Apologists Ambiguous

Lots of you have been alerting me to this op-ed in the NY Times, but I have to confess that I read it, and Richard A. Schweder makes no sense at all in his “Atheists Agonistes” article. His conclusion seems to be that we should stop “waging intellectual battles over the existence of god(s)”, but everything preceding that point doesn’t seem to make any kind of sensible case for much of anything. Here’s the heart, I think; he’s wondering why we’re seeing this resurgence of godlessness as a literary genre:

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Chopra gets brainy

Stop him before he assaults his readers’ minds again: Chopra babbles about consciousness and the brain. Supposedly, this is a response to something in The God Delusion, but Dawkins really doesn’t discuss mechanisms of consciousness much at all (the book is a little bit excessively broad as it is, so I’m relieved he didn’t try to throw that bit of the kitchen sink in there). The most appropriate section I could find in the book was this one:

Human thoughts and emotions emerge from exceedingly complex interconnections of physical entities within the brain. An atheist in this sense of philosophical naturalist is somebody who believes there is nothing beyond the natural, physical world, no supernatural creative intelligence lurking behind the observable universe, no soul that outlasts the body and no miracles— except in the sense of natural phenomena that we don’t yet understand. If there is something that appears to lie beyond the natural world as it is now imperfectly understood, we hope eventually to understand it and embrace it within the natural. As ever when we unweave a rainbow, it will not become less wonderful.

So Dawkins’ position is that thoughts emerge from complex interconnections in the brain—I’d agree with that. What is Chopra’s interpretation of Dawkins’ words?

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All the creationist fallacies in one easy-to-read pamphlet

If you want to see how the other side thinks, and I mean more than just the vocal leaders at the top of the creationist movement, there’s an excellent example at The Friendly Atheist. It’s written by a fellow who visited his local church, Parkview Christian Church, and reviewed a 25 page pamphlet on creationism put out by the pastor, Tim Harlow.

I have to be blunter than the Friendly Atheist (he’s friendly, after all; I have no such qualifier): Reverend Tim Harlow is sincere, caring, literate, and open to conversation, but his pamphlet is 199 proof distilled stupid, aged in oaken casks and decanted with love. It’s a collection of “scientific” creationism’s greatest hits, from “evolution is just a theory” to “evolution causes sexual deviancy and Naziism”, by way of quote mining, tornadoes in junkyards, Piltdown man, the Loch Ness monster, and every logical fallacy trotted out by the parade of fools we’ve heard from between Henry Morris and Phillip Johnson. This thing is a hotbed of quote mining. He’s quoting Richard Dawkins in support of Intelligent Design creationism; he quotes Carl Sagan to say evolution is impossible; he’s even got the infamous dishonest partial quote of Darwin on the evolution of the eye.

This pamphlet is written as a letter to his children’s teacher, and it’s presented as the work of a well-meaning parent begging a teacher to be fair. I’ve had students who ask me to be fair, before—it usually means they’ve thoroughly bombed on some test, and want some special consideration for their errors. That attitude holds true here, too.

So, as a teacher, you are bound to teach evolution. That is not your fault: it is simply the reality and I do understand that fact. I just want to try to keep you open to the idea that my child, and probably most children in your classroom, do not believe that “theory.” I am asking you to teach (or continue to teach) evolution as just that — a “theory,” and keep your classroom open to other theories of the origin of the world. The essential issue of the famous Scopes trial that started all of this was the fundamental right in a free country to study any theories of origin. At that point, the courts decided that evolution could be taught with creationism. Somehow the pendulum swing went way over to the other side. I would suggest that many people — some scientists included — would like to see it swing back.

Right there in his opening entreaty he demonstrates that he doesn’t know what the scientific meaning of the word “theory” is; I am not kindly disposed. The rest of the pamphlet is even worse, and there wasn’t a single paragraph I could find that was untainted by error. Sorry, Harlow, but it’s only fair that I flunk you.

I hope no teachers are taken in by his phony plea, either. Yes, you are free to learn any old stuff and nonsense you want—does anyone doubt that Harlow’s children are getting thoroughly and repeatedly indoctrinated into the baloney in his pamphlet? —but the job of the public schools should be to teach the best, established, superstition-free ideas, not echo the unscientific myths of ill-informed parents in the community, of whom Harlow is an excellent representative.

