisons rely not on the literal truth or accuracy of science vs. religion (as you say, beyond fundamentalists, many people who are seen and see themselves as religious are not literalists with regard to at least some parts of their holy texts), but on a quality of immanence. That is, scientific truth, without more, is characterized as lacking in comparison to religion in the ability of its stories to inspire awe, hope, and comfort.
In the piece you quoted, I was simply drawing a comparison between religious text as story and science as story in order to make the point that the unvarnished truth is not lacking in its ability to inspire.
“@Jaycubed #68
Theorising in Pol Sci and Economics is about the real world.
Asking questions about the impact of fairies on our world is not equal to theorise on optimal currency areas or the differences between majoritarian and proportional election systems.
If you prefer we can leave the Theology departments intact and just get rid of those who spend their time thinking about the human relation with leprechauns. The Theo in Theology is the problem.
Posted by: Don Quijote”
Science doesn’t have huge philosophical divides in the way that the Economics and Political Science “disciplines” have. “Theorizing” is not science, even if you theorize about the real world.
There are no equivalents to the various “Schools” of Economics in science. The ideas presented are Fairy ideas. The very idea of “The Market” is a Fairy concept.
Perhaps the best illustration of this would be a comparison of Nobel Memorial Prizes in Economics compared to Nobel Prizes in Physics or Chemistry. The Economics Nobels have been given to recipients with conflicting & irreconcilable differences in their theories. The Nobels in Physics & Chemistry demonstrate a continuous & coherent increase in knowledge, building upon & incorporating past discoveries.
A similar problem exists with “Political Science”. It is not science. It is a body of often conflicting beliefs & theories. It uses science at times, especially Mathematics: Game Theory is a good example. Kabbalah uses Mathematics too.
But neither Economics nor Political Science nor Kabbalah are predictive in a scientific sense. They are bodies of competing Fairy ideologies, albeit incorporating some scientific techniques.
It is not the “Theo…” that is the problem. That is only one specific Fairy. It is the hidden Fairies that go unquestioned by all of us that are the real problems. It’s easy to see other peoples’ Fairies, but hard to recognize our own.
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Plantinga isn’t distorting Churchland
I provided evidence that he is misrepresenting what her statement implies, diptwit. OTOH, you have failed to provide any sort of support for your absurd and self-refuting claim that “Unless you think knowledge gets into your head by way of magic or miracle, science is your only means of knowing anything about anything, as science has ably demonstrated through science”.
If you took seriously Plantinga’s claim that we lack justification (given naturalism) for thinking our beliefs are reliable, you should have no trouble understanding why I have no reason to adopt yours.
Wasn’t it Carl Sagan who asked why no one looks at the data coming in from the sciences and says “This is better and more awe inspiring than Genesis?” I won’t try to speak for anyone else. I do react that way to the data from the sciences, whether images from the Hubble Telescope or from biology or other fields.
One problem with Richard Dawkins’ last book was that it assumed that everyone who speaks about God is talking about the ‘Fairy-in-chief’. He had to struggle a bit with Einstein, but in the end decided pantheism (Einstein’s view) is simply “sexed up atheism” and Deism is simply “watered-down theism”. Panentheism (the view held in process theology, or by the Sufi mystics of Islam) doesn’t even get a mention, even though it is the most widely held theological view in many denominations in our time.
Again, I return to my original point. If you are going to keep using the term “God” to refer to that which people who are uneducated about theology mean by it, should I discuss evolution in terms of that which those uneducated in biology mean by it? Or should I just despair that we can even have an intelligent conversation about this, because there is in fact no interest in understanding what is meant?
To take one of your examples, whether “who my parents are” is a case of paternity or who raised me isn’t the sort of question you can answer through establishing a correspondence with reality, it’s a matter of arbitrary social convention. This view isn’t nearly as controversial as you seem to think it is.
I don’t think that’s controversial at all (discounting linguistic essentialists/intrinsicalists, who are fools). What I think is that it’s an astoundingly dense or dishonest strawman. That those alternatives are both accepted as social conventions in various circumstances is believed, justifiably, and almost certainly true — which is to say that we know what the words mean, but not through science. And we know which persons raised us, but not through science. But, as your beliefs are Plantinga-unreliable, my directing these comments to you is a waste of effort.
On the other hand, “‘F = ma’ is true” fits the philosophers intuition of what truth is quite nicely; it does so exactly because it isn’t a product of mere observation.
I’ve found that, more often than not, when people use the words “mere” or “just”, they are committing a fallacy.
No, not mere observation, but it’s an inference from observation. If the observations aren’t knowledge, then inferences from them can’t be either (they could be true and believed, but not justifiably). The contrary is magical. And the insistence that something is true only if it is inferred is ad hoc blather. There is no “philosophers intuition of what truth is” that fits a physical law but no instance of it.
We carefully build scientific theories in such a way that they’re grounded externally to us related by standards of measurement and manipulated through mathematical formalism.
This is nonsense. Measurements must be grounded in observation, otherwise there is no reason to accept them. Also, this rigid claim about scientific theories is more than a bit absurd on a biology blog; science in practice isn’t nearly that formal.
James McGrath:
“Again, I return to my original point. If you are going to keep using the term “God” to refer to that which people who are uneducated about theology mean by it, should I discuss evolution in terms of that which those uneducated in biology mean by it? Or should I just despair that we can even have an intelligent conversation about this, because there is in fact no interest in understanding what is meant?”
The point Dawkins makes is it doesn’t matter how you define your deity, unless and until you can provide any repeatable, testable, experimental evidence that such an entity exists then us scientists and atheists need pay no attention to the idea at all. To its consequences in the brains of believers and how those beliefs impact on the world and behaviour, yes that is the province of science. That is because these are real, demonstrable, testable open to experiment phenomena. Which is what Dennett says in Breaking the Spell of course. Or is this distinction too fine for you?
I haven’t claimed that inference from observation is knowledge or that something is true only if it is inferred. The only reason to think you need to give an account of science based on inference from observation is if you have an a priori commitment to Empiricism.
You apparently suffer from a complete inability to separate your philosophical account from the thing you are giving an account of. You just continually restate your beliefs without supplying any further argument. It’s rather tiresome. This probably explains why you think accusing me of not accounting for the truth of my claims within your philosophical commitments amounts to my not being able to make truth claims at all.
James McGrath wrote:
Of course definitions of “God” go all over the place — and as someone pointed out earlier, there are definitions which come so close to equating God with the natural universe, or the striving of humanity, or some other secular concept that the term can now be embraced by atheists. If so, I think it’s more reasonable to say that something was wrong with that definition, than to announce that atheists have now seen the error of their ways. Atheists see God as a symbol or metaphor for other things. If you’re a theist, you have to take it more literally than that, or you’re simply an atheist with a poetic bent.
In his book, Dawkins states the God Hypothesis as:”… there exists a superhuman, supernatural intelligence who deliberately designed and created the universe and everything in it.” This seems a pretty bare-bones description of most versions of God. If you remove attributes like intelligence, consciousness, and the ability to plan, act, and create, then I think you’ve taken away too much.
Here are some definitions of God I’ve encountered:
God is that mysterious force – and you can give it many names as many religions do – that works upon us and through us to seek and achieve truth, beauty, and goodness.
God is a being absolutely infinite, that is a substance consisting of infinite attributes, each of which expresses eternal and infinite essentiality.
God is a field of consciousness that is set up for maximum diversity — and that includes the divine and diabolical, the sacred and the profane.
God is a symbol of the mystery that lies between the poles of our clearest rational dichotomy.
God is a cosmic force beyond comprehension, beyond all categories, including good and evil.
God is pure actuality.
Those are so lovely. Contrary to what some may think, not all atheists were raised fundamentalists. This is more or less what I departed from, to become an atheist. No resentment, no hostility. No clear and shining breakthrough. You just find better ways to express the same things, because not all of this is clear, not all of this is meaningful, not all of this is likely, and some of it turns out to be wrong.
Sastra’s examples are precisely why I for one think that fundies are more intellectually honest — I can a least understand what claims are being made by them. By contrast, those “statements” are nothing but goobledygook to me.
Re: #213.
All I can do is respond to what this particular theologian seems to be talking about. However, you do touch upon a particular point of frustration. If one is going to write in defense of god, one ought to be a little more clear about what is meant by the word. Haught insists that “ultimate reality” is personal. It’s clear from context that “ultimate reality” = god. “Personal” he defines as “intellegent, capable of love, and able to make promises.” It would be very helpful if he clarified the nature of that intelligence, or at least attempted explain through what mechanism god carries out those promises. It seems to me he could be able to put together some testable propositions from that definition. However, in another part Haught seems to maintain that god is simply metaphor, and in another he seems to maintain that evidence is not necessary or should not be sought. I don’t think the problem is that we’re failing to discuss god on Haughts terms. Rather, his terms keep changing.
I’m certainly not familiar with theology, there may be some intelligible writing out there, but I’ve read all of Spong’s books. He strikes me as emblematic of the type of thought I grew up in. In my opinion, he’s defined god out of existence, but just can’t bring himself to admit it. I’m generally inclined to favor the literalists over people like Spong not because they’re easy to argue with, but because their perspective is consequential. If what they say is true, it’s big news. If Spong’s god exists, nothing changes. All the good stuff he attributes to god, I can get without him. Liberal Christianity, in a tortured effort to reconcile god with science, has made him utterly pointless. Better to shuck him off altogether. He isn’t needed.
Again, I return to my original point. If you are going to keep using the term “God” to refer to that which people who are uneducated about theology mean by it, should I discuss evolution in terms of that which those uneducated in biology mean by it?
This is so confused. First, when someone uses a word, “God” or “evolution” or any other, we should indeed refer to what they mean by it. That’s why we say, e.g., “that’s not what scientists mean by ‘theory'”, when people misunderstand what the word means in the context of “the theory of evolution”. Likewise, when people talk about “God”, they mean what they mean by it, not what some theologician means by it. To have a parallel to evolution, there would have to be some established, well-defined “theologician’s God”, and we would have to have people making ignorant claims about that concept, identified as such. But there is no such established, well-defined notion, and even if there were, it’s
not what people are referring to it when they use the word “God”.
