Author: Ron Murphy

Love – Something Humans Do

On Lesley’s post Peter Rollins – What is Religion? I’ve been trying to understand what Rollins is saying, without much success. But in the ensuing comments I claimed that love is just something that humans do – my intended implication being it is nothing to do with a god, or specifically God.

Kathryn asked, “Why do you think this [love] is something humans do? Do you think it is a genetic fluke, or is there some purpose?”, and I wanted to give a more complete response than I could in a comment on Lesley’s post.

It’s a fluke in one sense: the sense that it just turned out that way due to evolution, without any intentionality or direct design or purpose. But that ‘fluke’ is not to be confused with ID critiques of evolution that say evolution relies on impossible odds. Fluke, luck, random events, whatever we might call them, have a part to play in evolution, but the theory of evolution shows that other forces, such as natural selection, play on those flukes in order to cause some change that persists.

The significant point from an evolutionary perspective is that traits that have some benefit in some sets of circumstances are more likely to survive.

Some simplistic examples to make the point and put love in context (for sexually reproductive species)…

A genetic condition (e.g. a mutation) that caused infertility would not be passed on to the next generation at all. Another mutation that didn’t effect fertility but did remove sexual lust would also die out quickly in most animals (though humans, with our cognitive abailities, could overcome this). An emotion like love may not be as necessary at all for short term survival, but may be necessary in some species for greater group cohesion, or perhaps mother-infant bonding. Both fertility and lust are necessary for reproduction in sexually reproductive animals, but love isn’t.

But we can still see how love can provide a greater benefit than not experiencing love, for some species.

Fertility we count as a physiological trait, love as an emotional one, but lust we see more as something of both physiological and emotional – so, where’s the divide between physical trait and emotional trait? When you get down to the chemistry of what’s going on in the brain they are, all three, physiological traits, each with their own contribution to the survivability of a species (along with all other influences). We have no reason to suppose that love is anything other than this, and certainly no evidence that it has any special meaning or value outside the context of humans that, using our brains, give it meaning and value. it’s not something we need to associate with God, despite that fact that theists tend to raise it to the level of the divine.

Evolution doesn’t have a purpose as such – and so there is no purpose for love. There is a trivial descriptive sense in which, looking back, we might use a purposive description – e.g. ‘the purpose of this gene sequence was to cause that trait to emerge…’ (again, a simplistic view of genes) But this isn’t purpose in the sense of an agent intentionally causing some trait to appear for particular purpose of his. We are used to attributing purpose to the things we do, and we can mistakenly attribute purpose to complex causal chains that are otherwise hard to describe. It can be helpful to describe causal chains with such anthropomorphic framing of purpose – but we need to be careful that we understand that this purpose isn’t real, it’s a metaphor for causality.

So, there is nothing in our evolutionary past which could predict, in any reasonable sense, that love would turn out to be a trait that a particular species valued highly. There are clues available to the hindsight we have acquired through the development of the theory of evolution, based on our understanding of empathy and attachment that bond animal parents to young, and in some cases parents to each other. Insects have a very specific type of bond to their fellows nest, which is basically chemical. So, love (or its simpler animal parallel) isn’t necessary for all animals to be evolutionarily successful – though for larger animals with more complex brains it may be particularly beneficial. We think it’s beneficial for us – so much so we have learned to value it highly.

In this sense love is just what humans do, without it having any directive purpose. It’s one of the many things we do, along with hate, fear, lust, empathy and many other traits. They all boil down to having emerged through our evolutionary history, and having been developed in our intellectual and cultural history.

Perhaps a better phrasing might be love is just what humans did in the past as a more refined development of empathy, but which we do now with more purpose and intent as we have come to appreciate it and value it.

We can reasonably explain the relationship between some of these things we do, in this simplified evolutionary context…

Personally and subjectively we like the feeling of love, and we dislike the feeling of fear. Our empathy makes us appreciate the same perspective in others, so we want love for others as well as for ourselves, and part of that is that we get additional pleasure from giving love, and even more from reciprocative love. And conversely we dislike fear, we dislike seeing fear in others, and so we want to alleviate the fear we see in others. And, on top of that we dislike seeing others cause fear, because of our empathy for the victims; and in a simple sense, just as a mother responds to defend her young with the animal equivalent of anger, so we respond with anger towards those that cause fear. These are strong innate emotional responses, honed in our history, with their origins lost in myth.

Many of our basic emotions have parallels in other animals, but have been developed into more refined concepts by us, probably because of the concurrent development of our language and our brain’s ability to be more acute in our understanding of these emotions and the concepts we form about them. Just as a musician can develop a more acute sense of musical notes (an analogy Kathryn uses).

The problem is we don’t often consider the simpler animal basis for our complex emotions – partly because of our ignorance of the evolutionary perspective. This ignorance was understandable for most of human history in which our reach back to the past was only ever measured in terms of a few generations. We could only develop myths out of that ignorance – ironically using the very creative imagination that later allowed us to come up with the science that helped us discover more plausible explanations.

The weight of those myths persists, and is maintained in varying degrees by a continued ignorance of the significance of what evolution is telling us, along with the willing, and sometimes not so willing, indoctrination in and bias towards those myths. Even those theists that have an understanding of evolution find it hard to accept the full implications of evolution and related ideas when they challenge their theological beliefs – they sometimes express a fear of the consequences of following the ideas through – e.g. the fear of the nihilism of atheism, in the absence of God.

To help a theist put this in perspective, consider some of the cosmological ideas that are floating around – many of which theists use as examples of how science has its own myths. In some respects our old myths parallel the current speculations about our cosmological origins – the old myths were speculations in the absence of data, just as some of our cosmological ideas are speculations in the absence of data. In some cases the mathematical theory of the latter replaces imaginative theology of the former, and so cosmologists might feel their theories have a greater legitimacy than theologies. But there may come a time, when we are better informed, when some our current cosmological speculations seem more like myths. So, this is how now atheists see theologies as outdated myths.

The deep history of religion is interesting, but I’m still largely ignorant about it. One particular book on my reading list is The Evolution of God, by Robert Wright. It appears to put the contingency of Christianity in perspective, effectively explaining the myth. It’s the historical perspective that I need to know more about; and I suspect many Christians need to know more about it too, but without their own theological bias. If ever there was a case of the winners getting to write the history, theology is it – I don’t think much of the history of theology sees the light of day. I don’t know to what extent history of theology is taught in this respect. The book’s website gives a good sampling of the book and is worth a read.

Bring On The Lions

No, I’m not referring to the up-coming England match. It’s a much more serious issue than that. Or at least Christians think so.

Even my very fair minded liberal Christian friend Lesley is concerned, after reading this article in GQ

When saying ‘damning’, who or what does Lesley think is being damned? The nation, for it’s loss of faith? Or those that remain Christians, for this reason, “Their case was too weak, their opposition to divorce and abortion and gay people too cruel, their evidence for their claims nonexistent.” It does sound a little like role reversal; you know, the rapture of irreligion, and the left behind of the faithful, stuck at the bus stop on a cold wintery day not knowing the last bus has been cancelled.

This point is right, “…it’s only natural that we should dismantle the massive amounts of tax money and state power that are given to the religious. It’s a necessary process of building a secular state, where all citizens are free to make up their own minds.”, which will make it fair for all. But I can understand the fear in the CoE at losing privilege.

When I read this and what followed, “Really? Let’s list some of the ways in which Christians and other religious groups are given special privileges,…” I realised that it was religious privilege that the article was damning after all.

This was particularly damning of Mormons in ’78, “Until 1978, the Mormon Church said black people didn’t have souls. (They only changed their mind the day this was made illegal, and God niftily appeared to their leader to say they were ensouled after all.)”

This “In response, Carey and the Church of England demanded Christians be allowed to break the law” and the recent nonsense at the Gen Synod continues to be damning of the CoE now. And don’t get me started on RC and Islam.

Why do we have to resort to law to demand equality from religions? Christians are often quick to tell us of their valiant role in the abolition of slavery and their many other fights against injustice. OK all Christians, put up or shut up. Stop all prejudice and privilege – voluntarily! Let the ABC call for this now (I won’t hold my breath – he’d rather have Sharia). Let’s move to a secular nation, in education and government, that’s equal to all. You’ll be surprised how quickly atheists lose interest in your religion. Hold on. That’s precisely what Christians are afraid of isn’t it. Silly me.

The feelings of persecution even extend to the repeated mistake of thinking atheists want to abolish religion. This is from a comment by Chris, “The New Atheists seem to think a secular society is one that rejects religion” – No, quite wrong. That’s what Christians think New Atheists seem to think. You being a case in point 🙂 We (atheists new and old) know what it means, and you too would know that we know, if only you knew more about New Atheists, and old atheists.

Chris, “In fact, most countries with a secular constitution see secularism as protecting religion.” – Try telling that to Christians in America, with it’s very purposeful secular constitution. I can’t figure out why even having such a specific constitution isn’t clear enough. Oh, hold on. Got it. After centuries of selectively reading the Bible Christians are primed to read a constitution and see in it the very opposite of what is written.

And, what’s more Chris, when you’ve figured this out, could you let Tony Blair know: “Tony Blair warns that Christians must speak out in ‘aggressively secularist’ age” – The problem is, Tone, Christians and other faithful have been speaking out all too loudly for centuries now. “But he has since converted to Roman Catholicism and set up the Tony Blair Faith Foundation to “promote respect and understanding about the world’s major religions”. “ – Well, Tone, religions might have earned a little respect if they hadn’t been partying on so loudly themselves, indulging to excess in privileges, and then hypocritically protesting as the hurt and offended when the neighbours open a window and shout at them to be quiet while everyone gets some peace.

Preacherwoman isn’t keen on Johann Hari from GQ (God Quits? God’s Quiet?, Garrulus Quadrigae?), pointing out his selective use of data. She makes a fair point. We do have to be careful not to impart our bias. But wasn’t that the main point that the article went on to make, i.e. the whining by Carey and others about persecution, when religion has so many privileges? Hasn’t religion always been biased?

It’s not just Carey. This is from Cristina Odone, “Afraid to be a Christian? Who can blame you? The authorities, the media and the chattering classes are forever trying to run you down. We don’t have to brave the Colosseum, with its rapacious lions; we don’t have to wear an identifying badge; or meet in secret – yet.” – What?! Let’s form two queues – one of atheists who want a secular nation with freedom to think and choose our world view without favour to any, and another one of atheists who want to ban religion. I’m sure Carey and Odone think we’re all in the near empty latter. They’re confused by this secular call for freedom. Being so familiar with the centuries of persecution by the religious they think that once they lose power they’ll be burned at the stake.

“Christians need to be as strident as Muslims” she says. Well, that makes a change from Christians bemoaning how strident a few atheists are. But again she makes the mistake of bias again. The strident atheists are calling for freedom for all, and would protect the rights of Christians and Muslims alike – we’re just saying we won’t protect the current privilege of Christians or Muslims, and won’t give in to the strident calls for privilege. The stridency isn’t the problem, it’s what one is calling for that counts.

“But there is no doubt that many are afraid to be Christian. They will watch anxiously today as Shirley Chaplin will fight the NHS in an employment tribunal.” – For heaven’s sake, is there no end to the whining. Thankfully the tribunal saw sense.

But Chaplin “…had the support of a number of bishops who claim that Christians are being persecuted in an increasingly secular society.” How very Christian. I really do think some won’t be satisfied until there’s a Colosseum in Trafalgar Square, “Ha! to a mosque at Ground Zero. We Brits will show you how to be persecuted. Bring on the lions.”

Heavenly Science

I’m sometimes asked if I’m spiritual. Of course I’m not spiritual in the theistic sense, being an atheist, but there are atheists who consider themselves spiritual beings: Carl Sagan, Sam Harris, for example. I don’t think I am, but I do have a sense of wonder and awe about the world, whether it’s about our cosmological origins, or the new ideas in earthly sciences.

I guess this is the closest I’d come to heaven – being surrounded by fascinating people figuring out what makes the world go round, and how to make it go round better. Their enthusiasm is palpable.

For all Christians go on about what their God gives them it just seems pretty lame compared to discovering new stuff about the universe, or creating fascinating new content that solves very human problems.

Science Foo Camp 2009: by Nature Video.

I guess this un-conference format doesn’t make for easy video, and it’s by invite only. But I’d love to be a fly on the wall. Maybe that’s something that could come out of this type of event. We need a really cool new method of experiencing these events as if we were there.

Revelation

Some scientists and mathematicians can have experiences that can be considered revelations:

http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docId=8269328330690408516

Harris, Religion, Rape

The Harris religion and rape issue is inflaming opinion, still. This particular storm is about the comment he made in an interview with Bethany Saltman in 2006, and this particular sentence:

“I can be even more inflammatory than that. If I could wave a magic wand and get rid of either rape or religion, I would not hesitate to get rid of religion.”

The Beginning

But let’s go back to where it started, with his book, Letter To A Christian Nation, 2006, which prompted the Saltman interview.

Naturally, for religious people that haven’t read the book but who like to pick up on the nasty things atheists say on their journey to eternal damnation in the next life, then the whole concept of comparing their precious religion with rape is pretty shocking. And it looks like Harris has handed them a stick with which they can give him a damned good thrashing.

Trouble is, in their rush to read only the bad, they miss the point. Here’s the section from the book where rape is first raised.

“As a biological phenomenon, religion is the product of cognitive processes that have deep roots in our evolutionary past. Some researchers have speculated that religion itself may have played an important role in getting large groups of prehistoric humans to socially cohere. If this is true, we can say religion has served an important purpose. This does not suggest, however, that it serves an important purpose now. There is, after all nothing more natural than rape. But no one would argue that rape is good, or compatible with a civil society, because it may have had evolutionary advantages for our ancestors. That religion may have served some necessary function for us in the past does not preclude the possibility that it is now the greatest impediment to our building a global civilization.”

Here Harris is clearly using it to point out that because something has natural origins we don’t have to think it acceptable behaviour now. It’s used as an analogy.

But it’s an analogy that many religious people don’t get. And because they don’t get it they’ve come over all of a froth, because of the dreaded word ‘rape’ – such a taboo word.

Analogies

My pop-psychology point of the day is that religious people are so used to selective reading when it comes to their holy books, so used to interpreting anything they read in order to give an affirmative bias towards their religion and a negative bias against anything that challenges it, that they are simply confused by analogies, not knowing when to read something literally and when to interpret it as an analogy, or even how to figure out what work the analogy is doing.

Here’s a case in point. Suem wonders why there is so much outrage over Xola Skosana’s sermon that included ‘Jesus with HIV analogy‘.

Suem asks,

“Don’t people understand that analogies and metaphors are not meant to be definitive statements”

No they don’t!

They don’t get The Flying Spaghetti Monster, or fairy analogies. Here the point of the analogy is not to liken God to the obviously ridiculous FSM or fairies.

The FSM analogy is about the reasoning that gets you from some hypothesis, such as there is a God, or there is an FSM, to a full explanation, a theology, and even descriptions of characteristics of this hypothetical entity, without any evidence whatsoever.

The whole point of picking obvious nonsensical entities as the object of belief is to show that the same reasoning or faith that gives you God can give you these others; and so the reasoning and the faith is a flawed way of acquiring truth about the entity.

So, similarly, the point of Harris using ‘rape’ in this specific case in his book is to show that the analogous aspects of religion and rape is that because they had evolutionary advantage at some point doesn’t make them beneficial now. Here rape is not meant to be analogous to religion directly.

Symbolically it’s like this:

A has some aspect X
B has some aspect X

A is religion.
Where B is rape, X is the past evolutionary benefit of religion and rape.
Where B is the FSM, X is the poor reasoning about theology of religion and the FSM.

So, here’s the argument.
A has aspect X, and is therefore good.
But B has aspect X, and B is clearly not good.
So, having aspect X is no indication of B or A being good.

The religious could save a lot of unnecessary argument if they took the trouble to figure out what the analogy is about.

The Harris – Saltman Interview

As if the religious hadn’t got hold of the wrong end of the stick already, Harris gives them another excuse to fume. And fume they do.

Here’s the 2006 article in which the next scene in the melodrama takes place. (Here’s a pdf).

Let’s have a look at what else he says before we get to the crutial point. Though many religious people might disagree with many of his points, there are some who do see his issues with religion when it comes to the more fundamental flavour. Here’s how it goes towards the end of page 1 of The Sun web site version:

Saltman:

Isn’t religion a natural outgrowth of human nature?

Harris:

It almost certainly is. But everything we do is a natural outgrowth of human nature. Genocide is. Rape is. No one would ever think of arguing that this makes genocide or rape a necessary feature of a civilized society. Even if you had a detailed story about the essential purpose religion has served for the past fifty thousand years, even if you could prove that humanity would not have survived without believing in a creator God, that would not mean that it’s a good idea to believe in a creator God now, in a twenty-first-century world that has been shattered into separate moral communities on the basis of religious ideas.

Traditionally, religion has been the receptacle of some good and ennobling features of our psychology. It’s the arena in which people talk about contemplative experience and ethics. And I do think contemplative experience and ethics are absolutely essential to human happiness. I just think we now have to speak about them without endorsing any divisive mythology.

Note that both genocide and rape are given as examples. Clearly Harris is referring to the analogy, as I described it above. Being a natural human behaviour does not mean that it has any benefit now.