Harlow is also representative of the kind of authority figures standing at church pulpits all across the country, trading in fellowship and community good works, and handing out lies, nonsense, and ignorance with a happy glint in his eye. And people believe him—after all, would a preacher lie to you?

Now the scary part: there are pastors like Harlow in your town, right now. And they have congregations that listen to them, and vote, and harass your public school teachers. You should be afraid.

If we’re choosing teams now, I want to be with the shamelessly godless

That guy, Larry Moran…he seems to have been the final straw to tip a whole lot of people into twitterpated consternation. In particular, Ed Brayton, that sad panjandrum of the self-satisfied mean, medium, middle, moderate, and mediocre, has declared Moran (and all those who dare to profess their atheism without compromise) to be anathema, and John Lynch, Pat Hayes, and Nick Matzke have drawn up sides to put themselves clearly against wicked “evangelical atheists” like Dawkins and Moran and even PZ Maiieghrs.

What could have prompted such vociferous contempt? What awful thing could Moran have said, on top of the usual pile of criminal sins of overt atheists so numerous they don’t need explanation, that would justify calling us “disturbing and dangerous” and “appalling and vile”? You will be shocked. UCSD is requiring their biology majors to take a course in evolution to remediate the failings of their freshmen, and is making all of their incoming freshmen attend an anti-ID lecture. This infuriated the usual gang of IDists. Larry took it a step further.

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My kind of meeting

The NY Times is reporting on a wonderful meeting, “Beyond Belief: Science, Religion, Reason and Survival”. I wish I could have been there, but at least there’s the promise that recordings will be available. A meeting that is denounced by a spokesman from the Templeton Foundation is my kind of place.

It sounds like there was a great deal of vigorous argument, which also makes for my favorite kind of meeting. And then there were all the scientists plainly making these kinds of statements:

Carolyn Porco, a senior research scientist at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo., called, half in jest, for the establishment of an alternative church, with Dr. Tyson, whose powerful celebration of scientific discovery had the force and cadence of a good sermon, as its first minister.

She was not entirely kidding. “We should let the success of the religious formula guide us,” Dr. Porco said. “Let’s teach our children from a very young age about the story of the universe and its incredible richness and beauty. It is already so much more glorious and awesome—and even comforting—than anything offered by any scripture or God concept I know.”

Dang it. That’s the theme of the book I’m working on. I need to get cracking.

These two statements really sum up my feelings.

With atheists and agnostics outnumbering the faithful (a few believing scientists, like Francis S. Collins, author of “The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief,” were invited but could not attend), one speaker after another called on their colleagues to be less timid in challenging teachings about nature based only on scripture and belief. “The core of science is not a mathematical model; it is intellectual honesty,” said Sam Harris, a doctoral student in neuroscience and the author of “The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason” and “Letter to a Christian Nation.”

That was just the kind of accommodating attitude that drove Dr. Dawkins up the wall. “I am utterly fed up with the respect that we—all of us, including the secular among us—are brainwashed into bestowing on religion,” he said. “Children are systematically taught that there is a higher kind of knowledge which comes from faith, which comes from revelation, which comes from scripture, which comes from tradition, and that it is the equal if not the superior of knowledge that comes from real evidence.”

I’m sure there will be another volley of comments here that bandy about the terms “proof” and “disproof”, but that isn’t what this is about: it’s about a consistent pattern of unearned respect offered the failed paradigm of religion, and the need for scientists and citizens to honestly face up to the fact that there are no grounds for accepting the myths of your culture’s favorite myths, other than the constant dunning bombardment of religious propaganda on developing minds.

There’s another meeting in November 2007. I’m glad to hear the discussion isn’t going to stop, and that the godless are getting more and more active.

Another ignorant pastor brings shame to Christianity

The Minneapolis Star Tribune published a very foolish editorial in their Faith and Values section, carping about that Dawkins fella and his atheistic Darwinism. It’s typical creationist dreck, I’m afraid. If you want just one good argument against religion, it’s that it seems to promote idiots to positions of leadership.

Richard Dawkins, author of the book “The God Delusion,” intends that religious readers of his book will be atheists when they finish it. Let’s put some of the statements he made in his Nov. 4 Star Tribune interview to the test.

