I feel powerful. A silly gang of people stung by the criticisms of the New Atheists met for dinner to grumble about us, and my name came up a few times. It’s kind of like being a superhero and learning that nefarious villains are teaming up to shake their fists at you and make plans to thwart you…only in this case, it’s more like the League of Nitwits, which just sucks all the glory out of it. My nemeses are sadly disappointing.
Two atheists – John Gray and Alain de Botton – and two agnostics – Nassim Nicholas Taleb and I – meet for dinner at a Greek restaurant in Bayswater, London. The talk is genial, friendly and then, suddenly, intense when neo-atheism comes up. Three of us, including both atheists, have suffered abuse at the hands of this cult. Only Taleb seems to have escaped unscathed and this, we conclude, must be because he can do maths and people are afraid of maths.
The author is Bryan Appleyard, that tired hack of British crank journalism, anti-Darwinist and self-admitted terrible writer.
John Gray is one of those atheist apologists for religion, who claims that beliefs don’t matter — all that stuff about Jesus being the son of God, requiring your devotion in order for Christians to get into heaven? They don’t really believe that. They just like going to church for the company and the rituals and those comfy pews or something.
He’s quite right, the New Atheists haven’t been picking on Nassim Nicholas Taleb much, but it isn’t because he knows math (really — here we are, a largely science-dominated community, and Appleyard thinks we’re afraid of math? Gimme a break) — in my case, it’s because I never heard of him before. I had to look him up. All I know is that Taleb doesn’t like atheists, and likes religion for a stupid reason.
You’ve written a lot about chance and probability. Do you believe in God?
I’m in favour of religion as a tamer of arrogance. For a Greek Orthodox, the idea of God as creator outside the human is not God in God’s terms. My God isn’t the God of George Bush.What’s your view of the “new atheists”, people such as Richard Dawkins or Sam Harris?
They’re charlatans. But see the contradiction: people are sceptical about God, yet gullible when it comes to the stock market.
Yeah, he’s some stock market guru. It seems to me that the only way to really make money in the stock market is by getting paid for telling people how to make money in the stock market; Taleb tells people how to make money in the stock market, which sort of says everything you need to know about him, and also makes his accusation of charlatanry particularly ironic.
Oh, and he also likes Ron Paul. Not impressed.
The final guest at this peculiarly petty dinner party is Alain de Botton. Haven’t we heard enough of the silly de Botton lately? He’s the atheist who has been straining to crawl up religion’s asshole and take its place.
De Botton is the most recent and, consequently, the most shocked victim. He has just produced a book, Religion for Atheists: a Non-Believer’s Guide to the Uses of Religion, mildly suggesting that atheists like himself have much to learn from religion and that, in fact, religion is too important to be left to believers. He has also proposed an atheists’ temple, a place where non-believers can partake of the consolations of silence and meditation.
Right, because that’s exactly what atheists want, a new religion. And now he’s shocked that atheists sneer at his temple, and reject the papacy of Pope de Botton.
To rationalize this pity party, Appleyard tries to define the New Atheism by listing the three legs of our position. Would you be surprised to learn that he gets every one of them wrong? No, you would not, because this is Bryan Appleyard. You would be startled if he got something right.
First, a definition. By “neo-atheism”, I mean a tripartite belief system founded on the conviction that science provides the only road to truth and that all religions are deluded, irrational and destructive.
Atheism is just one-third of this exotic ideological cocktail. Secularism, the political wing of the movement, is another third. Neo-atheists often assume that the two are the same thing; in fact, atheism is a metaphysical position and secularism is a view of how society should be organised. So a Christian can easily be a secularist – indeed, even Christ was being one when he said, “Render unto Caesar” – and an atheist can be anti-secularist if he happens to believe that religious views should be taken into account. But, in some muddled way, the two ideas have been combined by the cultists.
The third leg of neo-atheism is Darwinism, the AK-47 of neo-atheist shock troops. Alone among scientists, and perhaps because of the enormous influence of Richard Dawkins, Darwin has been embraced as the final conclusive proof not only that God does not exist but also that religion as a whole is a uniquely dangerous threat to scientific rationality.
Heh. His weird misunderstandings say so much about Appleyard, and so little about atheism.
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Wrong. Science provides evidence that all religions are wrong or vacuous. The charge of scientism is a common one, but it’s not right: show us a different, better path to knowledge and we’ll embrace it. But the apologists for religion never do that. You’ll also find that we recognize that there are obvious attractions to religion — most of them don’t require a gun to the head to get adherents — but that they get the facts of the universe fundamentally wrong, and building on error is a bad policy.
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Wrong. We’re quite aware of the difference between atheism and secularism. I do not teach atheism in the classroom, nor do I encourage teachers to do so; I want a secular educational system. I do not argue that only atheists be allowed to serve in government, but that government only implement secular, non-sectarian, non-religious decisions that are appropriate for a pluralist society. You may notice I’ve got a badge over on the right sidebar to Americans United, a secular but not atheist organization that I whole-heartedly support.