But Harris isn’t saying benefit can’t be derived from religion. To go back to the book, Letter To A Christian Nation, Harris knows full well that some people do derive benefit from religion:

I have no doubt that your acceptance of Christ coincided with some very positive changes in your life. Perhaps you now love other people in a way you never imagined possible. You may even experience feelings of bliss while praying. I do not wish to denigrate any of these experiences. I would point out however, that billions of human beings, in every time and place, have had similar experiences – but they had them while thinking about Krishna, or Allah, or the Buddha, while making art or music, or while contemplating the beauty of nature

So clearly, despite what some critics claim, he doesn’t see all religious experience in the same light. But his main point is that overall it is detrimental to society.

I’ll skip ahead slightly in the interview, past the offending words, just to make it clear Harris isn’t a baby eater.

Harris:

Even Christian fundamentalists have learned, by and large, to ignore the most barbaric passages in the Bible. …[some details about specific problems]…Now, these people are not evil. They’re just concerned about the wrong things, because they have imbibed these unjustifiable religious taboos. There is no question, however, that these false concerns add to the world’s misery.

Saltman:

If we were to eliminate religious identity, wouldn’t something else take its place?

Harris:

Not necessarily. Look at what’s going on in Western Europe: some societies there are successfully undoing their commitment to religious identity, and I don’t think it is being replaced by anything. Sweden, Denmark, Canada, Australia, and Japan are all developed societies with a high level of atheism, and the religion they do have is not the populist, fundamentalist, shrill version we have in the U.S. So secularism is achievable…

See, he recognises some religions aren’t so bad.

…I think the human urge to identify with a subset of the population is something that we should be skeptical of in all its forms. Nationalism and tribal affiliations are divisive, too, and therefore dangerous. Even being a Red Sox fan or a Yankees fan has its liabilities, if pushed too far.

[page 3]

Saltman:

So you see Buddhist meditation not as a religious practice, but as something that can yield results.

Harris:

Clearly, there are results to any religious practice. A Christian might say, “If you pray to Jesus, you’ll notice a change in your life.” And I don’t dispute that. The crucial distinction between the teachings of Buddhism and the teachings of Western religions is that with Buddhism, you don’t have to believe anything on faith to get the process started.

Harris Hates All Religions?

Again I need to emphasise the fact that Harris does distinguish between degrees of religious fundamentalism and the associated harms. Remember that when we get to the crunch statement.

Saltman:

Do you think that there is such a thing as a peaceful religion?

Harris:

Oh, sure. Jainism is the best example that I know of. It emerged in India at more or less the same time as Buddhism. Nonviolence is its core doctrine. Jain “extremists” wear masks in order to avoid breathing in any living thing. To be a practicing Jain, you have to be a vegetarian and a pacifist. So the more “deranged” and dogmatic a Jain becomes, the less likely he or she is to harm living beings.
Jains probably believe certain things on insufficient evidence, and that’s not a good idea, in my opinion. I can even imagine a scenario in which Jain dogma could get people killed: I don’t actually know what Jains say on this subject, but let’s say they became unwilling to kill even bacteria and forbade the use of antibiotics.

…

Harris:

…They [evangelicals] have a great fear that unless we believe the Bible was written by the creator of the universe, we have no real reason to treat one another well, and I think there’s no evidence for that whatsoever. It’s just fundamentally untrue that people who do not believe in God are more prone to violent crime, for instance. The evidence, if anything, runs the other way. If you look at where we have the most violent crime and the most theft in the United States, it’s not in the secular-leaning blue states. It’s in the red states, with all their religiosity. In fact, three of the five most dangerous cities in the United States are in Texas.

Now, I’m not saying that we can look at this data and say, “Religion causes violence.” But you can look at this data and say that high levels of religious affiliation don’t guarantee that people are going to behave well. Likewise if you look at UN rankings of societies in terms of development — which includes levels of violent crime, infant mortality, and literacy — the most atheistic societies on the planet rank the highest: Sweden, the Netherlands, Denmark. So there is no evidence that a strong commitment to the literal truth of one’s religious doctrine is a good indicator of societal health or morality.

So, just to emphasise the point again. Harris does not see all religions as being as bad as each other. Harris does see people gaining some benefits from religion, though he thinks there are better ways. Harris does not think religion is the cause of all evil. Harris does not think all religion is evil. Nowhere does Harris actually call for the forced curtailment of religious belief. In all of this he is making very straight forward arguments about what he finds wrong with religion.

The Evil Atheists

Of course no discussion about religion is complete without a comment on the evil that atheists do. And nearly every religious person gets this point wrong. Saltman is playing devil’s advocate here of course.

Saltman:

Atheism doesn’t always go hand in hand with reason and compassion. Look at the destruction and violence caused by atheist ideology in China and the old Soviet Union.

Harris:

What I’m really arguing against is dogma, and those communist systems of belief were every bit as dogmatic as religious systems. In fact, I’d call them ‘political religions’. But no culture in human history ever suffered because its people became too reasonable or too desirous of having evidence in defense of their core beliefs. Whenever people start committing genocide or hurling women and children into mass graves, I think it’s worth asking what they believe about the universe. My reading of history suggests that they always believe something that’s obviously indefensible and dogmatic.

And just to re-state the point made countless times, none of this was done in the name of atheism. Atheism isn’t a dogmatic belief system that anyone does anything in the name of. And atheists are not claiming religion is the cause of all ills, or that all atheists are whitere than white. So, can we drop this red herring.

The Magic Wand of Harris

OK. Let’s get to the main point. The offending place is top of page 2.

Saltman:

Your analogy between organized religion and rape is pretty inflammatory. Is that intentional?

Harris:

I can be even more inflammatory than that. If I could wave a magic wand and get rid of either rape or religion, I would not hesitate to get rid of religion. I think more people are dying as a result of our religious myths than as a result of any other ideology. I would not say that all human conflict is born of religion or religious differences, but for the human community to be fractured on the basis of religious doctrines that are fundamentally incompatible, in an age when nuclear weapons are proliferating, is a terrifying scenario. I think we do the world a disservice when we suggest that religions are generally benign and not fundamentally divisive.

Now, given the context in which the original analogy was used, this is just an extension of that. Here’s the analogy:

A causes an amount of suffering.
B causes an amount of suffering.

Here A is rape, and B is religion. And on his assessment religion causes more harm than rape.

So, if he could wish away one of them he thinks the best option would be religion, as removing it would reduce harm the most.

Note that this is a simple thought experiment, wishful thinking, and as such has no specific bad consequences.

For example, if it clearly was a magic wish that did the trick he’d no doubt want all the currently religious people to be simply non-religious – so it’s not as if he would be causing more suffering by removing religion, the newly non-religious wouldn’t feel they were deprived of religion.

And, since rape sometimes occurs during religiously inspired genocides, and since some religious leaders use their status as a cover for sexual abuse and rape, then removing religion would remove some rape.

And we could still carry on trying to stop rape, so it’s not as if Harris is condoning rape. It just happens to be an unwanted human behaviour that he uses in an analogy.

There really isn’t that much to this statement after all, given the context. It’s ridiculous how many religious people have tried to get mileage out of it since he made it.

A More Literal Comparison

But what if he was to have meant it to be taken seriously. Is religion worse than rape? You’ll have to ask Harris yourself, if you still think he’s the son of Satan for uttering the words ‘rape’ and ‘religion’ in the same breath. But here’s my understanding of what he said and how to interpret it, should you want to take it as a literal intention by Harris.

1) Individual rape can ‘harm’ one victim at a time. I’m not aware of any person being able to rape more than one person at once. This is basically a one-on-one act. Annually (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_statistics) it might be 500,000 a year, accounting for unreported rape.

2) Nuclear weapons or biological weapons can ‘kill and harm’ hundreds of thousands or millions at a time. It might take more than one person to achieve this, but the ratios are still pretty high: one-to-hundreds-of-thousands, or one-to-millions.

3) Extreme religion probably has the highest potential for (2) currently.

4) All religions, by setting faith above reason, are self affirming systems that can, under some circumstances, provide the right framework for (3), and hence (2). That framework of extreme religions exists now, and this has been a self-evident fact since 9/11. Some small number of people with religious motivations killed thousands of people, directly and in the aftermath. And 9/11 was the catalyst for a war that kill even more. 9/11 is still invoking religious hatred now at ground zero. That’s before we get to the many conflicts around the world that are going on now that have a religious element, if not done in the name of religion. Harris covers plenty in his book.

Note to liberals: the extensive use of reason on top of faith is not a get out of jail card. Faith plus speculation is a poor move. It just happens to be a really bad move in the hands of terrorist fanatics.

5) The same applies to all dogmas that affirm their beliefs and aren’t subjected to sufficient scepticism. So, it’s not just religion Harris is objecting to. But currently religion is the most dangerous in his view.

Again, a note to easily offended moderates and liberals: just because you’re pretty harmless doesn’t change the fact that religion in the wrong hands is dangerous.

6) Bonus point: without religion there’s no RC church, which reduces the number of rapes and abuses a little. And since many of the genocidal wars around the world also include rape, then if removing religion could reduce the number of such wars then there’d be less rape anyway.

7) Harris isn’t calling for or expecting the abolition of religion – some people have mistaken his statements here for that. Harris believes in freedom of religious belief. His statement was hypothetical wishful thinking. His point being that if it were possible for religion to suddenly vanish, that would be a better outcome than if all men suddenly stopped raping.

Now I know some people don’t like it when we try to evaluate relative harms, when we try to be objective about them. They find something distasteful and taboo about even considering it.

Here’s a response to Harris,

I would like to ask Sam Harris what personal experience he has of rape.

Why is this relevant? What is my experience of rape or being the victim of a suicide bomber? None.

Another question to Harris,

And I wonder how it would feel to have been subjected to rape and then to hear a statement such as Harris’s?

– Or how it would feel to have your family taken by a suicide bomber or abducted and beheaded by terrorists, or killed leaving his place of work, or blown up in an Irish pub.

These are very one sided questions. Do we have to experience every suffering to have any regard for the sufferer? What do you think human empathy is all about? what do you think it is that has been driving your own morals all this time? God?

Conclusion

Having read Letter To A Christian Nation, and the interview with Saltman, I don’t think Harris has said anything particularly controversial. Dispite that being my opinion, of course Harris may well have made the statements specifically to be controversial. Maybe his remark about being inflammatory was calculated. You’ll have to ask Harris. But on first reading it I hadn’t noticed anything particularly bad about it – just a rhetorical flourish. I’m often surprised how the religious, who survive on emotive language, don’t particularly like it when their religion is the target.

We can take any version of his rape statements: analogy of natural evolved benefit no longer being beneficial; a thought experiment, a wish, that religion wasn’t present; or a more literal calculation of least harm. Each interpretation of Harris’s words are really not that controversial – except to the extent that the religious like to find fault with Harris.

Harris, throughout his book and interview is quite gracious about the people of religion. He sees their particular problem as being that they have been misguided by religion. He simply dislikes the principle of religion and faith that can provide a framework for fundamental atrocities.

So, here are the words again:

I can be even more inflammatory than that. If I could wave a magic wand and get rid of either rape or religion, I would not hesitate to get rid of religion.

Out of context I guess they could be misconstrued. And the problem is they usually are taken out of context – when seen in a blog, referencing another blog, taken from an article, that short changes the original source. And comments are made on the basis of the sentences here, or the fuller paragraph given earlier. But I see them as quite harmless in context, particularly the wider context of the book and the interview.

Atheists Against Religion – Misconceptions

Some theists seem to get the wrong impression about atheism and atheists, with regard to the extent and type of opposition to theism and religion. I think this occurs because several issues become conflated in discussions between theists and atheists. Some theists seem to think that atheists want to abolish religion or censor it; but they are confusing the following: genuine desire to stop some religious practices and privileges; the desire for a secular state; and intellectual disagreement on the validity of religious belief.

They are all issues that should be considered separately.

Opposition To Faith Schools
The objection to faith schools is because of their indoctrination of young minds and the fact that one faith view is projected. Most humanist atheists want schools to be secular, which only means no religious or other world view bias (not even atheism), not the censorship of religion. We actually want education to include information about all religions and other world views and basic philosophy in a non-biased here-it-is make what you want of it sort of way. There’s no requirement to impose the atheist or humanist world view above others.

My children attended a Roman Catholic school, which preached RC Christianity. Both my children said that when they compared notes with friends at a state school the coverage of other faiths was quite different. The Roman Catholic school had given feint acknowledgement to other faiths whereas the state school was more open about discussing the variations of the details of the different faiths. I don’t know to what extent a difference in teachers played a part, and I’ve no detailed experience of other faith schools. But in principle I’m opposed to the promotion of a particular faith.

Faith schools breed division. This I know from my personal school experiences, where a predominantly CoE state school backed on to a Roman Catholic school – pupils were always at war, and though most pupils probably weren’t particularly religious, the religious difference was a focus of difference. This inevitable divisiveness has also been commented on with regard to Northern Ireland many times. In Oldham there is currently a plan to form a mixed academy to replace the current Christian dominated school and Muslim dominated school in areas that resulted in race/faith/culture riots ten years ago.

Abolishing Religion
The wish by atheists that religions did not exist is just that, a wish. Not necessarily that religions never existed – there is no requirement to change history. The wish is that religions would begin to fade away – starting with the most obnoxious elements of each religion, because we think in the long term society will be better when religion has gone. Note, that isn’t saying atheist humanism is the cure for all ills.

And this wish isn’t expressed in any political sense. There is no way in which humanist atheists want to censor or ban religion or religious thought. The very nature of atheist humanism, or in this context secular humanism, is that the state should not be involved at all in personal world views, and that everyone should be free to choose their own world view. There are many unknowns about the universe, regarding its origins and its makeup. The God hypothesis is a reasonable one, so given the free-thought imperative of secular humanists there is no requirement to stop people believing in God.

Secular State
The political desire for a secular state is not a request for censorship, it’s the request for the removal of a religious bias and privilege that is already present. What’s the alternative to removing bishops from the House of Lords as religious political posts? Add more bishops representing every faith in proportion to the faith adherents? Add atheists specifically because they are atheists? What about Wiccans and followers of other belief systems? A Lord of New Age? No, the most equitable route is to remove all posts relating to religion and have people there on merit or by election – depending on the desired make-up. This then does not prevent religious leaders being members; they would simply be members for some other reason: hopefully, merit.

The wider issue of a state church is slightly less significant to me, though many British Muslims might disagree. We have a lot invested in our culture associated with our churches, armed services, state events, etc., that currently have a close association with religion. I’m in no hurry to see these go since they are quite benign, colourful and culturally of historic interest, in terms of the state. I don’t, for example, have an issue with traditions that date back to more feudal times, such as the monarchy and knighthoods and so on. They just need disassociating from the executive branch of the state.

Intellectual Opposition
The intellectual objection to theism, as opposed to particular religious organisations that implement the varieties of theism, is purely that, an intellectual one of the understanding of the philosophy and science of it all. Again the free-thought nature of secular humanism supports the unrestricted examination of all philosophical views and wants to engage freely in debates about these issues. Historically it has been religion that has wanted to censor views and interfere in the free thinking, free expression and free action of others that don’t agree with the religion.

It’s a bit rich for anyone associated with these ancient religions to accuse atheists of censorship – it couldn’t be further from the truth for atheism, while at the same time most religions don’t have a good record on censorship.

Anti-Religion
Anti-religion is the opposition to some or all religions. Personally I am strongly anti-religious when it comes to the more dogmatic religions.

There are many aspects of Islam, such as it’s political desire to dominate that is such an important and freely expressed part of that religion, and the discrimination inherent in Islam against non-Muslims in Islamic state governance. These are inherent parts of Islam, given that they are stated in the Koran or Hadith. Islam would have to go through a radical change for me not to be anti-Islam. But there are probably many Muslims who would like to see such change, and I’d support them in that without wishing to have them give up non-political or otherwise humane aspects of their faith. If some Muslims think atheists have an unfair view of Islam then they need to start making their more moderate voices heard, not only by atheists, but by the more radical Muslims.

There are many aspects of fundamentalist Christianity that make me anti-those sects too, such as the intense indoctrination of children into psychologically damaging beliefs about being sinners and being damned to hell. I am less anti-liberal-Christianity, though I do disagree with its ideas on intellectual grounds. Other atheists may have a more blanket anti-religious stance.

Summary
Atheists generally do want to stop faith schools, political privilege, any particularly unfair practices, and to work towards a secular state.

Atheists generally are willing to debate theism and atheism on intellectual philosophical grounds.

Atheists may also be happy to see the back of religion. But one of the main principles of free-thought humanist atheism is the right to practice ones own belief system, and so we would want to defend anyone’s right to belief, as long as the practice of that belief is not contrary to the freedoms of other people.

My personal feeling is that I have no problem with self-funded religions and places of worship. I quite like some aspects of the CoE; I like to visit old churches; I enjoy some religious music, though I have no interest in the content of any songs or hymns; I like to visit grand cathedrals and mosques. I suppose my interest is atmospheric and historic. I have fond memories of some vicars from when I was young in the Boys Brigade – even our local tyrant vicar was fair. So, other than the issues above I’m not that anti-religious.

And I enjoy a good argument.

So, in general atheists don’t want to burn theists at the stake, stone them or decapitate them, or condemn them to hell or whatever the atheist equivalent might be (which according to some theists would be for them to become atheists). Live and let live – if only the religious would.

