Conrad Black is an ex-con who once owned a newspaper empire (including the Torygraph) and then spent three years in prison for mail fraud and obstruction of justice. He apparently found religion in jail and has engaged in bashing atheists ever since, We met him in the atheist-bashing mode in 2015, and he hasn’t gotten any better. He now pushes his delusions in Canada’s National Post.

In a 2015 column, he evinced a Plantinga-ian view that the reality of God was simply self-evident:

Intellectually, the problem is that religion is essentially reasonable and atheism is unreasonable and the consequences of the militancy of contemporary atheism are not only unreasonable but offensive to reason. Few things in our murky lives could be more obvious and indisputable than that there must be some force in the cosmos that causes spiritual insight, authenticated miracles, and is able to grasp the notion of the timeless, the limitless, and the fact that at some point in our past there was some kind of creation.

Now he continues in this vein with a newish column, “I put this as simply as possible: Many atheists are excellent, but atheism itself is hurting the West“. Now my first response on reading the title was this: “Even if it is hurting the West, and I believe the opposite, that says nothing about the existence of gods!” But Black still thinks that the existence of the Abrahamic God is self evident, and, moreover, that atheists, by reaping the benefits of a “Judeo-Christian civilization” without accepting God, are simply parasites on society.

First, Black reprises his evidence for God:

Because there was so much misunderstanding and overwrought, misplaced hysteria from some readers, I will wind this up by restating key points with mind-numbing simplicity. We have no idea how the universe, or any version of the life and context we know, originated. We have no idea of the infinite, of what was before the beginning or is beyond any spatial limits we can imagine, even with the great exploratory progress of science. Miracles sometime occur and people do sometimes have completely inexplicable insights that are generally described as spiritual. No sane and somewhat experienced person disputes any of this. But there is a cyber-vigilante squad of atheist banshees that swarm like bats over such comments and are hyperactive philistines better responded to with pest control measures than logical argument.

My contention is that it is more logical and reasonable to attribute these phenomena to the existence of a supernatural force or intelligence than either to deny that they exist, or to take refuge in the faith that they are merely aspects of our environment that we will eventually understand as we explore our planet and the contiguous universe.

He’s equating scientific ignorance with the existence of God: the classic “god of the gaps” argument. We don’t know what the first form of life was like, either. Does that prove God? And thanks to Cantor and others, we do indeed have an idea of the infinite. As for miracles and spiritual insights that would convince a skeptic of God, Black doesn’t give any. He rejects Hume’s argument for the dubious “miracles” that he doesn’t mention, and fails to note the many “spiritual insights” gained by people on drugs like LSD or ayahuasca. Are those evidence for God, too?

According to Black, this is how atheists are free-riding on the accomplishments of religion:

Of course, in our society, most people, including most atheists, are reasonably honest and decent and get through their lives without horrible outbursts of sociopathic behaviour. I did write that those atheists who purport to espouse the Judeo-Christian life without admitting the probability of some supernatural force are essentially enjoying the benefits of Judeo-Christian civilization while denying even the least onerous definition of its basic tenets. Thus do schism and hypocrisy raise their hoary heads.

As atheists renounce the roots of our civilization, they are troublesome passengers, and are apt to be less integral defenders of the West in time of challenge.

First of all, although many of our ancestors were religious, that doesn’t mean that our society is a “Judeo-Christian civilization”. That means that Jews and Christians helped build it, but it doesn’t mean that all the precepts of society come from religion. Many of America’s founders, for instance, were either atheists or deists who explicitly wanted to take religion out of government. And many of the modern scientists who contributed to our well being were avowed atheists.  If there is no evidence to skeptics for a god, why must they “admit the probability of some supernatural force”? If atheists don’t, are we to be deprived of our social benefits?: “No soup for you, Heathen!”

I won’t need much more space to dissect this befuddled curmudgeon, whose presence in the Post I find baffling. He also makes the familiar claim that without God there’s no basis for morality:

I also wrote that the atheists are becoming steadily more aggressive, more generally dismissive of the supernatural tradition, while swaddling themselves in commendable precepts that are generally variants of the Golden Rule and other such formulations. These are fine, but they will not in themselves assure a norm of social conduct and they have already led to the  ghastly enfeeblement of moral relativism. Alternative scenarios emerge of equal worthiness, as right and wrong are concepts that are diluted by being severed from any original legitimacy. All schools of behavioural conduct compete on a level playing field and disorder gradually ensues. Man is deemed to be perfectible, the traditional matrix for authoritarianism. Where there is deemed to be no God the classic human deities — or Robespierre’s Supreme Being, the Nazi Pagan-Wagnerian leaders, or the Stalinist incarnation of the toiling Slavonic masses — replace deities. Anyone who imagines that our legal system, unto itself, will assure acceptable social conduct has had little experience of it. The entire apparatus of our society of laws has degenerated into a 360 degree cartel operated by and almost exclusively for the benefit of the legal profession.

