Atheism and Agnosticism

(I am taking a break from original posts due to the holidays and because of travel after that. Until I return, here are some old posts, updated and edited, for those who might have missed them the first time around. New posts should appear starting Monday, January 14, 2008.)

In an interview, Douglas Adams, author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, who called himself a “radical atheist,” explains why he uses that term (thanks to onegoodmove):

I think I use the term radical rather loosely, just for emphasis. If you describe yourself as “Atheist,” some people will say, “Don’t you mean ‘Agnostic’?” I have to reply that I really do mean Atheist. I really do not believe that there is a god – in fact I am convinced that there is not a god (a subtle difference). I see not a shred of evidence to suggest that there is one. It’s easier to say that I am a radical Atheist, just to signal that I really mean it, have thought about it a great deal, and that it’s an opinion I hold seriously…

People will then often say “But surely it’s better to remain an Agnostic just in case?” This, to me, suggests such a level of silliness and muddle that I usually edge out of the conversation rather than get sucked into it. (If it turns out that I’ve been wrong all along, and there is in fact a god, and if it further turned out that this kind of legalistic, cross-your-fingers-behind-your-back, Clintonian hair-splitting impressed him, then I think I would chose not to worship him anyway.) . . .

And making the move from Agnosticism to Atheism takes, I think, much more commitment to intellectual effort than most people are ready to put in. (italics in original)

I think Adams is exactly right. When I tell people that I am an atheist, they also tend to suggest that surely I must really mean that I am an agnostic. (See here for an earlier discussion of the distinction between the two terms.) After all, how can I be sure that there is no god? In that purely logical sense they are right, of course. You cannot prove a negative so there is always the chance that not only that a god exists but, if you take radical clerics Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell seriously, has a petty, spiteful, vengeful, and cruel personality.

When I say that I am atheist, I am not making that assertion based on logical or evidentiary proofs of non-existence. It is that I have been convinced that the case for no god is far stronger than the case for god. It is the same reasoning that makes me convinced that quantum mechanics is the theory to use for understanding sub-atomic phenomena or natural selection is the theory to be preferred for understanding the diversity of life. There is always the possibility that these theories are ‘wrong’ in some sense and will be superceded by other theories, but those theories will have to have convincing evidence in their favor.

If, on the other hand, I ask myself what evidence there is for the existence of a god, I come up empty. All I have are the assurances of clergy and assertions in certain books. I have no personal experience of it and there is no scientific evidence for it.

Of course, as long time readers of this blog are aware, I used to be quite religious for most of my life, even an ordained lay preacher of the Methodist Church. How could I have switched? It turns out that my experience is remarkably similar to that of Adams, who describes why he switched from Christianity to atheism.

As a teenager I was a committed Christian. It was in my background. I used to work for the school chapel in fact. Then one day when I was about eighteen I was walking down the street when I heard a street evangelist and, dutifully, stopped to listen. As I listened it began to be borne in on me that he was talking complete nonsense, and that I had better have a bit of a think about it.

I’ve put that a bit glibly. When I say I realized he was talking nonsense, what I mean is this. In the years I’d spent learning History, Physics, Latin, Math, I’d learnt (the hard way) something about standards of argument, standards of proof, standards of logic, etc. In fact we had just been learning how to spot the different types of logical fallacy, and it suddenly became apparent to me that these standards simply didn’t seem to apply in religious matters. In religious education we were asked to listen respectfully to arguments which, if they had been put forward in support of a view of, say, why the Corn Laws came to be abolished when they were, would have been laughed at as silly and childish and – in terms of logic and proof -just plain wrong. Why was this?
. . .
I was already familiar with and (I’m afraid) accepting of, the view that you couldn’t apply the logic of physics to religion, that they were dealing with different types of ‘truth’. (I now think this is baloney, but to continue…) What astonished me, however, was the realization that the arguments in favor of religious ideas were so feeble and silly next to the robust arguments of something as interpretative and opinionated as history. In fact they were embarrassingly childish. They were never subject to the kind of outright challenge which was the normal stock in trade of any other area of intellectual endeavor whatsoever. Why not? Because they wouldn’t stand up to it.
. . .
Sometime around my early thirties I stumbled upon evolutionary biology, particularly in the form of Richard Dawkins’s books The Selfish Gene and then The Blind Watchmaker and suddenly (on, I think the second reading of The Selfish Gene) it all fell into place. It was a concept of such stunning simplicity, but it gave rise, naturally, to all of the infinite and baffling complexity of life. The awe it inspired in me made the awe that people talk about in respect of religious experience seem, frankly, silly beside it. I’d take the awe of understanding over the awe of ignorance any day.

