A revealing review

Barbara Bradley Hagerty has lately been polluting NPR with a series of superficial fluff pieces on religion — I’ve just groaned and turned the radio off when she comes on. She also has a book out, Fingerprints of God: The Search for the Science of Spirituality, and just the title is sufficient to tell you it’s noise to avoid. If that’s not enough, though, you can also read a revealing review of the book.

That is why the work of a religion writer is different than that of a science reporter or a sportswriter. Most journalists — or at least most good journalists — are supposed to question everything. They are supposed to write about facts.

Religion writers, on the other hand, could care less about the facts – or at least about the basic facts. They write about faith, not facts.

Heh. Yes. Exactly.

And the conclusion of her book?

Nevertheless, Hagerty concludes by erring on the side of amorphous belief, concluding that “the language of our genes, the chemistry of our bodies, and the wiring of our brains – these are the handiwork of One who longs to be known.”

If he longs to be known, why not just come out and say howdy? Is this god shy or something? Otherwise, this is just the standard Intelligent Design creationist malarkey: something that is complex has the appearance of design because a) people conflate complexity with intent, and b) people have brains that have evolved to explain the world in terms of agency, therefore it must be designed by an intelligent agent for a purpose.

It’s a good review. It convinced me that I don’t need to read the book, ever.

Netroots Nation dives into inanity

Netroots Nation, the big lefty political/blogging meeting, is organizing sessions for their conference in August. Unfortunately, they seem have given up on the idea of a secular nation, because this one session on A New Progressive Vision for Church and State has a bizarre description.

The old liberal vision of a total separation of religion from politics has been discredited. Despite growing secularization, a secular progressive majority is still impossible, and a new two-part approach is needed–one that first admits that there is no political wall of separation. Voters must be allowed, without criticism, to propose policies based on religious belief. But, when government speaks and acts, messages must be universal. The burden is on religious believers, therefore, to explain public references like “under God” in universal terms. For example, the word “God” can refer to the ceaseless creativity of the universe and the objective validity of human rights. Promoting and accepting religious images as universal will help heal culture-war divisions and promote the formation of a broad-based progressive coalition.

That makes no sense at all. Separation of church and state certainly isn’t discredited — if anything, the experience of the last few years makes it more important than ever. Voters can already propose policies based on religion, and they do, unfortunately…but whoever wrote this thinks there should be no criticism? That’s insane. This is a progressive organization that is proposing that we shouldn’t even criticize religious intrusion into government.

And then look what they do: they redefine “god” into a waffling, meaningless placeholder for anything anyone wants!

I’d like to know who came up with this garbage — it reeks of the Jim Wallis/Amy Sullivan camp of liberal theocrats, although neither is actually on the panel.

Proof That God Exists?

That’s the title of the site, anyway, Proof That God Exists. It ain’t.

It’s a dreary exercise in the fallacy of the excluded middle. You are lead through a series of binary choices, in which you are asked to choose one alternative or the other, with the goal of shunting you to the desired conclusion, which is, of course, that God exists. Building on a fallacy is bad enough, but even worse, it can’t even do that competently — it cheats. All of the options are designed to bounce you to only one line of reasoning, and if you don’t play the designer’s game, it gets all pissy at you and announces that you aren’t serious and you should go away. Some proof, eh?

The one argument it channels you into is this one: there must be an absolute source of absolute morality, therefore, God. Francis Collins would be quite happy with it, I’m sure. When I took it, I agreed that there is an absolute truth (because I believe reality exists), I believe in logic and mathematics, but then when it asked if there is an absolute morality, I had to say no. Morality is a derived property generated by the interactions of individuals; it is not imposed on us from above. And that’s where the site gets nasty.

It gives you two choices: “Molesting children for fun is absolutely morally wrong” and “Molesting children for fun could be right”. If you answer the former, it bounces you back to the question about whether absolute moral laws exist…therefore God. You don’t get to choose something like “Molesting children is damaging to our species and harmful to individuals, and I agree with the cultural proscription against it”. If you answer the latter, you get their surrender message.

You have denied that absolute moral laws exist but you appeal to them all the time. You say that rape IS wrong because you know that it IS wrong and not just against your personal preference. Unless you reconsider your stand on this matter, your road to this site’s proof that God exists ends here. It is my prayer that you come to understand how inconsistent and irrational this line of thinking is and return to seek the truth.

I don’t think they understand the concept of a proof, or logic for that matter.

