Highway merging and the theory of evolution

Some time ago, I wrote about the best way for traffic to merge on a highway, say when a lane is closed up ahead. There are those drivers who begin to merge as soon as the signs warning of impending closure appear, thus making their lanes clear. Others take advantage of this lane opening up to drive fast right up to the merge point and then try to squeeze into the other lane.

I said that although people who followed the latter strategy were looked upon disapprovingly as queue jumpers, it seemed to me like the most efficient thing to do to optimize traffic flow was to follow the lead of the seemingly anti-social people and stay in the closed lane until the last moment since that had the effect of minimizing the length of the restricted road. To merge earlier meant that one had effectively made the restricted portion longer.
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The consequences of atheism

While atheism is not a philosophy as such, the reasons that one has for being one (mainly, the rejection of those beliefs for which there is no evidence) necessarily lead to certain consequences. Collected together, this set of results may look like a philosophy, but is not really. It is merely the playing out of the consequences of a scientific approach to every aspect of life.

For example, the same arguments that atheists use to reject the existence of god also lead them to the rejection of an afterlife. This has profound consequences for the way one lives and how one relates to others. For me, the fact that this life is all there is makes more imperative the importance of everyone being able to make the best of the one life they have. There is no heavenly compensation to satisfy the yearnings of people who are suffering here and now. All people have a right to, at minimum, adequate food, shelter, clothing, and health care, and there is no excuse for societies not being structured to provide them with those necessities.

Similarly, all people have a right to seek happiness wherever they can and with whomever they wish as long as they are not harming others. Hence gays, lesbians, and transgendered people are entitled to every right enjoyed by others, and atheists oppose objections to their behavior based on reasons like “god considers such acts sinful and they will go to hell” or because some religious text forbids it. (It is only such kinds of reasoning that is rejected. There may be atheists who disapprove of homosexuality on other grounds, such as that it is ‘not natural’ (whatever that may mean), but that is a different issue not involving religion.)

The same reasons that lead atheists to reject god also lead them to reject the idea of an independent soul that can survive the body. The problems of reconciling the idea of a non-material soul (or mind) interacting with the material brain and body are just as great as trying to figure out how a non-material god interacts with the material world. So I would argue that another corollary of being an atheist is to reject the idea of having a soul that can exist independently of the body. One can retain a concept of a ‘soul’ as long as it is merely a euphemism for the mind, a creature of the brain that ceases to exist when a person dies.

The idea that there is no god out there setting the standards of ethical and moral behavior also means that, rather than fighting to see which version of religious morality and behavior should prevail, atheists believe that we have to figure out what are the common bases on which we can live with one another in peace and justice in the world.

So in other words, the fact that atheism correlates with rejection of an afterlife and souls and religious text-based moral and ethical values means that the whole package has the trappings of a philosophy. But actually they are the almost independent consequences of having a philosophical naturalism philosophy that uses a scientific approach (empirical evidence and logical reasoning) to determine which beliefs are worthy of acceptance and which are not.

POST SCRIPT: Michael Moore on Oprah

The video of Oprah Winfrey interviewing Michael Moore on her show about his new film Sicko seems to suggest that she is going to take up the cause of a a single-payer universal health care system. (See the Post Script to this post for a preview and a clip from the film.)

If she does so, this could be a big step towards establishing such a system because the platform she has gives her a formidable ability to mobilize public opinion.

Taking offense (revisited)

There has been an interesting and (as usual) thoughtful set of responses to my earlier post on taking offense to critiques of religion. Instead of responding to each commenter separately as I usually do, in this case I thought I would respond to all collectively, not because they are all saying the same thing, but to make my response more coherent and less fragmented. I would urge readers to read those earlier comments in order to get a better sense of the context of this posting.

When it comes to critiques of religion, I think that the two issues of plausibility and worthiness tend to get conflated. When atheists put religions like Christianity and Judaism and Islam and Hinduism into the same basket as fairies and the Easter bunny, they are raising the issue of plausibility, making the point that all these beliefs suffer from the same lack of evidence for the existence of god and thus are equally implausible. That argument should be responded to on the basis of evidence.

