151. Dawkins Delusion (3rd article, Same Stupid Title)

Comment #6309 by Jonathan Dore on November 13, 2006 at 3:16 pm

David

Since you're exercised by RD's refusal to debate, here's an article he wrote giving a fuller statement of his stance on the subject: http://pages.sbcglobal.net/amun_ra/

A later version of the article, including his draft of the joint letter he proposed publishing with Stephen Gould to outline his reasons publicly, can be found in "A Devil's Chaplain".

152. The rise of the 'New Atheists'

Comment #5748 by Jonathan Dore on November 10, 2006 at 7:38 pm

Robzrob

Thanks for the linke to the Melanie Phillips article. Of course, it's become a standard trope of US neocons that Europe's limp-wristedness is dooming it to Islamicization (which, even if true, they assume someone vindicates everything they and the Bush administration has done and stands for) -- so it's no surprise to see La Phillips repeating it. Amazing to think that this woman used to write for the Observer.

153. The rise of the 'New Atheists'

Comment #5746 by Jonathan Dore on November 10, 2006 at 7:33 pm

David and AnneA understandably don't want to stop sponsoring the children they already are, but anyone else thinking of sponsoring a child might want to consider Plan (www.plan-international.org/), which I use to sponsor a child precisely because it's non-religious. They operate under various names in different countries, e.g. Foster Parents Plan in Canada (where I am), Plan UK, and Plan USA, all accessible from the international website above.

154. The Dawkins Delusion (Different Article, Same Stupid Title)

Comment #5546 by Jonathan Dore on November 9, 2006 at 10:59 pm

So McGrath is publishing yet another book "rebutting" Dawkins next year -- but he already published "Dawkins' God" last year (getting his "rebuttal" in first, as it were). One book with an opponent's name in the title might be understandable, if lame; but *two* is somewhere between a schoolboy crush and the obsessive mania of a stalker.

155. Teach sex and evolution or close, Quebec evangelical schools told

Comment #5542 by Jonathan Dore on November 9, 2006 at 10:39 pm

On a brighter note, Ontario premier Dalton McGuinty this year announced that all religious-based arbitration of legal cases would cease. Previously, orthodox Jews (if I remember correctly) were able to have certain domestic legal cases arbitrated according to traditional Jewish law. Certain Muslim groups then demanded Sharia-based arbitration on the same basis, and when this was strongly opposed by protestors, McGuinty corrected the anomaly by banning *all* religious-based input into the legal system -- a result that deserves to be better known and more widely celebrated than it has been.

156. A Dissent: The Case Against Faith

Comment #5173 by Jonathan Dore on November 7, 2006 at 7:24 pm

"It should be clear that this faith-based nihilism provides its adherents with absolutely no incentive to build a sustainable civilization—economically, environmentally or geopolitically."

Precisely. I'm looking forward to the first politician with the guts to stand up and say that anyone who holds such beliefs is, by definition, unfit to hold public office, since they cannot be assumed to be acting in the public interest, and will in all likelihood be actively working against it.

157. THANK GOODNESS!

Comment #5056 by Jonathan Dore on November 7, 2006 at 9:12 am

Billy

Your climbing story reminds me of the film/book "Touching the Void", about Joe Simpson's amazing struggle to survive after breaking his leg and falling into a crevasse on the descent from Siula Grande in the Andes. In the film, he describes his thoughts after landing in the crevasse:

"I was brought up as a devout Catholic. I had long since stopped believing in God. I always wondered if things really hit the fan, whether I would, under pressure, turn around and say a few Hail Marys and say, 'Get me out of here.' [But] it never once occurred to me."

The most inspiring moment of an inspiring film.

158. Liberty University is looking for Biology Professors

Comment #4932 by Jonathan Dore on November 7, 2006 at 12:03 am

"And what university hands out PhDs in biology to young-earth creationists?!?!"

Self-evidently, Liberty University. Presumably their former students and their current and future faculty form a closed loop of self-perpetuating delusion (perhaps a form of hot-air-powered perpetual motion machine?).

159. Dawkins' delusion is that science can determine the existence of God

Comment #4354 by Jonathan Dore on November 3, 2006 at 1:56 pm

Perhaps Williamson would be less "puzzled" if he had actually read the book, in which he would find his "puzzling" concerns amply addressed. I'm amazed to see this masquerading as a "review", rather than what it clearly is: a statement prepared from second-hand reports and heavily reliant on McGrath's book "Dawkins' God" -- the only one he shows evidence of having read -- published last year.

160. Fundamentalist Religion and Science

Comment #4325 by Jonathan Dore on November 3, 2006 at 11:42 am

Hi Annette

"... if the scientific model changes over time as it absorbs new evidence, why not imagine that a few thousand years down the line a model has evolved which includes what people now call "God"?"

I think it would depend on what you mean by "what people now call God". Which people are we talking about? The great majority of theists in the world today understand by that word a supernatural personality, existing independently of any life on earth, but in some way capable of having an impact on our day-to-day lives here. It's hard to imagine, even in principle, how science would some day be able to detect such an entity or establish its properties. And since the available evidence we have provides no grounds for believing such an entity exists, it's also hard to see how we would move towards that point.

If, on the other hand, you're positing some sort of natural phenomenon -- perhaps some kind of collective human consciousness that's an emergent property of aggregated human brain activity -- then that's something I can imagine, in principle, might one day be quantifiably detectable and testable, and your apparent telepathic experience could be explicable as a part of that phenomenon.

If and when that day comes, however, I'd be surprised if people described the discovered phenomenon as being God-like (though it *could*, of course, explain experiences that people have interpreted as indicating God's existence); still less would it be likely to correspond to what most people *today* call "God", because it would be a naturally occurring phenomenon within our universe, not a creator outside the universe.

161. Fundamentalist Religion and Science

Comment #4300 by Jonathan Dore on November 3, 2006 at 8:59 am

Annette wrote: "I said that I place a great emphasis on evidence and I include my own direct experience of the world in that evidence. So what do you suppose happens to my model of the world when, one day, I know the moment my father has died even though he's more than a hundred miles away? The scientific model just doesn't cover that."

