Comments by _J_

651. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath

Comment #50123 by _J_ on June 15, 2007 at 6:59 am

653. Comment #50075 by Downunder:

Just like to agree with Philip1978: I enjoyed reading your post, and am grateful to you for sharing your thoughts and experience. Some thought-provoking material in there. (The end was quite scary, but I think I can sympathise with your motivations and understand the reasoning. Still, hopelessly naïve as I may be, I was a bit happier with the 'LIVE and LET LIVE' part!) Thanks for being interesting.

Dianelos, I'm shoulder to shoulder with Steve99 here. Your argument with Dr Benway is proceeding on assumptions that are heavily embattled in posts that remain unanswered. I'm struggling to fight off the mental image of Wile E. Coyote running off a cliff edge, his feet pedalling away in open space during the interval before he looks down…

652. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath

Comment #50043 by _J_ on June 14, 2007 at 5:04 pm

Dianelos,

Hello, my friend (or, at least, pleasant discussion partner). It's time for me to take Steve99's lead and stop saying new things in favour of requiring you to respond to old ones. You have yourself invited this approach and, given the clamour of voices you're responding to, I think this is very sensible.

Everyone else - perhaps we should have a New Comments Moratorium for a day or two, to allow Dianelos a chance to do justice to some of what we're already requesting of him...?

For my part, I'd be very grateful to you if you could go through my comment 624 and respond to the points raised, including those that it refers back to from four other comments. (I also remember you saying, in your comment 567 'Interesting post; I intend to comment in detail in the future', apparently of my comment 564 (not 548, which is one of your own) – and I'd love to learn what you had in mind.)

Anyway, I'll leave you to it. Thanks for sticking at it.

653. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath

Comment #50035 by _J_ on June 14, 2007 at 4:10 pm

Paul Creber, Comment 641 ( #50002):

Ah – thanks – well spotted. On reflection, I think I just failed really badly in expressing myself. 'Most important to know about reality' is straight from Dianelos' own mouth, but I think what he's actually doing is finding sufficient grounds and rationalisations to support his personal belief on the matter. But I suspect people got that point irrespective of my failure to make it clear, as you did.

I should add, though, that Dianelos' approach to all this suggests to me that, in contrast to a lot of people we discuss with, he might be less wedded to the rationalisation of immovable assumptions, and instead the holder of a couple of slightly unusual (but quite well informed) perspectives that facilitate his belief. Which makes debate all the more tantalisingly potentially fruitful…

(He also makes me feel extremely ignorant on a lot of subjects.)

By the way, Paul: very nice of you to say such nice things! Just noticed your comment on the Winston thread, too (which I hadn't been paying attention to, and which I now see was challenging David on his video long before I responded to it. Ah, well.). Thank you.

Your comment may show up on the Free Church of Scotland site yet. It can take a few days, sometimes. (The only response that has thus far appeared is that someone there now wants me to explain what I mean by 'life'. C'est la vie.)

654. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath

Comment #50031 by _J_ on June 14, 2007 at 3:47 pm

648. Comment #50026 by Dr Benway

Fabulous post, concisely, affectingly and hauntingly phrased. Just thought I'd say.

655. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath

Comment #50025 by _J_ on June 14, 2007 at 3:21 pm

628. Comment #49964 by Dianelos Georgoudis:

I suppose you are trying here to test the coherence of the God concept.

Well, sort of. What I was angling for, though, was to expose a problem with your apparent perspective on consciousness – which helps to lead you to god – by noting that it rightfully applies to him, too, as a conscious being. Your description of god in this post ('that God is personal (i.e. a conscious being), objectively good, and willing as well as powerful/intelligent enough to create us and cause all experience we have') seems to confirm that this sort of thinking should logically apply to him. Particularly so because you do not regard him as omniscient. He must be aware of the boundaries of his consciousness, even as we are. So we find ourselves in a kind of infinite Russian Dolls arrangement of gods, where every deity is the creation of a greater consciousness. And you thought the Many Worlds theory sounded odd.

Moreover, though, I was having a bit of fun. One can't write overlong, po-faced essays all the time. I hope your choosing to respond to this doesn't mean you won't be addressing the matters raised in my other posts. Because, respect you as I do, I think your argument is in some trouble, and I haven't seen you get out of it yet…

656. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath

Comment #49956 by _J_ on June 14, 2007 at 8:48 am

625. Comment #49950 by epeeist

That's a nice idea!

I wonder if god, in the conception of those who believe in him, ever speculates about what lies outside his own consciousness?:

'DON'T BE SILLY, I'M GOD'

'ON THE OTHER HAND, HOW WOULD I KNOW…?'

'I KNOW EVERYTHING.'

'BUT HOW COULD I KNOW WHETHER MAYBE I DIDN'T KNOW EVERYTHING? LOGICALLY, I MEAN?'

'NEVER DID WORK OUT WHERE I CAME FROM, AFTER ALL'

'ALTHOUGH "BEFORE" IS RATHER MEANINGLESS WHEN YOU'RE "OUTSIDE TIME"'

'AS MUST THIS THOUGHT PROCESS THEREFORE BE, OF COURSE.'

'I CAN'T CARRY ON LIKE THIS. I NEED A HOBBY. LET'S CREATE SOMETHING.'

657. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath

Comment #49949 by _J_ on June 14, 2007 at 8:17 am

Right then, Dianelos,

Have read your posts since yesterday (thanks for the two responses) and everyone else's in between (so that's where all my time goes).

First: well done. You're nothing if not tenacious, and you're also clear, polite and apparently well motivated. Probably this is why we're all still talking to you.

Responses to some things you've said to me:

587. Comment #49772 by Dianelos Georgoudis

the failure to account for objective goodness appear to be insurmountable problems for naturalism

Steve99 dealt nicely with this in the very next comment. Ta, Steve! Others have since joined in and added more. Ta, others!

[theistic worldviews] avoid naturalism's problems without losing any of naturalism's usefulness (including science, technology, etc)… So I think that here and now it's much more reasonable to abandon naturalism and adopt some of these other worldviews.

No, whilst I really do admire – and largely share – your live-and-let-live attitude, I can't let this detail pass. Science is a naturalistic methodology of reasoning from observed phenomenon to minimal hypothesis, of proof and disproof. Supernaturalistic worldviews, by contrast, can be crafted to fit precisely with naturalistic observations, but they do not provide the same basis for gaining practical, applicable, productive knowledge. This really is quite an important point – and, happily, even if I've made a pig's ear of trying to express it here, it is also a demonstrable one. Once again, science actually works. Supplanting naturalism with supernaturalism as the dominant mode for uncovering knowledge among our scientists (or ex-scientists, were they to assume supernaturalism as a working practice) would be a disaster.

…after all according to Many Worlds there is a huge number of universes in which you and I live and resurrections happen all the time (maybe steve99 would like to confirm this)

And your point is…? Were our world one of these worlds, then we too would see resurrections happening all the time. Fine. We don't. So it isn't. This doesn't rule out the possibility that others are. Still personal incredulity, here.

I know of no argument to justify the belief that our continuously improved modeling of phenomena through science will tend to allow for only one description of the physical reality that produces them. So unless you can suggest such an argument the reasonable assumption is that naturalism will never agree on one description of physical reality, which is kind of a serious letdown.

False dichotomy. Acknowledging that we can't assume that a single explanation will emerge doesn't mean that we can therefore assume that one won't emerge. We simply don't assume one way or another. We keep trying to find out and we see what happens. Again, this is how science (and naturalism) works: minimal assumptions that we then try to disprove before proceeding. Unwarranted assumptions are the province of supernaturalism.

In any case a worldview based on the existence of an objectively good God who created us and our experiential environment with the goal that we attain virtue on personal merit represents, as far as I am concerned, what is most important to know about reality.

You, me and Richard Dawkins all agree on this. The reason Richard turned the full force of his decades of scientific experience on religion is because he regards the possible existence of a god as a matter of the utmost significance. He has said so himself, repeatedly. I agree, and that's why I have spent more time and effort on trying to reason this matter out than any other.

But 'most important to know about reality' is in direct conflict with 'most important to show to be true aboutreality' – which is what you appear to be doing. The latter is selective argumentation to support a prior assumption. The former is a serious attempt to discover whether something is actually true, and an honest acceptance of the results of that enquiry. These are dangerous things to confuse, but things that theists do confuse as a matter of course.

On the one [hand] God would not want to give us the experience of a Mickey-Mouse or a demon-haunted physical environment, on the other hand God would also not want to give us the experience of a physical environment that is so elegant and unproblematic that people could easily believe it is objectively real and would not be motivated to look beyond it in wonder.

Retrospective rationalisation. Define god to fit what you find and, lo and behold, he fits what you find. Not persuasive.

Here's another one for you. God exists, and will reveal Itself to us only after we have given up on It. It has deliberately hidden Its existence, creating an apparently godless world, and has also inspired some or all of the myriad religions. Only when we have demonstrated our ability to conquer our inclination to divide according to unjustified supernaturalist fantasies and have instead become a global race united in a shared concern for the welfare of life and respect for existence as we find it, will God emerge from behind Its divine arras, applauding our achievements and judging us finally mature enough to accept Its revelations. A hypothesis that is wholly possible, entirely compatible with the world we observe and totally supportive of naturalistic enquiry – but also completely superfluous. (If you'd like to subscribe to it, by the way, you're welcome. It's not copyrighted.)

603. Comment #49860 by Dianelos Georgoudis:

Do you think it more likely that God, being benevolent, would provide exactly the sort of evidence that is also used by conjurers, con-artists, and proselytisers of myriad other bogus religions?

No, I don't think that's likely at all. In fact I did never claim that such is the case.