But that is typically not what happens. The issue of relative plausibility is rarely addressed head-on. Instead religious believers tend to shift the focus to one of worthiness, and argue that mainstream religious beliefs have resulted in great things (like highly altruistic self-sacrificial behavior and contributions to culture) while beliefs in the Easter bunny and fairies and the Flying Spaghetti Monster have not, and thus religious ideas are worthy of greater ‘respect’ and should not be lumped with the others. (There is also an indirect implication that if religious ideas are more worthy, they should also be more plausible, but that argument is logically unsound. It should really be backwards, that more plausible ideas are more worthy (in a scientific and not moral sense) of belief.)

But even if we go along with the shift to worthiness, the issue is a wash. No one can deny that religions have inspired great music and poetry and art. But no one can deny that they have also resulted in unspeakable cruelty and murder and destruction. Even if we avoid a crude estimate of relative numbers for each side, religious people tend want to only consider the positive benefits and disown the negative results by saying that the people who did the latter things were really acting from other, baser, motives and were somehow deluded into thinking that they were following god’s will when they were actually working against it.

But if that is the case, then we can say the same thing about the motives of those who do positive things as well, that although they think and say they do it because of god, they are really doing it out of love of music and poetry and humanity and so on. If you accept people’s stated reasons for doing good things at face value, how can you reject their stated reasons for doing bad things?
As for the idea that comparing beliefs in god to Easter bunnies is offensive because it makes religious people look like simpletons, the whole point of my earlier post was to argue that this was not true, that in fact many very smart people over the centuries have believed in religion because they are able to find complex and sophisticated reasons for doing so. Michael Shermer’s words, which I used in that post, are worth quoting again: “Smart people believe weird things because they are skilled at defending beliefs they arrived at for non-smart reasons.“

Recall Pascal Boyer’s incredulity at the Christian theologian’s contempt for Fang beliefs about witches. The Cambridge University theologian had probably put in a lot of effort into creating reasons for believing his own religion and no effort into justifying the Fang beliefs. But there is no reason to think that the Fang people (or those who believe in voodoo or shamanistic or animistic religions) are any dumber or smarter than the Christian theologian or Christians or Jews or Muslims or Hindus in general. The Fang and others have probably striven over centuries into developing reasons why their own beliefs are worthy and the beliefs of others are not.

Recall Jacob Weisberg, who was refreshingly candid as to why he disdained Mormonism while valuing the more traditional religions: “Mormonism is different because it is based on such a transparent and recent fraud. It’s Scientology plus 125 years. Perhaps Christianity and Judaism are merely more venerable and poetic versions of the same. But a few eons makes a big difference. The world’s greater religions have had time to splinter, moderate, and turn their myths into metaphor.” (my emphasis)

The key factor at play here is not the intelligence of the believer but the level of desire to believe. If people really need to or want to believe something, they will find reasons to do so. The smarter people are, the more sophisticated and complex their reasons will be. And if they were to shift their considerable talents to other beliefs such as fairies and the Easter bunny and the Flying Spaghetti Monster, over time they will be equally successful.

POST SCRIPT: Preview of Sicko

Check out the preview of the new Michael Moore film Sicko on the scandal that is the US health industry:

You can also see a scene from the film, where Moore visits an English hospital:

The film is being released on June 29, 2007. I am definitely going to see it as soon as it comes out.

Is there an atheist philosophy?

I received a private email from a reader of this blog asking what exactly an atheist is and pointing out that my critiques of god and religion are written with a primarily western and Christian concept of a personal god in mind. I was asked how I felt about eastern concepts derived from religions such as Buddhism and Taoism, which the reader points out, do not require belief in a personal god.

It is true that I have focused primarily on Christianity. This is because it is the religion I was brought up in and is the one I am most familiar with. I have also studied it in some depth and am aware of much of its subtleties and apologetics, and of the differences in beliefs among its various sects. If I wrote about other religions, I would be necessarily less familiar with their details and more likely to commit gross generalizations that might be considered unfair by followers of those religions.

But one can make some general statements about atheism. As far as I am concerned, atheism rejects the idea of any supernatural entity that can influence the world. It does not have to just be a personal god in the western sense. Even if the word god is not used and the idea is called a ‘force’ or ‘principle’ or ‘consciousness’ or something else, as long as it represents some non-material intelligent entity that influences the material world, an atheist is likely to reject it for the same reasons he or she rejects god, unless some convincing positive evidence is produced in its favor.

