Category: atheist-baiting

Another breathtaking example of creationist Egnorance

September 27, 2019 • 10:45 am

If you’ve followed the Intelligent Design (ID) mishigass, you’ll have heard of Michael Egnor, a neurosurgeon, a Christian who was once an atheist, and a big supporter of ID and senior fellow of the Discovery Institute. Egnor writes for the Evolution News website. Like several people there, he’s obsessed with me, but instead of taking apart my views on evolution, he goes after me personally, criticizing my attacks on theology and, worse, calling me names. This tells you two things. First, that religion is intimately entangled with ID. Although IDers disingenuously claim that they’re driven to the idea of a Designer in the Sky by the science alone, it’s curious that virtually all of them (biker David Berlinski may be an exception) are religious. Why are all the Discovery Institute flaks religious?

Also, it shows the intellectual failure of ID to replace evolution, which according to the Wedge Document timetable, it should have done by now. So they result in apologetics, theodicy, and philosophy. They’ve already lost on the science.

This week Egnor goes after me because of what I wrote about David Attenborough the other day. You can read his rant, which includes name-calling, by clicking on the screenshot below from the comment-free Evolution News site (I’ve archived the link below so their site doesn’t get clicks.)

Here goes Egnor’s argument, which is indented.

A shimmering example of atheist idiocy (there is no other word for it) is Jerry Coyne’s recent argument, at Why Evolution Is True, against God’s existence in his post on David Attenborough’s agnosticism. Attenborough, who is a Darwinist producer of nature films (quite good films I must say, despite the Darwinist taint), was interviewed about his views on God.

To Coyne’s chagrin, Attenborough declares that he is agnostic about God’s existence. Attenborough raises common objections to theism (e.g., the problem of evil), but he invokes a rather nice metaphor about a termite mound. He points out that termites, blind and busily working away in a mound, are unaware of human observers. Their unawareness is not evidence that an observer doesn’t exist — they lack the sense organs to perceive the observer. Attenborough says that is why he is agnostic — he doesn’t sense that God exists, but perhaps that is because he lacks the capacity to know God.

Attenborough:

I do sometimes feel that maybe I’m lacking in some sense organ, and I don’t know whether there’s anybody else involved in all this sort of thing. And it’s a very confident thing, saying that you’re absolutely sure that there’s nothing in this world that I don’t have the sense organs to appreciate. That would be my position.

Coyne hops on this:

[O]f course, if a god wanted to make himself known to humans, he would have given them the sense organs to detect divinity.

A Breathtaking Ignorance

My goodness. In this one assertion, Coyne (culpably) and Attenborough (more innocently) betray a breathtaking ignorance.

God is not a physical thing. It is only physical things that can be sensed by sense organs. If God could be sensed via an organ, He would not be God. What would be sensed would be a part of creation, not the Creator. God is not in nature. He is prior to nature. He is the Source of nature.

And, contra Coyne and Attenborough, God did endow us with an organ by which we may know Him. He endowed us with reason. Alone among animals, human beings have the power of abstract thought — to contemplate ideas separated from concrete particular (sensible) objects. We have intellect, by which we can understand immaterial knowledge and will by which we act on our abstract knowledge.

Reason and Will

Our capacity for reason is the “organ” God gave us to know Him, and our will is the “organ” God gave us to love Him.

Reason is our divine “sense organ.” It is perfectly adapted to its task — it allows us to know and love our Creator. In this sense we are created in His image: we have the capacity to know immaterial reality and to act on our knowledge.

Atheists ask where is our “divine sense organ?”, when the very capacity by which they ask the question — their capacity for reason — is the “sense organ” they seek.  This utter atheist idiocy helped lead me to God. What I found, when I looked at the arguments for and against His existence, is that the arguments against His existence were vapid nonsense. 

There are many problems here. First of all, even if God is not a physical thing, nearly all Christians—the theistic ones—think that God interacts with the world in a physical way. After all, God sent his son/alter ego down to Earth as a scapegoat to be killed for our sins, thereby expiating us. IDers believe that God The Intelligent Designer either brought new species into being or made the requisite mutations to promote their appearance. Indeed, the very concept of Intelligent Design presupposes that empirical evidence—science and observation itself—inevitably brings us to the concept of an Intelligent Designer. And that evidence is “sensed by sense organs.” 

In other words, ID itself refutes Egnor’s claim that God The Intelligent Designer cannot be sensed via an organ. The stupidity here (and I’m not pulling punches given that Egnor engages in name-calling) is to assume that a deity who is nonphysical cannot be apprehended through sense organs. If you’re a theist, that’s palpably ridiculous.

As for God giving us our “capacity for reason” specifically so we can know Him (do chimps know Him, too, since they have a capacity to reason?), that’s also ridiculous. If our capacity for reason gives us the “capacity to know immaterial reality and act on our knowledge”, then how come every religion has a different conception of immaterial reality? Egnor is a Christian; does he reject the Muslim belief that Jesus wasn’t the son of God but merely a prophet, and that Muhammad was given the true religion by Allah through Gabriel? Does he reject Hindu pantheism, or the animism of some tribes? Does he reject the thetans and Xenu-beliefs of Scientology?

Yes, if God gave us reason to know the truth about Him, how come the “truths” that “reason” tells believers are so disparate? Our divine sense organs must be defective in some way.

And why, over time, has “reason” turned more and more of the West into atheists? After all, God gave this reason to each of us, and gave it to us specifically so we’d know Him (or Her or Whatever). Are some people lacking in this reason? And that includes people who seem to have plenty of reason on other fronts: atheist intellectuals like Bertrand Russell, Stephen Hawking, Dan Dennett, Stephen Fry, Richard Dawkins, and so on. And David Attenborough lacks it, too? Why did God give these people lots of ability to reason, but prevented that reason from apprehending His existence? Why are more and more people not using their organs of reason properly as time progresses?

And why is this blather on a site called Evolution News & Science Today? Because that’s also a site where Egnorant fools who are slaves to ancient superstitions parade their inability to reason. And that’s why they promote ID. Every time an IDer like Egnor writes about theology on that site, it affirms Judge Jones’s decision, back in Dover, that ID is not science but a form of religion.

