The history of western atheism-1: The ancient origins

In the BBC4 TV program Atheism: A Rough History of Disbelief, host Jonathan Miller states flatly right at the beginning, “This series is about the disappearance of something – religious faith. . . The history of the growing conviction that god does not exist.”

(The full three hour, three-part series can be seen starting at the beginning here. The price you pay for it being on YouTube is that each hour is chopped up into six ten-minute segments in order to meet the time restrictions. But the video and sound quality are excellent.)

Miller did a nice job of summarizing the rise and fall and rise again of freethinking. Strictly speaking, his is a survey of atheism just in the western world. In the eastern world of two millennia ago, the widespread acceptance of Confucianism, which placed very little emphasis on a god, and Buddhism, which required no belief in god, suggests that atheism was not perceived as negatively as in the west.

The Miller documentary is structured quite traditionally. It is long on voice-over narration by Miller as he walks through various imposing historical churches, museums, and other buildings and gazes upwards at portraits and statues of the people he is talking about, interspersed with interviews with scholars. It is Miller talking to the viewer in an informal, chatty way, interweaving the history of disbelief with his own journey to a comfortable atheism. But what it lacks in drama and glitz, it more than makes up in the low-key, understated charm that is characteristic of good BBC documentaries. The second and third hours are especially good as the pace picks up.
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The journey to atheism

(I am taking a short vacation from new blog posts. I will begin posting new entries again, on August 27, 2007. Until then, I will repost some early ones. Today’s one is from August 8, 2005, edited and updated.)

In a comment to a previous post, Jim Eastman said something that struck me as very profound. He said:

It’s also interesting to note that most theists are also in the game of declaring nonexistence of deities, just not their own. This quote has been sitting in my quote file for some time, and it seems appropriate to unearth it.

“I contend we are both atheists – I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you reject all other gods, you will understand why I reject yours as well.” – Stephen F. Roberts

The Roberts quote captures accurately an important stage in my own transition from belief to atheism. Since I grew up as a Christian in a multi-religious society and had Hindu, Muslim, and Buddhist friends, I had to confront the question of how to deal with other religions. My answer at that time was simple – Christianity was right and the others were wrong. Of course, since the Methodist Church I belonged to had an inclusive, open, and liberal theological outlook, I did not equate this distinction with good or evil or even heaven and hell. I felt that as long as people were good and decent, they were somehow all saved, irrespective of what they believed. But there was no question in my mind that Christians had the inside track on salvation and that others were at best slightly misguided.
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Waiting for the Rapture

(I am taking a short vacation from new blog posts. I will begin posting new entries again, on August 27, 2007. Until then, I will repost some early ones. Today’s one is from May 9, 2005, edited and updated.)

I am a huge fan of the English comic writer P. G. Wodehouse, especially of his Jeeves and Wooster books. The plots are pretty much the same in all the Jeeves stories but the smoothness of Wodehouse’s writing, his superb comic touch, and his brilliant choice of words make him a joy to read. Even though I have read all of the Jeeves books many times and know all the plots, they still have the ability to make me laugh out loud.
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What makes us change our minds?

(I am taking a short vacation from new blog posts. I will begin posting new entries again, on August 27, 2007. Until then, I will repost some early ones. Today’s one is from March 28, 2005, edited and updated.)

In an earlier post, I described the three kinds of challenges teachers face. Today I want to discuss how teachers might deal with each case.

On the surface, it might seem that the first kind of challenge (where students do not have much prior experience (either explicitly or implicitly) with the material being taught and don’t have strong feelings about it either way) is the easiest one. After all, if students have no strong beliefs or prior knowledge about what is being taught, then they should be able to accept the new knowledge more easily.

That is true, but the ease of acceptance also has its downside. The very act of not caring means that the new knowledge goes in easily but is also liable to be forgotten easily once the course is over. In other words, it might have little lasting impact. Since the student has little prior knowledge in that area, there is little in the brain to anchor the new knowledge to. And if the student does not care about it one way or the other, then no effort will be made by the student to really connect to the material. So the student might learn this material by mostly memorizing it, reproduce it on the exams, and forget it a few weeks later.