What Adams is describing is the conversion experience that I described earlier when, suddenly switching your perspective seems to make everything fall into place and make sense.

For me, like Adams, I realized that I was applying completely different standards for religious beliefs than I was for every other aspect of my life. And I could not explain why I should do so. Once I jettisoned the need for that kind of distinction, atheism just naturally emerged as the preferred explanation. Belief in a god required much more explaining away of inconvenient facts than not believing in a god.

POST SCRIPT: The Noah’s Ark horror

One of the great triumphs of Judeo-Christian propaganda is getting their followers to overlook the fact that the Biblical Noah story, which many of them believe to be true, would be the worst act of genocide ever, and committed by god to boot. Hellbound Alleee tries to correct this.

Precision in language

(I am taking a break from original posts due to the holidays and because of travel after that. Until I return, here are some old posts, updated and edited, for those who might have missed them the first time around. New posts should appear starting Monday, January 14, 2008.)

Some time ago, a commenter to this blog sent me a private email expressing this view:

Have you ever noticed people say “Do you believe in evolution?” just as you would ask “Do you believe in God?” as if both schools of thought have equal footing? I respect others’ religious beliefs as I realize I cannot disprove God just as anyone cannot prove His existence, but given the amount of evidence for evolution, shouldn’t we insist on asking “Do you accept evolution?”

It may just be semantics, but I feel that the latter wording carries an implied affirmation just as “Do you accept that 2+2=4?” carries a different meaning than “Do you believe 2+2=4?”

I guess the point I’m trying to make is that by stating something as a belief, it opens the debate to the possibility that something is untrue. While this may fine for discussions of religion, shouldn’t the scientific community be more insistent that a theory well supported by physical evidence, such as evolution, is not up for debate?

It’s a good point. To be fair, scientists themselves are partly responsible for this confusion because we also say that we “believe” in this or that scientific theory, and one cannot blame the general public from picking up on that terminology. What is important to realize, though, is that the word ‘believe’ is being used by scientists in a different sense from the way it is used in religion.

The late and deeply lamented Douglas Adams, author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, who called himself a “radical atheist” puts it nicely (thanks to onegoodmove):

First of all I do not believe-that-there-is-not-a-god. I don’t see what belief has got to do with it. I believe or don’t believe my four-year old daughter when she tells me that she didn’t make that mess on the floor. I believe in justice and fair play (though I don’t know exactly how we achieve them, other than by continually trying against all possible odds of success). I also believe that England should enter the European Monetary Union. I am not remotely enough of an economist to argue the issue vigorously with someone who is, but what little I do know, reinforced with a hefty dollop of gut feeling, strongly suggests to me that it’s the right course. I could very easily turn out to be wrong, and I know that. These seem to me to be legitimate uses for the word believe. As a carapace for the protection of irrational notions from legitimate questions, however, I think that the word has a lot of mischief to answer for. So, I do not believe-that-there-is-no-god. I am, however, convinced that there is no god, which is a totally different stance. . .

There is such a thing as the burden of proof, and in the case of god, as in the case of the composition of the moon, this has shifted radically. God used to be the best explanation we’d got, and we’ve now got vastly better ones. God is no longer an explanation of anything, but has instead become something that would itself need an insurmountable amount of explaining…

Well, in history, even though the understanding of events, of cause and effect, is a matter of interpretation, and even though interpretation is in many ways a matter of opinion, nevertheless those opinions and interpretations are honed to within an inch of their lives in the withering crossfire of argument and counterargument, and those that are still standing are then subjected to a whole new round of challenges of fact and logic from the next generation of historians – and so on. All opinions are not equal. Some are a very great more robust, sophisticated and well supported in logic and argument than others.

When someone says that they believe in god, they mean that they believe something in the absence of, or even counter to, the evidence, and even to reason and logic. When scientists say they believe a particular theory, they mean that they believe that theory because of the evidence and reason and logic, and the more evidence there is, and the better the reasoning behind it, the more strongly they believe it. Scientists use the word ‘belief’ the way Adams says, as a kind of synonym for ‘convinced,’ because we know that no scientific theory can be proven with 100% certainty and so we have to accept things even in the face of this remaining doubt. But the word ‘believe’ definitely does not carry the same meaning in the two contexts.