Dawkins claims that evolutionary science “offers a brilliant and beautiful explanation of origins and existence.” But evolutionists assert that this universe and everything in it has come about by chance. There is no plan, no divine planner/creator — just random combinations of atoms. What’s brilliant about a random, unplanned process?

Oh, come on now. Evolution is not simply a random process. There are strong elements of chance throughout, and random events are certainly a dominant contributor to the patterns we see—every child, for instance, is partly the product of a chance combination of alleles and biasing developmental events—but natural selection is not random at all.

What is utterly brilliant about Darwin’s insight was that he saw how the combination of random variation and a selective filter could lead to the diversity and complexity of the world around us. I’m not surprised that Pastor Hellmann is baffled by the value biologists place on Darwin’s idea, because he clearly does not understand it.

Can such a random process actually work? Sir Fred Hoyle, noted English astronomer, studied the problem and concluded this: The probability of one cell coming into being by chance was the same as the probability that a tornado striking a junkyard would produce a fully functioning 747 jet airplane. In other words, the chance of it happening is virtually zero.

Fred Hoyle did not study the problem at all—as noted, he was an astronomer, neither a biologist nor a chemist, and he was speaking far, far outside his domain of expertise. It is correct that the probability of a cell coming into being by chance is prohibitively low, but what did I just say? Evolution is not simply a chance process. The Hoyle analogy does not apply, even if it is a staple of simple-minded creationist thinking.

What is beautiful about evolution? It requires a struggle in which the fit survive and the weak are trampled in the dust. Progress is made by almost endless generations of creatures living, struggling and dying. Where is there beauty in an every-organism-for-itself struggle? Even though the fit may survive a little longer, they are trapped in an existence without purpose or meaning. Such a dreary and hopeless spectacle can only be described as ugly.

This objection is hilarious.

Look at the world around you. There is death, competition, struggle for limited resources, predators killing prey, disease, brutality, and waste. This is the way the world is, and Darwin (or any competent observer) can see that. This situation did not suddenly emerge in 1859 when Darwin published his book. What’s beautiful about evolution is that it explains how complexity and diversity and even beauty can arise naturally out of such callous and uncaring processes.

Does it somehow make the death of a gazelle by slow strangulation while it’s being mauled and eaten alive more beautiful to imagine that this is done under the watchful, loving eye of an omnipotent supernatural being?

A world without religion

Dawkins asks us to imagine what a world without religion would look like. We don’t have to imagine it. We have seen it and the results were horrific.

Communism, based on atheism and evolution, was tried in the Soviet Union. Stalin, the Communist dictator, ordered the murders of about 30 million of his citizens during his ruthless rule. Those who escaped liquidation lived in a “workers’ paradise” of poverty and oppression.

About 100 years ago, evolution spawned two abhorrent social movements. Social Darwinism was used by some titans of industry to justify their predatory, ruthless business practices. Eugenics was a racist movement that some used to try to keep people they considered undesirable (the infirm, disabled, racial minorities) from reproducing. Hitler, an atheist and evolutionist, used that idea to justify purging his favored Aryan race of the disabled or weak, as well as killing millions of Jews and others he deemed undesirable.

Communism is not based on evolution. In fact, its principles are anti-evolutionary, proposing a pattern of progress by force of the people’s will; if you want a political philosophy that’s much more compatible with the ideas of evolution, I’m afraid it’s capitalism.

Hitler was a Catholic, not an atheist. One might argue that he wasn’t a very good Catholic, but he sure paid a lot of lip service to religion.

Eugenics did find its rationalizations in biology, but it was bad biology and was based on principles rooted more strongly in the selective breeding used in agriculture for millennia.

Similarly, Stalin used atheism to purge the power of the orthodox church in Russia, but I’m afraid he was a very poor sort of evolutionist. He promoted Lysenkoism.

Atheism and evolution are based on the philosophy (religion) of materialism. Materialism asserts that matter is all that exists and that there is no God. Since materialists begin by denying the existence of God, it’s no surprise that they don’t find God revealed anywhere.

I challenge Richard Dawkins to study the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, John and the book of Acts. Jesus invites all to come out of the hopelessness of the religion of atheism and live in his light and the salvation that he offers to all.

