As some of you may know, both Aron Ra and I cut our teeth together in the creation/evolution battles that raged on the usenet newsgroup, talk.origins, back in the 1990s. One of our colleagues-in-arms was a fellow named Glenn Morton, a petroleum geologist, who brought his expertise to bear in debates with young earth creationists. Morton is a Christian, but he thought it was disgraceful how creationists brought his faith into disrepute with their flouting of the evidence.

One of the concepts he crystallized, in addition, was the idea of Morton’s Demon. One of the notable things about arguments with creationists (perhaps you’ve noticed this too) is how they can stand there slack-jawed and dead-eyed while you explain an uncomfortable fact to them, and how they’ll suddenly leap into action when you say some word or phrase that cues a creationist script — you can be describing how the chemistry of the cell works, for instance, and if you mention “thermodynamics” suddenly you’ll get “The second law of thermodynamics proves that everything trends towards disorder, and is proof of a Fallen World!”…followed by slack passivity as you explain that no, it does no such thing. Morton’s Demon is the mental game creationists have going: they selectively shut out evidence against their pet theories and only allow in ideas their pastor has assured them are completely wrong.

Aron has now made me very sad. It turns out Morton’s Demon was an especially appropriate name for the concept, because Glenn Morton is severely afflicted with one. He escaped the Young Earth Creationist trap because his work exposed him to the counter-evidence every day, hammering the YEC-demon into submission…but I mentioned that he was a Christian. It turns out that he’s a right-wing conservative Christian, with a fully functioning filter tuned to select out anything from any source other than Limbaughesque talk radio.

Glenn Morton has torn down the entirety of his web archive — years worth of articles and explanations refuting young earth creationism. Why?

Because it turns out he was less interested in addressing the truth than he was in defending Christianity. Atheists and agnostics had been using his evidence to argue not only against Biblical literalists and religious extremists, but against the entirety of Christianity. Arguing against religion is bigotry, you see, and he got tired of all those liberal leftist godless bullies who have taken over his country.

It’s an epic, rambling, incoherent, angry rant.

The powers that be think that everyone MUST be forced to pay for contraception for the YES, slutty life style of Sandra Fluck who gave a speech at the Democratic convention bemoaning that we don’t pay for her contraception. (Rush Limbaugh got in lots of trouble for saying she is a slut, yet it is Sandra who wants to live a life of sex where everyone else pays to keep her from getting pregnant). Why must I as a Christian, who thinks such behavior abysmal, sinful and self destructive pay for her to have sexcapades without consequences? Why must my taxes be used to support what I view as her responsibility? Why does she have a right to pick the money in my pocket when she didn’t earn it? But, it seems, if you question this simple fact in today’s world, everyone will cluck their tongues at you, making you out to be the evil one. Why is it that they think that everyone MUST be forced to believe that what Sandra does is OK AND PAY FOR HER TO HAVE PLEASURE WITHOUT WORRY FOR THE CONSEQUENCES???? She can do what she wants, but don’t ask me to pay for it and don’t force me to approve of her behavior. The modern political left, and make no doubt, most anti-YEC folk are from the political left, want to enforce their conformity upon us because we can not be allowed to actually have an independent view of Sandra Fluck’s behavior or anything else, including anything they deem to be wrong. That is not to be allowed. Enforced conformity is what they want. I must smile while I give Sandra my money to pay for her sexcapades.

I think he means Sandra Fluke. Her speech wasn’t about paying for her hedonistic pleasure, but that the omission of contraception from her school’s insurance plan was a selective disadvantage to low-income students, and she talked about a friend whose contraceptive prescription was necessary to manage polycystic ovary syndrome. But Morton’s Demon won’t let him hear that…all that gets through is “sexcapades.”

He also rages against the expectation that Catholic organizations should cover birth control and abortions in their hospitals — it’s abhorrent to them, you know, and therefore their personal opinions should be allowed to dictate how non-Catholics live their lives. Chick-Fil-A should have the freedom of speech to hate gays…but their customers should not, apparently, be allowed to choose where they eat. The religious ought to be allowed to put up monuments in the public square, because removing them is a theological view.

And apparently the Democrats are a “leftist party” that hates god.

I watched the leftist party vote 3 times to drop God and Jerusalem and then watched their leaders steal that election on national TV and everyone knows that election was stolen. but then I watched delegates of the convention saying church goers weren’t welcome in their party.