The research on the brain indicates that lasting learning occurs when students tie new knowledge to things they already know, when they integrate it with existing material. So teachers of even highly technical topics need to find ways to connect it with students’ prior knowledge. They have to know their students, what interests them, what concerns them, what they care about. This is why good teachers tie their material in some way to stories or topics that students know and care about or may be in the news or to controversies. Such strategies tap into the existing knowledge structures in the brain (the neural networks) and connect the new material to them, so that it is more likely to ‘stick.’

The second kind of challenge is where students’ life experiences have resulted in strongly held beliefs about a particular knowledge structure, even though the student may not always be consciously aware of having such beliefs. A teacher who does not take these existing beliefs into account when designing teaching strategies is likely to be wasting her time. Because these beliefs are so strongly, but unconsciously held, they are not easily dislodged or modified.

The task for the teacher in this case is to make students aware of their existing knowledge structures and the implications of them for understanding situations. A teacher needs to create situations (say experiments or cases) and encourage students to explore the consequences of the their prior beliefs and see what happens when they are confronted by these new experiences. This has to be done repeatedly in newer and more enriched contexts so that students realize for themselves the existence and inadequacy of their prior knowledge structures and become more accepting of the new knowledge structures and theories.

In the third case, students are consciously rejecting the new ideas because they are aware that it conflicts with views they value more (for whatever reason). This is the situation with those religious people who reject evolutionary ideas because they conflict with their religious beliefs. In such cases, there is no point trying to force or browbeat them into accepting the new ideas.

Does this mean that such people’s ideas never change? Obviously not. People do change their views on matters that they may have once thought were rock-solid. In my own case, I know that I now believe things that are diametrically opposed to things that I once thought were true, and I am sure that my experience is very common.

But the interesting thing is that although I know that my views have changed, I cannot tell you when they changed or why they changed. It is not as if there was an epiphany where you slap your forehead and exclaim “How could I have been so stupid? Of course I was wrong and the new view is right!” Rather, the process seems more like being on an ocean liner that is turning around. The process is so gentle that you are not aware that it is even happening, but at some point you realize that you are facing in a different direction. There may be a moment of realization that you now believe something that you did not before, but that moment is just an explicit acknowledgment of something that that you had already tacitly accepted.

What started the process of change could be one of many factors – something you read, a news item, a discussion with a friend, some major public event – whose implications you may not be immediately aware of. But over time these little things lodge in your mind, and as your mind tries to integrate them into a coherent framework, your views start to shift. For me personally, I enjoy discussions of deep ideas with people I like and respect. Even if they do not have any expertise in this area, discussions with such people tend to clarify one’s ideas.

I can see that process happening to me right now with the ideas about the brain. I used to think that the brain was quite plastic, that any of us could be anything given the right environment. I am not so sure now. The work of Chomsky on linguistics, the research on how people learn, and other bits and pieces of knowledge I have read have persuaded me that it is not at all clear that the perfectly-plastic-brain idea can be sustained. It seems reasonable that some structures of the brain, especially the basic ones that enable it to interpret the input from the five senses, and perhaps even learn language, must be pre-existing.

But I am not completely convinced of the socio-biological views of people like E. O. Wilson and Steven Pinker who seem to argue that much of our brains, attitudes, and values are biologically determined by evolutionary adaptation. I am also not convinced of the value of much of popular gender-related differences, such as that men are better than women at math or that women are more nurturing than men. That seems to me to be a little too pat. I am always a little skeptical of attempts to show that the status quo is ‘natural’ since that has historically been used to justify inequality and oppression.

But the works of cognitive scientists are interesting and I can see my views on how the brain works changing slowly. One sign of this is my desire to read widely on the subject.

So I am currently in limbo as regards the nature of the brain, mulling things over. At some point I might arrive at some kind of unified and coherent belief structure. And after I do so, I may well wonder if I ever believed anything else. Such are the tricks the brain can play on you, to make you think that what you currently believe is what is correct and what you always believed.

POST SCRIPT: The Church of the Wholly Undecided

Les Barker has a funny poem about agnosticism.

The purpose of teaching

(I am taking a short vacation from new blog posts. I will begin posting new entries again, on August 27, 2007. Until then, I will repost some early ones. Today’s one is from March 24, 2005, edited and updated.)

I have been teaching for many years and encountered many wonderful students. I remember in particular two students who were in my modern physics courses that dealt with quantum mechanics, relativity, and cosmology.