It is rather interesting that this is the most common “proof” people are throwing at us lately, this idea that the existence of a common morality in human cultures is evidence for a supreme being. It’s a sign of how weak and pathetic their arguments have become.

Theistic evolutionist beats hasty retreat

Jerry Coyne’s criticism of accommodationism by evolutionists seems to still be shaking a few trees and is generating an endless debate. Ken Miller has posted a long rebuttal. It’s mainly interesting for the way Miller flees from theism.

His first and only defense seems to be a denial of most of the implications of an interventionist deity…which is, of course, fine with me. He argues that all of his arguments about how a god could have intervened are carefully phrased in terms of conditional probabilities — he’s not describing what actually happened, but how a god might have meddled in the world, and then he openly states that any such interference would be beyond the ability of science to investigate. Well, OK. We could use the same logic to argue for the hypothetical role of elves in human history. I don’t see Miller or anyone else writing books about Finding Darwin’s Elves, however.

He then runs through various references from his books, and points out that he has been scrupulous about keeping the supernatural out of his explanations. This is true; whenever Miller talks about science, he’s careful not to play the “goddidit” gambit. He even says that you’d find “passages very much like that in some of Richard Dawkins’ books”, which is rather interesting and a point worth emphasizing. When scientists talk about evolution, it doesn’t matter whether you are a Miller or a Dawkins…the ideas are all the same. Note, however, that this occurs without Dawkins conceding a single point about a deity, while, as we see in his latest essay, Miller has to disavow any detection of divine tinkering at all.

It gets a little weird. Miller is reduced to embracing Dawkins and Carl Sagan, while claiming Coyne’s supporters are Bill Buckingham, Don McLeroy, and Phillip Johnson. Miller writes a book titled Finding Darwin’s God, but somehow he can claim this has nothing to do with mingling theism with evolution. It all reads as something rather disingenuous.

One thing I’d really like to have seen is something simple: is there anything that distinguishes the science of Coyne and Dawkins from that of Miller? Miller is quick to complain that his views have been twisted, but he only seems to want to say how everyone else is wrong, without clarifying exactly what his views on theistic explanations in evolution are. If they’re effectively excluded from scientific scrutiny, as he states, why should we bother with them at all? If any godly interventions would be indetectable, why shouldn’t we simply show the door to anyone who claims to have found reason to believe in them? Even more oddly, why should we credit any sectarian version of this interventionist deity — why Christian, or specifically Catholic, over any other supernatural tradition? Are we really supposed to accept that a vague deism and Catholicism are philosophically indistinguishable from one another?

Finally, two little details in his essay that bug me in particular.

In an essay in which he indignantly protests that his words have been twisted, he really ought to be more careful about twisting the words of others. He complains that Coyne argues that “Apparently, NAS and the NCSE ought to change their ways, come out of the intellectual closet, and admit that only one position is consistent with evolution — a philosophical naturalism that requires doctrinaire atheism on all questions of faith.”

I think if you actually read what Coyne wrote, he’s careful and explicit to say the exact opposite. He’s pointing out that those organizations have not been neutral, but have effectively endorsed a specific position favoring theistic evolution. He and I both have said that they should not demand atheistic purity, but that they should either stop making one-sided arguments for fluffy, boring, ‘innocuous’, and scientifically unsupportable theistic evolution, or they should be more careful to accurately represent the range of views of scientists, which includes atheists.

The final thing I find objectionable in the essay is Miller’s parting threat. I see this all the time, and seriously…every time, my lip curls in a sneer of disgust. It’s this genuinely stupid argument:

The tragedy of Coyne’s argument is the way in which it seeks to enlist science in a frankly philosophical crusade — a campaign to purge science of religionists in the name of doctrinal purity. That campaign will surely fail, but in so doing it may divert those of us who cherish science from a far more urgent task, especially in America today. That is the task of defending scientific rationalism from those who, in the name of religion would subvert it beyond all recognition. In that critical struggle, scientists who are also people of faith are critical allies, and we would do well not to turn those “Ardent Theists” away.

Set aside the claim that Coyne is on a crusade to purge biology — it’s a false assertion. What I really object to is the goofy “if you don’t be nice to god belief, the churchy scientists will take their ball home”. I metaphorically puke on the shoes of anyone who tries to make that argument.