Robert Hellmann is pastor at St. Paul’s and Trinity Lutheran Churches in Montrose, MN.

Atheism is built on that philosophy, I’ll agree; evolution is not. Atheism is a natural consequence of understanding the power of purely material processes, though, so I have to agree that atheism is often a product of education and scientific training—but it isn’t as if you can’t believe in a deistic god and also practice good science.

And I’m sorry, but seeing a pastor, one who doesn’t understand science and has read nothing in the literature of biology, tell me that I need to read the Bible is unconvincing. I’ve read the gospels. I was brought up a Lutheran, just like Pastor Hellmann. I rejected the masturbatory cycle of reading the dogma of theologians because I opened my eyes and looked at the real world, and the rocks and trees and the milling multitudes of nature all cry out that the books of the religious are impoverished shadows of reality. Why sip from the recycled piss of Christianity when I can drink deep from the Pierian Spring?

Chopra, again

Chopra’s latest attempt to critique Dawkins is as lame as his first. I summarized that first one as “Well, you can’t see love in your fancy microscope, now can you, Dr Smarty Pants?”; this one is the Incredibly Agile Evasive God trick. He’s going to play a game and try to define his god and religion into a kind of vague god he’s going to conveniently pull of out his pocket, one fuzzy enough that no one can criticize it, and he’s also going to engage in some blatant projection:

But Dawkins has pulled the same trick that he resorts to over and over. This is the us-versus-them trick. Either you think there is a personal God, a superhuman Creator who made the world according to the Book of Genesis, or you are a rational believer in the scientific method.

I begin to have doubts that Chopra has even read the book. Right at the beginning, Dawkins carefully and plainly explains that he is not setting up this false confusion, where everyone who believed in an impersonal ‘god’ made up of cosmic laws was going to get lumped with the fundies and slapped around with a bible.

By ‘religion’ Einstein meant something entirely different
from what is conventionally meant. As I continue to clarify the dis-
tinction between supernatural religion on the one hand and
Einsteinian religion on the other, bear in mind that I am calling only
supernatural gods delusional.

There is nothing comical about Einstein’s beliefs. Nevertheless, I wish that physicists would refrain from using the word God in their special metaphorical sense. The metaphorical or pantheistic God of the physicists is light years away from the interventionist, miracle- wreaking, thought-reading, sin-punishing, prayer-answering God of the Bible, of priests, mullahs and rabbis, and of ordinary language. Deliberately to confuse the two is, in my opinion, an act of intellectual high treason.

My title, The God Delusion, does not refer to the God of Einstein and the other enlightened scientists of the previous section. That is why I needed to get Einsteinian religion out of the way to begin with: it has a proven capacity to confuse. In the rest of this book I am talking only about supernatural gods, of which the most familiar to the majority of my readers will be Yahweh, the God of the Old Testament.

Notice that Dawkins has already pre-empted Chopra’s deliberate confusion.

I guess that since Chopra was getting whomped on for the silliness he was saying before, he felt the need to invent some silliness that Dawkins did not argue so he’d have something to whomp back. Pathetic. He’s threatening to have another part to this feeble criticism…it sounds like he’s already dribbling off into irrelevant nonsense.

Sexiest man living?

After South Park made such a botch of its portrayal, this might be some vindication: Salon names Richard Dawkins as one of the sexiest men living. It’s a bit gushy, I’m afraid.

Wonder is sexy. Knowledge is sexy. And embodying both as much as any man in the world today is a man in a tweed jacket riding his bike around the Oxford University campuses, the damp English breeze sweeping a curtain of silver hair from the delicate bones of his face. Yes, those cheekbones, those piercing eyes, that pursed bow of a mouth — but that brain, oh that brain, oh, god, that brain — is what makes Richard Dawkins, evolutionary biologist and the most famous atheist in the world, the sexiest man around.

Dawkins is the professor I never had an affair with, whose very sentence structure threatens to weaken my concentration on the content of his words. Call me deluded: I ache for his atheism; I reel from his reasoning. He is my James Bond, a well-attired, fearless seeker of truth in the face of nihilism. And yet, for all his pedigree, he enthusiastically appeared this fall on “South Park” to spread the gospel of science, his dashing cartoon figure covered in the feces of a teacher who scoffs at evolution.* While scatology isn’t my thing, straddling the highest of the ivory highbrow with the glorious lowest of the low: Now that’s sexy.