No one would consciously make this claim. Benny Hinn does not trick millions of dollars out of people by prefacing his performances with a confession that he is using cheap suggestion and emotional manipulation. I suggest that you simply haven't recognised that you are relying on such a position. 'Look,' says the preacher 'see how my interpretation of god fits neatly into the universe we behold. Notice how perfectly it reinforces your morality, how reassuringly it assuages your fears, how beautifully it adds a sense of purpose to your life. Be afraid of how much bleaker life might appear without it.' Details aside, the same techniques are available to any conjurer or con-artist. Evidence, please.

What kind of experiential environment would a benevolent, and powerful, and intelligent God want to give us? (But not what kind of environment we would like God to give us.) Does this kind of environment contradict the one we find ourselves in? If so this counts as evidence against the existence of God. Does it fit? Then this counts as evidence for the existence of God.

Au contraire. The world we are in is exactly consistent with one that has no god, but in which people – for a variety of naturalistically investigable reasons – tend to invent gods. The supposition of a god is a superfluous addition, an open door to religiously inspired abuses, and a wasteful distraction from the ongoing pursuit of knowledge.

Recap of standing issues

You've got plenty to deal with from some of the very good comments other people have been making. Also, I stand by my earlier assertions to you, that:

- You are actually applying naturalism as far as it suits you and inconsistently switching to supernaturalistic fabrication when it suits you. (564 and thereafter)
- Your supernaturalist interpretations are deliberately fashioned to imitate a naturalistically derived world view, but are incapable on their own strength of making the same reliable observations and predications about the world that a naturalistic perspective would (570 and 526)
- You are failing to recognise that when you reject naturalistic principles and Occam's Razor, you leave yourself without an operational selection criterion for your supernaturalistic hypotheses, leaving your version of god in direct competition with an infinity of other, equally unfounded, explanations (most of my posts)
- Your point about the brain as not being a reasonable source of consciousness falls foul of these errors. (570)
- Your exposure of a 'naturalistic fallacy' is itself a fallacious claim. (576)

(Tried to make those comment numbers hyperlinks, but ended up with long ugly addresses. Gave up. No HTML skills. Sorry.)

Two more...

...to add to these, partly in response to some of your more recent posts:

Objectivisim and consciousness. You have pointed out that objective observations ultimately reduce to subjective ones. This is true, as Steve99 acknowledged. However, this doesn't give you a carte blanche for throwing the whole lot in the bin and accepting whatever subjective data you choose.

The scientific method is a practical reaction to this same realisation. One scientist makes a subjective observation. She attempts to use to make a prediction. She attempts to find her observation unreliable. Once she has found an observation that seems to hold true, she exposes it to a large network of scientists who will then all apply their own subjective observations. If the observation remains reliable throughout, we tentatively grant it 'objective truth' status.

The possibility that future observations might raise contradictions is recognised, and today's 'objective truth' might need to be modified or scrapped in view of future data. Indeed, there is no such thing as absolutely iron-clad objective truth. But we have a working equivalent, achieved through the above process.

This is the same approach which puts paid to all your 'What if reality is like the Matrix?'-type arguments. We make our observations, we compare them with one another's and with earlier ones, and we draw our conclusions. Maybe the world isn't, according to some type of Platonic form of objectivity, 'really' what it seems to be – but so long as it behaves as though it is, that's good enough. We cannot, self-evidently, explore or confidently hypothesise beyond this. When our observations lead us to suspect an alternative explanation, we do so. This is how we can accept the bounds of consciousness and nevertheless live our lives according to a pretty reliable, and ever-advancing, understanding of reality.

(And don't take issue with the word 'reality' there. Suppose 'real' reality is something none of us get, and all living things are actually stuck in some shared delusion. (Arguably, this is a fair way of describing how our brains process and understand stimuli.) What of this? In all practically useful regards, this delusion is reality. If we have no means of accessing the 'real' thing, then we have no way of knowing it to exist at all, and no right to propose seriously that it does. It's not even clear what we would be talking about if we were to do so.)

Supernaturalism. Thanks for your explanation of what you mean by 'supernatural' in Comment 604. (#49863):

No, I use "supernatural" to denote anything we have reason to believe exists and that lies beyond the physical phenomena we experience and all existents we posit in order to explain them, i.e. lies beyond the "nature" that science studies. As I argued in a previous post this includes subjective experiences, such as our experience of red.

I don't see why 'our experience of red' lies 'beyond the "nature" that science studies'. Eyes, wavelengths and brains are all natural phenomena available for scientific study. I admit that the (philosophical, it seems to me) question of 'what constitutes redness' bends my mind in a way that makes me unable to imagine what an answer for it might look like. (This makes me suspect that I may be asking a slightly bogus question of myself…) But I don't see how positing some provider of redness that lurks beyond the observable sphere of reality achieves anything other than moving the question behind a protective screen of additional complication. I certainly don't see anything to justify this position.

the fundamental ingredient of reality is experience and that the physical world of physical phenomena is only a part of that larger reality that consists of experience. Further, this larger world of experience is structured or ordered by the presence of an overarching conscious being, a person of objective goodness who causes all our particular conscious experiences, and whom for reasons of consistence I call "God".

I have yet to see how you can justify any of these claims.

I put it to you that the above arguments I have raised, and the many others levelled by other contributors to this thread, should seriously undermine your confidence in asserting that the existence we observe ourselves to live in does anything reliably to suggest this 'larger world' or this god-being. And, that to submit to the sort of reasoning that allows you to support such a worldview logically necessitates you to accept infinite other equally valid (or invalid) hypotheses.

I think you underestimate the extent to which you in fact rely on naturalistic science throughout every day of your life, and that you are unconscious of the extent to which your purported worldview fundamentally betrays and undermines this.

I'm off to see if newatheist and alovrin are still in the pub.

658. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath

Comment #49930 by _J_ on June 14, 2007 at 6:26 am

622. Comment #49928 by newatheist

Steve99, _J_, et al, you can have him. Come on Alovrin, let's go to the pub. I'll buy you a pint.

Oh god, I know that feeling! And, if you're getting the first round in I might be there too...shortly.

But Dianelos is such a nice chap and seems to be working very hard at this and I just can't help but feel that he has it within him to see what's going on here.

It'd be nice to think that he might also turn up before last orders...

(Nothing patronising there, by the way, Dianelos! Just a sort of an optimistic invitation, really.)

659. A Compass That Can Clash With Modern Life

Comment #49760 by _J_ on June 13, 2007 at 9:15 am

Secularists have infiltrated the fatwa-issuing scholars. They are setting out to destroy Islam from the inside, one Onionesque absurdity at a time.

If only...

660. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath

Comment #49744 by _J_ on June 13, 2007 at 8:01 am

578. Comment #49723 by Dianelos Georgoudis

Getting carried away, I want to jump in and dispute the responses you've just made to Steve99. (Hope you don't mind, Steve99 – I'm sure it won't stop you dealing with them all beautifully yourself). I know you're overworked here, Dianelos. I'll just do bullet points:

1 – Your comments about the world as a god-made set of challenges to accrue virtue don't really dispel Steve99's challenges. I can't see your basis for dismissing his 'it could equally well be about wickedness' argument. Logically, it could. You see your life as being about gaining virtue (Where does your definition of 'virtue' come from, incidentally? Is it at all like morality, which appears not to have its origins in divine revelation?) and you thereby attribute your priorities to your god. In this vein, a glutton could see life as a god-created challenge to consume enormous amounts of food, or a mammonist could decide that it's all about gathering material wealth. 'That doesn't fit with the way I feel about life' doesn't negate the validity of these alternative perspectives, which are founded on the same type of reasoning as yours.

2 – all of your remarks about, for example, the Many Worlds theory sound like variations on the theme of 'I just can't believe that!' – the Argument from Personal Incredulity. Can you actually give some reason as to why you find it so implausible? Furthermore, I dub thee a hypocrite (don't take offence, though – we're all hypocrites somewhere along the line) when you finish off your argument with:

Why, suppose it turns out that we live in the Matrix like in the movie. That does not contradict science in any way, does it?

Yes, true, We Lost A Fight With Robots And Now They Are (in some way that surely offends the laws of physics) Using Us As Batteries Whilst Our Consciousnesses Languish In A Simulation is within the field of possible explanations, if we apply no reasonable selective criteria in our search for answers. There's no point pursuing this hypothesis because there's nothing to indicate it – or the infinite other non-evident theories of existence – to be true.

I don't know what the basis of the Many Worlds theory is. But there's no pressure on me to accept it as true. It's a contested area. We don't know those answers yet. And, I gather, the theory is helpful in providing potential explanations for difficult questions, whereas the Robots, Long Coats and Sunglasses theory gives us diddly-squat.

3 – you accuse Steve99 of using 'the naturalist fallacy'. Happily, this is the same 'fallacy' that I have attempted to show you is nonsense, in Comment 576 (#49711). If you can show me where I'm wrong, then maybe it stands as a response to Steve. Otherwise…

4 – continuing from the above two points, you try to turn the 'fallacy' on Steve99, saying:

I trust you believe that the physical universe objectively exists. Now I could suggest how this belief has evolved in your brain or what psychological needs it fulfils, but even if I were right it would not somehow imply that your belief in the objective existence of the physical universe is therefore wrong.

You have before suggested somewhere that we all tend to accept the existence of objective reality 'on faith'. You were wrong there and you're wrong here. We operate according to a set of assumptions which derive from and support a hypothesis that 'the physical universe objectively exists' because that hypothesis works and doesn't require us to imagine anything unsupported by our observations. On the day my kettle turns into a toad and Allah turns up selling tiny belly-dancers on my doorstep, I will revise this hypothesis; ie, show me that my belief is wrong, and I'll find it wrong. Show me that it is insufficient, and I'll find it insufficient. Say 'Yes, but this wildly more speculative version is also carefully contrived to avoid contradicting your hypothesis and is therefore equally valid', and I'll smile reassuringly and avoid making any sudden movements.