Morality

In the debate about Sam Harris on science and morality (links in this post) I want to side-step some of the philosophy, because much of it is influenced by the armchair philosophy of the past when science had nothing to offer at all, a time when philosophers plumbed the depths of their minds searching for something solid that indicated dry land in sight.

I see all moral codes as arbitrary in the grand scheme of things. They mean nothing outside a biological and social evolution. Prior to the evolution of consciousness, self-awareness and language what we think of as morals would have been biological imperatives. It’s our self-awareness, empathy, language and the classification of ideas that has caused us to label behaviour as good, bad, evil, right, wrong, moral, immoral. It’s our deep remaining biological imperatives that dictate which of these labels, and hence which behaviours, we prefer.

Within the contexts of separately developing cultures of the past there was still scope for moral codes to emerge as quite different from one culture to another. It may even have been possible to live by the maxim, “When in Rome do as the Romans do”, particularly for travellers who relished variety. Minority congregations that have travelled to a different culture still live by their own rules, and this can cause serious conflict of cultures – occasional ‘honour killings’ occur in the UK within cultures that value family honour greater than personal freedom and life of loved ones; and you can still get a good whisky in The United Arab Emirates, which restricts the purchase of alcohol from a liquor store to non-Muslim foreigners. We can see the social development of morals on top of biologically evolved imperatives.

Pre-TV we relied on news media that were much more susceptible of political and cultural influence. It was still possible for news reports to be so heavily censored, either for political reasons, or in acknowledgement of the sensitivity of the readers (i.e. the newspapers had a great concern for the dear ladies, and a fear of the indignant religious opinion). We were spared the blood and guts of foreign affairs. Only genuine travellers, and often soldiers, really knew the reality of events taking place elsewhere that didn’t fit our coy world view.

Innocent ignorance was real. During WWII my mother, 14 at the time, live near an aircraft factory in Manchester. During one attack a German plane strafed them in the street as she was walking to school, but it was soon shot down. She and her friends went to see the monster that had parachuted into a nearby field – they were expecting a real monster, a dreadful beast of a man, and were utterly shocked so see a very handsome blond haired terrified young man who looked not much older than them. The propaganda about the evil ‘Hun’ had been only words on a crackly radio, but those words had evoked vivid nightmarish images that had attributed evil to every member of another nation – every German was immoral.

The growth of TV was primed nicely for the Vietnam war. Horror came right into our homes. The Sixties and Seventies saw the dawning of a questioning of the morality of our own governments like never before. The threat of nuclear annihilation was real, and we questioned the immoral madness of it.

The subsequent rise of postmodernism awoke in us an appreciation of the arbitrariness of our own standards. Moral relativism seemed a logical necessity if we were to apply the Golden Rule to whole cultures – what right did we have to dictate to others how they should behave.

But as we’ve witnessed more of what goes on in other cultures, particularly with the rise of the internet, we’ve begun to question the soundness of the moral relativist argument. Do the Johnny come lately cultural customs of acceptable behaviour overrule our deeper stronger biological imperatives?

It’s difficult to pin down where the fault lies when we intuitively know there’s a fault. Many atheists have been quick to condemn Islam for it’s barbaric practices, only to learn that the cultural influence of the religion of Islam has itself been influenced by cultural values – some of the practices performed in the name of Islam are specific to one culture.

We know instinctively that female genital mutilation is ‘bad’, ‘wrong’, ‘immoral’. Our empathy tells us this. But note even here, when I’m trying to be rational, the judgemental term ‘mutilation’ rather than ‘female circumcision’, or ‘female genital cutting’.

Is the Jewish practice of circumcision also ‘mutilation’? Some adult ‘victims’ think it is. But some non-Jews don’t want to interfere with this ancient tradition, and yet are outspoken about female genital mutilation because, to us in the West, it’s news; most of us weren’t really aware it happened. Cutting was OK for Jesus, but not for some young girl? Yes, there are differences in what is cut – perhaps there might be greater outcry against circumcision if the male glans were cut off, as the clitoris is cut off in girls. What are the moral implications? Should we address this imbalance? Cut the skin but not the clitoris/glans; cut the clitoris and glans; or stop the practice altogether. Would it be immoral to interfere in both cultural practices, or just one, or to not interfere at all? Our gut feelings are in conflict with our own Western postmodern cultural relativism, resulting in a moral relativist angst.

How arbitrary is all that!

We have many instincts trying to get the attention of our conscious minds. Our empathy tells us killing is wrong. But our empathy for the killed is in conflict with our empathy for the killer, depending on the circumstances. If it’s self-defense against an aggressive assault we side with the killer. Some found it difficult to side with the killed when Tony Martin shot dead a fleeing burglar. Even within our Western culture we can’t always decide. Why? If morals are God given or absolutes, why is it so difficult to be consistent?

Morality doesn’t come from some holy book, and it isn’t written in the foundations of the cosmos. We evolved with it and invent it’s varieties. And my moral instincts tell me that we need to figure out where we stand with our morals before we pass judgment. We need to understand the moral implications of our moral behaviour. We need to stop being so parochial and arbitrary, because otherwise we are betraying our own commitment to one of our most empathetically driven moral codes – fairness.

I know what I think morality is, but others have different views. We need to figure out what morality really is. We need to decide which culturally derived morals, or customs, are acceptable to our evolved instincts. Various international human rights organisations make fair attempts, but are often thwarted by member nations with cultures where the cultural customs have a more powerful base than science and reason.

Using philosophy alone we’ve raised questions but provided no answers. So if Sam Harris wants to try going down the route of using science, then I’m all for it. And in defense of Sam Harris, I really don’t think he means that the abstract process that is ‘science’ make decisions for us, or that it (science) will dictate how we should behave. That decision is ours, using our reason, along with the science that we perform.

The behavioural act of performing science on issues relating to how we make moral decisions and how we attribute value, and how we measure value, and what we do with the data we uncover, is a complete and entirely human process that can only improve our moral behaviour. I really think this is what Sam Harris means.

Moral Facts – Sam Harris

In this post I plan to criticise some views, giving my opinion on where they go wrong, then ask some questions to which I have no answer, and then describe my particular view on the matter, without having the slightest confidence that I’m right. And, for good measure, I’ve every chance of contradicting myself on the way. It’s not going to be short. This sounds about par for the course.

The Harris Problem…

It’s all about what Sam Harris appears to be claiming in his TED Video. I blame Lesley for getting us into this mess, here, here and here. And now Gurder has turned this into a wider debate.

Sam Harris TED Talk…

I want to address the talk itself first,…

“It’s thought that science can help us get what we value, but it can never tell us what we ought to value.”

I think that’s right, but with the caveat that it can give us data that can influence what we think we ought to value. I’m with the general agreement on Lesley’s and Gurder’s blogs and comments that science provides the data and that it’s for us to form opinions about that data. At least I think I am.

There’s a formulaic sense in which science can give us an ‘ought’, but it’s the wrong sense of ‘ought’. If I include in my ethics the ‘least harm’ principle, and then concoct some scenarios where there’s a choice between harms – e.g. the Trolley Problem – then science could say I ‘ought’ to do such and such in a particular scenario to achieve least harm, then this isn’t the moral ‘ought’.

But for me this does then raise the questions, what is a moral ‘ought’? Do morals exist, and if they do what are they?

Back to Harris,

“And, consequently, most people … think that science will never answer the most important questions in human life: questions like, “What is worth living for?” “What is worth dying for?” “What constitutes a good life?” “

I think science can answer these questions, if we give science the goals that we want to achieve in the first place. Further more, I don’t think these particular questions are moral questions. They may be personal judgements – a Royalist might think Prince Charles is worth dying for, a Republican might not. We need to be clear about what constitutes a moral question.

“So, I’m going to argue that this is an illusion — that the separation between science and human values is an illusion…”

Let’s see if he does.

“Now, it’s often said that science can not give us a foundation for morality and human values,”

Now that depends on what is meant by ‘foundation’. (‘That depends’ is a theme of this post) If it’s a foundation of data upon which we can build our morality, our ethics, then yes, as long as we have the other elements of morality to go with this foundation. The stronger the foundation of facts the more informed we can be in building our morality. But the foundation of facts is not the full extent of our ethics – maybe. Don’t we need our moral goals in place to use these facts?

I think this is where Harris goes wrong.

“Values are a certain kind of fact. They are facts about the wellbeing of conscious creatures.”

Yes, they become facts in their own right, once we decide what they are – it is a fact that most humans believe murder is wrong. It may be a fact of biological and cultural evolution that has caused most humans to hold that view, and so on. But what is fact about why we should think that we should hold this view? – What makes this a moral question?

“Why is it that we don’t have ethical obligations toward rocks?…And if we’re more concerned about our fellow primates than we are about insects, as indeed we are, it’s because we think they’re exposed to a greater range of potential happiness and suffering. Now, the crucial thing to notice here is this is a factual claim: This is something that we could be right or wrong about.”

Yes, it is a factual claim, that we do hold this view, and we might be wrong about it (as Gurder points out). Again, evolution can explain why we do – where ‘why’ here means ‘how it came about’. It says nothing about why we should hold this view (or not).

“And we know — we know — that there are right and wrong answers to how to move in this space.”

Do we? Really? Just because we agree with Harris on most of his scenarios doesn’t mean they are moral questions, or questions that are only to do with morals.

“Would adding cholera to the water be a good idea? Probably not.” – Probably not? Why not just ‘no’? Why not ‘yes’? What is that turns this into a moral question?

“There are truths to be known about how human communities flourish, whether or not we understand these truths. And morality relates to these truths.” – First sentence, OK. Second? How and why? It relates in the sense that the more we know the more it can help us to construct morals – given we know what our moral goals are. Again, if least harm is a goal then the ‘Probably not’ answer is probably right – depending on other facts – but we do need to know our moral goals.

So, we must know our morals first, in order to decide what to do with the facts that we uncover. But is it that simple? How do we get to our moral codes in the first place? We observe them in ourselves? We feel them? But sometimes we feel we want to kill, so why do we choose non-murder as a moral code? Our morals often seem to be intended to overcome some of our feelings – our base instincts, or animal instincts. Why is love a moral good and murder a moral bad? Because of the Golden Rule? But what determines the Golden Rule is worth following? Our moral sense? But …. where do we go from here?

More from Harris. He gives some explanations, and then comes to this, “So, what I’m arguing is that value is reducible to facts — to facts about the conscious experience — of conscious beings.”

This sounds sort of right – we can reduce some values to facts. But which values? All of them? The fact that this organism (me) puts a greater value on raspberry to strawberry can be reducible to the details of science – raspberry releases more pleasure signals (simplification) than strawberry does – I like raspberry more than strawberry. But what’s happening in my nervous system when I attribute greater value to love than hate? I mean, it clearly is my nervous system that’s driving that valuation (at least as a materialist I think it is). And that nervous system is as it is because of scientific facts – biological and cultural evolution and personal experience – whether we have all pertinent facts or not. What is the difference between these values that makes one a matter of preference and the other a matter of morals or ethics?

I’ll leave that for now and get back to Harris.

“Now, let me be clear about what I’m not saying. I’m not saying that science is guaranteed to map this space, or that we will have scientific answers to every conceivable moral question. …” – See. Caveats – for those who take this talk too literally, or who didn’t hear this bit clearly enough. This is a common notion to materialists: just because we can’t answer questions yet, or maybe can never answer them (at least in our currently evolved human form), doesn’t mean we have the final answer on the matter.

“…But if questions affect human wellbeing then they do have answers, whether or not we can find them. And just admitting this — just admitting that there are right and wrong answers to the question of how humans flourish — will change the way we talk about morality, and will change our expectations of human cooperation in the future.”

And there it is! There’s his moral goal. He’s already stated this, but it’s easy to let it slip by; and so from there he thinks that science can provide answers. This is the respect in which Harris thinks science can answer moral questions.

The fact that science can’t do that for every ‘human wellbeing achievement’ question, by using current science, is not to say it can’t, ever. But even if it were the case that science can never answer every such question, then so what; maybe it can answer more than by not using science.

The remainder of the talk fills in the details. We can argue about some of the examples, and question some of his reasoning, as Chris Anderson does. But the general idea that if we can establish that human wellbeing is in fact a moral goal we value, and if we can establish what constitutes human wellbeing, then science can accumulate the data needed to make the judgement call – maybe.

But for me Harris isn’t clear (maybe in his own mind, I don’t know) about what we use to judge the value of the science he is talking about, because he doesn’t say how science gets us to evaluating our values. He seems to assume one moral value, human wellbeing, as a given. Where’s his science that gets us to this and other moral values? Maybe he gets to that in the future. Maybe all we can draw from this is that science can help more than we are accustomed to thinking since Hume gave us is/ought. Can we dispose of is/ought as we dispose of non-overlapping magisteria?

I don’t think Harris convinces that it’s all an illusion – unless he can tell us elsewhere how he’s figured out all the problems of metaethics – see later. It’s not illusory that science can’t help us with all aspects of morals – as his own caveats attest.

Sean Carroll On Harris…

Sean Carroll criticises Harris here.

Well, I don’t think this is quite right with regard to Hume’s is/ought. See this post by Alonzo Fyfe. “Prove it.”, challenges Alonzo. Of course Alonzo knows that can’t be done, and isn’t really expecting you to. It’s a rhetorical flourish to explain his claim that Hume’s argument is one from ignorance. The difficulty, the seeming impossibility, of getting and ‘ought’ from an ‘is’ doesn’t mean it’s not possible.

Carroll says, “Morality and science operate in very different ways.” – Well, maybe. Maybe morals and psychology are as different as psychology and physics. Maybe we just don’t understand morals too well – we may know them when we see them, but that doesn’t mean we understand them. Surely Carroll isn’t doing a Stephen Jay Gould on us – do science and morals operate in so different ways?

I’ll come back to Carroll where I think he’s right.

Where Does That Leave Me?…

Is the problem perhaps that morality itself isn’t quite what we think it is – that it is some specific set of facts that determine what we do? This has a similar flavour to questions of what consciousness is, what free-will is – whether they exist at all, or whether they do exist but not as we know it; Jim. Could Harris be right that morals can be reduced to facts?

Maybe morality is, in fact, just another, fact, another data point, an emotional response that we experience. What is it, in fact, to say we have morals? After all, as I conclude that I have no evidence of God (I therefore become an atheist), at all, and so can’t derive morals, whatever they are, from him, then God isn’t a source – as far as I can tell. Further, as I have no evidence that there are moral absolutes in the universe, but also no evidence that I can know I have access to absolutes in order to judge that, then I can’t claim that that’s a source, or not.

So if my morals come out of what’s left, the only evidence available to me, my biological and cultural evolution, then in the great scheme of things they are quite arbitrary facts, aren’t they? They could have been otherwise different facts. If we had inherited a propensity for infanticide of existing children of new mates, say from a common ancestor with some big cats, then any female divorcee might be reluctant to take on a new man – but the infanticide under those circumstances might then not be a moral problem. Maybe we would have come up with a ‘moral’ means of achieving this – like the debate over the method of death on death row in some US states, the death isn’t the moral issue, but the method is. Our morals are only meaningful in our own human contexts.

Maybe, below our feeling that they are not facts, they in fact are – and being this type of fact are open to discovery, and statistical analysis (i.e. democratic voting), the result of which determines what we do. This doesn’t mean we have to, as some fear, scan each other constantly to determine our moral values. The human genome project hasn’t been quite the horror for insurance access that we worried it might be, because we took some more general principle fact (empathy), constructed a moral code out of it (fairness) and prevented the wholesale use of genetics as a means to insurance discrimination and persecution.

So, before we’re too critical of Harris, maybe we need to think what our morals are first – I don’t mean what our moral values happen to be. Earlier I distinguished between two possible meanings of ‘ought’. But do we fully understand what the moral ‘ought’ is?

1) Is it (morally)right/wrong to murder?
2) Is it (morally or otherwise)right/wrong to make murder a moral matter?

What do I mean by ‘otherwise’? I mean as in ‘makes sense’, or as in ‘category error’, or as in ‘appropriate’…

If it’s wrong to make murder a moral matter, then the first question loses its significance.

3) Is it (morally)right/wrong to like oranges?
4) Is it (morally or otherwise)right/wrong to make the liking of oranges a moral matter?

Q4 is easier to answer than Q2, so Q3 is obviously not a moral issue. Why is Q1 a moral issue? Have we clearly answered Q2?

Exactly why is murder a moral question and the liking of oranges not? You might think to answer ‘The Golden Rule’, or ‘Least Harm’ or whatever is your moral code. But why is that a moral code in the first place?

As Gurder says, “Ethics are not easy“. Quite right. The whole subject of metaethics is testament to that. Try wading through this, through all the descriptive/normative stuff, and see if you can find a conclusion – you’ll certainly come out of it with more questions than you took in.

So, where do I stand?

Yes, ethics is real complex. we’re not even sure what it is we’re talking about – yet we all sort of know what we’re talking about, as if by magic (e.g. as if by God), when really it’s just some complex opinion we have that comes about because of our biological and cultural evolution and personal experience and reason – or at least as my biological and cultural evolution and personal experience and reason informs me. All very flaky, tentative, contingent, arbitrary? Too true it is.