Atlantic article pretends that atheists are really religious by lying about the data

August 29, 2019 • 10:30 am

When I saw this article from last year’s online Atlantic, I thought it was going to push the usual guff: “atheists are religious because they adhere fervently to the doctrine of No God, with no proof of their (non)beliefs.” But no, it wasn’t that. It was worse. In fact, the title is an arrant lie in at least two respects, and a distortion in another.

So how did author Sigal Samuel (a staff writer at Vox and former religion editor of The Atlantic) come to this conclusion? By distorting and misreporting the results from a 2018 Pew survey on the attitudes of Christians in Western Europe. That survey involved estimating the religiosity of Americans and Europeans by using standard questions like “Do you believe in God with absolute certainty?” and “Do you pray daily?”

Unsurprisingly, they found that Americans were more religious than Western Europeans. From Pew:

. . . Americans, overall, are considerably more religious than Western Europeans. Half of Americans (53%) say religion is “very important” in their lives, compared with a median of just 11% of adults across Western Europe. Among Christians, the gap is even bigger – two-thirds of U.S. Christians (68%) say religion is very important to them, compared with a median of 14% of Christians in the 15 countries surveyed across Western Europe.

Well, we’ve known this for a long time.

Second, as Samuel reports, there’s a difference between “nones” in America and “nones” in Europe:

. . . the researchers found that American “nones”—those who identify as atheist, agnostic, or nothing in particular—are more religious than European nones. The notion that religiously unaffiliated people can be religious at all may seem contradictory, but if you disaffiliate from organized religion it does not necessarily mean you’ve sworn off belief in God, say, or prayer.

Is there a deficit of neurons here? Lots of people who believe in a Higher Power don’t identify as members of a particular church. We all know some of these people.

Here’s what Pew says, affirming Samuel’s statement:

But even American “nones” are more religious than their European counterparts. While one-in-eight unaffiliated U.S. adults (13%) say religion is very important in their lives, hardly any Western European “nones” (median of 1%) share that sentiment.

Again, no surprise. Remember that “nones” aren’t all atheists, but simply a grouping term for people who don’t consider themselves affiliated with a formal religion. Atheists are only a small proportion of “nones”. And yes, you can still believe in God and be a “none”—you just don’t align yourself with the Catholic Church, Judaism, Islam, or any formal religion. Given that Americans are on the whole considerably more religious than Europeans, why is it a surprise that unaffiliated Americans are more religious than unaffiliated Europeans?

But here’s the result that got Samuel to her clickbait headline. As Pew said:

Similar patterns are seen on belief in God, attendance at religious services and prayer. In fact, by some of these standard measures of religious commitment, American “nones” are as religious as — or even more religious than — Christians in several European countries, including France, Germany and the UK.

And as Samuel tells us:

The third finding reported in the study is by far the most striking. As it turns out, “American ‘nones’ are as religious as—or even more religious than—Christians in several European countries, including France, Germany, and the U.K.”

“That was a surprise,” Neha Sahgal, the lead researcher on the study, told me. “That’s the comparison that’s fascinating to me.” She highlighted the fact that whereas only 23 percent of European Christians say they believe in God with absolute certainty, 27 percent of American nones say this.

Note the Pew statement (my emphases) “by some of these standard measures of religious commitment, American “nones” are as religious as—or even more religious than — Christians in several European countries, including France, Germany and the UK.

Two points here. First of all, “nones” aren’t all atheists, especially in the U.S. So Samuel has erred mightily in her headline, saying “atheists are sometimes more religious than Christians” when she means “nones are sometimes more religious than Christians”. Atheists, by definition, aren’t religious—at least according to the criteria Pew used for “religious”. And, of course,  her headline, even if corrected, doesn’t hold true for all European countries (Pew mentions three; I can’t be arsed to find the country-by-country data).

Here’s Pew’s table that’s apparently the basis for Samuel’s breathy conclusion:

The comparison we want to make is with Western European Christians (dark red dots in middle column) with “nones” in the U.S. (grayish dots in right column). It turns out that using the criteria “religion is important in my life” or “I attend religious services at least monthly”, American “nones” aren’t as religious as European Christians, belying the headline. (The difference is greatest for churchgoing, with 31% of European Christians going to church at least monthly compared to 9% of American “nones”.) And the “higher religiosity” of American nones than of European Christians isn’t impressive for the other two criteria: a difference of 2% in “praying daily” and 4% in “believing in God with absolute certainty.”

And if you compare European nones with European Christians, the “nones” are less religious—by a long shot—for every one of the four indices of religiosity.

So that is the lie, and Samuel should have known better. But telling the truth would have spoiled her headline: it would have had to be “Americans who don’t consider themselves affiliated with a church are, according to some criteria for religiosity, more religious than Europeans who identify as Christians.” That’s not very exciting, is it?

And given the secularism of Europe, and the fact that many who identify as “Christians” do so in a cultural rather than religious way, just as I identify as being a Jew, it’s not surprising that American “nones” are sometimes more religious than cultural European Christians. That’s a second contributor to the distortion in Samuel’s headline: that many Christians (she means European Christians) are really atheists and therefore don’t pray, go to church, or believe in God at all, much less with absolute certainty.

The Pew report has some interesting data; look for the table of how many European “nones” (as opposed to church-attending Christians or non-practicing Christians) think that science makes religion unnecessary (hint: it ranges between 53% and 69%.

One surprising result: a substantial proportion of the European “unaffiliated,” including those who are religious and those who aren’t, believe that they have a soul (see graph below). Such is the power of dualism. Perhaps some of it comes from the dualism inherent in many forms of free will. (I’ll get my coat.)

All in all, the headline really has the import of “Dog bites man” rather than the other way round. I guess the Atlantic doesn’t vet their headlines very well. And the rest of Samuel’s article is pretty much boilerplate reporting. It’s not worth reading once you find out that there’s little new here except some serious distortion.

h/t: Enrico

Discovery Institute puts out video purporting to refute materialiam and atheism

June 27, 2019 • 1:30 pm

The Discovery Institute has put out a series of videos that, they claim, will do in atheism—and presumably lead us to Intelligent Design and then to Jesus. I hate to give publicity to a bunch of superstitious yahoos, but will put up one sample of what they consider to be a convincing attack on atheism. First, though, the blurbs about these videos:

From Evolution News, written by Jonathan Witt:

A new YouTube series, Science Uprising, challenges the notion that the smart money is on atheism. I was part of the creative team behind the project. One of our aims was to reach those “digital natives” who get much of their impression of the wider world from the Internet, including streaming services like YouTube.