This can lead to the generation of confusion as warned by the commenter but what can we do about it? One option is, as was suggested, to use different words, with scientists avoiding use of the word ‘believe.’ I would have agreed with this some years ago but I am becoming increasingly doubtful that we can control the way that words are used.

For example, there was a time when I used to be on a crusade against the erroneous use of the word ‘unique’. The Oxford English Dictionary is pretty clear about what this word means:

  • Of which there is only one; one and no other; single, sole, solitary.
  • That is or forms the only one of its kind; having no like or equal; standing alone in comparison with others, freq. by reason of superior excellence; unequalled, unparalleled, unrivalled.
  • Formed or consisting of one or a single thing
  • A thing of which there is only one example, copy, or specimen; esp., in early use, a coin or medal of this class.
  • A thing, fact, or circumstance which by reason of exceptional or special qualities stands alone and is without equal or parallel in its kind.

It means, in short, one of a kind, so something is either unique or it is not. There are no in-betweens. And yet, you often find people saying things like “quite unique” or “very unique” or “almost unique.” I used to try and correct this but have given up. Clearly, people in general think that unique means something like “rare” and I don’t know that we can ever change this even if we all become annoying pedants, correcting people all the time, avoided at parties because of our pursuit of linguistic purity.

Some battles, such as with the word unique are, I believe, lost for good and I expect the OED to add the new meaning of ‘rare’ some time in the near future. It is a pity because then we would then be left with no word with the unique meaning of ‘unique’, but there we are. We would have to say something like ‘absolutely unique’ to convey the meaning once reserved for just ‘unique.’

In science too we often use words with precise operational meanings while the same words are used in everyday language with much looser meanings. For example, in physics the word ‘velocity’ is defined operationally by the situation when you have an object moving along a ruler and, at two points along its motion, you take ruler readings and clock readings, where the clocks are located at the points where the ruler readings are taken, and have been previously synchronized. Then the velocity of the moving object is the number you get when you take the difference between the two ruler readings and divide by the difference between the two clock readings.

Most people (especially sports commentators) have no idea of this precise meaning when they use the word velocity in everyday language, and often use the word synonymously with speed or, even worse, acceleration, although those concepts have different operational meanings. Even students who have taken physics courses find it hard to use the word in its strict operational sense.

Take, for another example, the word ‘theory’. By now, as a result of the intelligent design creationism (IDC) controversy, everyone should be aware that the way this word is used by scientists is quite different from its everyday use. In science, a theory is a powerful explanatory construct. Science depends crucially on its theories because they are the things that give it is predictive power. “There is nothing so practical as a good theory” as Kurt Lewin famously said. But in everyday language, the word theory is used as meaning ‘not factual,’ something that can be false or ignored.

I don’t think that we can solve this problem by putting constraints on how words can be used. English is a wonderful language precisely because it grows and evolves and trying to fix the meanings of words too rigidly would perhaps be stultifying. I now think that we need to change our tactics.

I think that once the meanings of words enter mainstream consciousness we will not be successful in trying to restrict their meanings beyond their generally accepted usage. What we can do is to make people aware that all words have varying meanings depending on the context, and that scientific and other academic contexts tend to require very precise meanings in order to minimize ambiguity.

Heidi Cool has a nice entry where she talks about the importance of being aware of when you are using specialized vocabulary, and the need to know your audience when speaking or writing, so that some of the pitfalls arising from the imprecise use of words can be avoided.

We have to realize though that despite our best efforts, we can never be sure that the meaning that we intend to convey by our words is the same as the meaning constructed in the minds of the reader or listener. Words always contain an inherent ambiguity that allows the ideas expressed by them to be interpreted differently.

I used to be surprised when people read the stuff I wrote and got a different meaning than I had intended. No longer. I now realize that there is always some residual ambiguity in words that cannot be overcome. While we can and should strive for maximum precision, we can never be totally unambiguous.

I agree with philosopher Karl Popper when he said, “It is impossible to speak in such a way that you cannot be misunderstood.” The best we can hope for is to have some sort or negotiated consensus on the meanings of ideas.

POST SCRIPT: Huckabee and Paul

Alexander Cockburn discusses why Mike Huckabee and Ron Paul are the two most interesting candidates on the Republican side.