Hi Annette. You're right in saying that there's currently no scientific theory to explain the sort of telepathic communication you're referring to, but I don't see any need to assume that there never will be (perhaps this isn't your assumption, but that was my impression). It's a widely reported phenomenon, and since it seems to involves information about a distant event it looks like it wouldn't fall into the category of hallucination, or any other artifact produced entirely within the brain. I simply assume there is a naturalistic explanation of the mechanism waiting to be understood, and look forward to its discovery, though it may well not be in my lifetime. In the meantime, there's no need to step outside a scientific world-view to accommodate it.

162. Nearly half of Americans uncertain God exists: poll

Comment #4295 by Jonathan Dore on November 3, 2006 at 8:36 am

Labour Humanist: Thanks very much for those links and that very under-reported Philadelphia Inquirer survey! I'm slightly less optimistic that this coalition will become electorally influential so soon - I think we may be talking decades rather than years - but let's hope this really is a trend, and not a blip.

163. Dawkins thinks atheism will save us

Comment #3985 by Jonathan Dore on November 2, 2006 at 12:36 am

Hi Maryhelena

You wrote: "Dawkins wants to attack ‘the very concept of faith’. I’m simply taking him at his word. Faith does not exist in some vacuum - it is a very personal thing. A bit like love. It’s not easily definable, measured or even grasped for that matter. Faith does not exist apart from the one holding it. Thus, one cannot separate the faith from the man. Any attack upon ‘faith’ is an attack upon those having faith - in what is not the issue. That is the point I was trying to make. I find Dawkins’ position here incomprehensible. Sure it might be politically advisable - but it is not logical."

This sounds to me like a counsel of despair: you seem to be saying that faith is impossible to define, so we can't actually talk about it at all. I don't think I agree with that. The *motivations* (or at least, explanations) that people have for believing propositions about the supernatural are certainly many and varied, including childhood upbringing, psychological comfort, desire not to disappoint parents, etc. etc., but in each case the core characteristic of faith is the same: consciously assenting to a proposition even though it is unsupported by evidence, and indeed contradicts any evidence that might be available. If you have evidence to support an idea, then it is not, in this sense, "faith". Nor is this some eccentric or unfairly circumscribed definition that Dawkins just made up because it's an easy target. Statistically speaking, this is a definition that the vast majority of religious believers in the world would have no problem agreeing with. The only difference is that they regard believing something without evidence to be a virtue.

Even though you may not like his definition, Dawkins has always been clear as to what he is talking about when he uses the word "faith" -- in interviews, TV programmes, and in The God Delusion. You point out that he doesn't define it in this interview. No doubt he has got a bit tired of always having to define his terms every time he uses them, but I would have thought you'd be familiar with his use of the word by now. Apologies if I'm wrong, but you don't seem to be very familiar with his work.

You wrote: "I was not making any implication that a scientific world-view could not accommodate a non-scientific perspective."

But that *is* precisely the point that *I* am making. Love, hope, and aspirations *are* a part of a scientific world-view, because they are all characteristics of human thought and emotions, and thus all potentially within the reach of scientific understanding. There is simply no need to step outside of a scientific framework to talk about these things. We may use different vocabulary depending on the context of the discussion, but that is quite different from saying that a different "world-view" is required.

You wrote "... faith has been around for a very long time and I don’t see that, Dawkins notwithstanding, it has any plans for taking a hike."

You may well be right. But slavery and polio were also around for thousands of years before anyone was able to do anything about them, or even imagined that something *could* be done about them. We're near the beginning of a very long process.

You wrote: "Evidence? Can you prove how much you love someone? I don’t think there is any mechanism yet invented able to measure it’s depth or it’s height - and yet we talk of true love…People find value in religion, for some it is their true, their highest value."

Love is unquantifiable, so it doesn't have height or depth except metaphorically, but I would have thought it was obvious that you prove how much you love someone by your actions and attitude towards them.

I wrote: “If you think the materialist view is true then, by definition, you think that the supernaturalist view is untrue, and so comfort founded on that is a delusion. There may always be situations in the real world, as Dawkins himself has said, where this idea could not be forcefully expressed to people without psychological cruelty”. To which you replied: "Goodness me. It that is what he has said - then why in heavens name did he call his new book The God Delusion. Why, knowingly do something that one knows could cause people distress. Has it all boiled down to a case of ‘the end justifies the means?. Denigrating people’s faith the means to some secular utopia? One cannot knock people to the ground and then expect them to get up and pat your back for you."

Why? Because, as I think I made plain in the sentence you were responding to, he was excepting cases "in extremis" (the example he mentioned was someone on their deathbed); that clearly doesn't mean not challenging people's beliefs at all, at any time in their lives, just because they might get upset. You seem to be suggesting that no-one should be subjected to the mental anguish of having their ideas about God challenged in any way. Simply as a practical matter, do you think supernaturalists are going to extend the same courtesy to you?

"Bearing in mind that what is ‘true’ for us is not necessarily ‘true’ for someone else - ‘truth’ not being something that can be confined to ‘mere’ facts."

There's nothing "mere" about facts, even with quotes around it. If you think it's a fact that the supernatural doesn't exist, then you think that's a fact for other people as well, not just for you.

For an atheist, your posts reveal a puzzling, even perverse, attachment to religious terminology. Why do you insist on labelling amazement at the splendour of the universe "religious faith"? Do terms like "amazement", "awe", or "splendour" strike you as insufficiently dignified? Whatever private meanings you may assign to this religious vocabulary, surely you realize that the vast majority of religious believers do not use them in your supposedly non-supernaturalist sense? Your insistence on them seems to me like a wilful desire to be misunderstood, just so you can get a kick out of correcting people's misperceptions. Surely it's better to use language to clarify our meanings, not obscure them.

164. Why there is no God

Comment #3959 by Jonathan Dore on November 1, 2006 at 6:34 pm

"For 7 days pray this prayer:

God, I do not believe in you. Asana Bodhtharta said if I say this prayer you would prove to me your existence to me.

Who will take this challenge. The main component is that you are honest and that you mention My Name. Will any here take the challenge?"

Why is it important that we mention your name Asana? So that the heavenly accountant doesn't credit the conversion to someone else? Don't want to lose out on the "recommend a friend" special offer, perhaps? Is this the prayer equivalent of click-through marketing?