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Taking offense

I have written before (See here, here, here, and here.) that one of the odd characteristics about the discussions about the new atheism is the frequently made charge that the new atheists are ‘rude’ and saying ‘offensive’ things about religion.

I myself have said things that may warrant this charge. I have frequently compared belief in god to belief in Santa Claus, the Easter bunny, and the tooth fairy. Religious people may have got offended by this, thinking that I am trivializing their deeply held beliefs. But this reaction itself suggests what a privileged position religion has long held in public discourse, trying to force critics into muting their statements. It is not as if I am making ad hominem attacks on believers or calling them names.

When I compare belief in god to things like the Flying Spaghetti Monster, I am making the point that they all have the same level of empirical evidence in support of them and that the same kinds of arguments are used in their favor. Atheists are merely taking these arguments of religious believers to their logical conclusions as a means of showing their weaknesses, which is a perfectly valid and time-honored form of reasoning. Yet people take one belief (their own particular variant of god) seriously and dismiss the others, making this an interesting study of what kind of thinking enables them to do so.

In a discussion on British radio Richard Dawkins (author of the book The God Delusion) picks up on a point made by another scientist Lord Robert Winston who suggests that Dawkins is insulting religion by calling belief in god a delusion. Dawkins responds:

There is a double standard here, that if we were just having an argument about some scientific matter we could argue quite vigorously and you wouldn’t feel insulted, you wouldn’t feel offended. But there’s something about religion that feels entitled to take offense if you just say something that would be comparatively mild in another context. I can’t help feeling that offense is something that people take when they’ve run out of arguments.

Dawkins makes a good point. In politics or science or other debates, you do not usually say you are offended if someone criticizes your position. It is usually done only when you have no adequate response. For example, in 2005 Amnesty International leveled a serious charge against the US: “We have documented that the U.S. government is a leading purveyor and practitioner of the odious human rights violation. . . As evidence of torture and widespread cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment mounts, it is more urgent than ever that the U.S. government bring the Guantanamo Bay detention camp and any other facilities it is operating outside the USA into full compliance with international law and standards. The only alternative is to close them down.”

When questioned about this Dick Cheney said he was “offended” by the comment. But why should we care if he is offended? His feelings are not the issue here. But what he was trying to do was make the issue off-limits to questioning, because he had no real arguments with which to respond.

When Kirk Cameron tried to ridicule evolutionary theory by suggesting that it should predict the existence of animals like ‘croc-o-ducks’, with the body of a duck and the head of a crocodile, I did not get offended and say “How dare you, sir!” in the fine manner of Victorian melodramas. I was simply amused and countered by pointing out how his statement shows his ignorance of the theory.

This tendency to give religious views shelter from criticism is the reason that one finds periodic eruptions of religious anger and even riots over perceived slights. The angry response by some Christians over the ‘chocolate Jesus’, the ‘elephant dung Mary’, and the ‘crucifix in urine’, the rioting by some Muslims over the Danish cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad, and the anger of some Hindus in India because of the depiction of naked Hindu deities by an acclaimed Indian painter M. F. Hussain are all signs that religious sensibilities have been accorded far too much deference. The more deference one gives to someone or some ideas, the more prickly sensitivity such people exhibit, resulting in them demanding even greater deference. It is a very harmful feedback loop.

Francis Crick, co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, said: “One of the most frightening things in the Western world, and in this country in particular, is the number of people who believe in things that are scientifically false. If someone tells me that the earth is less than 10,000 years old, in my opinion he should see a psychiatrist.” (Thanks to MachinesLikeUs for the quote.)

Should creationists get offended by the suggestion that they need professional help? Note that even Crick did not explicitly say that he would actually tell the person that he should see a psychiatrist. To gratuitously tell people that they are borderline psychotic, when they merely hold a particular set of views and seem to pose no danger to themselves or to others, would be offensive. But there is nothing wrong with publicly saying that certain beliefs are irrational.