This group tends to encounter well-articulated arguments for unbelief earlier than ever before, and they often encounter those arguments online. Science Uprising is part of an increasingly rich body of material that pushes back against anti-theistic online propaganda.

From the YouTube video site:

This episode of Science Uprising investigates claims by scientists and professors like Neil deGrasse Tyson, Carl Sagan, and Daniel Dennett, who try to hijack science to promote materialism—the idea that physical reality is all there is. Hear from experts who challenge this view of science, and learn about scientists who have to hide behind a mask because they face intimidation and censorship from dissenting from materialism. People featured in this episode include Jay Richards, PhD, Assistant Professor at The Catholic University of America, filmmaker, and author or co-author of books such as The Human Advantage, The Privileged Planet, The Hobbit Party, Infiltrated, and Money, Greed, and God; and Michael Egnor, MD (from Columbia University), neurosurgeon and professor of neurological surgery at Stony Brook University. Dr. Egnor is renowned for his work in pediatric neurosurgery.

Watch the 7-minute video below. I’ve put a few comments below it.

My comments:

1.) The video gives no evidence against atheism; that is, it adduces no evidence for the existence of a god. The gist of the video is that the implications of godlessness are unpalatable (e.g., the “purposeless of the universe”). Pity, but what exists—or doesn’t exist—doesn’t always comport with how we want things to be.

2.) Their evidence for god? The assertion that “Most people and cultures around the world have a profound belief that life extends beyond the physical—that compassion, ideas, joy and sorrow, aren’t made of matter.”  Since when has the ubiquity of a belief constituted evidence for its truth?

3.) Science is based on materialism, which they say is an unsubstantiated worldview. But materialism and naturalism (I prefer the latter term) are the only ways we’ve ever attained truth about the universe. Certainly faith and religion have given us no truth, as evidenced by the diverse and conflicting claims of the planet’s many religions. After years of trying, I’ve seen no “truth” about the universe adduced by religion itself that doesn’t require confirmation by science, but I’ve seen plenty of religious “truths” disconfirmed by science (creationism, the Flood, the Exodus, and so on).

4.) According to the video, scientists are stupid to claim that we have no (libertarian) free will. If that’s the case, say the dupes, “how can we be responsible for our actions?” I’ve already explained why determinism is still compatible with personal responsibility for our actions—and for punishment and reward—but not moral responsibility in the sense of “we could have done otherwise.”

5.) The implication of materialism is racism and murder (see the pictures).

6.) Our consciousness and a sense of self are illusory, say people like Dan Dennett and Sam Harris. This, claim the benighted, is not only incompatible with materialism, but conflicts with the claim that consciousness and self have real consequences. Well, these people don’t understand what “illusory” means, which is, in the Harrisian and Dennettian senses, “These things aren’t what they seem to be.” Further, if you’re a determinist, then consciousness and self are themselves the byproducts of natural processes—epiphenomena, if you will—and cannot exercise some non-deterministic, non-physical forces on our actions.

7.) And that’s about it, except that Michael Egnor (and the charlatan Rupert Sheldrake) make appearances. Egnor, misidentified as a scientist (he’s a neurosurgeon who doesn’t do science), says, “The deeper I look into the science, the more I realize what a catastrophe for science materialism/atheism really is.” Of course, Egnor doesn’t explain that statement. It is, in fact, theism and faith that have been catastrophes for science, as evidenced by the large number of people on this planet who reject the existence of evolution on religious grounds.

8.) At the end, the female narrator gets it exactly backwards when she says, “We want to follow the evidence, wherever it leads, and decide for ourselves.” Well, if they follow evidence that is strongly agreed on by all rational people, what they get is science—science that can work only without assuming a god. The kind of “evidence” that these people accept is evidence from scripture, from their preachers, and from their own feelings about how the world is or ought to be. That is not the way to find scientific truth.

Pity that the cowards at the Evolution News site don’t accept comments, but you can “like” or “dislike” the YouTube videos

 

The New Yorker praises atheism (sort of)

May 19, 2019 • 10:00 am

UPDATE: James Wood has responded politely to this piece in a comment below, which you can find here.

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The article below (click on screenshot), by New Yorker literary critic and Harvard English professor James Wood, is a review of Martin Hägglund’s new book, This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom, but also a paean (of sorts) to secularism and atheism.

I once spent a pleasant few hours with James in a Harvard Square coffeeshop, trying to find out if he thought literature was a “way of knowing” (as I recall, he agreed that we can’t find truths about the universe from literature itself), and I don’t want to be hard on him. Most of his pieces for the magazine are excellent, and his literary judgment is keen. But I think he’s somewhat off the mark in this review. And that is mainly because he takes some gratuitous swipes at New Atheism (and, of course, the Great Satan Dawkins), as well as implying that we don’t need to consider evidence—or, rather, the lack thereof—when we give up religion.

When New Yorker writers bestir themselves to say something good about nonbelief, you can be sure of five things:

1.) They may praise atheism, but they will also diss New Atheism.
2.) They will disdain the need for evidence when deciding whether to be a believer or an atheist. Evidence is irrelevant. This is part of the magazine’s perpetual favoring of the humanities and their “ways of knowing” over science.
3.) They will conflate religion with “passion”. One example came from a piece in the New Yorker that, while praising this website, implied that I was quasi-religious:

If atheists underestimate the fudginess in faith, believers underestimate the soupiness of doubt. My own favorite atheist blogger, Jerry Coyne, the University of Chicago evolutionary biologist, regularly offers unanswerable philippics against the idiocies of intelligent design. But a historian looking at his blog years from now would note that he varies the philippics with a tender stream of images of cats—into whose limited cognition, this dog-lover notes, he projects intelligence and personality quite as blithely as his enemies project design into seashells—and samples of old Motown songs. The articulation of humanism demands something humane, and its signal is disproportionate pleasure placed in some frankly irrational love.