You may have noticed a logical flaw in your prayer: if I do not believe in God, then who do I think I'm addressing?

165. Nearly half of Americans uncertain God exists: poll

Comment #3950 by Jonathan Dore on November 1, 2006 at 4:48 pm

Labour Humanist: "I've reported a few times that the levels of religious belief in the USA are grossly OVER reported. For example, in the next few years demographic changes mean there will be more secular voters than white evangelical voters (as researched by democrat pollster Stanley Greenberg). The media are years behind on this one."

That's very interesting, LH. Can you give us some background on the reasons for this over-reporting, and the changes mentioned over the next few years?

166. Why there is no God

Comment #3937 by Jonathan Dore on November 1, 2006 at 3:26 pm

Readers might be amused at the following exchange involving our friend here (a faith-head going head-to-head with an airhead):

premium.faithsite.com/showmsg.asp?fid=4&tid=223539&sid=&style=2
(not a link - just copy and paste into address bar).


And also by Asana's self-description at booktalk.org:
" Asana Bodhitharta
40 years of age
Born and raised in USA
Believer in The One God
Believer in The One Religion
Teacher of Progressive Revelation
Witness of the Most High God.
I have taught atheist to understand and believe in God."

Just the one then?

167. Tired of all the religious garbage? It's time to become an Enlightenist

Comment #3888 by Jonathan Dore on November 1, 2006 at 10:01 am

Corin writes: "You are presuming here that the parents do not want their children raised and educated in their superstitious belief systems. Nothing could be further from the truth. One need only look to various on-going debates in the United States over the inclusion of [un]'intelligent design' and similar garbage to realise that the majority of people do not aspire for better education and more learning for their offspring. They seek to perpetuate their religious and cultural beliefs and bigotries first and foremost."

Obviously true, Corin, but I think Muriel Gray is addressing the slightly different situation in the UK. There, the historical background is that "faith-based" schools (which used to mean just Anglican, RC, and Jewish ones) were certainly means of indoctrinating future generations in religion, but were not traditionally fundamentalist or anti-intellectual in the way their US counterparts that you mention typically are. The right they were given to select pupils on religious grounds (while unaffiliated schools were obliged to take anyone within their catchment area) meant they were also able to select disproportionately middle-class, well-off pupils with supportive parents. That in turn meant they were wealthier, and nicer places to work, and so attracted the best teachers, which made even non-religious parents willing to fake an interest in religion in order to get their kids into a good school. That means that religious schools (particularly Anglican ones) are now loaded with children of secular parents who, if given the choice, would *love* to be able to move their kid to a high-quality secular alternative. This is the pent-up need that Muriel is referring to.

168. The Dawkins Delusion

Comment #3774 by Jonathan Dore on October 31, 2006 at 2:17 pm

Locke: "matter and motion cannot produce thought".

I'm not sure why Jack was quoting this as if it proved anything. Clearly what we have here is an argument from incredulity (Locke is effectively saying: "I can't imagine how matter and motion could possibly produce thought"), based on the limited physiological knowledge of the 17th century (Locke died in 1704). At the risk of stating the obvious, no one in the 17th century HAD ANY IDEA how the brain functioned; they simply *assumed* that conscious minds must be fundamentally different and separate from corporeal brains, because they didn't have even the first basic building blocks of an understanding about how a physical neural network could produce an emergent phenomenon like consciousness. Today, we do. So Locke's confident assertion, which sounds so much like an axiom that would be unaffected by physical realities, turns out to be no more than an illustration of the limitations of 17th century medicine.

169. Why there is no God

Comment #3765 by Jonathan Dore on October 31, 2006 at 1:34 pm

"Oh, and if it isn’t about some tragedy, it is some sports star whose team apparently prayed harder than the other team. I know why god has no time to stop hunger and poverty. God is far too busy making sure the athletes don’t trip over their self named shoes."

Thanks, David S, for encapsulating the baroque silliness of trivial prayers; a burst of laughter on a grey day.

170. Tired of all the religious garbage? It's time to become an Enlightenist

Comment #3754 by Jonathan Dore on October 31, 2006 at 12:37 pm

Another fantastically invigorating slap in the face from the wonderful Muriel Gray. For anyone interested here are links to some more of her incisive columns in the Sunday Herald:
http://www.sundayherald.com/57256
http://www.sundayherald.com/58149
http://www.sundayherald.com/56189
http://www.sundayherald.com/56424

171. The God Conundrum

Comment #3601 by Jonathan Dore on October 30, 2006 at 2:05 pm

...and to amplify Mike Torr's point, religion is the only pretext on which Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland continue to be separately schooled -- which, after all, is the main mechanism by which the schism is kept alive from one generation to the next.

172. Dawkins thinks atheism will save us

Comment #3583 by Jonathan Dore on October 30, 2006 at 12:23 pm

Hi Maryhelena

You wrote: "On the one hand Dawkins does not want to be “demonizing individuals” - on the other hand he wants to attack “the very concept of faith” that these individuals hold. Sounds a bit like Orwellian ‘doublethink’ to me! Seems he wants to have his cake and eat it to…Which of course just can’t be done."

Sorry, but that seems like a bit of a deliberate misunderstanding of what he said. He was asked about the effect of his book on perceptions of *Muslims*, and he replied that he didn't want to demonize people "because of the groups to which they belong", which was the reason his attack is focused on "faith" (i.e. the characteristic that Islam shares with other religions) rather than on anything which might give anyone an excuse to think he was attacking any particular sect or ethnic group. So the contrast he was making was between one religion and all religions, not between an individual's religious belief and their wider personality as a whole -- as your selective quotation seemed to imply.

You wrote: "The words ‘religion’, ‘god’, and ‘faith', can mean different things to different people. We can’t just come up with our own definition in order to attack the ideas that these words are trying to convey. Common usage is not the final arbiter on what a word must mean ... Dawkins cannot, logically, say that ‘faith’ is what he says it to be - and then proceed to knock down a straw-man of his own creation."

I'm confused as to how you think words are defined. You say that people can't make up their own definitions, but that common usage is not the final arbiter either. So what is left? I think Dawkins has always been upfront as to how he defines faith: as "belief unsupported by evidence". I'm not clear whether you think an attack on "belief unsupported by evidence" is unwarranted, or whether you think it is warranted, but the object of attack is not what you would call "faith". Please clarify.