In addition, and most importantly, the expertise of biologists is in their understanding of the scientifically determined facts, not of the usage of the term, but of the actual phenomenon to which it refers. OTOH, while theologicians may have plenty of expertise on how other theologicians use the word “God”, they have no, nada, zilch, expertise on the phenomenon to which it refers, as there is no way to obtain such expertise, even if there were such a phenomenon; certainly theologicians do not have a methodology, as biologists do, of determining facts about the phenomenon that they are supposedly experts on. This expertise is a fiction, an imagining (which is, I suppose, something that theologicians excel at.)
Or should I just despair that we can even have an intelligent conversation about this, because there is in fact no interest in understanding what is meant?
That isn’t the reason that intelligent conversation with theologicians is hard to come by, but it’s a common complaint by the intellectually dishonest that the reason they aren’t agreed with is that they aren’t understood.
It’s rather tiresome.
Yes, you patent dishonesty is tiresome. You still have not provided any support for your original, patently absurd and self-refuting claim, and you just continually add on new unsupported claims while ignoring all refutations. Goodbye.
Thadd (re.#209),
I meant to say your skill set comes from zoology rather than botany.
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In his book, Dawkins states the God Hypothesis as:”… there exists a superhuman, supernatural intelligence who deliberately designed and created the universe and everything in it.”
And it’s that hypothesis he addresses. McGrath’s claim that “it assumed that everyone who speaks about God is talking about the ‘Fairy-in-chief'” is bearing false witness — or, to be more charitable, is foolish. Dawkins is undoubtedly aware that someone somewhere might use the word “God” to mean tapioca pudding, and most certainly did not assume that no one does, but not every possible use of the word God is interesting or worth addressing. McGrath’s complaint about Einstein is likewise foolish, as Einstein’s notions don’t fit the hypothesis. Einstein believed that the laws governing the universe reflected some unfathomable intelligence. That romantic notion is a bit hard to decipher — and we shouldn’t give it credit just because it was Einstein’s — but it isn’t pantheism; Einstein did not claim that the universe is God, or God is nature; he never made any positive claim about God at all. He did liken his view to that of Spinoza, but he was not actually a Spinozan. And what are we to make of Spinoza’s view that God = Nature = some “substance” out of which everything is made, other than yet another failed empirical claim? And those who think that “the Universe is God” is a “theistic” view need some training in linguistics, or at least quips by Lincoln about dogs, legs, and tails. In fact, to properly decode all this God-talk requires a fair amount of expertise in semantics and logic, not “theological” expertise in just how many angels any particular seminarian thinks dances on the head of a pin.
-Haught
-Angel
Ah, Joss, you always have all the answers.
And on an amusing note, Tim Minear the writer of the episode of Angel that quote comes from, is known to refer to God as “the Sky Bully”.
truth machine,
Sorry, but I’ve got to ask: what the heck is a “theologician”?
Your spelling is always very good, and you’ve used that word more or less consistently over several posts now, so I’m tempted to think that you are using it deliberately. We’ve been talking about theology here, so I thought it was a synonym for theologian, but I can’t find it as such in the online and paper dictionaries I checked. What’s up?
BTW, when I struck out with the online dictionaries, I tried a plain Google search of the word. Most hits were likely typos, but I found a couple of hits where people were asking the same question as me, only they offered possible definitions (adapted here to read better):
theologician: a cross between a Theologian and a Magician – a dude dressed up in a bad tuxedo then pulls God out of a tophat
theologician: Someone who makes things appear by magic in Scripture even though they’re not really there
Is either of these definitions what you meant? :-)
Einstein said explicitly that he believed in Spinoza’s God.
Haught just doesn’t get it. Our minds are part of the natural universe, which is made entirely out of matter-energy, according to all available evidence.
Mindful matter is certainly becoming “dominant” in our local picture in many important ways, and all but a minuscule fraction of the remaining universe remains largely unexplored.
As to whether universities should have theology departments — if only religious delusions were added to the DSM, ‘theological’ research could picked up by the department of psychiatric medicine.
Wow, that really makes all discussion rather pointless. This fellow seems to pretend that his definition is somehow superior to the little old lady in the pew.
You can’t be uneducated about it just as you can’t be educated about it. Now what some ‘theologians’ think sure but seeing how their stances, as evidenced by this Haught fellow, are about as vapid as nonsense can get I think the little old lady in the pew has the upper hand.
Nonsense. Our assumptions about parentage aren’t perfect, but completely arbitrary beliefs about parentage would be extremely maladaptive. I, at least, don’t know of any society where most parent-child pairs can be said to be “arbitrarily” assigned with respect to biological kinship.
Just for fun, I thought I’d attribute the quotes for the God definitions:
!.) God is that mysterious force – and you can give it many names as many religions do – that works upon us and through us to seek and achieve truth, beauty, and goodness. (Chris Hedges)
2.) God is a being absolutely infinite, that is a substance consisting of infinite attributes, each of which expresses eternal and infinite essentiality.(Spinoza)
3.) God is a field of consciousness that is set up for maximum diversity — and that includes the divine and diabolical, the sacred and the profane. (Deepak Chopra)
4.) God is a symbol of the mystery that lies between the poles of our clearest rational dichotomy. (Jim Rigby)
5.) God is a cosmic force beyond comprehension, beyond all categories, including good and evil. (J Moyer?)
6.) God is pure actuality. (Aquinas)
Hey, didja guess right? Huh? Didja?
truth machine:
So you suggest no longer apologizing for being intellectually dishonest? Wouldn’t it be better just to stop being intellectually dishonest? (That’s what apologetics is.)
Let me start by apologizing for failing to carefully read McGrath’s post and inadvertently misrepresenting your views with respect to the claim that McGrath made an ad hominem argument. I stubbed my toe there, and I can admit my mistake.
But, while we’re on the subject of intellectual dishonesty, don’t you think it’s kind of sneaky to first define all believers as apologists (as you did in post #165), and then apologetics as dishonesty (post #182)? Can I have your permission to conflate the two and conclude that all believers are dishonest?
You have only two possible responses here, as I see it.
1) You could admit that one of the two above statements is not entirely correct;
or
2) You are guilty of something like poisoning the well yourself, by identifying religious belief itself with dishonesty.
I predict you will deny (1) and say that (2) is not a problem because you honestly feel the whole matter is dishonest. I hasten to add that if I have again somehow misrepresented your views, it was not intended and I regret the earlier impression I might’ve given, and await your correction.
Amiably…SH
I DO think this is accurate simply because of all the bending and twisting one must be involved in to justify the premise.
mothworm:
We make that claim because it’s the one thing Fundies get right. If your only justification for your religion is what’s put down in your religious book, you don’t get to pick and choose which parts you want to believe.
Ah, but in fact all believers, including fundies, choose which parts to take or not take literally. And many believers, such as yours truly, recognize other legs to the chair of faith other than the prop of scripture.
Uber:
In truth the naive fundie as you call them is much more consistent in their arguments than anything Haught says above. The fact you make the above comment tends to make me think you prefer the vapid nonsense that lacks any real grounding.
The naive fundie may appear to have that foolish consistency that we associate with little minds, but as I mentioned above virtually all of them pick and choose what should be taken literally. As for me, I prefer a world in which metaphor, ambiguity and paradox are honestly employed to illuminate the gaps in our understanding. That comment could apply to a well-written science popularization, not just the scriptures.
It will never, however, apply to the literal-minded Bible thumper, because they abhor apparent gaps in knowledge. That is why they are in a hurry to say ‘Godditit’ as an answer to everything. That is why they are profoundly anti-intellectual: Mark Noll, a Christian, famously wrote that The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind is that there is very little interest in the life of the mind. I find it ridiculous that smart, thoughtful people would ever hold up fundamentalist ‘thought’ as more worthy purely on the basis of its’ alleged consistency, a consistency that largely evaporates in its’ practice. If it were really true that evangelical thought is to be admired on those grounds, then all other things being true, it would seem that non-believers should prefer the discourse of evangelicals over the moderately religious.
I would be disappointed if that were true. What do you think?
But if you ask me whether a scientific experiment could verify the Resurrection, I would say such an event is entirely too important to be subjected to a method which is devoid of all religious meaning.
So the allegedly most important event ever to have occurred on earth that allegedly transformed the relationship of human beings to the master of the universe is TOO IMPORTANT to be subjected to the only thing that could verify whether it really happened or not? What a f***ing joke.
Namely, Nature (deus sive natura in Spinoza’s own phrase)- i.e. the universe. Spinoza’s pantheism is virtually indistinguishable from atheism.
“But that statement itself — that evidence is necessary — holds a further hidden premise that all evidence worth examining has to be scientific evidence.”
Well, if not, then at least reliable would be nice.
Suppose you were in a spacecraft orbiting Jupiter. You could use crystal gazing, Feminist alternative “ways of knowing,” and Afro-centric mathematics, or you could use classical physics and mathematics. One gets you home, one gets you dead.
Scott Hatfeild,
I am enjoying some of your commentary, but until you actually describe what it is you believe, or what it is you believe non-fundie theologians believe, how much farther do expect this conversation to go?
Scott-
But thats the point. It doesn’t illuminate the gaps or increase the understanding. Your employing the same methodology of the fundie your insulting. There is no clearway to discern metaphor from literal. In this way you are doing exactly the same thing. Oh you can pretend it’s more intellectual but c’mon it takes about the same intellect to create the Creation museum which is almost impressive in it’s stupidity.
Again, the same can be said of Haught above. His useof metaphor shows the same pic and choose methodology asthe literalists minus the grounding. Hell the man just stated the appearance of Jesus wouldn’t be recordable. The question is why would anyone prefer that intellectually than the fundie? One wouldn’t if one was trying to keep an honest mind instead of simply trying to rescue a preconceived notion.
Why? You can have discourse with anyone. I can’t parse your meaning here.
Scott says,
“The naive fundie may appear to have that foolish consistency that we associate with little minds, but as I mentioned above virtually all of them pick and choose what should be taken literally.”
You are correct sir. There are so many inconsistencies and contradictions in the Bible concerning accounts of the same stories that can’t be reconciled. A fundie may believe that God created the heavens and the earth just like it says in Genesis but which contradicting version, chapter 1 or 2?
Likewise, the gospels state the date of birth for Jesus as ranging over a 10-12 year period. Each account differs from the others.
The fundie is not intellectually honest nor more truthful in their beliefs. Furthermore, they are afraid to face reality which is a trait less appealing to me than those who would make the scriptures metaphorical in order to deal with a real world. At least they are making an attempt. We can hope that they simply find reality so intoxicating that they chose to join us on a permanent basis.
