Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
Reader Barry called my attention to this tweet by Richard Dawkins, and, unusually, MEMRI has put the 3-minute video (with English subtitles) on YouTube. I’ve embedded it below:
Listen to this decent, intelligent young man trying to explain something, quietly & respectfully. The TV host yells at him, then kicks him out. Religion poisons everything.https://t.co/lopJE5HVZS
Mohammad Hashem, an atheist, was invited to the Alhadath Alyoum TV studio to participate in a debate with former Deputy Sheikh of Al-Azhar Mahmoud Ashour. However, his statement that there is no scientific evidence for the existence of God and his attempt to talk about the Big Bang theory met with a barrage of insults from Sheikh Ashour and from TV host Mahmoud Abd Al-Halim, with Sheikh Ashour recommending psychiatric treatment and Abd Al-Halim refusing to allow him to remain on the show. The TV host, apologizing to his viewers for subjecting them to “inappropriate” and “destructive ideas,” advised Hashem “to leave the studio and go straight to a psychiatric hospital.” The show aired on February 11.
It’s amazing how violently the presenters react to Hashem’s claim that there is no scientific evidence for God. They fulminate, tell him he is “mentally ill” and then, in a pot/kettle/black moment, say that he “has nothing to offer”. But of course it is the hosts who are deluded; yet their delusion is so common in Egypt that it’s taken as the norm.
Now I’m not sure how much of the posturing of the loud host in the royal-blue blazer is merely for the benefit of the camera and the government, but surely both hosts knew that Hashem was an atheist when they invited him on. What did they expect?
And, of course Hashem is persona non grata in Egypt now, perhaps even in danger of his life. This is a brave man.
Diana MacPherson sent these two videos, one of which is a real commercial and the other a parody. As she says:
I hope you can view these. It’s for “This Hour Has 22 Minutes“, a political and satirical comedy show in Canada. Here they make fun of religion as divisive based on an Ancestry.ca commercial about finding out about your DNA.
The show Diana refers to appears on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, a government entity.
First we have the legit commercial—the one parodied by the satire below. It’s tribalistic and way over the top, but that’s how they’re sellling ancestry tests in Canada. (I wonder, as an atheist Jew who has ancestors in Galway, if I’d be greeted so warmly!):
And here’s the “This Hour Has 22 Minutes” parody: [JAC: be sure to watch to the end.]
Can you imagine this being shown on any television station in the U.S., much less one run by the government? Ceiling Cat bless Canada!
It reminds me of this joke related by Richard Dawkins in The God Delusion:
A journalist, researching for an article on the complex political situation in Northern Ireland, was in a pub in a war-torn area of Belfast. One of his potential informants leaned over his pint of Guinness and suspiciously cross-examined the journalist: “Are you a Catholic or a Protestant?” the Irishman asked.”Neither,” replied the journalist; “I’m an atheist.”
The Irishman, not content with this answer, put a further question: “Ah, but are you a Catholic atheist or a Protestant atheist?”
The relentless march of our country towards nonbelief continues, documented by Michael Shermer in his latest Scientific American post (click on screenshot below):
There are three pieces of information:
1.) The number of atheists, agnostics, and “nones” (those who claim no formal religious affiliation) is continuing to grow.
A 2013 Harris Poll of 2,250 American adults, for example, found that 23 percent of all Americans have forsaken religion altogether. A 2015 Pew Research Center poll reported that 34 to 36 percent of millennials (those born after 1980) are nones and corroborated the 23 percent figure, adding that this was a dramatic increase from 2007, when only 16 percent of Americans said they were affiliated with no religion. In raw numbers, this translates to an increase from 36.6 million to 55.8 million nones. Though lagging far behind the 71 percent of Americans who identified as Christian in the Pew poll, they are still a significant voting block, far larger than Jews (4.7 million), Muslims (2.2 million) and Buddhists (1.7 million) combined (8.6 million) and comparable to politically powerful Christian sects such as Evangelical (25.4 percent) and Catholic (20.8 percent).