Doug was an excellent student, demonstrating a wonderful understanding of all the topics we discussed in class. But across the top of his almost perfect final examination paper, I was amused to see that he had written, “I still don’t believe in relativity!”

The other student was Jamal and he is not as direct as Doug. He came into my office a few years after the course was over (and just before he was about to graduate) to say goodbye. We chatted awhile, I wished him well, and then as he was about to leave he turned to me and said hesitantly in his characteristically shy way: “Do you remember that stuff you taught us about how the universe originated in the Big Bang about 15 billion years ago? Well, I don’t really believe all that.” After a pause he went on, “It kind of conflicts with my religious beliefs.” He looked apprehensively at me, perhaps to see if I might be offended or angry or think less of him. But I simply smiled and let it pass. It did not bother me at all.

Why was I not upset that these two students had, after having two semester-long courses with me, still not accepted the fundamental ideas that I had been teaching? The answer is simple. The goal of my teaching is not to change what my students believe. It is to have them understand what practitioners in the field believe. And those are two very different teaching goals.

As I said, I have taught for many years. And it seems to me that teachers encounter three kinds of situations with students.

One is where students do not have much prior experience (either explicitly or implicitly) with the material being taught and don’t have strong feelings about it either way. This is usually the case with technical or highly specialized areas (such as learning the symptoms of some rare disease or applying the laws of quantum mechanics to the hydrogen atom). In such cases, students have little trouble accepting what is taught.

The second type of situation is where students’ life experiences have resulted in strongly held beliefs about a particular knowledge structure, even though the student may not always be consciously aware of having such beliefs. The physics education literature is full of examples that our life experiences conspire to create in people an Aristotelian understanding of mechanics. This makes it hard for them to accept Newtonian mechanics. Note that this difficulty exists even though the students have no particular attachment to Aristotle’s views on mechanics and may not have the faintest idea what they are. Overcoming this kind of implicit belief structure is not easy. Doug was an example of someone who had got over the first hurdle from Aristotelian to Newtonian mechanics, but was finding the next transition to Einsteinian relativistic ideas much harder to swallow.

The third kind of situation is where the student has strong and explicit beliefs about something. These kinds of beliefs, as in the case of Jamal, come from religion or politics or parents or other major influences in their lives. You cannot force such students to change their views and any instructor who tries to do so is foolish. If students think that you are trying to force them to a particular point of view, they are very good at telling you what they think you want to hear, while retaining their beliefs. In fact, trying to force or bully students to accept your point of view, apart from being highly unethical teaching practice, is a sure way of reinforcing the strength of their original views.

So Doug’s and Jamal’s rejection of my ideas did not bother me and I was actually pleased that they felt comfortable telling me so. They had every right to believe whatever they wanted to believe. But what I had a right to expect was that they had understood what I was trying to teach and could use those ideas to make arguments within those frameworks.

For example, if I had given an exam problem that required that the student demonstrate his understanding of relativistic physics to solve, and Doug had refused to answer the question because he did not believe in relativity or had answered it using his own private theories of physics, I would have had to mark him down.

Similarly, if I had asked Jamal to calculate the age of the universe using the cosmological theories we had discussed in class, and he had instead said that the universe was 6,000 years old because that is what the Bible said, then I would have to mark him down too. He is free to believe what he wants, but the point of the course is to learn how the physics community interprets the world, and be able to use that information.

Understanding this distinction is important because of the periodic appearance of demagogues who try to frighten people by asserting that colleges are indoctrinating students to think in a particular way. Such people seem to assume that students are like sheep who can be induced to believe almost anything the instructor wants them to and thus require legal protection. Anyone who has taught for any length of time and has listened closely to students will know that this is ridiculous. It is not that students are not influenced by teaching and do not change their minds but that the process is far more complex and subtle than it is usually portrayed, as I will discuss in the next posting.

My own advice to students is to listen carefully and courteously to what knowledgeable people have to say, learn what the community of scholars thinks about an issue, and be able to understand and use that information when necessary. Weigh the arguments for and against any issue but ultimately stand up for what you believe and even more importantly know why you believe it. Don’t ever feel forced to accept something just because some ‘expert’ or other authority figure (teacher, preacher, parent, political leader, pundit, or media talking head) tells you it is true. Believe things only when it makes sense to you and you are good and ready for it.

