Category: Faith versus Fact

Templeton-funded researcher defends Templeton Foundation and its call for “dialogue” between science and religion

December 28, 2017 • 10:30 am

In the new issue of the Los Angeles Review of Books (link below), Peter Harrison, in a piece called “From conflict to dialogue and all the way back“, purports to review Yves Gingras’s recent book on science and religion, a book whose thesis is that no useful dialogue is possible between science and religion.

Harrison is described by Wikipedia as “an Australian Laureate Fellow and Director of the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Queensland.”

Harrison doesn’t like the book (though he damns it with faint praise at the end of his piece) for three reasons.

First, he appears to hold the Gouldian view that science  and religion cannot be in conflict because they deal with different areas of inquiry (Gould saw religion as the bailiwick of morality, science as the study of the natural universe). He quotes for instance the arrogant and obscurantist Terry Eagleton, a prime specimen of the Sophisticated Theologian™:

TERRY EAGLETON once remarked that regarding religion as an attempt to offer a scientific explanation of the world is rather like seeing ballet as a botched attempt to run for a bus. Eagleton gestures toward a confusion that often afflicts those who advocate for an essential conflict between science and religion — the assumption that the two enterprises are competing for the same explanatory territory. Were this to be true, conflict between them would indeed be pretty much inevitable. An alternative view holds science and religion to be essentially independent operations, concerned with quite different questions. On this model, conflict is unlikely. Equally, dialogue would be unnecessary, perhaps even impossible? [JAC: Harrison never tells us, given his view that science and religion aren’t in conflict, what such a dialogue would consist of, or even if he approves of one!]

As I show at great length in Faith Versus Fact, religion does indeed make truth claims, some of which (efficacy of prayer, existence of Jesus, existence of a soul, etc.) are either directly or in principle testable empirically. Moreover, many religious scientists and science-friendly theologians, including Francis Collins, Karl Giberson, and Ian Barbour, have at least had the intellectual honesty to admit that many religions, including the Abrahamic ones, are at bottom founded on truth claims. I quote:

A religious tradition is indeed a way of life and not a set of abstract ideas. But a way of life presupposes beliefs about the nature of reality and cannot be sustained if those beliefs are no longer credible.  —Ian Barbour

Likewise, religion in almost all of its manifestations is morethan just a collection of value judgments and moral directives. Religion often makes claims about ‘the way things are.’
—Karl Giberson and Francis Collins

If you don’t like those, how about the Bible?

If Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vain, and your Faith is also vain.  —1 Corinthians 15:14

You can hardly call yourself a Christian if you don’t think Jesus was the son of God, part man and part divine, and died and was resurrected to expiate our sins. If you don’t think an angel dictated God’s words to Muhammad to create the Qur’an, you’re hardly a Muslim.

I won’t go on here, but see Faith Versus Fact for the list of empirical claims made by religion. As I note there, the biggest opponents of the “separate magisteria” argument aren’t scientists but theologians, who dislike Gould’s claim that religion makes no factual claims about the world.

On this issue, both Eagleton and Harrison are wrong. If you disagree with me, look at the continuing and long-standing battle in America and other places (including Muslim countries) between scientists and creationists. This battle deals entirely with empirical claims about biology and origins, is motivated solely by religious dislike of evolution, and is a prime example of the “conflict hypothesis” in action: a battle lost by creationists on empirical grounds. I’ll add here the insistence of the Catholic Church that Adam and Eve were literally  the ancestors of all of us, a claim that, says the Church, cannot be contradicted. Yet science has disproven that claim. And we’ve seen no evidence for a soul that enters us at conception, whatever that soul may be.

It is this duel of empirical claims that has indeed created a conflict between science and religion. That conflict is exacerbated  because only science, and not religion, has ways of proving its own claims wrong.  Most Abrahamic believers, I think, can envision no evidence that would make them change their minds about their factual claims. One well known person, whose name I can’t recall (see FvF), argued that even if a camera in Jesus’s tomb showed his body rotting, he’d still believe in the Resurrection.