You wrote: "The ABC of science does not have it’s equivalent in the language of spirituality. These are two different world-views that beat to two very different drummers. One world-view wants it’s facts and figures. The other world-view wants it’s dreams, hopes and aspirations - and yes, it’s imaginations. The material world and the spiritual world are not antagonists - only science is hell bent on making them so!"

As a materialist, I rather resent the implication that my world-view does not want dreams, hopes, aspiration or imagination. These are all essential parts of my life, and I would say any healthy human life -- and if you read "Unweaving the Rainbow" I think you'll find Dawkins considers them so as well. But these are all things that go on inside our heads, and are the stuff of our relationships with each other: none of them has anything to do with the supernatural. If science, in this context, is "hell-bent" on anything, it is on getting people to realize this distinction: that dreams, hopes, aspiration and imagination are all, properly understood, part of the material world (because they are part of what goes on inside our heads), not part of some separate magisteria to which scientific understanding has no access.

You wrote: "So, because fundamentalist religious faith is “potentially dangerous" the “very concept of faith” must be attacked. But is this reasoning not simplistic. Is it not a bit like saying ‘because guns are potentially dangerous we must ban guns’? Or that motor cars are potentially dangerous therefore we must not drive cars. Surely, one can’t ‘attack’ a potential? If there is potential danger in something, then the rational course of action open to us is to try and avert the danger as best we can. There is no way we can eradicate ‘danger’ from our lives."

I'm not sure these analogies work, as faith, guns, and cars seem to me to be dissimilar in the following ways. The only purpose of a gun is to cause harm, so harm is not an accidental side-effect of some other, proper use. Cars do have a genuine, non-harmful utility -- getting people from A to B -- and when they cause people's deaths in accidents it is an unintended side-effect. Faith (by which I understand "belief unsupported by evidence"), like a car, has at least a potential utility in providing psychological comfort and (for previous generations) some sort of answer to imponderable questions of origins, but unlike a car it is no longer necessary for the latter purpose, and therefore, properly understood, is redundant for the former as well. If we understand that the material universe is the only one we have, we can find our psychological comfort, too, from other sources (loving relationships and some measure of material security). Since faith is now redundant in the sense of no longer having any utility that cannot be met from other means, it therefore becomes legitimate to say that its potentially dangerous character is a good enough reason to oppose it, even in its milder form -- and since, as Harris and others have pointed out, the milder forms essentially provide social protection for the more extreme forms (by lending them an unwarranted respectability), that is all the more reason for the milder forms to be subject to the same criticism.

You wrote: "Some people, many people in fact, find value in religion [comfort in death and suffering was mentioned]. Others find value in science. Dawkins thinks that his value, science, is a superior value. All well and good. Where he is going wrong is to think that his superior value must be the superior value for everyone else!"

I think it's fairly clear that Dawkins finds value in science not because he thinks it's "superior" but because he thinks it's true (i.e. it's a belief *supported* by evidence). If you think the materialist view is true then, by definition, you think that the supernaturalist view is untrue, and so comfort founded on that is a delusion. There may always be situations in the real world, as Dawkins himself has said, where this idea could not be forcefully expressed to people without psychological cruelty (to a believer on his deathbed, for instance), but cases in extremis apart, I think it's quite legitimate to say, out loud and in public, that in the long run it's better for people to believe true things than to believe delusions.

173. Dawkins thinks atheism will save us

Comment #3574 by Jonathan Dore on October 30, 2006 at 10:22 am

NMcC writes: "Since I agree with Marx that religion constitutes the illusionary happiness of people as a substitute for a real, material happiness and that criticism of religion should start with a criticism of the conditions which require illusions, I'd be interested to know where Dawkins deals with this Marxist view. I don't think he ever has. Despite his excellent writings and eloquent defence of atheism, Dawkins is completely missing the real target by concentrating his fire on a reflection rather than the substance. What is the religious belief in heaven, for example, but an idealised material existence in place of a less than ideal life on earth in the here and now?"

As much as I'd agree with the huge importance of material poverty, powerlessness etc as a causative factor in maintaining the hold of religion on modern societies, I don't think it's a *fundamental* cause in the way I take you to mean (apologies if I've misunderstood you). While the dominant religions we're familiar with today are certainly susceptible of a Marxist analysis, I think it's fairly clear from palaeolithic cave paintings that a sense of the supernatural, and of communication with a spirit world through which humans could gain some understanding of their animal prey, long pre-dates the holocene agricultural revolution, and thus the concepts of land ownership, property, and the means of production that are the indispensable cornerstones of Marxist social analysis. The continuation of these characteristics into historical times in the religions of surviving hunter-gatherer peoples (e.g. the Inuit or the San) I take to be good evidence that supernaturalist views of life exist in societies in which Marxist terms of reference have no meaning.

That means that a Marxist understanding can only concern itself with aspects of religion that are, ultimately, secondary, and not fundamental. The fundamental level is the psychological predisposition of humans (based on the physiological characteristics of their brains, and independent of any social or political context) to believe an imagined supernatural realm to be real -- in other words, to have "faith", or to believe without evidence.

I suspect the reason Dawkins does not concern himself with Marxist or other social/political systems of explanation is because, to the extent that any of them may be true, they would all be equally dependent on the ultimate bedrock of human neural physiology, from which all genuine understanding of religion must flow.

174. Dawkins thinks atheism will save us

Comment #3526 by Jonathan Dore on October 29, 2006 at 7:47 pm

Michael Crosby wrote: "Why dont the English get the testicular fortitude to do what the French did during the FR from 1789-1815?"

Hi Michael! They did - 140 years before the French. Then again (though stopping short of decapitation) 40 years after that. So for the last 300+ years the UK monarchy has been neutered, non-absolutist and divine-right-free, as any sane person would want them. As a solution to the head-of-state problem, I think it's actually got quite a lot going for it: it provides an ignorable figurehead who can get on with hosting garden parties and welcoming foreign dignitaries, while the elected prime minister can do the actual ruling. It thus avoids a particular weakness of systems in which the head of state is also the head of the executive branch of government (as in the US and France), which is that the occupant uses the deference owed to a head of state as camouflage behind which to shield his activities as head of government from proper scrutiny (as GW Bush's softball press conferences attest).