4.) They will show a sneaking sympathy with religious belief and ritual; and
5.) They will lard their arguments with heavy literary knowledge and references

These features are all on view in Wood’s article, and all but #5 are missteps, though, as I said, I think the piece is generally good and certainly worth reading.

According to Wood, the thesis of Hägglund’s book includes these ideas:

a. Religion is bogus, but it’s not bogus just because there is no evidence for gods. In fact, evidence is irrelevant to nonbelief.

b. Religion is bogus because the notion of eternity, which Hägglund sees as inherent in most religions (including Buddhism and Judaism, which don’t have a concept of heaven), is incoherent and, even if comprehensible, is palpably undesirable.

c. Even religious people act as if they’re atheists because they mourn the loss of loved ones who die, and have no concrete notion of seeing them again. This is an attachment to the secular—a hidden atheism.

d. If we reject eternity, and realize that the here and now is all we have, then we must construct our secular values around that notion. Hägglund thinks that this drives us to a form of socialism. Why? Because we are all striving for maximal freedom in our finite existence, and thus must balance our drive for individual freedom with our social duties. According to Hägglund, capitalism is opposed to this by constantly trying to increase our work time and reduce our free time. To counterbalance this, we need a form of democratic socialism that will “reduce, in the aggregate, socially necessary labor time and to increase socially available free time.”

Hägglund’s book, then, is a bipartite meditation on the uselessness of eternity and the need to accept our finitude, and then a set of ideological and political prescriptions on how to construct a society that takes our finitude on board. I’m not going to discuss this part: Wood talks heavily about Marx and Feuerbach, the architects of the kind of society Hägglund wants, and while this is interesting I’m not sure how convincing it is. Even Wood finds the author”s arguments for how to negotiate necessary labor with freedom unconvincing:

Rather than simply replace the realm of necessity with the realm of freedom—which would be impossible anyway, because there is always tedious and burdensome work to be done—we should be able to better “negotiate” the relationship between those realms. Hägglund gives an example of how this might be done when he talks about the way his own work on the book we are reading unites the two realms: writing “This Life” was labor, of course, but it was pursued as an end in itself, as a matter of intellectual inquiry. In a Hägglundian utopia, labor would be part of our freedom.

As Church Lady would say, “isn’t that convenient?” Academics like Hägglund already have that freedom. And Wood stresses the hypocrisy:

An ideal democratic socialism that harmonizes Hägglund’s idea of freedom with the state’s necessarily different idea of freedom will come to America, I guess, not just when the mountain comes to Muhammad but when the tenured academic willingly gives up his Yale chair for a job at New Haven’s Gateway Community College. Like many readers, I get anxious when literary academics use the verb “negotiate” at tricky moments; it forecloses argument, and seldom means actual negotiation. Indeed, Hägglund is unusually weasel-wordy when he concedes that such negotiation will demand “an ongoing democratic conversation.” That’s putting it optimistically.

Indeed. But let’s get to Wood’s criticism of New Atheism. Here’s some of it, channeled through Hägglund’s book (these are Wood’s words):

The problem with eternity is not that it doesn’t exist (Hägglund is uninterested in the pin dancing of proof and disproof) but that it is undesirable and incoherent; it kills meaning and collapses value. This is a difficult truth to learn, because we are naturally fearful of loss, and therefore attached to the idea of eternal restoration.

It’s clear that Wood isn’t interested in evidence, either, calling it “the pin dancing of proof and disproof”. But that’s bogus, for why would one reject eternity at all if you didn’t think that there was no evidence for it? If there were convincing evidence for a heaven, then surely we’d like to know about it and take it on board. If we knew that we would see our loved ones for eternity in some form or another (and yes, considering precisely what form gets you mired in the hinterlands of theology), we’d surely behave differently from how we do—perhaps mourning less when a loved one dies. Wood and Hägglund give plenty of evidence for literary figures showing the kind of mourning that seems inconsistent with a belief in eternity, including C. S. Lewis as well as writers like Primo Levi, Chekhov and Montaigne, but of course some mourning can still be consistent with belief in a heaven. After all, it may be some time before you see your loved ones again—if you even do. (If you believe in reincarnation, you won’t even remember them in the next life.)

It’s almost as if Wood (and Hägglund) don’t think evidence is even relevant to giving up religion: one can instead just say that the notion of heaven is incoherent, many people don’t act as if eternity exists, and therefore there are no gods.

But Wood is right that many religious people act as if this life is all they have. And he’s right that the notion of eternity as limned by various faiths isn’t something we’d really want. But he can’t help going after New Atheism and its dogged insistence on empirical evidence:

The great merit of Hägglund’s book is that he releases atheism from its ancient curse: its sticky intimacy with theism. Hägglund has no need for a parasitical relationship to the host (which, for instance, contaminates the so-called New Atheism), because he’s not interested in disproving the host’s existence. So, instead of being forced into, say, rationalist triumphalism (there is no God, and science is His prophet), he can expand the definition of the secular life so that it incorporates many of the elements traditionally thought of as religious.

This is an explicit criticism of New Atheism by Wood and an explicit rejection of the empirical argument made by people like Dawkins and Hitchens.  But again, that’s bogus. For, after all, why would you even be an atheist unless you were convinced, though a lack of evidence—or in the case of theodicy, positive evidence against a god—that gods and heavens didn’t exist? Only once you have dispensed with the idea of gods and heavens can you then buckle down and do the kind of work that Hägglund prescribes.

Note, too, that Wood calls New Atheism a form of “rationalist triumphalism” (a clear slur) and also gets in a lick against science when he implies that the New Atheist creed is “there is no God and science is His prophet”. This is unworthy of Wood and in fact inimical to his argument. I’d ask both Wood (who may be an atheist; I’m not sure) and Hägglund this question: “Why don’t you believe in gods, heaven or eternity?” I’d bet their answer would be “Because there is no evidence for them.” And presto, you’re talking about the arguments of New Atheists.

I see I’m running on here, and can leave the rest of the article to you, but I’ll give one more quote. Again we see Wood apparently agreeing with Hägglund that the trappings of religion may be valuable, or even necessary, for modern humans. There’s also a gratuitous slap at Dawkins, who is apparently the Great Satan of Atheism.