If anyone we knew said that they heard voices telling them what to do and that they believed in invisible things like magic unicorns, we would be more concerned and may try and get them some help. But if they say identical things about god, we give them a pass. The fact that we do not usually tell people that they should see a psychiatrist when they say that they think the world is less than 10,000 years old shows that religious beliefs already receive considerable deference and leeway.

The proper response to this demand for excessive deference to religious beliefs is not to go out of one’s way to gratuitously insult people. That usually does not achieve anything worthwhile. But at the same time, people should not be allowed to say “I’m offended!” and expect that to be taken as a serious argument.

So when atheists suggest that the beliefs of Christianity have the same intellectual and scientific stature as belief in the Flying Spaghetti Monster, the response should not be to get in a huff but to show why the two beliefs deserve to be treated differently. To merely say one is offended is, as Dawkins points out, to tacitly concede that one has run out of arguments.

“So, do you support the troops?”

That was the question asked by the perky young female TV news reporter holding the microphone near my face.

I must admit that I was surprised by the question. It seemed like such a non sequitur.

Perhaps I should back up a bit and explain how it got to that point. This happened to me four years ago but I was reminded of it during the recent discussions in congress concerning the supplemental appropriations for funding the war in Iraq when those who opposed it were accused, as usual, of not supporting the troops.

Back in 2003, just before the invasion of Iraq was launched, a group of students, faculty and staff at Case Western Reserve University opposed to the war had been holding weekly public vigils in Cleveland, Ohio. March 5th, 2003 was the day of the worldwide student moratorium against the war and on that bitterly cold, windy, dreary day, we were standing at a busy intersection holding up signs and urging people to honk their horns to show opposition to the war, which many obligingly did. The media news crews were present, looking for sound bites.

My colleague and I were holding a “Not in my name” banner as the reporter and her cameraman approached and asked me why I opposed the war. That was an easy question. Although not too media savvy, I knew enough not to try and give a lengthy, complex, or subtle answer.

“Because I believe a war is justified only in self defense or in the case of imminent threat and neither condition holds with respect to Iraq” I replied.

I waited for the next question, expecting a follow-up, maybe asking for clarification or elaboration or justification or even challenging my assertion. All those would have been natural continuations of the dialogue.

Instead I got the “So, do you support the troops?” question.

I paused. “What do you mean?” I eventually asked, looking into her eyes to see if I could decipher the train of thought that had caused her to ask a question that had little relationship to my response. All my years of teaching has helped me realize that behind the seemingly random questions and comments that a student would sometimes make, there usually lay some complicated but relevant train of that that could, under careful questioning, be brought to the surface. The student and I both learned something from that process of intellectual excavation.

So my question to the TV reporter was the first step in that process of deeper understanding. But she looked blankly at me, as if my question made no sense to her.

It then dawned on me what was going on. This was not the kind of dialogue I was used to with students. She already had in her mind a set of questions that, to her, represented journalism. And in that fixed mental template, to be against the war was to undermine the troops.

Just a little reflection (and comparative analysis) should persuade anyone that this is just plain silly. Suppose that we had been protesting the President’s tax policies. Would anyone think to ask us “So, do you support the government’s accountants?” If we were protesting the government’s welfare policies, would the media ask us “So, do you support the administrators in the welfare departments?” The “Do you support the troops?” question has the same lack of logic. Troops are just the agents that the government uses to implement its war policy. Opposing the policy has nothing to do with one’s attitude towards the agents who have no choice concerning it.

But it is too much to expect the media to appreciate this. They will continue to ask the question and those of us opposed to the slaughter in Iraq had better be prepared to answer it.

So this is the answer that I gave the TV reporter then. “I don’t want the troops to die and I don’t want them to be made into killers in an unjustified war. I would like them to be brought home.”

Is this a good answer? I don’t know. Did it make it into the five-second clip that would be shown on the evening news? I don’t know that either because I long ago gave up watching TV news, especially the local ones. The encounter with the reporter reminded me why.

POST SCRIPT: Ron Paul interviewed by Bill Maher

Rudy Giuliani may have done congressman Ron Paul a big favor when, during the first Republican candidates debate, he tried to bully Paul into withdrawing his statement that the attacks of 9/11 were a consequence of resentment over US foreign policies. As a result of that exchange, Paul has gone from being an obscure congressman to receiving a lot of media attention, most recently being interviewed by Bill Maher.