Turn it around. Can you imagine atheist scientists saying that, if the NAS and NCSE keep talking the god talk, we’ll stop being allies in support of evolutionary biology and good science education? That we’ll be turned away and go do what, support Buckingham and McLeroy and Johnson? Pssht.

If theistic scientists are going to “turn away” from the science because of vigorous debate by the atheist contingent, then that gives the lie to the claim that they are not prioritizing their superstitions over science, and suggests that they aren’t really our allies in promoting good science. It’s a genuinely contemptible argument.

Desecration for sale

Now you can all do it: an archbishop of the Open Episcopal Church is selling consecrated crackers by mail, payable with paypal. The guy sounds like a bit of a kook; he’s doing this because he believes people will sincerely appreciate receiving a scrap of Jesus’ holy meat in the mail, and will use them to carry out informal masses whenever they feel like it.

Unfortunately for the desired effect of desecration, he has been excommunicated from the Anglican church, and the Catholics say his consecrations aren’t real, so the only people who might be offended by any cracker abuse are these fringey street preachers, who probably are casual about it all, anyway.

The Jewish way?

This local (he’s in my backyard of St Paul!) rabbi, Manis Friedman, offers an enlightening vision of old testament morality. He was asked, “How should Jews treat their Arab neighbors?” Here’s his answer.

I don’t believe in western morality, i.e. don’t kill civilians or children, don’t destroy holy sites, don’t fight during holiday seasons, don’t bomb cemeteries, don’t shoot until they shoot first because it is immoral.

The only way to fight a moral war is the Jewish way: Destroy their holy sites. Kill men, women and children (and cattle).

Fortunately, other rabbis gave slightly different answers.

What is it with creationists and the iPod Touch lately?

Classy.

My Prof Got Run Over By An iPod (Biology) from Mark Nauroth on Vimeo.

The fundies are very concerned, because they have rightly noticed that when their kids go off to college, they come back better educated…which often means they become more liberal and reject traditional religious beliefs. What to do? How about creating desperate online courses with ‘hip, edgy’ music and bad acting to tell teenagers not to do those things? You really have to see that caricature of a movie at that link: a family says goodbye to their sweet little girl going off to college; she comes back 9 months later pregnant, snotty, and ecologically conscious. The classes spout all these statistics about how many college students try drugs and experiment with sex…but somehow never get around to the counterbalancing facts of meth and alcohol abuse and teen pregnancy rates among high school dropouts.

They’re misleading on the statistics about drugs and disease and pregnancy — colleges are actually very healthy places — but they’re dead on with their complaints that college graduates are less enthusiastic, on average, about religion. The video above is wrong, though: it’s not because we actively proselytize for atheism, but because we teach them to think and to question, two activities that are anathema to dogma.

How annoying: the video was in the clear this morning, and shortly after I linked to it, they slapped on all kinds of privacy restrictions. Sorry.

It’s easy to summarize, though. Bad actor pretending to be a college professor lectures about how you need to be a godless humanist atheist to learn anything, then a giant iPod Touch falls out of the sky and crushes him to a bloody splatter. Cut to ad for their religious indoctrination seminars. You didn’t miss much but the egregiously violent elimination of a liberal atheist.

Alvin Plantinga gives philosophy a bad name

The more sophisticated creationists like to toss the name “Alvin Plantinga” into arguments — he’s a well-regarded philosopher/theologian who favors Intelligent Design creationism, or more accurately, Christian creationism. I’ve read some of his work, but not much; it’s very bizarre stuff, and every time I get going on one of his papers I hit some ludicrous, literally stupid claim that makes me wonder why I’m wasting time with this pretentious clown, and I give up, throw the paper in the trash, and go read something from Science or Nature to cleanse my palate. Unfortunately, that means that what I have read is typically an indigestible muddled mess that I don’t have much interest in discussing, and what I haven’t read is something I can’t discuss.

Well, we’re in luck. Plantinga has written a short, 5 page summary of his views on evolution and naturalism, and it’s lucid (for Plantinga) and goes straight to his main points. The workings of the man’s mind sit there naked and exposed, and all the stripped gears and misaligned cogs and broken engines of his misperception are there for easy examination. Read it, and you’ll wonder how a man so confused could have acquired such a high reputation; you might even think that philosophy has been Sokaled.

Begin at the beginning. He doesn’t think much of atheism, and as we’ll discover, doesn’t like naturalism or evolution at all.