I can’t imagine any circumstance that would reverse this loss of belief, except perhaps a cataclysm that destroys the well being of all Americans, which might prompt a return to faith for many. Eventually we’re going to wind up like Denmark and Sweden, and we’ll be the better for it.
2.) The “nones” and nonbelievers can still believe in woo.
Even among atheists and agnostics, belief in things usually associated with religious faith can worm its way through fissures in the materialist dam. A 2014 survey conducted by the Austin Institute for the Study of Family and Culture on 15,738 Americans, for example, found that of the 13.2 percent who called themselves atheist or agnostic, 32 percent answered in the affirmative to the question “Do you think there is life, or some sort of conscious existence, after death?” Huh? Even more incongruent, 6 percent of these atheists and agnostics also said that they believed in the bodily resurrection of the dead. You know, like Jesus.
What’s going on here? The surveys didn’t ask, but I strongly suspect a lot of these nonbelievers adopt either New Age notions of the continuation of consciousness without brains via some kind of “morphic resonance” or quantum field (or some such) or are holding out hope that science will soon master cloning, cryonics, mind uploading or the transhumanist ability to morph us into cyber-human hybrids.
Well, stuff like crystal healing and other forms of spirituality aren’t nearly as injurious to society as religion: for one thing, these believers don’t usually proselytize nor bring up their kids in as propagandistic a way as, say, Catholics, Mormons, or Christian Scientists. Belief in Resurrection is more harmful, as it “enables” religionists, and of course all forms of belief in woo gives unwarranted respect to faith, which is believe without proper evidence.
3.) The number of nonbelievers might be underestimated from poll data. (My emphasis in the following)
To work around this problem of self-reported data, the psychologists employed what is called an unmatched count technique, which has been previously validated for estimating the size of other underreported cohorts, such as the LGBTQ community. They contracted with YouGov to conduct two surveys of 2,000 American adults each, for a total of 4,000 subjects, asking participants to indicate how many innocuous versus sensitive statements on a list were true for them. The researchers then applied a Bayesian probability estimation to compare their results with similar Gallup and Pew polls of 2,000 American adults each. From this analysis, they estimated, with 93 percent certainty, that somewhere between 17 and 35 percent of Americans are atheists, with a “most credible indirect estimate” of 26 percent.
If true, this means that there are more than 64 million American atheists, a staggering number that no politician can afford to ignore. Moreover, if these trends continue, we should be thinking about the deeper implications for how people will find meaning as the traditional source of it wanes in influence. And we should continue working on grounding our morals and values on viable secular sources such as reason and science.
Well, that’s heartening, but I’m not all that concerned about the issue of “how people will find meaning” in a world without religion. This will happen naturally, as it has in northern Europe—a largely atheist area. I don’t see it as my job to tell people how and where they should find meaning once they give up religion. They will find their own meaning.
As for grounding morals and values on secular sources, well, that’s a more important issue, and one that atheists should think about—if for no other reason than to answer religionists who say that without God there’s no source of morality. There are endless resources for reading about this, including Steve Pinker’s latest book, Enlightenment Now.
I wouldn’t worry too much about what seems like a semantic question except that it bears on how respected scientists are viewed by the public. As we know, the term “atheist” is largely pejorative, even in the U.K., and so is avoided by public figures, who, if atheists, like to use soft euphemisms like “nonbeliever” or “agnostic”. But to a rationalist, as Robert G. Ingersoll realized, an “atheist” is pretty much the same as an “agnostic”, and Ingersoll applied those terms interchangeably to himself. Both connote rejections of the idea that there is a god, although to some (and to the Oxford English Dictionary below), “atheist” means “someone who absolutely denies there’s a god,” while agnostic means “someone who doesn’t know whether there’s a god or not.”
So, when you look at the OED definition of “atheist”, you get both senses of the word: denial (which could, but doesn’t have to, mean “absolute rejection”) or “lack of belief”.
But to a scientist, absolute denial of any empirical proposition isn’t kosher, and so all one can say about gods, if you don’t accept them, is this: “There is not the slightest evidence for a god, and therefore I don’t accept a god’s existence.”
Those are the sentiments of an “a-theist”, that is, someone who has removed the concept of gods from their thinking. True agnostics, who in my experience are few and far between, are those who think there might be some evidence for a god, but not enough to be convincing. (Most “agnostics” are really those who see no evidence for a god, but don’t want to use the word “atheist”.)
Scientists like Brian Cox and Neil deGrasse Tyson, who have rejected the label “atheist”, surely do not think there is any evidence for a god. They truly are atheists, but don’t like to use the word. I suspect, but can’t prove, that this refusal to call oneself an “atheist,” despite seeing no evidence for a god, is based on social acceptance: it’s not good for your image to say you’re an “atheist.” And although it’s fine to say you’re an a-Santa-ist or an a-fairy-ist, since you see no evidence for Santa or fairies, religion is a more widespread delusion, and you don’t want to buck public opinion so blatantly. No, best to say you just “don’t believe.”
Brian Cox (and Tyson) have long rejected the label “atheist”, as you see with Cox below. (As far as Cox being militant, no, he’s not, but that’s okay. He does say in public that he sees no evidence for god, and that’s good enough for me):
@destraudo I reject the label atheist, and I'm about as militant as the Vicar of Dibley.
Nevertheless, this two-minute clip of Cox discussing his “atheism” with Russell Brand disturbed me a bit (make sure you turn the sound up), as this is from Facebook:
First, Cox says “I reject the label because I think that it’s divisive.” That’s one clue that he doesn’t accept the monicker, at least in part, because people don’t like it, not because he thinks it’s inaccurate. What bothers me more is his expression of agnosticism parading under the banner of science:
“Science does not rule out the existence of a creator by definition because we don’t know how the universe began, full stop.”
and
“I don’t feel compelled to go further than the statement ‘I don’t know.'”
Well, there’s a difference between “I don’t know and there’s a decent probability of a god” and “I don’t know but there’s simply not an iota of evidence for a god.” After all, science doesn’t rule out the existence of anything: not the Loch Ness monster, not Santa Claus, not leprechauns, not fairies, not Bigfoot. Why wouldn’t Cox say the same thing about these?
Instead, he uses our ignorance of why the laws of nature are as they are, and about how the universe began, as a justification for some sort of agnosticism. What Bayesian probability, based on the complete lack of evidence for supernaturalism in physics, would Cox assign to the laws of nature, or the Universe, having been created by a god? He doesn’t know whether Bigfoot or Russell’s Teapot exists, either, but would he say that he’s comfortable asserting that “I just don’t know about these things”? After all, Cox has been an ardent opponent of flat-earthers and Moon-landing conspiracists, as well as other forms of pseudoscience. Why does religion alone get a pass?
This reminds me of a passage in Natalie Angier’s brilliant essay, “My God Problem“, where she notes the different way physicists treat religion versus other superstitions:
Consider the very different treatments accorded two questions presented to Cornell University’s “Ask an Astronomer” Web site. To the query, “Do most astronomers believe in God, based on the available evidence?” the astronomer Dave Rothstein replies that, in his opinion, “modern science leaves plenty of room for the existence of God . . . places where people who do believe in God can fit their beliefs in the scientific framework without creating any contradictions.” He cites the Big Bang as offering solace to those who want to believe in a Genesis equivalent and the probabilistic realms of quantum mechanics as raising the possibility of “God intervening every time a measurement occurs” before concluding that, ultimately, science can never prove or disprove the existence of a god, and religious belief doesn’t—and shouldn’t—”have anything to do with scientific reasoning.”
How much less velveteen is the response to the reader asking whether astronomers believe in astrology. “No, astronomers do not believe in astrology,” snarls Dave Kornreich. “It is considered to be a ludicrous scam. There is no evidence that it works, and plenty of evidence to the contrary.” Dr. Kornreich ends his dismissal with the assertion that in science “one does not need a reason not to believe in something.” Skepticism is “the default position” and “one requires proof if one is to be convinced of something’s existence.”
Now I don’t think Cox leaves room for God, but I think he’s giving religion a pass; after all, saying one is an atheist is “divisive.” That’s not true of astrology—or of any form of unevidenced superstition beside religion.
Indeed, here’s an earlier clip in which Cox doesn’t say “I don’t know” about God, but expresses assurance that there is no God. He says this in Human Universe, episode 5 (clip below, my emphasis):
“We must also learn to value the human race and take responsibility for our own survival. Why? [Points up to the heavens] Because there’s nobody else out there to value us or to look after us. And finally, most important of all, we must educate the next generation in the great discoveries of science and we must teach them to use the light of reason to banish the darkness of superstition, because if we do that, then at least there’s a chance that this universe will remain a human one.”
That is not doubt; that is expressed assurance that “there’s nobody out there”, i.e. God. And that’s atheism: a confidence—not an absolute one, of course—that there’s no God.
So, even if Cox doesn’t want to call himself an atheist, he is one. It’s like a cat saying that it’s not a cat but a dog in order not to frighten the mice.
Let me be clear, though: I have enormous respect for Cox and feel that he’s one of the best science popularizers going. And, unlike, Tyson, he’s less timorous about his beliefs (Tyson had to be forced to admit he was an atheist, and did so petulantly.) And I do appreciate that it may hurt one’s scientific message among the faithful to forcefully express atheism when your job is to sell science. I’m not asking Cox to be an antitheist, of course—I wouldn’t demand that of anyone. But if you do talk about beliefs, then—at least, as a scientist—tell people that that some beliefs have a very low probability of being true based on prior evidence. Just because you “can’t disprove God” by science doesn’t mean that you can’t say that the probability that a god exists, based on the evidence, is very low. Getting the best conclusions based on what we know is, after all, the task of science, and applies to God as much as it applies to Bigfoot.
Why do I care? In the end, it’s only when respected and idolized people like Cox are willing to say, “Yes, I am an atheist” that the term will begin to lose its pejorative tint. And it would be a better explanation of how scientific confidence works to use some sort of Bayesian statement. After all, the question of God is an empirical one.
On my train rides up to and back from Madison, I polished off Susan Jacoby’s 2013 short (211 small pages) book on Robert G. Ingersoll (1833-1899). Ingersoll was an author, freethinker, and perhaps America’s most spellbinding orator of the 19th century, despite the fact that he was absolutely godless and spent much of his writing and speaking criticizing religion. Click on the screenshot to go to the Amazon page, where you’ll see it’s been rated highly by readers:
It’s a good book, concerned more with Ingersoll’s ideas than his life, and well worth reading to see a true antecedent of the “New Atheists”. As Jacoby says in her antepenultimate chapter, “A Letter to the ‘New’ Atheists”, the hallmarks of what I see as New Atheism—its love of and use of science in dispelling religion as well as its uncompromising and in-your-face godlessness and antitheism—were all present in Ingersoll’s writings and speeches. And yet despite his atheism, which denied him the possibility of any public or elective position despite his fierce intelligence and drive, he regularly sold out his lectures, so wonderful a speaker was he. Further, most of his audience, unlike those attending the talks of people like Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, or me, weren’t nonbelievers: many religious people came to see Ingersoll because of the power of his rhetoric.
Ingersoll was impressive in many ways. He was apparently as close to a perfect human as one could get: a devoted husband and father, a faithful friend, and someone whom even his enemies couldn’t fault. His virtues extended to his views: he was an ardent opponent of slavery and any law or behavior that discriminated against blacks, a strong promoter of women’s rights—complete equality with men—and a great popularizer of Darwin’s work. (Jacoby considers him a better explainer of evolution to the average person than was Thomas Henry Huxley, for Ingersoll had no scientific training and so was able to gauge and address people’s ignorance.) Ingersoll constantly emphasized the Founders’ view of the First Amendment, fighting against the incursion of religions such as Catholicism into government. Finally, he was also a lover and supporter of the arts, especially fond of Shakespeare and—his one flaw, in my eyes—Walt Whitman.
Jacoby feels, rightly, that all of us heathens should be aware that a New Atheist existed long before the genre got its name, and tells us why in her “Letter” chapter. I’ll let you read that for yourself. Although Ingersoll’s reputation waned after his death, and few modern atheists know much about him, it’s salubrious to see a man of our stripe being “strident” (the adjective doesn’t really apply: he didn’t have a mean bone in his body) and changing minds well before the rise of Fundamentalism.
After reading that book, I wanted to go further into Ingersoll. For those who feel likewise, here’s some other material you might essay (screenshots take you to Amazon page)
Here’s a half-hour interview of Jacoby about her Ingersoll book (by Chris M**ney); click on screenshot:
Finally, near the end of his life Ingersoll visited the laboratory of his friend Thomas Edison and recorded seven short bits of oratory. At the site below (click) you can hear the three ones that remain. The quality is poor, but at least you can get an idea of his voice and his cadences. (Remember, Ingersoll spoke to large audiences without a microphone.)
I end with a photo of The Great Agnostic himself (Ingersoll said there was no difference between an agnostic and an atheist) as well as my very favorite quote from him—about the “compatibility” of science and religion. I often use this quote in my talks about faith versus science:
There is no harmony between religion and science. When science was a child, religion sought to strangle it in the cradle. Now that science has attained its youth, and superstition is in its dotage, the trembling, palsied wreck says to the athlete: “Let us be friends.” It reminds me of the bargain the cock wished to make with the horse: “Let us agree not to step on each other’s feet.”
Need I note that I’m using the word “soul” metaphorically?
From The Ithacan, the student newspaper of Ithaca College, we have the sad tale of Mahad Olad, a columnist for the paper who had a narrow escape from religious dogma. A sophomore, Olad was both atheist and gay, but had to hide it from his devout Somali Muslim parents, who lived in Minnesota. His mother invited him on a summer vacation to Kenya (where the family had moved during the Somali wars) to “visit the relatives.”
He arrived in the country on May of last year, only to discover that his family had found out about his double apostasy and planned to “cure him”. He was visited by sheikhs, and realized he was to be sent to a “conversion camp” for gays of the Muslim faith. He describes these hellholes:
I was quite aware of the horrors of these gay and religious conversion camps. The leaders operate the camps around grim parts of Somalia and Kenya. They subject their captives to severe beatings, shackling, food deprivation and other cruel practices. It usually involves a rigorous Islamic curriculum. Those who fail to cooperate, make adequate progress or try to escape could possibly be killed.
. . . Gay conversion therapy is exceedingly abhorrent. While it can’t alter someone’s sexual orientation, it certainly can scar them for life. Suicide rates are extremely high for people forced into these conversion camps. I have been meeting with the State Department and others to discuss what can be done to stop this barbaric practice, which is sadly still prevalent in American society.
Unlike conversion therapy in the U.S., the religious conversion camps in Africa aren’t commonly reported on or talked about; they operate in secrecy. The fact that homosexuality is still illegal in most of Africa makes these conversion camps even crueler. We don’t have exact numbers of how many young people are forced to go to these camps, but we know the numbers are growing. Many of the people held captive have similar stories to myself. Their families immigrated to the U.S., then brought them back to Somalia or Kenya to force them into these places.
Olad was having none of it. Resourceful and brave, he escaped from his hotel and contacted the Ex-Muslims of North America (EXMNA), the organization run by Muhammad Syed and Sarah Haider. Syed contacted the US Embassy in Kenya, who offered to help. They sheltered him and persuaded Ithaca College to put him up for the summer. EXMNA then paid for his plane ticket home.
Olad of course is now without family; such is the fate of Muslim apostates:
Both the FBI and campus police are keeping an eye on me and, while I have begun to feel physically safe, emotionally the nightmare isn’t over. At 19, I now have no family. Even family members who weren’t a part of this scheme aren’t talking to me. Their rejection and treatment of me has been devastating. It has left me seriously questioning who I am and whether I deserve to be treated this way. The loss of my family’s love and support, both financial and emotional, has been extremely traumatic.
While I’m lucky to have close friends who have offered comfort, it does nothing for the hole my family ripped into my heart. I know what they did to me was horrible and wrong, but they are still my family and reconciling with them will take some time.
. . . After everything they put me through, I don’t know if I will ever be able to have a relationship with my family, but I am thankful that I am alive. For now, I am taking it one day at a time.
I can only imagine what it means to instantly lose your family. But how horrible of them to do this to Olad because he was gay and an atheist! What does love mean to such people?
Kudos to EXMNA for working to keep Olud safe and returning him to America. They’re a good group, and you can donate to them here. I just did. Any group that would do something like this deserves our support.
Below is a photo of Olud from The Ithacan and EXMNA’s short video of him from their “Life Beyond Faith” series:
I watched the people walk in, and if you didn’t know this was an event rife with discussion of science, meditation, and atheism, you wouldn’t have guessed from the audience: a diverse group of all ages, ethnicities, and sartorial quality. I especially looked at the sex ratio given that Sam has been excoriated for saying that movement atheism was male-dominated because of its “testosterone vibe”. Well, maybe the prominent figures are mostly males, but the audience for this event was pretty much half male and half female. And about half the questions at the end came from women.
We had dinner before the event, as Sam kindly invited me. After dinner, the speakers took a limo from the restaurant to the theater, even though it was only a block away! Such are the perks of fame (see also names in lights above). Matt did some close-up magic at the table, using cards and rubber bands.
The Chicago Theater is a beautiful old venue, with fancy baroque decoration inside and comfortable (albeit small) seats. You can read about it, and see more pictures, here. It seats 3600 people, and I think they sold about 2800 seats. Inside, on the way to the Green Room, you see the walls decorated with memorabilia from past performances (the theater has been going since 1921 and is a National Historic Landmark).
More perks of fame!
Backstage before the event. For such a well appointed and famous theater, it had a pretty dire Green Room:
On to my report. The event began at 8 pm and lasted about two hours, with about 1 hour and 10 minutes for conversation between Matt, Sam, and Lawrence, and another 50 minutes for questions. It was engaging, and the audience was edified and amused, but to my mind there was a bit too much discussion about meditation, consciousness, and the illusion of “self”. I’d heard all that before in similar events, so it’s not the fault of the speakers.
As is often the case in these presentations, the question-and-answer session was the best part, and the humor of the speakers shone through (they all have different styles of humor).
I asked Sam at dinner if he was going to talk about free will, but he said that they’d covered that topic in a previous event, which was archived on his podcast. Nevertheless, one guy asked the speakers how, given the absence of free will, they could advise him how to cure his addiction to alcohol. That was a good question, because Sam and Lawrence are hard determinists (Matt is a compatibilist but still a determinist.) Answering that question without getting balled up in an infinite regress is quite difficult. If, for instance, you tell someone that they can choose to put themselves in a milieu where there is no alcohol and also surround themselves with supportive people (yes, that’s how it could be done), you risk making people think that you can make such a choice freely, instantiating dualism. I suppose a good answer is that one’s brain is a computer that weighs various inputs before giving the output (a decision), and that the advice Sam gave—which could of course influence the actions of the addict—was also adaptive, in the sense that he was giving strategies that his brain calculated had a higher probability of being useful. Further, we all try to be helpful to cement relationships and get a good reputation—that’s part of the evolved and learned program of our brains. But of course Sam had no “free” choice about his advice, and this shows the difficulty of discussing free will with those who haven’t thought about it.
Another question was from someone who wanted to improve their lives through meditation. What, the guy asked, is the best way to do this? Should he go to India, as Sam did, and join a meditation ashram?
Sam gave a brief history of his own involvement in meditation and his visits to India (this is all in his book Waking Up), and said that there was no “best way,” but a good start was to try to meditate for five minutes a day, observing one’s own thoughts and impressions and blocking everything else out. That was, he said, hard (I know!); nothing how difficult it was when he stayed in India and meditated regularly for fourteen hours a day. Krauss was dubious about all the talk of meditation and consciousness, and it was clear that he and Sam differ on the importance of such discussion.
Lawrence’s discussion of how science gets done, describing the discovery of gravitational waves, was animated and most absorbing. I’d heard it before—in Vancouver—but it was nice to experience the infectious enthusiasm when he discusses science. At one point he was asked how we can get kids more interested in science. Krauss said that we need to stop thinking of education as “stuffing people’s brains with facts and making them regurgitate them”, and teach critical thinking: the tools we must use to find out what is true about the world. I agree—with some caveats. Critical-thinking courses are hard, especially for young children (I taught one at the University of Maryland), and, after all, we need some facts, especially if you want to learn science. You simply cannot do science without acquiring a background of what is known. Further, the critical-thinking method as applied to science would differ from that applied to something like literature or philosophy, where the problem is clear thinking and not so much the use of empirical evidence. (Still, one can be critical about evidence when analyzing, say, what a work of literature was intended to convey.)
Krauss broached the idea—one that I’ve often emphasized but is not popular with the public—that most of us do science not to help humanity, but to satisfy our own curiosity. And government should fund that curiosity for two reasons. First, there is often a long-term and unpredictable practical payoff of such research (but that’s still a practical benefit). More important, the findings of science resemble in some ways the outcome of the humanities: they change us as people. I’ve often thought of evolutionary biology, which has few practical applications, as resembling the fine arts of biology, with the difference being that evolutionary biology can also tell us what is true about nature. But both pure science and the humanities can fill us with awe and wonder, and change our outlook on the world.
One further question was posed to the group: How can one best get rid of religion? Sam was the first to field that one, saying that he didn’t conceive of his task as destroying religion so much as teaching people how to think clearly and critically about evidence, and with that would come, he hoped, the End of Faith. He asserted unequivocally that religion was a bad thing, though of course we don’t have a balance sheet for that. For me, as for Sam, it seems pretty obvious, but we can’t “prove” it. As for his own two daughters, Sam said he’d never lied to them about religion, and tells them that different people believe different things and celebrate their faith in different ways. But he added that both of his daughters think it’s weird that anybody would believe in gods. Sam added, “But of course, having been properly socialized, they’re not assholes.”
That same person asked Sam how one could replace the benefits of religion with secular activities. Sam replied that yes, we’ve failed in our task of helping people get the perks of religion without the superstition. I disagree: it’s not our job to do that, and, as we can see in secularized countries like those of Europe, the lacuna that forms when faith disappears is, like a deep well, filled naturally with other things. There was some discussion of how one can find meaning and purpose without faith, and the answer from the stage was that “you have to find your meaning and purpose from within, for there’s no external source of that.” Well, so much is obvious. I would have added that “meaning and purpose” are simply post facto reifications of “what someone likes to do”, and those concepts aren’t particularly useful.
The final remark came from Lawrence, who said that every time he stays in a hotel, his own gesture to diminish faith was to take the Gideon Bible, wrap it in a piece of paper, and throw it in the trash. Sam remarked dryly, “And that’s why atheists have such a good public image.”
And so the audience, heads filled with Deep Thoughts, spilled out onto the snowy Chicago streets. It was a very big audience, and it’s heartening that so many would come to “a celebration of science and reason.”