Of course, it's also possible to have a hybrid system, as in Germany, India, Italy or Ireland, in which the president is elected (either by a senate or by popular vote) but the position is still ceremonial. That has the advantage that the people occupying the office are more likely to be impressive individuals than the limited gene pools of the aristocracy are likely to throw up, but the disadvantage that such people are usually ex-politicians, and consequently are less likely to be unifying figures, which is what a ceremonial position needs. And in terms of connecting people with a sense of their own history, there's something to be said for having a head of state who can trace her family tree back to Alfred the Great.

175. The Dawkins Delusion

Comment #3522 by Jonathan Dore on October 29, 2006 at 7:17 pm

Phil wrote: ... In case you didnt notice when I asked for someone to prove scientifically how a void of nothing can explode I got not answer!

Hi Phil,
Please clarify: are you asking what the evidence is for the big bang? Or are you asking by what mechanism the expansion of the universe got started?

176. The Dawkins Delusion

Comment #3506 by Jonathan Dore on October 29, 2006 at 3:32 pm

"He [Phil] does evade challenges, plenty have noticed that."

Too right mate. I'm still waiting for Phil to respond to my posts 227 and 274 (back on pages 5 and 6). I don't think our Phil does responses. Every time he gets argued into a corner he scatters another handful of fairy dust in the vain hope that one of his random, inchoate ideas will make some sort of impression on somebody.

177. Sermons and straw men

Comment #3311 by Jonathan Dore on October 27, 2006 at 10:17 am

johnc writes:
"3. The legitimacy of someone's interpretation of a scripture is not our concern. The strength of our skepticism is that we can comfortably say to all sects - "argue among yourselves, we're not interested", which is in fact what the majority of people in the more secular countries actually do. Bemused indifference to whether the person of God is three-in-one, all-for-one or one-for-all sets a better example to our children than angry invective about nonsensical theology."

This laissez-faire approach is what has prevailed in Western Europe for the last fifty years -- certainly in Britain, where I spent the first forty years of my life. But the unexpected weakness of this position, as it's been exposed over the last few years, is that de-Christianizing (in this case) a population through benign neglect ("we're not interested") does little to equip them intellectually to respond to those whose brand of faith is more exotically intense than they are accustomed to. It's also become apparent that those of us who have consciously rejected supernaturalism are greatly outnumbered by those who are non-religious simply by default and have never bothered to think through their position. Such people tend to be more vulnerable to religious argument than one might assume. Witness the small but significant number of white Europeans with non-religious (certainly non-Islamic) or only nominally religious backgrounds who, post-9/11, have found themselves mesmerized by Islam and become converts -- and that, at a time when one might logically assume that such a religion would appear less attractive than ever. Coupled with the recent entrenchment in Britain of the power of religious institutions in state education (which is more or less the result of Tony Blair's personal religiosity), with all the implications for the indoctrination of future generations that that implies, and it seems clear to me that, unless we are simply content to have a tide of religiosity rise above our heads (a "Dover Beach" in reverse, perhaps?) simply for the want of anyone opposing it, "bemused indifference" is no longer a sufficient response to the well-organized and well-motivated opponents we face (and they certainly regard themselves as our opponents, even if we would like to think we aren't). We have to give people who may never have given much thought to religion access to positive reasons why a supernaturalist outlook is *not* a good idea, give them some intellectual tools for critical evaluation of religious tenets, and give them a sense that a solid community of people who have consciously chosen not to be believers does actually exist. This is one of the tasks that Dawkins's book performs, and the sense of relief expressed by so many posters here at discovering a community (albeit virtual) of unbelievers shows how much it is needed.

"2. Respecting people's right to hold a religious belief does not imply toleration of criminal or anti-social behaviour. We can respect everyone's right to a belief (be they atheist or jihadist) without agreeing that that belief gives anyone the right to violate social norms (be it by suicide bombing, raping "immodest women", or introducing religion in public classrooms)."

No argument there, except to point out that the aim of the Mufti of Australia and others like him is to effect a *shift* in "social norms" -- witness the gradual increase among Muslim women in the West wearing ever more veiling, from the hair-covering hijab to the face-covering niqab to the body-covering burkah, each step in the progressive dehumanization of their wearers becoming steadily "normalized" on the streets of Western cities. Norms are not givens, and if there are any you don't want to change you need to defend them.

Regarding the political expediency of attacking religious moderates, I actually think there is a very positive role to be played by such as Dawkins and Harris. Religious believers are so accustomed to having their beliefs discussed in a tone, not just of respect (which every human owes to every other) but of deferential reverence, that their outraged bewilderment at having them publicly examined with the same unembarrassed acuity one would bring to a political or scientific concept can only, in the long run, make them more accommodating to those who they regard as less extreme. If it's politically savvy for atheists to make common cause with religious moderates, it also makes sense for fundamentalists to make common cause with Gouldians, as the lesser of two evils. If that causes fundies to acknowledge and abandon some of their grosser idiocies in the interests of alliance with a "sensible" opponent, then a shift in intellectual norms will have been effected for the better. But it will *only* have happened because the Dawkinsians forced the issue. If you'll forgive a cheesy analogy from popular drama, the same psychology is at work in "good cop/bad cop" interrogation routines: the crim doesn't have a motive to co-operate with the good cop until the bad one works him over.

178. Sermons and straw men

Comment #3141 by Jonathan Dore on October 25, 2006 at 10:27 pm

What's puzzling about reviews such as this, and Andrew Brown's in Prospect -- both presumably well-informed people sympathetic, as Krausse says here, to Dawkins's basic position -- is their complete absence of any sense of urgency about the rise of religious fanaticism and the steps that might be needed to combat it. They both seem wilfully to misunderstand who the book is aimed at, and give no hint that they recognize the rising tide of supernaturalism and increasing attacks on science to be real phenomena, with real political and social outcomes that demand real actions in response.

179. The Fact of Evolution

Comment #2956 by Jonathan Dore on October 24, 2006 at 11:42 pm

JohnC writes: "The preponderance of religious belief in the US is not the result of people being shielded from the evidence or being inherently stupid."