Do follow that last link. It doesn’t say what Morton says it does — it’s about some Democrats expressing contempt for red-necked Teabaggers, not church goers (which would be very odd, given we just elected a church goer to the presidency). Morton’s Demon strikes again.

He goes on and on. He’s all for teaching young earth creationism and racism in the classroom despite disagreeing with them and recognizing that they’re built on lies, but gosh darn it all to heck, he’s absolutely committed to freedom. He has shut down all of his evidence-based arguments against young earth creationism because he’s a freedom fighter. And he really, really hates atheists.

I no longer want to worry about what a YEC believes. I no longer wish to be used to destroy my religion. The American Indians lost because the tribes hated each other more than the English and they couldn’t join together to beat them. The Scots lost to the English for the same reason. I do not intend to make the same mistake with the atheist war on religion. It doesn’t matter one whit that someone is a YEC and I am not, it does not matter a whit if I am protestant and someone else is Catholic, or Mormon. I urge all religious peoples to cease bickering about such trifles, when the wolf is at our door. We are in danger of losing our religious freedom, I will NOT argue inconsequential stuff with my co-religionists, ignoring the real danger to our religion, you, the religious bigot and Christophobe. YEC is a trifle; a mere philosophical debate. Freedom is dear; and you, the religious bigot, are a danger to my freedom.

I will note the irony of his signature, which has included this comment for a long, long time:

Banned forever by the Amer. Scientific Affiliation, a Christian Scientific Group, for the crime of discussing the ethics of ignoring scientific data.

Apparently it’s not unethical to ignore the scientific data if it contradicts the teaching of your church. Morton’s Demon strikes again!

Unfortunately for Morton’s goals, his diatribe simply reaffirms to me that religion poisons the mind…or that minds poisoned by an information deficit are more receptive to religion. Either way, it’s a shame.

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In case you’re wondering what got him kicked out of the ASA, it’s buried in a thread here. It was a fight over Morton’s climate change denialism, and I notice that he announced his resignation.

Oh, no…I have to defend Sam Harris a little bit even while disagreeing with him! There was a strange flare-up, a revival of an old interview with Harris from 6 years ago, in which he said something controversial:

If I could wave a magic wand and get rid of either rape or religion, I would not hesitate to get rid of religion.

This is one of those fraught philosophical scenarios loaded with emotional biases against an unrealistic, overly simplified moral dilemma that can never occur in the real world, and all I can say is…I hate those things. And there it was, all over twitter, and people were emailing me about it, and I just wanted the stupid story to go away, but now David Futrelle has highlighted it and John Wilkins has storified it.

[Read more…]

I’m an atheist. I know where we’ll all end up: death, extinction, oblivion. So I’m sure as hell going to emphasize how I live my life, how I make my conclusions, and how I regard my place in the universe as far more important than my final fate. I’m not interested in authoritarian short-cuts that substitute wish-fulfillment fantasies for truth, and one thing I definitely do not want to do is lie to myself.

Those are the thoughts I was thinking on reading this review of Stedman’s book, Faitheist, and while watching this lecture by Sir Ghillean Prance, a British ecologist. They’re very different discussions about very different phenomena, but I agree with the general message of both the book and the lecture while utterly detesting how they get there. They are wasting my time and they are misleading people — they are failing to provide the tools that will help people guide themselves to a rational conclusion and a correct answer.

We all know of Stedman here. He’s an atheist, and his book is all about social justice and working with religious people to achieve the goal of helping the poor, the needy, the disadvantaged. I can agree entirely with that goal; I think atheists ought to recognize the reality that they share the world with 7 billion people, each of whom has just as much right to be here as they do, and that a just solution to the world’s problems does not deny the needs of a majority, or even a significant minority, of the people who live there.

While Stedman has part of the answer right — we need to work with everyone to achieve that goal — his path to it is a combination of contradiction and emotion. Everyone, sure, except those meanie-head atheists who he will undercut at every opportunity, because that’s his scheme for notoriety, to be the good atheist, the one who loves Christians and despises atheists. He’s the left-wing version of S.E. Cupp. And how will he persuade people to his vision? By being the gosh-darned nicest, sweetest, gentlest person he can be, and by sucking up to faith (oh, excuse me: “interfaith”) leaders, who will never ever get the kind of criticism he delivers to atheists.

We will never get the critical thinking I consider the ideal of rationalism from a Stedman — even when he’s fighting for a cause I consider eminently defensible by rational means. While an atheist by definition, Stedman is not an atheist by principle. He’s an atheist by feeling (which, admittedly, is true of a great many atheists — just not as often by atheists who try to justify their position with a book).