So the allegedly most important event ever to have occurred on earth that allegedly transformed the relationship of human beings to the master of the universe is TOO IMPORTANT to be subjected to the only thing that could verify whether it really happened or not?
I just have one thing to say in response to the idea that the life/death of Jesus is too important to subject to scientific scrutiny:
The Shroud of Turin.
how many over the last few centuries held up the Shroud as literal evidence of the life/death of Jesus, I wonder.
the only reason it hadn’t been tested for so long was out of simple fear.
now that it’s conclusively a fake…
I think more honestly, what people who say things like “religion cannot be tested” should say instead is that they are afraid science will in fact demonstrate their fantasies to be just that.
the real issue, going beyond even that is:
why should they care?
I mean they have faith, right? does that faith require observational evidence like the Shroud in order to maintain itself?
if so, that’s not faith, right?
so what are they afraid of?
I think it’s simply that they themselves will be forced to consciously realize they don’t really have the faith they claim to.
I think the larger churches fear this as well.
eventually, we will get to the point where the CC will end up saying something like:
“OK, yeah, 99% of our dogma is made up BS, but hey, people like it so we are doing a service.”
and then people will finally start to see that religions are just like TV shows; each person can pick their favorite one that makes them feel good on sundays, and not need to even bother to think about taking them seriously at all.
praise the FSM.
“And beneath that assumption, there’s the deeper worldview — it’s a kind of dogma — that science is the only reliable way to truth. But that itself is a faith statement. It’s a deep faith commitment because there’s no way you can set up a series of scientific experiments to prove that science is the only reliable guide to truth. It’s a creed.”
This is the identical moronic shit as in that fucking NY Times commentary a few weeks ago. Is this the same asshole who wrote that?
Observer:
Thanks for the comment. Regular readers of Pharyngula may know that I am a poor spokesman for organized religion, precisely because I tend to regard faith-based claims as not justified by evidence. I’m not sure so much if that’s due to any particular intellectual consistency (my critics would say ‘no’), or whether it’s just an aspect of my personality. At any rate, I would make a very poor sheep.
Some very bright people here have suggested that I might be in the ‘pre-atheist’ stage. I mull that over quite a bit. Another poster here with a fascinating personal history involving Spiritualism has written rather movingly and persuasively about the capacity for personal self-deception where faith experience is concerned. I think about that quite a bit, especially when I am involved in faith-centered activities. So it would be dishonest of me to pretend that I have the final word, that I am utterly convinced that my own faith experience is entirely valid, and I find much of the discussions here on belief etc. to be valuable and clarifying.
Since I am a guest here, however, I draw the line at either pushing or directly exploring my own personal beliefs in this forum. For those who are interested in such things, for whatever reason, can visit my blog and peruse posts under ‘Behind The Curtain’, and (if they like) leave comments. I would welcome criticism.
As for Haught, he’s a scholar in his field, which I am not, so I have some lingering doubts about some of the criticisms leveled against him here. I suspect, for example, that there is quite a bit more to the ‘camera in the Upper Room’ argument than meets the eye. Neverthelss, in general I agree that his comments as discussed in this thread sound pretty vacuous, so I in no way want to go on record as signing on for his views.
At the same time, I recognize that Haught has been a useful evolution-friendly voice within the pews, and I am disappointed to perceive little more than another unclothed Emperor in the referenced interview.
Uber:
Sorry if I misled you, but you don’t appear to be responding to the sense in which I think metaphor can shed light on problems. You appear to think that I am proposing metaphor as an ‘explanation.’ Not so. I am thinking about metaphor as a tool for clarifying problems, like the Gedankenexperiment beloved of Einstein, who famously wondered what it would be like to ‘ride’ a wave of light.
As for another (poorly couched?) claim on my part, I mean something along these lines: would you prefer to interact with a fundy (no matter how consistent) whose belief system is reducible to a bumper sticker dogmatically at odds with reality? Or, rather, with a non-fundy whose views are not held dogmatically, who attempt to accommodate her views to the best available evidence, who sees a role for nuance and metaphor in the evidence of the natural world? Which would you really prefer to interact with? With whom would you be likely to have the most fruitful conversation? With whom would you be able to make common cause against the enemies of science and reason?
I’m just sayin’….
Rick T:
You either grasped my point above, or we were thinking along the same lines. In any case, I agree with the general criticism of the Bible as a flawed human document and I beg your indulgence as one of those still challenged by faith at present.
Sorry, but I’ve got to ask: what the heck is a “theologician”? Your spelling is always very good,
I guess it’s an exception that proves the rule :-) … a mistaken spelling for theologian that got stuck in my head.
Einstein said explicitly that he believed in Spinoza’s God.
As I said, one needs expertise in semantics. To what does “Spinoza’s God” refer? Einstein made explicit his conception when he wrote “I believe in Spinoza’s God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with the fates and actions of human beings”, but that doesn’t mean that Einstein’s conception was the same as Spinoza’s, and in later years he made more circumspect statements, such as “If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.”
Nonsense. Our assumptions about parentage aren’t perfect, but completely arbitrary beliefs about parentage would be extremely maladaptive.
poke’s statement was rather hard to parse, but I’m pretty sure he wasn’t saying anything about beliefs about parentage being arbitrary (although he did say things much like that about beliefs in general). Rather, he was saying that the phrase “who my parents are” can refer to parents in two senses, biological or familial, and there’s no fact of the matter as to which it does refer to. That’s true, and indicates that my example wasn’t the best, but isn’t really relevant to the rest of the discussion. In the case of familial parents, we really do know (in the general case; there can always be TrumanWorld exceptions) which people are those people.
God is a being absolutely infinite, that is a substance consisting of infinite attributes, each of which expresses eternal and infinite essentiality.(Spinoza)
That strongly suggests that, regardless of what Einstein said, he didn’t actually believe in Spinoza’s God.
But, while we’re on the subject of intellectual dishonesty, don’t you think it’s kind of sneaky to first define all believers as apologists (as you did in post #165), and then apologetics as dishonesty (post #182)?
Sneaky? No, I did not intend any deception. I’ve always considered apologetics to be obviously intellectually dishonest; I simply made it explicit in #182. You thinking it sneaky seems to flow from a number of errors in fact and reasoning on your part, some of which I address here. e.g., I not define anything; rather, I made claims about believers and about apologetics, based on presumed shared definitions.
And I didn’t say in #182 that apologetics is “dishonesty”, I said it’s intellectually dishonest. Intellectual dishonesty isn’t ordinary dishonesty, it is the failure to treat with due respect arguments that challenge one’s position. Some types of fallacies, like tu quoque, are inherently intellectually dishonest. Certainly ignoring inconvenient evidence and persisting with arguments that have been shown to be fallacious is intellectually dishonest. No intentional deception is needed for intellectual dishonesty. Apologetics is an intellectually dishonest enterprise because it has a fixed conclusion for which supporting arguments are sought; it is confirmation bias hammered down into a methodology. It puts the conclusion cart before the logic horse. It turns truth seeking on its head.
Can I have your permission to conflate the two and conclude that all believers are dishonest?
You can combine them and conclude that all believers are intellectually dishonest. (But see below.)
You are guilty of something like poisoning the well yourself, by identifying religious belief itself with dishonesty.
No, it’s not poisoning of the well or anything like it — you don’t seem to have any idea what that is; think about what the phrase says, man! Poisoning the well is destroying someone or some group as a source of valid claims. But just because religious believers are intellectually dishonest — in regard to their religious beliefs — doesn’t mean that they can’t make an infinity of quite valid claims supported by perfectly good reasoning. And you can’t refute an argument that believers are intellectually dishonest (because they seek reasons to support their beliefs rather than derive their beliefs from reasoning) merely by labeling it with some term for a fallacy like “poisoning of the well”, it has to actually be fallacious. If I had said “Religious believers are intellectually dishonest and therefore you can’t believe anything they say“, that would be poisoning the well. But the first clause, being a mere assertion, cannot possibly be fallacious, and the argument “believers are apologists; apologetics is intellectually dishonest; therefore believers are intellectually dishonest” looks like valid modus ponens to me. All you can do is challenge the truth value of the premises.
However, my parenthetical above bothers me, and (in an attempt to be intellectually honest) I think I should withdraw my claim that all believers are apologists; I think there may be believers who have honestly weighed all the evidence and all the arguments they have been exposed to, to the best ability that they can, and have reached some religious beliefs as conclusions. But I don’t think there are any theologians or other sophisticated thinkers among them, because those people have all been exposed to numerous refutations of religious arguments and can only maintain their belief despite, not as a consequence of, rational evaluation. It could be argued that some religious believers are really dense and just never “get” the counterarguments, but this failure to “get” it suspiciously only works in one direction. For instance, I honestly believe that you are a somewhat poor reasoner, but it isn’t through poor reasoning alone that you maintain religious beliefs.
I predict you will deny (1) and say that (2) is not a problem because you honestly feel the whole matter is dishonest.
Your prediction is wrong. First, I in part confirmed (1) above (and, FWIW, I did so before reading this part of your message, not just to invalidate your prediction — which would have been shooting myself in the foot!) Second, I certainly do not say that poisoning the well is not a problem, but rather that you are mistaken in your belief that that’s what I did by arguing (intentionally, not sneakily; it’s not an argument I’m shy about making) that [nearly] all religious believers are intellectually dishonest. And I certainly would not argue that dishonesty is ok on my part because there’s other dishonesty, which it seems like you are saying — that most certainly would be intellectually dishonest, being a tu quoque fallacy.
I find it ridiculous that smart, thoughtful people would ever hold up fundamentalist ‘thought’ as more worthy purely on the basis of its’ alleged consistency
People are contrasting it to the sort of sloppy intellectual inanity that folks like you and Haught engage in to defend your “faith” when you confuse theistic claims with metaphors. The two aren’t in the same conceptual category.
If it were really true that evangelical thought is to be admired on those grounds, then all other things being true, it would seem that non-believers should prefer the discourse of evangelicals over the moderately religious.
It’s not to be admired, it’s just less puke-producing, at least at times. That you seem so intent on misunderstanding and misrepresenting what people have clearly said here is a fine example of intellectual dishonesty.
it would be dishonest of me to pretend that I have the final word, that I am utterly convinced that my own faith experience is entirely valid
What the heck is a “faith experience”? Do you mean something like seeing Jesus? Why would anyone take such experiences as having metaphysical import, especially when they can be induced by a brain probe? It seems to me to be immensely arrogant to think that the nature of the universe can hinge on the mental states occurring in one’s own brain, which is just an insignificant bit of matter in a big universe.