In this interview, Paul comes across as a soft-spoken, thoughtful, and well-read person who actually knows history. He says that the goal of the US should not be to be loved or hated around the world but to be respected, and that would be achieved if it sets its own house in order by restoring liberties at home and avoiding interfering in other countries.

Is the Republican party ready for such a person as its presidential nominee?

How to talk to religious believers: A guide for atheists-5

In previous posts, I wrote about how to talk to the devout concerned believer, the devout offended believer, and the fundamentalist religious intellectual when you tell people you are an atheist. Today I continue with the last case (that of religious moderates) that was begun yesterday.

People can be persuaded to relinquish, at least intellectually, small-scale beliefs like superstitions, although the reflexive habits associated with them may be hard to give up. Deeply held religious beliefs are not like that, though, even though they have the same lack of evidence as superstitions. Believing in god has enormous ramifications and why people strongly hold on to that belief requires some explanation and understanding. Those beliefs are far more closely intertwined with people’s self-identity and are not as easily conceded to be irrational. In fact, people will go to great lengths to make them appear rational. Why this is so is the fundamental question.

In trying to answer why otherwise rational people believe in such a hugely irrational idea like a god, there are certain ideas that are not helpful in reaching an understanding. For example, just as there is no evidence that religious people are more moral or ethical than atheists, there is also no evidence that atheists are smarter than religious people. So we should rule out differences in intelligence in explaining the difference. Belief in god is irrational but that does not mean that people who believe in god are irrational in general.

I speculate that the problem is that more sophisticated religious believers know that they believe things that are not supported by any empirical evidence but have found reasons to come to terms with it. Michael Shermer in his book Why People Believe Weird Things (2002) puts it well when he says that the people who believe weird things are not stupid. He says: “Smart people believe weird things because they are skilled at defending beliefs they arrived at for non-smart reasons.” (p. 283).

Almost all our religious beliefs and superstitions are acquired early in life, as young children, for non-smart reasons. Children arrive at their beliefs about god, Santa Claus, the Easter bunny, fairies, ghosts, etc. not on the basis of a reasoned judgment based on empirical evidence, but simply by trusting that the authority figures in their lives (especially parents, teachers, and priests) are telling them the truth. As we get older, some of these beliefs tend to get undermined and disappear while others remain. The difference lies in the level of effort made by the people around us to sustain the beliefs.

Some parents will go to extraordinary lengths to perpetuate the myth of Santa Claus while their children are young but then wean them away from this belief as they get older, because Santa Claus is not a belief sanctioned by adult society and a grown up who believes in him will be considered nuts. The same is true with the Easter bunny. As the child grows up and finds that none of the adults around him really believes in those things, he relinquishes the beliefs with perhaps only a faint nostalgic regret for a loss of childhood innocence

But that is not the case with beliefs about god. Because the adults around him continue to believe, the child continues to be given reasons to believe in the absence of any evidence and even in the face of massive counterevidence. And the reasons for belief become more and more elaborate the older people get and the more sophisticated they are.

Shermer describes a 1981 study by psychologist David Perkins who found “a positive relationship between intelligence and the ability to justify beliefs, and a negative relationship between intelligence and the ability to consider other beliefs as viable. That is to say, smart people are better at rationalizing their beliefs with reasoned arguments, but as a consequence they are less open to considering other positions. So, although intelligence does not affect what you believe, it does influence how beliefs are defended after the beliefs are acquired for non-smart reasons.” (p. 302)

If children are not taught their religious beliefs when they are young, they are very unlikely to adopt them when they are old. The very fact that the religion of children is almost always the same as that of their parents, and that they have no difficulty in dismissing the beliefs of other religions as weird and unbelievable, is a testimony to the power of this childhood indoctrination, because their own religious beliefs are learned when they were impressionable children, unquestioningly accepting the authority of their parents, while they usually encounter the beliefs of other religions later in life. The fact that parents usually teach their young children that other religions are wrong helps to maintain this allegiance.