I'd certainly agree with the second proposition, but I'm not too sure about the first. As far as I'm aware, surveys in the US have shown quite a startling level of basic ignorance of what terms like evolution, natural selection etc. mean, and what mechanisms they operate through. People are *not* being exposed to the information with sufficient clarity in schools, and in the wider culture it's almost invisible, while theist assumptions and rhetoric permeate every kind of discourse. And yes, in a country with such a large proportion of fundamentalists, a large number of people are indeed actively "shielded" from this information, or actively shield others from it, as the contributions from the ones who venture onto this website attest. Tens of millions of Americans effectively inhabit a parallel society in which private schooling ensures they are never exposed to factual information about evolution. So there are huge deficits of factual ignorance to be made good before anyone need evoke more distantly responsible historical and cultural factors.

180. Danger ahead - there are good reasons why God created atheists

Comment #2881 by Jonathan Dore on October 24, 2006 at 11:41 am

“DO YOU believe,” the disciple asked the rabbi, “that God created everything for a purpose?”
“I do,” replied the rabbi.
“Well,” asked the disciple, “why did God create atheists?”

My main objection to this is that, even for a believer in God, it is ludicrous to think of people being created with fully formed sets of attitudes and beliefs already in place, like inserting a SIM card into a mobile phone. People are not *created* supernaturalists or materialists, they *become* them, through a confluence of social forces, emotional experiences, intellectual growth, psychological tendencies, and conscious thought. No one rolls off the production line with their programming fixed for all time.

181. Dawkins the dogmatist

Comment #2880 by Jonathan Dore on October 24, 2006 at 11:23 am

Clive

Apologies for being rather late in picking up a rather old point you made (back on page 1), but regarding the religious/political character of the Northern Ireland conundrum, I think a crucial point is that, no matter how far one reduces the question to a political one, religion is the only pretext on which the two communities continue to be separately schooled. Take that away, and although catchment areas would tend to preserve existing ghettoization if left unchecked, a vigorous campaign of bussing (such as forcibly integrated public schools in the southern US in the 1960s) would, surely, soon begin to break down intercommunal prejudices by reducing the chance of passing them on to the next generation?

182. D.J. Grothe Interviews Richard Dawkins

Comment #2214 by Jonathan Dore on October 19, 2006 at 6:31 pm

Hi Maryhelena

I think the main problem raised by your point is that if Spong, Leaves and Geering were representative of theists in general to any statistically significant extent, The God Delusion wouldn't have needed writing, and RD could go back to Oxford and spend his time doing evolutionary biology. There would still be a debate to be had over whether their post-supernaturalist ethics' attachment to such labels as "Christianity" was anything more than sentimentality, but the debate would have no wider urgency.

Unfortunately, the vast majority of believers in the Abrahamic religions (which are top of any current list of "religions dangerous to the survival of life on earth", and thus most in need of addressing) consider their religion to be theistic -- some from conviction, others by default, but theistic nonetheless. And in a world where those with the greatest conviction are in some of the most powerful political positions, this makes the debate a very urgent and practical one.

That's why I think it would be a mistake to think of The God Delusion as being primarily an attempt to "advance the argument" on a philosophical level. In that arena, as you've pointed out, it's arriving late in the day. But in the arena of the personal beliefs of ordinary people who have never studied theology or philosophy, and the practical politics and everyday public policy that flow from the socially aggregated mass of those beliefs, such a book is very much in the vanguard. It may be pushing at a philosophical open door, but it's straining even to open the thinnest chink of daylight into the world of popular belief.

183. There is no God, sayeth Dawkins

Comment #1914 by Jonathan Dore on October 17, 2006 at 11:59 pm

Hi Monkey Man

Thanks for brightening the day with your "little thought"; a perfect illustration of the malevolent smugness of the true believer (one can almost hear you licking your lips at the thought of people having a "very bad time"). Coupled with the sanctimonious, more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger concern for our anger issues, it's hard to believe you're actually for real (or perhaps you're a spoof?).

Evolutionists have a lot to be angry about, not least seeing people being taught to believe feeble lies when they could be marvelling in the far more wonderful strangeness of the actual, real, physical universe (you know, the one that we actually live in). "Life means nothing"? Well, it has no meaning that is fixed by someone *else*, if that's way you mean. My life has plenty of meaning, thanks, but like anyone else, it's the meaning that I have chosen to invest in it. It's up to each one of us to make the most of our brief time in the sun -- now *that's* an exciting and liberating thought.

184. The Dawkins Delusion

Comment #1862 by Jonathan Dore on October 17, 2006 at 9:33 am

Phil writes:

"I stress to point out the reason behind this discussion. Remember Albert Mohlers opinion of Dawkins book? It was a criticising opinion (and as a reader had pointed out earlier), this view was not to read the message that Dawkins put forward but because the critic already made up his mind before the first sentence.
"This will happen when someone who supports Dawkins reads those 10 views above. And the same argument is again put forward for the opposite side of this discussion.
"If Dawkins book is to be read with an open mind then so must any objections or criticising opinions put forward. The key issue here is science and philosophy mix like oil and water and we need to make ourselves aware of where we treed before blindly attacking philosophical views that people hold near and dear in their hearts...
"You have read the points with a criticising mind before the first sentence and added your points at the end explaining your points. If I was to answer back then this would without doubt go on all day."


Phil, I took considerable time and trouble to engage with the points that you (or as you now admit, an email correspondent of yours) made, pointing out their logical flaws and downright mendacity, and offering counter-arguments to them. I'd be grateful if you'd have the courtesy to respond to my points in the same way and, if I've made logical flaws in my argument, point them out to me. If you're not prepared to do that, then stop posting. No-one should be posting stuff they can't defend (or even, perhaps, understand ...). I sense that English is not your native language, in which case you are at something of a disadvantage. All the more reason, then, not to try to palm off someone else's second-hand arguments when you don't even realize their implications.

You seem to have a bizarre belief that reading something with "a criticizing mind" invalidates one's response, because it indicates one is not reading with "an open mind". But a "criticizing mind" is precisely what *everyone* should bring to *everything* they read that seeks to persuade them of a factual truth. Has it not occurred to you that Mohler's criticisms are judged unimpressive not because they are *criticisms*, but because they are badly thought-through and illogical? Again, if you can point to badly thought-through and illogical statements in my responses to your 10 points, I invite you to point out to me precisely what they are. If you can't, then I'm entitled to presume that you agree with me.