The conflict in methodology between the way science and religion establish their truth claims creates a telling asymmetry. Science has the ability to tell believers that their factual beliefs are wrong, while religionists have no way to tell scientists that scientific facts are wrong. And so, over the years, science has repeatedly knocked down the truth claims of believers. Science has showed that prayer doesn’t work, we weren’t created 10,000 years ago at the same time as all other living things, there was no Exodus of the Jews from Egypt, there was no Adam and Eve, and so on.  Religion can’t do anything similar to claims about biology, physics, or chemistry. This, I think, is one reason why believers often resent science, even while giving it lip service, and decry “scientism”, the pejorative and erroneous claim that scientists often overstep their expertise.

This asymmetry is in fact why a “constructive dialogue” is useless between scientists and religionists. What can believers tell scientists that’s of any use to science? (Yes, they can tell us what they believe, or things about the history of religion, but that’s not what’s meant by such an exchange.) In contrast, scientists can tell believers things that can fundamentally alter what they believe. That was one byproduct of the great work of Charles Darwin.

So while we can’t have a constructive dialogue, we can have a “destructive monologue”: science can tell religionists that what they believe is wrong, but the other side has no such ability.

This brings us to Harrison’s second claim: that Gingras’s criticism of the Templeton Foundation in spending millions of dollars fostering such dialogue is misguided and “unnuanced”, and, worse, has “played a major role in foisting the theme of a ‘dialogue’ between science and religion onto the history of science [emphasis added].”  Harrison says that Gingras doesn’t convincingly document the claim that Templeton is trying to rewrite the history of science, and perhaps Gingras doesn’t, as I haven’t read his book. But given how Templeton is constantly funding people (like Harrison!) who maintain that the “conflict hypothesis” of religion versus science is misguided, there is more than a grain of truth in Gingras’s claim. For that is rewriting the history of science.

What’s odious about all this is that Harrison himself has received Templeton money, and yet spends a lot of his review defending Templeton against Gingras’s claims. Here’s what Harrison says:

(Full disclosure: I have been the recipient of Templeton funding, although none of my books on the historical relations between science and religion have been supported by them.)

This is a gross conflict of interest, and had I been Harrison trying to review Gingras’s book for, say, The Washington Post, the first question my editor would have asked me was whether I had any personal conflict of interest involving the author’s thesis. If I said I had taken Templeton money and Gingras criticizes the Templeton Foundation, I would absolutely have been prohibited from reviewing Science and Religion: An Impossible Dialogue. Shame on the L.A. Review of Books for even allowing Harrison to review the Gingras volume!

For, of course, if you’re in the Templeton stable, you better defend them if you want more Templeton money, and that is the prime conflict of interest at play here. Harrison, had he acted ethically, should have recused himself from reviewing this book.

If you want to see Harrison’s involvement with Templeton, check this Google search. He has given Templeton-sponsored lectures, attended Templeton-sponsored conferences, and accepted grants from the Templeton Foundation. In fact, in Templeton’s Stable of Prize Thoroughbreds, there’s a special stall labeled “Peter Harrison”. He knows which side his oats are buttered on.

Third, and I’m growing weary, Harrison goes through the usual machinations to show that what seems like a conflict between science and religion is really about something else, a thesis most prominently advanced by Ronald Numbers of the University of Wisconsin. Thus we learn from Harrison that Galileo was suppressed not because of religion, but because of other stuff, to wit:

This brings us to the Galileo affair, which makes a predictable appearance as a set piece. The basic details of the story are well known, and again Gingras does a creditable job of reconstructing them. Galileo was warned by the Inquisition in 1616 not to teach or defend the heliocentric hypothesis first propounded by Copernicus over 70 years before. Following the publication, in 1632, of an insufficiently ambiguous defense of Copernicanism, Galileo was placed on trial, and in the following year he was found guilty of vehement suspicion of heresy and ordered to recant. He did so and remained under house arrest until his death almost 10 years later.

This looks like an open and shut case of science versus religion. But there are complications. For a start, Galileo’s theory lacked proof, and his argument for the Earth’s motion based on a theory about the tides was simply wrong. Not only that, but the absence of observable stellar parallax provided apparently unassailable evidence against the motion of the Earth. The planetary model of Tycho Brahe, which had the planets orbiting the sun, and the sun orbiting a stationary Earth, offered a good compromise solution, and accounted for at least some of Galileo’s telescopic observations without the physical difficulties of putting the Earth into motion. In short, at this time there was no consensus in the scientific community about whether Galileo was right, and good reasons for thinking he was wrong. For its part, the Church was well informed on the relative merits of the various systems, and its support for the Tychonic model in the later 17th century was scientifically defensible.