5 –

naturalism and all its incoherencies.

I'm still not seeing these! Naturalism has only ever appeared incoherent in your posts when you have given an inadequate expression of it. Similarly, your supernaturalism has only ever appeared plausible to the degree that you have fashioned it to imitate true naturalism. Please find some incoherencies we can agree on before bandying this phrase around as if it means something.

6 –

Suppose a fundamentalist Christian would argue that God did in fact create the universe in 6 days about 6,000 years ago, and included much older looking geological strata and fossils (not to mention the background radiation) in order to test our faith in his holy book. There is nothing logically wrong with that worldview and no objective evidence that contradicts it, but still I trust we both reject it because it is too implausible in comparison with other available worldviews.

You frequently disregard things because they are 'too implausible', whilst buttressing your claims for Dianelos' God with assertions that he is 'plausible'. The word 'plausible' doesn't say much without some explanation of why something is (or isn't) plausible.

In this particular instance, whilst it is indeed impossible to evidentially disprove a belief that specifically states all the evidence against it to have been falsified, it's certainly not wise to regard this particular belief as 'logical'. Is it logical to suppose that a god would imbue us with reason and then expect us to defy this reason by regarding one piece of highly unreliable evidence as superior to a vast store of far stronger, more reliable evidence? Such a god would be playing practical jokes that endanger our immortal souls – a mischief maker, a psychopath (in his insensitivity) and an idiot. This belief is not logical.

Anyway, Dianelos, no need to respond to this post - I'd rather you replied to my earlier ones. But, next time you're talking to Steve99, please bear this in mind.

(Sorry again, Steve99. Over to you.)

661. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath

Comment #49711 by _J_ on June 13, 2007 at 4:58 am

Hello again, Dianelos,

About your Comment 574 (#49694):

There is an entire class of fallacious arguments with the following form: "The fact that one can explain on naturalistic grounds how some belief X that opposes naturalism has evolved implies that belief X is wrong". The fallacy should be obvious: the evolution of all beliefs can be explained on naturalistic grounds, so this cannot say anything about whether any one belief is in fact true or false, and of course some are true and other are false. One could call the entire class of such fallacious arguments "the naturalistic fallacy" (the term is normally used for the special case of ethical beliefs).

I think you've got your fallacies in a twist.

Two points:

One:

"The fact that one can explain on naturalistic grounds how some belief X that opposes naturalism has evolved implies that belief X is wrong"

Correct, and not fallacious. Note your (correct) use of the word 'implies'. A naturalistic explanation for an apparently supernatural event does not prove beyond doubt that there is no supernatural agent at work, but it renders a supernaturalistic hypothesis superfluous. Once I know how my toaster heats bread, I need not take recourse to speculations about magic. It may later turn out that I actually do have a magic toaster, but this is only one of countless supernatural hypotheses which I would be unable to pursue without something to point me in the right direction. (For example, if my toaster one day produces a white rabbit from its sleeve, I might suspect that my hitherto persuasive 'electric current through thin wires' explanation is insufficient.)

Two:

The fallacy should be obvious: the evolution of all beliefs can be explained on naturalistic grounds, so this cannot say anything about whether any one belief is in fact true or false, and of course some are true and others are false.

Nope.

Person A believes that when a piano falls off a building, it will make an impressive noise as it hits the road. I can use naturalistic observation and reasoning to uncover and detail the thought processes and life experience that have led Person A to this belief. And then I can push a piano off a building and find that, lo and behold, they are absolutely right.

Person B claims, in earnest belief, to be King Henry VIII. Again, I can use naturalistic observation and reasoning to unpick where this belief has come from and, if I'm good enough at it, come up with a convincing answer. (If it really is a good answer, it'll allow me to make accurate predictions about unusual beliefs and their stimuli in other instances.) I can also use naturalistic observation and reasoning to show that Person B was in fact born in Woking in 1964 and bears not the slightest resemblance to King Henry VIII, and, furthermore, is a woman.

The basis of a belief is a subject for naturalistic enquiry. So too is the accuracy of that belief. In the case of accurate beliefs, we will usually find some degree of causal relationship between the two: Person A's belief about pianos will proceed from an accurate understanding of pianos, gravity and roads. But in the case of inaccurate beliefs, we will tend to find a causal background for the belief that stems not from the thing being believed, but from elsewhere: Person B's assumption of Renaissance kingship stems not from an accurate perception of herself and her status, but from some set of other experiences within her life or unusual activity within her brain which have led her to commit wholeheartedly to a false belief.

Your claimed fallacy relies on a failure to recognise what an exploration of beliefs on naturalistic grounds entails. You've actually given yourself a clue when you go on to say 'and of course some are true and others are false' – a distinction that proceeds from naturalistic enquiry and which would have to form part of a naturalistic investigation of a belief.

Not for the first time, you are using naturalistic reasoning when it suits you, and simultaneously caricaturing 'naturalism' as something much shallower and sillier than it really is. Your own unacknowledged uses of it actually often fill the gaping holes that you have attributed to it as an ontological method. You move the goalposts halfway through your arguments and thereby claim to have won the game. 'Foul', I say, sir!

662. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath

Comment #49640 by _J_ on June 12, 2007 at 5:09 pm

Hi, Dianelos, thanks for getting back to me.

Okay, my responses to your two points in 567. Comment #49589:

The first begins with the whole Speculative Doctor scenario. Okay, my metaphor building was a bit shoddy. What I was hoping to suggest was this:

An entirely naturalistic doctor would reason 'An injury has been caused, this damage is the result, treat the damage and everybody's happy'.

A doctor who regarded supernaturalism as having an equal claim would have to accept reasoning along the lines of 'Well, if it's a witch's curse, treating the symptoms (the muscle damage) is a waste of time, because the injury will recur until the curse is lifted. And if it's ley lines, he'll need to move house. And if…' and so on. Even if any one of these lines of reasoning is not necessarily the only way in which a person might interpret the required treatment for witchcraft-inflicted injuries or ley-line-induced damage or whatever, they are strands of reasoning that fall within the (infinite) field of available supernaturalistic hypotheses. This field, being infinite, is crippling in so far as making any kind of practical decision is concerned. Our doctor could make a trial-and-error stab at it, but a supernaturalistically governed trial and error procedure lacks rhyme or reason for favouring one hypothesis over another and it could literally take forever to strike it lucky and hit the right result. ('Oh, the Invisible Weasel-bait didn't work? Hmm, this week let's try appeasing Freya…').

If we actually want our back curing, we (both, I suspect) want the doctor who starts with the 'let's fix the injury' hypothesis and works from there. We'd also like her to use her naturalistically derived knowledge of what sort of treatment actually works for this type of injury and provide some sort of tried-and-tested therapy; not, say rubbing our ears with rhubarb and chanting incantations in Swahili. Even if we are happy to accept a doctor who, unfathomably, believes all explanations she can imagine to be equally valid, we'd rather like her to start with the minimal hypothesis: that we've hurt our back in a one-off accident and it wants fixing in a way that has a track record of working, please. We want our doctor to employ a naturalistically-based selection process to her footloose and fancy-free ontology, and we want her to be as handy with Occam's Razor as with a surgical one.

So, when you say:

Because by stopping [the neural firings that constitute pain], no matter what or who causes the subjective experience of pain, her patient will feel better.

…I'd like to point out that you are using a process of naturalistic observation of cause and effect. A truly supernaturalistic ontology would admit the possibility that the (arbitrarily) chosen process of trying to stop the pain might have no effect, or might cause the patient to burst into flames, or to turn into a Wurlitzer. Supernatural agencies need not be bound by the causalities we detect through naturalistic observation.

And so, when you say:

Unless one uses a very naive worldview, one's understanding of reality cannot possibly contradict or interfere with scientific knowledge.

…the impression you are giving me is that a 'sophisticated' supernaturalistic worldview is simply one that is carefully hand-crafted to exactly fit behind the operational model of the world provided for us by naturalistic enquiry, but that then elbows naturalism aside in the one or two places in which you feel that you'd rather like to stretch your wings and believe whatever you want to. And, because you can point back to the rest of it and say 'Look, my supernaturalist model exactly fits the naturalistic one, see?' you can convince…somebody (maybe) that it actually works as an entire metaphysical system.

This is rather like borrowing a friend's car and maintaining that it's powered by jelly-eating demons. We can all regard your vehemently-stated belief as rather quaint for as long as it has no effect whatsoever on how you drive the car ('The demons work harder when I press this pedal…see!?'). But someone's going to look silly when you try to fill the tank up before handing the keys back. (I'll take bets on who it will be.)

Okay, flogged that one to death. The other thing:

what troubles those who study consciousness from the naturalistic perspective is literally the question of how "something material could become conscious", i.e. how a particular configuration of matter could achieve the capacity of having conscious experience. If we accept that capacity as a given, it seems to me that the problem of consciousness becomes easy: the only thing remaining is to map exactly what physical processes in the brain correlate with specific conscious experiences. And that's not a hard problem.

I might need to ask you to explain that a bit for me. 'If we accept that capacity as a given…the problem of consciousness becomes easy.' 'That capacity' being 'the capacity of having conscious experience'. Assume it as a given? As in saying: 'Oh, we don't need to explain that - it just happens?' Forgive me, but don't most problems become easy if you just assume the answer to be a given? Isn't it the case that we generally regard it to be necessary to find some basis for taking something as a given? I don't think Just Deciding It To Be So constitutes such a basis.

