Unbelievable?

As mentioned previously, my interview on British Christian talk radio is now available — you can download the mp3 directly, and you can join in an online discussion, in which I am accused of “scientism”…which is rather pecuilar, given that in the interview I rather specifically said there were phenomena for which science is not the best tool for examination (although I would also say that there are no phenomena which require something beyond natural mechanisms).

The interviewer also thinks Plantinga’s arguments are good, which we didn’t talk about at all, but which would have triggered some on-air gagging noises if they had come up.

I may not be perfectly rational, but my magic invisible monkeys are!

John Wilkins has tried to make some arguments for accommodationism. I am unimpressed. He makes six points that I briefly summarize here, with my reply.

  1. It’s the job of the religious to reconcile their beliefs with science, and atheists don’t get to “insist that nobody else can make the claim that their religious belief is consistent with science.” The first part is obvious — we aren’t going to compromise science with superstition, nor are we going to make excuses for them. The second part makes no sense. Nobody has been making that demand…but we will point out how silly the excused people make are.

  2. The usual excuse that making nice with religion is strategic, coupled with the claim that religion is always going to be around. Other people can be strategic. Scientists just ought to be honest. As for the tired argument that religion will always be around — no. Some of us have shed the old myths. More will follow. I don’t have any problem seeing a coming future where religious belief is an irrelevant minority position. Of course, if you start out with a defeatist attitude, it becomes a bit more difficult.

  3. Some scientists are religious, and we don’t have the right to insist that they give it up. I have not heard a single atheist insist that anyone must give up their religion. I can imagine a majority voluntarily giving it up, but my imagination fails at the idea of going up to some believer and ordering them to stop believing. How do we do that? So, sorry, Wilkins — it’s another complaint about something no one is proposing.

  4. Scientific institutions shouldn’t be asserting that science is compatible with religion — let the religious do that themselves. That’s the very same thing the atheists have been saying all along.

  5. Religion has always been wrong about the natural world, but religion is seeking knowledge of something different. Again, first part fine, second part weird. What knowledge? Can you even call it “knowledge” if it’s nothing that anyone can know? Why should we accept any claims by religion?

  6. NOMA is wrong, and there is no war between religion and science. Wilkins continues his pattern of being half right. I agree that NOMA was a false attempt at reconciliation. I disagree that there is no conflict between religion and science. Religion is an archaic, failed mode of thinking that continues to demand greater respect than it deserves, and exploits tradition, fear, and emotion to maintain its undeserved position. Wilkins tries to compare it to two dancers jostling for space on a dance floor, I prefer to think of it as one dancer, humanity, afflicted with lice, religion, and twitching and squirming unpleasantly while struggling with a persistent parasite.

So, a resounding “eh”. However, then he tosses out this bizarre bit of philosophical insipidity that irritates, like an annoying bit of grit in my shoe. It’s one of those superficially reasonable comments that, with just a little thought, looks awfully stupid.

Only those who are completely without self-knowledge think they are entirely rational on every subject, and that this licenses attacking others for their perceived failings in that respect. I know I won’t change their mind either.

Grrr. Once again, we’ve got a caricature of the atheist position: who among us claims perfect self-knowledge and flawless rationality? We’re human beings, last I looked. However, to imply that we can therefore have no license to criticize irrationality is to claim that no one can say anything ever against foolishness. It’s an abdication of intellectual responsibility.

If I were to announce that I were absolutely rational and that I had perfect knowledge, I would expect to be rightfully attacked by people like John Wilkins for my obvious failing. Hey, he just did — even though I’ve never made such an assertion. But I think we’d both agree that such an extravagant claim would most definitely be an astonishing foolishness that ought to be smacked down. What a crazy idea!

John clearly thinks some philosophical claims are wrong. But the curious thing is that he thinks certain other claims are beyond our capacity to criticize.

If, for instance, someone believes that a god gave us magical absolution by turning into a man and dying temporarily, well, heck—that may not be an irrational, wacky idea at all. If this someone claims that they have a magical communication line to an omniscient superman who assures him that the 36-hour death absolution was really, really true, we should step back, take a charitably philosophical view of the idea, and abstain from calling him a very silly man.

There are limits to what we can attack as bad ideas.

But, apparently, there are no limits to the absurdities that the religious can advance.

