Missing Shades of Grue

ORANGE COUNTY, Fla. -- It looked harmless enough, but the words on a billboard unnerved so many people that a popular restaurant nearby actually lost business.

"When you condemn all religions and say they are a fairytale, that is wrong," said Rich Stormes, a nearby business owner. The billboard went up a week before Easter and business at the restaurant went down.

Would it have been more appetizing to say "Some religions are fairy tales?" Or "Nearly all religions are fairy tales?" Or "All religions are fairy tales except yours?"

The Anti-Advertising Agency | Billboard: All Religions Are Fairy Tales

I started watching the recent debate between Dinesh D'Souza and Dan Dennett at Tufts (video here). I didn't make it all the way to the end, finding myself very early on generally disappointed at the level of the discussion. In this debate, as in most recent debates on theism I've witnessed, nothing new appears on the stage.

The question to be debated is whether God is a human invention. Dennett's opening presentation failed to bring any structure or substance to that question, focusing instead on whether world religions should be a curriculum requirement and then trying to shift the debate to whether religion is a human invention. D'Souza is--as we should all know by now--a simple-minded thinker who recycles the most naive versions of theistic, pro-religion (pro-Christianity) arguments. The first cause, the Anthropic Principle, intelligence can't come from material nature, atheism is also a religion, science is also based on faith, science can't explain morality or free will, etc. He throws out these "arguments" rapidly in all directions, with no unifying purpose except to overwhelm the listener with barrage of nonsense. Some listeners might find a large number of rapid-fire bad arguments to be more convincing than a small number of good arguments. But Dennett--as we should all know by now--isn't one of those listeners. Yet, he goes on the defensive as though he needs to address nearly every bit of nonsense. I would rather that he had taken control of the debate, choosing one point to champion and then provide some substantive thinking on the matter. Dennett has a body of work from which to do just that. D'Souza is unable to handle any truly deep thinking about these matters and would have been quickly overwhelmed himself.

I suppose the nature of the debate forum itself limits the degree to which substantive discussion can surface. But I can't help but feel that Dan Dennett has met Bizarro-Dennett, and on such an occasion there can be no Hegelian synthesis.

As opening day approaches, the Creationism Museum and its half-baked Ham are getting more national attention. The NYT has, at least, presented a somewhat circumspect advertisement.

Start accepting evolution or an ancient Earth, and the result is like the giant wrecking ball, labeled ?Millions of Years,? that is shown smashing the ground at the foundation of a church, the cracks reaching across the gallery to a model of a home in which videos demonstrate the imminence of moral dissolution. A teenager is shown sitting at a computer; he is, we are told, looking at pornography.

But given the museum?s unwavering insistence on belief in the literal truth of biblical accounts, it is strange that so much energy is put into demonstrating their scientific coherence with discussions of erosion or interstellar space. Are such justifications required to convince the skeptical or reassure the believer?

In the museum?s portrayal, creationists and secularists view the same facts, but come up with differing interpretations, perhaps the way Ptolemaic astronomers in the 16th century saw the Earth at the center of the universe, where Copernicans began to place the sun. But one problem is that scientific activity presumes that the material world is organized according to unchanging laws, while biblical fundamentalism presumes that those laws are themselves subject to disruption and miracle. Is not that a slippery slope as well, even affecting these analyses?

But for debates, a visitor goes elsewhere. The Creation Museum offers an alternate world that has its fascinations, even for a skeptic wary of the effect of so many unanswered assertions. He leaves feeling a bit like Adam emerging from Eden, all the world before him, freshly amazed at its strangeness and extravagant peculiarities.

So, if I shouldn't go there for debate or edification, why would I go there? Amusement? If only Jesus wore the same floppy shoes and wide smile as Mickey Mouse. But the god who extinguishes dinosaurs, allows children to watch internet porn all day, and promotes fiction over well-established fact, is just not very amusing and goes well beyond peculiar.