I may be misunderstanding your elucidation of 'the hard problem of consciousness'. I'm no expert, so please do put me right ! But, to give my very simplistic approach to brains and consciousness – behold:

Observation 1: 'We're conscious. I wonder how that works…'

Observation 2: 'Look at this brain we're carrying around! Its activity seems to bear some kind of coded relationship to our conscious experiences. And it's such a complex assembly of thousands upon thousands upon thousands of cells that it could be capable of…well, damned if I can say, for sure! Come back in a few decades when we've poked it a bit…'

My conclusion from this: 'Seems like a good chance that the field of unknowns presented by Observation 2 might fit the big unknown in Observation 1. Let's find out.'

Your conclusion (as near as I can tell): 'The Observation 1 problem is doubtless solved by something else that we can't observe, and the field of as-yet unresolved complexity presented by Observation 2 is pretty much incidental, or at least is subject the unobservable thing that's really in charge.'

This latter conclusion seems to me to be like jumping from an injured back to pentangles and exorcisms.

Basically, there's a reason why 'smoking gun' is a meaningful phrase, and it isn't that guilty-looking people holding still-warm pistols are ignored at murder scenes in favour of drawing up arrest warrants for supernatural gunslingers.

We do the simplest explanation, the one that most closely fits with our prior experience, first. Then we posit more outlandish hypotheses (like some of the weird and wacky theoretical physics you've referred to) as our simpler hypotheses fail. This is how we catch murderers, refuel cars and fix bad backs. It is also how we approach the question of consciousness (calling it 'The Problem of Consciousness' seems to me to betray an undeserved scepticism about finding an answer from the outset).

Both of my responses seem to have turned into emphatic restatements of Occam's Razor. Forgive me if I've spent a long time banging on ad nauseum about something that's patently obvious to you. But you are giving me the impression that your worldview hinges an unjustifiable inconsistency in the way you apply (and then don't apply) this principle. This seems to me to be the big problem that needs addressing here.

Read you soon…

663. Can we really learn to love people who aren't like us?

Comment #49538 by _J_ on June 12, 2007 at 10:21 am

149. Comment #49372 by Zaphod

6. Praying to a non existent entity in order to change its unchangeable mind to alter a perfect plan (WTF?)

Most aptly placed acronym of the day award for that one! Couldn't put it better.

664. Interview with Richard Dawkins

Comment #49495 by _J_ on June 12, 2007 at 6:05 am

Quetzalcoatl,

Flight of Dragons had such a memorable theme tune that I can still hum it. For about four bars. (Probably wrongly.)

My avatar is supposed to be an eye, yes. I hope it succeeds, actually, since it is a photograph of my own eye. (I will be in trouble when iris-scanning becomes a popular security measure.)

665. Interview with Richard Dawkins

Comment #49484 by _J_ on June 12, 2007 at 4:47 am

Quetzalcoatl,

You are my favourite person of the day, because you have mentioned Flight of Dragons.

Its like being ten years old and at my Grandma's house all over again.

666. Interview with Richard Dawkins

Comment #49481 by _J_ on June 12, 2007 at 4:39 am

9. Comment #49466 by The Wee Flea

By the way how do you use the term deluded in a 'non-insulting' sense?

I'll have a go:

During two or three periods in my life so far, I have been in love with someone. This experience, on each occasion, partook of delusion.

This isn't just because all of those episodes have now ended. If I'm lucky, at some point I'll fall in love again, and find myself in a relationship that gradually becomes a solid, worthwhile sort of companionship that'll last me the rest of my days. However, it'll probably start out with a period of intense feelings which entail a strong conviction that we two are meant for each other. This feeling is a delusion.

It's not a bad delusion. It's a natural and valuable delusion, and we'd be the poorer without it. On the other hand, we need to be a bit wary about it, because the delusion of love can lead us, in extremes of emotion, to do unjustifiable things that can be very harmful. (For example, you will probably think it right that I should regard my romantic partner as the most important person in my life, but you would not support my beating someone to death for flirting with her in a bar.)

Were Professor Dawkins to flatter me by attending my wedding, and then to stand up as we're exchanging vows and shout 'You're deluded, the pair of you!', then that would be rather offensive. On the other hand, if he wrote a book entitled The Love Delusion detailing the science of romantic love and how it can be regarded as a delusion, that would be perfectly reasonable.

And if, in that book, he could point to numerous cases where an unquestioning acceptance of the experience of romantic love as a paramount truth had led to crimes of passion, and used that to support an argument that we could do with taking a more responsible attitude to the facts of the subject, then that - a rather more direct demand that we consciously recognise ourselves as delusional - would also be entirely justified. Again, this couldn't legitimately be taken as an insult.

I can understand why Dawkins is backing away a little from blanket application of the word 'delusion' in interviews like this, but I think he can afford to stick by his guns. His remark about taking offence got it right. 'Delusion' is an accurate word in the context in which Dawkins uses it. As long as he isn't screaming it at baptisms and tagging words like 'moron' to it, he's every right to go on using it.

667. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath

Comment #49469 by _J_ on June 12, 2007 at 3:20 am

Apologies for quite a long post.

548. Comment #49425 by Dianelos Georgoudis:

If I understand you correctly, the argument is as follows:

1. Religious experience is caused by God. (questionable – that's what religious people believe)
2. Religious experience is caused by LSD. (fact)
3. Premise 1 and 2 contradict each other, so 1 is false.

Is that it? So let's try an analogous argument:

1. Our experience of light is caused by photons.
2. Our experience of light is caused at the absence of photons, for example when we dream or when we apply sudden pressure to our eyeballs.
3. Therefore 1 is false.

Uh-uh, Dianelos. You're being selectively naturalistic and then dropping supernaturalism from up your sleeve when it suits you. Photons and pressure on the eyeball are both observable, measurable, physical causes. Were God similarly well provided for by evidence as LSD, of course I could accept your contention that both He and the drug were factors that induce transcendent experiences. But as God refuses to demean his existence with anything so trivial as actual existence, it's rather hard to say. Claiming god to be a factor that affects the brain similarly to LSD is like claiming that photons have the same effect on the eyes as Magic Dragon Fire.

Actually, the argument I was making (perhaps unclearly) is not that god causes transcendent experiences that can also be caused by LSD, but that there are various naturalistically observable physical causes for such experiences. These include various chemicals and ritual behaviours. Since religious people having a transcendent experience make use of practices akin to these naturalistically observable physical triggers of subjective transcendence, it is unsafe (and completely superfluous) to hypothesise an additional supernatural cause for them. Making such a claim is rather like pressing your thumbs against your eyes and shouting 'This is how you see the Magic Dragon Fire!'

Basically, if an experience can be shown to be happily accounted for by naturalistic causes, there's no basis for assuming a supernaturalistic cause. This appears to be the case for the impressive 'transcendent' feelings that seem to inspire and sustain faith for many people. That's my point.

In fact I think everybody has had religious experiences. It's what one experiences when one is smitten by the beauty of a piece of music, or the euphoria one feels at the moment of creativity, or the kind of love one feels when one gives without expecting anything in return. All our experiences are caused by God, and we call "religious" those experiences that more clearly or powerfully reflect God's nature. So how come people who, say, are very creative or love music or sacrifice themselves for others do not always realize the presence of God? Well, it's a cognitive failure but not a failure of experience.

Well, that's a cosy enough sweeping generalisation. It's clearly 'a cognitive failure' to fail to recognise that there are many types of emotional and sensory experience, and it would be a touch presumptuous to suppose that, were we to study the mind, we could not thereby gain an increasingly sophisticated appreciation of what those many different experiences are. We have people who do this job, and the experience I described as 'transcendent', which they have identified as strongly associated with religious experience (and LSD, and so on), is not the same as finding something beautiful. This isn't an argument that can legitimately be swept aside with the remark 'Well, feelings is feelings is feelings, and I say god gives us them all anyway'. That's straw-man-ery plus presumption.

As for the rest of your response: we seem to be in the same territory that I've addressed later, in Comment 526. You see no problem with replacing minimal hypotheses with the theoretical possibility of your choice. Here's what you say of the competing hypotheses B (brain produces consciousness) and C (brain is only a puppet for the true, non-observable, supernatural origin of consciousness):

Even if neurophysiology somehow discovers how our brain produces consciouseness, B would still not become more plausible than C. Why not? Because any true thing we might discover about how consciousness is produced by our brain will also be true for C (assuming that consciousness is produced in one way).

How can I persuade you to see the silliness of this reasoning?

Suppose you go to the doctor with back pain. You have been in a car accident. The doctor inspects your back and finds damage to the muscles caused by the stress of the impact.

However, after describing a course of medication and physiotherapy consistent with this damage, he moves on:

'I'm not going to prescribe that, however, because I'm not persuaded that it's the cause of your discomfort. It's at least equally possible that you have been cursed by a witch, and that this muscular damage is only a manifestation of her malevolence. We'd need to deal with the root cause and burn the witch.'

Having drawn up a list of all the warty old women you know, the doctor starts again:

'Voodoo is another possibility...Your house may be on a ley line…Have you thought about feng shui?...Sprites! It could be sprites!...Have you said anything that might offend Poseidon?…'

After a few hours of these equally plausible explanations for your back pain, it becomes clear that you are never actually going to leave the surgery. The doctor is quite able, with his highly trained medical mind, to fabricate chillingly persuasive supernatural agents of backache forever.

I don't suppose you would accept this sort of approach to backache. I suspect that you'd demand the first course of treatment – the one endorsed by the same field of naturalistic, scientific medicine that's kept you alive and well to your present age – and hope never to cross his path again. Only if the treatment failed would you seek further advice (probably from another doctor). Your options would have to have run pretty thin before you began assembling pyres and scouting for hags.