I dream of his perfectly-accented voice — Oxbridge softened by a childhood spent in, sigh, East Africa — whispering to me from his latest book, “The God Delusion,” a defense of endless curiosity in the face of omnipresent theism. “If the demise of god will leave a gap, different people will fill it in different ways. My way includes a good dose of science, the honest and systematic endeavor to find out the truth about the real world.” Take me with you, Richard: You put the “sex” in sexagenarian. Let us clinch in a godless embrace, crying out to what we know does not exist, searching, searching evermore.

Personally, he’s not my type…but still, it’s good to see an atheist and a scientist described in such flattering terms.

*The article is incorrect to assume that Dawkins had anything at all to do with that South Park episode, though.

Deepak Chopra and his magic love god

Chopra.

Deepak Chopra is a fraud who probably makes at least ten times my salary, who gets invited onto talk shows and news programs to spout his opinions, whose books are read by millions as if they actually provide any insight…and the guy has the brains of a turnip. It’s just sad. Have you no shame, Ariana Huffington?

His latest attempt to explain himself (an effort which is to reason as cat-strangling is to art) is a poor critique of Dawkins’ The God Delusion(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll). It promises to be part one. When I was in my twenties, I had a very difficult extraction of my wisdom teeth, and that promise reminded me of what the dentist said, after he he had literally knelt on the armrests of the chair, wielding a hammer and chisel against my tooth…”Well, that’s the first one done.” I’m sure you all know that awful sinking feeling as you complete one ugly chore, only to realize that there’s more to come.

There isn’t much to his argument, fortunately, so I’ll just pluck out one representative piece of it. This is a familiar complaint: I call it the “Well, you can’t see love in your fancy microscope, now can you, Dr Smarty Pants?” argument.

Is science the only route to knowledge? Obviously not. I know that my mother loved me all her life, as I love my own children. I feel genius in great works of art. None of this knowledge is validated by science. I have seen medical cures that science can’t explain, some seemingly triggered by faith. The same is true of millions of other people. I know that I am conscious and have a self, even though Dawkins—along with many arch materialists—doesn’t believe that consciousness is real or that the self is anything but a chemical illusion created in the brain. By Dawkins’ reasoning a mother’s love is no more real than God as neither can be empirically quantified.

Ho hum. You can sort of see the wheels turning in the poor sap’s head: he’s got this idea that Science is men in white lab coats with needles and instruments and computers, and he is surely convinced that they had nothing to do with his momma loving him, and of course they didn’t. But then, his naive view of meddling scientism has nothing to do with what the godless and Dawkins are talking about. We’re just saying that love is a natural property between human beings, no deity required. I would just ask him a few questions.

Is he, Deepak Chopra, a human being? Is he real?

Was his mother a human being? Was she real?

Can human beings feel love for one another here in the real world?

The answers, I would hope, would all be “yes” (although with a wacked-out flake like Chopra, one can never tell; he might answer “Unicorns,” “Vibrations,” and “Quantum” to the questions, but at least then I’ll have cause to ask that he be committed.) Then I would say that all people like Dawkins are saying is that we’re dealing with natural phenomena between natural agents in the natural world, so yes, we can observe it, test it, measure it, and believe it…no problem. Dawkins and I are most definitely not denying the existence of love, nor are we advancing this strange idea that other properties of the mind, like consciousness, do not exist.

It’s a bad argument when you have to mischaracterize your opponents that grossly to make a point.

I would also turn his worries around. Do you think a mother’s love and consciousness and art need to be validated by religion? Religion has nothing to do with those experiences; it offers nothing but unfounded, contradictory assertions that it contributes; it adds nothing to our understanding of mind or love or art. All of his complaints can be reversed right back at the superstitious nonsense of religion with far more accuracy than they can be applied to science.

Not that any of this will make the slightest impression on that turnip. He’ll just go on making stuff up, selling lots of goofy books, and appearing on television. And, of course, he’ll go on to inflict on us another vacuous cavil against a book he doesn’t comprehend.