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Wrong, but hilarious. Darwin is not proof of the non-existence of gods. He showed how life actually diversified and changed on this planet, and he provided a mechanism that works without divine meddling of any kind. He makes gods superfluous. I love the fact that this kook finds science as threatening and scary as an AK-47, though. It says a lot about him.
Appleyard was so enthused about his new buddies in the We-Hate-New-Atheists movement that he had to get right on the phone and call up his buddy, Jerry Fodor, the philosopher who wrote an anti-Darwinian evolution book and got thoroughly panned everywhere. A new recruit for the League of Nitwits!
Of course he complained about me. And complained dishonestly.
Furthermore, the rise of evolutionary psychology – an analysis of human behaviour based on the tracing of evolved traits – seemed to suggest that the human mind, too, would soon succumb to the logic of neo-atheism.
It was in the midst of this that Fodor and the cognitive scientist Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini published What Darwin Got Wrong, a highly sophisticated analysis of Darwinian thought which concluded that the theory of natural selection could not be stated coherently. All hell broke loose. Such was the abuse that Fodor vowed never to read a blog again. Myers the provocateur announced that he had no intention of reading the book but spent 3,000 words trashing it anyway, a remarkably frank statement of intellectual tyranny.
Fodor now chuckles at the memory. “I said we should write back saying we had no intention of reading his review but we thought it was all wrong anyway.”
No, I haven’t read and won’t be reading the book by Piattelli-Palmarini and Fodor. But that article he’s whining about wasn’t a review of his book at all, and I plainly said so! It was a review of Fodor’s article in New Scientist, and I did read the whole thing. I am impressed that I and the other critics have completely driven him away from blogs; now if we can just scare him away from books, magazines, and television, he can spend the rest of his life happily rocking away in an empty room.
Appleyard closed his meeting of the shocked, traumatized, trembling victims of New Atheist ferocity with the tepid call of the religious apologist:
Religion is not going to go away. It is a natural and legitimate response to the human condition, to human consciousness and to human ignorance. One of the most striking things revealed by the progress of science has been the revelation of how little we know and how easily what we do know can be overthrown. Furthermore, as Hitchens in effect acknowledged and as the neo-atheists demonstrate by their ideological rigidity and savagery, absence of religion does not guarantee that the demonic side of our natures will be eliminated. People should have learned this from the catastrophic failed atheist project of communism, but too many didn’t.
I’m pessimistic that religion will go away in my lifetime, too, but not because it is a valid and reasonable reaction to the world around us. It isn’t. It’s the invisible friend the fearful cling to in the darkness, it’s the lie the desperate tell themselves in denial. But there is a better solution: you can turn on the light, and the invisible friend evaporates, the dangers are all exposed to be dealt with, and the truth emerges. Atheists are the ones who’ve flipped on the light, and found the universe to be not quite as scary as the ignorant claim it to be, and even better, to be full of wonders — wonders that we are part of, that aren’t painted on a fabric of myth.
And it really feels good. Religion can go away, every one of us atheists is testimony to that, and it leaves us better, stronger, and happier. I see no barrier to the complete eradication of religion someday, other than the fearfulness of craven little shadow-huggers like Appleyard.
Tamer of arrogance? Religion?
A group of people who all share the same opinion gathered around to call a larger group that disagrees with them a cult.
It’s the IDiots who made “Darwinism” a major point of contention, because they claim that it exists to “do away with God.”
Maybe if they themselves defended science better, they wouldn’t so easily mistake the position of the IDiots for that of the “new atheists.”
Glen Davidson
Excellent description of atheist enlightenment! Those men are all fools. I would be most pleased if they would all crawl back into the darkness of their empty rooms and leave us the fuck alone.
As I understand it, Fodor and Piatelli-Palmarini did successfully demonstrate in book form that they were unable to coherently state the theory of natural selection. Unfortunately they’ve projected their inadequacies onto the rest of us.
Handy summary of their argument: suppose that there are two variant traits in a population of antelope. Trait A gives an antelope the ability to run twice as fast using half the energy of a normal antelope. This gives a selective advantage to A+ antelopes compared to A- ones. Trait B gives an antelope a 1 in 10000 chance on any given day of spontaneously vanishing in a puff of smoke. This gives a selective disadvantage to B+ individuals compared to B- ones.
But now let us suppose that traits A and B are linked, e.g. their genes are adjacent on a chromosome and always inherited together. Now the population consists of normal antelope (A-,B-) and very fast, occasionally exploding antelope (A+,B+).
According to Fodor and PP, we now cannot argue that trait A is advantageous and B is disadvantageous! Since they are always inherited together, we can only discuss the advantage of being (fast and exploding), not of being fast or of being exploding independently! Therefore, natural selection is wrong!