As for Haught, he’s a scholar in his field, which I am not, so I have some lingering doubts about some of the criticisms leveled against him here.
“scholar in his field”? You mean, like, he’s done experiments on God or something? The criticisms are about the claims he made in his interview and can be judged on their own merit. Your inane blather here is like saying that you must doubt the criticisms of someone who claims that the Emperor is clothed in metaphor because you aren’t an expert on the process of weaving metaphors. This sort of moronic dreck is why some people say, at times, that they prefer fundies — the fundies say that the Earth is 6,000 years old and that there was a global flood, ordinary sorts of empirical claims that are not inherently stupid.
I am thinking about metaphor as a tool for clarifying problems, like the Gedankenexperiment beloved of Einstein, who famously wondered what it would be like to ‘ride’ a wave of light.
Einstein really was thinking about accompanying the light beam; “ride” is no metaphor.
As for another (poorly couched?) claim on my part, I mean something along these lines: would you prefer to interact with a fundy (no matter how consistent) whose belief system is reducible to a bumper sticker dogmatically at odds with reality? Or, rather, with a non-fundy whose views are not held dogmatically, who attempt to accommodate her views to the best available evidence, who sees a role for nuance and metaphor in the evidence of the natural world? Which would you really prefer to interact with?
Don’t flatter yourself. The question is, who would we rather interact with, someone who clings to mistaken facts in order to support his “faith”, or someone who treats words and concepts like silly putty and bends them any which way so as to support his “faith”?
Scott Hatfield, Einstein’s riding on the light wave thought experiment is nice metaphor and a useful way of allowing our brains to intuitively grasp something. BUT, they and other metaphorical devices are definitely, absolutely and certainly NOT explanations. Nor are they mechanisms for how things work.
Einstein used that metaphor and out of it the insight it gave him he produced the maths and subsequently we got the physics which are explanations and mechanism devoid of metaphor. Do not make the mistake of thinking that just because lesser mortals like thee and me cannot grasp the idea from the bare equations that others also cannot. That you cannot use them as explanation and mechanism does not mean those do not exist.
Those of use who have made the journey from faith to atheism via the sort of position you hold have recognised the intellectual emptiness of staring at metaphors papering over the gaps and cracks, they are pretty but they are unsatisfying. So perhaps you need to ask yourself if you are being truly intellectually honest about those metaphors and whether or not there are explanations and mechanisms out there that are better. If they are not as compatible with your faith as the metaphors then it becomes that little matter of intellectual honesty. To thine own self be true.
I should add that when faced with an emptiness in our knowledge and understanding, there is third alternative. Rather than say goddidit as the fundies do, or papering over it with metaphor as you want to do, why not simply say ‘I don’t know’? There is something very intellectually honest in saying that.
In many ways what a research scientist is best at is being truly and profoundly ignorant. The job of a PhD (a proper one anyway) is for the candidate to get to the point where they understand the level of our, all humanity’s, ignorance about a certain subject. Else how do you identify what needs to be replaced with explanation and mechanism? No point in reinventing the wheel. One thing you will often hear real scientists say in the lab is ‘I don’t know’ or ‘it is not known’. Statements like that are what gets you up in the morning.
Scott Hatfield, I’m curious:
1) Does your view of the natural world (AKA the material realm AKA the world as encountered through methodological naturalism) effectively differ – either in its history (e.g. scientifically provable miracles) or its universal characteristics – from the view of atheists?
2) If so, is the realm of spirit (divinity / the sacred / miracles / God) largely a realm of symbols and metaphors?
3) Why those particular metaphors (Jesus et al.) and not another one? Would another set of metaphors be equally valid?
BaldApe wrote:
With respect, I think “Afro-centric” (Arabic) numerals and algebra would do a better job for you than Roman numerals and the relatively clumsy ways of manipulating them known to the classical world.
Regarding the use of metaphor to hang on to discredited ideas, in one of his books Richard Dawkins invents an analogy where scientists discover that DNA is not shaped like a double helix after all. Crick & Watson’s experiments were seriously flawed. He then asks you to imagine scientists responding with something like “But of course we never meant that the double helix was to be taken literally. The double helix is one of the foundational aspects of genetics, and we cannot do without it. It speaks to us of our nature as humans, of our turning towards understanding, of how we are interconnected to each other and the world blah blah blah…” and so on. So DNA is still a double helix — just not the way we thought.
That’s not a direct quote, but one gets the idea. If you are clever and imaginative enough, you can reconcile almost anything with reality by going into the metaphorical language of meaning. Nothing will ever really be wrong again. You just need to understand it in a different way.
Whom would I rather deal with as people? Oh, the liberal theists. We share a lot of common ground that’s absent with the Biblical literalists. But when it comes to debate, what I think a lot of people have been getting at is that they’re not really making an argument — they’re slipping and sliding around with a big goofy smile on their face saying “We’re not being literal — you are” as they contradict themselves all over the place.
I’ll second what truth machine said on ‘intellectual dishonesty’ and liberal theism. It’s not the same kind of dishonesty — actual and intellectual — of the creationists, but it’s equally if not more frustrating.
Atheists appear to be damned if we do and damned if we don’t. Attack fundamentalism and we’re sneered at for hitting an ‘easy target.’ Go after the feel-good sanctified vagueness of liberal theology, though, and we’re accused of picking on the nice guys — why don’t you go after the fundamentalists, they’re so much more wrong than we are?
Thats not the discussion. We where discussing theology. Of course I agree with this aspect.
As a scientist and rationalist, I find the more I read the writings of atheists, the more disillusioned I am with the secular movement in this country. Dissolve academic departments? Eradication of religion? And let’s put scarlet letters on our website to show how we are being persecuted for our deeds! It seems the movement has become a caricature of the very irrationality and ignorance it seeks to defeat.
I understand the need to stand up for the rights of atheists, and to fight against ignorance, but surely we can do better than such absurdity.
truthmachine,
Did you really just make the “I know you are but what am I?” move?
My original claim was that science does support science being the only “way to truth.” If you consider science to offer truth, then you accept scientific ontology (particles, atoms, molecules, etc), and scientific ontology alone does not contain any non-scientific objects by default. This is rather trivial fact. You need to do additional philosophical wrangling – such as founding science on sense experience – in order get a richer ontology. This isn’t controversial. Further, you wouldn’t claim science doesn’t give an account of how science proceeds: we both agree nothing non-physical need happen for there to be science (there’s no magic). This forms a closed loop; science accounts for science. Additionally, the truth semantics of logic apply rather neatly to objects in the ontology of science, without any of the problems of vagueness and so forth found in applying them to assertions in natural language. So “‘F = ma’ is true” (or whatever) is sound. Finally, that I think natural language has an arbitrary relationship with the world does not, on my account, mean I can’t communicate these facts to you: we share that arbitrary relationship. None of this is “self-refuting” as you seem to think.
If you were really a rationalist you would be able to mount an actual defense of theology as a legitimate academic discipline rather than merely whining. care to back up and try again?
Is Brian what is called a “concern troll?”
Brian: I think you have the wrong picture in mind when you read about how some atheists want to “dissolve” theology departments and “eradicate” religion. You may be imagining a violent kind of purge, where professors come to class and see a sign on the door that it’s been shut down, and sad groups of believers are mocked and marched away from their temples. You see the “fight” as being resolved in the political arena, through laws.
The existence of God is a hypothesis, and arguments against religion are being fought like one fights against bad science and pseudoscience. It may touch into politics, but that’s not where the action is.
Theology departments should be removed from universities for the same reason Therapeutic Touch should be removed from nursing schools. The subjects should be taught only to understand them — not to actually use them as if they were valid knowledge and real skills. Religion should be ‘eradicated’ or wiped out through changed hearts and minds. By argument. Not force.
What’s worthwhile in religion and theology falls into other departments and areas. What makes them unique — and different than philosophy, ethics, science, and psychology — is quite simply wrong.
Hello Everyone!
I seem to have prompted quite a few thoughtful and strongly-worded comments here, so let me begin with a sincere compliment:
truth machine’s last few comments (particularly #251) have been encyclopedic in parsing his original statements. I note in passing that he/she showed intellectual honesty in withdrawing some rhetorical overkill. He/she also demonstrated considerable intellect and, much as I hate to admit it, a better grasp of the nuance of these arguments than I possess. So it’s back to the drawing board for me. In the spirit of intellectual honesty, that will mean mulling over more than the question of whether any belief on my part is wedded to Haught’s views. But (sigh) casting a critical eye on my own faith is what prompts me to come here, so I can’t really complain.
So, for what it’s worth, I appreciated the lengthy reply, even though I feel a bit like the proverbial dog with the tail betwixt its legs.
Peter Ashby:
Your comments were also greatly appreciated. As with truth machine’s, I am likely to blog about them.
Colugo:
With respect to your questions, the short answers are Yes, No and Possibly. The late lamented Caledonian was fond of noting that the term supernatural is ‘incoherent.’ I agree. I think that, if the term God has any meaning in the natural world, it must represent activity/personality which is a product of Nature. So my view is not necessarily that we must posit a Supernatural, but that we must explore Nature more fully. The difference between me and the atheist is that I expect, on faith, to actually find a source of order and design that is, in Dawkins’ words, the ‘Ultimate 747’. But I do not expect to find it by any other means than the ones proscribed by science. As for metaphor, no, it is not identifiable with the gaps in our understanding, much less the vague ‘spirituality’ that seems to possess the minds of many believers. As for what others believe, I do not doubt that different religious viewpoints are convergent in some sense, and I do not have to deny their experience in order to affirm my own. In truth, I suspect that we are all boxing with shadows, including my skeptical friends. I admire skeptics because I think, as a group, that they are more likely to practice the intellectual honesty urged in this thread.
truthmachine,
Pretty much. I’ve said commonsense beliefs and language have an arbitrary relationship to the world not an arbitrary relationship tout court. The parenthood example is trivial but philosophy is full of (allegedly) more profound problems. Does “Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion” refer to a type or a token? Are there things like “piles” (or even “tables” or “chairs”) given Sorites arguments against them? “Rabbits” or “undetached rabbit parts”? The game is to relate them to things to the world by solving the paradoxes or problems. But all of these problems can be easily explained if language is a matter of convention and not a truth correspondence. You can argue that we need know the conventions, but I’d disagree: we only have to follow conventions to take advantage of them. That is at best know-how.