“I know this is politically incorrect but . . .”

(I am taking a short vacation from new blog posts. I will begin posting new entries again, on August 27, 2007. Until then, I will repost some early ones. Today’s one is from August 14, 2006, edited and updated.)

One of the advantages of being older is that sometimes you can personally witness how language evolves and changes, and how words and phrases undergo changes and sometimes outright reversals of meaning.

One of the interesting evolutions is that of the phrase “politically correct.” It was originally used as a kind of scornful in-joke within Marxist political groups to sneer at those members who seemed to have an excessive concern with political orthodoxy and who seemed to be more preoccupied with vocabulary than with the substance of arguments and actions.

Later it became used as a weapon against those who were trying to make language more nuanced and inclusive and less hurtful, judgmental, or discriminatory. Such people advocated using “disabled” instead of “crippled” or “mentally ill” instead of “crazy,” or “hearing impaired” instead of “deaf” and so on in an effort to remove the stigma under which those groups had traditionally suffered. Those who felt such efforts had been carried to an extreme, or just wanted to use words the way they always had, disparaged those efforts as trying to be “politically correct.”

The most recent development has been to shift the emphasis from sneering at the careful choosing of words to sneering at the ideas and sentiments behind those words. The phrase has started being used pre-emptively, to shield people from the negative repercussions of stating views that otherwise may be offensive or antiquated. This usage usually begins by saying “I know this is politically incorrect but….” and then finishes up by making a statement that would normally provoke quick opposition.

So you can now find people saying “I know this is politically incorrect but perhaps women are inferior to men at mathematics and science” or “I know this is politically incorrect but perhaps poor people are poor because they are stupid” or “I know this is politically incorrect but perhaps blacks are less capable than whites at academics.” The opening preamble is not only designed to make such statements acceptable, the speaker can even claim the mantle of being daring and brave, an outspoken and even heroic bearer of unpopular or unpalatable truths.

Take for example, a blurb by intelligent design creationist Jonathan Wells for his own book The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design. The cover of the book says: “Darwin is an emperor who has no clothes— but it takes a brave man to say so. Jonathan Wells, a microbiologist with two Ph.D.s (from Berkeley and Yale), is that brave man.” There have been similar books that try this same linguistic maneuver, such as The Politically Incorrect Guide to Science and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Global Warming (and Environmentalism).

Brandishing the label of being ‘politically incorrect’ as a form of argument is silly, as is invoking the fact that one has a doctorate. It is actually a sign of weakness, indicating that one’s arguments cannot stand on their own. For example, physicists assume that all electrons are identical. We don’t really know this for a fact, since it is impossible to compare all electrons. The statement “all electrons are identical” is a kind of default position and, in the absence of evidence to the contrary, does not need to be supported by positive evidence. The assertion that “some electrons are heavier than others” is going to be dismissed in the absence of supporting evidence. Simply saying ” I know this is not politically correct but I believe some electrons are heavier than others and I have a PhD” does not make it any more credible. It merely makes you look pompous and self-aggrandizing.

Sentiments that would normally would be considered discriminatory, biased, and outright offensive if uttered without any supporting evidence are now protected from criticism by this preamble. It is then the person who challenges this view who is put on the defensive, as if he or she was some prig who unthinkingly spouts an orthodox view.

Fintan O’Toole of The Irish Times (May 5, 1994) noted this trend early and pithily said:

We have now reached the point where every goon with a grievance, every bitter bigot, merely has to place the prefix, “I know this is not politically correct but . . .” in front of the usual string of insults in order to be not just safe from criticism but actually a card, a lad, even a hero. Conversely, to talk about poverty and inequality, to draw attention to the reality that discrimination and injustice are still facts of life, is to commit the new sin of political correctness……… Anti-PC has become the latest cover for creeps. It is a godsend for every sort of curmudgeon or crank, from the fascistic to the merely smug.

Hate blacks? Attack positive discrimination – everyone will know the codes. Want to keep Europe white? Attack multiculturalism. Fed up with the girlies making noise? Tired of listening to whining about unemployment when your personal economy is booming? Haul out political correctness and you don’t even have to say what’s on your mind.