If that last paragraph made you go “That’s incredibly stupid and doesn’t make any damn sense at all”, you have identified the problem with Fodor and PP’s book.
Religion is a fucking cause of human ignorance. It preaches faith as a virtue. It is illegitimate, irrational, and oppressive.
This Bryan Appleyard is ridiculous.
Fuck you. Your insinuation that gnu atheists are attempting to destroy only Christianity, leaving a hole for scary, scary Islam to fill, is false. If “we win”, all forms of superstitious belief in any god(s) will be viewed as quaint idiocy. And much worse, your threat that our “attempt to destroy religion” will result in “corpses of believers and unbelievers alike” is fucking asinine. Gnu atheists are fighting for reason and the abandonment of the divisive, intolerant, thought-crime patrolling, immoral, and oppressive force that is religion. Seriously, we risk creating a pile of corpses? What an asshole.
The “cultish intolerance” militant atheists display is towards lies. Being intolerant of un-truth is “one of the many roads to truth”. Fucking hell this guy is dense.
“…from the catastrophic failed atheist project of communism.”
European style communism seems to have failed but the last I heard the communist party is still in charge in China. While things change all the time, at this moment in history, the Chinese style of a market economy with central planning seems to be more effective that economies with unregulated financial sectors. Not that it is an “atheist” project any more than our system is a religious one.
“Religion is not going to go away. It is a natural and legitimate response to the human condition, to human consciousness and to human ignorance.”
He’s claiming defeat; saying in essence that people are stupid and always will be. What a terrible and sad world view. I much to prefer to think of a world where every mind has value, where every mind, with the right education, can surpass their rudimentary inclinations.
How can their accommodation possibly progress society?
My high-school understanding of this is:-
1) It is highly unlikely that an advantageous and disadvantageous mutation will arise in the same individual, at adjacent parts of the genome.
2) Even if it were to happen, then the combination (A+,B+) or (A-,B-) would be selected, so if A+ gives more than a 1:10,000 daily chance of escaping being lion-food (over A-), then (A+,B+) would be selected for, otherwise (A-,B-) would be selected for.
3) Cross-over/recombination would eventually give rise to A+,B- and A-,B+ individuals, the later of which would be selected against.
Is my naive understanding (broadly) correct?
@9: it’s a bit more complex than that – there really are traits that are very closely linked, e.g. being in adjacent genes in a part of a chromosome that rarely recombines. Your point 2, that in fact we can quite coherently reason about the adaptive value of traits A and B separately, is quite true, and it’s weird that F&PP managed to write a whole book denying this.
I feel as though there are other people, people other than these accomodationists, who are also willfully dishonest or just plain ignorant, spewing patent lies and falsehoods and gain popularity and money from it. Who would those other people be?
Isn’t it amazing that the alleged traits of the gnu atheists are tripartite. Almost like the alleged traits of a Bronze Age storm god, his masochistic son, and some other ghosty thingy that no one can adequately explain but is there anyway in perfect union with the other two.
For the record, I did not need science to tell me that god concepts were untenable. I needed my 8-year-old brain to figure out that the Santa story was just as credible as the Great Flood story. And vice versa.
Now, science indeed helps confirm my childhood deduction, but I don’t need it to argue against the concept in general and against any specific god-concept such as Christianity or Islam. The individual god-concepts are self-defeating and ludicrous. The overall “goddy god” concepts of Karen Armstrong, et al, are only slightly less untenable.
It’s logic and reason that leads to the conclusion that there are no gods. Science is just the cherry on the sundae. Or maybe the banana in the banana split. It underpins the logic and provides a basis for reaching valid conclusions, but you still have enough stuff to fatten you up even if it’s not there.
And I have never ever, ever used the biologic theory of evolution as a disproof for the existence of god. It’s an explanation for the diversity of life on this planet. It’s not a magic spell.
Taleb’s book “The Black Swan” is a very good read, although it won’t help you beat the stock market. I would say he’s a better economist than he is a theologian though if the quotes attributed to him are accurate.
NO NO NO NO NO! It’s the “we’re being persecuted” faithists and their apologists who constantly muddle up atheism and secularism. This is worthy of one of Ed’s Bryan Fischer awards.
Especially rich coming from Taleb who sees fit to lecture pretty much anyone from any field that they’re completely wrong about everything.
His first book WAS on how to beat the stock market, he talks about it a lot in The Black Swan. It’s an interesting way to look at things, he definitely has some interesting insights about uncertainty and risk. And I like how he spends all his time beating up on economists with better econ credentials than he has, but as I said above he’s pretty much the last person I’d want to advise me on how not to be arrogant.
#5 #9
Not only can both positive and negative phenotypes and genotypes be inherited together, they can easily be the _same_ genotype. The sickle cell mutation protects against malaria etc. I’ve not read the book though, and this is pretty obvious, so maybe it’s dealt with already.