Yes, complications!!! First of all, “proof” is not required for a theory to have credibility; the concept of “proof” is alien to science. And whether or not the scientific community agreed with Galileo or not, he wasn’t suppressed and put under house arrest because other scientists didn’t accept him. No, that happened because his own evidence contradicted Church teachings. This defense of the Church is boilerplate accommodationism. Yeah, maybe there were “complications”, but to say that religious dogma played no role in the Galileo affair is to show yourself as willfully blinkered. Even Harrison admits that Galileo was found guilty of heresy, and, well, heresy involves religion, not scientific debate.

Sadly, but understandably, Harrison says little about evolution except this (my emphasis):

Historians of science tend to cling to the old-fashioned idea that effects come after their causes. The canonical works that first began to dismantle the idea of a perennial conflict between science and religion — God and Nature (1986) edited by David Lindberg and Ronald Numbers, and John Hedley Brooke’s classic Science and Religion: Some Historical Perspectives (1991) — were written before the Templeton Foundation’s funding activities had begun to have an impact in the 1990s (the Foundation itself was not constituted until 1987). Earlier still was James R. Moore’s The Post-Darwinian Controversies (1979). This book was instrumental in identifying the 19th-century progenitors of the conflict thesis, conclusively laying bare its deficiencies, and showing how religious opposition to Darwinism had been greatly exaggerated.

Anybody who claims that, beginning with the Scopes trial up to today, “religious opposition to Darwinism is greatly exaggerated”, is either ignorant or lying. 76% of Americans think that God either created life directly as Genesis states (38%) or thinks that God had a hand in directing or tweaking evolution (the other 38%). Muslim opposition to evolution continues throughout the world, but we don’t hear much about it. One example: the teaching of evolution in Turkish secondary schools was just banned by the pro-Islamic regime of President Erdogan. Woe to that once-secular country!

Harrison is wrong on all counts, I think, and it’s shameful that he, a consumer of Templeton dosh, accepted a commission to review a book that criticizes the Templeton Foundation. But that’s only one flaw in a deeply flawed and fulsomely accommodationist book review.

h/t: Matthew Cobb

My Voice of America discussion of science versus religion

July 22, 2017 • 10:15 am

The Voice of America World Service interviewed me last week about the compatibility of religion and science as part of a 30-minute program in the “Press Conference USA” series. My take, of course, is that they’re incompatible. I use the first 15 minutes to explain why, and then we hear from a Catholic scientist who feels the opposite way.

Here are the VOA program notes:

From Galileo’s run-in with the Catholic Church in the 17th century to more recent controversies over the teaching of creationism in public schools, the relationship between science and religion has been the subject of ongoing debate. Host Rick Pantaleo speaks with Jerry Coyne, the author of “Faith vs. Fact” and Stephen Barr, President of the Society of Catholic Scientists  [JAC: he’s also a professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Delaware] about whether science and religion are compatible or mutually exclusive.

Barr (whose segment begins at 15:55) espouses many of the familiar arguments: many famous scientists were religious; many scientists are still religious; Catholic priests like Mendel were scientists (he was a monk); religion “answers some questions that science doesn’t” (e.g., why are we here, how we should live), and so on. He claims that, unlike science, religion can explain why there is a Universe and why it’s orderly and obeys physical laws that can be expressed with mathematics. His answer, of course, is that there is a “Mind” behind it all, and by that he means the Catholic god.

That’s the God of the Gaps argument, which is just an argument from ignorance: “We don’t know, ergo Catholicism.” He even maintains that compatibility comes from seeing that the same motivation underlies science and religion: a desire to understand the universe and a confidence that it makes sense. But he doesn’t mention that scientific explanations can be tested, while religion’s attempts to “make sense” involve simply making stuff up, and differ from one religion to the next.

Barr finally brings up Dawkins (i.e., Satan) as an example of an aggressive, arrogant, and disrespectful atheist scientist who asserts that a person can’t be a believer and a scientist at the same time. I don’t think either Richard or I maintain that view: we argue that religious scientists aren’t coherent in how they deal with evidence. If you apportion your beliefs in accordance with the strength of the empirical evidence supporting them, then a religious attitude is clearly at odds with a scientific one. As I always say, in science faith is a vice, while in religion it’s a virtue.