As everyone knows, there has been a recent spate of books attacking Christian belief and religion in general. Some of these books are little more than screeds, long on vituperation but short on reasoning, long on name-calling but short on competence, long on righteous indignation but short on good sense; for the most part they are driven by hatred rather than logic.

Hmm. It’s not a good start when the author is so oblivious to irony that he opens his paper with a name-calling screed in which he lambastes others for writing name-calling screeds. Especially when, as we read further, we discover that Plantinga is the one lacking in competence, good sense, and logic.

Plantinga’s claim is straightforward. Naturalism, the idea he defines as the claim that “there is no such person as God or anything like God”, is in “philosophical hot water” and is untenable, and specifically, it is in complete contradiction to evolution — “you can’t rationally accept both evolution and naturalism”, contra Dawkins’ claim that evolution made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.

Very straightforward, but it sounds like lunacy. Plantinga’s going to have to be very, very persuasive indeed to convince me of that claim.

The way he does this starts off well. He points out that we naturalist/evolutionist types are also materialists who believe human beings are just material objects with no souls, that we operate on principles described by chemistry and physiology, and that we evolved. That’s quite right. He gives the impression that he doesn’t believe any of this (and I know from his other writings that he doesn’t), but that is my position, and that of just about any other modern atheist you might name. Now let us consider the implications.

But while evolution, natural selection, rewards adaptive behavior (rewards it with survival and reproduction) and penalizes maladaptive behavior, it doesn’t, as such, care a fig about true belief. As Francis Crick, the co-discoverer of the genetic code, writes in The Astonishing Hypothesis, “Our highly developed brains, after all, were not evolved under the pressure of discovering scientific truth, but only to enable us to be clever enough to survive and leave descendents.” Taking up this theme, naturalist philosopher Patricia Churchland declares that the most important thing about the human brain is that it has evolved; hence, she says, its principal function is to enable the organism to move appropriately:

Boiled down to essentials, a nervous system enables the organism to succeed in the four F’s: feeding, fleeing, fighting and reproducing. The principal chore of nervous systems is to get the body parts where they should be in order that the organism may survive … . Improvements in sensorimotor control confer an evolutionary advantage: a fancier style of representing is advantageous so long as it is geared to the organism’s way of life and enhances the organism’s chances of survival [Churchland’s emphasis]. Truth, whatever that is, definitely takes the hindmost.

What she means is that natural selection doesn’t care about the truth or falsehood of your beliefs; it cares only about adaptive behavior. Your beliefs may all be false, ridiculously false; if your behavior is adaptive, you will survive and reproduce.

Yes, exactly! Just believing in something, whether it is Christianity or physics, doesn’t mean it is necessarily true. Our brains attempt to model the world for functional purposes and lack any inherent, absolute means to detect truth. I agree 100% with what he’s saying, but now watch as he takes this foundation and runs it off the rails.

He imagines a hypothetical population of creatures living on another planet who operate entirely on these rules. What will happen to their beliefs?

So consider any particular belief on the part of one of those creatures: what is the probability that it is true? Well, what we know is that the belief in question was produced by adaptive neurophysiology, neurophysiology that produces adaptive behavior. But as we’ve seen, that gives us no reason to think the belief true (and none to think it false). We must suppose, therefore, that the belief in question is about as likely to be false as to be true; the probability of any particular belief’s being true is in the neighborhood of 1/2. But then it is massively unlikely that the cognitive faculties of these creatures produce the preponderance of true beliefs over false required by reliability. If I have 1,000 independent beliefs, for example, and the probability of any particular belief’s being true is 1/2, then the probability that 3/4 or more of these beliefs are true (certainly a modest enough requirement for reliability) will be less than 10(to the power -58). And even if I am running a modest epistemic establishment of only 100 beliefs, the probability that 3/4 of them are true, given that the probability of any one’s being true is 1/2, is very low, something like .000001.[7] So the chances that these creatures’ true beliefs substantially outnumber their false beliefs (even in a particular area) are small. The conclusion to be drawn is that it is exceedingly unlikely that their cognitive faculties are reliable.

(First, an amusing aside: footnote [7] is an acknowledgment of the assistance of someone else in doing those calculations. He needed help from an expert to multiply simple probabilities? Does being a philosopher mean you’re incapable of tapping buttons on a calculator?)

I think you can now see what I mean when I say Plantinga’s ideas are muddled lunacy. This is the same innumerate error creationists make when they babble about the odds of a single protein of 100 amino acids forming by chance; they assume that it’s all a matter of sudden, spontaneous good fortune that a protein (or in this case, a brain) has all of its traits fixed, with no input from history or the environment. In Plantinga’s imaginary materialist/naturalist world, beliefs are only the product of random chance.