#13
I have read Taleb’s the black swan though. It’s pants. Not a single actual piece of data in the entire book to support his idea; random racism and one idea which is that things happen that some or most people don’t expect. It’s useless in every way except as a window into the minds of the 1% that make money out of the 99%.
*sigh*
Isaac Asimov sez U iz stoopid
I, unfortunately, do know who Nassim Nicholas Taleb is, sort of. He has written a book called “Fooled by Randomness” in which he argues that virtually all stock traders with the exception of himself of course, are idiots who do not understand probability. They succeed dispite their ignorance and fail because of it. In other words, their success and failure is entirely out of their hands. He on the other hand does understand probability and the role of chance in driving stock fluctuations. By cleverly avoiding the errors of others, he becomes successful and financially well off for the long haul. The book was almost incomprehensible and was like most investment books in suggesting that he and maybe he alone had the true knowledge of how to make it. Given that the argument of the book was incredibly difficult to follow, it is likely that he will remain the “master of the universe” on his own. His inability to explain his position with any clarity suggests that his opinion on religion and atheism is likely to be rather muddled and the anecdote here seems to confirm that. Skip the book unless you have a strong masochistic inclination.
state-communism is not, and never was, an “atheist project”. Understandable that stupid people would be confused about this though, when the only thing they know about Marx is half a quote about opiates, and they can’t tell the difference between not believing in gods and eliminating the competition.
I read this article and my feelings were very much the same as PZ’s. I also tried to read “What Darwin Got Wrong”, but it was so wrong, I could only skim parts of it. They seemed to be saying that Darwin didn’t know eveything that has happened in genetics and evolutionary science in the past 150 years, so his books are meaninglass. They also demonstrated their almost complete ignorance of how evolution and natural selection have become incredibly stronger theories in that time.
It was pretty much complete garbage.
Aww, that’s just us being religious. Isn’t it that supposed to be a good thing?
Something something Charlie something something Tan, address something something Saddleback, something?
Wrong, O witless wonder, religion is the psychological analog of the erector pili response, at one time a useful adaptation, , but quickly becoming an irrelevant response to any current human concern.
*Sigh* … you know, you’d think people who complain about a group failing to take details and nuances into account would take extra special care to be sure to use a definition of that group which actual members of that group would agree was accurate … but no. As someone said, accomodationism tends to amount to a bonfire of strawmen.
I’ve liked to characterize gnu atheism (or ‘neo-atheism’ (?)) by 3 basic approaches: 1.) there is an inherent conflict between science and religion 2.) religious “faith” is not a character virtue and deserves no special consideration and 3.)systems built on ‘faith’ have no objective way to draw the line between reasonable and not reasonable, so ‘extremists’ are not the root of the problem.
Okay, this one made me laugh. Sure, nothing humbles people more than getting comfortable using a method which doesn’t allow them to know if they’re wrong, and nothing makes them meeker than being convinced that they are the obedient servants of an Absolute Ruler Who Brooks no Dissent and has a plan for the entire universe — including the Damned.
I’m really, really small. I’m nothing. Pretend I’m not even here; just listen to me as if I was God telling you in person.
If Taleb is a Paulorrhoid, I wouldn’t even trust his economic observations.
Did anyone catch the phrase “neo-atheist fatwa” in that execrable article? PZ, what price did you put on de Botton’s head, again?
I really like this from the comments:
Yes, yes, it does.
Ditto for pseudoscience. Belief in such things as ESP, homeopathy, alien abductions, and perpetual motion machines will never go completely away, because the human mind is not very good at being thoughtful, precise, and scientific. In fact, we’re never going to get completely rid of ignorance either — nor violence, nor bigotry, nor people making butt-stupid decisions or doing sloppy work.
But improving these things won’t help make people nicer to each other. So like, what’s the point?
“It’s better to be nice than right.”
The neo-atheists need to understand that. Also women. And anyone who criticizes the League of Nitwits (which is not a very nice term, is it?)
I wish these guys would realize they’re acting as PR men for the Axis of Medieval and find something else to do.
How is this different from “Im in favor of religion because it reminds people of their place”
Aubse? Really?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb is a more or less competent economist who likes to think he’s the only one who predicted the 2007 financial crisis. And he did predict it, in 2008.
Of course it isn’t. Just ask the League of Nitwits, they’ll tell you how not very nice the term is.
One of the most striking things revealed by the progress of science has been the revelation of how little we know and how easily what we do know can be overthrown.
*facepalm* I really, REALLY hate the God of the Gaps fallacy. I want to tear my hair out every time I hear it. It’s a damn good thing I DON’T, because with the frequency it comes up, I’d be bald by now. I’m sick of having to explain to woo believers that, no, just because science doesn’t know EVERYTHING doesn’t mean that the magical energy bracelet being advertised on TV actually DOES anything, or that physicists are wrong about the age of the universe.