It’s an asymmetrical situation that will be maintained as long as we have people insisting that we grant religious ideas a specially protected status. I reject that — I’m going to insist that it is fair game to attack the obvious failings of religion. And it’s not because I am unaware of the limitations of my knowledge, or because I believe I’m flawlessly rational.

It’s because the invisible monkeys in my pants dart out every once in a while to whisper the truth in my ear, in the ancient language of omniscient primates. And that is a source of knowledge nobody can attack me on, by Wilkins’ rules.

Christian faith is at odds with science

Yesterday morning, I was in a discussion on UK Christian talk radio on the topic of “Is Christian faith at odds with science?”, with Denis Alexander of the Faraday Institute for Science and Religion. It’s going to be available as a podcast at sometime in the next day, but I may not be able to link to it right away — tomorrow I fly away to Germany for a week, so my schedule is going to be a bit chaotic for a while.

Don’t expect fireworks. It was the usual feeble accommodationist claptrap, but I had my nice man hat on and actually tried to get across some basic ideas. To no avail, of course, but at least I tried.

I have now discovered that I was trying to make the same points Lawrence Krauss is doing in the Wall Street Journal: religion is wrong. It’s a set of answers, and worse, a set of procedures, that don’t work. That’s the root of our argument that religion is incompatible with science.

That word, “incompatibility”, is a problem, though. The uniform response we always get when we say that is “Hey! I’m a Christian, and I’m a scientist, therefore they can’t be incompatible!” Alexander was no exception, and said basically the same thing right away. It’s an irrelevant point; it assumes that a person can’t possibly hold two incompatible ideas at once. We know that is not true. We have complicated and imperfect brains, and even the most brilliant person on earth is not going to be perfectly consistent. When we talk about incompatibility, we have to also specify what purposes are in conflict, and show that the patterns of behavior have different results.

For instance, if you just like to go to church because you enjoy the company, then the purpose of religion to you is to reinforce social bonds — so of course there is no incompatibility between science and religion there. If you go for the choir (as Stephen Jay Gould was known to do), you’re there to enjoy the music, and science does not dictate that human beings are not allowed to enjoy music. For that matter, science doesn’t say that someone is not allowed to enjoy the perverse circumlocutions of theology, so if someone attends for the religion sensu strictu, no problem.

But in a debate about the compatibility of science and religion, we have to put the argument in an appropriate context and define a specific shared purpose for both science and religion — it’s the only legitimate ground for discussion. In this case, what we’re trying to do is address big questions (remember, the Templeton Foundation says they’re all about those “big questions”) about the nature of the universe, about our history, about how we function, and then we encounter a conflict: religion keeps giving us different answers. Very different answers. They can’t all be right, and since no two religions give the same answers, but since science can generally converge on similar and consistent answers, I know which one is right. And that makes religion simply wrong.

We have to look at what they do to see why. In order to probe the nature of the universe around us, science is a process, a body of tools, that has a long history of success in giving us robust, consistent answers. We use observation, experiment, critical analysis, and repeated reevaluation and confirmation of events in the natural world. It works. We use frequent internal cross-checking of results to get an answer, and we never entirely trust our answers, so we keep pushing harder at them. We also evaluate our success by whether the end results work: it’s how we end up with lasers and microwave ovens, and antibiotics and cancer therapies.

Religion, on the other hand, uses a different body of techniques to explain the nature of the universe. It uses tradition and dogma and authority and revelation, and a detailed legalistic analysis of source texts, to dictate what the nature of reality should be. It’s always wrong, from an empirical perspective, although I do have to credit theologians with some of the most amazingly intricate logical exercises as they try to justify their conclusions. The end result of all of this kind of clever wankery, though, is that some people say the world is 6000 years old, that it was inundated with a global flood 4000 years ago, and other people say something completely different, and there is no way within the body of theology to resolve which answers are right. They have to step outside their narrow domain to get an independent confirmation — that is, they rely on science to give them the answers to the Big Questions in which they purport to have expertise.

So what theistic scientists have to do is abandon the operational techniques of religion and use science to address those questions. The “theistic” part of their moniker is nothing but useless baggage which, if they take it at all seriously, would interfere with their understanding of the world. That is what I mean by an incompatibility between the two.