Of course there can be religious scientists: that’s a matter of simple fact. But many are deeply inconsistent in how they approach life. In the end, Barr’s argument for compatibility boils down not to evidence, but to the fact that there were and are people who are both religious and scientists. And that’s not compatibility, but coexistence. 

I wish Pantaleo had asked Barr what the evidence was for the truth of Barr’s Catholic beliefs, but of course that’s confrontational, and the interviewer wished to avoid hardball questions.

Click on the screenshot to hear the two viewpoints:

Rick Pantaleo, the nice man who interviewed me, adds this:

Along with being broadcast multiple times on VOA’s radio network throughout this weekend, the program will also be available via several online audio streams (including iTunes).

The Society of Catholic Scientists is apparently new, or at least they’ve just had their first conference. Stephen Barr announces it here, with a poster. See anything interesting?

One of the speakers was biologist Kenneth Miller (not a member of the Society, though he’s considering it), and Forbes wrote this about his take on the society:

But two of the highlighted speakers of the conference were indeed quite well known Catholic scientists: Kenneth R. Miller, the Brown University biologist who became nationally known for his defence of evolution against creationists, especially during the Kitzmiller v. Dover trial in 2005.

The co-author of the best selling high school biology textbook in the country, Miller was present to receive the first St. Albert Award from the Society, in honor of St. Albert the Great, who is considered the patron saint of science in the Catholic Church.

Miller actually had been invited to speak at the March for Science, which was taking place in cities all over the country at the same time as the conference.  “And I would actually be speaking at the one in Providence, if I was at home in Rhode Island,” he said. “Because I was invited to do so.”

But one of the things that motivated that march, he told me, is the sense of disaffection from popular support that the scientific community feels.

“And I think part of that disaffection is the sense that science is in fact anti-religious,” he said. “That science promotes an absolute secularist agenda. I think that harms the reputation of science in the eyes of the public. And I think an organization like the Society here can go a long way towards healing it. So, I think this organization is a good thing.”

 I doubt it: not so long as Catholicism perpetuates antiscientific views like the existence of souls, of Resurrections, and of the literal ancestry of all humans from Adam and Eve. And not so long as they privilege faith over reason and base their religion on unsubstantiated fairy tales. In fact, the methods and outcomes of science have been secular as a matter not of principle, but of practice; so if that’s what Miller means by science having a “secular agenda,” he’s right. If he means that science leads to a lack of religious belief, well, that’s also true—or so I argue in Faith Versus Fact—but most scientists don’t promote atheism as a deliberate agenda.

My interview at the Hong Kong Literary Festival, and a note on folk medicine

November 11, 2016 • 11:30 am

Last night I had an hour event (45 minutes of conversation about Faith Versus Fact and 15 minutes of Q&A) at the Hong Kong Literary Festival, co-sponsored by the Hong Kong Skeptics. You can watch it by clicking on the screenshot below.

The interviewer is Mike Bigelow, a businessman, former Jehovah’s Witness (now a nonbeliever), and officer of the Hong Kong Skeptics Society; he had some great questions. The taping was done by Andrew Davidson, who kindly recorded it on his phone and posted it on Periscope.

My thanks as well to Phillipa Milne, head of the Literary Festival, to David Young, one of my “handlers” who extended me warm hospitality, and the other Literary Festival and Hong Kong Skeptic folk who dealt with the logistical hurdles.

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I was gratified that the event was sold out, that the audience seemed enthusiastic, and that many people bought books (WEIT was also on sale).

After the event I got to talk to some of the audience, and I was especially interested in what four young Hong Kong medics—practitioners of modern scientific medicine—had to say.

One thing I’ve learned is that although many people in Hong Kong and China are not conventionally religious, they are often deeply superstitious, not only relying on untested or disproven forms of medical treatment (acupuncture, homeopathy, herbal medicine), but having a belief in feng shui, lucky numbers (many buildings don’t have fourth floors), ghosts, and the like. Since the last chapter of Faith versus Fact was about the dangers of faith healing, I wanted to know whether these dangers applied to non-religious but untested Chinese folk medicine.