Atheism and meaning

(As is my custom this time of year, I am taking some time off from writing new posts and instead reposting some old favorites (often edited and updated) for the benefit of those who missed them the first time around or have forgotten them. The POST SCRIPTS will generally be new. New posts will start again on Monday, January 5, 2009. Today’s post originally appeared in October 2007.)

People often think that atheists do not have a life affirming philosophy. They have sometimes taken the quote by prominent atheist Richard Dawkins (Scientific American November 1995, p. 85) that “The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference” to argue that atheism leads to a philosophy of hopelessness and despair. I have heard several talks by intelligent design creationism advocate Michael Behe and he repeatedly uses the quote to get a laugh at the expense of atheism by saying that Dawkins must be a real downer at parties. But anyone who has seen interviews with Dawkins and read his writings will come away with the contrary impression, that he is a witty, courteous, and engaging man with a mischievous sense of humor. One can well imagine him livening up any party. Dawkins was merely making a factual observation about the nature of the universe, saying that it is futile to try and obtain our meaning and purpose externally from the universe, although we can observe it with awe and wonder. We can, and should, construct meaning and purpose for our lives.
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Opinion polls and statistics

(I am taking a break from original posts due to the holidays and because of travel after that. Until I return, here are some old posts, updated and edited, for those who might have missed them the first time around. New posts should appear starting Monday, January 14, 2008.)

As the 2008 election season gets into high gear, we will get inundated with the results of opinion polls. Many of our public policies are strongly influenced by these polls, with politicians paying close attention to them before speaking out.

But while people are inundated with opinion polls, there is still considerable misunderstanding about how they work. Especially during elections, when there are polls practically every day, one often hears people expressing skepticism about polls, saying that they feel the polls are not representative because they, personally, and all the people they know, have never been asked their opinion. Surely, they reason, if so many polls are done, every person should get a shot at answering these surveys? That fact that no pollster has contacted them or their friends and families seem to make the poll results suspect in their eyes, as if the pollsters are using some highly selective group of people to ask and leaving out ‘ordinary’ people.

This betrays a misunderstanding of statistics and the sampling size needed to get good results. The so-called “margin of error” quoted by statisticians is found by dividing 100 by the square root of the size of the sample. So if you have a sample of 100, then the margin of error is 10%. If you have a sample size of 625, then the margin of error drops sharply to 4%. If you have a sample size of 1111, the margin of error becomes 3%. To get to 2% requires a sample size of 2500.

Clearly you would like your margin of error to be as small as possible, which argues for large samples, but your sample sizes are limited by the cost and time involved in surveying people, so trade offs have to be made. Most pollsters use samples of about 1000, and quote margins of error of 3%.

One interesting point is that there are statistical theorems that say that the sample size needed to get a certain margin of error does not depend on the size of the whole population (for large enough populations, say over 100,000). So a sample size of 1000 is sufficient for Cuyahoga County, the state of Ohio, or the whole USA. This explains why any given individual is highly unlikely to be polled. Since the population of the US is close to 300 million, any one of the 1000 people I may personally know has only a 0.00033% probability of being contacted.

We know that a poll tells us that 54% of Americans say that “I do not think human beings developed from earlier species.” The sample size was 1000, which means a margin of error of about 3%. Statistically, this means that there is a 95% chance that the “true” percentage of people who agree with that statement (i.e., the number we would get if could actually ask each and every person on the country) lies somewhere between 51% and 57%.

Certain assumptions and precautions go into interpreting these results. The first assumption is that the people polled are a truly random sample of the population. If you randomly contact people, that may not be true. You may, for example, end up with more women than men, or you may have contacted more old people or registered Republicans than are in the general population. If, from census and other data, you know the correct proportions of the various subpopulations in your survey, then this kind of skewing can be adjusted for by changing the weight of the contributions from each subgroup to match the actual population distribution.

With political polls, sometimes people complain that the sample sizes of Democrats and Republicans are not equal and that thus the poll is biased. But that difference is usually because the number of people who are officially registered as belonging to those parties are not equal.

But sometimes pollsters also quote the results for the subpopulations in their samples, and since the subsamples are smaller, the breakdown data has greater margin of error than the results for the full sample, though you are often not explicitly told this. For example, the above-mentioned survey says that 59% of people who had high school education or less agreed that “I do not think human beings developed from earlier species.” But the number of people in the sample who fit that description is 407, which means that there is a 5% uncertainty in the result for that subgroup, unlike the 3% for the full sample of 1000.