Should I be a moral relativist? Well, what an awkward question that is – I’m asking an ‘ought’ question about my ‘oughts’. I can certainly observe a moral relativism – it’s plain to see that everyone has a relative opinion about morality, even if there are more common features than differences. There are probably as many nuanced moral views as there are variations in the human genome – and why shouldn’t that be so.

But we don’t generally implement moral relativism (some post modernists excepted). We do make moral stands – i.e. we do make moral claims – and Harris points out some of these. Even if we can’t justify how we come by them or why we hold them. We can’t give a moral justification for all our moral views.

That means conflict. I think genital mutilation of baby boys and young girls is morally wrong. I can justify why – Golden rule, least Harm, Freedom to Choose, Self-Determination, etc. – but I can’t justify those in turn on moral grounds. I am at odds with people who think those practices are acceptable. I could have, had I lived at the time of the Crusades, gone to war over an issue like this. Now I have to content myself with changing opinions through reason and law – if I, with others, can through reason persuade enough others that these practices should be proscribed through law, then I win that conflict; otherwise I continue to lose. This is what it boils down to.

So, I think Sean Carroll is on firmer ground with this:

“A big part of the temptation to insist that moral judgments are objectively true is that we would like to have justification for arguing against what we see as moral outrages when they occur. But there’s no reason why we can’t be judgmental and firm in our personal convictions, even if we are honest that those convictions don’t have the same status as objective laws of nature. In the real world, when we disagree with someone else’s moral judgments, we try to persuade them to see things our way; if that fails, we may (as a society) resort to more dramatic measures like throwing them in jail. But our ability to persuade others that they are being immoral is completely unaffected — and indeed, may even be hindered — by pretending that our version of morality is objectively true. In the end, we will always be appealing to their own moral senses, which may or may not coincide with ours.”

I’ve emphasised the bit where I’d add something: by pretending that our version of morality is objectively true, whether they turn out to be objectively true or not, whether Harris is right or not. I’m back to my contingency of knowledge again. Epistemology is a bitch, even for a deity. But that’s okay. When it gets very vague – at the limits of ability to figure things out, we just have to make the best of it we can – we do science.

The religious seem to dump this whole problem in God’s lap. That doesn’t seem good enough to me (do I find that an immoral failure of responsibility?). If I can’t figure something out I’d rather admit it, and if I must, I make a choice, based on whatever I’ve got available. And that consists of my senses and reason. And the best we can do with our senses and reason is to use them as rigorously as possible – science.

So, to some extent I’m with Harris in his project. I don’t think he’s got it right yet. But give the guy a break, we’re still trying to figure out lots of stuff, and philosophers and scientists are bound to make lots of mistakes. But how do we know what are the limits of knowledge; how do we know what we can’t know, when it comes to complex issues like this, that are processed in our very peculiar brains, which we don’t yet fully understand.

Let’s give Harris some rope – see if he ties it all up nicely or hangs himself.

A Biblical Story

The religious like their stories. Postmodern relativist theists love them. It allows everyone to have their own cuddly warm snug safety blanket in which to wrap themselves, without fear of someone nasty coming along and snatching it away – a gift from their father, God. There’s nothing more comforting than being wrapped up, nice and warm, being told lovely stories about their heroic father protecting them from evil.

But there’s another part of their story that’s not so pleasant, but just as necessary, because we all like scary stories, and these scary stories help cement the dependence on the myth. One day a bully arrives in the class, and his name is Atheist. His favourite wicked pass-time is to snatch their faith blankets away and make them cry. His second favourite is to tell a frightful story, of how his own father, Nietzsche, is killing their father, God.

But I’ve got a better story, a predominantly Western story (for there are similar stories elsewhere). And it goes like this.

Nietzsche is blamed for killing God. How can that be? There never was a God to be killed. Let’s start at the beginning, or as near to it as matters for this story.

In the forgotten past humans evolved along with other animals from some common anscestor with similar characteristics. Humans have many featues in common with all vertabrates. Even more in common with mammals. Even more with primates. Most with the other remaining apes.

This family have a mix of traits, that include complex combinations of being able to love and hate, help and kill. Their social evolution has caused them to be mostly loving to those close, and fairly neutral and even co-operative with other groups, suppressing their baser inclinations. However, conflicting interests, fear, misunderstanding, jealousy, all the nasty bits, are just below the surface.

It’s difficult to know for sure what real evolutionary mechanism caused religion to come about, whether it conferred some direct benefit, or whether it’s a by-product of the evolution of the degree of self-awareness that we experience. It remains a mystery, but many facts fit one particular idea.

All mammals have a sense of ‘other’, as in other external creatures: to be eaten by, to eat, to fight, to mate. Few animals are self-aware, so when self-awareness evolved to a certain degree there becomes both ‘other’ and ‘self’. The brain sciences have shown quite clearly that these are in different parts of the brain, but are linked; that the confusion of ‘self’ and ‘other’ can give a feeling of an internal ‘other’. This is very striking in various forms of brain damage – the type and location of the damage can determine loss of this internal ‘other’ or its acquisition. It can also be induced or inhibited in healthy brains at will, in a laboratory. Many humans have a ‘self-self’ and an ‘other-self’.

There were no brain scientists around in ancient times, but there were a multitude of unexplained awful events. With a familiarity of how powerful humans were, compared to other animals, it might have seemed obvious that there must be some more powerful external hidden ‘others’ at work, directing nature, inlfuencing lives.

Put these internal and external ‘others’ together, and you have gods that are doing things for and to humans, and even invade their minds.

But, some humans aren’t quite as dumb as they first appear. Over the millenia, as the population increases, and populations merge and compare ideas, as they record their ideas and they spread them, it seems obvious that there are some inconsistencies, competing gods, and, frankly, silly notions of what it is to be a god.

From the recordings of the Greeks onward, philosophy and rudementary science bring some critical thinking to the table, which begins the whole process of rationalising and economising on gods and their capabilities. There emerges the most concise God, the Jewish God, with many of his awkward inconvenient inconsistencies explained away into the sky, or heaven or wherever – depending on how critical the analysis has to be to avoid arguments from those that tend not to believe or who have competing gods. God goes into hiding, and leaves the material world behind, and his interactions with us and our world have to be explained by miracles.

The religions provide great social cohesion in times that are still barbaric and brutal. They provide an authority that can’t be matched by individual rulers. They help keep the peace mostly, but can still just as easily be invoked to wage war. Religions are used to control the uneducated supersticious masses, for reasons of good for the theologians, for reasons of convenience for the godless powerful.

Despite the reconciling role of great religions there are still independent theological thinkers who challenge the various orthodoxies, causing many schisms in what had been the start of a grand religious project: Judaism, Christianity, Islam – examples of new grand religions that each has its schisms. Other religions emerged on the boundaries of western thinking, the most prominat being Islam which separated much of western thinking from its Greek routes.

Come the enlightnement, ever more events and wonders of the world, like the rainbow, become explainable as natural phenomena. Western Europe becomes the focul point for many revolutions in thinking, and in the discovery of of ideas, places, animals and peoples. God and his works recede into the distance.

From Darwin and others a unifying explanation develops that shows not only that humans are not special, but that evolution can remove the need for a God, or at least push him back to the moment of creation. Sophisticated theology is required all the more to hide God somewhere safe. The struggle between the angel on one shoulder and the devil on the other mirrors the internal dichotomy of the rational internal ‘self-self’ and the feeling internal ‘other-self’.

This vanishing act needn’t be an intentional response to the chipping away at the ‘God did it’ explanatuions. It can be a genuine shift in the detail of beliefs of thologians that have as much access to the enlightenment ideas as any atheist. They have to reconcile what they know with what they feel, but what they feel has a strong hold and won’t let go.

So, God remains the primary presupposition that in their cognitive dissonance must override all other ideas. They may even have a sneaky suspision that their beliefs are nonsense, but what can you do if the internal ‘other-self’ is so persuasive? They even see the folly in other beliefs that are similar, or in those of their own religion that have a less sophisticated view of what God is. Sophisticated theologians mock athesists that speak of the Sky Fairy, and yet the Sky Fairy still fits what many religious people see as God. The theologians know they can’t explain their God, really, but they can have faith.

Some become so close to being atheists in their intellectual disposal of God’s inconveniences, that they even confuse what atheism means – Peter Rollins, with his really odd twisting of words is so confused, and therefore confusing in his religious babble. No doubt Rollins is sincere. I’m not accusing these theists of being charlatons, though some of the money making TV evangelists may be, I don’t know. But many theists clearly have an eye for this world as much as the next.

And so here we are. Nieztshce didn’t kill God. There never was a God, just an idea of a God accompanied by a feeling. Nieztshce and many others have been dripping slow acting poisons into the challace, causing a lingering and painful death for the idea that is yet incomplete. Though the feeling remains you can see the agony of self-realisation of the inevitable dawning on the likes of the Arch Bishop of Cantebury, as they struggle to reconcile their faith with the ultimate demise of the God that never was.

Rather than let the atheist kill their God they would rather do it themselves. They suffocate him in an act of kindness, they bury him in the safest place they can find, in the depths of their souls where he’ll be accessible to them. He becomes a fully personal God. No longer the need to explain him away, he’ll still be close by, feeding ideas through the inner ‘other-self’.

They see the problems, yet they still feel God, see God, or see the need for God, or fear the lack of God. What must it be like to have this inner self, the ‘other-self’, ripped from their hearts?

Those that don’t have it can only sympathise. Atheists who see a grand picture of the universe and beyond as a natural unfolding process have no need for God. There’s a freedom to think the unthinkable without fear, to find what we find without judgement, to see what the science tells us, without thinking it has a moral dimension, that the creation of moral codes are just one more human trait. We can take what evolution has given us and build our moral codes on top of that, and make those moral codes do the best they can for everyone, because the predominant evolved characteristics are to love, to help, not to hate and to kill.

This is just a story. Many different stories can be told, and are told. This one is as close to the observed facts that I know of. Think of it as a docu-drama – a story made to fit the facts; or as a working hypothesis that has evidence to support it. This is a story told by humans, about humans using evidence accumulated by humans.

The predominant alternative story is one written by humans too, but where the main unobserved fictional character is supposed to have written the story himself. And as such, the authors can have the character explain away any inconsistencies by the magic of miracles, or by claiming not to know the mind of the unfathomable character the human authors have created. Now that’s some serious imaginative just-so fiction. An incredible story. Seiously, it just isn’t credible.

It’s A Kind Of Magic

Thanks to Lesley, and indirectly to The MadPriest, for a pointer to this Irish Times article.

In it Canon Ginnie Kennerley puts magical thinking in its place, as eloquently and effectively as any atheist could:

“…is a demonstration of “magical thinking” at its most primitive, akin to ritual rain-making ceremonies and tribal rituals designed to control the uncontrollable”

Yes, even Christians are atheistic when it comes to some beliefs.

“While many of us occasionally indulge in magical thinking in small ways, if applied to serious issues it can become a major cause of injustice and handicap to general well-being.”

“As I understand it, magical thinking relies on perceived (but un-confirmable) causal links between desired events and the phenomena that appear normally to accompany or precede them.”

“It assumes that, by ensuring that there is no change in the supposed link of cause and effect, we can ensure the desired result every time – in effect, we imagine we can control the action of God.”

“Those who fall prey to this style of magical thinking in the 21st century may deserve our sympathy and even a degree of respect, given that a high level of anxiety and desire for control, of which they may not be aware, is probably at the root of the matter.”

I’ve a sneaky feeling Canon Ginnie Kennerley nodded off while reading some New Atheist book, and awoke thinking she’d been taking notes for something else entirely. I hope she doesn’t mind if I keep these words in mind when I next argue with a theist.

Lesley’s Salford Experience

Lesley posted an interesting item today in which she described her experience of Salford. I know Salford quite well, though I grew up on Langley – another notorious area that suffered many of these same problems.

The post was mainly about homosexuality. But what I found more interesting was the type of society that exists in these places that, despite all the publicity, is still below the radar for most educated people. There are plenty of hard working decent honest people in these areas (that’s right off a politician’s crib sheet) who live side by side with troubled families.

We think the gulf of understanding between atheists and theists is great – it’s nothing compared to the gulf between the educated middle classes and this under-class. Let’s not mince words; there are very different segments of our society, and even though we no longer like to think in terms of classes, that’s as good a term as any.

The recent Raoul Moat Facebook page comes to mind. I urge you to listen to this: Siobhan O’Dowd. What you hear is a severely uneducated woman being taken down a peg or two by a reasonably articulate radio presenter. All his points are reasonable. It’s so endemic in these sub-cultures to be so anti-police that anyone who evades them is a ‘legend’. Siobhan O’Dowd isn’t condoning any of the harm Moat caused, but isn’t the least bit sympathetic for the police efforts or the expense of mounting the police efforts. Her mind is filled with this screwed (to us) view of affairs, “I wouldn’t say he’s a legend for shooting people, but I would say he’s a legend for keeping the police on their toes, like I’ve told you about five times.”

If you don’t get this ‘other world’ that they live in, then you don’t get quite a lot about life.

Here’s someone who misunderstands, who comments on the clip, “What a disgrace of a human being.. the chav whore.” Another, “this stupid bitch should be steralized and lobotomized.” Another, “Ian is awesome!? This interview is hilarious. Siobahn O’Dowd is fucking retarded.”

Well, she may or may not be clinically retarded or otherwise biologically impaired, but she seems to suffer a psychological depravation that comes from a life of poor education, poverty, and being forced to mix with others in the same deprived environment.

If school doesn’t catch you and inspire you, if you come from a poor home that offers you little, if you can’t figure out that a 200% or 2000% interest to a loan shark isn’t a good deal, if a good bargain is knocked-off tele or mobile from the pub, if you think the police are your enemy, if you think the ‘Social’ is out to screw you and you’re entitled to screw them, then you are basically screwed for the rest of your life, and you are bound to repeat the whole experience for your own children.

To think the Siobhan O’Dowd’s are in control of their lives to any great degree beyond instinctive short sighted responses to problems that come their way, is to be mistaken. To think the common notion of free-will is at work in many of these individuals is a mistake. I’d say it would be mistaken understanding of free-will, but that’s another story – yet our misunderstanding of free-will colours our judgement.

This is our under-class, that includes the Siobhan O’Dowd’s, the mothers who spend more on cigs than their kids’ meals, and the women who learn that some of the men in this environment can’t be trusted, because those men too grew up in the same environment, where their inherent worthlessness leads to the abuse of women and children. You have to get a feel for how lost they are to what we consider a normal life to appreciate how much beyond self-help many of them are.

This isn’t a liberal lefty plea to let everyone off the hook. As members of a society we have a right (we invent this right and claim it) to have a say in how our fellow members behave, to some extent: Golden Rule, least harm, whatever your view is. We are prepared to say that some behaviours are intolerable, and so we avoid where we can, and criminalise where we have to.

We often hear kids say, “I didn’t ask to be born.” when trying to avoid their responsibilities. Well, many of these people didn’t ask to be born into poor families in deprived areas that condemn them and their children to this perpetual cycle. They will not, cannot, break the cycle. They cannot live up to their responsibilities because they are not equipped to do so.

Only the rest of us can do that for them, if we want to. We can make gestures like Lesley’s and help on the ground – but this only alleviates a specific problem for some people. If there is no political will to make bigger changes then we have to accept that this is how it will be.

Angela’s Reasonable Religion

This is a response to Angela’s Reasonable Religion, which in turn was a response to my comments here.

Yes, there are some generalisations we can make. All theists are, well, theists – a belief in God. The fact that the generalisation covers a wide variety doesn’t detract from the generalisation. If you don’t believe in God then you are an atheist – though precisely how that is interpreted and used does vary.

The charge you make against Dawkins isn’t unique, but nor is it true.

“Many will happily throw away all scientific objectivity to take a pop at religion…” – Can you give instances, or are you too making sweeping statements.

“as though ‘religion’ is a genus” – Well, it is sort of like a genus, with lots of species below it. Or maybe religion is the family, Christianity a genus, and the various versions of Christianity a species. But then, just as in our species there is a variety of individuals. And just as there are evolutionarily determined common features across species, such as some of the morphological similarities between humans and apes, then so there might be some similarities across Christian species. So, yes, some sort of taxonomy might well be used to describe theists.

Can you show me one piece from a Dawkins book, or site where Dawkins makes any such generalisation? The problem is that in context Dawkins may be speaking about one particular type of believer, or one particular aspect of theology, and he’s usually clear about that; but it’s the reading thesis who says, “Hold on, that doesn’t apply to me. Dawkins is making sweeping generalisations.” As I said originally – selective reading.

“…but most people are too willing to sacrifice reason on the altar of prejudice.” – This is precisely what the religious do when they put their faith in their dogma above reason. Note I don’t say all religious all the time. Wouldn’t want you to make the same mistake again of assuming I meant that.

“What fascinates me is the way in which those more interested in blaming…” – Well, here’s a quote from a reasonable theist:

“What has science actually done for us to date in this regard? Probably – on balance – exacerbated the problem rather than done anything to ameliorate it. Your faith in science is touching!”

You can find this here, for context (Mike’s 23 June 2010 18:39 comment).

Science or atheism are often blamed for the ills of the world, sometimes in the context of, “You can’t be good without God.”, or, “Look what atheists like Hitler/Mao/Pol Pot have done.”