Well, you already know the argument against the “original legitimacy” of morality derived from religion. It’s threefold. First, Plato’s Euthyphro Argument. Does Black believe that we should stone to death those who work on the Sabbath because God said so, or do the same to kids who curse their parents? If not, why not? For the same reasons that underlie the second point: every believer picks and chooses their morality from scripture or dogma, which means there are pre-scriptural moral feelings that dictate our actions. The Golden Rule has arisen many times in history independent of religion, and had religion not arisen I’m sure someone would have adumbrated it. Further, even if it were true that people need a god so much that they accept Hitlers and Stalins as gods if they give up on conventional faith, that still says nothing about the existence of God. All it says is that some people need a godlike presence in their lives. Or does Black even really care whether or not people accept God, so long as it’s good for society?

Finally: Scandinavia, including Iceland. Those are godless countries full of moral people. I suppose Black would argue that their morality must come from their religious background, but that would ignore the recent innovations in morality, like gay marriage, that came independent of religion. Read Pinker’s The Better Angels of our Nature for more examples. If there were a jail for intellectual miscreants, Black would be in it.

Again. why does the Post give this guy space to make such poor arguments?

h/t: Mark

I’ve about had it with the mushheaded osculation of faith by New Scientist (see some of my previous criticism here), and if I had a subscription, which I don’t, I’d cancel it this week. (I don’t think it’s a very good magazine anyway.)

For this week’s editorial, “Holy faith?”, Graham Lawton (no free link), executive editor of the magazine, takes up the argument that atheism is “just another religion.” And then Lawton, who says he’s an atheist, defends that claim!

You might remember Lawton as the author of the incredibly misguided article, “Darwin was wrong about the tree of life” (no free link”) in New Scientist‘s “Darwin Was Wrong” issue. My critique of Lawton’s sensationalist tripe was one of the first posts I put up on this website.

Here he’s far more wrong than he said Darwin was (all emphasis is by Lawton):

The “just another religion” claim seems to have arisen around a decade ago 
in response to the rise of New Atheism, 
a scientifically motivated critique of religion led by Richard Dawkins and underpinned by his 2006 book The God Delusion. Journalists writing about the movement took to using religious metaphors, calling it “the church 
of the non-believers” and a “crusade against god”. Religious scholars joined the fray to defend their beliefs. Even some scientists 
took up the cause. In 2007, evolutionary biologist (and atheist) David Sloan Wilson of Binghamton University in New York controversially described the new atheism as a “stealth religion”. His point was that, like many religions, it portrayed itself as the only source of truth and righteousness and its enemies as “bad, bad, bad”.

Well, given Sloan Wilson’s track record of atheist-bashing and religion-praising, and his almost unhinged defense of group selection, it’s rarely a good idea to quote him as an authority, but let’s proceed with Lawton:

To atheists, such accusations might seem easily refuted. The defining feature of religion is belief in god(s). Atheism defines itself as 
the absence of belief in god. How can it be a religion? That is like saying that “off” is a TV channel, or not-playing-tennis is a sport.

But atheists arguably have not taken the charge seriously enough. “They’d say, the 
word just means ‘without god’. That is all. 
We can go home now,” says Jon Lanman who works on the scientific study of religion at Queen’s University Belfast, UK. Perhaps because of this rather aloof response, atheists have failed to dispel the sense that the critics were on to something.

The truth is that atheism is not simply 
an absence of belief in god, but also a set of alternative beliefs about the origin and nature of reality. Even though these belief systems diverge in their content and level of fact from religious beliefs, perhaps they originate from the same underlying psychological processes, and fulfil similar psychological needs. Religious ideas, for example, provide stability and reassurance in the face of uncertainty. They help to explain events and provide a moral framework. For these reasons, and others, they are intuitively appealing to human brains. Maybe brains that reject supernatural ideas simply soak up naturalistic ones to take their place. “They may work as replacement beliefs, helping alleviate stress and anxiety as religion does,” says Miguel Farias, leader of the brain, belief and behaviour group at Coventry University, UK.