The medics instantly said “yes,” and noted that they’d come across many cases of people who had been severely damaged by relying on folk and traditional cures rather than scientific medicine. One, an oncologist, told me grisly stories about women with breast cancer who had tried to cure themselves by rubbing herbal creams on their tumor-ridden breasts, which of course only got worse and worse, often over years. By the time they sought Western treatment, it was too late, though many could have been cured had they consulted a real doctor early on. The oncologist said the same thing about lymphoma: it’s often a treatable and curable form of cancer, but becomes terminal if treated with folk nostrums.

So yes, there is lots of ineffective “faith healing” in which the “faith” devolves not on gods and their wills, but on untested remedies. Belief in untested forms of medicine is itself a form of faith, for there’s no systematic evidence that they work. But I suppose we knew that already. I just wanted confirmation from local doctors, and got it in spades.

NASA osculates religion again

July 7, 2016 • 9:45 am

Well, this ceremony—The Blessing of the Astronauts—took place in Kazakhstan, but it was still posted by NASA. Jebus—it’s the equivalent of Indian scientists going to the temple for blessings before they launch a satellite. And it’s sheer madness: the juxtaposition of a ludicrous medieval theology with a modern science that actually works. Note how the astronauts kiss the cross.

h/t: Bryan L.

Oy! An accommodationist comic book

March 20, 2016 • 11:30 am

Excuse me; I should have said “graphic novel” in the title, but I can barely bring myself to describe this venture as having the gravitas of real graphic novels like Maus or The Rabbi’s Cat. The bad news is that the science-and-faith-are-friends juggernaut is rolling on. The good news is that this project may not reach fruition.

In Faith versus Fact, I argue that science and religion are incompatible if you believe that religion makes “truth statements” about the real world, which then brings religion into the realm of the empirical—and in principle the realm of the testable. I won’t amplify that thesis here, as all loyal readers should have either bought the book or read a library version. (I will add that I give provide ample documentation that religion is indeed grounded on statements about what’s true in the universe, and that that notion is explicitly confirmed by many theologians.)

One of the reasons I wrote that book was to counteract the spate of other books—in fact, the vast majority of books on science and religion—that argue for the compatibility of science and faith on specious grounds, e.g.,  the existence of religious scientists.

And now we have the first accommodationist graphic novel. As described in at article at PuffHo, the comic was financed by Tommaso Todesca, a wealthy Los Angeles banker and a Catholic of Italian extraction.

Todesca got the idea for this travesty from reading an Italian accommodationist book called Scienze e fede (“Science and faith”) written by two Italian professors. After initially wanting to translate the book into English, Todesca decided that a graphic novel would be a better venue for his misguided thesis:

The “hook of the project,” Todesca said, is the message that “science and faith are not in conflict with each other.”

“Through the patience of dialogue, science and faith can and should complement each other, and make each other stronger,” he told The Huffington Post.

As I say in FvF, science can certainly change religion, but by rejecting religious dogma that’s scientifically testable (Genesis and its creationism, Adam and Eve, Noah’s Ark, the Exodus, the census of Caesar Augustus, the efficacy of prayer, and so on). Whether this makes religion stronger is questionable. I’d argue that as religious scripture becomes increasingly falsified by empiricism, religion becomes weaker. But certainly faith does nothing to make science stronger, for science utterly rejects faith. Science is an atheistic enterprise. As Laplace supposedly said, we don’t need a god hypothesis.

The comic book, apparently also called Science and Faith, has a Kickstarter page with a goal of $10,000 (I won’t link to it, though the PuffHo page does). Judging by the data so far, the idea isn’t selling like hotcakes:

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And the plot? Lame.

The graphic novel will feature Savagnone and Briguglia — a philosopher and a physicist, respectively — as comic book characters who go on a journey that takes them from Rome to Florence to Toulouse, meeting with great scientists and thinkers of the past and the present, including Galileo Galilei, Johannes Kepler and Thomas Aquinas. [JAC: The Kickstarter video also mentions that Savagnone and Briuglia will meet Richard Dawkins, but that meeting is pointedly omitted by PuffHo; possibly because potential funders see Dawkins as Satan incarnate.]

Their dialogue draws from the original book, which Todesca said “makes a compelling case for faith as a type of knowledge that can find its ground in rationality.”

The fact that Todesca claims that faith is a “type of knowledge” based on rationality will be the comic book’s fatal flaw, for faith, whatever it may be, is certainly not a type of knowledge, but rather belief in the absence of convincing evidence. And it’s grounded not in rationality but irrationality—the desire to confirm what you want to be true. That makes faith the very antithesis of science. But I digress. .