In fact, I'd make a friendly bet that, were your concept of god to clash directly with naturalism in such a way as to cause you actual pain, you would either abandon your faith or else refashion it into something that allowed you to profit by the fruits of naturalistically-derived knowledge whilst maintaining your belief in Dianelos' God. I suspect that this is why you have come to hold a religion defined by a private conception of god, as this reduces to zero the chances of any detail of your faith clashing with your chosen life experience.

This, incidentally, is exactly the path I followed. I was a member of an evangelist church until my credulity was stretched to breaking point by seeing otherwise intelligent people persuade themselves that homosexuality was a sin because the same tome that authorised the massacre of the Canaanites told them so. I became a believer in my own interpretation of Jesus for a time. When you define your own faith, you can bend it any way you like. But continuing to pick away at my own assumptions and bases for belief, along with a reading of The Demon Haunted World, led me finally out of the whole mess.

I only include this digressive anecdote because I'm not quite ready to accept krogercomplete's understandably pessimistic evaluation of the situation here (550, Comment #49428). I think you can come to see that you are making a special allowance for you belief in god that you wouldn't make for any other important aspect in your life.

If this logic doesn't follow through, then I'm doing something wrong myself. And blow me down with a feather if I can see what it is…

...unless you are deliberately doing something that has occurred to me before. I've previously wondered if I might make myself a happier and more productive bunny through a religious faith, but realised that to do so I'd have to carefully fashion it so as to do no harm to anyone else and to fit neatly with the world as I observe. Then I've have to somehow lead myself into completely believing it. Like trying to put the placebo effect back into a recognised sham. I haven't tried this, partly because I'm not persuaded that religions provide access to resources of joy and profundity that good, all-encompassing naturalism can't reach, and partly because I can't get over the initial psychological hurdle of wilfully lying to myself on this scale. But, I wonder: if I were to do so, would I become, essentially, you?

668. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath

Comment #49264 by _J_ on June 11, 2007 at 8:00 am

516. Comment #49224 by Dianelos Georgoudis:

In other words, how do we test that the moon would exist even if nobody were around to observe it?

Ah, the old 'if a tree falls in a forest and there's no one around to see it…' chestnut.

I'm not a philosopher, so I proceed in the awareness that I may say something stupid. You seem to be using some famously entertaining questions as a justification for binning the entirety of naturalistic, evidence-based reasoning. 'Does something still exist when no one is perceiving its existence?' 'Do I really exist myself?' 'Are you all real, or just projections of my imagination?' 'Am I living in The Truman Show, or The Matrix?' 'Is my memory an accurate record of genuine past events, or has it all just been plonked into my mind, Total Recall-style, while I've been typing this sentence?'

There's a reason why these notions make better sci-fi movies than practical living philosophies.

Suppose the moon does in fact blink out of existence, but only when nobody is looking at it. It will be impossible for us ever to discern this truth, because it is, by definition, unobservable. We have here a reality consistent with a moon that is always present, or with a moon that, according to unknown principles, vanishes when we are not looking at it.

Actually, there are more consistent realities. Perhaps the moon transforms into an enormous smiley face when no one is looking at it. Perhaps it is replaced by The Eye of Sauron. Perhaps it, cheekily, moons us. If we are going to speculate about things that are, by definition, unknowable, then we have a literally infinite field in which to speculate.

Any and all of the other questions I listed above go the same way. They all reduce to the comedy classic:

Superior Officer But is there anything going on you don't know about?
Junior Officer If there is, sir, we don't know about it.

These questions nicely delineate the borders of consciousness. But I hope they are not the sort of thing that you are regarding as 'fatal problems with naturalism'. To give credence to the abstract scepticism about the very possibility of knowledge that such questions invite is to misapply the sci-fi movie writer's approach as a worldview. 'It really could all be a simulation/TV show/implanted memory', or indeed any personal fantasy of deities and leprechauns that a person chooses to dream up.

I've come late to this debate, and I suppose that Occam's Razor had already done the rounds a few pages back. The point I'd make about the naturalism you consider fatally flawed is that, if it is thus flawed, we haven't hit its limits yet. Naturalistically derived knowledge continues to spread apace in all directions, and as I mentioned in an earlier post our grasp of the brain's consciousness-generating abilities seems to be making good progress.

Maybe the moon is currently non existent and maybe There Is Some Transcendent Seat Of Consciousness. But, if so, these facts have yet to contradict naturalistic investigation. We can either keep going with the naturalistic system that has been serving us well for centuries, or we can ditch it in favour of untestable imagining. Naturalistic enquiry continues to furnish me with the non-drowsy decongestants that will hopefully see me through tonight's show. Abstract scepticism about the value of naturalism, meanwhile, offers up only a realm of speculation that can only be judged according to how much we like the feeling of the answers we have made up for ourselves. This will neither provide a convincing explanation of where the moon goes to nor stop my nose running.

I suppose this is the Argument from Robert Maynard's Avatar: Science! It works, bitches.

669. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath

Comment #49263 by _J_ on June 11, 2007 at 7:53 am

514. Comment #49211 by Dianelos Georgoudis:

Let's not forget the context of our discussion: I am only explaining why I think that theism is the most reasonable worldview, and not why you should think that theism is the most reasonable worldview.

You are a very reasonable chap. But, I want to take a cue from Dr Benway's question:

Let's get to the point: What are the political implications of your supernaturalist world view?

You have said:

But suppose I am wrong and atheism is right. Even then…[a gold star, here, for the nice, if slightly inaccurate, Blade Runner quote]…I will have lived a better life than my more realistic fellow beings.

A better life, eh? It's possible, but it ain't necessarily so…

You have an admirably 'live and let live' approach to this whole issue, and are clearly far too knowledgeable to engage in social or political activities that contravene what we might all agree to be human rights in accordance with your own religious principles (still no clue whether you belong to a particular identifiable brand of theism, by the way). And, as you seem to regard existence as a sort of rat maze manufactured for the purpose of allowing you to accrue 'virtue', I guess I'd only need to see a list of what you consider virtuous to decide on whether or not you're likely to be living a good, or 'better', life.

But I think there is a reason for me and other atheists to be concerned about your theistic beliefs, be they the cuddliest around. It's the reason indicated in William K. Clifford's The Ethics of Belief. Your beliefs, if they are truly held as beliefs, cannot avoid informing your actions. And you appear to believe that there is a realm of existence that outweighs the observable in its importance. It is a foundational principle of your belief that god, an afterlife, and the pursuit of virtue that gets a person there are of greater moment than naturalistic trivia like, say, death.

I suggest that if you are going to embrace a life-guiding belief that places your conception of the supernatural higher up the priorities list than the observable fact of the mortality of the six and a half billion people you share the planet with, you owe it to more people than just yourself to make quite sure that your basis for this belief is very, very sound.

But you are likely to take issue with that phrase 'observable fact', I think. You seem to consider your 'supernaturalism first, naturalism second' approach to things to be equally as valid - and more than equally as justified - as the naturalistic approach. See next post...

670. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath

Comment #49259 by _J_ on June 11, 2007 at 7:46 am

513. Comment #49208 by Dianelos Georgoudis:

You are using here the argument of infinite regress…

Here is the answer: …in God there are no more dots to be connected: In God we find the explanatory principle that explains the whole of our conscious experience, including the fact that we exist as conscious beings.

When I read the phrase 'Here is the answer', I got all excited. Alas, no revelation. Dianelos, that's not an answer. That's just an assertion that the question is answered by the idea you call god. God is not made invulnerable to the argument of infinite regress just because his believers claim him to be so. (This notion reminds me vividly of friends I used to play Cops'n'Robbers with during school lunch breaks when I was five. They would duck and shout 'You can't shoot me - I'm ducking!' I beg to differ...)

God is only the marvellous 'explanatory principle' you claim him to be because he's a principle that says 'Hey, folks, now you've whipped me up, you can stop asking questions'. You have displaced a problem that felt uncomfortable with another one that feels like an answer. We've all made the mistake of feeling like something has been resolved just because we can no longer intuitively sense the problem through the layers of intermediary complication we have conjured up. This is not uncommon, but it is not a virtue.

On which note, see next post...

671. Evolution: God as Genetic Engineer

Comment #49153 by _J_ on June 10, 2007 at 5:00 pm

I'm grateful for this review's guide through patches of biology that I otherwise wouldn't know how to navigate. But I'm astonished that Behe is recycling stuff like the flagellum argument that have been debunked in layman's terms in books as widely read as TGD. His defensive instinct seems to border on the suicidal. How many federal courts does it take to silence a deluded man?

672. Manliness is next to godliness

Comment #49143 by _J_ on June 10, 2007 at 3:36 pm

Wouldn't look so good on a badge, though.

673. Manliness is next to godliness

Comment #49138 by _J_ on June 10, 2007 at 3:00 pm

Amazing! Describe a belief system as 'a bronze age myth' often enough and they actually take notice! It's like he's seen the Scopes 2 clip and thought 'Neanderthal? You're calling me a neanderthal? You ain't seen nuthin' yet...'.

I'm all for polite, reasonable debate, but occasionally it's quite refreshing to find a target who really wears his 'I AM A TWAT' badge with pride.

674. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath

Comment #49126 by _J_ on June 10, 2007 at 12:42 pm

And again,

497. Comment #49102 by Dianelos Georgoudis

as long as you can't let go of the mindset of naturalism you won't understand theism and won't be able to evaluate how well it works

and later

I hope to have at least dispelled one myth: that all theistic worldviews are incompatible with science. That can only be true for the most naive religious worldviews, for the rest seamlessly and naturally absorb science in their understanding of reality.