Sometimes we do blame religion for certain problems. With good reason. In the case of abusing Catholic priest it’s actually individual humans to do this, not the religion as such. And the cover ups that have occurred have been performed by individual or collectives of humans within the church, so again it’s not the religion as such. But it is the religion that sustains the authority that allows these things continue. It’s religious authority that allows religious fanatics to manipulate the gullible into acts of terrorism. It is the religion that helps to maintain a sectarian division in Northern Ireland.

Sometimes science, or at least scientists deserve blame too. It’s an impartial view. The difference is that science doesn’t hold itself up to be following the perfect word of anyone. All science claims is to be the best method we have of acquiring knowledge, and even then it has specific means of dealing with the fallibility of the humans that implement it.

Science is just one more system invented by humans. It’s the best we can do, given our limited access to knowledge and all our fallibilities. This isn’t to say science is perfect. But science is the best we can do.

“The Social Sciences may have proven…” – The social sciences haven’t proven anything of the sort. They have acquired some supporting evidence. We have to be careful how we use the term ‘proof’. It has a very specific meaning in logic, and is generally inadequate for describing scientific ‘truths’. And ‘truth’ is another word we have to use with care – it’s something we strive for, but not something we can be sure we have found.

“You [God] have repeatedly shown us that the violence that really destroys this world begins in ourselves.” – We’re nearly on the same page here. The scientific atheist view is that there is no evidence for God. Everything we worry about, all our problems of morality, come from us, as an evolved species that has developed innate and culturally evolved behaviours into a moral system. Given both the common ancestry and individual variety it is to be expected that there will be a some common features and plenty of variety in the belief in God – which is what we see. If there really was a God that revealed himself to us, either he made a very bad job of it, or he created us so that to us it looks as if belief is a human invention that comes out of our evolutionary and cultural history – how else would you explain the variety, inconsistency and contradictory nature of belief.

This isn’t to say categorically that there isn’t a God (and Dawkins is specific about this too: there might be, but there’s no evidence.) The problem with all theologies is that they start with this basic unknown – is there a creator agent or is it all non-anthropomorphic cosmic fluctuation?; pick one of them, that there is a creator; and then go on to create all fantastically unsubstantiated theologies, without the slightest bit of evidence.

Theists are keen to tell us what God wants. “You [God] have repeatedly shown us…” – How do you know that? All your claims about God are based on what one particular branch of a whole group of societies made up: ancient superstition. Even the most basic attempts to verify any of this (such as experiments on the power of prayer) have failed utterly.

“Thank you [God] for the gift of reason…” – If you’re using reason, and we know reason is fallible (that’s why we need science, to compensate), how do you come to reason that there is a God? The only difference between those people who believe they are Napoleon and the faithful is that the Napoleon’s are adamant they are in the face of irrefutable contradictory evidence, whereas the religious are relying on the fact that there is no data whatsoever, and also relying on the momentum that the organised religions provided.

“We may have mapped the human genome, but to the best of my knowledge, we have yet to find a way of accurately and predictably mapping the thoughts of a single human mind.. Even though we know this, even though we know that we cannot really know the mind or heart of another human being, we persist in pretending that we know enough to identify, label and blame..” – Even though we know we can’t know the mind of God, and can’t establish there is a God, some of us persist in pretending we know what he wants of us.

Violence with Violence

Talk about selective reading. This is a joke. It’s a bit of religious promotion based on some scientific studies that are confirming common sense. And for some it’s too good an opportunity to pass up.

“You can’t fight violence with violence” doesn’t require detailed science, or God. It’s common sense that some members of most societies have figured out is a good general rule, and that goes back well before Jesus. So, it’s hardly as if it was a new idea – but fair enough, Jesus and some of his followers have made a significant contribution to the popularisation of that view and are to be congratulated on that.

And it’s not as if science was around to figure this stuff out. As a science psychology is still relatively new, has many methodological problems, and the detailed thorough science is difficult to do. So, no surprise that science is late in the game.

But hold on, who is it that creates wars, and on what basis do wars begin? It’s usually based on ignorance about differences and dogma, and religion has had a great input here (as have non-religious dogmas). It’s religious politicians, like Bush and Blair that have wanted war on terror; it’s religiously motivated political divisions that have caused conflict, from the Christian crusades to Northern Ireland and former Yugoslavia, to the continuing tribal, racial and religious divisions in Africa.

It certainly isn’t to religion’s credit that it has not sorted these problems out so far, and it is to religions discredit that it has contributed so much to the problems. Perhaps the question should be why has it taken science to step in and provide rational reasons to explain the complexities? It’s because ignorant politics and religion have failed, and reason and science have had to come to the rescue to provide a less biased view that can be taken on board whatever one’s politics or religion (dogma permitting). Science is for everyone everywhere. It doesn’t matter if you’re black or white, Muslim or Jew or Christian, Roman Catholic or Anglican – there are no divisions in science, and no dogma (except when fallible humans screw it up and become dogmatic about the science).

Thorough science isn’t easy. The scientific method is used to overcome the foibles of the human mind, by trying to account for biases, such as those that religion and politics is likely to enforce. It’s thanks to sciences like anthropology, sociology, psychology, and the engineering sciences and technologies like print, radio, TV and satellite that have provided a greater understanding of the natural variety of human nature and culture and education, and the dissemination of that knowledge, that has led to slow but positive progress in lifting the veil of ignorance of a non-scientific view.

But “You can’t fight violence with violence” is a general rule. We are not that good at science yet; or more specifically we are not that good at listening to science yet. We still get ourselves into some serious fixes, through political gaffs, intolerance of the religious and non-religious alike, through ignorance. And sometimes we are left with no choice but to defend ourselves, even if it’s our own fault that got us into the mess.

We are dumb apes – which is what science tells us, and helps explain quite a lot, but which many religious deny. This denial, and the ignorant notion that we of some particular religion or other are chosen in some way fuels the ignorance.

Science fails often, in the hands of fallible humans, despite attempts to develop a scientific method to overcome our fallibilities in seeking truth. Religion fails far more. So, less of the back slapping, a little more humility, and get on with promoting the views of Jesus the peace loving mortal man, and less of the religious dogma.

The Kneeler’s post is typical of the selective reading that the religious have to develop as second nature if they are to make any sense of the Bible. And of course they always apply it to science. Science is great when it’s curing ills – though it hasn’t been beyond the religious to thank God for those cures. But where are most of the religious on evolution? Still in the dark ages. It’s also typical of the religious to claim prior credit for scientific discoveries – though Muslims seem particularly good at this as they often claim the Koran said it first, no matter how vague the reference, and no matter that they got it from the Greeks. No, it only requires the holy book to come up with some common sense notion, like ‘thou shalt not kill’, which anyone can now see is an evolutionarily driven survival strategy, for the religious to claim with self righteous indignation that it’s God’s law, and
they, by association, are the righteous ones.

The Bible is just a book, written by men. Genesis has as much scientific validity and truth as The Flintstones – sure there were dinosaurs, but not at the same time as man (tell that to the curator of the Creationist Museum); see the similarity (talking snake?). The whole Bible is an invention of minds that today would be considered uneducated – not in language, not unintelligent, just ignorant of very basic science and the methods of science and critical thinking that would have debunked many of their ideas in their own day had those methods been available. So there’s no shadow of disgrace on them – they were working with what they had.

The Bible bashers of today have no excuse. It doesn’t take much to pick holes in most of the theological crap. We don’t know how our particular universe started, so we remain ignorant of many things. We have no idea whether there is some ultimate intelligent agency behind it all, or if it is really all soulless fluctuations in nothingness – the metaphysics is beyond our data, just not beyond our imagination. But it’s foolish to build whole systems of belief on that one speculative imaginary idea about the metaphysical inaccessible, and to pile theological bunk on theological bunk on top of ancient books that have to be deciphered in ever more obscure ways to make the theology fit reality (or not).

Science is the best we can do, for now. Ridicule it viciously when it’s wrong, by all means – that’s what it needs, that’s part of the very method itself. We must be challenging our knowledge all the time, because we are not capable of being certain. We don’t have the equipment, whether it’s equipment we’ve invented or that which has evolved between our ears. But for God’s sake don’t rely on religion to tell us anything useful – and I mean ‘for God’s sake’, for if there really is a God, he’s going to be very disappointed in his own creation, if he’s endowed us with brains, and we refuse to use them, to paraphrase Galileo.

BBC Mythos and Logos

The BBC programme
Something Understood – Mythos and Logos (h/t Lesley) discusses the roles of Mythos and Logos: Mark Tully explores the difference between a scientific understanding of the world and a mythological understanding; between the rational language of science and the poetic language of myth.

My view is as follows:

Mythos – Myth, fantasy, didn’t actually happen. Fine for fictional novels. Some fictional novels are intended to portrait philosophical or sociological metaphors or allegories, from which we can learn stuff, so okay on that too – but care is required not to read too much into it (as is done with the Bible).

Mythos had a greater place in the past because there was less logos. The mythos of the ancients is viewed retrospectively with rosy tint of modern theology and myth. My guess would be that if you could go back in time and offer some of the ancients a bit more of our logos so that they didn’t need so much of their mythos, then they’d bite your hand off. There’s a tendency to over glamorise the past.

There’s also two categories of mythos in the current post modern mind. I don’t know if it was present in earlier ideas, but it’s here now, and it does cause confusion. There’s (a) the mythos that is really just creative imagination, and there’s (b) the mythos that is believing fantasy to be true; and they are confused at will by theists. It goes like this: the theist makes a claim (b), and the atheists says there’s no evidence, to which the theist responds with (a), which obviously the atheist didn’t intend to dispute. Angela Tilby gives fine examples below.

But first Tully introduces words from Karen Armstrong.

Karen, “There were regarded as complementary ways…” – Not surprising. if you had little logos available, what else did you have to turn to in your uncertainty?

Karen, “myth was not concerned with practical matters, but with meaning…” – Because they didn’t have the logos to tell them that there was no meaning, as they understood that to be, and as I think most theists still understand it to be.

Karen, “Logos…it must work efficiently in the mundane world. We use…when we have to make things happen, get something done, or to persuade other people to adopt a course of action.”

Karen, “Logos is practical, unlike myth…” – What price pragmatism? – “..to elaborate on old insights” – i.e. correct the mistakes of the myths – “…achieve a greater control over our environment…” – our only known environment.

Tully, “We may have regressed spiritually, because of our suppression of mythos.” – Note the negative defensiveness. Alternatively we may have progressed, not by suppressing, but by outgrowing mythos. Lucretius sounds as though he was onto it. Can you honestly say that the old mythos was reasoned? Wasn’t it just more of the same nonsense you might attribute to some of the crazier believers of today? Trouble is, once you mistake mythos for truth all bets are off – you are capable of believing anything; or sometimes more significantly, you can’t deny someone else’s right to believe their crazy mythos.

Tully, on Peter Gabriel, “…overcome by the power of music and ritual, the mythos” – No. Just hypnotised by it. A brain state. Many animals can be lulled into these states too. Think of it as your computer freezing up momentarily for no apparent reason – it’s doing something, it’s just not obvious to consciousness.

Angela Tilby, and Anglican Priest and theologian…

Angela, “You might think … scientific..is logos… clearly right in the way science practises itself. But it probably isn’t right in way scientists sometimes use their imagination, use their instincts, use their sense of adventure to inhabit the whole enterprise; mythos carries on even when it’s denied.” – Bollocks. This is not the same mythos at all. This is an attempt (maybe unintended) to conflate mythos as myth with straight forward human emotion, personality, involvement – all potential for scientific explanation in themselves. Scientists don’t pray for guidance in their work, unless they’re scientists who happen to be religious. They don’t look to ancient books for eternal truths, they look to older evidence and challenge it, or reproduce it, they question older truths, mythos or logos – all is up for questioning.

Has logos won? Not entirely, on two points. The first, is that if logos itself implies that mythos is nonsense as a route to truth, then there’s no room for complacency, mythos is still influencing irrationally. The second, the very nature of logos (certainly now) is that it’s an ongoing quest for truth, and so again there’s no room for complacency – there is no winning, there is only progress. Winning implies the job is done. There is no know reason to think we will ever be able to say, job done.

Angela, “Mythos does continue to hold great sway” – Only for those that believe it. There’s not inherent place for mythos. I see it as a temporary fluctuation in the evolution of one particular species – think evolutionary time scales, where will we be in 1,000 years, 10,000. There’s no reason to suppose the remaining elements of mythos, the Rollins view if you like, won’t go the same way as sacrificing to Gods. As protestant Christians, do you really see RC transubstantiation surviving as a credible truth? The resurrection?

Angela, “We delight in story telling, in narrative…” – Yes. That’s how we came to grow into our language, to be able to make connections with each other, reporting non-local non-current events, transmitting knowledge – all when logos was particularly scarce that it was indistinguishable from myth.

We know soaps and novels are fiction, but yes, we can relate to stories that they tell. We do not really think that Gail McIntyre actually spent time in prison, but some of us do really think Jesus arose from the dead. The problem isn’t the stories, the fantasies, the myths, it’s believing they are true – and the more literally we take them, the more danger they pose as falsehoods.

Angela, “Mythos doesn’t die just because logos is in the ascendancy…” – Conflating mythos (believing fantasy to be truth) with fantasy again. This really is a mistake the Mythos crowd make. They see both the pleasure and the practical value in telling stories, using them as metaphor and allegory – this is fine. But they lump that in with truth claims about ridiculous fantasy.

We put too much emphasis on logos, underestimating mythos?

Angela, “I think there is an imbalance … live in a world of pure fact … if you do that you end up in a very impoverished way.” – Again, the mistaken conflation of wrong headed fantasy as truth, with the very commendable use of story telling, emotional involvement, and all the other fluffy stuff that scientists are equally (more so says Feynman) capable of appreciating – not impoverished at all.

Angela, “Truth doesn’t contradict truth…” – Another problem. The issue, from the logos point of view is that it’s difficult to be sure when we have got at the truth, particularly any ultimate truth. Science refuses to make that claim. It’s only theism and other mythos adherents and pos modernist woolly thinkers that use this move. In essence it relies on ‘stories’ (the mythos kind not the soap opera kind) to entitle people to their own versions of the truth, as they see fit. It demands respect among the mythos crowd for each other’s myths, and prevents any serious questioning from the sceptical logos community – or at least the mythos crowd think it should…. Angela, “I think that’s absolutely true” – which becomes true since all truth claims (stories) are true, by the mythos principle. Bollocks of course.

Angela, “As a person I believe [1] thoroughly in the scientific method and in evolution. I want to use antibiotic drugs, I’m interested in space exploration; [2] I’m interested in the strangeness of new physics. At the same time [3] I want to respond to the world as God’s good creation and to live in it a creative and ethical life that has meaning and fulfilment beyond myself and physical death.” – The mythos team think [3] is made compatible with [1], but they really mean there’s no conflict between [3] and [2] – and many theists are comfortable with science processes. But [1], if followed to where it leads, through whatever evidence there is – and [1] relies on evidence – then they are not compatible: there’s nothing that leads a rational scientific mind to [3].

Angela, “It isn’t a problem to live with those two truths.” – I agree. It’s not a problem to live with the truth that London is in France, as long as you don’t try to visit London. You can even visit France, without visiting London, and still believe that false truth, while believing the truth that you are in France. And so it is possible, that if you don’t think clearly enough about what you’re, well, thinking about, you can make incompatible beliefs co-exist in your head quite comfortable – even though some of them are myths (the fantasy kind).

Angela, “I don’t think they contradict each other.” – Set theory: A and B are independent sets. 1) x is a member of A; 2) x is a member of A and B. Statements (1) and (2) don’t contradict each other, but (2) happens to be false. Again, woolly thinking. Contradiction isn’t the issue. Mythos being the route to truth is the issue.

Angela, “I won’t choose. They’re both valid ways of being a human being.” – I agree. Logos is a valid way of being a rational human being; mythos is a way of being an irrational human being. Don’t get me wrong. In backing logos I’m not saying we must always be perfect rational human beings – the whole point of my argument is that we can’t be, and that recognising this helps us to realise that mythos is one of our more dramatic failures – particularly in the hands of fundamentalists.

Angela, “I think I would be less human if I wasn’t trying to hold the two together.” – Well, such low self-esteem seems to be one of the attributes of the religious. They seem to need the God mythos to validate their lives. Note the inherent insult to non-believers – we’re less human. That’s a clear message that’s been spelled out to the irreligious for centuries – sinners destined for hell – and it’s no less clear simply because it’s disguised in woolly post modern terms. Thankfully we’ve got broad shoulders – or maybe it’s just that we know there’s no weight, no mass, no substance to this nonsense, so it doesn’t bother us. But there are times when it matters.

Angela uses Bach as an example of mythos and logos coming together. She points out the rigour in the maths and the precision behind his work, “…and yet he produces this astonishingly heart rending music.” – Conflating mythos with music now? The creativity of human beings is a distinct imaginative skill, facet, characteristic, whatever you want to call it. There’s no logical attachment of imagination to believing fantasy is truth.

Angela, “..[Bach] goes right to the soul and speaks of realities far greater than that of the scale itself.” – Well, no. It says nothing at all about other realities, greater or otherwise. What music does do is resonate. It may do this literally and physically, in that it does cause resonant conditions within the brain, particularly if it’s loud enough to feel more physically through the body rather than just through the ears. It can also do it psychologically, in that it invokes emotions, sometimes associated with events and experiences, or even with fantasies. This latter is less well understood, and requires much more from brain science disciplines to understand more fully – but that current gap in our knowledge is not one for a God of the gaps, or in this case a mythos of the gaps, to fill in. Of course that’s the tradition our ancient much-mythos less-logos has left us with, so it’s understandable some are easily persuaded of this.