Take your example from earlier: I’m not saying you can see a lion and think you see an orange and it doesn’t matter as long as you run away. That’s a comparison between conventions. You could say: “A clump of matter comes into proximity of another clump of matter and light reflecting off the surface of the second clump of matter and striking the first clump of matter causes motions within the first clump of matter that in turn cause the first clump of matter to move with great velocity in the opposite direction of the second clump of matter.” That’s an approximate attempt of giving a scientific account of what happened. I don’t think any amount of analysis is going to take you from “I saw a lion and ran” to that. All of the various paradoxes and problems I noted above will come into play if you try. I do, however, think a complete scientific account can be given (in principle) of how that situation transpires and, later, leads to “I saw a lion and ran”-type sounds being vocalized.
I just don’t see that talk about truth adds anything here. My movements are advantageous but nobody thinks my movements should create truth; why, then, should my perceptions create truth? You can argue that true beliefs are beliefs from which I can make true inferences. This would be advantageous. But can I not simply make advantageous inferences from advantageous beliefs? Perhaps it would be most advantageous to have true beliefs. This seems to be taking us in the direction of a pragmatist theory of truth: true beliefs are just advantageous beliefs. Otherwise, given that I’m an animal of limited capacity (as you keep reminding me), wouldn’t true beliefs often be less advantageous? Is it more adaptive to represent the world accurately or to represent it in a way heavily biased to your role within it?
Steve,
From a rational standpoint, I actually DON’T have to argue in support of theology departments. Theology departments exist, and draw students. If they didn’t, they would be closed or folded into other departments. Sure, you could split them apart into history, philosophy, etc, but who cares? The argument being made is that theology shouldn’t exist as an academic endeavor because what they teach (i.e. God) isn’t real. That isn’t a rational argument. Irrational numbers have no physical reality, and yet math departments teach about them all the time. Maybe mathematics should be subsumed into physics, and we should raze math buildings to the ground! That’s just crazy talk, and so is arguing that theology departments shouldn’t exist.
Theology is a human academic endeavor. You may find it pointless, I may find it pointless, but many people don’t. If the thrust of the secular argument is to eliminate all human philosophies which we think aren’t “real”, then we are no better than religious institutions that declare their God to be the one true path to salvation.
Sastra,
Go back and look at my comment. I said nothing about using the force of law against religion. Myers used the phrase “razed to the ground”, not me. I haven’t accused anyone of supporting force to overcome religion. However, when I read articles which speak of “razing theology departments to the ground”, or the “feeble gullibility” of Lutherans, it does make me more disillusioned with the secular movement. It is one thing to promote secularism in government, or to advocate for atheism as a valuable worldview. It is quite another to use atheism or science as a hammer with which to crush all those naked apes which don’t think like us. It is the idolatry of the one true worldview which troubles me.
This equation is even seen in your comment, where you equate fighting pseudoscience with fighting religion. Fighting against pseudoscience and bad science is NOT the same as fighting against religious ideas. The former is what science does, the latter is simply a philosophical pissing contest.
Scott Hatfield, Einstein’s riding on the light wave thought experiment is nice metaphor
You folks seem not to know what either metaphors or thought experiments are. Thought experiments are NOT metaphors and do not employ metaphors; they are meant to be taken literally: What would happen if …
In any case, the way scientists and other rational people use metaphors to communicate has nothing to do with the way theist bullshitters use metaphor to create confusion between fact and fiction.
A department of astrology would no doubt draw students as well. Is that the only criterion a university should use for deciding what are legitimate academic fields?
The rest of your “argument” is even stupider. If I prove a theorem about irrational numbers, the same theorem is perforce valid for you. (Your computer wouldn’t work otherwise, dubmbass.) One does not have to be a platonist to understand that math is in no way arbitrary and capricious the way a pseudo-discipline like theolog, (which does not have and never has had any stable, intersubjectively testable results) is.
If you want to talk such utter crap without being mocked unmercifully, better go some place where there are fewer smart people around.
Did you really just make the “I know you are but what am I?” move?
No, you stupid tiresome twit.
As a scientist and rationalist
You flatter yourself.
I find the more I read the writings of atheists, the more disillusioned I am with the secular movement in this country.
But apparently misrepresent yourself as a rationalist. You’re an atheist, aren’t you? So your writings are among the writings of atheists, right? So your writings disillusion you? Or perhaps you are prone to irrational generalizations.
Dissolve academic departments?
Do you have some argument to make?
Eradication of religion?
Who has called for the eradication of religion? How would such eradication be effected?
And let’s put scarlet letters on our website to show how we are being persecuted for our deeds! It seems the movement has become a caricature of the very irrationality and ignorance it seeks to defeat.
Move along, troll.
The argument being made is that theology shouldn’t exist as an academic endeavor because what they teach (i.e. God) isn’t real. That isn’t a rational argument. Irrational numbers have no physical reality, and yet math departments teach about them all the time.
Whoa. This guy calls himself a scientist and rationalist? Did someone say “intellectual dishonesty”? Let us know when math departments start teaching false bullshit and we’ll consider disbanding them too.
P.S. I wonder if this “scientist” meant “imaginary numbers” rather than “irrational numbers”, but it’s not true in any obvious or uncontroversial way either one has “no physical reality”. If I create a square from four unit-length wires, the length of its diagonal is irrational — even if all measurements are quantizable as multiples of the Planck constant.
Brian #267 wrote:
This may be the point where you diverge from PZ and many of the rest of us. You can “take religion seriously” in several ways. You can look at how it works culturally and psychologically; you can examine its history and philosophy. You can study it.
But I think the most important way to take it seriously — the first significant question to ask — is to determine whether or not it’s actually true. Does God exist? Is there such a thing, in reality, something that is more than just a concept or idea or symbol people use to frame their stories? Most believers insist it is. Very well then. Take it seriously. Approach it with respect.
In other words, examine the hypothesis scientifically.
Do that, though, and it turns out to be pseudoscience. Or bad science. Or bad philosophy. And, as you agree, that is what we fight against. Religious studies, sure. But — taken seriously — “theology” no more belongs in universities than Vedic Astrology or Therapeutic Touch. And there are (or have recently been) universities which teach both.
There are a lot of apologetics out there designed to protect religion from critical scrutiny. They’ll often focus on how religion supplies meaning to lives. That’s not taking the subject seriously. That’s providing therapy. I agree with PZ — we don’t need a scholarly department for that.
Steve,
You are right, astrology would draw students. And no, drawing students shouldn’t be the only criteria for an academic field. I would certainly be opposed to the formation of a theology department at my university. But that is also not the same as arguing that a department should be eliminated because I don’t believe what it teaches.
As for the irrational numbers, I never claimed that they are not logical, merely that they are not physically measurable. If you can tell me of an experiment that yields infinite precision, I’d love to hear about it. As for my computer, I’d be willing to bet that it would work just fine even if we humans had never discovered irrational numbers. I don’t think reality cares how we describe it mathematically. Perhaps you disagree.
One final point. Dumb-ass has only one “b” in it, and is usually hyphenated.
truth machine,
You ask if I am an atheist. Which God do you wish me to disbelieve? What exactly am I supposed to be against? If fairness, if you asked me if I was a theist, I would ask pretty much the same question: Which God? We can get specific if you wish. Am I Christian? No. Muslim? Buddhist? Wiccan? Pastifarian? Nope. Do I claim that God exists? No. Does this meet your definition of atheist?
I’ll stick with scientist and rationalist, since I am for science and reason. So I would consider my writings rationalist, not atheist. Perhaps you equate the two.
To answer your other question, lots of atheists have called for the eradication of religion. I think we agree that such an eradication won’t happen.
Finally, you can name call all you want, but isn’t the scarlet letter thing a bit over the top? Let’s equate being an atheist with being a woman persecuted by Puritans? Were there no better ideas at that meeting?
Oh, I see you made two more comments. Let’s see. Intellectual dishonesty, eh? I would probably say arguing to absurdity, but that was kind of the point. I wouldn’t call mathematics false bullshit, though I do recall a graduate course discussing the axiom of choice that seemed to tread on the edge of sanity.
I really did mean irrational numbers. The experiment you describe would not result in an irrational physical quantity. If I measured the length of the diagonal, I would get a rational number. It is true that if I took the ratio of the diagonal length to the length of a side, the uncertainty of my measurement should span the irrational number sqrt(2), but that doesn’t make sqrt(2) physically real. You could argue that the mathematical ideal of the diagonal is irrational, but if you argue that ideal is somehow “real”, then you are arguing that mathematical logic somehow transcends physical reality. That sounds a tad like some theological arguments I’ve heard.
If I understand your argument, you feel theology departments should be razed because theology is false bullshit. Should we also purge faculty members who happen to believe this bullshit? Should we require that all science faculty be atheists? I realize this is a bit of a tangent, but where do we draw the line? Would theology departments be okay if they taught their philosophical dogma without claiming its reality? Is it the belief people have which is bullshit, or is it religious philosophy in toto which should be removed from universities?
Sastra,
You make an interesting point about Vedic Astrology and Therapeutic Touch. At first blush, I would have more of an issue with the latter, particularly if it considered itself a medical department. I suppose I put theology more with Vedic Astrology: historical remnants which will eventually fade.
I believe we might walk a little way before parting company. I agree that to argue for special protection of religion from criticism is weak tea. Certainly any theology can and should be analyzed critically, and when religions make scientific claims they should be analyzed scientifically.
I think we begin to part company when you argue that religion must be examined scientifically to be respected. As I understand it, theology departments might argue that God is “real” in some sense, but they don’t claim their claims are scientifically testable. We could counter-argue that “real” equates to scientific testability, but not everyone agrees on that point. I do, you do, but we’re not everyone. The real question is what to do when people hold differing world views. Do we force everyone to submit to ours? Do we ridicule them for thinking differently?
Religion does give meaning to many people, and we need to recognize that. This does not mean we cannot critically scrutinize religious faith. However, where I am troubled by the secular movement in this country is where critical analysis crosses the line into blatant ridicule of individuals or groups. It is one thing to argue the logical inconsistencies of various theology, or to state boldly that we don’t accept a particular religion and why. It is quite another to equate those with differing views as addle-brained or delusional. In this very post, Myers refers to moderate Lutherans as both feeble-minded and the real problem with religion in this country. Seriously? Sweet old Aunt Maggie, who is certain as Sunday that she’ll see Uncle Joe in heaven is the real threat to America? Have we lost our collective minds?