To quote O’Briain: “Just because science doesn’t know everything doesn’t mean you can fill in the gaps with whatever fairy tale most appeals to you.”
I used to think the same thing. After all, religions are ubiquitous in every society.
But it isn’t a natural response to the human condition. Religions survive by early and relentless childhood brainwashing, backed up by all known mechanisms for social conformity, and killing of occasional defectors.
They never completely die. But they can diminish from life threatening social illnesses to minor annoyances. This has happened in virtually all western countries and Japan.
Perhaps a more realistic linguistic breakdown of “philosopher” is
“One who loves the appearance of being wise and knowledgeable.”
This group doesn’t seem to have a very good grasp of the basic science that their ‘philosophical’ discussions revolve around. Even their grasp of history is lacking – for example, communism was not an atheist project, more of a totalitarian state project – which is the tradition role of religion in history.
You can still see state-religion oppression in places like Saudi Arabia, where “insulting the Prophet Mohammed is a crime punishable by execution.” They just arrested a blogger (Kashgari) on those charges. Does anyone really doubt that large sections of the religious sector would like to apply such rules in the U.S. and elsewhere? Is that a “benefit of religion?”
As far as Darwin, any modern molecular biologist looks at Darwin the same way that any modern physicist looks at Newton – as an important historical figure in science, but one who was wrong as often as they were right. For example, natural selection based on survival of the fittest is just one mode of evolution – take genetic drift:
The sad thing is that this group doesn’t even understand the basic science of What Darwin Got Wrong, probably not any more than they understand What Newton Got Wrong, let alone What Einstein Got Wrong. (For a rational science-based discussion of Darwin: Darwinism Must Die So That Evolution May Live, By Carl Safina, NYT, April 30, 2010)
This is why it is hard to take ‘trained philosophers’ seriously – their grasp of science is well over a hundred years out of date. But they must know what a “straw man argument” is, and they also seem quite willing to use it, with Darwin as their straw man.
That would indicate not only ignorance on their part, but also intellectual dishonesty.
A buck two eighty, I think.
Uh oh, the C word! I wonder if he’s aware that some of the first people to recognize the “catastrophic failed
atheistproject of [Soviet] communism” were other communists and radical socialists? Probably not. He probably doesn’t even know that many Communists and Socialists realized by the 30s that Stalin’s state “Communism” was just another form of Fascism. Nah…he’s probably more into just accepting conventional “wisdom”.Actually European Communism/Socialism isn’t in as bad shape as it is here in the “freedom loving” USA. There are active parties in many countries that participate in elections and win seats. They tend to be smaller parties than the Labor/Social Democrat vs Tory/Christian Democrat spectrum, but in the >2-party political system common in Europe, small parties can actually have a voice. Doh!
And, yes, Stalin’s regime was not particularly atheist. Early in the revolution, religious institutions were attacked…typical of revolutions since religious institutions tend to be closely identified with the elite and aristocratic. Much like many totalitarian state systems, Stalin tended to use religion when convenient. In fact, IIRC, when the German’s invaded, he kind of got religion because he thought it would bolster popular support for the war effort. I believe it was then that the Soviet state reached agreements with the Orthodox clergy that persisted throughout the years of the USSR so that the Orthodox church was sort of unofficially the state religion. At the very least, it was the least suppressed and is thought to have actively worked with the secret police to assure conformity, a role they were well qualified for from the Tsarist days.
The many economists who predicted the 2007 crisis are about as invisible as the many intelligence agents who said Saddam didn’t have WMDs. Nothing gets you ignored by the political establishment and the mainstream media like being proven right.
Right now they’re all having an invisible party with all the economists who said Greece’s financial figures didn’t add it up and it would be extremely risky to let them join the euro.
In my experience, a whole hell of a lot of modern molecular biologists have themeselves a pretty tenuous understanding of evolutionary biology.
Frankly, your apparently unironic use of the phrase “survival of the fittest” suggests strongly that you’re in that category too.
This guy has deep fantasies of writing schlocky action/adventure screenplays, doesn’t he?
‘Tis:
A friend of mine interviewed him once and said his most noticeable trait was a love of talking about himself. He seems to be terribly impressed with himself.
Jeez, ChasCP, didn’t Darwin expound on “survival of the fittest?” Try reading the Safina article – here’s a key point:
Darwinism also serves as a ‘straw man’ for those who wish to attack science on behalf of religion, my key point here.
But yes, molecular biologists of the ‘model organism’ era (whose view of biological diversity was limited to E. coli, S. saccharomyces, C. elegans, Xenopus laevis, Mus musculus and Homo sapiens) often had a low understanding of evolution – but the molecular techniques they developed have opened up new vistas in evolutionary biology, particularly in areas like population biology and environmental microbiology.