Creation Museum - Religion - New York Times

First, suppose Darwin did believe in God as a divine creator. Now suppose he didn't. See, the evidence for evolution remains unchanged no matter what Darwin believed. So why are some so obsessed with Darwin's religious views? There is valid historical interest, of course, and recently released correspondence shows how Darwin expressed his own religious doubts.

Darwin himself had a trying relationship with God. Though he was a firm believer in his early years, his theories forced him to question his faith and any commitment to Christianity that remained was extinguished with the death of his daughter in 1851. In one letter to another correspondent, Charles Lyell, he made his position clear: "Many persons seem to make themselves quite easy about immortality & the existence of a personal God by intuition; & I suppose that I must differ from such persons, for I do not feel any innate conviction on any such points.""

Darwin's doubts revealed in his letters to friends - Independent Online Edition > This Britain

The old-fashioned homophobic Baptists used to argue that homosexuality was immoral because it was unnatural--a sinner's choice, not something God imposed on innocent babies. Now that they are starting to figure out that sexual orientation is largely biologically-based, they are forced to shift from merely fallacious reasoning to sheer absurdity.

The president of the leading Southern Baptist seminary has suggested that a biological basis for homosexuality may be proven, and that prenatal treatment to reverse gay orientation would be biblically justified.

Biblically justified? When do they figure out that it's not the Bible, it's the homophobia? BTW, when is science going to find a genetic or biological basis for homophopia? There's an immoral "disease" waiting for a cure, or better yet, prevention. Biblically justified, I'd argue.

Homosexuality May Be Based on Biology, Baptist Says - New York Times

I've been thinking a lot about Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange recently. First, there was the interesting post on Pandagon about Pastor Ted and his Clockwork Orange restoration.

Ted Haggard is about to start his formal three-to-five year "spiritual journey" of restoration, though from the description in the LA Times, it sounds like the man's about to be put through a horrible emotional, perhaps even physical, wringer by these fundies who consider themselves peers and friends of the fallen pastor.

Scary sh*t, as Pam Saulding points out. Then in the Times this morning there is an article on how evangelicals are using taxpayer money to brainwash individuals in the nation's prison system.

The program ? which grew from a project started in 1997 at a Texas prison with the support of George W. Bush, who was governor at the time ? says on its Web site that it seeks ?to ?cure? prisoners by identifying sin as the root of their problems? and showing inmates ?how God can heal them permanently, if they turn from their sinful past.?

As I recall in the movie, the prison Chaplain was the one person to stand up to the Skinnarian politicians, arguing that their brainwashing took away the individual's free will.

Prison Chaplain: Choice! The boy has not a real choice, has he? Self-interest, the fear of physical pain drove him to that grotesque act of self-abasement. The insincerity was clear to be seen. He ceases to be a wrongdoer. He ceases also to be a creature capable of moral choice.

Minister: Padre, there are subtleties! We are not concerned with motives, with the higher ethics. We are concerned only with cutting down crime and with relieving the ghastly congestion in our prisons. He will be your true Christian, ready to turn the other cheek, ready to be crucified rather than crucify, sick to the heart at the thought of killing a fly. Reclamation! Joy before the angels of God! The point is that it works.

With all that is wrong in the Minister's project, I thought there was irony in the Chaplain's position then, and I think there is irony in the stories currently in the news. And the truly scary part is that today in the US the Chaplain and the Minister are working together. Scary ironic sh*t.

A. C. Grayling responds to a recent joint statement by the Archbishops of Canterbury and Westminster that "atheism is itself a faith position." (Recall the James Randi response: "atheism is a religion like not collecting stamps is a hobby.") They are committing, says Grayling, the informal fallacy of to quoque.

We understand that the faithful live in an inspissated gloaming of incense and obfuscation, through the swirls of which it is hard to see anything clearly, so a simple lesson in semantics might help to clear the air for them on the meanings of "secular", "humanist"; and "atheist". Once they have succeeded in understanding these terms they will grasp that none of them imply "faith" in anything, and that it is not possible to be a "fundamentalist" with respect to any of them.

