This has got to be a first

May 18, 2015 • 1:10 pm

. . . or rather, what the Brits would call a “double first.” (Don’t mind me; I’m just trying to soothe my nerves.)

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AND. . .

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Meanwhile, both P. Z. Myers and Larry Moran have been quite helpful, disarming the critics before they strike. P. Z. takes on those people who argue that religion isn’t about truth, but meaning and community, while Larry goes after the criticism that believers and faitheists are sure to level at my book: it doesn’t address The Best Arguments for God. (It does.) Thanks to both!

 

85 thoughts on “This has got to be a first”

  1. You don’t give yourself enough credit. From the viewpoint of a street level atheist and admirer of science you are as important and dynamic as Dawkins, Harris, or Dennett. I am constantly amazed at your insight, day in and day out, and have learned a great deal from it. I think perhaps the world is catching on to what Dr. Jerry Coyne has to say, because it is important.

    2. Also, to be a bit librarian-ish, note that Coyne comes before Dawkins, Dennett & Harris when alphabetized! 😉

  3. Just received an e-mail from Amazon.ca telling me the Albatross is on its way. Can’t wait.

      1. Mine too! Hope I get it by the weekend. Though I still have a couple hundred pages left of Pinker’s How the Mind Works. I have good reading in my future!

        1. A coincidence? I am just finishing Pinker’s The Language Instinct. I’d really like to have a word with my 9th grade literature teacher!

          2. Mine’s due tomorrow! (so says Amazon, as of a couple of hours back).

          5. Got the call today from my independent bookstore. Can’t get there today, but that’s OK. Gives me an opportunity to further savor the anticipation. Will get there tomorrow.

          6. Independent book store…makin’ the rest of us feel guilty for buying from amazon… actually, I probably should be buying my new stuff from Rainy Day books instead.

          7. I haven’t read that (yet), but Pinker always makes me want to retake some classes and have a “word” or two. heehee

          8. Still no word yet. I see it has been ordered in my account some months ago.

          9. Did you use a card to order? Has that card been renewed since you ordered? They don’t charge you until it ships and sometimes cards change in the intervening time. Has happened to me. But, if that is the case, when you view your order it should say that you need to update your method of payment.

          10. That is exactly what happened to me . I got an email at seven minutes after midnight saying the card that I ordered it on has expired . They didn’t use the new card that I had added to the Amazon account four months ago .

          11. I suspect one might find a lot of one’s early education is full of mistakes wrt what experts actually know.

            (My personal beef is not being exposed to French as an infant – which would have been trivial as a Montrealer – to make me a genuine bilingual.)

  4. Guess I need to turn the cell connection on my kindle back on, see what pops into it!

    it doesn’t address The Best Arguments for God. (It does.)

    Ah, but the whole point of the courtier’s reply is that there is always another Best Argument. However far you’ve looked, however many turtles down you’ve gone, there is always another turtle. Defense through infinite regression.

    2. However far you’ve looked, however many turtles down you’ve gone, there is always another turtle.

      Turtle soup, in infinite quantities?
      Actually, I don’t think I’ve ever eaten turtle soup. Given the generally endangered status of Testudines, I’m not sure that I would.

  5. #1 on amazon, #1 in our hearts… my copy shipped, should have it in my godless, star stuff hands Tuesday!

  6. Hoping/presuming that this will website will remain as the dual site for WEIT and FvF.

    1. Some days, its more appropriately titled Puss & Boots. 🙂 Not complaining, merely jesting.

  8. When I read this I checked the Amazon UK site only to discover that the release date here is 26th June. So I checked the US website and ordered from there. Believe it or not it was 72 pence cheaper, including postage!

  9. Number 1 in Religious Studies! All you need is No. 1 in Mind, Body and Spirit and you’ve got the Trinity, Jerry. Congratulations! x

    1. A particularly unholy (and unworthy of attention, despite the buoyancy imparted by the evolution #1) trinity.

    1. If you like browsing in ink-on-paper bookshops, you’ve got to use them.

  13. Re Arguments for the Existence of God

    I recently perused Rebecca Goldstein’s appendix to “36 arguments for the Existence of God” in which she rebuts all 36. (The book is a novel, but contains a non-fiction appendix.)

    The rebuttals seem to fall into two categories.

    1) The logic is fundamentally false. (The Ontological Argument- IMO the very worst argument for God EVER.)

