It’s this weekend, in Cincinnati: the Free Inquiry Group 20th Anniversary. It’s got a nice lineup, with Greta Christina doing the opening, JT Eberhard somewhere in the middle, and me closing up the show, along with some other people who are not affiliated with FtB.
Come on out. What else are you going to do in that area, go to the Creation “Museum”?
This one isn’t crazy. It’s from an atheist, so it’s also properly spelled and punctuated, with good grammar.
The point is that many (sophisticated) religious advocates would argue that if everyone dedicated themselves to following certain religious codes of conduct, this would improve the world, and whether a God actually exists is largely irrelevant. Terry Eagleton discusses this position in Reason, Faith and Revolution.
This leads on to an interesting philosophical question: if the world could be a more peaceful and fulfilling place because people acted in accordance with strictly false beliefs, whereas if people only held true beliefs the world would be more conflicted and painful – then which scenario is preferred? This question is philosophical and I can’t see how science alone can adjudicate on the answer.
Science can’t, directly. This is a matter of values, and I, for instance, value truth very highly — so highly that the world logically cannot be a more fulfilling place for me if I were driven by false beliefs. That, I would admit, is a personal idiosyncrasy and I can easily imagine people who don’t give a damn about the truth of their beliefs. Picture the Joe Pantoliano character in The Matrix, Cypher, who sells out his friends in order to be reinserted into the computer fantasy simulation. Notice also that he’s portrayed as a bad guy.
You see, living a lie is nearly universally considered a bad thing. Even the people who most devoutly believe in the most wacky fundy beliefs, or scientologists, or Mormons, do not argue that their ideas are false but that they believe in them anyway — they all argue that they are literally true. The truth of Christianity or Islam or Hinduism or whatever is considered very important, but they’ve simply deluded themselves into believing that they are true (and we know that they can’t all be true, since they’re mutually contradictory).
I would also argue that an intellectual foundation built on false beliefs is inherently less stable than one built on true beliefs, because there is the continual risk that the falsity of that foundation can be found by its proponents, reducing their confidence. I presume that stability contributes to “peaceful and fulfilling”, although maybe some kind of chaotic anarchy would form a stable attractor in the great state space of possible social worlds. Unfortunately, my personal values intrude again: I don’t want to live in an anarchic state built on lies. I want to live in a totalitarian Dominionist state built on lies even less, though, so maybe you could make a “lesser of two evils” argument.
Simple. I read the bible. At 11. After reading through Norse, Roman, Egyptian and Greek mythology. I recognized they were the same. My mother was ecstatic, My father not so much. Oh, and I am African American. My mother was an atheist, and so are my children…they also came there with some guidance, but of their own volition.
Gwen
California
Shorter Deepak: “Richard Dawkins didn’t endorse my quantum bullshit, therefore The Magic of Reality sucks!”
Deepak Chopra actually sounds quite upset — his review of the book reads more like the indignant squawk of a charlatan furious that the presence of a skeptic might cut into his take. It’s largely an exercise in name-dropping and the profession of bleary, vacuous misinterpretations of science on his part, which he then turns around and uses to accuse Dawkins of error because he doesn’t share his inoculation of the ideas with pseudoscience. Like this:
What is obnoxious about Dawkins’ version is his tone of absolute authority about matters that he shows complete ignorance of. Respected physicists like John Archibald Wheeler, Sir Arthur Eddington, Freeman Dyson, Hans-Peter Dürr, Henry Stapp, Sir Roger Penrose, Eugene Wigner, Erwin Schrodinger, and Werner Heisenberg suggest a fundamental role for consciousness in quantum theory and a mental component at the level of biological organisms and the universe itself.
I notice that 56% of the people he names are dead, that none of them are biologists or psychologists, and that several of them, while authoritative in their fields, aren’t actually known for their views on consciousness. This is a common pseudo-scientific con, roping a few famous corpses into agreeing with wacky interpretations.
But even the ones who’ve pontificated on consciousness and physics, like Dyson and Penrose, don’t help. Those guys don’t know what the hell they’re talking about. Quantum effects matter in that they’re fundamental to how all matter behaves, but cells are big — any counter-intuitive weird quantum effects are going to be negligible in the large-scale bulk activity of a synapse. This is a world where the laws of thermodynamics and electromagnetism rule: the Goldman-Hodgkin-Katz equation doesn’t need any quantum handwaving to accurately describe the potential across a cell membrane.
Bringing these guys into the argument is as silly as if I were to charge into a discussion of how the tides go in, the tides go out by insisting that we have to take into account the effect of the presence of schools of squid. Sure, they’re real and they’re there, but they don’t affect the tides. This simply is not where neuroscience is going: if you want to understand how the nervous system works, learn math and the physics of electrochemistry, and in particular learn about biochemistry, pharmacology, and molecular biology…but studying quantum physics won’t help you at all.
I won’t even get into his absurd ideas that the universe itself is conscious. Dawkins’ book is about reality, not fantasy.
So Deepak then gets off his quantum bandwagon and tries to discuss biology. He fails.
Dawkins bypasses evidence from his own field of genetics that might upset his hobby-horse. He ignores, either willfully or through ignorance, the evidence for directed mutagenesis first put forward by John Cairns of Harvard in 1988. John Cairns showed that if you grow bacteria with the inability to metabolize lactose, they evolve that ability in petri dishes tens of thousands of times faster than would be predicted if mutations simply occurred randomly. Professor Rudolph Tanzi of Harvard Medical School further points out that mutations in the human genome do not occur randomly but cluster in “hot spots” that are hundreds of times more likely to undergo mutation.
Dawkins is not a geneticist: he’s an ethologist and evolutionary biologist. Of course, he knows far more about genetics than does Deepak, so his confusion is understandable. Deepak would have to stand awed before the depth of knowledge known by my undergraduate students in comparison to his.
The Cairns results were interesting, but I don’t know of anyone who still claims that they are the result of directed mutagenesis, other than woo-peddlers. The fact that bacteria produced viable mutations more rapidly than predicted is explained by the observation of hypermutability in bacteria under stress. Basically, if you measure the error rate of replication in normal, healthy bacteria under growth promoting conditions, and then use that same rate to predict the frequency of mutations in a population under stressed conditions, you’ll underestimate the frequency.
The observation of hotspots for mutation in the genome is also well-known. It’s not magic, it’s not because these regions are well-liked by the mutation fairy, it’s because of chemistry. Some areas of a chromosome are more prone to breakage or error because of their structure or sequence.
This does not defy the observation that mutations are random. It merely means that the probability of mutation is not uniform across the entire length of the genome. Deepak’s argument is like claiming that because, when shooting craps, you’re more likely to roll a 7 than snake-eyes, throwing two dice generates a non-random result. Deepak doesn’t understand physics or biology, and he also doesn’t understand elementary probability theory.
Dawkins does. I heard him talk about this book on Sunday, and Deepak’s baseless complaints to the contrary, he did take a moment to explain what he meant by “random”, and it wasn’t the cartoonish nonsense Deepak Chopra babbles about.
I could go on and on about the stupidity of Deepak’s review — every paragraph is like the evacuations of an elephant with diarrhea — massively feculent and slimy, of a quality that will not even appeal to the neighborhood dung beetles. But I do have to mention one more sentence that left me laughing.
One doesn’t ask for advanced genetics in a primer for young adults, but one does ask that the writer know his field before adopting a tone of authority.
That’s rich coming from a quantum quack who is demonstrably deluded about medicine, biology, evolution, physics, chemistry, and the entirety of science, yet manages to pretend to be an authority every day.
(Also on Sb)
I am an atheist because I have never seen any real evidence of any gods of any kind. I was raised Catholic and later converted to Baptist as an adult. Even as a child it bothered me that god did not act in obvious and public ways as depicted in the Bible. The liberal interpretation that the supernatural events in the Bible should be interpreted metaphorically only begged the question why the god entity shouldn’t be interpreted metaphorically as well. Also, as an African American I can’t reconcile accepting a religion that was used to enslave my ancestors.
But seeing George Carlin’s routine Religion is Bullshit sealed my atheism.
Frederick Sparks
United States
(I put out a simple call for your explanations for why you’re an atheist, and I’m still inundated with submissions. This will be a daily feature on Pharyngula.)
Richard Dawkins was supposed to speak at a hotel near Detroit, but had to change his plans at the last minute because the hotel owner watches TV and is bigoted and unethical.
Prejudice against atheists manifested itself again when The Wyndgate Country Club in Rochester Hills, Michigan (outside of Detroit), cancelled an event with scientist and author Richard Dawkins after learning of Dawkins’s views on religion. The event had been arranged by the Center for Inquiry–Michigan (CFI), an advocacy group for secularism and science, and the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science.