His argument is, roughly, that not subscribing to a belief in god is not itself a view that requires faith because it is a position dependent upon reason and evidence. "I don't believe P because there is insufficient evidence for P" is not at all like "I believe that P even though there is insufficient reason that P."

People who do not believe in supernatural entities do not have a "faith" in "the non-existence of X" (where X is "fairies" or "goblins" or "gods"); what they have is a reliance on reason and observation, and a concomitant preparedness to accept the judgment of both on the principles and theories that premise their actions.

By calling those who don't share their belief in a god "atheists" who commit to different articles of "faith," theists attempt to keep the discussion in their own terms.

I would add only that often--and we see this frequently from creationists who attack evolutionary theory--a lack of certainty is associated with faith. So, when scientists admit that their evidence, though sufficient to support belief, falls short of supporting complete certainty, many of the religious believers will describe the scientitsts' situtation of as a matter of faith. But faith is a matter of believing without or despite empirical evidence--evidence doesn't matter. Thus Grayling's point that rejecting a position for lack of evidence is not the same as accepting something for which there is no evidence.

Richard Sloan measures the difference between science and religion in the Chronicle.

The view that all human experience can be reduced to the function of biological activity may be satisfying to scientists, but it is anathema to theologians. The researchers Marguerite Lederberg and George Fitchett recognize this problem in an interesting article with the provocative title "Can You Measure a Sunbeam With a Ruler?" In it, they explore the scientific problems with attempts to reduce the experience of religion to the measurable quantities of science. The point of their title is to reiterate a longstanding concern in science: the difficulty of quantifying human experience. By attempting to measure a sunbeam and in so doing reduce it to that which can be quantified by a ruler, we lose the character of the sunbeam itself. While such measurement may be possible, it cannot capture the essence of the sunbeam and in fact may distort it."

Water is H2O, but that fact doesn't dilute or reject the enjoyment I experience when I drink some. But what about the experience of enjoyment ittself? If it turns out that the experience of enjoyment can be reduced to (or identified with) particular patterns of synaptic firing, would it follow that enjoyment loses all its punch? Of course not. The feelings aren't lost by giving a materialist account of them. The worry by Sloan and others is really that this materialistic account will exclude the immaterialistic (supernatural) elements in their worldview. You don't lose the character of the sunbeam; you lose the miraculous or magical account of the source of that character. Sunbeams remain golden, warm, and lovely. Similarly for religious experience. I agree with Sloan that counting the number of people who attend church wouldn't help us much to understand the nature and source of religious experience. But even if we could give a meaningful materialistic (scientific) account of the experiences, that would not change the character of the experience. It would, perhaps, undermine Sloan's assumptions about the source or purpose of those experiences. If those assumptions are wrong, it would be good to know that. I'm much more concerned with those who try to reduce matters of science to religious assumptions and articles of faith.

The Chronicle: 11/3/2006: The Critical Distinction Between Science and Religion

New survey by Harris Poll.

...a new Harris Poll finds that 42 percent of all U.S. adults say they are not "absolutely certain" there is a God, including 15 percent who are "somewhat certain," 11 percent who think there is probably no God and 16 percent who are not sure.

It's not clear what people are claiming when they say they are not absolutely certain but are somewhat certain. What would it take to convince them they are wrong? I suspect many who claim to belong to a particular religion do so because they are identifying with a cultural group and not with a set of specific theistic beliefs.

Not everyone who describes themselves as Christian or Jewish believes in God. Indeed, only 76 percent of Protestants, 64 percent of Catholics, and 30 percent of Jews say they are "absolutely certain" there is a God. However, most Christians who describe themselves as "Born Again" (93%) are absolutely certain there is a God.

I'm not surprised that belief in God is not necessarily an essential part of Americans' religious commitment. A strong affiliation with a cultural or religious group will still inform (or sometimes misinform) one's sense of moral and social value.