Even marketers are cashing in on this anti-PC fad, as illustrated by this cartoon.

Here’s a tip. Anyone who feels the need to invoke the “politically incorrect” trope as an indicator of his or her valor is probably trying to hide the weaknesses in their argument.

POST SCRIPT: Comparing the candidates

How do the presidential candidates compare when it comes to where they stand on the left-right and authoritarian-libertarian continua?

You can see for yourself, based on their positions on a range of issues.

I found it interesting (but not surprising) that every candidate of both parties (except for Democrats Dennis Kucinich and Mike gravel) ended up in the right-wing /authoritarian quadrant.

You can also answer the questions yourself and compare yourself to them. My scores put me in the deep southwest part in the left-libertarian quadrant, more so than Kucinich and Gravel.

These kinds of things are fun but should not be considered a serious analysis of political philosophies.

What do creationist/ID advocates want-III?

(I am taking a short vacation from new blog posts. I will begin posting new entries again, on August 27, 2007. Until then, I will repost some very early ones, updated if necessary. Today’s one is from March 18, 2005, edited and updated.)

It is time to tackle head-on the notion of what is meant by the ‘materialism’ that the intelligent design creationism (IDC) camp find so distasteful. (See part I and part II for the background.)

The word materialism is used synonymously with ‘naturalism’ and perhaps the clearest formulation of what it means can be found in the writings of paleontologist George Gaylord Simpson who said in Tempo and Mode in Evolution (p. 76.):

The progress of knowledge rigidly requires that no non-physical postulate ever be admitted in connection with the study of physical phenomena. We do not know what is and what is not explicable in physical terms, and the researcher who is seeking explanations must seek physical explanations only. (Emphasis added)

Simpson was by not an atheist (as far as I can tell) but he is saying something that all scientists take for granted, that when you seek a scientific explanation for something, you look for something that has natural causes, and you do not countenance the miraculous or the inscrutable. This process is more properly called ‘methodological naturalism’, to be contrasted with ‘philosophical naturalism.’

Despite the polysyllabic terminology, the ideas are easy to understand. For example, if you hear a strange noise in the next room, you might wonder if it is a radiator or the wind or a mouse or an intruder. You can systematically investigate each possible cause, looking for evidence. For each question that you pose, the answer is sought in natural causes. You would be unlikely to say: “The noise in the next room is caused by god throwing stuff around.” In general, people don’t invoke god to explain the everyday phenomena of our lives, even though they might be quite religious.

Methodological naturalism is just that same idea. Scientists look for natural explanations to the phenomena they encounter because that is the way science works. Such an approach allows you to systematically investigate open questions and not shut off avenues of research. Any scientist who said that an experimental result was due to God intervening in the lab would be looked at askance, not because other scientists are all atheists determined to stamp out any form of religion but because that scientist would be violating one of the fundamental rules of operation. There is no question in science that is closed to further investigation of deeper natural causes.

Non-scientists sometimes do not understand how hard and frustrating much of scientific research is. People work for years and even decades banging their heads against brick walls, trying to solve some tough problem. What keeps them going? What makes them persevere? It is the practice of methodological naturalism, the belief that a discoverable explanation must exist and that it is only their ingenuity and skill that is preventing them from finding the solution. Unsolved problems are seen as challenges to the skills of the individual scientist and the scientific community, not as manifestations of god’s workings.

This is what, for example, causes medical researchers to work for years to find causes (and thus possibly cures) for rare and obscure diseases. Part of the reason is the desire to be helpful, part of it is due to personal ambition and career advancement, but an important part is also the belief that a solution exists that lies within their grasp.

It is because of this willingness to persevere in the face of enormous difficulty that science has been able to make the breakthroughs it has. If, at the early signs of difficulty in solving a problem scientists threw up their hands and said “Well, looks like god is behind this one. Let’s give up and move on to something else” then the great discoveries of science that we associate with Newton, Darwin, Einstein, Planck, Heisenberg, etc. would never have occurred.

For example, the motion of the perigee of the moon was a well-known unsolved problem for over sixty years after the introduction of Newtonian physics. It constituted a serious problem that resisted solution for a longer time than the problems in evolution pointed to by IDC advocates. Yet no supernatural explanation was invoked, eventually the problem was solved, and the result was seen as a triumph for Newtonian theory.