But a more serious source of uncertainty these days is that many people refuse to answer pollsters when they call and it is not possible to adjust for the views of those who refuse. So although the pollsters do have data on the numbers of persons who hang up on them or otherwise refuse to answer, they do not know if such people are more likely or less likely to think that humans developed from earlier species. So they cannot adjust for this factor. They have to simply assume that if those non-responders had answered, their responses would have been in line with those who actually did respond.

Then there may be people who do not answer honestly for whatever reason or are just playing the fool. They are also hard to adjust for. This is why I am somewhat more skeptical of surveys of teens on various topics. It seems to me that teenagers are just the right age to get enjoyment from deliberately answering questions in exotic ways.

These kinds of biases are hard, if not impossible, to compensate for, though in serious research the researchers try to put in extra questions that can help gauge whether people are answering honestly. But opinion polls, which have to be done quickly and cheaply, are not likely to go to all that trouble

Because of such reasons, polls like the Harris poll issue this disclaimer at the end:

In theory, with probability samples of this size, one could say with 95 percent certainty that the overall results have a sampling error of plus or minus 3 percentage points of what they would be if the entire U.S. adult population had been polled with complete accuracy. Sampling error for subsamples is higher and varies. Unfortunately, there are several other possible sources of error in all polls or surveys that are probably more serious than theoretical calculations of sampling error. They include refusals to be interviewed (nonresponse), question wording and question order, and weighting. It is impossible to quantify the errors that may result from these factors.

For all these reasons, one should take the quoted margins of error, which are based purely on sample size, with a considerable amount of salt.

There is one last point I want to make concerning a popular misconception propagated by news reporters during elections. If an opinion poll says that a sample of 1000 voters has candidate A with 51% support and candidate B with 49%, then since the margin of error (3%) is greater than the percentage of votes separating the candidates (2%), the reporters will often say that the race is a “statistical dead heat,” implying that the two candidates have equal chances of winning.

Actually, this is not true. What those numbers imply (using math that I won’t give here) is that there is about a 75% chance that candidate A truly does lead candidate B, while candidate B has only a 25% chance of being ahead. So when one candidate is three times as likely as the other to win, it is highly misleading to say that the race is a “dead heat.”

POST SCRIPT: Inflated value of religion

Many people have an inflated sense of the value of religion that simply falls apart on close examination. For example, Mike Huckabee said the following: “The Ten Commandments form the basis of most of our laws and therefore, you know if you look through them does anybody find anything there that would be all that objectionable? I don’t think most people would if they actually read them.”

He says this as if it is obviously true. But Ed Brayton shows how absurd this is.

The joy of free thinking

(I am taking a break from original posts due to the holidays and because of travel after that. Until I return, here are some old posts, updated and edited, for those who might have missed them the first time around. New posts should appear starting Monday, January 14, 2008.)

There is scarcely a week that does not pass without some interesting new scientific discovery about the nature of life. You open the newspaper and read of observations of light emitted by distant stars from the very edges of the known universe, light that must have been emitted almost at the very beginning, over ten billion years ago. Such research puts us in touch with our own cosmic beginnings.

Just recently there was the discovery of the fossils a possible new Hobbit-like people who lived in a remote island in the Indonesian archipelago about 18,000 years ago. Then there was the discovery in China of an almost perfectly preserved bowl of noodles that is about the 4,000 years old. Discoveries like these shed light on how evolution works and how human society evolved. And then the discovery of Tiktaalik, the 375-million year-old fossil that seems like an intermediary between sea and land animals.

Similarly, the discoveries that come from studies of DNA tell us a lot about where humans probably originated, how we are all related to one another and how, despite our common origins, the species spread over the Earth and diversified. The fact (according to the September 21, 2005 issue of The Washington Post) that we share nearly 99 percent of our DNA with chimpanzees, lend further strong support (not that it needed it) to the evolutionary idea that chimpanzees and humans share a common ancestry. (The approximately one percent difference, according to The Daily Show, is what causes human beings to kill each other!)

I enjoy reading things like this because it reminds me of Charles Darwin’s central idea, that we are all linked together in one great biological evolutionary tree, with the various animal species being our cousins, and even seemingly insignificant things like worms and bacteria having common ancestors with us, however distantly in the past that might have happened. Some people may find the idea of being related to a monkey repulsive but I think it is fascinating. The ability of science to investigate, to find new relationships, to explore and conjecture and come up with answers to old questions as well as create new questions to investigate is one of its greatest qualities.