We like to think of ourselves as the reasonable ones, the ones who have the truth. True, we have much to crow about, but we must also be wary of being closed-minded and intolerant. It is too easy to fall into that trap. Just as an example, I have made just two comments expressing a differing opinion. Not an “you’re all going to hell!” comment, but an expression of concern. In that span I have been called “troll”, “dumb-ass” and “intellectually dishonest”. Scientist and rationalist were put in quotes to imply that I am neither. In fairness, I did mock the big red “A” a bit, but still, does name-calling and ridiculing someone with a mildly differing opinion constitute reasoned discourse on scienceblogs?
My original comment was an expression of concern that the secular movement seems to be moving toward an increasingly intolerant and irrational stance. I don’t know about you, but the responses I’ve gotten so far seem to reinforce that concern.
As for the irrational numbers, I never claimed that they are not logical, merely that they are not physically measurable.
No, you claimed they are not physically realizable; that’s something different. But it isn’t relevant — as I said, your comparison was intellectually dishonest.
You ask if I am an atheist. Which God do you wish me to disbelieve?
It’s not up to me, you silly twit troll. If you’re disillusioned about “the secular movement” because of what we atheists write, tough shit for you, but you’re an idiot if you think that people here will take your concern trolling any more to heart than we did with the bunch who have preceded you.
I don’t know about you, but the responses I’ve gotten so far seem to reinforce that concern.
Which proves you’re no rationalist, since no rationalist would reach any conclusion about “the secular movement” from a few comments from a few people on a single blog entry. No, what a rationalist would conclude is the response to you has to do with you — you, a troll who came here opening a blast against the blogger and the other people who post here. “It seems the movement has become a caricature of the very irrationality and ignorance it seeks to defeat”??? You acted like an asshole, and we responded; that’s all.
Not an “you’re all going to hell!” comment, but an expression of concern
It wasn’t just an expression of concern, you lying asshole.
In that span I have been called “troll”, “dumb-ass” and “intellectually dishonest”. Scientist and rationalist were put in quotes to imply that I am neither.
And exactly how many authors generated those comments, from which you reach some conclusion about “the secular movement”? You were called those things because you deserved them.
The experiment you describe would not result in an irrational physical quantity.
There’s a theorem of mathematics that say it would. If a unit square is physically realizable, then an irrational quantity is physically realizaable, as a matter of logic. If an irrational diagonal isn’t realizable, then the experiment isn’t realizable — it’s impossible to create a unit square in the physical world. That might be true; but as I said, your claim isn’t obviously or uncontroversially true.
If I measured the length of the diagonal, I would get a rational number.
Only if you used a direct measurement, but that’s a limitation of the measuring technique. A simple application of the Pythagorean Theorem yields an inferred value that is irrational. The irrationality of the length of the diagonal of a unit square is an incontrovertible fact, a matter of logic.
It is true that if I took the ratio of the diagonal length to the length of a side, the uncertainty of my measurement should span the irrational number sqrt(2), but that doesn’t make sqrt(2) physically real.
sqrt(2) is a number; no number is “physically real”, they are all abstractions. But the question is whether irrational lengths are physically realizable, and I described a physical realization. Pointing out that you can’t make a direct measurement misses the point — direct measurements are always rational due to the nature of direct measurements. It’s like saying that there are no irrational numbers because you can’t write one on a piece of paper.
You could argue that the mathematical ideal of the diagonal is irrational, but if you argue that ideal is somehow “real”, then you are arguing that mathematical logic somehow transcends physical reality. That sounds a tad like some theological arguments I’ve heard.
No, actually, insistence that the nature of “physical reality” is determined by the limitations of your measuring tape is theology.
You’re like a child in a math class just learning about irrational numbers, who draws a unit square and then measures the diagonal and decides that it can’t possibly be irrational because, no matter how tightly graduated the measuring stick, it can only contain a finite number of ticks. Or maybe you notice that a line segment is made up of points, but the width of a point is mathematically zero, so the sum of all those widths must add up to zero, yet the width of the line isn’t zero, which shows that “mathematical logic” can be wrong. You think you’re clever, but you’re not — you just don’t know enough about mathematics yet. The teacher wonders if you ever will.
truth machine,
I don’t know if this will help, but let me start with an apology. You accuse me of coming in hot, and that is a fair cop. I am truly sorry if I have offended you by my comments. It was not my intent.
As for the other points, we could continue to argue them, but let us for the sake of brevity assume that you are right, and I am wrong. Let’s see, I think that makes me a lying, intellectually dishonest, asshole twit troll. I can live with that.
From here on out, I will try to be as honest and open as one meeting the above criteria can be. I’m sure if I’m not, you will call me on it.
But I have a few questions, if you would be kind enough to answer.
For you, does science and rationalism equate to atheism?
Should scientists be promoting the equation of the two?
If you were to outline some goals of atheists/rationalists as a political movement, what might they be?
If you could eliminate religion from the world, would you?
I ask them in good faith. I do hope we can move past the name-calling.
No numbers have physical reality in the sense you mean. If I observe some deer in a field and notice that there are five deer, that “five” is not any more real than my measurement of the length of the diagonal of the field (to continue with truth machine’s example). Both refer to something real, though.
Take another example, the Lotka-Volterra equation, a classic predator-prey model. The equation does not “exist” in nature either. However, if ecology departments taught that the Lotka-Volterra equation is transcendent and controls predators and prey through non-physical means, or entertained the possibility that the spirits of Lotka and Volterra offer telepathic guidance to aspiring biology students, then yes, maybe it would be best to disband the ecology departments.
I don’t know if this will help, but let me start with an apology.
Of course it helps. Thank you.
For you, does science and rationalism equate to atheism?
No; to be an atheist one need not be either rational or scientific — equations work both ways. Do I think a rational examination of scientific evidence implies atheism? I think both Dawkins and Stenger have made good arguments to that effect. But I don’t think science is necessary — there are cogent logical arguments that the attributes commonly attributed to “god” are inconsistent, making such logically impossible. In fact, the whole category “supernatural” is semantically incoherent.
Should scientists be promoting the equation of the two?
This is a badly conceived question. Even if I thought the equation were correct, and I preferred that it be promoted, there is no objective morality and thus no free-standing “should”. Would I prefer that people, scientists included, promote true statements? Sure, why not? Do I think that scientists, or anyone else, are morally obligated to promote some particular true statement? No, certainly not. But if individual scientists choose, in their personal capacities, to promote valid arguments for the lack of gods, more power to them. (And ditto for valid arguments for the existence of gods, if there are such arguments.)
If you were to outline some goals of atheists/rationalists as a political movement, what might they be?
If atheists or rationalists or anyone else were to form a political movement, their goals should be to further their political interests, whatever they conceive them to be. Is it rational to promote rationalism? Not necessarily — there’s an is/ought dichotomy here. But I consider it desirable to promote rationalism — I think it would help lead to my other concerns, primarily reduction in human suffering and conflict. To achieve that specifically in terms of an increase in rationalism I would promote early teaching in critical thinking, particularly the appreciation of logical argument and the ability to detect fallacious arguments and sloppy thinking. I would also promote early education in emotive and relational communication, much as is done in couples therapy. There’s all sorts of irrational and abusive interpersonal communication that creates much strife. (I’ll readily admit that my “truth machine” persona here is not a model in this regard.) I would also promote teaching of creative thinking, pragmatic problem solving, including real day-to-day problems, how to deal effectively with institutions, and so on. I would also promote teaching about the realities of human suffering and what causes it — the role of corporations, political corruption, how religion is used to manipulate people and motivate them to act against their best interests, etc. etc. This is just off the top of my head, thinking about how children could be taught to deal with and produce a better (in my view) world but currently are not. Of course I would not advocate any religious indoctrination, and I think that in the absence of religious indoctrination there would be no inclination to form religious beliefs (hey, it worked for me).
I ask them in good faith.
People say this a lot, but they usually ask such questions in order to control the direction of the discussion. But perhaps I didn’t go where you expected.
the realities of human suffering and what causes it — the role of corporations, political corruption, how religion is used …
I definitely should have included the role of corporate- and state- controlled media, and propaganda — how Madison Ave. and “think tanks” study and use human psychology to manipulate people and get them to act against their own interests. How nationalism and other tribalisms are used to get people to conflate the manipulators’ interests with their own. Taxation can be used as a prime example — lowering taxes usually results in a transfer of wealth from the consumer of propaganda to the promoter of propaganda due to the unequal distribution of benefit. And “death tax” is a more specific illustration — a term promoted as a result of focus group studies taken by highly paid Republican framer Frank Luntz. Calling it more accurately the “Paris Hilton tax” might get a different response.
Getting back to this:
Intellectual dishonesty, eh? I would probably say arguing to absurdity, but that was kind of the point.
I called the argument intellectually dishonest because it was. You likened math departments teaching about irrational numbers … to teaching “God”. But people like me have no objection to what math departments teach because they don’t teach anything false; in fact we strongly favor what math departments teach, including the mathematics of irrational numbers, because it is indispensable. Whether or not irrational numbers are physically realizable is completely irrelevant and isn’t usually discussed in math departments; irrational numbers are nothing at all like God, who purportedly is a real entity with real effects on the material world. The comparison is transparently bogus; there isn’t even a feeble attempt in it at a good faith recognition of what we object to about what theology departments teach — specifically those things that PZ objected to that led him to his comment.
I wouldn’t call mathematics false bullshit, though I do recall a graduate course discussing the axiom of choice that seemed to tread on the edge of sanity.
Mathematical logic does trump all — that’s the nature of logic. If it defies your intuitions, either your intuitions about sets and geometry or your intuitions about physical reality, so much the worse for your intuitions. To hold the contrary is sheer arrogance. Some of the implications of quantum mechanics are arguably more “insane” than the Banach-Tarski paradox (given the axiom of choice, one ball can be decomposed into two balls, each equal in volume to the original ball). But eventually physicists became accustomed to the notion that physical reality is truly “weird”, and has aspects that can only be represented mathematically, with no intuitive but accurate model. That doesn’t make physics into theology.
Evidence is the causal connection between reality and your beliefs about reality. That is why it so reliably allows us to engage that reality.