Angela, “…[Bach’s music] says something about how Western civilisation can bring these two things [logos mythos] together” – Only because Angela wants it to, and because she categorises creativity and human physio-psychological responses to that creativity as an element of mythos. Now if she wants to do that, if that’s how she wants to define mythos, great. Except that then causes confusion in debates about theism and mythos, about the mythos of Genesis, and so on. Not very helpful.

I find it curious that the mythos team seem to think that if they can only give us on the logos team good examples then we’ll get it. They read us poetry, excerpts from the Bible, sayings of wise some wise sage, or maybe play us some music – as Tully does here with Bach. we get it. We are moved by the music and the poetry too. What we also get is that what the mythos team lump together with their fantasies we see as something distinct. No amount of reading poetry and playing music is going to make us magically lose the logical difference.

So, there are four distinct topics recognised so far here: logos, creative-mythos, fantasy-story-mythos, and fantasy-truth-mythos.

Logos is compatible with creative-mythos. We recognise the blend of art and science in many of our most creative polymaths. We can also accommodate fantasy-story-mythos, using the vehicle of story telling, narrative, to show us allegorically the many twists and turns of human nature. the Bible is often quoted in this respect, and it does have some good human stories that strike a chord. Shakespeare does it better for me personally, and often with a damn site more humour – always a bonus.

What isn’t compatible with logos, and what goes against the grain of any sort of rationality that we humans are capable of, and what flies in the face of science’s greatest efforts to understand this world, this universe, ourselves, is the make-believe of fantasy-truth-mythos. There is no evidence for a God, no matter how much some people would like him to be there – wishful thinking does not make it true. The miraculous appearance of Adam, and the use of his rib, transubstantiation, resurrection – all fantasy by all rational standards.

Tully on Kant: Reason has it’s limitations and philosophers can be too dependent on it. Quite. So, why does Kant reason, quite reasonably, that we can’t go beyond what we can know, and then go on to describe in some detail things that are beyond his reasoning capacity?

Listen to this Philosophy Bites. Kant is okay, up to the point where he recognises the limitations of our perceptions. In Kant’s terms we can never take the spectacles off – okay. We have to put to one side all metaphysical question that are beyond us – including any deity. We can ask the questions – that isn’t the problem. But we can’t know what is out there. We can speculate. We are at liberty to have faith, but you can’t have knowledge of whether that’s true or not. This is the atheist logos position and offers nothing to the mythos.

In supposing noumena exists Kant goes too far – beyond our fallible human capabilities.

Kant is motivated to maintain faith. And he’s prepared to give up all his hard work in order to sustain this. Like many philosophers, he can’t stop himself going beyond his own claims.

Spiritual Mumbo Jumbo, or Hypnosis?

I wanted to give an example of religious wooly thinking, and here’s one. You can watch the video here (h/t Lesley), and you might want to do that first to get the flavour of it. Or, you could read this first, and then go back and listen with some of these questions in mind. By the time you read this the full video may have been taken down, so here I’m working on the part-transcript I took while it was up.

This piss-take video gets right to the point (h/t Lesley again).

Rob starts off criticising what he sees as obviously ridiculous ‘signs’, as if he’s the rational one, appealing to you too as rational Christians, not prepared to believe what are clearly nonsensical claims. This is the psychological technique of inclusion whereby he invites you into his circle of knowing believers that aren’t fooled by false claims of miracles and prayer. Little pauses and glances aside for dramatic effect always add to the performance – and Rob is a performer. Is it me, because I don’t get it, or does he come across as really insincere to you?

“…old man…long white beard…” – He’s setting up his own straw man to show how he can knock it down.

But from here on in, it gets really woolly. So much so that it’s hard to critique in it’s entirety. It’s hard to pick out any meaningful idea to criticise because the way it’s presented is in a dreamy hypnotic style that drifts in and out of sense. There’s nothing for it but to dive right in and comment as it goes. From here on the words are Rob’s – my comments are italicised in square brackets – I’m going to have a quiet word with Rob, by interjecting in his consciousness, just as God does. I’m not entirely sure if this will work.

Rob continues with his observations on and criticisms of an existent God…

“..concept of God is a God who is outside of everything; a God who is essentially somewhere else. A God who made the world and who then stands back, and then, like, watches it from this other vantage point. A God who’s there [Pointing dramatically helps, Rob?] and then from time to time comes, here [Overdid the theatrical pause there Rob – looked a little fake (but this is quite muted compared to your Resurrection video)]. But the problem with this concept of God is you end up you haven’t even proved that this God even exists [That’s right, you haven’t; and nor do you ever prove, or give evidence for, or even a rational reason to accept, any of the bullshit that you invent to replace this God]. And so what happens is we start with real life, we start with existence, this, what we all agree actually exists [This is a good start]. And then people end up arguing and debating and discussing whether there’s a God somewhere else who has something to do with this [Well, some Christians will persist in believing God exists as an entity, and some will come back to it some time after denying it. But note what’s really happened here, Rob. You’ve managed to distance yourself from any requirement to define an existent God, without actually denying that God actually exists – which comes in handy later when you allude to God’s existence by saying what God ‘is’ or what God ‘is like’, or when you talk about why we were created, by God. Rob, I accuse you of woolly thinking, but really it’s quite an astute move – you been reading up on hypnosis techniques on how to confuse the listener?].

But the writers of the Bible seem far less interested in proving whether God exists, and far more interested in talking about what God is like. [How would you expect to find out what something is like when you’re not even sure it exists – or do you really think God exists, but you just choose to skip that bit because it’s an inconvenient problem? So, Rob, have we forgotten Genesis then, God as creator; you’re sure?] Like in the book of Exodus, a man named Moses wants to know God’s name and God responds “I am”[‘I am’, as in I exist? Confused Moses? You will be.], and then later God reminds Moses that when Moses heard God’s voice he saw no shape or form [Moses wouldn’t see God if Moses was hearing voices. When people ‘hear voices’ it’s real. Though the ear isn’t receiving any sound the auditory cortex is actually active, just as if they were really hearing a voice. So, we’ve established that the religious are hearing things. But, if God doesn’t exist, what is it that’s actually speaking to Moses? Couldn’t be Moses’s own sub-conscious could it? No, that’s way too straight forward for a Biblical story; heaven forbid – and apparently it does forbid the bleedin’ obvious. But, let’s continue Rob.]

God is beyond anything our minds can comprehend [But, Rob, theists are still keen to tell us God is love, etc., as you do later. So let’s keep this incomprehensibility in mind for when you get round to comprehending him, which is what you do when you describe him.] What does it mean to have a personal relationship with this kind of God? [Good question, let’s see how it goes.] That’s, like, hard to get your mind around [Well, it would be, Rob, since you haven’t told me anything yet, except there’s a non-existent God, or a God that exists but you don’t want to get into that, or a God who’s beyond comprehension – it is a tall order when you don’t appear to know what it is you’re talking about. Could it possibly be you’re inventing a relationship with yourself as a duality, as if there are two Robs, or is this friend completely imaginary?]

But you know I believe that God listens and God cares and God’s involved [Why? Given what you’ve just said, Rob, this statement is right out of the blue. Here’s an idea, why don’t we give this ‘out of the blue’ unsubstantiated belief that doesn’t rely on any reason whatsoever, why don’t we give it a name, like…’faith’ – oh, you already have? OK.], but I find the whole relationship idea hard to comprehend [You should, Rob! And you should be asking yourself serious sceptical questions, not trying to affirm it, not trying to use flaky pshyce techniques to influence your audience into falling for it too. But, so far, all you’ve said is you believe that God does a few things. But why do you believe that?]

And then, loving this kind of God [Whoa! What kind? You haven’t been able to comprehend him to say what kind he is.], what does that look like [You mean what does love look like, what does a relationship with a non-entity look like? What are you really asking Rob?], what does it mean [That’s a better question. No answer due any time soon.], and … how do you do it? [Another good one. No Answer coming.] Well when I think of God I hear a song [Nutty attempt coming up, but no real answer. This is semantically okay, but meaningless, unless you take it literally, that when he thinks of God he does actually hear a song. But, let’s take it that you’re about to use the act of listening to a song as a metaphor for constructing a relationship with God, or of hearing God. Doesn’t seem like a great metaphor to me – there’s supposed to some way of tallying the metaphor to the target, but this seems a little flaky. But, I forget; the whole point of this babble is to cuase confusion in the mind of the listener; sorry Rob. ].

It’s a song that moves me, it has a melody and it has a groove. It has a certain rhythm. [So, it’s a relationship that moves you? Is the metaphor really necessary for this bit? I would expect any good relationship to be like this, so the metaphor isn’t really meeting it’s objective, which is to explain a relationship with an incomprehensible being.] And people have heard this song for thousands and thousands of years across continents and cultures and time periods. [All Christians, or other theists too? And is the song we’re hearing now God, or is he saying many people have had relationships with God, which seems like a song? Confusing.] People have heard the song and they have found it captivating [So far this is song as a metaphor, not for God, but just what it feels like to those who have a relationship with God – they’ve had a captivating experience – okay, but again, this could be any relationship, not one specifically with an incomprehensible entity.] and they’ve wanted to hear more [okay, they are hooked on the song, but really they are hooked on the experience of the relationship. Got that].

But there have always been people who say there is no song and have denied the music, but the song keeps playing [Why don’t you just say there have always been atheists, or if that implies too much non-existence that you don’t want to get into then just say non-believers. The metaphor isn’t doing much work – but you’ve started it Rob, so you’re stuck with it I guess. But, yes, we atheists say your ‘song’ is only in the heads of those having the delusion]. And so, Jesus came to show us how to live in tune with the song [How to remain deluded? How to continue to fool yourself? How to convince yourself that the song inside your head is real in some sense, or that the relationship you have constructed is a real relationship with something real (yet incomprehensible) and not just like a relationship with a child’s imaginary friend?] ..way and the truth and the life [What does this mean? These are favourite meaningless tropes, rhetorical devices use for hypnotic effect. They are nonsense].

This isn’t a statement about one religion being better than all the others. The last thing Jesus came to do was start a new religion [Oops! What have those damn Christians gone and done? But, good point. How does that work with religions, Rob? A Jewish man comes along with some neat ideas, but not wanting to start a new religion, but inadvertently does, based on him (through no fault of his own). Would he reject Christians as idolaters?] he came to show us reality at its most raw [What? In what way did he do this, and what does it mean anyway? Was he explaining evolution red in tooth and claw? Don’t think so. And what has that to do with the song as metaphor for relationship with God? Don’t forget the song Rob.], and came to show us how things are [We didn’t know already? What did he actually show us? He had some nice cultural ideas, which were great, but that’s about it. Is this meant as in the hippy ‘tell it like is man’ phrase, was Jesus merely a hippy?] Jesus is like God [But we don’t know what the incomprehensible God is like yet, so what’s the point of saying Jesus is like him, unless Jesus is incomprehensible too?], and in taking on flesh and blood [Thought Jesus was God? He was like God in taking on flesh and blood? But God only took on flesh and blood in Jesus? Confusing meaningless hypnotic rhetoric], and so in his generosity and in his compassion, that’s what God’s like, in his telling of the truth, that’s what God’s like, in his love and forgiveness and sacrifice, that’s what God’s like [So, now we are defining God, through Jesus, as a simile? Hold on. I thought God was incomprehensible. Or is this another metaphor, Jesus’s behaviour as metaphor for God? The only incomprehensibility here is you Rob] That’s who God is, that’s how the song goes. [Utter bullshit. This has turned into a definition of God – remember the incomprehensible God that can’t be explained? And I thought this song was about one’s relationship with God, not a declaration of what this non-existent incomprehensible entity is].

[Something I’ve noticed here Rob, is how the sentences aren’t always complete, how the subject switches subtly from what is, at one moment, clearly a concept, to later being assumed to be fact. Admire your grasp of hypnosis Rob Oops, hold on, you’re back to the song.]

The song is playing all around us all the time [Just in your head, Rob, but you can’t tell the difference] the song is playing everywhere [No it isn’t Rob. Honestly. Unless you mean everywhere to you – which it would if it’s constantly playing in your head]. It’s written on our hearts [you mean you really feel the experience that you have just self-induced. Fair enough]. And everybody is playing the song [I thought we were listening to it, just hearing it, but now we’re playing it too. But, no we’re not Rob. Honest. I don’t know who’s supposed to be the most confused, Rob, you or the listener (I mean listener to you Rob, not listener to the song – sorry, I’m just confusing you/me/them all the more).].

See, the question isn’t whether or not you are playing the song [You just said we were! but now that’s not significant?], the question is are you in tune? [So, are we all playing, but some not in tune, or are some not actually playing the song but only hearing, in which case how can they get in tune if they aren’t actually playing?].

Like it’s written in the book of Acts …God gives us life and breath and everything else. God is generous [which is easy for a non-existent entity who relies on the faithful to not only to invent Him, but to invent his generosity]. So when I’m, like, selfish and stingy and I refuse to give, I’m essentially out of tune with the song. Later, in one of John’s letters he says that God is love; unrestrained, unconditional love [Another definition of that which is beyond comprehension – so you learned this trick from John?] So when you see somebody sacrifice themselves for another, for the wellbeing of somebody else, it’s like they’re playing in the right key, that’s why it’s so inspiring and powerful; they’re in tune with the song [Not just in tune, but also in the right key, ok. In tune with the person they are helping or in tune with God or in tune with the relationship with God? And suddenly sacrifice is related to the tune – I thought the tune was about a relationship, with God. Well, if any of your audience are having trouble keeping up with this, then good, they’re supposed to, right Rob?]

Now some people know all sorts of stuff about music, and they’ll talk about pitch, and modes, and keys [yes, you just did] and instruments, so they can hear things that maybe other people don’t, they can hear subtlety and nuance in the song, they appreciate things other people might miss, but it’s also possible to be so caught up in the technical aspects of the song that you miss the simple pure enjoyment of the song. [It’s also possible to be so caught up in the bullshit of presenting the message that there ends up being no discernible message – you might be stretching it a bit here Rob.] And there are people who talk as if they know everything about being a Christian, and yet they can seem way out of tune[Nice one Rob, distancing yourself from those Christians that claim to know, without acknowledging that through this message you are sort of claiming to know yourself. You are so slick]. And there are others who would say they don’t know much at all about the Christian faith, and yet they can see very in tune with the song[i.e. you Rob? – Say it Rob, don’t be bashful. Okay, so this snippet is just using the same ongoing metaphor, but this time to conjure up how some people may be interpreting scripture wrong, or God wrong? It’s so confusing it’s difficult to determine what the real point is. Does it make the audience feel in-group or out-group? If they’re in already they feel warm and cosy, if they’re out they’re missing out and want to get in? More rhetorical psyche trickery – excellently performed Rob].

I’ve met lots of people who struggle with what it means to have a relationship with God, but they haven’t lost faith and love and hope and truth and compassion and justice and generosity [They haven’t lost their faith, love, hope, etc., or they haven’t lost faith in God’s love; but then is it God’s hope they haven’t lost faith in or their hope…? This is yet more syntactically correct but semantic hypnotic nonsense Rob – your audience must be fully entranced by now]. They maybe have this sense, like, you have no relationship with God because of all these ideas about what that means, all these things that you’ve been told about what it is or what it isn’t [And Rob, you think you’re helping?]. And an infinite massive invisible God, that’s hard to get our minds around [Yes it is, but you’re skipping that bit, or are they okay to continue to believe the existence of the incomprehensible? All that’s left is the song in your head that isn’t heard by anyone outside. Your own auditory cortex, your God module, is convincing you that you’re hearing things and your pushing at it, willing it to be true. And all the while you’re sort of telling the audience to forget the big God issue, though avoiding actually saying it]. But truth, love, grace, mercy, justice, mercy, compassion, the way that Jesus lived; I can see that, I can understand that, I can relate to that [So you can relate to human emotions and feelings – well done. Why the God bit?] I can play (in) that song [Don’t you mean you can hear it, in this context?]“

Okay, back to reality. Thanks Rob, that’s as clear as mud.

When we talk of mixed metaphor it’s usually that someone has tried to relay a concept using elements of two or more metaphors, so it sounds a bit silly. But this is a more obscure mixture. The metaphor is the same throughout, but it’s use changes as it appears to be applied to a relationship with an unfathomable being, as a notion for this being, for some human actions of love, or maybe sacrifice, for the misunderstanding of scripture, for what Jesus came to do, the way Jesus lived, or as a definition of God, etc. But not only that, the metaphor switches so that to be in the game you have to hear the song, or to play the song, or to play in tune with the song – and I’m not sure if it’s any of those or all.

Encountering a theist like Rob is like receiving the Chinese Whispers, where every time you pin down a point with a question the answer doesn’t quite seem to match the case being questioned; so you ask another question, and the answer has moved on to yet a different meaning – until eventually, as if by magic, the very first statement you were questioning is stated again as if it answers the last question. There you are, right back at the beginning, with nothing learned, and nothing really said. There’s no temptation to feel as if you’ve lost the debate, as if your objections have been shown to be unfounded, because you can see they haven’t; but there is a frustration that comes from knowing that no matter what you ask, the theist is locked into their own self-deception that what they are saying is actually meaningful.