PuffHo gives some panels from the novel’s beginning. The use of the book’s text as dialogue seems to be a fatal flaw. Have a gander. I’m not impressed, but of course I’m biased!

Note that they mention Father Coyne, which of course isn’t me, but Father George V. Coyne, former director of the Vatican Observatory and a vociferous accommodationist.

(Note: They should fix “biforcations” in the first panel.):

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Zzzzzzzzz. . . .

Well, if Pope Benedict said it, it must be true, right? Pity about those 40% of Americans who reject what he said, seeing a clear conflict between their view of creation and “the version offered by empirical science.”

They should also fix the misspelling in the first panel here:

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I have no bloody idea what’s happening in the last panel, but it looks like a miracle: the resurrection of that old charlatan Teilhard de Chardin—out of a book bag. (If you want something really entertaining, read Peter Medwar’s review of Teilhard’s famous The Phenomenon of Man. Both Dawkins and I think it’s the best bad book review ever written.)

If all this comic book does is illustrate tedious bromides from the accommodationist movement, as the panels above suggest, it will be not only a snoozer but a loser. Can you imaging a curious kid—or anyone with two neurons to rub together—wanting to read it?

Oh, and have a look at the comments. Most of them aren’t exactly supportive.
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I’m heartened, as these sorts of comments would have been unthinkable fifty years ago.

BuzzFeed compilation: How do atheists find meaning in life?

August 11, 2015 • 8:00 am

Author Tom Chivers sometimes writes at Buzzfeed, where he’s a welcome exception to the usual clickbait-compilers at that site (see my post on his nice article  about how doctors would like to die). His latest effort involved interviewing several of us heathens about how nonbelievers find meaning in life. As you well know, theists seem deeply puzzled by this question, a sign that they can’t think outside the God Box, and can’t even see what’s around them.

Chivers’s piece, “I asked atheists how they find meaning in a purposeless universe,” surveys a broad spectrum of scientists, writers, and humanists. The answers, I hope, will put an end to this persistent and annoying question. Here’s my answer, which was given by phone so is a bit choppy:

Jerry Coyne, evolutionary biologist and author of Faith vs. Fact: Why Science and Religion are Incompatible

“The way I find meaning is the way that most people find meaning, even religious ones, which is to get pleasure and significance from your job, from your loved ones, from your avocation, art, literature, music. People like me don’t worry about what it’s all about in a cosmic sense, because we know it isn’t about anything. It’s what we make of this transitory existence that matters.

“If you’re an atheist and an evolutionary biologist, what you think is, I’m lucky to have these 80-odd years: How can I make the most of my existence here? Being an atheist means coming to grips with reality. And the reality is twofold. We’re going to die as individuals, and the whole of humanity, unless we find a way to colonise other planets, is going to go extinct. So there’s lots of things that we have to deal with that we don’t like. We just come to grips with the reality. Life is the result of natural selection, and death is the result of natural selection. We are evolved in such a way that death is almost inevitable. So you just deal with it.

“It says in the Bible that, ‘When I was a child I played with childish things, and when I became a man I put away those childish things.’ And one of those childish things is the superstition that there’s a higher purpose. Christopher Hitchens said it’s time to move beyond the mewling childhood of our species and deal with reality as it is, and that’s what we have to do.”

The subtitle of Chivers’s piece is “If there’s no afterlife or reason for the universe, how do you make your life matter? Warning: the last answer may break your heart.” So of course I’ll put up the last answer:

Jan Doig [JAC: I’m not sure who she is, but she’s wonderfully eloquent]:

“Three years and nine months ago I would have declared myself agnostic. Then my husband died without warning at the age of 47. My life fell to pieces. This is no exaggeration. As the terrible days passed in a fog the same question kept forming. Why? Why him? Why us? I was told by well-meaning friends that it was part of God’s plan and we would simply never know what that was. Or from friends with a looser definition of religion, that The Universe had something to teach me. I had lessons to learn.

“These thoughts caused me great fear, anger and confusion. What sort of God, even if he had a plan for me, would separate a fine. kind, gentle man from his children. Why would God or the Universe look down and pick on our little family for special treatment? Why a good man with not a bad bone in his body who had never raised a hand to anyone. My best friend for 29 years. Any lesson the Universe had to teach me I would have learned willingly. He didn’t have to die!