Today, that old “Ecological and Evolutionary” vs. “Biochemical and Molecular” political clash (over funding and prestige in academic departments, mostly) – well, it’s over. The cutting edge of evolutionary and ecological science now relies heavily on the tools of biochemists and molecular biologists, period. Conflict resolved, except for some bitter old warhorses, but that’s academics for you.
Does anyone have a good catalog of fainting couches? I’d like to pick out an extra-squishy one to send them for their next gathering. Preferably one with Andrew Brietbart’s face embroidered on it so they can look on and snuggle up to that icon of their brand of “honesty”.
My first reaction to the League of Nitwits was deep annoyance at so much wrong piled on dishonest topped with smug. I was going to write a long impassioned screed but the following thought came to me and I decided to do something more productive:
The League of Nitwits are just a Dunning-Kruger circle jerk.
[pours glass of Cotes du Rhone]
Best dollar eighty I ever spent, hee HEE!
/YoungGunsII
No, I’m not advocating shooting them. The analogy of how many supposedly lethal, powerful, or influential people were beside themselves trying to find some way, any way to take down that upstart freethinking (and fictional) Billy the Kid amuses me.
– Taleb’s books are interesting but he has a nasty habit of calling everyone else ‘charlatans’ or ‘imbeciles.’ Apparently the Greek Orthodox Church has not tamed his arrogance.
– I do not have the citation but he also says somewhere that it is not religion that is the problem, it is nationalism.
S.
@Tis’
Yeah, he wasn’t the only one that predicted the collapse. If I remember right, I think Krugman said that the housing bubble would be happening was an extremely clear case. Although he did underestimate the severity of the collapse.
Nouriel Roubini also predicted the meltdown.
PZ, I love your last two paragraphs.
Yes.
Sure, but “rarely” doesn’t mean “never” – and if it means “less than the frequency of point mutations that directly turn B+ into B-“, then, well, so be it.
And yes, there are plenty of known examples where neutral or even disadvantageous traits are (for some time) dragged along by strong selection for advantageous ones.
Awesome. *clenched-tentacle salute*
Very good point.
LOL in meatspace!
Well, yeah, drift happens and must not be overlooked if you want a complete picture, but natural selection is a lot more influential, even though “survival of the fittest” is a quite insufficient description of it.
In physics, big amendments to Newton had to be made by relativity and quantum physics. As far as such things are comparable, no fundamental amendments to Darwin have ever been made or needed to be made – if only because Darwin didn’t rely on any particular theory of heredity.
(Darwin’s own theory of heredity is so completely wrong that most of you have probably never heard of it. It was disproved in his lifetime… and, ironically, works less well with evolution than Mendel’s does once you allow for mutations.)
Practically the same thing when he’s Greek Orthodox.
I’m a mathematician. Wait, wait, don’t all run away in terror!
Why the heckity-heck are THEY not called the NEW atheists? We’ve already established that atheism as we know it has been around for hundreds of years (Jacoby’s Freethinkers and Hecht’s Doubt: A History and my Letters from an Atheist Nation). What we haven’t seen in all these years are people claiming to be atheists that go to church. Oh, wait, those are UU’s! Scratch NEW atheists, they are the U-atheists.
–
These are atheists in sheep’s clothing. <–Almost literally right there.
“Furthermore, as Hitchens in effect acknowledged and as the neo-atheists demonstrate by their ideological rigidity and savagery, absence of religion does not guarantee that the demonic side of our natures will be eliminated.”
Yes it does. No atheist attributes mental illness to non-existent demons, anymore than they attribute good health to a non-existent god.
On the other hand, by its very phrasing here, that moron has inadvertantly acceded to a permanent residency within human nature of demons, a RELIGIOUS BELIEF.
It’s plain that the fool is also a cheap disingenuous lying bastard as well. Any argument to crush the object of his hatred and intolerance; unfortunately, he shot himself in the mouth.
oops, too impatient – here’s the rest that got lopped off: “…himself in the mouth WITH IT.”
that religion is the tamer of arrogance does not seem to apply in practice to those who are the ones doing the preaching or promoting religion. They set themselves up as the authorities to do the defining what their religions true beliefs and practices are. Who is it that is advocating an Atheist religion or church? Who is it that describes science as a belief system?
It sounds to me that what we have here is a small group of individuals who are united in their desire to be recognized as the authorities and leaders of the Atheist movement and are acting a little resentful at not being lionized for the obvious superior insights and in stead are being openly criticized and having to engage in publicly defending themselves and their thoughts.
Dam it sure is tough out here in the real world mommy people do not think I’m so special.
Eric Cartmen ?
uncle frogy
Douglas Adams:
I think we need to add sophisticated theologians and accomodationists to the outbound passenger list.
Nothing says humility like claiming to know the mind of God.