Meanwhile, Ghillean Prance is an excellent biologist, with data and real concerns about the state of the planet. He discusses the evidence for climate change, its effect on natural populations, the consequences of environmental degradation and habitat destruction, and also deplores the selfishness of our current economic inequities — inequities that are widening rather than be corrected.

I cannot emphasize strongly enough how much I agree with his conclusion. But what ruins it for me is how he gets there.

“We should be taking care of the earth and not destroying it,” says Sir Ghillean. “The Lord God took man and put him in the Garden of Eden to cultivate it and keep it – not to destroy it.”

In this guest lecture, Sir Ghillean discusses the positive role faith leaders are playing in the environmental movement – from the leadership of the Ecumenical Patriarch of the Eastern Orthodox Church (dubbed ‘the Green Patriarch’ by Al Gore), who has brought together faith leaders from around the world to discuss environmental issues, to His Holiness the Dalai Lama who speaks of an ethical approach to environmental protection.

Environmental ethics are, Sir Ghillean says, a part of Christianity and Judaism. He points to Job 12:7-8 as an example:

But ask the animals, and they will teach you, or the birds in the sky, and they will tell you; or speak to the earth, and it will teach you, or let the fish in the sea inform you.” (Job, 12:7-8 NIV)

He asserts that his Christianity is compatible with his scientific/ecological views, and of course it is. But it’s because the religious justifications are endlessly malleable, and you can wrap it around any conclusion you want. There are industrialists bulldozing the rain forests right now who will tell you that their holy book tells them that it is their right to do so; there are people murdering other people because their holy book says to kill the infidel; there are people treating their own children as subhuman because their dogma does not allow them to tolerate people with different sexual desires. To tell people that they should accept scientific observations because their magic book and their sacred leaders say so is a betrayal of scientific thought.

And, man, this guy loves to quote the Bible.

It is through the combination of his faith and career that Sir Ghillean sees the case for environmental sustainability as a moral one. He quotes Isaiah 24:5 to make his case, but points out that there are similar messages and beliefs across the major world religions.

“The earth is defiled by its people; they have disobeyed the laws, violated the statutes and broken the everlasting covenant.” (Isaiah 24:5 NIV)

Whilst Isaiah was talking about moral defilement rather than ecological damage, Sir Ghillean believes that the message here and the impacts of climate change cover the intersection of ethics and ecology.

“It’s the poor who suffer the most from this climate change,” he says. “In some places the rich are getting even richer and the poor poorer. When there’s 1.4 per cent of the world’s wealth with 20 per cent of the population, it is something we should truly be ashamed about.”

If Christianity (and religiosity in general) is so good at convincing people of the importance of charity and fairness, explain the Republican party.

Isn’t it obvious that religion is not a tool for spreading goodness and kindness? That some individuals do so is not argument that their little granfalloon is responsible. That’s true of religion, but it’s also true of science and atheism, as we know all too well.

If you’re trying to persuade people to do the right thing because they’re Christians, or atheists, or ecologists, you’re making a fallacious argument: you’re trying to rope them into a cause by invoking the tribe or authority. Those things are not an appeal to reason! It’s easily subverted: the whole tribe can go marching off to war with another tribe, or the authority can be wrong and send everyone chasing the wrong answer, and the only check we can possibly have on that is if everyone is taught to think for themselves. A quote from the Bible or Darwin can be pretty words to illustrate an argument, but they are not necessarily arguments in themselves.

I entirely endorse the concerns and scientific solutions Ghillean Prance advocates, but not because he’s a Christian. It’s because the data that we’re changing the world for the worse is strong, and because I can respect the beauty and richness of the natural world — not because the Bible tells me I should, but because I know enough about how that world works to see the relationships of all those elements to each other and to me. If I want to see further and do better, I won’t achieve that by burying my nose in a holy book, and advocating greater absorption in magical thinking is going to actively interfere with our appreciation of reality.

I similarly endorse greater involvement in social justice and equality. It’s not because Jesus was a politically progressive social worker or because atheism says I must: it’s because of empathy and the ability to identify with other human beings, and recognizing that all 7 billion of us are on this planet together and that I cannot demand of others what they cannot also demand of me. Philosophy and ethics should shape how we behave not a deified science or imaginary magical being.

Another faulty argument that is fundamental to religion is the idea that you should follow the precepts of your faith because you will be rewarded after you die — an evil argument right at the heart of Christianity. No, you won’t; you’ll be dead, as will we all be, whether we’re paragons of virtue or monsters of vice. The only good arguments are ones that explain the consequences on living human beings — that the paths we take have to be their own rewards.