So when IDC advocates advocate the abandonment of methodological naturalism, they are not trying to ease just Darwin out of the picture. They are throwing out the operational basis of the entire scientific enterprise.

Philosophical (or ontological) naturalism, as contrasted with methodological naturalism, is the belief that the natural world is all there is, that there is nothing more. Some scientists undoubtedly choose to be philosophical naturalists (and thus atheists) because they see no need to have god in their philosophical framework, but as I said in an earlier posting, others reject that option and stay religious. But this is purely a personal choice made by individual scientists and it has no impact on how they do science, which only involves using methodological naturalism. There is no requirement in science that one must be a philosophical naturalist, and as I alluded to earlier, there is little evidence that Gaylord Simpson was a philosophical naturalist although he definitely was a methodological naturalist.

The question of philosophical naturalism is, frankly, irrelevant to working scientists. Scientists don’t really care if their colleagues are religious or not. I have been around scientists all my life. But apart from my close friends, I have no idea what their religious beliefs are, and even then I have only a vague idea of what they actually believe. I know that some are religious and others are not. Whether a scientist is a philosophical naturalist or not does not affect how his or her work is received by the community. It just does not matter.

But what the IDC advocates want, according to their stated goal of “If things are to improve, materialism needs to be defeated and God has to be accepted as the creator of nature and human beings” is to enforce the requirement that scientists reject both philosophical and methodological naturalism. They are essentially forcing two things on everyone:

  • Requiring people to adopt the IDC religious worldview as their own.
  • Requiring scientists to reject methodological naturalism as a rule of operation for science.

In other words, IDC advocates are not asking us to reject only Darwin or to turn the scientific clock back to the time just prior to Darwin, they want us to go all the way back to before Copernicus, and reject the very methods of science that has enabled it to be so successful. They want us to go back to a time of rampant and unchecked superstition.

This is not a good idea.

What do creationist/ID advocates want-II?

(I am taking a short vacation from new blog posts. Until I begin posting again, which should not be more than a couple of weeks, I will repost some very early ones, updated if necessary. Today’s one is from March 16, 2005, edited and updated.)

We saw in an earlier posting that a key idea of the creationists is that it was the arrival of the ideas of Darwin, Marx, and Freud that led to the undermining of Western civilization.

The basis for this extraordinary charge is the claim that it was these three that ushered in the age of materialism. These three people make convenient targets because, although they were all serious scientific and social scholars, they have all been successfully tarred as purveyors of ideas that have been portrayed as unpleasant or even evil (Darwin for saying that we share a common ancestor with apes, Marx with communism, Freud with sexuality).
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What do creationist/ID advocates want-I?

(I am taking a short vacation from new blog posts. Until I begin posting again, which should not be more than a couple of weeks, I will repost some very early ones, updated if necessary. Today’s one is from February 24, 2005, edited and updated.)

In an earlier posting, I spoke about how those who view Darwin’s ideas as evil see it as the source of the alleged decline in morality. But on the surface, so-called ‘intelligent design creationism’ (or IDC) seems to accept much of evolutionary ideas, reserving the actions of a ‘designer’ for just a very few (five, actually) instances of alleged ‘irreducible complexity’ that occur at the microbiological level.

This hardly seems like a major attack on Darwin since, on the surface, it seems to leave unchallenged almost all of the major ideas of the Darwinian structure such as the non-constancy of species (the basic theory of evolution), the descent of all organisms from common ancestors (branching evolution), the gradualness of evolution (no discontinuities), the multiplication of species, and natural selection.
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Evolution and moral decay

(I am taking a short vacation from new blog posts. Until I begin posting again, which should not be more than a couple of weeks, I will repost some very early ones, updated if necessary. Today’s one is from February 24, 2005, edited and updated.)

In a previous posting, I discussed why some religious people found evolutionary theory so distressing. It was because natural selection implies that human beings were not destined or chosen to be what they are.

While I can understand why this is upsetting to religious fundamentalists who believe they were created specially in God’s image and are thus part of a grand cosmic plan, there is still a remaining puzzle and that is why they are so militant about trying to have evolution not taught in schools or undermining its credibility by inserting fake cautions about it. After all, if a person dislikes evolutionary theory for whatever reason, all they have to do is not believe it.
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