So the question remains, does God exist or are we knocking Genesis on the head? Are we relinquishing the idea that this God actually exists as some entity, either ‘out there’ or in your head, or in any respect by which he is the creator God? I don’t think so, and this is where the muddle headedness comes in. Theist will say, or suggest, or imply, or sidestep, as Bell does, that it is wrong to take the creation as literal, in the sense that some powerful entity created the universe and us, and that the notion that God exists as an entity out there isn’t of concern, as if they don’t need it. But, you can guarantee that somewhere along the line Genesis will be mentioned, and in that discussion there will be no reasonable way of taking it other than literal – that God actually created the world (though they may not read it literally in the six days Adam and Eve young earth Creationism sense – there are obviously grades of literalism). In fact it’s hard to get a theist to commit to anything along these lines, which is odd, since commitment and faith are supposed to be big pluses.

Given that these ideas are developed and dispersed in the theological institutions of the church or colleges it’s not surprising that the search for a common understanding results in something that is difficult to explain for the faithful and difficult to refute for the atheist.

I’ve often asked how you tell the difference between the delusion of being Napoleon and what I see as a delusion of belief in God. Rob Bell’s explanation just seems like self-induced delusion, and I guess that’s how I see the difference between a mad man who is off in La-La land, and the theist who appears to have their madness under self-control. And because it is self-induced, under the influence of the particular religion a person holds to, it is also well controlled, with affirmations for like-minded self-inducing people.

Note I’m not saying the theists don’t believe in their God, that there is intentional underhandedness – just that the belief is so strong and so intricately supported by the church that they are incapable of willfully applying reason beyond the point where it starts to seriously challenge their faith.

Some get past this point, and become atheists – the internet has plenty of ex-theists who now pave the way for others.

And some are on the cusp – they see many of the problems with their faith, but still maintain it. They question their faith seriously and have moments of doubt. But if you suggest that they have in fact reached the point where they can let go of their faith, they are likely to backtrack and re-affirm many of the points that they have otherwise put up for questioning.

And they rely on the likes of Rob Bell to help them maintain their faith. Have I already said this is woolly thinking? Well, it’s also a psyche trick to make the audience feel left out if they say no to any of this stuff. It’s meant to draw them in, isn’t it? It’s a standard hypnosis technique. It starts off with ordinary language, slowly calmly yet still lucid, but then introduces babble that the brain can’t quite focus on and draws you into the hypnotic state – the mind, in confusion, looks for someting to hang on to. Can’t remember who said it, but, “A drowning man will clutch at a straw; so hold him under water, then offer him the straw”, but it does describe the way this video is supposed to work. Listen to a Paul McKenna CD, or get a free DIY hypnosis download, or any relaxation CD. They draw you in with babble, slowing the pace of the words, not quite enunciating them, whispering in parts to make to lose mental focus.

Look up the definition of a cult and tell me it’s different from plain old religious belief. Look of explanations for hypnosis and tell me that’s not what’s going on in Rob’s beautifully scripted video. Welcome to the world of religious language.

Religion has nothing to do with science – and vice versa

Thanks to Alan’s comments for this link, where he say’s “Just found this story with which I agree.”:

Religion has nothing to do with science – and vice versa, by Francisco J. Ayala

Well, though I agree with some points, there are many specific ones with which I don’t agree, and I don’t agree with the general notion that Ayala makes.

Let’s start with this:

“On the other side, some people of faith believe that science conveys a materialistic view of the world that denies the existence of any reality outside the material world. Science, they think, is incompatible with their religious faith.”

and within that, this:

“denies the existence of any reality outside the material world.

First, that’s false. Many don’t deny it. They say there’s no evidence to show it. Why? Because we are material creatures. We have senses that detect the material world. We have a material brain that operates in the material realm. How the heck are we supposed to detect or otherwise see something that is non-material? Do the religious magically have access to a realm that all of science, including religious scientists, has been unable to detect in any way. Our instruments are designed especially to extend the scale of human experience – but nowhere, never, has there been evidence of supernatural forces. Everything that has been discovered has fallen within the bounds of natural laws.

“If they are properly understood, they cannot be in contradiction because science and religion concern different matters.” – Only to the extent that the religious want this to be the case, along with the odd atheist exception, such as Stephen Jay Gould, who just wanted to let us all get on.

“The scope of science is the world of nature: the reality that is observed, directly or indirectly, by our senses. Science advances explanations about the natural world, explanations that are accepted or rejected by observation and experiment.” – This bit is right.

“Outside the world of nature, however, science has no authority, no statements to make, no business whatsoever taking one position or another.” – This bit is right too. But what the religious don’t get is that it applies to them too! Science uses reason and the senses – exactly the same faculties available to the religious. There is nothing the religious can get at that scientists can’t. In fact it’s the other way round. Science has given us access to the brain – albeit we’re still in the early stages – so that there are many examples of the brain doing weird things that one particular example, experiencing God, is really no big deal. We have no examples of anything that confirms that an experience of God is actually that and not some trick of the brain.

“Science has nothing decisive to say about values, whether economic, aesthetic or moral” – Simply not true. Science has plenty to say about all these.

“…nothing to say about the meaning of life or its purpose.” – Simply not true. Results of science suggest that there is no purpose or meaning in the sense that religion would like there to be.

“Science has nothing to say, either, about religious beliefs, except…” – No exceptions. Science can say quite a lot about beliefs, and I’m sure will be saying more and more as the various branches of brain science expose more.

“People of faith need not be troubled that science is materialistic.” – Only if they want to ignore it and pretend it doesn’t have anything to say. Wishful thinking will not make science go away.

“The methods and scope of science remain within the world of matter.” – True. Same applies to you.

“It [science] cannot make assertions beyond that world.” – And neither can you or anyone religious. Well, not quite true. You can make the assertions – and often do, but based on nothing at all.

“Science transcends cultural, political and religious beliefs because it has nothing to say about these subjects.” – Warning! Pseudo-intellectual postmodern claim! What the hell does it mean by ‘transcends’ in this statement? The word is usually the reserve of the religious, to say what they know of is above or beyond, bigger and better (e.g. Lesley’s Rollins video). The word is sometimes used to mean ‘encompasses’, as in Venn diagrams when one encompasses another: the outer includes all that’s in the inner but ‘transcends’ it by encompassing more than is in the inner.

“That science is not constrained by cultural or religious differences is one of its great virtues.” – True. It can address anything the human mind and senses can address, because it is an instrument that expands the human mind and senses. If science can’t get at it then we can’t.

“Some scientists deny that there can be valid knowledge about values or about the meaning and purpose of the world and of human life.” – This is true, but curiously this isn’t the point he then goes on to describe with regard to Dawkins. He’s confusing the point about what we have access to, what we can know, which this statement is about, with some things that we actually do have ideas about: the denying of purpose (in the religious sense) (not values – Dawkins isn’t denying that)

“There is a monumental contradiction in these assertions. If its commitment to naturalism does not allow science to derive values, meaning or purposes from scientific knowledge, it surely does not allow it, either, to deny their existence.” – This totally misunderstands the point. The point is that science shows there is no inherent purpose in the universe, not even the characteristics that give rise to us (essentially issues regarding Entropy – it all just happens as the universe ‘winds down’, to give a simple expression). This in no way prevents us, as organisms with brains that evaluate our surroundings and our selves (echoes of the free will issues here), and to derive values and purpose for ourselves, based on non-teleological evolutionary directives.

“In its publication Teaching About Evolution and the Nature of Science, the US National Academy of Sciences emphatically asserts that religion and science answer different questions about the world…” – And this is supposed to tell us what? With all the kerfuffle in the US about religion, evolution, ID’s ‘teach the controversy’, etc., this is just a conciliatory nod to the religious that evolution won’t step on their toes if they don’t step on science’s. other than that, the specific issue of evolution doesn’t cross swords with liberal religion, since liberal religion accepts evolution and evolution doesn’t address ultimate origins; but it does very specifically deny Creationism’s young Earth claims.

“People of faith should stand in awe of the wondrous achievements of science. But they should not be troubled that science may deny their religious beliefs.” – Of course they should. Science, like any common sense approach to life, demands that we have evidence for what we are being told – otherwise you will be conned all to easily, by email scammers for one. The fact that these scams succeed is a testament to the gullibility of the human brain when left to it’s own devices. Belief in religion is another.

“Religion concerns the meaning and purpose of the world and human life” – for all it tries to do that, for all it makes claims, it has nothing to back that up. basically, even when you dress up liberal religion in postmodern ‘opinion’ truths, it says nothing more than, “What’s our purpose? Go is our purpose, or gives us our purpose, or demands our purpose, or loves us so we have the purpose to be loved, …”, and on and on with all sorts of unsubstantiated drivel that basically means they don’t know either, but they’ll have damned good fun making something up.

“[Religion concerns] the proper relation of people to their Creator and to each other” – Whoa! Hold on. “The proper relation of the people to the creator” – More postmodern bollocks. Without any evidence of a creator, or without the capacity to access the creator in order to establish there is a relation (remember, we are material beings. We don’t have access to the supernatural) Note how this grammatically reasonable but nonsensical sentence is given some semblance of meaning, “make sure we include something human, our relation to each other, just to give this nonsense some grounding in reality.”

“[Religion concerns] the moral values that inspire and govern their lives.” – Only because the religious make that claim, and then espouse morality as if they are the only ones with access to it.

“Science, on the other hand, concerns the processes that account for the natural world: how the planets move, the composition of matter and the atmosphere, the origin and function of organisms.” – And, one of these concerns is the workings of the human brain: neuroscience and evolution and anthropology suggest that internal personal ‘religious experiences’ are just brain anomalies, even if within normal bounds of variation; psychology and sociology and anthropology and evolution all suggest that external religious experiences and organisations are cultural memes that satisfied some requirement in the past.

“Religion has nothing definitive to say about …” – Well, about anything really. Religion is made-up stuff.

“According to Augustine, the great theologian of the early Christian church…” – And therein lies another problem. Augustine and other theologians concerned themselves with explaining what pertains once a belief in God is given. This puts anything else they have to say into doubt.

“Successful as it is, however, a scientific view of the world is hopelessly incomplete.” – Incomplete, yes, of course. It’s work in progress. Humans first appeared about 50,000 to 100,000 years ago – and this might be the point when we really began to use our brains, but the details are unclear. The first human markings on pottery go back about 5500 years. What we call science now had it’s base in Greek thought, but really took off just over a thousand years ago – about 1% – 2% of human existence? So, yes, we are still in our scientific infancy. We have no real conception of what science will be telling us about the brain, about religious belief, in another thousand years.

Because religion has been around for a while and science is so young, the religious seem to have the conceited view that theology has and continues to have access to great insights into the makings of the universe. But given that most of our current religious systems are not much different that those of two thousand years ago, give or take a bit of theological jiggery-pokery in the middle ages, I don’t see that religion has had anything to offer.

“Scientific knowledge may enrich aesthetic and moral perceptions and illuminate the significance of life and the world, but these matters are outside the realm of science.” – No they are not, because that would put them outside the realm of human beings, when it’s human beings that create both science (the process) and these perceptions (in our brains).

Ayala made some similar statements at the Buckingham Palace reception where he received his Templeton Foundation prize. Probably is best statement was this:

“Properly they cannot be in contradiction because they deal in different subjects. They are like two windows through which we look at the world; the world is one and the same, but what we see is different,…”

My response to that is that they could be. If religion stuck to it’s organisational and pastoral care roles then it has a lot to contribute to human affairs. It differs from science in this respect in that science is best at finding things out, telling us how the world is – even though through understanding the brain and human social issues it can contribute data to be used by religious organisations. This also seems in accord with what Alan has said on his blog – he sees the pragmatic value in religion, what it can do for us.

But if religion wants to tell us how or who created the universe, what interaction the personal brain is having with as yet unknown agents (i.e. God), then these are real questions of science. Cosmology and particle physics tells us much more about how the universe actually is, and as much as we can yet know about how it began, and no amount of theological navel gazing is going to improve on that. The branches of brain science are examining how the brain works, and how it doesn’t, how it fools itself, how gullible it is, and no amount of theological navel gazing and introspection is going to tell us anything better.

The religious need to move on. I haven’t read anything by some of the more liberally religious, such as Richard Holloway, recommended to me by Lesley. Though science can’t yet answer many of our questions about our origins and our interactions with internal agents, neither can religion, and science is in the best position to get those answers, eventually.

The Populode of the Musicolly

Terry Sanderson’s Guardian article discusses the issue of theological language, which I’ve been trying to interpret without success: Theology – truly a naked emperor (h/t http://richarddawkins.net)

First things first, it helps if you know what theology is about…

“What is theology? I think one of the best definitions was given by the sci-fi writer Robert A Heinlein:”

Heinlin, “Theology … is searching in a dark cellar at midnight for a black cat that isn’t there. Theologians can persuade themselves of anything.”

…
Down to business, the language…

“They can twist the language, invert the meaning of words, tie themselves into logical knots and then get admired for it.”
…
“Take Rowan Williams, for example, who is lauded far and wide for the vastness of his theological knowledge. He is said to have a brain the size of Jupiter because he can produce convoluted writing that nobody with their feet in reality can comprehend. And because no one can fathom it, it must be very important, right?”

Sanderson treats us to a few words from Williams…

Williams, “The word of God is not bound. God speaks, and the world is made; God speaks and the world is remade by the word incarnate. And our human speaking struggles to keep up. We need, not human words that will decisively capture what the word of God has done and is doing, but words that will show us how much time we have to take in fathoming this reality, helping us turn and move and see, from what may be infinitesimally different perspectives, the patterns of light and shadow in a world where the word’s light has been made manifest. It is no accident that the gospel which most unequivocally identifies Jesus as the word made flesh is the gospel most characterised by this same circling, hovering, recapitulatory style, as if nothing in human language could ever be a ‘last’ word.”

“But when he has reached the very depths of his profundity what does it amount to? I can do no better than HL Mencken, who said:”

Menken, “For centuries, theologians have been explaining the unknowable in terms of the-not-worth-knowing.”

“Theology is an excuse for grown men to spend their lives trying to convince themselves, and others, that ridiculous fairy tales are true.”

And Sanderson’s view of TV evangelists…

“Five minutes after tuning in to such a session, you will begin to wonder whether you’ve had one of those strokes that make your native language incomprehensible to you. You recognise individual words as English, but they have no meaning. … This is theology.”

“Theology is a completely and utterly useless pursuit. It is self-indulgence of the first order.”

Sanderson finishes by treating us to a use of language that is intentionally obscure, yet far clearer and easier to follow that the clip from Rowan Williams…

“If you wish to hear a really brilliant theologian at work, here’s a great one.”

Good Books and Pervasive Ideas

I watched Michael Mosley’s BBC Story Of Science (Episode 5) yesterday (get it while you can).

There were two messages I took from the programme, mainly because of the debates I’ve been having over on the blogs of Lesley and Alan. Those messages are:

  • The fallibility of the good books


  • The power and pervasiveness of science

Good/Bad Books

The story starts with Galen, the Roman physician and philosopher who mad remarkable progress in understanding the human body, its structure and it’s processes. He created what became the ‘good book’ of anatomy and physiology. This work was revered and studied for over a thousand years and became the ‘Bible’ of medicine.

The analogy with the Bible I want to draw out is the conviction with which its anatomy was held to be a true representation of the human body. The flaw lay in the fact that it was based on animal dissections. So despite it’s value it contained many inaccuracies that were propagated from teacher to student for centuries. But because of the authority of Galen’s book, and that of the teachers, the mistakes were believed to be truths.

Galen wasn’t challenged and further significant progress wasn’t made until Andreas Vesalius at University of Padua. Because the university wasn’t affiliated with the church the dissections of the human body, of criminals, as opposed to animal, at last began to give up its detailed secrets. Another break with tradition was that Vesalius got stuck in and found out for himself – where traditionally the teacher would have guided the demonstrator to do the dissecting by reading from Galen, describing, prescribing, what would be found, rather than what was found by the demonstrator, and all the students would nod and agree, they would bow to the authorities of the teacher and Galen’s good book.

Only when traditional boundaries and authorities were challenged would the good book’s flaws be exposed, and only when reality was dissected was the truth discovered. This should be a lesson for the religious. But sadly, for many, the old authority still rules. Even for the liberal Christian the Bible holds sway and influences their interpretations of what are personal experiences. That’s why there is no reasonable response to the charge that one good book, the Bible, is no better, no more true, that any other good book, such as the Quran. It’s all a matter of faith.

The Pervasive View of Science

The other message from the programme is one I’ve been trying to express in several ways. That is that science is not a completely different way of looking at the world.

It isn’t a new World View against which traditional Holy views must be rallied. It’s the same view we’ve always had. Science is, if anything, just a process of looking at the world more rigorously, in more detail and with finer precision, and with greater reliability.

Science does no more than account for and compensate for our own limitations, which it does through its methods for devising experiments and observational techniques, which are repeated by different people at different times in different places to rule out any local or biased influences, using instruments that extend the range of our natural senses.