If atheism is a “set of alternative beliefs about the origin and nature of reality,” those beliefs are disbeliefs: there is no evidence for any gods or supernatural beings. End of story. But Lawton disagrees.

What, then, constitutes the atheist belief system? Lawton argues this:

• Atheists “believe” in progress. Lawton’s evidence is that secularists forced to read an essay that progress was illusory became more aware of their own deaths, “as if it were pulling their comfort blanket out from under their feet.”  To me this says nothing, particularly because there doesn’t seem to have been a religious control group!

• Atheists believe in science more strongly when they’re stressed. Lawton says this:

Doing the “progress” experiment with people on board an aeroplane, for example, makes them espouse a stronger belief in progress.

For many atheists, scientific ideas have a similar soothing effect. Stressful situations tend to strengthen their belief in science, especially in theories that emphasise orderliness and predictability over randomness and unpredictability. All of which suggests that religious believers and atheists are more psychologically similar than either would like to think.

So? Where’s the control group? And is a psychological reaction the same thing as a “belief system”? Nope, not in my view.

• Some atheists have “spiritual beliefs”:

Proponents of the “psychological impossibility of atheism” argue that supernatural beliefs are so hard-wired into our brains that discarding them altogether is not an option. . . And, sure enough, there is evidence that even hardcore atheists tend to entertain quasi-religious or spiritual ideas such as there being a higher power or that everything happens 
for a purpose.

Spirituality is not the same thing as religion: for many atheists, it’s simply wonder and awe before the universe—an emotional reaction. I prefer to not use the word at all. And any atheist who believes in a higher power or some “purpose” isn’t an atheist at all, much less a “hardcore atheist.”

• Atheists are just as liable to discard scientific facts when they’re inconvenient. To “prove” this, Lawton simply quotes David Sloan Wilson again:

So, despite some similarity between religious and non-religious beliefs systems, they are not equivalent. Surely that buries the claim that atheism is just another religion?

Maybe not. There is another way in which atheist beliefs make them religion-like, according to Sloan Wilson. It is the way they play fast-and-loose with scientific facts. “Atheists will say that religion is bad for humanity, that it’s not an evolutionary adaptation – which happens not to be true,” 
he says. “That is how atheism becomes 
an ideology. It is organised to motivate behaviour. If it uses counterfactual beliefs 
in order to do it then there’s really very little difference between atheism and a religion.”

We don’t know that Sloan Wilson’s claim is true! Religion could in fact have been a spandrel rather than a social behavior directly installed in the human brain by natural selection. It is GOOD to be dubious of Sloan Wilson’s “natural selection” claim because there’s no good evidence for “god genes.” Religion may, for instance, be a spandrel of other beliefs, whether learned or adaptive. (Read Pascal Boyer for an example of how religion might have hitchhiked on other beliefs that might have been adaptive, but perhaps based more in experience than on natural selection.) We are not “playing fast and loose with the facts” to question Sloan Wilson’s claim, which is just a hypothesis.

To be fair, Lawton then quotes Dan Dennett and others who reject the view that atheism is like religion. But Lawton, whose sympathies are evident (and have been from the magazine’s continuing osculation of faith), ends by agreeing with some parallels:

One conclusion is that religion and atheism do have things in common, sometimes. Both feature sacred values, which are beliefs that people would not trade for material goods. Both have rituals – although atheist ones are rare – and distinct social identities. But the content of these features are very different. An atheist’s sacred value might be that religion should have no place in government, whereas a Muslim’s might be the exact opposite.

I’m not sure what the point of all this is. After all, EVERYONE has some beliefs, many of them passionate, but atheist beliefs are, I contend, not only more evidence-based, but don’t involve gods. Further, everyone has a “social identity.” And, as Lawton notes, atheist “rituals” are rare.

His whole point is a pointless exercise in saying, “Look, atheists are ‘believers’ too, and are thus hypocrites to criticize religion.” He doesn’t realize that by criticizing atheism in this way, he’s also criticizing religion: “Look: we atheists are as bad as believers!”

Time to cancel those subscriptions to New Scientist. I prefer the words of Dan Dennett, who is quoted in the piece as saying this:

“When somebody puts it to me that atheism is just another religion, [Dennett] says: “I ask ‘in what way?’ They usually counter with demonstrably false parallels. We have no rituals, no membership rules, no sacred texts and the small percentage of atheists who belong to specifically atheist organisations 
are more like people who belong to interest groups like scuba divers or guitar aficionados. And most atheists don’t feel the need to proselytise.”

In light of that, which is true, Lawton’s piece becomes superfluous.

h/t: AGH