And for me, personally, being an atheist makes that joy completely unalloyed. Shafars (i.e., secularists, humanists, atheists, freethinkers, agnostics, and rationalists), as well as religious people who interpret their religious texts metaphorically and not literally, do not have any concerns when new headlines describing a new scientific discovery are reported in the news. They do not have to worry whether any new fact will contradict a deeply held religious belief. They do not have to worry about whether they need to reconcile the new information with any unchanging religious text.

On the other hand, the same news items that give us fascinating glimpses of scientific discoveries undoubtedly create fresh headaches for all religious people, and especially those whose beliefs are based on literal readings of religious texts, because each new discovery has to be explained away if it disagrees with some dogma. There are people who devote their entire lives to this kind of apologetics, to ensure that their religious beliefs are made compatible with science. The website Answers in Genesis, for example, is devoted to making Young-Earth creationism (YEC) credible. So it goes to great lengths to show that the earth is less that 10,000 years old, all the animals could have fitted into Noah’s Ark, and that dinosaurs lived at the same time as humans.

One has to admire the tenacity of such people, their willingness to devote enormous amounts of time, sometimes their whole lives, to find support for a belief structure that is continuously under siege from new scientific discoveries. It must feel like trying to hold back the tide. (See this site which heroically tries to fit into a 10,000 year old universe model the astrophysical data received from light emitted by stars that are billions of light years away.)

Of course, scientific discoveries come too thick and fast for even the most determined religious apologists to keep up. So they tend to focus only on explaining away a few questions, the kinds of questions that the lay public is likely to be most concerned about, such as whether dinosaurs existed concurrently with humans, the ages of the universe and the Earth, whether the size of the Ark was sufficient to accommodate all the species, how Noah coped with the logistical problems of feeding all the animals and disposing of the waste, how Adam and Eve’s children could multiply without there already being other people around or indulging in incest, and so on.

But the rest of us don’t have to worry about any of that stuff and so can enjoy new scientific discoveries without any cares, and follow them wherever they lead. It is nice to know that one can throw wide open the windows of knowledge and let anything blow in, clearing out the cobwebs of old ideas and freshening up the recesses of the mind.

It is a wonderful and exhilarating feeling.

So for this new year, I wish all the readers of this blog the joys of free thinking. May your thoughts not be hobbled by superstitions ancient or modern.

POST SCRIPT: The 50 Most Loathsome People in America

I usually avoid reading all the lists of best, worst, etc. that come out this time of year, but this one is actually very good.

Here’s #29 on the list Dinesh D’Souza:

Charges: Wrote a book blaming 9/11 on — who else? — liberals, because if we didn’t live in a free society, then fundamentalists wouldn’t dislike us so. Even conservative nuts blasted D’Souza’s empathy for poor al Qaeda. Lately, he’s been engaging prominent atheists in debates, revealing himself to be a pseudointellectual ass, and then declaring victory. D’Souza’s master plan for attacking atheism is the ridiculous Pascal’s wager: Atheists could be wrong, and then they’d go to hell, but if the religious are wrong, then they suffer no ill effect — aside from living their lives in delusion, of course. And possibly going to someone else’s hell for believing the wrong religion. D’Souza seems to think that if he speaks more loudly and rapidly than his opponent, he is winning, but his arguments are weak and idiotic, and he never even attempts to truly debate the existence of any god, which is the ostensible point of these debates. Instead, he likes to compare body counts — Stalin and Mao killed more than the religious leaders of their time — rather than actually debate whether there is a God, or for that matter a Jesus. This, of course, is because there is no case to be made.

Exhibit A: “[Atheists] are God-haters… I don’t believe in unicorns, but then I haven’t written any books called The End of Unicorns, Unicorns are Not Great, or The Unicorn Delusion.” But what if everyone you met did believe in unicorns, and not only that, but worshiped a unicorn, held a book about unicorns to be the divine truth of the universe, invoked unicorns in political contexts, and speechified about how non-believers were indecent people waging a war on morality, which could only be predicated on the unquestioning belief in unicorns? Then, maybe, D’Souza would think about writing that book. But of course, that’s not really true, because if that was the world we lived in, then Dinesh D’Souza would believe in unicorns.

Sentence: Spanish inquisition.

Praying for other people’s souls

(I am taking a break from original posts due to the holidays and because of travel after that. Until I return, here are some old posts, updated and edited, for those who might have missed them the first time around. New posts should appear starting Monday, January 14, 2008.)