The people who have defended the existence of god and the afterlife in the comments to my previous postings on why belief in god is irrational or the afterlife are clearly people who have arrived at sophisticated reasons for believing in both. And they are helped by the fact that many very smart people (such as theologians, philosophers, and other scholars) have devoted their entire lives to find reasons to continue to believe in the absence of evidence and in the face of massive counterevidence. As a result, one finds the curious result that people find the supernatural elements and bizarre practices of their own religions quite plausible while the equally supernatural elements and bizarre practices of other religions are seen as unbelievable.

Recently, former Republican congressman Tom DeLay said the following: “God has spoken to me. I listen to God and what I’ve heard is that I’m supposed to devote myself to rebuilding the conservative base of the Republican Party.” When religious people say things like this, there is a surprising lack of curiosity among those who claim to believe in the same religion. You would think they would ask questions like: “Really? How exciting! Was it a male voice? What did his voice sound like? Did he speak in English? Did he have an accent? Where did you hear the voice? Did you take down the exact words? Was anyone else there to hear it?” And so on. But they don’t because, I suspect, asking such questions would expose the silliness of the whole idea of god “speaking” to people. Religious moderates have learned to keep things vague and unspecific and not ask probing questions, so that they can believe what they like and shift their beliefs when convenient.

This illustrates how important it is to religion that children be indoctrinated early and that they be brought up in an environment of like-minded believers. This also explains why ‘mixed’ marriages, where the parents are practicing members of different religions, are frowned upon by religious institutions, because children in such households are unlikely to receive the kind of thorough indoctrination necessary to maintain religious beliefs into adulthood.

How to talk to religious believers: A guide for atheists-4

In previous posts, I wrote about how to talk to the devout concerned believer, the devout offended believer, and the fundamentalist religious intellectual when you tell people you are an atheist. Today I will deal with the last case.

The liberal or moderate believer: The hardest group for the atheist to deal might be, strangely enough, the people who are religious believers of the ‘moderate’ and ‘liberal’ variety. This may seem odd because such people tend to be rational and scientific about almost all aspects of their lives, so one would think that it would be easy to have a dialogue with them. But we know that often the most severe disagreements and arguments occur within families or like-minded groups, mainly because we understand each other so well and know each other’s weaknesses.

The reason for the awkwardness between atheists and liberal or moderate religious people arises for the same reason. Most people grow up with the same beliefs as their families and their communities. Once you become an atheist, the scales fall from your eyes and you realize that many of the religious beliefs you used to cherish make no sense at all anymore. But the rest of your views and values have not changed much and the people around you still are the same. So you have the difficult challenge of trying to understand how you could have unquestioningly believed all this stuff for so long and also why the people around you still continue to do so.

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How to talk to religious believers: A guide for atheists-3

In previous posts, I wrote about how to talk to the devout concerned believer and the devout offended believer when you tell people you are an atheist.

Today, I will address the religious fundamentalist intellectual: These people are the most fun to deal with because there is usually no rancor or personal element involved in the disagreements. These are people who have essentially constructed an alternate reality. They believe that the Bible is literally true, that Noah’s flood and ark are historical events, that humans lived alongside dinosaurs, that the Earth and the universe is less than 10,000 years old, and so on. They have satisfied themselves that what they believe can be substantiated and will try to convince you of it. They are usually not offended by you being an atheist but are convinced that you are mistaken. If you are lucky enough to engage such people in conversation and have the time, you should probe their beliefs and why they believe them and you will witness the unfolding of a fascinating and complex set of hypotheses that are invoked to explain why their beliefs are so out of step with the results of mainstream science.
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How to talk to religious believers: A guide for atheists-2

In the previous post, I discussed how to deal with the concerned devout believer. Today I deal with a more difficult case.

The offended devout believer: Like the concerned believer, this reaction will come from someone who is devoutly and unquestioningly religious. But their reaction will be to take strong offense at the idea that you have rejected beliefs that they hold dear. Some of them will be people who are close to you. Parents often fall into this category since they are the ones who taught you their religious beliefs and your rejection of the beliefs will be interpreted also as a rejection of them.

Julia Sweeney, who grew up as a devout Catholic, in her show Letting Go of God describes her parents’ reaction when she said she was an atheist.
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