The building that John Haught was sitting in, and the chair that he was sitting on, and the computer that he uses every day of his life, were all created by people who tinkered, who observed, who tested — in other words, by people who sampled reality — and made a causal connection between their beliefs and that external reality which allowed them craft the world around them.
It is futile to argue against people who deny the importance of evidence, not least because they don’t see the contradiction of engaging in debate in the first place.
Today I discovered the existence of Hell. Yes, I think, literally.
Apparently it’s the layer just below the D” boundary, between the inner mantle and the core.
White hot mush.
Oh, wait….
Brian #276 wrote:
I don’t think I agree that religious people hold a “differing world view.” Yes, and no. I think that, in the most important sense, we all hold the same one. They’re just as rational, and have similar ethics and values, when it comes to how we think and live and care about things. The things that matter, matter to all of us.
And one of those things that matter to all of us is the idea of truth. Not the unattainable perfection, but being more correct than not. Getting something right, to a reasonable degree of probability. And I think most religious people really do think their religion is true, and God is real — and that means something to them.
How do people who believe in God think that God is “real?” Is God real the way love is real? God is a feeling. Is God real the way abstractions are real? God is a concept. Is God real the way the universe is real? God is a testable hypothesis. Is God real the way spirits are real? That last one is usually the last resort. Now how are spirits real? Are they real the way love is real…. and so on. Belief in God seems to consist of throwing the concept into different categories, as convenient. God is like an irrational number — only a number who feels and thinks and plans and is conscious and alive. But, otherwise, the same kind of thing.
I think people can do better than that, and want to do better in general, as a principle. That’s what all that talk of growth and meaning is about. If you force someone to “submit” by convincing them they were mistaken, the master they obeyed wasn’t you — it was their own ideals and their own conscience. That doesn’t lessen — it adds. And they know that — in principle. And they want to live by their principles — that’s often what scares the pious about atheism. They think it will leave them without a way to have principles.
But take away the supernatural and nothing really falls apart. All the things that religion once supplied don’t go away. The strength is there, the hope is there, the beauty is there, the aspirations and values and appreciation and compassion and love are still there, the same. We simply recognize they had a different source, and it’s us. Do you really think that the only really important thing religion has to offer is the only thing that neither science nor philosophy can’t — “I will never die?” That would be a petty and immature religion. We should at least offer something better. Visibly, and publicly. And, maybe, loudly.
You ask a good question on tactics, though, on whether there’s been a dangerous increase in intolerance and tendency to ridicule. To give an honest answer, I don’t know. And I come to that indefinite conclusion having started out with the certainty that the brutal, sharp, and in-your-face atheism was divisive, and harmful.
In some ways, it seems to unexpectedly engendered an odd kind of respect — self-respect, and the respect of others. I know that sounds counter-intuitive, but when push comes to shove there seems to be a lot to be said for passion, for honesty, for humor, and for anger. It might be needed — to shift the Overton window, to gain attention, to mobilize a movement, to break through elaborate defenses, or even — maybe — to make the nice atheists look better in comparison.
As for the abusive insults on this blog, from what I can tell religion is not being singled out for special treatment. Try bringing up global warming or libertarians or circumcision. Better yet, don’t. Perhaps the nature of the scientific process includes the necessity that the community needs to approach disagreements in mathematical theories the way the Visigoths approached Rome.
Just always remember to rape and pillage BEFORE you burn.
If you would be opposed to forming a new theology department, that can only be because you do NOT actually see it as a legitimate discipline. If you nevertheless blanch at closing existing ones, I can only say that I admire your tenderheartedness but certainly not your consistency. And you have no principled basis on which to condemn people who are not so inconsistent.
P.S. Mocking typos (I will readily admit to being a crappy typist and not a very careful proofreader) is the surest sign of somebody who’s got nothing, argumentatively speaking.
Another excellent post, Sastra.
I don’t think I agree that religious people hold a “differing world view.”
I think the clearest evidence of this is people who were formally religious, and what the say about the process of change.
people who were formally religious
Er, formerly.
P.S. Mocking typos (I will readily admit to being a crappy typist and not a very careful proofreader) is the surest sign of somebody who’s got nothing, argumentatively speaking.
I culdn t aggree mor !
I culdn t aggree mor !
That’s your response to my serious attempt to address your questions?
And on the same score, where has Brian gone?
I like the camera idea. Perhaps when it is examined later it would have “18 minutes of static”.
Agree with most of your criticisms, but your opening shot misses the mark. “Doesn’t the fact that none of the New Atheists that I know of are nihilists matter?” No, it doesn’t; Haught’s argument, which he repeats several times, is that the fact that the New Atheists aren’t nihilists proves that they’re not thinking things through properly — unlike Nietzsche, Sartre, and Camus. Quite likely Haught thinks Nietzsche, Sartre, and Camus deep merely because they agree with him on the hopelessness of a godless universe; nevertheless, he specifically said that not all atheists are depressive, so this was a bit of a stumble on your part. Dormitat Homerus, and all that.
The interviewer tells us that Haught’s book is going to answer the question: “How can an intellectually responsible person of faith justify that faith – and even belief in a personal God – after Darwin and Einstein?”
Which prompts me to ask: How is someone whose core belief is that the world was created a thousand years after glue was invented suddenly qualified to ask anyone about intellectual responsibility?
Cheers.
NakedCelt, quite right. It’s a rather obvious error; I’m surprised it took nearly 300 comments before it was mentioned (actually, I’m rather surprised it was made in the first place). A similar error is often made during arguments about morality: someone will note that we atheists can be “moral”, when the claim under consideration is that there is no basis for morality if god does not exist.
NakedCelt, quite right. It’s a rather obvious error
No, it’s not an error. Haught insists that “The new atheists don’t want to think out the implications of a complete absence of deity. Nietzsche, as well as Sartre and Camus, all expressed it quite correctly. The implications should be nihilism.” But what could this possibly mean, when atheists aren’t nihilists? What can it mean that they “should” be? “You should be a nihilist! Sorry, but I’m not. But there’s no reason for you to not to be! But I’m not, nonetheless”. The fact that atheists aren’t nihilists shows that Haught — channeling Nietzsche, Sartre, and Camus — is wrong; it isn’t necessary for atheists for to be nihilists. Saying they “should” be is fallacious; mental states are not in the same category as the conclusions of arguments, even arguments by great thinkers.
Haught says “What I want to show in my own work — as an alternative to the new atheists — is a universe in which hope is possible”. But the evidence, which is what PZ refers to, is that no alternative is necessary; the universe that the new atheists live in has plenty of hope, whether it “should” or not.
A similar error is often made during arguments about morality: someone will note that we atheists can be “moral”, when the claim under consideration is that there is no basis for morality if god does not exist.
Ahem. If people are moral without God, then the claim that morality is impossible without God — which is the theist’s claim — is clearly false. The theists’ argument that the reason that morality is impossible without God is that there is then no basis for it is made moot by the fact that it is, in fact, possible. Either they are wrong that a basis is needed or they are wrong that there is none in the absence of God.
I’m not sure I understand what nihilism means. Glancing over the Wikipedia article, it looks rather vaguely defined.
It certainly looks like the theist argument for nihilism is “God gives hope, purpose, and morality to humans. If you reject God, you also must therefore reject hope and purpose.”
Of course, the premise that “God gives hope, purpose, and morality to humans” is what is rejected.
Hope is an emotion; in general, the feeling that conditions may improve.
Purpose is a drive; having a particular goal in mind and trying to work towards it.
Morality, or ethics, are principles based on the recognition of the reality of other people, and caring about the consequences of one’s actions on other people.
In no case is God necessary for any of the above. Indeed, we can even argue that God is not even sufficient for hope, purpose, or morality.
Some God-beliefs are specifically rooted in despair: The idea that God hates the world, and is planning to destroy it and every living being on it.
Some God-beliefs are specifically rooted in purposelessness: The idea that God determines all; and therefore one’s own actions are meaningless.
Some God-beliefs are are specifically rooted in immorality; deliberately treating others as one would not wish to be treated. As the bishop said: “Kill them all; God will know his own.”
If there’s more to nihilism than saying “Without God there is no hope, purpose or morality”, well, I’d like to see it more clearly explained.
I think the disappearing camera idea is very revealing of the actual nature of religious “truth”. A religious “truth” is both true and real to the people who believe it – after all, we can only experience the universe through our consciousness – and the religious claim this is a experience that constitutes some kind of substantive reality. To a non-believing observer though (like the camera, or a scientist), there is nothing there. It is only rarely that the difference between religious “truth” and any other kind of truth is exposed so clearly, with a superb example highlighting the heights of absurdity you can reach when trying to rationalise the irrational.
I think part of the reason “they” are attacking “us” new atheists is the way PZ Myers (and the likes) expresses himself in this very article. His “refutation” is full of ad hominem attacks and is completely unsupported. Perhaps he was baffled by Hitchensian nonsense such as “what can be affirmed without evidence can be dismissed without evidence”?
Or perhaps if he had studied some philosophy (and, incidentally, some theology–because how will you ever be able to know anything if you don’t understand your enemy?) he would have granted Haught’s fallacious arguments the proper refutation.
Instead, he merely decided to “sound like an asshole.” I wonder if theologians can tell the difference between someone who sounds like an asshole and someone who IS an asshole. I am not sure I can…
I can’t remember where I read it, but someone once said: “If atheism is a religion, then not collecting stamps is a hobby”
So I gather that this Haught fellow has touched a nerve with this Myers fellow… At least, that was the impression I got from Myers’ textbook example of rational argumentation.
The argument that I thought was most effective was the admission “I don’t know what’s going on in the world of theology. And I don’t give a damn.” I think it contrasts remarkably well against those Creationists who admit that they not only don’t know about a subject they don’t believe in, but that they don’t care to know about it either.
Indeed, the shallow sort of hairbrained apologist for religious delusions might insist that acknowledging deep and willful ignorance of a subject would disqualify one’s opinions from being worth consideration. What they don’t understand is that religion is a priori stupid. Therefore not caring to know about the subject of theology which one criticizes is virtuous since it does not pollute the mind with religion, meanwhile Creationists’ insistence on talking about a scientific subject of which they care not to know anything is an example of religion’s stupidity. Game, set, match.