After I published an op-ed on intelligent design in the Plain Dealer following the Dover case, I was woken up at 5:30am the next day by someone who had clearly disliked my article. The point of his call was to tell me to read some book (presumably in favor of intelligent design) and he proceeded to spell out the name and the author. I interrupted to ask him if he knew what time it was and he replied “I can only pray for your soul.”

When people say they are praying for someone else’s soul, what they really mean depends on the context. When friends and members of my family say it, they really do mean it and are worried that my atheism is going to bring me to a bad end. I am touched by their concern and appreciate the thought.

But when someone who is obviously annoyed with you or disagrees with you says it, then you know it is insincere. When such people say it, what I think they are really saying is “I can’t wait for judgment day when I can see you rot in hell and gloat over you.” But because such people feel the need to preserve a publicly pious face, they sanctimoniously say “I will pray for your soul” instead.

Another thing that puzzles me is when you tell people that you are an atheist and they try to convince you that you are wrong using the Bible as evidence. What’s the point? The Bible can only be used to debate points between people who accept its central premise that it is the word of god. Using it to argue with an unbeliever makes as much sense as appealing to the Book of Mormon.

So here’s my advice to such religious people who do such things, in the unlikely event that they are reading this blog.

If someone says that they do not believe in god, quoting Biblical passages is not going to get you anywhere. Worse, that person will think that your belief has led you to lose your grip on the nature of rational argument. Competing philosophies cannot be resolved by using the tenets of one of the competitors, but must always appeal to common, mutually agreed upon principles.

Similarly, if someone annoys you because of their disbelief in your particular version of god, do not expect to get any appreciation when you say that you are praying for their soul. If that person is an atheist, he or she will probably laugh at you (internally if they are polite people) for saying this, because atheists don’t think they have an immortal soul, remember? And if that person is religious but belongs to another sect, he or she may be offended at the implication that you are tighter with god than they are and have some sort of say in what happens to their soul. Nobody likes a “holier than thou” attitude. Just ask the Pharisees, if you can find one in your neighborhood. Or better still, ask Pat Robertson.

POST SCRIPT: John Edwards

Steven Zunes, a progressive rofessor of political science whose does careful analyses, looks the policies of John Edwards. He finds him to be progressive on domestic issues but with troubling positions on foreign affairs. He concludes:

[A] John Edwards administration would be a real improvement over the administration of George W. Bush in the foreign policy realm, but it would clearly not be as progressive as many of his supporters would hope for.

Since first entering politics less than a decade ago, Edwards has greatly deepened his understanding of important policy issues and has moved to the left on his domestic agenda. His learning curve on foreign policy matters has thus far not been as impressive, but could potentially improve as well if, and only if, Democrats at the grass roots demand it.

Zunes’ conclusions resonate with mine. His full article is well worth reading.

POST SCRIPT: Is John Edwards progressive?

Stephen Zunes, a progressive professor of political science whose does thoughtful analyses of many issues, looks the policies of John Edwards. He finds him to be progressive on domestic issues but with troubling positions on foreign affairs. He concludes:

[A] John Edwards administration would be a real improvement over the administration of George W. Bush in the foreign policy realm, but it would clearly not be as progressive as many of his supporters would hope for.

Since first entering politics less than a decade ago, Edwards has greatly deepened his understanding of important policy issues and has moved to the left on his domestic agenda. His learning curve on foreign policy matters has thus far not been as impressive, but could potentially improve as well if, and only if, Democrats at the grass roots demand it.

Zunes’ conclusions resonate with mine. His full article is well worth reading.

Should atheists “come out”? -2

(I am taking a break from original posts due to the holidays and because of travel after that. Until I return, here are some old posts, updated and edited, for those who might have missed them the first time around. New posts should appear starting Monday, January 14, 2008.)

Some time ago, I posed the question on whether atheists should “come out.” I was reminded of this recently when I was involved in a discussion some time ago on the topic of whether atheists should ‘come out of the closet.’ The implication of the question was that stating openly that was one was an atheist could have negative repercussions on one’s work and family and social life, the way that being openly gay could. Of course, no one was suggesting that atheists experience anything close to the repression and harassment that gays experience. But it was clear that many people in the group kept their atheistic beliefs private for fear of negative consequences.

I was surprised by this because I have not personally felt any negative consequences. But this may be that the university setting in which I work is generally more accepting of heterodox views than the community at large.