Krauss uses a marvelous and well-known quote from J.B.S. Haldane to make that point more briefly.

My practice as a scientist is atheistic. That is to say, when I set up an experiment I assume that no god, angel or devil is going to interfere with its course; and this assumption has been justified by such success as I have achieved in my professional career. I should therefore be intellectually dishonest if I were not also atheistic in the affairs of the world.

I got Alexander to agree that he does not use religion in the laboratory — I don’t know anyone who would say that they do, other than creationist kooks — but it didn’t seem to sink in that that is an admission of incompatibility. Religion doesn’t work to answer questions in science, which always leaves me wondering…if you accept that, why do you go on thinking it might be giving you correct answers in ordinary daily life? It has an awfully poor track record.

Now one way the defenders of religion like to get around this empirical problem is to change the game in mid-play: one moment we’re talking about tools for understanding the world, where there is a conflict, and then they switch to a completely different purpose, that of establishing a common morality, or appreciating art, or falling in love. I would be the first to admit that science does not and should not dictate morality: the cases in the past where this has happened (eugenics comes to mind right away) have been disastrous. Science is good at explaining what is and how it works, and not so great at telling us how it should work. I also wouldn’t use the scientific method directly to determine whether I like some music or poetry or not.

However, I’m going to have to say that religion doesn’t do a good job at that either. SJ Gould tried to partition the domains of authority for science and religion by explicitly setting a boundary, and saying religion should have the job of defining what is right and good…but I think he failed, because he gave far too much credit to religion for being able to discern and act on a reasonable morality. It’s foundation on authority and its role in defining in and out groups means it is too exclusionary, too narrow and inflexible, and also too willing to ignore empirical evidence. It’s why we have religion behind such immoral acts today as trying to restrict civil rights to people who have only a certain range of sexual behaviors, or facilitating the spread of sexually transmitted disease in Africa by damning sex education and condom use.

And when it comes to other questions than the cosmic ones about the nature of existence, I prefer that we apply just about any discipline other than religion to the problem: at least they are evidence-based, where religion is not. I’d rather consult a philosopher than a theologian on morality; they’ve been thinking about it with a broader scope than the pious promoters of sectarian belief, anyway, don’t restrict their principles to worshippers of one particular idol, and usually don’t invoke magical rewards and punishments that have never been seen to justify decisions. If I’m in love I’m better off pulling a book of poetry off the shelf than consulting a celibate. I’d rather hear about economics from an economist than from a ouija board or a pulpit, and I like the idea of policy decisions being evaluated for effectiveness, rather than ideological purity. When we’re looking at communities and interactions between individuals, give me a psychologist or a sociologist over a priest any day. The only useful priests in those matters are the ones who understand the principles of psychology and sociology, and apply those, rather than pulling a quote out of their holy book.

Accommodationists are a problem not because accommodation is bad, but because they are pushing for the wrong kind of accommodation. Science doesn’t need to conform, religion does. Religion demands a special kind of privilege in these discussions because if we actually get down to assessing views fairly and objectively, on the basis of what works, it fails. I say, let it.

This is also why so many of us object to the Templeton Foundation. Their agenda consists solely of mixing up science and religion, to the detriment of the former. They just want to compromise…but asking us to compromise science that works with faith that doesn’t is a fool’s bargain. Why should we?

A serious theologian

It’s a novel argument, at least. This evangelist has a weird justification for the priority of Christianity: because we say “Jesus Christ!” when we wack our thumb with a hammer, instead of “Buddha!”, he must be the one true god.

Alas for that line of reasoning, I’ve noticed that more people are more likely to shout out a certain four-letter word when surprised or hurt or angry, which must mean that sex is god.

The kids are getting smarter

The news from a small UK survey is heartening: teenagers are abandoning or never had much belief in religion. Two thirds don’t believe in gods at all, and

It also emerged six out of ten 10 children (59 per cent) believe that religion “has a negative influence on the world”.
 

The survey also shows that half of teenagers have never prayed and 16 per cent have never been to church.

I came to the enlightenment late, so I’ve been in church. Really, they aren’t missing a single thing. Not one thing. Funny, isn’t it; the religious insist that we need the fellowship and ritual and sermonizing, but it’s all the most dreary crap and superficial ‘community’. We won’t miss it when it is all gone.