I read this ridiculously flippant article. And I thought I was going to choke on my own vomit. I often wonder how the religious continually get Atheism wrong. We are so in their face these days you would think they would at least know a little something about us. But no, they don’t listen. They stick their fingers in their ears while we’re talking. And then when we are done they spout out what amounts to a load of horseshit. Why? Because that is apparently their only defense. Why so many people want to defend themselves against truth and reason is beyond me.
What? That’s not a contradiction, that’s a non-sequitur.
a little attempt at liteness of being!
“Fuck ’em all… Fuck ’em all… Fuck ’em all…the long and the short and the tall”
Fuck off de Botton ya balls ave gone rotten, ya fuckin ain’t fit company!
And Fuck off John Gray ya ethics are astray and ya ass is where ya elbow should be!
“Fuck ’em all… Fuck ’em all… Fuck ’em all…the long and the short and the tall”
Fuck the apologists ‘n’ philosophers too… fuck their whore mothers and their brothers to!
Now dozy Nassim Nik ya so full of shit ya should bottle it and deep six it at sea…
but ya so fucking rancid ya dick as gone flaccid and ya brain ain’t where it should be…
“Fuck ’em all… Fuck ’em all… Fuck ’em all…the long and the short and the tall”
Young master Appelyard is a fat tub of pork lard very greasy ‘n’ oily ya see…
so wet and depressing and really quite vexing and maybe that is not just me!
“Fuck ’em all… Fuck ’em all… Fuck ’em all…the long and the short and the tall”
Or claiming to be God’s favorite play thing.
“Aren’t I just adorable? *bats eyes*” ←[humility]
He’s stunningly wrong about Jesus being a secularist of course. Jesus was a Jewish rebel who imagined that God had given him super powers to overthrow the Roman Empire and set up a Jewish theocracy with Jesus as King of the World.
The “render unto Caesar” comment has been confusing people for centuries, but I think I finally have it figured out. If you listen to it literally it does sound like Jesus is saying “pay your taxes.” But if you imagine Jesus privately telling his followers that everything belongs to God or some such meaningless drivel, you realize that it means the exact opposite–that you need not pay your taxes.
In short, it was a clever dodge designed to tell his followers that they could break the law but at the same time not give any ammunition to the spies who were listening to his preaching.
And you know this how ? Or was that an attempt at satire ?
I’m impressed by PZ’s ability to address the overall conceptual wrongness without getting bogged down in the ridiculous details, such as the occurrence of bullshit and non sequitur in once sentence, like:
It’s not quite post-modernism, it’s not quite religious, and it’s not quite plain ol’ stupid. It’s also not quite engineered. What the hell is it?
It’s kind of like being a superhero and learning that nefarious villains are teaming up to shake their fists at you and make plans to thwart you
Meanwhile, at the Hall of Doom…
I just don’t see any necessity to waste money building a ‘temple’ specifically to non-belief when just about every town in America already has a library dedicated to silence and meditation of ‘truth’.
I would certainly rather hand over any cash I can spare to a librarian with a wish list of science books than to someone who likes the idea of being a non-priest of a non-god.
@61: It’s a hypothesis and a pretty good one:
http://www.livius.org/men-mh/messiah/messianic_claimants00.html
1. If you claim that science is the best possible path to knowledge you have to prove that. It’s not up to religious people to disprove your claim. Oh, I agree with you on this, but I take scientism as a compliment actually. The 200 years of history in which science influenced literally everything on Earth more than any religion could backs us. But it’s not evidence.
2. As many Europeans I am more relaxed. As long as I have equal freedom to express my atheism (or Pastafarianism, just what I prefer at a given moment) it’s OK with me.
3. All science makes god superfluous. But again, that’s not proof. The way I see it it’s the problem of religious people to make their beliefs compatible with science, not mine. If they succeed, good for them. It won’t make me convert. In that sense I’m a stronger atheist than you are; no argument that spirituality is a better path to knowledge will convince me. Religious dishonesty is my problem, like its yours.
If you claim that science is the best possible path to knowledge you have to prove that.
easy. compare it to any other method for the last 400 years.
But it’s not evidence.
you must have a very odd definition of evidence then.
any successful path to knowledge must demonstrate two things:
explantory power
predictive power
seems to me that there is a literal mountain of evidence in support of the scientific method providing those two things.
any other method?
zilch.
The legion of Doom were too competent. They’re more of Merik’s Evil Council.
http://yugioh.wikia.com/wiki/Marik%27s_Evil_Council_of_Doom
Somehow, I can only think of Dr Evil.
who was Number 2, who was Scott Evil and who’s Frau Farbissina ?
I really don’t want to see Goldmember.
and I’ll add: Yes, we often use mockery and derision, because we are not like the religious who use terrorism, murder and intimidation.
Yup. Religion has tamed arrogance, attack-trained it, renamed it as faith, and sold it to the faithfools as a form of humility.
As usual, PZ has hit the nail on the head with these fart-heads.