In Plantinga’s world, if we queried the inhabitants with some simple question, such as, “Is fire hot?”, 50% would say no, and 50% would say yes. This world must be populated entirely with philosophers of Plantinga’s ilk, because I think that in reality they would have used experience and their senses to winnow out bad ideas, like that fire is cold, and you’d actually find nearly 100% giving the same, correct answer. Plantinga does not seem to believe in empiricism, either.

What it does mean, though, is that if there are ideas that are not amenable to empirical testing, such as “I will go to heaven when I die”, those ideas have a very low probability of being true. We can think of those as being the product of random input, in some ways, and since they cannot be winnowed against reality, they are unreliable.

Plantinga has heard this objection before, sort of. He’s heard it, but it hasn’t quite penetrated; he recites the common objection with some garbling.

What sort of reception has this argument had? As you might expect, naturalists tend to be less than wholly enthusiastic about it, and many objections have been brought against it. In my opinion (which of course some people might claim is biased), none of these objections is successful. Perhaps the most natural and intuitive objection goes as follows. Return to that hypothetical population of a few paragraphs back. Granted, it could be that their behavior is adaptive even though their beliefs are false; but wouldn’t it be much more likely that their behavior is adaptive if their beliefs are true? And doesn’t that mean that, since their behavior is in fact adaptive, their beliefs are probably true and their cognitive faculties probably reliable?

Almost. So close, and yet he still doesn’t get it. A large part of our behavior will be functional (not contradicting reality) and some of it will even be adaptive (better fitting us to reality), and a lot of it will be neutral (contradicting reality, perhaps, but in ways that do not affect survival), but this does not imply that our cognitive faculties are necessarily and implicitly reliable. We could have highly unreliable cognition that maintains functionality by constant cross-checks against reality — we build cognitive models of how the world works that are progressively refined by experience.

Plantinga really thinks that one of the claims he is arguing against is that materialists/naturalists assume our minds are reliable.

But of course we can’t just assume that they are in the same cognitive situation we think we are in. For example, we assume that our cognitive faculties are reliable. We can’t sensibly assume that about this population; after all, the whole point of the argument is to show that if evolutionary naturalism is true, then very likely we and our cognitive faculties are not reliable.

To which I say…exactly! Brains are not reliable; they’ve been shaped by forces which, as has been clearly said, do not value Truth with a capital T. Scientists are all skeptics who do not trust their perceptions at all; we design experiments to challenge our assumptions, we measure everything multiple times in multiple ways, we get input from many people, we put our ideas out in public for criticism, we repeat experiments and observations over and over. We demand repeated and repeatable confirmation before we accept a conclusion, because our minds are not reliable. We cannot just sit in our office at Notre Dame with a bible and conjure truth out of divine effluent. We need to supplement brains with evidence, which is the piece Plantinga is missing.

He’s reduced to a bogus either/or distinction. Either we are organic machines that evolved and our brains are therefore collections of random beliefs, or — and this is a leap I find unbelievable — Jesus gave us reliable minds. Seriously. That’s what his argument reduces to. He flat out says it.

The obvious conclusion, so it seems to me, is that evolutionary naturalism can’t sensibly be accepted. The high priests of evolutionary naturalism loudly proclaim that Christian and even theistic belief is bankrupt and foolish. The fact, however, is that the shoe is on the other foot. It is evolutionary naturalism, not Christian belief, that can’t rationally be accepted.

Apparently, because Plantinga cannot imagine a source of information to imperfect minds other than the Christian deities, we’re supposed to conclude that microwave ovens cannot be the product of ape brains shaped by evolution, with new and deeper understanding of the physical world derived by trial and error.

I really cannot take Alvin Plantinga seriously, ever.

I think this is what is called ‘framing’

Only this is the good kind, addressing a problem with power and honesty, and providing a personal connection. This is the testimony of a victim of the Irish Catholic workhouse system, and the brutal pedophilia of corrupt priests.

I found this on the blog of one of the creators of the Father Ted series, Graham Linehan, who wrote of this:

If all copies and records of ‘Father Ted’ were somehow wiped, I would find it impossible to summon up the affection with which Arthur and I initially wrote the show. Somehow, these days, The Irish Catholic Church seems a lot less cuddly.