I don't think this is really so. My experience of religion was that more sophisticated religious worldviews simply have more complete webs of rationalisation and subtle ways of converting legitimate doubt into helpful by-products (like feelings of humility). All of which activity avoids the basic irrationality of the whole edifice.

To describe that irrationality, I'd like to quote from way back, in your 91. Comment #47033:

...consider this: Suppose God had given us evidence for His/Her existence that is similar to the evidence we use to ascertain the existence of teapots or electrons. Wouldn't this misguide us into thinking that God is similar to teapots or electrons? And don't you think that God, being benevolent, would abstain from misguiding us in this way?

Do you think it more likely that God, being benevolent, would provide exactly the sort of evidence that is also used by conjurers, con-artists, and proselytisers of myriad other bogus religions? Would the same God that had given us the ability to reason naturalistically, and to recognise that through reason we can make our lives longer, happier and healthier, require us to abandon this when approaching the biggest of questions and instead embrace the same sort of 'Well, I guess it's possible so what the hell?' thinking that leads people into astrology, Scientology and the Heaven's Gate cult?

Either there's a god or there isn't.

If there is, he (I'll go with 'he' just because it's the norm) has either revealed himself to us or he hasn't. If he hasn't, we will find nothing to indicate his existence and will merrily live our lives away in a world that looks just like one without a god. (Should we eventually uncover evidence of his existence, this - on the basis that god doesn't do things by accident - itself constitutes a revelation.) In this world without revelation, we might find all sorts of claimed revelations and claimed gods, or we might not. Any of these will be shown, ultimately, to be unfounded, because there hasn't actually been a genuine divine revelation. We will continue in god-permitted ignorance.

If he has revealed himself to us, the omniscient, benevolent creator of humanity would presumably have done so in such a way as to settle all arguments. There would be a revelation that put all others to shame, one that is completely in agreement with our best powers of reasoning and that successfully conquers all opposition. God would be, after all, a fact, and ought therefore to agree with naturalistic reasoning, even if his revelation is light-years beyond our current level or naturalistic understanding. Such a revelation would be embraced by scientist non-scientist alike.

We do not find ourselves in such a world.

Either there has been no revelation (and thus either no god, or a god who doesn't want to be spotted) or there has been a revelation that has been deliberately handled in a way that makes it impossible for us to reliably identify it with the powers of reason that god has granted us. Since all claimed revelations appeal to abandonment of naturalistic reason and the assumption of a theistic credulity that could equally lead to any other, bogus, revelation, the god of the sketchy revelation clearly cannot expect us to work this one out for ourselves. In this case, we can only assume that god is himself sorting out who will come to believe in him and who will not. The matter is out of our hands and not worth worrying about.

The only logical thing to do faced with a god who is either (a) non-existent, (b) hiding or (c) subverting our powers of reason and hand-picking his followers, is to give up on the whole thing and get back on with the naturalistic approach that was reliably expanding our understanding of things and turning up such finds as penicillin and radio.

The only argument left for the believer appears to be a form of the Pascal's Wager fallacy. 'There might be a god, and it might be this particular god, and he might choose us according to our arbitrary selection of the right faith'. Well, yes, there might. And there might be any one of a billion other gods waiting to kick your arse for getting it wrong.

As many of the supernaturalistic belief systems appear to be similarly persuasive to those who hold them, a person seeking a means to establish one as more likely to be true will be applying naturalistic criteria ('This holy text looks less like it was written by malevolent toddlers than that one', and so forth.) Doing so is again embracing a perspective that, if followed through, indicates that the entire belief game is absurd and pointless.

I, like many others before me, fondly imagine having a post-life chat with an un-revealed god and hearing It's reaction to an attempt to explain a decision to believe in a different one: 'So, you had a proven, reliable method of reasoning and all the evidence you could thereby find pointed away from any of the gods, but instead of dismissing them all, you chose that nonsense? Well, welcome to Paradise, but keep away from sharp objects.'

675. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath

Comment #49124 by _J_ on June 10, 2007 at 12:39 pm

Again,

497. Comment #49102 by Dianelos Georgoudis:

After all naturalism is supposed to be a description of all reality, and if objective ethical precepts exist and naturalism has trouble accounting for this fact then naturalism has a problem as a description of reality

Our naturalistic understanding of all things is a work in progress. It may very well always be so. To acknowledge this is not to find a fault in naturalism as a reliable approach to discovery and description.

Did you know that the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics implies that there are many physical universes where you and I will never die? It seems to me that naturalism works really badly even in its own natural subject matter of the physical world.

How fascinating. What is your point? Again, our understanding is in progress. Hopefully, our many competing theories will gradually resolve as we learn more. Secondly, this theory may well, for all I know, be entirely correct. Personal credulity, mine or yours, has nothing to do with it – but, since you appear to be invoking it, I find the stated theory much more plausible than one that states that a carpenter was resurrected within a universe in which resurrection is, by all observations, impossible.

676. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath

Comment #49123 by _J_ on June 10, 2007 at 12:38 pm

497. Comment #49102 by Dianelos Georgoudis:

...as Jerry Fodor put it, "Nobody even knows what it would be like to have the slightest idea about how anything material could be conscious." No such problem exists if one hypothesizes a supernatural realm that consists of a conscious person of great goodness, power and intelligence, God.

No. Fodor's statement is one of bafflement about what consciousness is and how it can arise. It is at least equally baffling (if not totally oxymoronic) to try to imagine the existence of anything that does not, in fact, materially exist. One could perfectly well paraphrase Fodor by saying "Nobody even knows what it would be like to have the slightest idea about how anything existent could be non-existent."

Your solution to one problem is to posit a similarly enormous problem and decide that they make a nice couple. Two bafflements do not make an epiphany.

Incidentally, I don't take Fodor's statement as an unquestionable truth. The consciousness of material things seems to be something we are gradually learning about. Perhaps one day all neuroscientists and psychologists will throw their hands in the air and say 'We can learn no more – we're beaten'. I see no virtue in assuming such a defeat to be inevitable.

By the way, can I just agree with all the other posters who have remarked on what a pleasant person you are to have discussions with? You'll have the crown of Ultra-Calmness off Sam Harris, you know.

677. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath

Comment #49100 by _J_ on June 10, 2007 at 10:20 am

Dianelos, your Comment #49081 seems to suggest that, even as we can reason that a malfunctioning lightbulb is not the origin of our consciousness by referring to the physical brain that detects and interprets the lightbulb, so we might also reason that there is a source of consciousness beyond the physical brain and thereby conclude that our insistence on the brain as the seat of consciousness is unjustified.

The reason we are not stuck imagining that the lightbulb provides our consciousness is that we can separate our conscious experience from its thrall. We can step outside the dark room and perceive the world without its help, and we can blunder around in the dark room, bouncing off the walls and thinking 'Well, I can still feel these walls – and, for that matter, talk to myself.' The bulb gives only a very partial account of consciousness, at best.

We can supplant bulb-centric theories of consciousness with brain-centric ones by reigning in our hypotheses like peeling layers from an onion. We've already gone through 'Perhaps it's our eyes, then?', for example, when we get to The Brain.

So, the lightbulb had two problems. One, it only illuminated (excuse me) one area of consciousness, leaving a lot of questions. Two, it could be replaced by a better candidate (the brain) which answered a good deal more (and explained what was going on with the lightbulb along the way).

What ground there is to support your thesis that there is a deeper layer to the onion? Certainly, you can say 'We don't fully understand how the brain handles all aspects of consciousness', which I suppose loosely parallels 'I don't see how the lightbulb could influence my interior monologue'. Consequently, we have neurologists and psychologists uncovering the mysteries of the brain, and they are far from finished. (Meanwhile, we seem to have lightbulbs pretty well covered.)

But you don't seem to be able so say 'Here is a more plausible source of consciousness: the X.' Your 'X' is apparently Supernaturalism, or 'Stuff happens that we're incapable of understanding'. How can you support this? It certainly doesn't compare to moving from the lightbulb-based theory of consciousness to the brain-based one, because we actually have a brain to pop on the lab table.

You responded to Phasmagigas by saying 'I don't see what the special relevance of LSD is.' I suspect Phasmagigas is indicating the sort of experience that leads many rational people to strongly, viscerally, believe that There Is Something Beyond Their Brain, in spite of not having anything clear to point to. There is a type of experience usually described by those who have it as 'transcendent', which involves losing one's sense of the physical definition of one's body and simultaneously feeling a kind of overwhelming hugeness of the world around. It's often interpreted as an experience of merging with something greater than oneself. Many people reach this experience through the rituals and beliefs of their religion, and it thereby inspires and consolidates such beliefs. But it is also an experience that has been reproduced using LSD and other phenethlylamines. Other researchers have found that the same experience can be reproduced with rituals of synchronised movement, whether they be secular or religious in nature. (Apparently Why God Won't Go Away: Brain Science and the Biology of Belief by Newberg, D.Aquili and Rause is good on this)

The point about LSD, then (and it's only one example) is that studies of the physical brain increasingly indicate how it can itself create the false feeling that there is something beyond itself. In short, studying the brain reveals how it tricks us. In face of such findings, to maintain that it is reasonable to posit the existence of some unobservable, untestable, supernatural source of consciousness seems, at very least, incautious.

By the way, your lightbulb metaphor somehow gave me a pleasing shiver of irony, in reflecting upon McGrath's use of CS Lewis' idea about seeing the world by light of Christianity. God is real because he is the one true light source by which we see everything, but he is also real because we should know better than to imagine that one particular light source is responsible for our ability to see everything. It's not quite Wilde, but it's an entertaining paradox.

678. Americans believe in both evolution, creationism: poll

Comment #49048 by _J_ on June 10, 2007 at 4:55 am

14. Comment #49036 by pewkatchoo:

I see stupid people all around, they don't know they are stupid.