Feuerbach wanted to liberate human beings from their harmful self-deceptions, but Hägglund sees no imperative to disdain this venerable meaning-making projection, no need to close down all the temples and churches and wash them away with a strong dose of Dawkins. Instead, religious practice could be seen as valuable and even cherishable, once it is understood to be a natural human quest for meaning. Everything flows from the double assumption that only finitude makes for ultimate meaning and that most religious values are unconsciously secular. We are meaning-haunted creatures.

This is the old argument that humans need ceremony and bonding, and religion gives us that. My response is that the churches and temples of Scandinavia have been closed down for a long time, and the country is no worse for it. People find their ritual and meaning in many ways, and as the growth of secularism and of the non-churchy “nones” continues even more churches will close of their own accord. And don’t forget that those temples and churches don’t just provide comity: they are often divisive toward those of other faiths, and enforce a kind of morality that is far inferior to secular morality. Not to mention that they buttress the habit of faith: belief without substantial evidence.

The reader who called this article to my attention said that Wood’s piece was “very positive on atheism.” I’m not so sure, and it’s certainly not positive on New Atheism nor its reliance on empirical standards. But you be the judge.

h/t: David

My newest piece in Quillette: Another response to John Staddon

May 11, 2019 • 10:30 am

My contretemps in the pages of Quillette continues with the psychobiologist John Staddon. I hope this is the end of it, as it’s no fun to write what I’ve written many times before to criticize a man who’s repeating old and tedious arguments that have been rebutted many times before. But so great is Staddon’s animus against atheism that he simply can’t learn.

As you may recall, Staddon originally wrote a piece in Quillette called “Is secular humanism a religion?” His answer was “yes,” even though his own concept of religion didn’t fit secular humanism in two of its three defining characteristics. But his main point was that secular humanism is religious because it has a morality—a morality that, as a conservative, he considered odious. (One of the supposedly repugnant aspects of secular morality was gay marriage.) He also argued that, like religion, secular humanism has “blasphemy rules,” like the criticism of those who wear blackface. That’s what’s known as “straining to support your argument”, and it causes mental hernias.

Well, I couldn’t let his piece stand, and so wrote a substantial reply, “Secular humanism is not a religion.” I won’t reiterate it here, as you can read it at the link or read about it on my website (here and here).

Staddon was apparently peeved that I didn’t swallow his half-digested pabulum, and so wrote a response to me called “Values, even secular ones, depend on faith: A reply to Jerry Coyne” (you can read my note about it here, which didn’t give a rebuttal because I knew I’d write one for Quillette). In this response, without admitting it, he retracts his original claim that secular humanism is a religion. He first argues that he didn’t choose the title (and that may have been true), but neglects to add that the very first sentence of his first piece, a sentence that he surely wrote himself, was this:

It is now a rather old story: secular humanism is a religion.

Oh well, let the readers be deceived. But he went on to claim that well, maybe secular humanism and its morality really isn’t religious, but they do have religious aspects: they’re based on faith. As Staddon said,

My argument is simple: religions have three characteristics: spiritual, mythical/historical, and moral. Secular humanism lacks the first two and is often quite critical of these aspects of religion. But they are largely irrelevant to politics. Hence the truth or falsity of religious myths is also irrelevant, as are Coyne’s disproofs of the existence of God. The fact that religious morals are derived from religious stories—myths in Mr. Coyne’s book—does not make them any more dismissible than Mr. Coyne’s morals, which are connected to nothing at all. In his own agnostic terms, all are matters of faith.

I couldn’t let that stand, either, as “faith” means something very different in secular humanistic ethics and religious ethics. And the claim that secular morality is based on “nothing at all” is completely stupid.

I explain the difference in the construals of “faith” in my article, while noting that, at bottom, any ethical system is based on “preferences”. In religion it’s for following the dictates of your particular sect, while in humanism it’s usually based on what kind of world you’d like to see and inhabit. There can be no claim that this and that morality is “objective and scientific” as all are grounded on preferences. (Some differ from me: Sam Harris and Derek Parfit, for instance, think that we can construct a perfectly objective morality.)

Nevertheless, secular morality can be based on a rational and coherent set of principles (I give one example in my piece), can be informed by science, and can also change based on changing mores. (When religious morality changes, that’s not based on changes in theology but on changes in secular morality that then force changes in theology. The Euthyphro Dilemma applies here.)

But I’m getting ahead of myself. You can read my response by clicking on the screenshot below.  And thanks to Rebecca Goldstein for discussing the issues with me; one can have no better critic.

As I found before, the commenters on my piece, already active, are disappointingly unthoughtful.

Atheist bashing at Al-Jazeera: Columbia professor claims that New Atheism is a resurrection of imperialism, white supremacy, Islamophobia, and so on

May 6, 2019 • 10:30 am

I don’t know if I should spend any more time going after pieces like this, but I’ll call it to your attention. This one, at Al-Jazeera USA, is particularly invidious. The author, Hamid Dabashi, is an Iranian-born Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, and has been involved in several altercations and controversies. He states in the piece that he’s a Muslim.

Read by clicking on the screenshot:

The occasion for Dabashi’s splenetic eructations is the publication of a transcript of the “Four Horsemen Discussion” in book form, The Four Horsemen: The Conversation that Sparked an Atheist Revolution. I’ve read the book, but if you’ve seen the publicly available video, it doesn’t add much to it. (There are some introductions by the three living Horsepersons as well as a foreword by Stephen Fry, but they’re very short).

Here’s the two-hour video, which is good, and I suspect most of us have seen it.

Dabashi’s beef is that all four of these men are ignorant of Islam, are “Islamophobic”, are white supremacists and imperialists, and are in league with Christian conservatives in espousing a “toxic ideology”. Moreover, he implies, they bear some responsibility for the attack on the mosques in New Zealand, for the Easter terrorist attack in Sri Lanka, and for the deaths of Palestinians during “right of return” demonstrations at the Israel-Gaza border. In the end, though, his whole critique rests on these men’s criticism of Islam:

So who are these four “new atheist” crusaders (yes, they may deny it, but they are indeed very much the product of the white Western Christian crusader tradition)? They are all white older men, who have never embarked on studying Islam, do not speak Arabic – the language of the Qur’an – and certainly have no special insight into any Muslim community on earth. They are, literally, illiterate.