We are atheists because we value truth based on objective evidence, we value skeptical inquiry into all matters–even sometimes painfully our own blind-spots (e.g. elevator-gate), and we want this world to be a better place where people aren’t fucking killing each other, threatening each other, brainwashing children, hurting and killing children, scaping women’s body parts off, and oppressing anyone who doesn’t agree, FOR A BUNCH OF FUCKING FAIRY TALES!
And I’m fully with PZ to continue to ridicule, criticize, and mock the purveyors of religious nonsense and woo of all kinds. These things are crying out to be demolished, and maybe, just maybe, it will happen, this world will be a better place, and we won’t destroy our teensy little planet’s biosphere that we all rely on to survive in a vast–unbelievably VAST–universe.
Just a thought: presumably if there were a better path to knowledge, (e.g. banging your head against a wall to see what visions appear), in order for you to accept it, you would require it to be subjected to some fairly rigorous testing, and presumably you would demand that the tests used would be scientific.
Would it be fair to assume that any methodology that passes such tests becomes itself subsumed into the scientific method?
I quite suspect that the scientific method does in fact wield a necessary validity. If you doubt this, ask yourself under what non-scientific circumstance would you accept a procedure for advancing knowledge.
I’m sure it will be objected that there is no single, unchanging scientific method, and that it is therefore senseless to say that it is necessarily valid. Let me counter that argument by venturing a definition of science that encompasses its malleability:
The scientific method is an ever improving, and best available, approximation to some fully rational procedure for assessing the state of reality
To clarify, what I said above is weaker than what I meant to say. The suspicion I wanted to convey is that for a methodology for advancing knowledge to be good, it must be scientific.
A procedure may be capable of generating statements that accurately reflect the state of reality, but if we do not have confidence in the accuracy of those statements, then our knowledge is not really advanced by them. It is our ability assign degrees of plausibility to propositions that arises from the scientific method.
I see the communism line was already well dismantled up-thread. Anyone making a comment like that deserves the ‘nitwit’ appellation (and worse). It reminds me of another Pharyngula thread where the one devastating argument the person had was Pascal’s wager. Yeah, we all laughed. Now we laugh again.
If he’s going to use Hitchens’ name in the same paragraph, he should at least fucking know what Hitch’s (and a hell of a lot of others) thoughts on communism acting as a religion are/were. Selling a concept using the godbot’s terminology just proves that apologists that drink too much of the goofy-juice of religion end up getting their realities and outlooks utterly FUBAR’ed, or, bending over too far backwards is VERY hard on the spine.
1. Science has nothing to do with religion, and cannot provide “evidence that all religions are wrong or vacuous.” There is no such thing as providing evidence that all religions are wrong or vacuous, unless you go into the evidence providing with the assumption that all religions are wrong or vacuous. Now, yes, you are followers of scientism, a narrow way of thinking and apparently a narrow way of being. We are at our essence spiritual, what religions are about. What does science tell us about anything other than the physical realm that we perceive? And we should hope and expect that applying scientific method would develop knowledge of the physical world beyond what was know centuries ago. But that does not touch us in our religious experience of life. What does biology tell us about anything other than the physical? Nothing. Scientists are not qualified as scientists to talk about whether there is a god or not, nor what that means to our lives.
2. In this country, freedom of religion includes the freedom to be an atheist. I was for a long while. So was my brother, for even a longer while. The best this country can do is to find a way to embrace the religious, the atheists, and the agnostics–or even the unlabeled, those who don’t even know if they are agnostic really.
3. The fact that we can conceive, and could always conceive (from the beginning of humankind—whenever wherever however that was) the world and all that is in it as having evolved (or come from other than a god, a broader way to state the anti-deity position), would mean that such conceptions have always been in counterpoint to religious writings ever since there have been scripture broaching physical topics. This is borne out within scripture. Scripture has always been about not only the path of believers, but the conversion of atheists and agnostics. That someone, you or anyone, Darwin, whomever, can proffer the non-existence of a deity, does not make god superfluous. Never has. Yet, there have always been atheists, I should think, that would disbelieve god on those very grounds. Darwin has added nothing, nor have the current wave of atheistic scientists. Darwin’s thoughts may have fueled scientism, but back to point 1, none of this broaches who we are as spiritual beings.
4. Yes, true, you did not list a 4. But since this article uses the language of the gutter in order to apparently sound tough or something, emphatic maybe–I’m not sure, as the toughest guys I know don’t talk so “tough” . . . I saw this great tee shirt when I was in New Orleans. It was black with white lettering that said, “Fuck you you fucking fuck.” I’m not directing that at anyone, just thought I’d get to be one of the guys here, getting some cussing out of my system and out into the blogging world. It is important here at point #4 that there is no point in #4. In other words, the article could have been written far better. Oh well, maybe that’s the point, that Bryan Appleyard is a world-class writer of articles.