Keep in mind, of course, that only irrational people are guilty of logical fallacies like straw men and false dilemma. This does not apply to New Atheists who are, of course, rational. We know this because they say so themselves and demonstrate such by their rejection of religion. We know religion to be irrational a priori, since it is stupid, therefore denial of religion is automatic evidence of rationality. This must be made clear so that it can be understood that Myers’ talk of razing the university departments dedicated to subjects of which he is disinterested is a rational approach to the issue of differing viewpoints in a civil society.
We should also make a special note of his objection to Haught’s invocation of highly regarded philosophers on the subject of atheism. Regardless of the fact that Nietzsche, Sartre and Camus all demonstrate an intimate understanding of Judeo-Christian theology and the implications of their rejection of it, to the point where the careful Christian reader may even find themselves agreeing with a Nietzsche up to the critical point of rejecting master morality and accepting Jesus, we must remember that no New Atheists are Nihilists. While Haught, Nietzsche, Sartre and Camus may all agree that Nihilism is a logical endpoint of atheism, the non-existence of Nihilist New Atheists is proof that this is not so.
We know this to be true because New Atheists are rational, as we have discussed previously. Since we know them to be rational already, no further counterargument to this claim is necessary. The contrary assumption – that New Atheists have not completely thought through the implications of their beliefs, relative even to atheist philosophers, such as they claim religious believers have not completely thought through their beliefs, which must be revealed to them by enlightened New Atheists – is obviously absurd, since New Atheists are rational.
Unfortunately I did not read much further than that in this extremely important entry into the field of debate over metaphysics. As a mere Masters of Divinity student, the overwhelming logic and reason of Myer’s critique left me in a state of sublime shock, in which my philosophical vision was so consumed by the horror of the argument’s unyeilding revelation of absolute truth that I had to turn from the screen in abject holy terror. I almost feel compeled to leave such useless and profitless so-called “studies” behind to resume my original BSc in Geology, where cataloguing the cladistic features of maniraptors would equip me in a much more profound way to comment on issues of divinity.
Cory. +1 for sarcasm, -3 for using the courtier’s reply.
What, exactly, is the subject of a Masters of Divinity? ;)
What is this, dig up an old thread and crap all over it day? Sheesh. I guess PZ doesn’t bother erecting troll-fences around the outer reaches.
What you’ve missed, Cory, is that theology is the creation of a body of discourse regarding something for which there is no evidence – only speculation and conjecture; the attempt of humans who, lacking any first-hand knowledge, feel the need to explain why the gods they insist are real do the things they do.
Creationists doubting science, on the other hand, are denying facts, figures and the results of repeated experimentation on, and investigation and observation of, actual physical matter.
If neither of the two sides both had physical evidence – if evolution was only supported by the same level of baseless speculation and self-indulgent pseudo-intellectual masturbation that theology is; if it was only the ‘theory’ your ill-educated and/or disingenuous colleagues lie about it being – then perhaps the impasse to which you allude would be worthy of comment.
Sadly – for you – it isn’t.
Bah, Cory seems to be a drive-by. I so wanted to ask him why he was being taught palaeontology during his “BSc in Geology”. <giggle>
What I want to know how it is they end up on year-old threads rather than current ones. If they do it during a busy period then their troll-droppings will go unnoticed. Then again, these people are cowards; they probably brag to their equally timid christian pals about ‘how they showed the atheists up with an irrefutable argument that none of them was brave enough to respond to’.
Cory,
How much do you know about unicorn husbandry? Unless your answer is “a lot” then your opinion on the field is worthless.
I think it contrasts remarkably well against those Creationists who admit that they not only don’t know about a subject they don’t believe in, but that they don’t care to know about it either. – Cory
Leading creationists in fact claim they know all about biology. So your parallel collapses at the first hurdle. FAIL.
Neither Sartre nor Camus was a nihilist. FAIL.
By the way, does your “Masters of Divinity” cover leprachaunology and werewolfology?
Bah! You can’t even get the terminology correct: it’s leprechology and lycanthropology.
Cory, with all that “book learnin'” you done got in Religion. Have you smart fellers come up with any empirical evidence of God yet?
Dear John,
At least where I studied, there were two tracks to enter into the palaentology graduate program: through an undergrad in either biology or geology. A distaste for the recently dead led me to geology.
Unfortunately, that interest in prehistoric life – which according to both Creationsists and New Atheists I ought not to accept the existence of since it conflicts with particular literalist readings of Genesis 1-3 – was set to an avocational appreciation when my interest in the subjective and intersubjective content of religion asserted itself with more immediacy. I took to studying the interior theological world of religion as one might take to studying the interior cultural world of a society or the interior literary and cinematic world of the human mind. For shame!
As Myers has, I think, clearly demonstrated with his argument (I only learned of it too late, I’m afraid), religion is stupid and therefore studying its interior world is doomed to futility and irrelevance. Studying its external world of history, anthropology, neuroscience and other like dimensions where physical evidence presents itself is entirely sufficient for understanding the phenomenon and reflecting as intimately and sensitively upon it as Myers has done with his nuanced approach. Given that religion is stupid, any supposed interior world is necessarily an artifice, devoid of any merit whatsoever.
Of course, one ought to keep in mind that this study of interiority is different from other such studies. The weakminded may argue that theology is more like a humanity than a science, but that makes at least two critically faulty assumptions. The first is that humanities are useful as well. For example, since movies are fiction they can safely be said not to reflect in any useful manner on the interior world of the human condition, therefore one could argue that film studies are stupid and that someone who has only taken it upon themselves to see occasional high-profile recent Hollywood films is just as equipped as any professional critic to assess film’s irrelevance. The second assumption is that there is sufficient cause for taking it upon oneself to study theology. For example, one may take it upon themselves to study literature since they know by reason that the author exists and that the human subject of their writing exists, therefore literature is a valid subject of study.
Religion is not, of course, since no such things as deities exist as author or subject. Even if such a claim is made by a large number of people who freely admit that the evidence for such is subjective and rests within their interior world – that is what they may facilely call “experiential” – and some may foolishly devote their lives to studying these interior worlds in the hopes that this study may tease out certain consistent and useful concepts, we must understand that it is on its face ridiculous. Though we may take for granted that other experiential aspects of life, such as love or wonder, are real because we have experienced these relationships between the human/cultural subject and an external stimulus, one’s not having had a religious experience is sufficient to assert that all interior processing of religious experience is fraudlent. This is because, as we have demonstrated already, religion is stupid and singularly so.
The cardinal skeptical rule of “beware of experts outside their area of expertise” does not apply in such a case because the artifice of this supposed interior world and the petty excuse of experience is not sufficient to suggest that religion is a subject where an issue like “expertise” actually applies. It is all made up, and since it is made up and we know it to be so since it is stupid, being versed in theological studies is not so much “expertise” in the proper sense. It may be in the technical sense, but that is forgetting that religion is stupid and therefore being versed in commentary on it is stupid. Except for New Atheist commentary, since their assessment of theological matters is based in rational disciplines like degrees in biology. A background in any rational discipline is sufficient for “expert” status in any irrational one, no matter how oblique it may seem to the causal and sloppy observer. Having actually read any theology would only pollute the mind.
So if I understand the point of all that…
You’re saying that theology is like art study? Or do you mean that theology is like an art in and of itself?
Emmet@312,
I concede on “lycanthropology”, but how do you derive “leprechology”?
Dear Owlmirror,
Well, if I’ve understood the argument as well as one might care too before letting their brain go completely to rot, a theologian might suggest that it is a most complicated “queen of the sciences” (roflol) because the problem of the observer is amplified by the subject. That is, since the subject is literally immaterial, all evidence must be furnished by the interior subjective/intersubjective world of the observer(s), to the point where testing is necessarily an act of entering into that interior world as a participant observer. They may even patronize scientists by saying that the actual sciences have it easier by virtue of its sole focus on material objects and externally observable systems, which allows for investigation without a comparable personal investment of participation.
This, however, is foolishness, since we know by way of studying the actual sciences that no things exist except those which the actual sciences study. There is nothing that is not a material object or externally observable system in the broad sense, since the actual sciences have not uncovered them. Of course, there are such things as love even though they do not exist in the proper sense as being a thing, but this is quite different from gods which do not exist in any sense.
Yes these theologian types may go to great pains to explain that religions take for granted that gods don’t exist in the same sense as a material object exists, but to know that would require reading what they write, which would cause brain rot. Simply pointing out to religious persons that gods don’t exist in the same sense as a material object, and therefore logically do not exist in any sense, is entirely sufficient. If they seem to acknowledge this point of immateriality, then that may be taken as another conquest over religion.
A sloppy religious thinker might then object that we take many interior subjective things and relations for granted, and don’t permit study of their exterior expressions to put limitations on them. What they don’t understand is that religion is not like, say, love or angst because religion is stupid. New Atheists certainly do love their spouses and New Atheists are rational, as we have discussed, and therefore love is a reasonable hypothesis. New Atheists understand that religion is a priori stupid and therefore not a reasonable hypothesis.
It is only weasel wording on the part of theologians to suggest that their propositions are in a comparable class of experience as the arts and humanities, that is, subjective experience nesting holistically in a framework of objective reality. It is nothing of the sort, because many of us have experienced these other things but many of us have not experienced religion. The idea that some sort of immaterial, ineffable divine personality or personalities or impersonal forces or animistic unions (or whatever your brand of superstition be) are in contact with the interior world of human beings is plainly ludicrous. There is no physical evidence, save for some spikes in temporal lobe activity. Unlike, say, connections between brain chemistry and love, this proves the invalidity of religion because religion is stupid.
It gets to such ridiculous extremes though, owl, when one hears the poppycock that theology is inherently integrative because assessing this interior experience requires a functioning knowledge of the actual sciences, arts and humanities… They would actually claim that in order to understand human claims about the so-called divine one must understand how the mind works and expresses itself in its social and physical context. I’m sure Dr. Myer’s will excuse my cursing if I state that this is utter horses**t. As many New Atheist thinkers (is there any other kind of thinker?) have demonstrated so admirably, when a theologian conceeds to facts like evolution and heliocentrism, it is not adjusting their always tentative theological theorems to new evidence like how a scientist might adjust their always tentative scientific theorems, but a retreat of the gods from possession of the human psyche.
Theology is in a constant state of flight from any worthwhile discipline because religion is stupid and stupidity cannot entertain the light of knowledge. We know this, not by polluting our minds with religious writings but by not polluting our minds with religious writings. Only by clearly refusing to care what these lunatics say can we properly assess what they say.