I guess you have to read Hebrew and Greek to criticize the Bible, too, as those are the languages of scripture. As for “white older men”, that’s both ageist and racist, and Sam was only 40 at the time of this conversation. As for needing “special” (as opposed to “general”, I guess) insight into Islam before you can criticize it, I’ll leave that for you to judge.

Across religions and cultures, there are decent and reasonable atheists, as there are equally decent and reasonable believers, who can and should openly engage in debate about religion and the belief in God without succumbing to hatred and convictions in one’s supremacy. Such open and honest conversations are indeed healthy for any community or nation and should be encouraged.

But what the so-called “four horsemen” have engaged in during their 2007 discussion and in their public appearances and writings, is not an open and honest debate. Instead, the entirety of their work is just a vicious attack on a 1.5-billion-strong, immensely diverse and dynamic community.

To those who have followed these men and their writings, these charges are palpably ridiculous. They have all separated criticism of Islam from criticism of Muslims, have decried not only the Christian Right but also Christianity (and other faiths), and are certainly not white supremacists. As for the terrorist attacks, it’s ridiculous to blame these men for what happened in New Zealand, and of course the attacks in Sri Lanka were carried out by Muslims.

What is happening here is that Dabashi is simply upset that these men are not “good atheists,” and by “not good” I think he means that they haven’t refrained from criticizing Islam. I’ll give a few quotes to support that. First, his criticisms of each Horseperson (quotes from Dabashi’s piece are indented):

Sam Harris

In his book, End of Faith, he dedicates a whole chapter to the “The Problem with Islam.” There, he explains that: “While Christianity has few living inquisitors today, Islam has many … In our opposition to the world view of Islam, we confront a civilization with an arrested history. It is as though a portal in time has opened, and fourteenth-century hordes are pouring into our world. Unfortunately, they are now armed with twenty-first-century weapons.” One is left breathless considering whether to address the unabashed racism, the astonishing ignorance, or the barefaced vulgarity of such utterances.

This isn’t of course racism: it’s criticism of a faith and its effects on extremist adherents. Note that Sam says “many living inquisitors,” which is true, but he doesn’t indict all Muslims, and has repeatedly separated extremist from moderate Muslims. He’s clearly speaking about terrorists.

Christopher Hitchens

Last but not least, Hitchens is equally creative with his spurious conclusions about Islam in God Is Not Great. Just one example would suffice: “Real horror of the porcine is manifest all over the Islamic world. One good instance would be the continued prohibition of George Orwell’s Animal Farm, one of the most charming and useful fables of modern times, of the reading of which Muslim schoolchildren are deprived.” 

I am a Muslim. I was born and raised in a Muslim country. I read Orwell’s Animal Farm in Persian in Iran when I was a teenager. The book was translated into Persian soon after its publication in English, and ever since has had numerous Persian translations and I, myself, have repeatedly included it in my courses.

This is the only indictment that can carry any weight, although its weight is that of a feather. Note that Dabashi was born in 1951, and thus was 28 when the 1979 Islamic Revolution occurred in Iran. That means he certainly read the book when the country was more liberal and the theocracy hadn’t started wholesale censorship. (He seems to have moved to the US before 1979). I doubt that Animal Farm is prescribed in Iran today (though I could be wrong); but as for Dabashi “including it in his courses,” well, his courses are at Columbia University. 

Richard Dawkins

The other rabid Islamophobe, Dawkins uses the infamous Jyllands-Posten cartoons of Prophet Mohammed, which sparked mass protests in a few Muslim countries, to portray in his book, The God Delusion, all Muslims as a gang of delusional psychopaths. In his opinion: “Danes just live in a country with a free press, something that people in many Islamic countries might have a hard time understanding.” With this one sentence, Dawkins tries (but fails) to erase the long and sustained history of Muslims’ struggle for freedom of expression and truthful journalism.

I deny that Richard argues in The God Delusion that “all Muslims are a gang of delusional psychopaths”.  As for ignoring the long history of Muslims’ struggle for freedom of expression, well, why did they have to struggle for freedom of expression if the religion wasn’t denying it? Certainly it does these days (which are the days that are relevant), as there is little freedom to criticize Islamic governments. In fact, you can be jailed or murdered for such criticism, as in Bangladesh. The Jyllands-Posten cartoons are but one example: Dabashi doesn’t mention The Satanic Verses or the Charlie Hebdo incidents; and there are many more. No, Islam indeed has a serious problem with dissent, at least in Islamic countries.

When I sent this article to Richard, he sent a response, which I quote with permission:

At least as far as The God Delusion is concerned, what is revealing in this ridiculous article is the grotesquely inflated obsession with Islam. To my regret, my ignorance of Islam and other religions led me to concentrate on attacking Christianity almost exclusively – so much for being a “Christian-enabler”. One of the most common criticisms I receive is precisely that I concentrate on attacking Christianity and ignore Islam (Christian hurt expressing itself in what has been called “Fatwa Envy”). My couple of sentences about the Danish cartoons is almost the only mention of Islam in the entire book. Perhaps it’s the only bit he read – maybe looked it up in the index.

Dan Dennett

In Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, Dennett, too, engages in some sweeping and vastly inaccurate conclusions. For example, he makes the following mind-boggling observation: “It is worth recalling that the Arabic word Islam means ‘submission’. The idea that Muslims should put the proliferation of Islam ahead of their own interests is built right into the etymology of its name.” Yet, Islam means submission to the will of God, which is a central theological pillar in many religions and which has nothing to do with “proliferation of Islam”.

Oh, for crying out loud! This is a distinction without a difference. Islam is nothing if not a proselytizing faith, and, as many have pointed out, the distinction between religion and culture in many Muslim societies is nil. And yes, many Muslims, including terrorists and Islamists, do indeed put the proliferation of Islam ahead of their own interest; or rather, the proliferation of Islam is their chief interest.

In all of this, Dabashi picks on particulars, not addressing the general critiques of religion tendered by the Horsepersons, the criticisms that promoted the resurgence of atheism. These include the fact that there’s no evidence for religion’s fact claims or for a divine being, that the various religion conflict with each other in both claims about reality and, on the ground, militarily, and that all religions promote dogma and behavior that is divisive, oppressive, and inimical to the progress of liberal society. Instead, Dabishi just tars New Atheists with various slurs. Here are a few:

In other words, it is quite clear from the writings of the “four horsemen” that “new atheism” has little to do with atheism or any serious intellectual examination of the belief in God and everything to do with hatred and power.  