The Wyndgate terminated the agreement after the owner saw an October 5th interview with Dawkins on The O’Reilly Factor in which Dawkins discussed his new book, The Magic of Reality: How We Know What’s Really True.
Hmm. The most prominent atheist in the world gets openly discriminated against, and where’s the outrage? I hope CFI is pursuing legal action.
At first I thought this discovery was really cool, because I love the idea of ancient giant cephalopods creating art and us finding the works now. But then, reality sinks in: that’s a genuinely, flamboyantly extravagant claim, and the evidence better be really, really solid. And it’s not. It’s actually rather pathetic.
It consists of the discovery of ichthyosaur vertebrae lying in a flattened array. They look like this.
Wait, what? That’s it?
Here are the first videos I’ve seen of Hitchens in action at the Texas Freethought Conference.
These aren’t bad; there was also a pro crew there taping everything, so expect more later.
The world as explained by science is so beautiful it makes me weep. Literally. When I think about these tiny jiggling particles that constitute everything, when I gaze into the sky and see the vastness of the Cosmos, when I sit in my chair, smoke a pipe and consider life on Earth and try to wrap my head around the unimaginably complex processes that allowed me to form as a human being and now ponder life itself, when I try to imagine and appreciate how much we have accomplished, when I see the shrouded realm of what we do not yet know my eyes brim with tears of emotion, my heart leaps with expectation and wonder. I am so grateful that I am privileged enough to live in times of great scientific understanding and in social circumstances that exposed me to all this information. It is marvellous. It is profound.
When I hear anyone proposing an invisible being whose existence denies the weight of all the things I hold dearest, I feel like I have been slapped in the face. Any concept of god steals away the world’s beauty and wonder and mints it into a mere cog in some strange machinery. It is outrageous to me and most offensive. It beslimes the greatness of human discovery and I will have none of it.
There are also moral reasons for my disbelief. I have a firm conviction that only the morality that emerges from a deep intrinsic need to do good is worthwhile. The opposed, religious morality of punishment and reward I find unwholesome, dishonest and infantile. I do not consider people who behave acceptably because they fear eternal punishment moral. They are petty and cowardly at best. I believe in humankind, I believe that a vast majority of us have enough sense to be decent human beings without some whiplash constantly ringing in our ears.
All of these ideas might be easily explained to the readers of this blog, but are virtually incommunicable in Poland, which is still vastly Catholic. There are a lot of young people who do not care too deeply about religion, do not go to any church and simply do not concern themselves with those issues but when the time comes they get church-approved marriages, baptize their children and demand a Catholic funeral. People who take a stand against religion are as rare as comets. People who share my strong feelings about science and morality are even less frequent. This is sad and disheartening. To not be understood by fellow atheists does not feel great.
Mine was the long road to atheism. I was always driven by curiosity and a desperate craving for truth. As a young man I thought I found my answers in religion but I became quickly disillusioned when I understood that religion only poses more questions and gives no sensible answers in return. I tried many things, many belief systems, many philosophical approaches and I found that all the answers are improbably simple. I just have to rely on the facts, without fairy tales, false hopes and wishful thinking. And if I could not find hard facts to answer my questions, I became courageous enough to accept that I did not know. Not knowing is not particularly worse than knowing, if you have your reason in place and solid grounding — it just propels you to ask questions and try to find out, it kindles a desire to know everything there is to know. And my greatest wish is that we eventually do.
Radek Szyroki
Poland
(I put out a simple call for your explanations for why you’re an atheist, and I’m still inundated with submissions. This will be a daily feature on Pharyngula.)
I am an atheist, in short, because I am a rationalist and a scientist. I am an atheist because of reason – because of a simple love of the power of reasoning and rational thinking to bring real clarity, resolution and a grasp of the closest thing you really will get to get to real ‘truth’ while living out your lives on this pale blue dot. (Or indeed while living anywhere else in the cosmos – to any readers tuning in from the International Space Station, Mars, Europa, or wherever.)
I don’t believe in gods for much the same reason that I don’t believe in fairies, bogeymen, ghosts, lucky gems, leprechauns, Santa or the Easter Bunny. There isn’t a shred of convincing evidence for the existence of any of them, plenty of evidence that they are grossly surplus to requirements for explaining any phenomenon, and that proposing them just creates more problems than it solves.