BREITBART.COM - While Most U.S. Adults Believe in God, Only 58 Percent are 'Absolutely Certain'

Terry Eagleton reviews Richard Dawkin's book The God Delusion. He is bothered by Dawkin's religious devotion to attacking religion.

Apart from the occasional perfunctory gesture to ?sophisticated? religious believers, Dawkins tends to see religion and fundamentalist religion as one and the same. This is not only grotesquely false; it is also a device to outflank any more reflective kind of faith by implying that it belongs to the coterie and not to the mass.

Eagleton argues that Dawkins doesn't fairly portray religion, that he doesn't understand religion properly, and so presents a strawman, a radicalized version of religion, to be rejected. But Eagleton's own notion of God and Christianity, which he thinks should excape Dawkin's diatribe, is highly stylized and in need of clarification.

For Judeo-Christianity, God is not a person in the sense that Al Gore arguably is. Nor is he a principle, an entity, or ?existent?: in one sense of that word it would be perfectly coherent for religious types to claim that God does not in fact exist. He is, rather, the condition of possibility of any entity whatsoever, including ourselves. He is the answer to why there is something rather than nothing. God and the universe do not add up to two, any more than my envy and my left foot constitute a pair of objects.

In what sense is God a person? What is it to be a condition of possibility? What is the answer to why there is something rather than nothing? Eagleton's religion has many of the same goals as Dawkin's strawman.

Salvation for Christianity has to do with caring for the sick and welcoming the immigrant, protecting the poor from the violence of the rich. It is not a ?religious? affair at all, and demands no special clothing, ritual behaviour or fussiness about diet.

It strikes one that all the positive elements of Eagleton's Dawkins-proof Christianity can be achieved without the cloak of religious belief, ritual, or mythology. Would Dawkin's object?

LRB | Terry Eagleton : Lunging, Flailing, Mispunching

Salon has posted an interview with Richard Dawkins, whose latest book The God Delusion presents a rather scathing attack on religion. There have been a number of books challenging the reasonableness of religion lately, probably a reaction in America to the current administration's abuse of religious zealotry for political ends. Dawkins is unrelenting. I can appreciate his efforts, but I doubt his tone will take him very far. This passage isn't so bad, however.

What is so bad about religion?

Well, it encourages you to believe falsehoods, to be satisfied with inadequate explanations which really aren't explanations at all. And this is particularly bad because the real explanations, the scientific explanations, are so beautiful and so elegant. Plenty of people never get exposed to the beauties of the scientific explanation for the world and for life. And that's very sad. But it's even sadder if they are actively discouraged from understanding by a systematic attempt in the opposite direction, which is what many religions actually are. But that's only the first of my many reasons for being hostile to religion.

Salon.com Books | The flying spaghetti monster

Kim Sterelny reviews Dennett's Breaking the Spell.

Daniel C. Dennett's Breaking The Spell adds to the growing list of books on religion as a natural phenomenon but is strikingly different in tone and content from its predecessors. It is written for Americans, whose world is not secular: In the United States, it is impossible for an open skeptic to be a serious political figure, and even the skeptical take religion to be of profound moral and social significance. Dennett devotes much of his energy to trying to convince his nonsecular readers that it is legitimate to inquire scientifically into the roots of religious belief and to assess its moral consequences, good and bad. Reading this, I felt like a member of an alien species; it was a strange experience for a secular boy from a secular world.

Sterelny argues that Dennett's project is "doomed": religious leaders won't take it seriously because they will see the secular model of religion's origins to be corrosive. I suspect that Sterelny is right about that. I thought Dennett spent too much space attempting to appease the intended religious critic when, in fact, the religious critics are not going to take the proposal seriously, if they even read the book.