This isn’t a magic against which we should be fighting. It isn’t telling us anything that is unbelievable. In fact quite the opposite, because it raises our confidence that what it’s telling us is true, increasing our trust in what it is showing us. We trust science every time we go under the surgeon’s knife and the anaesthetist gases; every time we take a trip in a plane; every time we type a blog post; every time we use a phone. We know science is the best use of the only tools we have of accessing knowledge: our reason and senses.

There is no other World View to be had that isn’t make-believe. If we can’t reason about it and sense it then we don’t know much about it – effectively nothing at all. If we can’t apply science to it, from our basic reason and senses to any of the specific methods that make up the scientific method, then what can we know about it? We have nothing else! Everything else that we make up just in our minds is fantasy. Our ideas, concepts, our nightmares, dreams, our monsters, goblins, unicorns, witches and gods – they are all fantasy; unless we can back them up, corroborate them, with our reason and senses. And the more strange our ideas the more confirmation we need before we should believe them.

If you believe you communicate with God; if there is an inner experience that is so convincing that you really believe it, if you have faith in it, I can’t offer more than say that the human brain sees and hears plenty of things that aren’t there, and we all know that this is the case. If you can’t review these examples and see that this might apply to you in some way, then what more can I do? If you think the vague paradoxical nonsensical irrational mystique of religious language is offering you an explanation for what you can’t otherwise demonstrate to be true, if you are prepared to be bamboozled into your faith, then I think you’re stuck with that.

Only the sceptical application of our reason and senses, most rigorously at work in science, will be able to set you free from the strangle hold of tradition. This isn’t some other way of knowing; there is no other way of knowing.

Free Will

The concept ‘free-will’ can be considered as one model for how the human organism operates in its outer environment. But this doesn’t show that free-will is not part of the causal framework in which the organism operates. A specific “act of free-will” is simply a model we use to describe what is still basically a causal physical response. It’s the notion of free-will as something independent of all the physical processes that all physicalists are disputing, and in this sense I think autonomous-free-will can be described as an illusion, or at best as a conceptual model.

I say free-will is a ‘model’ of response because thinking in terms of models allows us to accept a level of abstract detachment. We regularly use models for systems – conceptual ideas that represent something on a manageable arbitrary level. We do this probably because we have to – it’s how our brains manage external perceptions as patterns and memories, one of those perceptions being the self, another, free-will, being a model of how that self responds. It may be natural for the organism itself to feel that free-will is something the organism does actively and autonomously simply because of the proximity and complexity of how an act of free-will comes about.

If you accept causality and the level of physicalism that has been discussed here, then I don’t see how free-will in its religious and autonomous senses has any meaning. And without free-will what is religion, other than one more conceptual abstraction of the physical environment of the organism. All religious ideas come to us through reading, listening and seeing – all part of physical environment acting on the organism as a whole, and through layers down to the brain; the brain that already has a history and hence existing interconnections and chemistry that is amenable to these inputs, or not. Even an internally occurring “sign”, a revelation, can be explained as a religious event only in the context of pre-existing knowledge about religion.

For any individual, how does their brain respond to a religious idea (or any input)? As an excited, inhibited, or conditioned response (utilising yet another model of behaviour)? Probably in some complex combination. The emergent response to a religious idea may be whatever the organism’s brain does internally, plus how that operates on the outer organism. So a theist response might be to offer a supportive argument. This particular organism (me) might respond with a criticism. The fact that the response may be complex does not detract from the fact that it came about from a complex interaction of components within the organism, albeit with externally sourced inputs, many of which have been consolidated over time. We call that a free-will response, using the free-will model. But that’s all it is – it is a caused response (still assuming causality).

In this context the only difference between a person performing an act out of ‘free-will’ and one who has been induced into performing the act, say through hypnosis, is that the most influential and most recent causal events that preceded the act came from within the organism for the former, but from outside the organism for the latter.

One of the main objections to physicalist non-autonomous free-will comes about because it’s difficult for some to accept this point of view – but this in itself is a response, to prior physical activity. When you “feel” free-will must be real, that feeling itself is merely a response with a physical base.

The next paragraph is long winded because I’ve gone out the way to put it in terms of a non-agent mechanical reaction. We’re not used to doing this. It’s possible our natural language that describes us as agents that interact is a convenience, and efficiency that has evolved naturally, just as we naturally and conveniently attribute agency and free will to inanimate objects sometimes.

Other objections are associated with justice and culpability. You might ask me, “How can you justify locking up that ‘criminal’ organism, when on your model he didn’t ‘willfully’ carry out the crime?” My response would be, “Well, this organism’s response is to do just that.” All organisms tend to avoid self harm, and through evolved empathetic responses we generally try to avoid harm to others. That particular criminal organism caused harm, albeit indirectly and in a non-autonomous free-will caused sense, so the complex collective socially constructed response of this set of organisms, this social group, is to prevent further harm by locking up that criminal organism. The notion that this sequence of events might act as sufficient causal input to that criminal organism that in time it’s caused actions might be to no longer cause harm to others, is also compatible. Similarly, the desire for retribution can be considered as another physical response. The complexity of these interactions is not evidence against physicalism.

A physicalist view of free-will as an illusion or a model does not entail the collapse of society and morality. It may even inform us better than some of the many arbitrary and conflicting reasonings of the various religions.

Irrational Science Denial

TED Video: The danger of science denial:

People wrap themselves in their beliefs, and they do it so tightly that you can’t set them free. Not even the truth will set them free. And, listen, everyone’s entitled to their opinion; they’re even entitled to their opinion about progress, but you know what you’re not entitled to? You’re not entitled to your own facts. Sorry, you’re not.

There are questions and problems with the people we used to believe were always right. So be skeptical. Ask questions, demand proof, demand evidence. Don’t take anything for granted. But here’s the thing: When you get proof, you need to accept the proof, and we’re not that good at doing that.

Now, we love to wrap ourselves in lies. We love to do it. Everyone take their vitamins this morning? Echinacea, a little antioxidant to get you going. I know you did because half of Americans do every day. They take the stuff, and they take alternative medicines, and it doesn’t matter how often we find out that they’re useless. The data says it all the time. They darken your urine. They almost never do more than that.

Well, I think I understand, we hate big pharma. … So we run away from it, and where do we run? We leap into the arms of big placebo. … But, you know, it’s really a serious thing because this stuff is crap…

And you know what? When I say this stuff, people scream at me, and they say, “What do you care? Let people do what they want to do. it makes them feel good.” And you know what? You’re wrong. Because I don’t care if it’s the secretary of H.H.S. who’s saying, “Hmm, I’m not going to take the evidence of my experts on mammograms,” or some cancer quack who wants to treat his patient with coffee enemas. When you start down the road where belief and magic replace evidence and science, you end up in a place you don’t want to be. You end up in Thabo Mbeki South Africa. He killed 400,000 of his people by insisting that beetroot garlic and lemon oil were much more effective than the antiretroviral drugs we know can slow the course of AIDS.

Watch for more.

Truth Matters

A liberal believer may claim that their faith is benign. They want to get on with their own faith, want to do good, want to enjoy the community and other perceived benefits of their faith. It may be a personal faith, where they at least doubt some of the contents of scripture. If challenged about the evidence that supports their faith they might debate some of the details, but in the end both sides have to acknowledge that for many believers, the faith, the belief, in the end need not be justified by rational argument. Such a benign faith is distinguished from ‘fundamental’ faith, in that there are elements of rationality to it. An atheist might agree with such a person in many ways about what should constitute a moral society, for example. Though the atheist might attribute his moral code to evolutionary and cultural developments, the liberal believer might attribute theirs more to God, even if there is some agreement on the role of evolution and culture.

Given this view that it is personal and benign, a question might arise, “Does it matter?” Or, “What’s it to the atheist what I believe or not?”, Or, “What harm is it doing?”. Or, “Given all the good that religion does, provided it’s a benign religion that isn’t ‘fundamentalist’, doesn’t do harm, what’s the problem?”

For me it’s the truth that matters, and the only route to truth we have as far as I can tell is reason and the evidence of science.

One problem as I see it for any benign faith is that it’s a mix of reason, evidence and faith. The reason helps such a believer to dismiss all the nasty and down right obvious crazy stuff, but it stops short with the basic belief in a God of some sort. To give up on reason and evidence at that point seems to have negated much of the benefit put in it up front. But it’s not always obvious where the reason ends and the faith begins. The reason melds seamlessly into confusion as religious reasons merges into obscure religious language.

Confusion and obfuscation are arguably the best way to go. Obfuscation is legal, it’s easy, there’s always an abundant supply and it often does the trick. The more unclear it is exactly what one is arguing, the more trouble one’s opponents will have in refuting one’s claims. [1]

It’s also arguable that obfuscation is what postmodernism is all about. Clouds of squid ink in the form of jargon, mathematical equations whose relevance is obscure, peacock displays of name-dropping, misappropriation and misapplication of scientific theories are often seen as postmodernist ‘discourse’. Nietzsche, Heidegger, Heisenberg, Einstein, Gödel, Wittgenstein are hauled in and cited as saying things they didn’t say – sometimes as saying exactly the opposite of what they said. … The tactic doesn’t work with people who actually know something of Einstein, Heisenberg or Gödel – but what of it? How many people is that? And it does work with many who don’t. [1]

I’m not out to criticise the ignorant simply for being ignorant. None of us has the capacity to know all that has been discovered – we may be limited by time, access, interest or intelligence. The problem is that those making great claims for their world view that use these references should really check with those that have a better understanding before jumping straight in and acquiring this knowledge in the construction of their pseudo-knowledge.

The confusion of course raises it’s own questions for the believers.

Asking unanswerable questions is an inconclusive but useful tactic. … “But why did all this happen? Why is there something rather than nothing? Why is there Mind? Why is there order? … The fact that no one can answer such questions is taken by the pure of heart and limpid of mind to entail divine explanation. The fact that such explanation allows the questions to be asked all over again seems not to trouble the divinely inclined. [1]

i.e. God answers nothing.

Of course if the questions are allowed to continue, the contortions of explanation become greater and greater, more obscure language is employed. It is more important that the faith is maintained, at the expense of clarity and reason.

In fact, the contortions are a giveaway not only that the explanation is not the right one, but that something is badly wrong with the method of generating the explanation, that things are back to front, that the enquirer has started, not with a desire to produce an explanation, but with the desire to produce a particular explanation, or a particular kind of explanation. [1]

What is necessary to get at truth?

What should trump what? Should rational enquiry, sound evidence, norms of accuracy, logical inference trump human needs, desires, fears, hopes? Or should our wishes and beliefs, politics and morality, dreams and visions be allowed to shape our decisions about what constitutes good evidence, what criteria determine whether an explanation is supported by evidence or not, what is admissible and what isn’t? [1]

How much do we want the truth?

The truth is important to us, but so are our needs and desires and hopes and fears. Without them we wouldn’t even recognise ourselves. Without them, we think, we would merely be something like an adding machine. An adding machine can get at the truth, given the right input, but it doesn’t care. We want the truth but we also want to care – wanting the truth is indeed inseparable from caring. We want it, we care about it, it matters, and so do various other things we want and care about, some of which are threatened by the truth. … But we have to choose. … If we’ve never bothered to decide that truth matters, and that it shouldn’t be subject to our wishes – that, in short, wishful thinking is bad thinking – then we are likely to be far less aware of the tension. We simply allow ourselves, without much worry or reflection, to assume that the way humans want the world to be is the way the world is, more or less by definition – and endemic confusion and muddle is the result. [1]

The muddle and confusion is so obvious in the Alice in Wonderland nonsense of much religious language – the desire to believe in the impossible (or at least un-evidenced) things manufactures incomprehensible language about incomprehensible beings, agents that interact yet don’t exist, that we can’t know of yet we know what they want from us.

Religion and related modes of thinking such as New Age, Wicca, paganism, the vaguely named ‘spirituality’, are where this outcome is most obvious. Public discourse features talk of God-shaped holes, of a deep human need for ‘faith’, of the longing of transcendence, of the despair and cosmic loneliness that results when God is doubted, and the like … without apparently stopping to notice that there may be reasons to prefer true beliefs rather than false ones. [1]

What reasons? There are many. One is truth is something of an all-or-nothing proposition. It is intimately related to concepts such as consistency, thoroughness, universal applicability, and the like. If one decides that truth doesn’t matter in one area what is to prevent one deciding it doesn’t matter in any, in all? [1]

It’s surely the nature of truth that it has to be all of a piece. It’s norms have to apply here as well as there, if they are to apply at all. That is why relativism about truth is always self-undermining. If we say, ‘there is no truth, truth is an illusion, a myth, a construct, a mystification’ then that statement is not true – so there is truth then. [1]

Does it matter that we kid ourselves?

Our internal private thoughts might not matter at all. … But how we influence each other, how we teach – by writing, by journalism, by talking on the radio, on platforms, in churches, in mosques, in classrooms – it does matter. If we are going to influence people, it’s important we get it right. [1]

This is crucial as far as I can see. There’s enough fog, lack of clarity, confusion, in transcribing thoughts from one mind to another as it is. The last thing we need is the obfuscation of falsehoods. But it doesn’t have to be lies. There doesn’t need to be intentional dishonestly. The transmission of unsupported ideas, non-truths, non-facts, sold as truths, or alternative truths is an easily acquired skill.

It might seem like there are good reasons to hide from truth. When it’s trivial, when it’s short term, then maybe we can excuse it. It might be a useful coping mechanism that allows us to avert pain, to concentrate on work, to withdraw from anger. But this isn’t to deny the truth, it’s just to postpone it, compartmentalise it, to push attention to one side. But this shouldn’t become the rule, if we want to avoid living outside of reality. Truth isn’t subject to our whims, our wishful thinking. But it’s possible to live that way if we get into the habit.

If we minimize true facts that we dislike too often, we may lose sight of the fact that it is our reaction and degree of attention that is subject to our wills, and start to think that the facts themselves are subject to our wills. But on the whole they’re not. [1]

Religious scholarship, theology, seems to me to be worst of the search for the answers. What kind of search for truth is it, when the truth is declared before the search begins, when search is directed at affirming what is already believed to be the truth? This isn’t the discovery of truth; it’s rationalising away the evidence to affirm the truth. Religion is often explained as a journey of discovery. This is the poorest form of journey of discovery; it’s a journey through the front door that ends on the doorstep, where the ‘truth’ is already packaged up neatly into a three letter word, God. The only remaining work to do is to go back inside and rationalise about how this might be, or what it might mean, or how it can be applied to persuade people to conform to it. No evidence is required; in fact evidence has been a nuisance for religion from the start. As soon as someone asked, “How do you know that?”, religion was on the defensive.

Religion is a big part of our lives, even if we are non-believers, because it is so ingrained in our history. But religion is supposed to be an honest affair isn’t it? Don’t we have enough to contend with?

There are fields where indifference to truth is no handicap – advertising, PR, fashion, lobbying, marketing, entertainment. In fact there are whole large, well paid, high status areas of the economy where truth-scepticism, wishful thinking, fantasy, suspension of disbelief, deletion of the boundary between dreams and reality, are not only not a handicap, but essential to the enterprise. … We need our dreams and stories, our imaginaries. They are good for us. We need the cognitive rest from confronting reality all day, we need to be able to imagine alternatives, we need the pleasure of fantasy. But we also need to hang on to our awareness of the difference between dreams and reality. [1]

The more we realise both our fallibilities at knowing, and the more we realise that our only route to knowledge is through our fallible reason and senses, and the more we realise that the best we can do is repeat and repeat, thrash out what we think we know, hammer it into submission to our inquiry, the more religion, mysticism and other ‘ways of knowing’ has to retreat into the obscurity of mystical language.

Given religions penchant for morality, why isn’t it the most rigorous of our philosophies? How wrong can we be in our search for alternative realities, alternative truths? It’s not all religion’s fault, though religion is often happy to jump on the bandwagon of unreason.

There is a profound irony in the situation – in postmodernist epistemic relativism. It is thought to be, and often touted as, emancipatory. It is supposed to set us all free: free from all those coercive repressive restrictive hegemonic totalizing old ideas. From white male western reason and science, from the requirement to heed the boundary between science and pseudo science, from the need to offer genuine evidence for our versions of history, from scholars who point out we have our facts wrong. … Take away reasoned argument and the requirement for reference to evidence – by discrediting them via deconstruction and rhetoric, via scare quotes and mocking capital letters, and what can be left other than force of one kind or another? … This is emancipatory? Not in our view. It is not emancipatory because it helps emotive rhetoric to prevail over reason and evidence, which means it helps falsehood prevail over truth. [1]

Even for benign religion? Well, precisely the same mechanisms, the same poor reasoning, the emotive language, the same style of faith, is used to justify a liberal believer’s opinion as is used to justify a fundamentalist terrorist’s opinion. The subsuming of reason and science to faith is the same in both cases. If you have faith in a benign God, from what stance to you argue against faith in a vengeful God? No matter how much you think you might reason it will do you no good, because you have already abandoned reason yourself – it’s clear to all concerned that any reason you apply is only a token gesture, because to you your core is faith, not reason.

So, why does truth matter? It’s hard figuring out what ‘truth’ is and how to get at it. We have only limited means at our disposal. I’d rather all our efforts go into finding the truth for what it is, not inventing ‘truth’ for which there’s no evidence, no matter how cosy it makes us feel, no matter what the short term pragmatic value.

[1] http://www.whytruthmatters.com/
Why Truth Matters – Ophelia Benson, Jeremy Stangroom