Cheesy pablum for Jebus

Oh, dog. Discussion of the conflict between science and religion. Francis Collins comes up first. Atheists are shrill. Human genome. Morality is a pointer to god. C.S. Lewis. Fine tuning. Atheists are arrogant. Atheists are fundamentalists. Atheism is irrational. Read my BioLogos website. The usual appalling Collins drivel.

Next up…you’d think anything would be a relief after that tepid, tired inanity, wouldn’t you? But no. Who is the complement to the pious, gullible, nice Dr Collins? Someone who might offer a different point of view? Someone who might spark some real discussion? Someone who might, you know, disagree?

It’s Barbara Bradley Hagerty.

Jebus. What a pile of brainless, self-congratulatory pudding pretending to be a discussion of substance. And then the reporters in attendance dish it up with a spoon, and they gum it over with their soft, toothless questions, and everyone dies of sugar poisoning.

No, I lied. The ending is even worse.

Francis Collins picks up his guitar and sings.

Praise the source of faith and learning that has sparked and stoked the mind
With a passion for discerning how the world has been designed.
Let the sense of wonder flowing from the wonders we survey
Keep our faith forever growing and renew our need to pray.

That’s where I began projectile vomiting. Horked up my spleen right on my keyboard, blood squirted out of my eyeballs, and my howls set the small vermin lurking in the walls of my house scuttling to throw themselves beneath the wheels of passing vehicles in a massive and merciful act of suicide.

The god mob

Speak the name “Templeton” and the prim, dutiful servants of the foundation will appear. If you look at the recent articles from Coyne, Dawkins, and me, you’ll discover the same comment, shown below, from a representative of the Templeton Foundation. I’ve seen these guys in action before. They are very serious, somber fellows in their nice suits, with the dignitas of boodles of cash behind them, who will calmly state their position with an air of dispassionate certitude.

They remind me of Mafia lawyers.

A.C. Grayling and Daniel Dennett have refused to talk to a serious
journalist (Edwin Cartlidge of Physics World) about a serious subject
(philosophical materialism) because the journalism fellowship under
which he is pursuing this subject is sponsored by the Templeton
Foundation. They will have nothing to do with the Templeton Foundation,
they say, because our aim is somehow to “muddy the waters” about the
relationship between science and religion.

That’s not how we see it at all. First-rate, peer-reviewed science is
essential to our work at the Foundation and to the progressive vision
of the late Sir John Templeton, who was deeply committed to scientific
discovery. Many of our largest grants go to pure scientific research
(like our support for the Foundational Questions Institute in Physics
and Cosmology, the Godel Centenary Research Prize Fellowships, and the
Program for Evolutionary Dynamics at Harvard).

But, yes, we do like to include philosophers and theologians in many of
our projects. Excellent science is crucial to what we do, but it is not
all that we do. We are a “Big Questions” foundation, not a science
foundation, and we believe that the world’s philosophical and religious
traditions have much to contribute to understanding human experience
and our place in the universe. For Grayling and Dennett to compare this
rich, expansive discussion to a dialogue with astrologers is silly.
They know better.

Gary Rosen
Chief External Affairs Officer
John Templeton Foundation

Materialism, philosophical or otherwise, is a serious and useful subject. The bit he left off, though, is that the Templeton Foundation opposes it. For instance, they give a series of prizes, many of which reward people for making the best excuses for inserting superstition into research: the Templeton Prize, for “affirming life’s spiritual dimension”; the Award for Theological Promise, for the best thesis on “God and spirituality”; the Religion Reporter of the Year; the European Religion Writer of the Year; the Religion Story of the Year; the Epiphany Prize, for shows that “increase man’s understanding and love of God”; the Kairos Prize, for movies that “result in a greater increase in either man’s understanding or love of God”; you get the idea. Let’s have no illusions. First and foremost, the Templeton Foundation’s purpose is the promotion of religion…they have simply chosen to pursue that goal by dressing up as philanthropists supporting a certain kind of science. They are what the Discovery Institute wishes they could be, if they were staffed with grown-ups and had $1.5 billion to play with.