Phil writes:
"Why do you keep missing the point? I want you to see the flaws with NOTHING BANGED!"

Perhaps the obvious reason people keep missing your point is that you have great trouble writing a grammatically coherent sentence. What does "NOTHING BANGED" actually mean? And what are its flaws? Please explain.

185. Cambridge Speech: The God Delusion

Comment #1794 by Jonathan Dore on October 16, 2006 at 11:51 pm

Maryhelena writes "The fact that we might not like the word ‘religion’ is neither here nor there - ‘religion’ is the common and garden word, in the English language, that has long been associated with spirituality, with man’s spiritual nature as opposed to his physical nature."

I see what you're saying, but I simply don't think most people use the word with the doctrine-free sense that you use it. Most people use "religion" to mean a set of theological beliefs. They may be wrong, but if the usage is established, it's too late to change, and I don't think you'll be clarifying the issue in most people's minds to say that you're *against* supernatural theology but *for* religion. Speaking for myself, I certainly wouldn't want my conceptions of the meaning of my life, the morality of my social interactions, or my loyalty in personal relationships, to be characterized in any way by the word "religion". For the sense of wonder, I prefer "awe"; for intellect, consciousness, emotions, psychology ... well, I prefer "intellect", "consciousness", "emotions", and "psychology". Insisting on retaining "religion" will only be misunderstood by most people as retaining a vague sense of the supernatural, and we have to be firm in our insistence that ethical questions are not dependent on supernatural authority.

186. The Dawkins Delusion

Comment #1790 by Jonathan Dore on October 16, 2006 at 7:07 pm

Hello Phil

Thanks for your numbered points.
1. Ok, I don't agree but this is just a question of opinion.
2. A blatant misrepresentation. When or where did RD ever say anything like "science is the only or best source of reliable knowledge about what is worth knowing"? If you're familiar with his work (e.g. the essay "Good and Bad Reasons for Believing", or the book "Unweaving the Rainbow"), you'll know that he brings the full range of human emotional and intellectual responses to a given question. "What is love?" An emergent property of complex brains (and if you think that devalues it, or makes it any less important to any of us, more fool you). Should I get married? Depends how you feel about the institution of marriage, coupled with the evidence you have from your own emotions of how you feel about the other person, and that of their feelings towards you. Is it sensible to bear children? A calculation involving all sorts of such mundane variables as cost and housing, together with general feelings about the state of the world and your emotional response to your prospective co-parent. How should we assess scientific explanation? By judging the persuasiveness of the evidence. Not sure what you think this rag-bag of questions is meant to imply.
3. I'm puzzled as to why you think (as this seems to be your implication) that the existence of a sense of "ought"-ness among humans is evidence of anything supernatural. Religious authority is no basis on which rational individuals move from "is" to "ought". We are all, individually and collectively, responsible for our own ethical choices and for maintaining, defending and advancing the collective ethical standards by which those choices are judged. Our species' collective moral childhood is over, as is (one must hope), the 20th century's moral adolescence: it's up to us now.
4. "...even such an ostensibly objective act as "empirical observation" is both theory laden and "tainted" by the subjective knower." Would you care to be more specific as to the nature of this "tainting"? The second half of the para is ludicrous. You quote the question: "what do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?", then quote Dawkins's answer, then say "Ah, but he can't prove it, can he?" I refer you to the questioner's question to see the logical flaw in your argument.
5. The my-brainies versus your-brainies argument. Rather than quoting lists of your friends, I think a statistical analysis is more revealing. Among all segments of the population, scientists are among the least likely to believe in the supernatural (even in such an overly religiose society as the United States). Are they also the least moral or least intelligent segment of society? It's probably safe to say not. There's probably more likely to be a correlation to the fact that they are the most likely segment to understand that supernatural forces are not needed for a satisfactory understanding of the origins of the universe and of life on earth.
6. "...the overwhelming majority of intelligent peoples of all times, places, and cultures have been religious..." - rather obviously, I would have thought, because only the underwhelming minority of intelligent people of all times, places and cultures have yet had access to scientifically plausible explanations for the most arcane problems of cosmology and human origins that were, until recently, default reasons to believe in a deity even for people who could think of no other reason. (For instance, deists such as most of the US Fouding Fathers were clearly pretty unimpressed by the supernatural, but not yet having a scientific framework within which to understand the hard questions of origins they had to allow for its possibility. Today, we don't.) This is therefore rather like pointing out that the vast majority of people in human history have never travelled at 500 mph, or made a telephone call, or posted a message on the internet. All absolutely true, but so what? The reality and validity of jet planes, telecommunications and microprocessors are not thereby compromised one iota.
7. The success of religious ideas is precisely that they are able to insulate themselves against reasoned objection (any that weren't have, by definition, fallen by the wayside). That doesn't mean believers are idiots, but yes, it does mean they are befuddled, in the sense that their reasoning faculties have, to a greater or lesser extent, been shortcircuited by the conditioning of religious belief. Faith provides them with the psychological comfort that allows them to ignore the implications that, for instance, the 2004 tsunami would have on any rationally based belief in a morally upright and loving creator.
"It is better to have lived than never to have lived at all." Absolutely right mate. Read the opening paragraph of "Unweaving the Rainbow" for an eloquent exposition of why this is so:
"We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here."
8. More intellectually compelling? You betcha. Humanly satisfying? Easily - because it's based on the knowledge that human satisfaction is the only kind any of us will ever know. Not sure what you're trying to prove with numbers. 100 million dead? sure - but that's because killing technology was so much more efficient in the 20th century than in the religiously dominated centuries before it, and world population larger. Give Mohammed a Panzer division, or fight the Thirty Years' War with cruise missiles, in a world population of 2-billion plus, and the casualty rolls would have put WWII to shame. As for nihilism, your point deserves to be taken seriously. In my view, the behaviour of Stalin (trained in the habits of religious certainty instilled in him in the seminary), Mao and Pol Pot were analogous to that of a teenager whose parents have gone away for the weekend: "Wow, mom and dad aren't around. I can do WHATEVER I LIKE" - hence the moral adolescence I referred to in point 3 above. But adolescents eventually grow up, and realize that just because you CAN do something doesn't mean you should. Whether anyone SHOULD do something or not is, as I said above, an ethical question that every individual is responsible for, according to the standards that we all collectively create. This also answers your point "that in Dawkins's world view you might consider those deaths unfortunate, despicable, socially counter productive, or whatever, but you cannot call them Wrong with a capital W." Yes, you're absolutely correct that you can't "call them Wrong with a capital W", if by that you mean that ethical standards are unchanging over time, because clearly they do change. I venture to suspect that you consider slavery to be "wrong", but our ancestors, who considered themselves equally morally upright, did not. In fact, many of them were convinced it was Right with a capital R. They also thought it was absolutely Wrong, for all time, that women should have legal or social equality with men, and Right that homosexuals should be executed. You insinuate that the idea of moral values shifting over time is a spiral that can only go downward. On the contrary, it can, and does, spiral up (usually no thanks to the religiously minded, who tend to tag on and assimilate the change rather late - another example of the success of the religious meme in adapting itself to new realities, then convincing itself it always believed them).
9. The problem of evil is, indeed, one that has exercised theologians for centuries. But Dawkins's basic point is that a world in which such suffering occurs does not provide *evidence* of a god's existence (still less a loving or compassionate god), and if anyone were to look at the question dispassionately, they would conclude that any *evidence* it provided on the question was rather in the opposite direction. People who believe do so in the teeth of what is actually happening in the world, not because of it.
10. The fulfilment of the psychological need for comfort in the face of an incomprehensible tragedy or natural disaster is something that Christianity has often done very well. You don't need me to point out that this has nothing to do with whether or not its claims are *true* (people often find fictions comforting). Once people understand natural disasters to be just that - natural - they tend not to need psychological crutches.