“I thought about it a lot. I was raised Catholic so guilt ran through me like writing through a stick of rock. Had I been a bad wife? Was he waiting for me? There were days when if I had been certain of a belief in an afterlife I might have gone to join him. It was a desperate time. I needed evidence and there simply wasn’t any. I just had to have faith and believe.

“One day as I was sitting on his memorial bench in the local park I suddenly thought: what if no one is to blame? Not God. Not me. Not the Universe. What if he’s gone and that’s all there is to it? No plan. Just dreadful circumstances. A minor disturbance in his heart lead to a more serious and ultimately deadly arrhythmia and that killed him in a matter of moments. It is a purely scientific view of it. I may seem cold or callous but I found comfort in that. I cried and cried and cried, but that made logical sense to me and brought me great peace.

[JAC: This reminds me of Christopher Hitchens’s statement after his diagnosis of cancer. As he said at the time, “To the dumb question ‘Why me?’ the cosmos barely bothers to return the reply: Why not?”]

“My heart and head still miss my husband every day. I treasure everything he gave me and I love him as much today as the day he died. But I can remember him happily without wondering what we had done to deserve this dreadful separation.

“So I declare myself atheist (and humanist by extension) and my friends shake their heads. I stay on the straight and narrow without the guiding hand of a creator or any book of instructions.

“I’m not a religious or a spiritual person. (For some reason many of my female friends are shocked by this admission!) I don’t believe in God or the Universe. I don’t believe in angels, the power of prayer, spirits, ghosts or an afterlife. The list goes on and on. I think there is a scientific meaning for everything even if we don’t understand it yet. I find meaning in every day things and I choose to carry on.

“The sun comes up and I have a chance to be kind to anyone who crosses my path because I can. I make that choice for myself and nobody has to tell me to do it. I am right with myself. I try my best to do my best, and if I fail, I try again tomorrow. I support myself in my own journey through life. I draw my own conclusions.

“I find joy in the people I love. I love and I am loved. I find peace in the places I visit. Cry when I listen to music I love and find almost child like joy in many things.This world is brilliant and full of fascinating things. I have to think carefully for myself. I don’t have to believe what I’m told. I must ask questions and I try and use logic and reason to answer them. I believe that every human life carries equal worth. I struggle with how difficult the world can be but when we have free will some people will make terrible decisions. No deity forces their hand and they must live with that.

“Life is a personal struggle. Grieving is never an easy road to travel. It’s painful and lonely at times but I use what I know to try to help when I can. I try to be loving and caring with my family and friends and have fun. I will cry with friends in distress and hear other people’s stories and be kind because it does me good as well. I listen and I learn. It helps me to be better. Life without God is not a life without meaning. Everything, each and every interaction is full of meaning. Everything matters.”

Among the others interviewed are Susan Blackmore, Gia Milinovich, Jennifer Michael Hecht, and Adam Rutherford. There’s a commonality among the answers—I’d like to echo Darwin in saying that “there is a grandeur in this view of life”—and the common theme is that we all recognize that there is no ultimate purpose or meaning of life, at least in the theists’ cosmic sense, but that we find meaning in our activities and relationships. That’s not much different from how theists find meaning in their quotidian life: note the convergence between what many of the atheists consider their “purpose” (“Be kind to loved ones and strangers”, “Do something good for society”) and the so-called Meaning Given by God. In the end, the quotidian life is all we have.

Chivers’s article should be bookmarked as the definitive response to a nonsensical question that religionists raise time and time again. They may not like the answers, but, given what we know about the universe, they happen to be true.

Brother Tayler’s secular Sunday sermon: a riff on a hoax

July 27, 2015 • 11:30 am

An article in The NewsNerd notes that the American Psychological Association is about to classify extreme religiosity as a mental illness. A true God Delusion!:

According to the American Psychological Association (APA), a strong and passionate belief in a deity or higher power, to the point where it impairs one’s ability to make conscientious decisions about common sense matters, will now be classified as a mental illness.

The controversial ruling comes after a 5-year study by the APA showed devoutly religious people often suffered from anxiety, emotional distress, hallucinations, and paranoia. The study stated that those who perceived God as punitive was directly related to their poorer health, while those who viewed God as benevolent did not suffer as many mental problems. The religious views of both groups often resulted in them being disconnected from reality.