    2) There is a logical leap rendering the argument merely suggestive supplemented by speculation, so it certainly is not a smoking gun that seals the deal. (OK, I’m mixing metaphors badly). In the latter category would fall the argument from the “hard problem” of consciousness.

    The ONLY one of the 36 arguments she likes is Spinoza’s, but there she notes that Spinoza’s concept of God is so removed from what had been classically held by theologians, it still doesn’t amount to a hill of beans (or a Hill of Being 🙂 ). Spinoza postulates a necessary self-subsistent being, but is this being a sentient spirit?? It need not be.

    1. I haven’t read FvF yet but from Jerry’s postings over the last few months, I’m guessing that when he says he covers the best arguments, he’s talking primarily about the two biggies (and their many many variants): Ontological, and Teleological. There aren’t many arguments for the existence of God that don’t end up being some sort of variation on one of those two. For example, Spinoza’s argument (which you say Goldstein likes) is just a variant on the Ontological argument (which you say you don’t like).

      1. No, I don’t go over that stuff; I’m talking about the approach of the Sophisticated Theologians, and why it is no the only form of religion that critics must deal with. Those other arguments were dealt with in the first spate of atheist books, most notably The God Delusion. I’ve tried to avoid overlap.

        1. Fantastic! Now I’m even more psyched than I was when I saw the shipping notice come through.

          1. Faith versus Fact:

            fact: existence of Ceiling Cat*

            faith: necessary to sustain false belief in all other “deities”

            *Proof:
            Define Ceiling Cat as the cat with the most puuurfect Purr imaginable.
            Now existence is really really great, so if Ceiling Cat didn’t exist, she couldn’t have the most puuuuuurrrrrrrfect Purr imaginable.
            Therefore, Ceiling Cat exists.

        2. Well I stand corrected. 🙂 I think like Benjamin, this makes me more curious to read it rather than less. Though now I expect that some of the Courtier’s Replies we’ll see will be “What about Ontological Argument???” and “What about Teleological Argument???”

      2. I’m not so sure the arguments are the same.

        Spinoza is arguing from the chain of causality needing to start somewhere, so it’s more a variation on the cosmological argument. There needs to be a causi sui (self-caused) ultimate reality, or as the cosmological argument puts it a Prime Mover. (But why need this be God?) The cosmological argument as Wikipedia puts it “from facts or alleged facts concerning causation, change, motion, contingency,”

        The ontological argument argues from semantics starting with “God, by definition, is that for which no greater can be conceived” to arguing that a being with this kind of “positive property” (Kurt Godel’s formulation) must exist, but this argument has nothing at all to do with God as first cause or prime mover.

        I especially dislike the ontological argument because it is just words (or as Hamlet would say “words, words, words”) and semantic trickery.

    2. In fact, Spinoza says it isn’t one. He says god/nature has the two aspects we know, mental and physical, and *infinitely many others* we don’t. So he actually seems to think we don’t know more than an infinitessimal amount about it. (I regard some of this stuff as the weakest point of his metaphysics, even historically, but …)

  14. I ordered my copy through itunes a week ago, they gave me a preview in the way of chapter one. I’ll be very happy with the rest.

  17. Those of us with digital orders don’t appear to have our copies yet. 🙁

    1. My hard copy is due to arrive tomorrow, too. While tracking it, I noticed that I seem to have accidentally pre-ordered the Kindle version as well, so quickly cancelled that in the nick of time.

      1. I had ordered it using a credit card which expired in the interim. Fixed it and got my e-copy.

    1. Ditto on the congrats to PCC.

      I haven’t even received an e-mail from Amazon yet, but I presumed that they would send the book out tomorrow, and I’d receive it later this week.

      How fortuitous to have a three-day weekend coming up–more time to read it!

  22. Really good articles by both PZ and Larry Moran!

    Since, as we’ve learned here, the laws of physics require it, I’ll post some key snippets.

    From Larry Moran’s article:

    Science is the most successful way of knowing that humans have ever invented. It relies absolutely on evidence. You don’t believe in something unless you have evidence. You can believe in gods, hobbits, and fairy tales if you want but that belief conflicts with the scientific way of knowing. No amount of obfuscation and attempts at diversion is going to hide that fact. It’s about time that serious theologians start defending their belief in gods instead of wasting their time on other things.

