AC Grayling on the growing resentment of and towards religion

Juicy stuff from AC Grayling, who writes on the futility of faith and why we’re all getting a bit peevish:

Religion has lost respectability as a result of the atrocities committed in its name, because of its clamouring for an undue slice of the pie, and for its efforts to impose its views on others.

Where politeness once restrained non-religious folk from expressing their true feelings about religion, both politeness and restraint have been banished by the confrontational face that faith now turns to the modern world.

This, then, is why there is an acerbic quarrel going on between religion and non-religion today, and it does not look as if it will end soon.

It does have a bit of an “it’s all their fault” tone, but I think it’s fair. The religious may have felt threatened first, since secular progress was leaving them behind, but the only side damning the other is that of religion.

I get mail

One sure way to get your Important Message to me is to use the good old US Mail (although my email is much snappier now, thanks to previous suggestions), and sometimes I do get the strangest stuff. This time, it was a formal looking letter from an organization called “Campaign for the Children.” How can you possibly turn away a letter from someone who is for the children? You can’t, of course. Then once I started reading … well, this doesn’t seem to be a campaign for children after all.

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Are you going to believe someone who thinks with his feet?

Chuck Norris convinced me before that the bruised and jellied blob bobbing about in his cranium isn’t working so well anymore, but this video of Norris advocating a bible-based public school curriculum is the final kicker.

He’s fronting for an organization that’s trying to smuggle bogus history and religious propaganda into our schools. It’s a shame—after playing a hero for so many years on TV, he’s fading away in the real world as one of the bad guys.

Busy busy busy

There are a couple of events going on here in Morris this week that I’ll be participating in, and that any of you in the region might find worth seeing. First, tonight:

Everyone is cordially invited to the last session of

THE 31st
MIDWEST PHILOSOPHY COLLOQUIUM

Personal Identity

Eric T. Olson

(Professor of Philosophy, University of Sheffield, UK)

Will present

“When Do We Begin and End?”

Monday, March 26, 7:30 p.m., Newman Catholic Center
306 East 4th Street, Morris

The gradual nature of development from fertilization to birth and beyond leaves it uncertain when we come into being; advances in medical technology leave it increasingly uncertain when we cease to exist. Many philosophers have tried to answer these questions. Professor Olson will argue that most of these answers are wrong, and that a simpler answer follows from the apparent fact that we are biological organisms.

Then, tomorrow night (Tuesday, 27 March, 6:00 at the Common Cup Coffee House), it’s time for Café Scientifique!

“So… what am I looking at?”

Kristin Kearns

An introduction to the celestial objects
visible through the UMM 16-inch telescope.

An observing session at the University’s telescope might begin with a view of the Moon and some of the more photogenic planets then, as the sky darkens, move on to a wide variety of stellar views, from planetary nebulae to globular clusters and maybe even a supernova remnant. On a clear, moonless night the telescope may probe even deeper into the darkness to find galaxies beyond our own. Whether you’ve looked through a telescope or just always wanted to, this talk will fill in the details behind the images. I’ll discuss the physical nature and cosmic context of those “smoke rings” and “cotton balls” you see in the eyepiece.

If the skies are clear, Kristin will also open up the UMM Observatory to the public after the talk, so you can come on down and see some stars.

You might as well just come on out here and spend a few days in town.

A defense of the Blasphemy Challenge

Greta Christina has an excellent and lengthy defense of the idea behind the Blasphemy Challenge— that exercise on YouTube that received a lot of criticism from certain quarters because it wasn’t serious or respectful enough. She gets it exactly right: that was the point, to show that religion receives a lot of unwarranted deference. If you’re one of those people who got irate because the challenge mocked and ridiculed religion, thanks for making the case for us: your irritation is what was being pointed to as part of the problem.

Happy Birthday, Richard Dawkins!

Go on over to his place and leave a birthday greeting, and be sure to check out the multimedia collection of good wishes.

We wondered what we could do to express our appreciation, and had a hard time figuring out what would be appropriate … until a student asked to borrow one of my copies of The God Delusion because he couldn’t find one anywhere in town. Instead of giving Dawkins a present directly, the Myers family is donating a copy of his book to the local library, where we hope some receptive minds will discover it.