But I'm not convinced that Sterelny is fair when he claims that "Religious commitment cannot both be the result of natural selection for (for example) enhanced social cohesion and be a response to something that is actually divine." Of course, if each explanation is intended to be exhaustive, then if one is correct, the other is incorrect. But one can imagine circumstances where one adaptation favoring social cohesion puts one in a favorable position to appreciate or come to understand something the truly refers to something divine. Now I don't have any reason to think there is anything divine to appreciate or come to understand, but I don't see that these two explanations are inconsistent anytime they are employed in larger explanations of human behavior. Adaptations might get me looking in a certain direction and something else might be responsible for my seeing what I see, and perhaps for my continuing to look in that direction. Social cohesion may be partially at work in forming scientific communities and institutions, but it might also be the accuracy of results (and empirical success) that contributes to the ongoing existence of scientific practices.

American Scientist Online - Escaping Illusion?

Newsweek has an article on the recent proliferation of books--by Harris, Dennett, and Dawkins--on atheism. We start with Harris's endeavor.

Americans answered the atrocities of September 11, overwhelmingly, with faith. Attacked in the name of God, they turned to God for comfort; in the week after the attacks, nearly 70 percent said they were praying more than usual. Confronted by a hatred that seemed inexplicable, Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson proclaimed that God was mad at America because it harbored feminists, gays and civil libertarians. Sam Harris, then a 34-year-old graduate student in neuroscience, had a different reaction. On Sept. 12, he began a book. If, he reasoned, young men were slaughtering people in the name of religion?something that had been going on since long before 2001, of course?then perhaps the problem was religion itself.

A rather mild treatment follows, which is all I would expect from a brief Newsweek article. The last few lines, however, sound a little ominous--a warning of sorts.

If Dawkins, Dennett and Harris are right, the five-century-long competition between science and religion is sharpening. People are choosing sides. And when that happens, people get hurt.

But aren't people getting hurt anyway?

Being an Atheist in America Isn't Easy - Newsweek Society - MSNBC.com

A theodicy is an attempt to reconcile the existence of evil with the existence of a morally good, omniponent, and omniscient god. In some cases one attempts only to show that God's existence and the existence of evil are logically consistent. More powerful efforts aim at showing how one could reasonably believe in both. Leibniz, who may have introduced the term, famously attempted to show that the actual world is the best of all possible worlds--a claim that to many seems even more incredible than the claim that a benevolent god would permit some evil.

At EvolutionBlog, Jason Rosenhouse critically discusses William Dembski's recent attempt at a theodicy. Two main hurdles face anyone offering a theodicy: if evil is claimed to be the result of human sin (the Fall) and part of an effort to bring about redemption, why is there any natural evil and why is there so much evil? Though Dembski has a lot to say, his response seems to boil down to this passage (quoted in the Rosenhouse critique).

God's immediate response to the Fall is therefore not to create anew but to control the damage. In the Fall, humans rebelled against God and thereby invited evil into the world. The challenge God faces in controlling the damage resulting from this original sin is how to make humans realize the full extent of their sin so that, in the fullness of time, they can fully embrace the redemption in Christ and thus experience full release from sin. For this reason, God does not merely allow personal evils (the disordering of our souls and the sins we commit as consequence) to run their course subsequent to the Fall. In addition, God also brings about natural evils (e.g. death, predation, parasitism, disease, draught, famines, earthquakes and hurricanes), letting them run their course prior to the Fall. Thus, God himself disorders the creation, making it defective on purpose God disorders the world not merely as a matter of justice (to bring judgment against human sin as required by God's holiness) but even more significantly as a matter of redemption (to bring humanity to its senses by making us realize the gravity of sin). (Page 39)

Like Rosenhouse, I find this completely unconvincing. God disorders the world to bring us to our senses? Notice that this says nothing about why the amount of evil is so disproportionate to--and why the kinds of existing evil are so irrelevant to--the "purpose" of evil. Rosenhouse suggests that a world with no natural evil preceding the Fall would have sent a better message: "Look at what you've lost!" God had the foresight to plan for the Fall, but with any hindsight he must now be regreting such a stupid strategy.