    And from PZ’s:

    You know, you don’t have to believe in gods and ghosts to find “meaning, values, tradition, consolation, community, and transcendence”, right? No one is objecting to community or values. We’re objecting to the dishonesty of using community and values as excuses to prop up irrelevant falsehoods.

    and:

    And that’s how I feel about the finding “something valuable in religion nonetheless” argument. It doesn’t hang together. When you find swarms of people investing huge amounts of time and money into a long-term project with dubious premises, it seems profoundly dishonest to pretend that the openly, loudly stated aims of the project are not a major contributor to participation. It’s like saying you’re a devout Catholic because you appreciate the Pope’s stylin’ attire…
    The belief is real. Its adherents ought to be a little embarrassed about it, and we ought not to be distracted by these post hoc excuses for it. So our friend has every right, and can believably get enjoyment out of the exercise, to build his perpetual motion machine — and we can even respect the skill going into it — but let’s not lie to each other and pretend that it’s about “community” or “ritual”. It’s about a lie that has sucked a talented human being into a dead end.

  23. Well, I resent that it’s not midnight yet, because I want this book right now. I do believe I’ll hold a protest, right here, in my hotel room. I’m going to go sit in the doorway now. Cheers.

    Can’t wait to start reading tomorrow 🙂

  24. Onwards to chapter two!

    Reading my Google books copy as I doubt the physical book would arrive in our local bookstores within one month.

    So far so good…

  25. Wow! shades of Cinderella at precisely 9pm pst (midnight est) my book appeared on ipad. Excited.

  26. Congratulations! Maybe you should charge twice the going rate. =D

    There will as always be many Courtiers that want to touch, nay, osculate, the nude rump of religion with their gaze. My envisioning this is that they scurry to hang up another curtain behind those that are torn down in order to pretend that their magical beings hides behind.

    What they don’t realize is that the question for evidence is an atom bomb released in their midst, burning their infinite regress stack of curtains in toto. It’s curtains for curtains. Because “Science. It works, bitches.” [ https://xkcd.com/54/ ]

    That said it will be entertaining to watch Jerry saddle up and ride off towards the horizon with the other horsemen. He, at least, has the boots for it. And now the steed. Yeehaw!

    1. “That said it will be entertaining to watch Jerry saddle up and ride off towards the horizon with the other horsemen. He, at least, has the boots for it. And now the steed. Yeehaw!”

      Good. “Firefly”/”Serenity” comes to mind.

      2. I just saw an advert (from the last month or so of recorded tv) of an homage to the Dawkins-led “Dissecting Nature’s Giants” series of programmes (you want to see the absurdity of the giraffe’s recurrent pharyngyal nerve … on video. Beee-atches?)
        Some schmuck claims to have created an “anatomically correct” T-rex model, and then dissected it.
        OK, lots of room for genuine quibbles over whose idea of anatomically correct, and did they compress 18 tonnes of chicken meat to appropriately shaped. But I think I’ll have to ensure that the deranged idiot of a TV box does it’s stuff correctly. It’ll probably be a bit silly, but fun nonetheless.

  28. As an addendum, I don’t see how the Courtier’s “the best argument [is yet to come]” is making a good faith effort.

    They may say, even think, that those asking for evidence is not criticizing religion in good faith. But really, come on! When was it ever good faith to criticize the details of what isn’t? How many angels can you put on that needle tip?

    Establish veracity of the subject, then we can have that discussion.

  29. Dammit, Amazon UK:

    Release date: Thursday, 25 June 2015

    Looks like it’ll be next week when Teh (sic) Albatross lands!

        1. Already pre-ordered, so I may as well have it as a surprise next month.

          I have a massive number of unread books on my Kobo plus some dead trees to finish so I’m not *that* put out!

  31. Mine doesn’t arrive until Friday. Strange — Amazon usually times deliveries to hit the day of official release. Ah well, I’m in the middle of Weinberg’s book right now.

    But the Kindle version should upload toady — I’m going to try now.

    1. Ah, I figured out why: Amazon is being more careful about grouping orders into single packages.

      I almost always opt for free shipping. These days, those packages take longer than they used to because they are now grouping items from different orders (not just the ones on the order in question).

      I’m actually really good with this: It lowers the overall planetary impact of the shipping. It’s a good thing.

  33. Just read the preface of the book so far.
    Followers of this web site, you will be thrilled with the book.

  34. I started a new job about a month ago. I use my work computer to read this website nearly every day. Because of this post, I went and read Larry Moran’s post. Then I went back and tried to go read PZ’s post. An obnoxious warning came up on the screen. It said, “website forbidden – access denied. Category: Religion”

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