Although, to be fair, I think we’re mostly in agreement but talking past one another because of our prioritizing of certain premises.

Michael Shermer thinks that “the most any natural science could ever discover in the way of a deity would be a natural intelligence sufficiently advanced to be god-like but still within the realm of the natural world.”; Jerry Coyne claims that there could be, in principle, evidence for a supernatural god — there just isn’t.

My position is that we cannot find evidence for a god, that the God Hypothesis is invalid and unacceptable, because “god” is an incoherent concept that has not been defined. I could claim that a spumboodle exists, for instance, and we could go around and around with you presenting hypothetical examples and listing potential entities or forces that are spumboodles, but we’ll get nowhere if I never tell you what the heck a spumboodle is or what it does or even how I recognize a spumboodle. Without that, the whole concept is untestable and unverifiable. It really doesn’t count if I insist that something undefined exists, and then keep jiggling between vague realities (it exists in our dimension! It has a color!) and contradictory guesswork (it’s transdimensional! And completely invisible!) designed to keep moving the spumboodle away from any possibility of honest evaluation.

Coyne accepts the wobble. On the one hand, he is insisting on general principle in the possibility of existence of a divine being (I think a clear and unambiguous definition of “divine” is a prerequisite for that), but on the other he’s willing to substitute a mundane creature with only unexplainable abilities for “divine”.

Well, yes, we wouldn’t know whether a divine being was absolutely omniscient and omnipotent, or relatively more omniscient or omnipotent than us. But if the degree of, say, omnipotence and omniscience is sufficiently large (i.e, any miracle can be worked, all things can be foretold), then I think we can say provisionally that there is a God. I’ve previously described the kind of evidence that I’d provisionally accept for a divine being, including messages written in our DNA or in a pattern of stars, the reappearance of Jesus on earth in a way that is well documented and convincing to scientists, along with the ability of this returned Jesus to do things like heal amputees. Alternatively, maybe only the prayers of Catholics get answered, and the prayers of Muslims, Jews, and other Christians, don’t.

Yes, maybe aliens could do that, and maybe it would be an alien trick to imitate Jesus (combined with an advanced technology that could regrow limbs), but so what? I see no problem with provisionally calling such a being “God”—particularly if it comports with traditional religious belief—until proven otherwise. What I can say is “this looks like God, but we should try to find out more. In the meantime, I’ll provisionally accept it.” That, of course, depends on there being a plethora of evidence. As we all know, there isn’t.

And that’s where he loses me. What does it mean to be relatively omniscient or omnipotent? If our criterion is that the being has to be a certain amount more powerful than us to be defined as a god, what is that amount? The sun is much larger than us, and has far more power than we do…is it a god? Or will that suggestion be met by the sudden appearance of additional criteria to constantly exclude all entities from consideration that don’t also meet certain unstated requirements?

What I want is something like the Higgs boson: a description of a set of properties, inferred and observed, that can be used as a reasonable boundary for identifying the phenomenon. If you’re going to dignify it with the term “hypothesis”, there ought to be some little bit of substance there, even if it’s speculative. The god proponents can’t even do that. God beliefs are remarkably specific — belief in Jesus as an admission ticket to paradise, for instance — but somehow, when it gets down to saying who, what, where, when, and why, they all fly to pieces, and when it comes to saying how they know of its existence, all goes silent, or subsides into ritualistic repetitious chanting of words from a holy book.

The only way to win this game is to not play. Don’t concede the possibility that X might exist unless you’ve got clear criteria for defining the bounds of X’s existence, and it’s up to the advocates for X to provide that basic foundation. If they can’t do that, reject the whole mess before you brain gets sucked into a twisty morass of convoluted theological BS.

(By the way, I do agree with Coyne on one thing: I also reject Shermer’s a priori commitment to methodological naturalism. If a source outside the bounds of what modern science considers the limits of natural phenomena is having an observable effect, we should take its existence into account. If Catholic prayers actually affected medical outcomes, we shouldn’t reject it out of hand because of the possibility of a supernatural source. But it’s still not evidence for a god, unless you’re going to commit to defining god as a force that responds to remote invocation via standard Catholic ritual chants by increasing healing…in which case god becomes something we can disprove, and also faces the prospect of consolidation with other phenomena. Maybe god becomes the placebo response, for instance, in which case he’s been reduced to something feeble.)