Indeed, “new atheism” is the ideological foregrounding of liberal imperialism whose fanatical secularism extends the racist logic of white supremacy. It purports to be areligious, but it is not. It is, in fact, the twin brother of the rabid Christian conservatism which currently feeds the Trump administration’s destructive policies at home and abroad – minus all the biblical references. 

And then he starts blaming New Atheism for the killings:

And just as religious white supremacy encourages individual and state-sponsored violence against those perceived as “inferior”, so does its “new atheist” version. Historically, the “liberal atheists” have always eagerly joined their “Christian conservative” brethren in the battle call in advance of any US aggression anywhere in the world. 

However, this is, not to say that such deadly fanaticism occurs only in the US (and by extension Europe). Militant Islamism and extremist Zionism have the same exact roots. If Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and Osama bin Laden are the symbols of Muslim fanaticism, Meir Kahane, Benjamin Netanyahu, Ayelet Shaked, and Naftali Bennett are the prime examples of the Zionist equivalent, while the “four horsemen”, along with Steve Bannon, Mike Pompeo et al are the flag bearers of secular-Christian imperialism in full power.  

I’m not sure that all of those things are like the others.

And, finally, this:

In the raging battle between these hateful, toxic ideologies, they thrive and feed off of each other. Caught in the crossfire of this clash of ignorance and barbarity, are billions of human beings – Jews, Christians, Muslims and atheists – who pay the price with their lives. 

Thus, Robert Bowers, who killed 11 Jewish worshipers in the US, Brenton Tarrant who massacred 51 Muslims during Friday prayers in New Zealand, members of National Thowheed Jamath, who murdered 257 people during the Easter massacre in Sri Lanka and the Israeli soldiers who over the past year have slain more than 260 unarmed Palestinian during right of return protests at the Israel-Gaza fence are all kindred souls.

In today’s world, mass murder and religious and secular fanaticism go hand-in-hand.

Well, if you’re going to blame Dawkins et al. for this kind of stuff, we could blame Dabashi for every form of Islamist malfeasance perpetrated in this world, including the pervasive oppression of women, gays, apostates, the existence of corporal punishment and censorship, and so on. While Dabashi decries “Militant Islamism,” at the same time he decries reasonable criticism of Islam—the only thing that will ever stop Islamic violence and oppression (and that’s a long shot). Reasonable criticism of all religions is what is on offer by the Horsemen. As Dennett says at the beginning of the video:

“I came to realize it’s a no win situation; it’s a mug’s game. Religions have contrived to make it impossible to disagree with them, critically, without being rude. They simply play the hurt feelings card at every opportunity and you’re faced with the choice of well, are you going to be rude, or are you going to articulate this criticism and button your lip.”

Dabashi’s article is in fact one big Hurt Feelings Card. 

The worst article ever to appear in Quillette: Psychologist declares secular humanism a “religion”

April 12, 2019 • 9:45 am

In general I like the articles in Quillette: they’re generally left-wing but also critical of the Left’s excesses—a theme that has led some misguided ideologues to call the site “alt-right.” But this time the editors screwed up by accepting a piece that makes very little sense, and arrives at its conclusion by some risibly tortuous logic (click on screenshot). The author, John Staddon, is identified as “James B. Duke Professor of Psychology and Professor of Biology, Emeritus, at Duke University”. His answer to the title question, by the way, is “yes”.

This may in fact be the worst piece that Quillette has ever published:

Staddon begins by claiming that there are three elements common to all religions (his defining traits are in bold). I won’t argue with him except to say that the first and second claims show substantial overlap:

1.)  “The first is the belief in invisible or hidden beings, worlds and processes—like God, heaven, miracles, reincarnation, and the soul. All these are unverifiable, or unseen and unseeable, except by mystics under special and generally unrepeatable conditions. Since absence of evidence is not, logically, evidence of absence, these features of religion are neither true nor false, but simply unprovable. They have no implications for action, hence no bearing on legal matters.”

I’ll leave it to readers to judge whether this claim is true of all religions (Staddon mentions no exceptions). But this characteristic is certainly not true of secular humanism, which is SECULAR.  So on this count Staddon shows that secular humanism doesn’t share an important feature of religion.

However, he fails to realize that claims about God, miracles, the soul, and so on, can indeed be testable under some circumstances. I summarized in Faith Versus Fact how there could be evidence for God and miracles (all provisional, of course, because this is empirical and semiscientific evidence). Carl Sagan also wrote about the conceivable but unobserved evidence for God.

2.) “The second element are claims about the real world: every religion, especially in its primordial version, makes claims that are essentially scientific—assertions of fact that are potentially verifiable. These claims are of two kinds. The first we might call timeless: e.g., claims about physical properties—the four elementary humors, for example, the Hindu turtle that supports the world, properties of foods, the doctrine of literal transubstantiation. The second are claims about history: Noah’s flood, the age of the earth, the resurrection—all “myths of origin.” Some of these claims are unverifiable; as for the rest, there is now a consensus that science usually wins—in law and elsewhere. In any case, few of these claims have any bearing on action.”

First of all, this overlaps almost entirely with claim 1, for things like resurrections and miracles and the soul are claims about the real world, and some are testable. There could, for example, be a soul that is somehow detectable (people used to weigh dying people to see if they lost weight when they died and their “souls” left the body). In fact, I’d say that claims about heaven are in principle more testable than claims about literal transubstantiation, which the Vatican has immunized against disproof by making the “transubstantiation” undetectable by empirical means.

But we see in the last sentence of #2 what Staddon really wants to see as the defining trait of religion: something that “have a bearing on action”. That brings us to #3:

3.) “The third property of a religion are its rules for action—prohibitions and requirements—its morality. All religions have a code, a set of moral and behavioral prescriptions, matters of belief —usually, but not necessarily—said to flow from God, that provide guides to action in a wide range of situations. The 10 Commandments, the principles of Sharia, the Five Precepts of Buddhism, etc. 