By the way, I can't help but feel that these ten points are not - how can I put it delicately - not all your own work? The literary style of the topping and tailing sentences seems rather too dissimilar to the bit in the middle. I'm finding it hard to believe that the sentence "Micro evolution helps the animal adapt to its surroundings and is observable and proves I.D. but macro evolution is religious pompous and will never ever change any animal to a different kind" was written by someone who was a "pastor at Stanford for almost nine years". If I'm wrong, I beg your pardon (and I'll revise my opinion of the intellectual calibre of the staff at Stanford...).

187. ACTION ITEM: Religion and Education

Comment #1762 by Jonathan Dore on October 16, 2006 at 2:30 pm

Apologies for repeating something I've said elsewhere, but it's germane to this topic: I'm surprised that teachers' unions haven't yet spoken out against the increasing influence of religious lobbies in schools (or have they? I haven't heard if so). I'm not a teacher, and I no longer live in the UK, but I would encourage any British teachers reading this to get in touch with their union leadership and with the National Secular Society (who did a lot of work mobilizing action against the Religious Hatred Bill earlier this year) and get them to initiate a proper campaign to promote and defend secular education in the UK, and to protest against the lies that children are being exposed to in religious schools.

188. Better living without God?

Comment #1744 by Jonathan Dore on October 16, 2006 at 9:51 am

I'm inclined to agree with Troy Jollimore's pessimism about the utility of appealing to the environmental conscience of American believers. Probably in most of the rest of the Western world such an alliance would be fruitful -- mainstream churches in Europe and Canada have tended to absorb an environmentalist agenda without much complaint. Sadly the particularly virulent form of apocalyptic millenarianism that is common in the US, and which has gradually moved closer and closer to the centres of political power there over the last 25 years, is profoundly anti-environmental. Indeed, I'm surprised how little of an issue is made of this. Someone who thinks the second coming is just around the corner, who looks forward to the "rapture", and who thinks nuclear Armageddon is actually desirable, won't care if the planet is environmentally screwed, and clearly won't have an interest in actually solving environmental problems on the scale of decades or centuries. We should be saying the obvious as loudly as possible: anyone who holds such opinions renders themselves unfit to hold public office, since their beliefs are a positive menace to life on this planet. Publicly espousing such beliefs should be seen as disqualifying someone from positions of responsibility.

189. The Dawkins Delusion

Comment #1322 by Jonathan Dore on October 11, 2006 at 11:53 am

It's a familiar trope from religionists such as Mohler (another example is Alister McGrath's interview here: www.stnews.org/News-201.htm) that Dawkins spends all his time banging on obsessively about religion instead of fulfilling his "public understanding of science" role. In fact, a glance at his published work shows this to be grossly untrue: from the Selfish Gene more than 30 years ago onward, all of his books have been firmly about science, and more recently the public understanding of science - even the "Devil's Chaplain" anthology had only a small section devoted to the effects of religion. Many people would probably be amazed to discover that "The God Delusion" is actually his first book on the subject. Why the misperception? Probably because most people's view of RD is shaped by his broadcasting appearances rather than his books, and TV and Radio producers love controversy more than anything else, because it "sells". If anyone doubts it, they should ask themselves why Dawkins was given a TV series this year to talk about religion, but has never in the last three decades been given a TV series to explain the basics of evolution.

190. The Language of Ignorance

Comment #994 by Jonathan Dore on October 8, 2006 at 2:07 pm

I find nothing substantive to dissent from in Harris's review, and it is dismaying to find a scientist of public prominence touting such nonsense as Collins. However, I think it's possible to have a marginally more optimistic view of the effect of Collins's book, or of the intellectual position it exemplifies. Given that, while his reasoning on "evidence" for God is specious, he nevertheless takes evolution and a 14-billion-year-old universe for granted, the book could be regarded as an example of the wider American culture beginning to come to terms with the idea that it is possible to be a Christian at the same time as accepting evolution and an ancient universe - in other words, what had become the default Anglican position by around 1880, and that of the Catholic Church perhaps a few decades later. If that interim position could became established as the norm in American society, as it was by a century ago in Europe, that would surely be a major step towards weening the U.S. off its anomalously enthusiastic religiosity, and setting it on the road of following Europe towards becoming a post-religious society. Frankly, it's hard to see how that outcome would be achieved without going through this interim stage.