Thanks for that. I just spat my tea laughing.

679. Teaching assistant quit in protest at Harry Potter

Comment #48868 by _J_ on June 9, 2007 at 8:53 am

10. Comment #48733 by Satanburiedfossils:

1 Timothy 2:11-12 Let the woman learn in silence with all subjection. But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence.

Well done, sir! You've saved me a visit to the Skeptics' Annotated Bible, there.

What a silly, silly, silly woman, by the way.

As a contribution to the ongoing Children's Books That Are Better Than Harry Potter conversation: I guess what she needs is one in which the 'magic' is derived more from either science or, better still, from Christian literary precedents. Or both. So, the His Dark Materials trilogy, perhaps...?

680. Republican candidates range from ignorant to dishonest, part 2

Comment #48370 by _J_ on June 7, 2007 at 3:37 pm

MIND_REBEL,

Spoil your paper, at least. That way, they know you're disgusted rather than apathetic.

681. A Quote Against Theocracy

Comment #48367 by _J_ on June 7, 2007 at 3:21 pm

I have quite a lot of time for C.S.Lewis.

One fascinating little book of his is A Grief Observed, compiled from four notebooks he filled while struggling to get over the death of his partner. It really shook his faith, but gradually, as he makes sense of the whole thing and pieces himself back together, his religion re-emerges, giving him a kind of framework for picking himself back up again.

Sure, he's wrong about god and his reasoning collapses all over the place when he writes as a Christian apologist. But he seems a great example of a man capable of very good reasoning but who is nevertheless blinded by his faith, and who sometimes comes tantalisingly close to seeing through the whole charade or realising that he is hoist with is own petard.

Which, if he followed through his thoughts as presented in the above quotation with a reading of William K. Clifford's essay 'The Ethics of Belief', he really ought to be.

682. Scopes Two

Comment #48204 by _J_ on June 7, 2007 at 3:42 am

I remember years ago seeing that episode of Friends in which Phoebe declares a disbelief in evolution. At the time my response was partly sympathy with Ross (who virtually tripped over his jaw in astonishment) and partly to think 'Oh, those zany comedy writers - what crazy notion will they put in Phoebe's ditsy head next?'

Lately I feel increasingly as though I'm living in some warped Phoebe-world. Serious-looking men in suits keep popping up stating, with completely straight faces, that they 'don't believe in' evolution. On television. In between sentences in which they claim, with complete sincerity, to be the most able person to run the most powerful nation on the planet.

Can everyone else see these videos? I'd just like some confirmation that I'm not actually going mad.

683. Gamma-Ray Wipe-Out

Comment #47209 by _J_ on June 3, 2007 at 1:31 pm

In other news, it's been lovely and sunny here in Manchester. The end of another perfect day in this safe, human-friendly cosmos that God created just for us.

(Sorry for dragging god in again. Cosmology like this is fascinating in it's own right, of course.)

684. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath

Comment #46920 by _J_ on June 2, 2007 at 8:04 am

I've not read through the posts in this thread, but I thought this was a fantastic video. It showed Professor Dawkins at his thoughtful, calm and unswervingly reasonable best.

It's possibly the best sort of interview to present to more moderate, thinking theists. Since it hasn't all been edited down to soundbites and cross faces, there's much less to prompt knee-jerk defensiveness. It would take a very partisan viewer to object to the way Richard conducts this interview (and rather an ungracious one to be unimpressed by the speed and clarity of his challenges to McGrath's justifications).

The response to McGrath's question at the end is also a really useful couple of minutes to have on record. Richard comes across as anything but angry in this interview, but the passion of his objections does indeed flash through in other places and is doubtless taken by some theists as an excuse to unfairly dismiss him as aggressive and unreasonable. To see such a honest and understandable explanation of why he is sometimes angered by religion is marvellous. (I sympathise completely and am very grateful to have Richard's reply here to refer to. I find that when I'm accused of being an Angry Atheist, it's usually when I'm already being Angry, and am thus not in an ideal frame of mind for explaining myself.)

Well done, anyway, to Richard and to the forces that have made this one available. And, in fairness, to McGrath, who conducts himself very well and seems to get along admirably in life in spite what sounds like a serious inability to differentiate between causes and effects.

685. What I Think About Evolution

Comment #46556 by _J_ on May 31, 2007 at 4:18 pm

Fuckwit.

Anyone who so easily abuses words like 'reason' and who posits his personal assumptions ('the spiritual order and the material order were created by the same God'; 'man's essential dignity and unique and intended place in the cosmos'; and so on) as part of the unquestionable framework surrounding all discussion should simply not be allowed into a position of responsibility. Not a senator, not local councillor, not a school teacher.

You don't have to be an atheist to cut through the bullshit thinking here. Just trying to follow the logic impartially pulls it all apart. The man's head is so far up his arse he's looking at us through his mouth.

Ken Ham's museum of creationism should include a big glass case in which all politicians infected by this brainrot can form a sort of alter-government. They can be neatly labelled as the Administration Created in God's Image and left to gibber inanities at one another until their air runs out.

'What I Think About Evolution'. That's a laugh.

Fuckwit, fuckwit, fuckwit.

686. The Dawkins delusion

Comment #46550 by _J_ on May 31, 2007 at 3:57 pm

Hi, Snail - 75. Comment #46418:

...what we are really after is a herd benefit...[and the rest]

Ooh, good point and nice analogy. I can't think of a very persuasive counter argument right now, so I'm conditionally persuaded!

I guess my proviso is, as always, that once you get into the details, I suspect things prove muddier. If large numbers of individuals are sharing similar personal benefits through communal religious activities, and if these benefits include, say, greater social responsibility or above average thoughtfulness for others, what you've got is a herd benefit (or at least a sub-herd benefit).

I imagine that accurately and definitively weighing out the costs and benefits of religions against one another is a doomed project. I guess my continuing point is still just to avoid knee-jerk blanket anti-theism and to get the fairest possible view of what how the thing we're throwing on the bonfire works in practice. It may be that we want to pick its pockets before we light the pyre.

687. I Believe In Evolution, Except For The Whole Triassic Period

Comment #46390 by _J_ on May 31, 2007 at 5:21 am

For what it's worth - in case Josh is taking a poll or something - I'm happy for science/rationalism/religion-related Onion articles to be posted here. They give me a laugh.

Maybe The Onion is just up my street, but I usually enjoy it and thought this was one of their better satires. It makes an enjoyable mockery of God-evolution conflation woolly thinking.

(By the way, Shuggy:

...but he says the secular Triacissists are only claiming it's 44 million years and 51 weeks older...

This would refer back to the earlier part of the article that defines the Triassic period:

...the period that scientists claim lasted from roughly 205 to 250 million years ago, commonly known as the Triassic period, was quite obviously the work of the Lord God Almighty.

The '...misrepresenting 300-million-year-old fossils as 230-million-year-old fossils...' passage is just using dates that fall somewhere within the Triassic and somewhere before it.)

688. The Dawkins delusion

Comment #46245 by _J_ on May 30, 2007 at 4:41 pm

Hi again, folks,

66. Comment #46131 by poppythinks on May 30, 2007 at 10:00 am

Sorry to add to your bad day, Poppythinks! You're entitled to a rant when pissed off about life. But, just to be clear: I'm not on a fence. There is no god. Dawkins is right. And blasting religious arguments with fiery bursts of irrefutable common sense is a hell of a lot of fun – especially when the lunacy of popes, televangelists and other reality-defying charlatans has got you down.

But, at other times, thinking about the whole thing seriously, it's madness to just suppose that of the world's 6 and a half billion people, the majority of them are rubes and simpletons who just can't see that two plus two makes four. Know your enemy, is all I'm saying. Theistic apologists stereotype atheists often enough, and make their arguments all the more ridiculous as a result. I'm not keen to fall into the same trap.

68. Comment #46144 by Snail on May 30, 2007 at 11:14 am

Does this viewpoint, that they will be no happier if religion were to be removed from their lives excuse people passing on their delusion to other people? What if it had never been there in the first place? Is it not a valid point of view, that if you take two identical individuals, and raise one in the presence and the other in the absence of religion, the one that no matter what small comfort the religion exposed individual has derived from their delusion, the individual that has never known religion will never suffer guilt over 'sins' they may have committed, will never have persecuted others for having a variant delusion, will never have tried to repent for sins, never suffered at the thought of a deceased loved one suffering in purgatory or prayed for their early release from purgatory, will never have used up hours of their life in prayer to a non-existent higher being to raise them from their mortal suffering, rather than realise they have control over their own life.

Overwhelmingly I agree with you.

Quick thought experiment, though. Let's say that we do a set of faultlessly handled scientific trials that reveal that regularly praying, singing hymns, listening to morality-enforcing sermons and spending time in a community of supportive, like-minded people makes a huge benefit to people's wellbeing. Imagine that the trials reveal that this is in fact the very best way of improving health and happiness – better than Prozac, meditation, voluntary work, CBT, running ten miles a day and eating nothing but organically grown ambrosia rolled into one. Does this mean there's a god? No. I'm still going to be an atheist, and I'm still going to be keen to work out how to synthesize the benefits of religion without the fundamentally harmful wrong ideas about everything that lie (in both senses of the word) at the heart of the theisms.

I agree with what you write, but the point I want to make is that the balance you present is prone to great variation. I recognise that guilt and time spent praying ineffectually and every other negative that you mention are aspects of religion. Doubtless there are more besides. The cost/benefit balance will vary from person to person and from faith to faith. In the churches I've been involved with in the past and among my friends who are still involved, I can safely say the personal benefits outweigh the costs. Those people are, on balance, made happier, more socially responsible people by their involvement in their churches. It may be for all the wrong reasons – it really is for the wrong reasons – but that doesn't stop it being a fact.