Secular humanism lacks any reference to the supernatural and defers matters of fact to science. But it is as rich in moral rules, in dogma, as any religion. Its rules come not from God but from texts like Mill’s On Liberty, and the works of philosophers like Peter Singer, Dan Dennett and Bertrand Russell, psychologists B. F. Skinner and Sigmund Freud, public intellectuals like Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins, and “humanist chaplains” everywhere. “

Yes, most religions do have a morality, at least the theistic ones. But Staddon doesn’t seem to realize that the morality of religion has two features which differentiate it from the morality deriving from secular humanism. (I’ll add here that there isn’t really a morality of secular humanism beyond “Do what benefits other people.”) The variety of secular-humanistic morality makes it far less comprehensive than the morality of religions, for secular humanists differ drastically from each other in how they construe ethical action beyond the Golden Rule. Indeed, Staddon recognizes this:
Because secular-humanist morals cannot be easily identified, they cannot be easily attacked

First, much of religious morality, as Maarten Boudry and I argued, derives directly or indirectly from its supernatural claims. So the view that abortion is murder, for instance, comes from the view that fetuses, like adults, have souls, and therefore aborting them is murder. The prohibition of homosexuality comes from scripture, both in Islam and Christianity. And so on.

Second, religious morality largely comes from interpreting what is God’s will—sometimes in the “divine command theory”: the view that whatever God says is good is good. (This overlaps, of course with my point above.) In contrast, the morality of secular humanists usually (and should) come from some basic non-divine principles about how we ought to act—principles based largely on reason but in the end are grounded on preference. While the foundations of secular morality are subjective, they largely coincide for most of us, and encompass some version of Sam Harris’s view that “objective” morality means maximizing well being.

I’ve objected to Sam’s view not because it’s not a good guideline for action (it almost invariably is), but simply because it’s not as objective as he thinks. You have to sign on to the idea that “maximizing well being” is the highest good, and not everybody might do that. How do you show people who reject the well-being criterion that they’re objectively wrong?

In other cases Sam’s criterion is not practicable. How do we weigh the well-being of animals versus humans when we cut down rain forest, eat meat, or use animals in medical research? How many mice have the well being equivalent to one human? How do you trade off wealth versus health? My objection, in other words, is not that Sam’s utilitarian rule is not generally the best one, but that it’s not objective in its claim that science can decide the most moral thing to do. (Given some constraints, science may be able to decide what will maximize well being, however.)

If you do accept the idea that most secular humanists have a similar morality that derives from an intuitive grasp of maximizing well being, a view that goes hand in hand with liberalism and empathy, then you get a very different morality from secular humanism than you do from religion.

Most important EVERYONE has a moral code, but that doesn’t make everyone religious. For, in the end, Staddon decides that only item #3, rules for behavior and right action, counts as religion. Thus everyone in the world is religious save sociopaths and others who have no moral rules. That makes Staddon’s characterization of secular humanism pretty much of a tautology. To wit:

But it is only the morality of a religion, not its supernatural or historical beliefs, that has any implications for action, for politics and law. Secular humanism makes moral claims as strong as any other faith. It is therefore as much a religion as any other. But because it is not seen as religious, the beliefs of secular humanists increasingly influence U.S. law.

This is about as dumb a claim as you’ll see a respected academic making. It completely evades both the dictionary and the vernacular conceptions of religion, and makes everybody religious who has a view of right and wrong. It also ignores the diversity of moral views among secular humanists. I’d take issue, for instance, with Staddon’s argument that secular humanism makes moral claims as strong as that of, say Sunni Islam or Southern Baptists.

So the whole piece is bogus, resting on a nonstandard definition of “religion”. But why does Staddon twist language this way?

Apparently because he doesn’t like the kind of morality that he sees flowing from secular humanism, which contravenes what I think is his own conservative view of morality. He gives three examples of how secular humanistic “faith” has affected people’s actions and the law in ways he clearly disapproves of.

One is the legalization of same-sex marriage. The second is the existence of “blasphemy rules,” like “it’s immoral to dress in blackface or use the “n-word”. I myself object to the extreme censoriousness affecting some of these actions (though the two cited are abhorrent), but I see this as the result of people trying to create a harmonious world (sometimes in misguided ways), and not at all the same thing as a religious dictate. The passion of opposing blackface may be of the same intensity as the passion of opposing abortion, but that doesn’t make the former religious, except insofar as you use “religious” as a synonym for “passionate.”

Staddon’s third example is weird: humanist Fred Edwords’ (Staddon misspells it as “Edwards”) opposition to the erection of a 40-foot cross in Maryland on public land. Not realizing that opposing that is simply enforcing the First Amendment (an Amendment supported, by the way, by many believers), Staddon argues that “It seems to be the faith of a competitor that Fred objects to.” In other words, by allowing people to erect nonreligious monuments on public land but opposing religious ones, Edwords is supposedly showing the religious side of secular humanism:  no competitor monuments allowed. To make a pun, this is monumentally stupid.

Staddon goes on objecting to asking political candidates about their religion, something I think is fair if their faith would influence their actions as an elected official, but I desist. In the end, Stodden fails to prove his thesis since he admits that secular humanism lacks two of the three defining traits of religion, and then he implies that anybody with a moral code is religious.

That reminds me of Stephen Jay Gould’s weaselly reconciliation between science and religion in his book Rocks of Ages. In that book, Gould’s NOMA Hypothesis was that science is about finding the facts of the universe, while religion’s bailiwick is meaning, morals, and values. Gould ignored the long tradition of secular ethics, and, addressing that lacuna when I reviewed the book for the Times Literary Supplement, I said this:

Finally, it need hardly be pointed out that atheists are not automatically amoral. Gould senses this difficulty, but finesses it by claiming that all ethics is really religion in disguise. To distinguish the two, he says, is to “quibble about the labels”, and he decides to “construe as fundamentally religious (literally, binding us together) all moral discourse on principles that might activate the ideal of universal fellowship of people”. But one cannot evade this problem by defining it out of existence.

Gould was wrong, and so is Staddon. Why did the editors of Quillette publish this odiferous serving of tripe?

h/t: Michael, who says, “I remember this same guy rabbiting on about ‘scientific imperialism’ a decade ago.  I found a video of Staddon doing that; it’s only two minutes long, and I’ll leave it to you to react/rebut.