There just isn’t a good reason for believing in any supernatural being, and plenty of good reasons for not believing. Theists who are otherwise rational and who fail to grasp that conclusion are simply not being fully honest with themselves, and failing to challenge their ideas on the subject of gods with the same robustness as they would challenge other ideas. And I speak with experience, as someone who once was that theist.
Indeed, the whole concept of ‘god’ or ‘gods’ is so ill-defined that asking me if I believe in ‘god’ is like asking me if I believe in floogamaloops. I don’t know what floogamaloops are, and neither do you. I don’t know what exactly gods would be like, and neither do you. Or rather, everybody has their own personal idea of what ‘god’ is – varying vastly from person to person, region to region and time to time. To some, god is simply energy, and you can find it in a lump of coal – which is at any rate an interesting insight into the power of wishful thinking, and the tragic lengths some people will go to to cling desperately and shamelessly to this strange ‘god’ notion.
Do you believe immunoglobulin M exists? I do. And I can tell you what it is – and it will be roughly the same definition that any person who knows about the subject will give you. And I could hand you to someone more competent than myself who could give you the robust evidence for the existence of immunoglobulin M, and take you through graceful laboratory techniques that isolate the molecule and allow us to say things about its size, structure and function. The great thing about it actually existing, and having a testable definition, is that it will pass through the fire of reason, and you don’t have to take it on faith. Of course it also helps that IgM is a mere molecule that lacks the capacity to be a passive-aggressive bastard that wants to hide its existence from you, reveal itself occasionally through arbitrary phenomena such as weeping statues and faces in toast, and otherwise must insist on being taken purely on faith – which are common themes on the subject of gods – but let’s not complicate things further.
And that’s why I’m an atheist. My own atheism is a simple consequence of my reasoning – just one result of my mind thinking rationally – one result of many opinions I’ve landed on through reason. And I also know that it’s a stance that some people reach through routes other than reason. Some people are atheists just because they are. Buddhists are atheists, Raelians are atheists – literally anyone who doesn’t believe in gods gets to legitimately call themselves an atheist – no matter how bizarre or outlandish their beliefs and worldviews may be outside of that particular aspect of their thinking. So atheism isn’t important or particularly worthy or noble to me just in and of itself – the process that gave rise to it in my case is. I am an atheist because I am a rationalist – an honest and thorough rationalist – and my rationalism is much, much more important to me than my atheism could ever hope to be.
My atheism is but a small bud sprouting from the scientific thinking that lets me appreciate the real world, the real universe, as it actually is, in every other aspect of my life. Atheism should be one of those things you arrive at in any honest quest for truth – but it’s not an ends in itself. And science, reason, rational thinking and sceptical enquiry are the best tools devised for uncovering reality.
There are of course “other ways of knowing” – it’s just they’re complete bollocks. Beyond laughable in the shadow of empirical science. ‘Intuition’, ‘gut feeling’ and ‘just knowing’ are alternative ways of knowing things, in much the same way that having sex standing up is an alternative form of contraception. Find me a person who could uncover the structure of the atom, of light, of the complexity of life through “other ways of knowing”. It’s exasperating, ridiculous and sad that adult humans can even utter those kinds of opinions with a straight face. I don’t know whether to laugh or cry – and I don’t care if they’re offended by that. They should be. They don’t deserve to be cushioned from having their beliefs poked and prodded – and frankly, they really don’t know what they’re missing by not learning to love sceptical interrogation, the thrill of the culmination of arriving at a real, intellectually satisfying conclusion, instead of evading awkward questions, putting their fingers in their ears and playing the faith card to shield their cherished beliefs.
Faith is by definition belief without evidence – it’s pulling things out of your ass; it’s clinging to things that you might well know are faintly ridiculous; it’s putting up barriers to honest enquiry; it can be used as an impediment to curiosity and intellect, and it is simply the most ridiculous method of discovering or knowing anything about reality. It’s not a virtue – and it shouldn’t be a virtue in wider society any more than it would be in a court of law.
Some atheists of course ‘respect’ such nonsense – but that is just yet another reason why atheism is not an ends in itself to me. It’s all about the process of rationality, reasoning and sceptical curiosity that if pursued boldly should necessarily give rise to atheism, and have much, much broader and deeper ramifications than just mere atheism alone.
Heather Dalgleish
Scotland
(I put out a simple call for your explanations for why you’re an atheist, and in a single day I got almost 100 essays. I think we have a new regular feature here. I’m going to just work through them and post one a day, so if you sent one in, be patient…we’ll get around to it eventually.)