It is, actually, amazing to watch some progressive religious people carry out the job of interpreting the bible. When asked, they'll tell you it's the word of god. Then they'll spend a sermon carefully twisting the words of their scripture to support a kind of morality that any atheist would be proud of, and that certainly wouldn't follow from an impartial (if such a thing were possible) reading of the same material. Only in a few key areas – say, a bizarre failure to ignore the crazy passages about homosexuality – do the cracks vividly show.

These cracks resoundingly bring out the problem with the whole edifice – that it's all based on a topsy-turvy view of things that can easily lead to all kinds of damaging wrongness. And so, yes, I'd far rather bring people up with no exposure to religion. But I think we can learn a few tricks about being happy, good people from some of the more progressive religions. And I think we might have to do that learning if we want to persuade the current adherents to those religions to ditch their fairy tales and join us instead.

I'm going to go back to writing short and facetious posts, I think. It's easier and more fun.

689. The Dawkins delusion

Comment #46107 by _J_ on May 30, 2007 at 8:41 am

62. Comment #46096 by Luthien on May 30, 2007 at 7:46 am

I appreciate the concerns you have about not being smug, but I don't think that this 20% can be considered superior to the rest(any more than people immune to measels are superior to those that fall victim to it).

Right you are, I can agree with this. It was just the speculation about the 20% possibly being 'the leaders' (which is perfectly acceptable speculation, of course) that set alarm bells faintly ringing, as it seemed to resonate with some of the unexamined self-aggrandisement that atheists, theists, saxophonists, dendrologists and indeed anyone in an in-group easily fall into. But I can happily accept that that wasn't what you had in mind.

Fantastic Étienne De La Boétie quotation, by the way! Very rousing and encouraging. Again, I cautiously advise anyone against slipping into thinking too confidently 'That's me! Clear mind, far-sighted spirit – my middle names!' in much the same way that I'd advise, say, US Presidents from assuming that any big decisions they've convinced themselves of feel good because they've been divinely endorsed. But that proviso is probably unnecessary to the point of neuroticism. It's a great quote.

I completely agree with your concerns about placebos and that their provision should be somehow policed. A doctor who shuns the placebo effect outright is wilfully failing to help her patients, even if she sticks to medically proven treatments. If your doctor persuades you that these (clinically proven) pills definitely will relieve your symptoms, they are much more likely to do so than if she gives you the sense that she's not too sure about the whole thing, for she is combining their chemical potency with the might of the placebo effect. A knowledgeable doctor, having determined that your back pain is something that could be relieved by placebo as effectively as by medication, might in good conscience refer you to a convincing homeopathist or reiki practitioner, who will persuade you into wellness (and maybe make you feel a bit more special and happy than an NHS waiting room can manage). But if this experience leads you to make future treatment decisions on your own, without taking recourse to medical expertise, then we have a problem as soon as you start suffering from a condition that really needs surgery.

I love placebos because they're a tricky question that seems to get to the heart of much of what we have to think about with religion. Things do get difficult when we identify beliefs that are only beneficial as long as we don't recognise them for what they are. I'm pretty sure I used to benefit from praying and going to church. By doing so, I regularly spent time reflecting on my blessings and being thankful for them; thinking seriously about the underprivileged and asking myself if I could do anything to help them; reflecting on my moral and behavioural failings and encouraging myself to do better; developing a positive, optimistic attitude to life's ups and downs; integrating myself into a network of mutually supportive friends… All of these are practices that have been found to make people happier, healthier and more thoughtful towards one another, and it doesn't take a genius to see why. But what motivated me to do all this was my belief in god. Once I'd reasoned my way out of that, I also lost all of the productive baggage that went along with it.

This site is probably above-averagely populated by people who feel no desire to attend anything that at all resembles a church. I get the impression that Professor Dawkins is such a man. If I ever attend a church these days, I find it hard because, whilst I may applaud much of the sermon, I am nagged by my concerns about the twisted foundation of the congregation's beliefs, and by the constant effort of mentally excising god from every worthwhile pearl of wisdom.

But it doesn't follow from this that the majority of people around the world are going to be happier, healthier and more socially responsible if we shake them out of the belief that motivates them to partake in the activities that give them their happiness, health and responsibility.

Does this mean we should give up and just let everyone keep their gods? No. I don't think so. Too much harm accompanies the good. But it does mean that we should try to appreciate deeply and fully what it is we're removing and what we are proposing to put in its place. What is our responsibility to the people we mean to disillusion? When we have a really good knowledge of how people benefit from their faiths, we ought to be able to provide the same benefits (and better, hopefully) without taking recourse to the same, dangerous, delusions.

A Christian friend of mine recently asked me in a discussion whether I would rather be happy or right. Call me an idealist, but I'm angling for both.

690. Another Christian Science Fair embarrasses itself

Comment #46090 by _J_ on May 30, 2007 at 7:15 am

131. Comment #46064 by pewkatchoo on May 30, 2007 at 5:29 am

Absolutely bang-on right. God as a tireless prankster, mischeivously fabricating evidence to contradict has badly ghost-written manifesto makes bugger-all sense - yet is apparently the only logical conclusion if we decide to believe that manifesto.

133. Comment #46076 by BillySands on May 30, 2007 at 6:29 am

It's true. The Adam and Eve story is like a newspaper report about the principal of a primary school unleashing tigers among the children, then blaming the kids for getting eaten. What sort of omnipotent creator lets Satan - Satan, mind - into the Garden of Eden? As a lecturer describing Milton's take on the story in Paradise Lost once said to us when I was a student: 'In paradise, you shouldn't have to wear a crash helmet'.

691. The Dawkins delusion

Comment #46044 by _J_ on May 30, 2007 at 4:21 am

54. Comment #45994 by Luthien on May 30, 2007 at 1:40 am

I don't think it eludes sheer logic[…]

Fair point - perhaps a bit of lazy phrasing by me, there. No, of course, I don't mean to suggest that a religious state of mind is somehow so magically complex as to be forever beyond rational understanding. Otherwise, it would have been a bit daft of me to go on to suggest that 'we need to study it'.

Your 'I wonder if that 20% are the "leaders" ' line of thought is a pleasing and interesting bit of speculation, but it is again part of an attitude that inevitably creeps in over and over among this big bunch of mutually agreeing atheists. It's all too easy to slip into a kind of unchallenged assumption of superiority. This not only makes us seem rather smug and aloof when talking to the quaintly theistic, but more seriously constitutes a possible blind spot in the blanket rationalism that we pride ourselves on applying.

To agree with Professor Dawkins' own post a little way back: yes, of course he 'gets it', in one sense. Certainly he 'gets it' in a way that theists themselves don't get it: he has a clear, reason-based appreciation of the stack of irrationalities and inaccuracies that holds up theistic faith.

But there's another sense of 'getting it' which is still, I think, relevant. I seem to recall (I may be wrong) hearing Dawkins acknowledge being baffled by the way that some people manage to hold a completely irrational faith in god at the same time as being extremely rational minded in, say, their career. Once again, good practice from Dawkins here: if you don't understand something, admit to being baffled by it. This should lead us to greater efforts to understand how this religious/rational state of mind operates – not to lazily reducing our conception of it to something we find less baffling (like 'he can't really be as religious as he says', or 'she is being very childish in clinging to her faith').

Actually, that last example in the parenthesis brings me back round to what I find worrying in your post, Luthien. Professor Dawkins has used the religion-as-comfort-blanket metaphor quite often, and remarked on this not being a very dignified way of going about life. I'm sure many of us will agree with that and recognise this to be quite an effective argument.

Effective in motivating sympathetic atheists and people who already doubt their religion, perhaps. Peeking behind the rhetoric, the metaphor simply restates that religion is a delusion held not for its factual truth but for its desirable psychological side effects. Sure, it's easy to compare this with comfort blankets, tooth fairies and Father Christmas and thereby to undermine it. But another fair comparison might be the visualisation exercises and mantras by which a person can overcome shyness, or insecurity, or a bad habit. Or the placebo effect, reliant upon a patient's ignorance though it may be, might be used by a doctor who fully understands the effect to alleviate that patient's pain more effectively.

Some of us have never needed any such supports in our lives, and never will. This doesn't put us in a safe position to lambaste those who do.

I do agree that religions are a basically undesirable way of achieving such benefits as they provide for their adherents, because they rest upon quite serious misunderstandings about the world, and encourage the religious to regard their faith-constructed assumptions as superior to objectively observable realities – like, for example, death. The potential for harm that this opens up is very clear to all of us. But it's amazing how much has been achieved by religions beginning with this sort of bad start. (I'm here put in mind of Professor Dawkins' own comments on the compound eye, I think, in Climbing Mount Improbable. A camera eye might be better all round, but it's pretty amazing what can be managed with by a highly-developed example of an inferior basic design. And damn near impossible to switch designs once committed.)

We should not be surprised when evidence suggests that people profit, in mental and physical wellbeing, by their religions, and we should not talk such evidence away, as we may be tempted to. We do our own attempts to understand things truthfully a disservice when we refuse to investigate the quite subtle and complex relationship between faith and rationality that seems to exist in many people's minds, and we do little to encourage such investigations by dismissing intelligent religious people as 'childish' or 'undignified'. And we're in dangerous territory whenever we assume that, because we have come by rational consideration to dismiss religion, we are therefore necessarily being unbiased and fair-minded.

By the way, relevo - 50. Comment #45980 – excellent stuff!

692. Scientists divided over alliance with religion

Comment #45935 by _J_ on May 29, 2007 at 4:48 pm

I don't care how charming they are, I don't care how pleasant they are, these people are evil.

Wow, Professor Jones has been sharpening his teeth.

He is a (very) re