Planet Earth

This evening, I caught most of some episodes of this series the Discovery Channel is airing, Planet Earth, which was advertised here for a while. It wasn’t bad. It had some spectacular photography, did a great job of displaying a wide range of environments, and showed off some of the amazing abilities of animals very well. There were a few things that irritated me, though (I admit it, I criticize everything).

The biggest problem? It’s a show for people with short attention spans. We got brief vignettes of a few minutes—you’d just be getting into the pumas and alpacas in Patagonia, and zip, we’re off to grizzly bears in the Rockies. It was popcorn biology, crunch crunch crunch, you’ve snarfed down a whole bag a few kernels at a time.

That quick glimpse of each biome also meant the focus was entirely on the biggest, most distinctive organisms in the environment, the ol’ charismatic megafauna problem of nature documentaries. For instance, several of the scenes featured whale sharks or dolphins or sailfish chowing down on these great schools of generically named “bait fish”…but hey, wait a minute, aren’t these “bait fish” a rather critical component of the ecosystem? Why not tell us more about them? Treating them as convenient clouds of meat for bigger predators didn’t seem to do them justice.

Still, it was worth watching, and maybe younger kids would have an easier time getting into it. After a few hours exposure, I was feeling a bit whipsawed by the too frequent changes in subject.

Inconceivable!

I just had to say that I stepped outside the door a few minutes ago, and it is 60°F! And almost all the snow is gone! And the sky is blue! And there are birds chirping in the trees!

I think aliens kidnapped me while I wasn’t looking and have transported me to a strange and distant world. But the internet still works here!

No, really, I doubt that religion is adaptive

That Allen MacNeill fella is crazy brave — after trying to approach Intelligent Design seriously as a course subject, now he’s going to teach another controversial summer seminar on whether religion is adaptive. I think where the previous course ran off the rails was in the too-respectful attempt to encourage the participation of the Cornell IDEA club — he basically ended up aiding and abetting a gang of ignorant ideologues, and that’s also the way it got spun in the media, to the creationists’ advantage. I agree that it’s a good idea to engage the counter-culture warriors who are pushing the unscientific glop on the public, but we can’t begin with the premise that ID creationism has some validity; that’s doing the work of the Discovery Institute. Discussion of evolution has to begin with the scientific foundation of modern evolutionary biology, and if anyone wants to wiggle in with their alternatives, they need to do the hard work of providing evidence, first.

I also have to disagree with one of the premises of his course description. After explaining the ubiquity of religious belief, it’s variation, and the existence of people who have no use for religion, he says:

To an evolutionary biologist, such pan-specificity combined with continuous variation strongly suggests that one is dealing with an evolutionary adaptation.

No, it most definitely does not.

I have noticed a lot of students wandering around with these white rectangular objects with cables hooked up to their ears. I’ve also discovered by personal experience with a teenager that these objects are quite precious to their owners, and are practically revered. Yet there are also some students who don’t care at all for them. Do evolutionary biologists look at the iPod and say “A-ha! There is an evolutionary adaptation”? Probably not. Evolutionary psychologists might, but we already know they’re nuts.

I think instead that we ought to determine if there is a hereditary component before talking about its likelihood of having an evolutionary function. Since we see that whole cultures can rapidly, within a few generations, shed much of their religious baggage; since religion seems to be largely a product of indoctrination rather than a built-in product of the brain; and since individuals can exhibit reversals from religiosity to atheism and vice versa within their lifetime, I remain unconvinced that there exists any kind of direct biological predilection for religion. The frequency of a phenomenon is not an indicator of its adaptive value, nor do variations reinforce that notion.

For another example, people in the US largely speak English, with a subset that speak Spanish, and a few other languages represented in scattered groups. That does not mean we should talk about English as an adaptive product of evolution. Language, definitely—there’s clearly a heritable biological element to that ability. Similarly, religion may easily be a consequence of a universal trait like curiosity (we want answers to questions, religion provides them, so it spreads—even if the answers are all wrong) or empathy (we are social animals, we like community activities, religion hijacks that communal urge), but religion itself is but one replaceable instance, an epiphenomenon that too many people mistake for the actual substrate of the behavior.