Dr. Lillian Andrews, professor of psychology, stated, “Every year thousands of people die after refusing life-saving treatment on religious grounds. Even when being told ‘you will die without this treatment’ patients reject the idea and believe that their God will still save them. Those lives could be saved simply by classifying those people as mentally unfit for decision making.”

. . . With the new classification, the APA will lobby to introduce legislation which would allow doctors the right to force life-saving treatment on those who refuse it for spiritual reasons on the grounds that they are mentally incapable of making decisions about their health.

I’ve written at length about this very problem (in Slate, for example), especially the the United States’s shameful coddling of parents who withhold medical care from their children on religious grounds. Those parents are given a legal break in 43 of the 50 U.S. states, and it’s reprehensible and unconscionable.(47 of the 50 states also permit religious exemptions from vaccination for children attending public school.) The last chapter of Faith versus Fact, for example, discusses this issue in detail, for it’s a palpable example of severe harm caused by faith—and the onus to fix it is on all of us.

Sadly, as Jeffrey Tayler notes in his latest Sunday Secular Sermon in Salon, “The religious have gone insane: the separation of church and state—and Scalia from his mind,” this story in NewsNerd, like all others on the site, is a fake. It sounds realistic, and is what many of us would like to be true, but it isn’t.

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So the largely free license that religious parents have to hurt their children via faith-healing remains untrammeled. (Tayler even pays me a nice parenthetical compliment for my discussion of the issue: “For a shocking, even heartbreaking exploration of this issue and much more, check out Jerry Coyne’s ‘Faith vs. Fact: Why Science and Religion are Incompatible’, which could be a primer for all rationalists wishing to argue the case for nonbelief.”)

Tayler goes on to insist, as he has before, that extreme religiosity is a form of mental illness. Some readers may disagree, but let those who do remember that if people behaved the same way about Bigfoot as they did about Jesus, they’d be seen as delusional. Tayler:

 . . . the satire in the News Nerd’s piece derives its efficacy from an obvious truth: belief in a deity motivates people to behave in all sorts of ways — some childish and pathetic, others harmful, a few outright criminal — most of which, to the nonbeliever at least, mimic symptoms of an all-encompassing mental illness, if of widely varying severity.

Why childish?  A majority of adults in one of the most developed countries on Earth believe, in all seriousness, that an invisible, inaudible, undetectable “father” exercises parental supervision over them, protecting them from evil (except when he doesn’t), and, for the mere price of surrendering their faculty of reason and behaving in ways spelled out in various magic books, will ensure their postmortem survival.  Wishful thinking characterizes childhood, yes, but, where the religious are concerned, not only.  That is childish.

Tayler goes on to recount the palpable harms of faith: not only the death of innocent and brainwashed children, but the oppression of women, the “scarred psyches” of many of those brainwashed kids, Jesus Camp, ISIS, and so on. The list is familiar, but Tayler’s remedy is pure New Atheist:

Yet all is not lost!  If the News Nerd’s APA story was a hoax, professionals are, nonetheless, taking note of the danger it was parodying.  A San-Franciscan human development consultant named Dr. Marlene Winell, herself a survivor of a Pentecostal upbringing, has bruited the idea of “religious trauma syndrome” and established its symptoms as “anxiety . . . depression, cognitive difficulties, and problems with social functioning.”  Kathleen Taylor, an Oxford neuroscientist, has proposed treating religious fundamentalism itself as a “mental disturbance.”

The cure, in my view?  Talk therapy, otherwise known as free speech, focusing relentlessly on religion and its multitudinous, multiplying ills, to be administered by us to the faith-deranged.  Treatment might begin in language they can readily understand.  The best, most succinct notion to be transmitted to the patients: “The deepest sin against the human mind is to believe things without evidence.”  The nineteenth-century British biologist Thomas H. Huxley, “Darwin’s Bulldog,” said that.

It’s up to us.  For the sake of humanity’s future, for the sake of our children, rationalists need to be unabashedly “bull-doggish.”

The time has arrived to bark, and even to bite.

I’ll bite! What say you: should we treat this extreme form of religiosity as a mental illness, when we know it really is one, albeit one that’s widespread? Should we even call it a mental illness, knowing that it will alienate many of the faithful?