But the interesting point that arose was that many of the people who hid their atheist beliefs said that it would be much more socially acceptable in America to say they were Hindus or Jews or Buddhists than to say that they were atheists. Despite the current anti-Islam sentiment in the US, even saying one was a Muslim was seen as being less discomfiting to the listener than being an atheist.

Why is this? Why would atheism arouse stronger negative feelings than belonging to a completely different religion? And it is not just in the US that this happens. I recall during the first Gulf war in 1991, CBS News correspondent Bob Simon was captured by some Islamic group but was subsequently released unharmed. He said that during his captivity his captors asked him whether he was a Jew and he acknowledged it. Simon said he felt that the fact that he was religious, a ‘man of the Book,’ made it safer for him than if he had said he was an atheist.

In the comments to the discussion on atheists coming out, someone made a very enlightening remark. He said that he recalled seeing the late Madalyn Murray O’Hair, the militant atheist who was responsible for the case that resulted in school-sponsored prayer being outlawed from public schools, on TV talk shows. He said she would love to get the audience all worked up and hissing at her with her provocative statements. Then she would tell them “You hate me because I am the embodiment of all your doubts.”

That makes sense. All religions depend on faith, the willful act of belief in something that cannot be discerned. Faith implies belief in the absence of, and counter to, evidence. Such an effort necessarily involves the suppression of doubt. When a person of one religion encounters someone from another, it is relatively easy to think that yours is the ‘right’ faith and the other person’s is the ‘wrong’ one. The other person is not challenging the very act of faith, but just the details of that faith.

The greater challenge to faith is not a competing faith, but doubt. When persons of faith encounter an atheist, that brings them face to face with their own doubts and that can be much more disconcerting.

POST SCRIPT: Follow up by Austin Cline

Austin Cline picked up on the above original post that appeared on January 18, 2006 and added an interesting coda at his website About atheism. He said:

This is very similar to something George Smith wrote:

In Christianity doubt stands opposed not to certainty per se, but to faith. To have faith, in a religious context, is to have absolute confidence in God and to trust his revelations unconditionally. Thus, for the Christian to be uncertain of a divine revelation is bad enough, but to doubt that revelation is incomparably worse, because the latter implies a readiness to criticize that the former does not. … In short, for the Christian to doubt the truth of a purported revelation is potentially to challenge the authority of the infallible God in whom she believes. It is therefore religious doubt, not atheistic disbelief, that constitutes the greatest threat to orthodox beliefs, because doubt threatens to undermine a belief system from within.

I wonder if this is also one reason why so many Christians insist that atheism is a faith? If, as Singham writes, faith is less threatening than doubt, then “atheism as a faith” can be dismissed more readily than “atheism as a challenge, a question, and a doubt.” I don’t think it likely that many, if any, Christians actually think about the issue in these terms, but this doesn’t mean that the connection isn’t being made unconsciously.

Should atheists “come out”?

(I am taking a break from original posts due to the holidays and because of travel after that. Until I return, here are some old posts, updated and edited, for those who might have missed them the first time around. New posts should appear starting Monday, January 14, 2008.)

In a previous posting, I suggested that people tend to have a negative view of atheism. In his blog essay Sam Harris provides support for this view, saying that “More than 50 percent of Americans have a “negative” or “highly negative” view of people who do not believe in God.”

Possible reasons for this dislike were discussed earlier but here I want to focus on what, if anything, should be done about it.

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Should scientists try to accommodate religion?

(I am taking a break from original posts due to the holidays and because of travel after that. Until I return, here are some old posts, updated and edited, for those who might have missed them the first time around. New posts should appear starting Monday, January 14, 2008.)

Within the scientific community, there are two groups, those who are religious and who hold to the minimal scientific requirement of methodological naturalism, and those who go beyond that and are also philosophical naturalists, and thus atheists/agnostics or more generally “shafars”. (For definitions of the two kinds of naturalism, see here).
[Read more…]

Reason’s Greetings!

(I am taking a break from original posts due to the holidays and because of travel after that. Until I return, here are some old posts, updated and edited, for those who might have mossed them the first time around. New posts should appear starting Monday, January 14, 2008.)

I hope all this blog’s readers have a pleasant and safe holiday season. For today’s holiday, here are three of my favorite seasonally appropriate Rowan Atkinson video clips.

On Jesus’ miracles:

On The General Synod’s Life of Christ:

On hell: