The rise and fall of Paul Kurtz

October 2, 2010 • 11:11 am

I’m not a member of the Center for Inquiry, and until recently haven’t followed their doings, but readers might be interested in this piece in yesterday’s New York Times: “Closer look at rift between humanists reveals deeper divisions.”

It’s largely about the problems at CfI that led to Kurtz’s ouster. Here’s a snippet:

In June 2009, at odds with Mr. Lindsay, Mr. Kurtz was voted out as the center’s chairman. In May, he resigned from the board altogether.

According to Mr. Kurtz, there were two areas of conflict. First, he says, Mr. Lindsay changed the work culture. Whereas Mr. Kurtz had managed “in the spirit of a think tank,” Mr. Lindsay brought his legal background to bear.

“I am used to the academic life, where we don’t impose rules on employees,” Mr. Kurtz said, sitting in his living room. But Mr. Lindsay, he said, “set up a command system, said these are the rules and laws, and anyone who deviates from that will be investigated.”

Employees were interrogated for minor infractions, Mr. Kurtz said, and several were let go. “That is like Stalinism or the Inquisition,” Mr. Kurtz said.

By phone and by e-mail, Mr. Lindsay said that the “investigations” were due-process inquiries into complaints, and that he had not fired anyone for questioning his authority. He said that four employees were laid off for economic reasons, one resigned, and one freelance employee did not have his contract renewed. Only the center’s spokesman, Nathan Bupp, who left last week, may have been fired; Mr. Lindsay, in an e-mail, would only say, “This was not a layoff.”

More generally, he said that Mr. Kurtz, after 30 years of leadership, simply found it too difficult to cede responsibility; in particular, Mr. Lindsay mentioned fund-raising, saying that Mr. Kurtz was reluctant to introduce him to donors he had known for years.

Most of you CfI followers probably know this stuff.  The piece also describes other juicy shenanigans, like Ronald Lindsay recently changing the locks at the Amherst CfI center so that Kurtz couldn’t get in.  Of more interest to me is Kurtz’s assertion that he left CfI because of its infusion of “angry atheism.”  Could that accusation explain why CfI has recently been so vociferous in its attacks on the Gnu Atheists?

Donations to CfI have also fallen.

Jesus and Mo move over—you’ve got competition

October 2, 2010 • 5:28 am

This is at once ridiculous and hilarious: the Charity Commission of the UK has decided that druids—or rather the Druid Network—is to be granted status as a religion. This status comes of course with tax breaks.

The BBC reports:

BBC religious affairs correspondent Robert Pigott says that with concern for the environment growing and the influence of mainstream faiths waning, druidry is flourishing more now than at any time since the arrival of Christianity.

Druidry’s followers are not restricted to one god or creator, but worship the spirit they believe inhabits the earth and forces of nature such as thunder.

Druids also worship the spirits of places, such as mountains and rivers, with rituals focused particularly on the turning of the seasons.

After a four-year inquiry, the Charity Commission decided that druidry offered coherent practices for the worship of a supreme being, and provided a beneficial moral framework.

Since (according to Wikipedia) the druid religion has a long history, antedating Christianity, and since by its own lights the Druid Network is largely polytheistic, recognized religions clearly have a new and serious competitor.  It will be fun to see Christians like Karl Giberson explain why they’re so sure that there’s only one god—the Christian one—and not a bunch of supernatural spirits.

h/t: Anthony Grayling

Of penicillin and the Incarnation

October 1, 2010 • 3:07 pm

So sue me—I couldn’t help pointing this out because it’s funny!

The first straw man I want to examine is the argument that scientific ideas are empirical and testable and religious ideas are not. Coyne compares the well-understood function of penicillin to belief in the incarnation of Jesus and notes that the former is well established as true but the latter is just a matter of faith with nothing more than a “book” to suggest that it might be true. (And, of course, he notes that the “book” of the Christians is just one holy book among several—all of which make different claims with no clear way to adjudicate among them.) . . .

This is the situation with the multi-verse today. We have equations with solutions that may or may not describe a reality for which at present there is not a shred of evidence. This uncertainty may resolve itself or it may not. Leading scientists may continue to dispute whether our universe is unique, or one of many, or one of an infinity.

The straw man argument comes into play when we take the simplest settled truths of science and contrast them with the ambiguous and unsettled “truths” of other fields. Science also has many ambiguous and unsettled “truths.” This is not to say that religious truths are thus now on the same playing field with scientific truths. Science purchases its great success by choosing easy problems and thus will always provide a clearer model for thinking than, say theology, or literary criticism, or sociology, or aesthetics. But it does suggest that we should not be exclaiming about how much clearer our understanding of penicillin is than our understanding of the Incarnation.

Science has an unfair advantage over faith because science chooses the easy problems??? Right—establishing the truth of general relativity is just so much simpler than establishing the truth of the Incarnation.

It’s not a matter of different degrees of difficulty; it’s a matter of religious problems being insoluble because they’re not about reality.

Take the atheist quiz!

October 1, 2010 • 12:05 pm

All of us did pretty well on the pathetically easy religion quiz, but don’t get a big head.  Over at All Things Wildly Considered, there’s a tougher quiz on how much you know about atheism. I haven’t yet taken it, but let’s post how well we did.  I particularly like question 10.

I’m sure there will be some gripes about the questions.

Dawkins paperback tour

October 1, 2010 • 11:51 am

UPDATE:  Oh dear, these all appear to be sold out.  Sorry—I didn’t check.

This fall, Richard is promoting the paperback edition of The Greatest Show on Earth in the U.S.  I know we have readers in some of the cities where he’ll speak, so check it out. Here’s the latest schedule; the details are here.

Duke University, Durham, NC:  Oct 3

Wortham Center, Houston, TX  Oct 5

Cal Tech, Pasadena, CA  Oct 6

Times Higher Ed promotes a science-faith lovefest

October 1, 2010 • 9:05 am

The “science-and-faith-are-friends” articles just keep on coming as religious people try to neuter the discipline most dangerous to their faith.  Here’s one more. I don’t want to dissect it in extenso, but I’ll call it to your attention. Matthew Reisz, a features writer for the Times Higher Education, has written “The Dogma Delusion,” a long analysis of the science-faith “war.”

It’s wearingly familiar, and pretty much biased against atheists.  While a few token atheists appear, like Peter Atkins and Steven Weinberg, Reisz quickly shoots them down:

“You clearly can be a scientist and have religious beliefs,” Peter Atkins, professor of chemistry at the University of Oxford, once conceded. “But I don’t think you can be a real scientist in the deepest sense of the word because they are such alien categories of knowledge.”

This view would, of course, demote Isaac Newton, to name but one, from the ranks of “real scientists”. Is such a “conflict model” either accurate or helpful?

Reiz devotes far more space to the lucubrations of Elaine Ecklund (reprinting without criticism her misleading take on her own survey data), David Wilkinson, a religious physicist at Durham University, and Karl Giberson of BioLogos, who gets the lion’s share of the space and comments.  Atheists are decried again for their theological ignorance.  Reisz even raises the charge of scientism (“But is it really the job of chemists to pronounce on whether love exists, or any wonder that such ‘scientism’ alienates many readers?”).

The quality of Reisz’s “analysis” can be roughly seen by these two paragraphs, meant to underscore the importance of faith:

So, many people devote their lives to scientific work but still find – more or less comfortable – ways of combining [their science] with their religious beliefs and practices. Yet this also implies something else. “Arik”  [an atheist physicist in a U.S. university] may despise religion, but by the sheer law of averages, progress within his discipline, and probably within his department, depends on collaboration between religious, agnostic and atheist scientists.

Science and religion also seem to have rubbed along well during one of the golden ages of scientific discovery. Peter Harrison is Andreas Idreos professor of science and religion at the University of Oxford. Much of his research has focused on the 17th century, when, he says, “virtually all the key natural philosophers (early scientists) were religious believers. Some were clearly motivated by religious considerations – notably Johannes Kepler and Robert Boyle – although different individuals had different motivations. Most, however, thought that religious beliefs were consistent with their scientific findings, and indeed that religious beliefs and science were mutually reinforcing.”

In the end, Reisz—as did Ecklund in a recent piece—calls for a greater presence of religion in “secular” college campuses, enabling everyone to study theology so that we can have a “wider conversation.”

I’m not sure if Times Higher Ed sees this as an opinion piece or a news piece, but it’s certainly not the latter.  It’s terribly biased towards accommodationists, and quotes atheists only so their ideas can be dismissed.

The number of these types of articles is increasing, and believe me, it’s no fun to do exegesis on the same old arguments.  But I think we need to keep them on our radar screen, for, as accommodationists always emphasize, we need to know the quirks and wiles of our opponents.