They do aim to muddy the waters. They want to blur the boundaries between legitimate science, which questions traditional dogma, and religion, which is traditional dogma, by playing favorites with religion in a game that apes scientific institutions. Yes, they certainly do spend money on real science projects; it’s part of their aim to entangle valid, secular science in the financial webs of a religiously motivated agency. Again, look at the Mafia for a model. Diversify and get your hands in real businesses like trucking or garbage collection or construction, and when someone asks difficult questions, just say “Hey, look — fleet of garbage trucks!” And meanwhile, build up a network of obligations — do a little, perfectly legal favor for some little guy, and when the time comes, you can ask him to return the favor, to your advantage.

Now of course, the Templeton Foundation is doing nothing illegal, and the comparison to a criminal organization does not extend to actual criminality. The only place it holds up is in the way they maintain a pretext of doing one thing, while actually profiting most off another activity altogether. Look at Mr Rosen’s comment. Nowhere does he admit outright that what they fund is the introduction of a religious perspective in science. Instead, we get euphemisms. They are a “Big Questions” foundation, whatever that means. He will not come right out and state plainly that what they think is a “Big Question” is the role of a god in creating and maintaining the universe and humankind.

That’s not a big question. It’s a bad question.

I have never found a discussion with a theologian about their favorite deities to be “rich, expansive” — just saying it is so doesn’t make it so, but is actually the crux of the argument. They are trying to buy their way into the debate, rather than earning it. I don’t think they know Grayling and Dennett very well at all, either, because they do know better, and the comparison with a dialog with astrologers is spot on — they won’t be disavowing it any time soon.

I’ll stand by my Mafia comparison, too. It’s an organization that gets a lot of mileage out of making offers people can’t refuse.

St Petersburg Times takes on Scientology

Juicy stuff from a mainstream newspaper coming out and hitting Scientology hard: this week and over the next few days, they’re publishing a special report on Scientology. If you’ve followed the cult at all, there’s nothing too surprising — it’s a scam run by abusive psychotics — but it does have some personal accounts by high-ranking defectors.

I’m sure there are meetings going on in Clearwater right now where they’re plotting revenge.

A miracle!

A young man in Kansas had a traumatic event in his life. Here’s a simple outline of what happened.

Chase Kear has a serious accident, fracturing his skull.

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Bystanders call for emergency medical help on their phones.
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Doctors arrive in a helicopter.
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Doctors administer emergency care.
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Helicopter arrives at hospital; doctors take him into surgery.
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Surgeons remove portion of his skull to protect his brain from swelling.
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Kear is treated with antibiotics to prevent infections.
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Swelling reduces, doctors restore Kear’s skull.
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Bystanders pray.
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Family prays.
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Family prays.
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Family asks for the last rites to be administered to Kear.
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Family prays.
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Family prays.
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Family prays.
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Family prays.
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Kear survives, is rehabilited, and seems to be making a full recovery.

There are two ways of looking at this event. You either look at all the hard work that was put into saving Kear and helping him recover (the left column), or you ignore all that and pretend it was a group of people sitting around with folded hands who magically prodded an invisible man to do indetectable things that saved him (the right column). The latter view is now prompting the Catholic Church to send in a team of ‘investigators’ to determine whether Kear’s recovery was a miracle.

You should see me right now. I turned water into iced tea this morning, and right now I’m levitating a glass of the stuff with the power of my mind. Please ignore the contributions of the Lipton company, and the fact that I’m also using my left hand to hold up the glass, and canonize me. Oh, wait…I feel another magical transformation coming on. Let me submit this post (Huzzah! I affect electrons thousands of miles away!) and teleport myself to the bathroom. I expect emissaries from the Vatican to be at the door by the time I get back.

Amreen and Lokesh

It’s a sad story. Amreen was Muslim, and Lokesh was Hindu, but these two young people loved each other and got married anyway. Isn’t that the way it should be, that religion is something that shouldn’t dictate the important matters in your lives? Unfortunately, the other people in their small town of Phaphunda couldn’t allow that. The village council met and ordered them to annul the marriage — and their families seem to have felt likewise, that their love had to be destroyed.

So Amreen and Lokesh took poison and killed themselves.

If this story sounds vaguely familiar, Cuttlefish has written a poem to clarify the resemblance.

Now the village is turning silent and stony to the outside world; the chief of the village is scurrying about to make sure no one speaks ill of the council or their traditions. It won’t help. Amreen and Lokesh spoke loud enough.