Tag: Religion

Relaxing the Celibacy Rules?

Father Edward Daly is in favour of relaxing the celibacy rules.

As an atheist I’m not too bothered what the rules of the club of Roman Catholic priests might be, but as a humanist I’d support their freedom of choice to be celibate or not as their personal religious conscience takes them.

But there’s something hypocritical about a bishop who thinks the rules should change for the expedient reason of encouraging more priests by the relaxation of the celibacy rule. This is another instance of what in secular terms is common sense, but in theistic terms is a denial of what the church considers essential church dogma. I wonder what the bishop thinks about contraception. Is he equally flexible on that score? My suggestions on that come shortly, if you’ll pardon the expression.

Well, according to the article the rule was brought in for both spiritual and pragmatic reasons, “Historians have contended that the move was partly for spiritual reasons, but was mainly to ensure estates held by clerics would pass back to the church upon their deaths rather than to offspring.” so no change in convenient policy making then, as long as you can attach some holy reasoning to it. So, what spiritual reason does Father Daly have for his proposed change that might excuse his earthly one? “..under the guidance of the holy spirit…” Well as a catholic it appears he still has access to the hot line to god and is waiting for a call that contains the answer.

I find it odd that the holy spirit works this way and gives such varied messages to so many different religious listeners. It’s as if the messages are encrypted and each theist has his own decryption key which coincidentally provides a specifically different but to them coherent message for each listener.

The move by the Vatican to make allowances to Anglican marrieds to join the RC church reminds me of the skulduggery that has sometimes plagued the football transfer market. Anglican priests are offered a bung of non-celibacy to make the transfer.

A say again, from a secular view all these pragmatic changes make perfect sense. But to push so many church rules as spiritual dogmatic requirements, as essentials to the faith, for years, centuries even, and then to change them for non-spiritual reasons of convenience, just highlights the bollocks that is the RC church anyway.

So, if you’re a relaxed Roman Catholic and you find some rule particularly inconvenient, write to your bishop and suggest that you would like it changed because it is a bit of an inconvenience to you; but promise you will wait for a call from the holy spirit in the expectation that a spiritual reason will be provided in due course. For example, a condom could be considered a symbolic representation of your celibacy: you’re not shagging a women but cloaking your penis in a holy shroud. With luck, in time, the Vatican will come around to the idea that this symbolic representation should become a literal one, just as a wafer actually becomes the body of Christ, and wine his blood. Then you’ll be able to add real spiritual ecstasy to your very mortal human experience.

And, a bunus: that’ll solve the problem of AIDS in Africa! And, the RC church gets all the credit! Result!

I tell you, this theological stuff is easy. I sometimes wish I were religious. Making up holy shit is great fun.

Stephen Law to debate William Lane Craig

Stephen Law is to debate William Lane Craig on “Does God Exist?”.

Some time ago Richard Carrier was lured into a debate with Muslim theists which was supposed to propose something like “We can prove God exists”, but at the last minute was changed to “We cannot prove God exists” (can’t remember the details). Carrier went from looking at an easy ride to being knocked out by a sucker punch because he played their game. His opener at the actual event should have been, “I concede we cannot prove God exists, so my opponents win the debate. Now, let’s get down to some interesting points about philosophy and science: this is why I don’t believe in God.”

The title of this debate pretty neutral, but I’d recommend a similar tactic with WLC: that SL doesn’t get into playing WLC’s game, or even necessarily trying to rebut his points. He should simply present his own case, pretty much ignore WLC, and just dismiss his argument totally with fundamental philosophy.

One of WLC’s moves is to concentrate on the ‘failure’ of science to disprove God’s existence, as though atheists think that possible or necessary.

The key points for me are as follows…

We humans have found ourselves to be thinking beings, and this awareness appears to have been sprung upon us some few thousand years ago, at least as far back as we can tell from philosophical and religious writings and artifacts. And with the hindsight of evolution this thinking capacity appears to be a recent acquisition, and we’re not as good at it as WLC likes to think he is, particularly with regard to the metaphysics of things outside our common experience.

The only tools we find provide knowledge consistent over wide areas of our understanding of reality are all tools of science. And science can demonstrate many instances where introspective thinking and the invention of fanciful theistic explanations of events are woefully incorrect and often incoherent. Whatever we think reality might be our only route to it is through science. That someone believes there is a God has no bearing whatsoever on the actual existence of a God, no matter how inventive their logic, because there logic will always come back to the dependence on the presupposition that there is a God – to do the revealing, to inspire or command the authoring of religious texts.

If there’s any proving to be done, or any evidence required, the responsibility is entirely on the theist to provide it. Everything we do come to know about this universe shouts out at us that there is some causal universe that conforms to various patterns, which we understand as the laws of physics. If theists like WLC want to take a pop the limitations of science, then he has to accept that these very limitations apply to him too – he cannot demonstrate a superior capacity to know stuff.

These laws are so pervasive, so in-your-face, every moment of every day conforms to them – except, supposedly, with respect to God, astrology, ESP and a few other unsubstantiated ideas. These latter beliefs are the exceptions – but where is the evidence to support them?

Because they are the exceptions the null hypothesis is that everything conforms to the laws of physics, just as we find, evidentially, empirically. Even our own existence, according to evolution, conforms to these laws; and what’s more, shows us that our predecessors were empirical sensory animals. Our cognitive abilities appear to lie on the same continuum that our physical attributes do, from our evolutionary past. Our particular self-aware introspective cognition is such a late addition we should be very wary of supposing it to be the pinnacle of creation, the precise and acute tool that WLC thinks his mind is, rather than a fallible tool, a temporary blip in an evolutionary history of one particular species. Our intellect appears to be just one more product of evolution, with a primary purpose of helping us survive. There’s no reason to believe that it has any greater capacity than that, no particular reason that it should give us access to some metaphysical supernatural – except to the extent that this very limited intellect mistakenly thinks we can.

These other ideas, these metaphysical speculations, constitute the alternative hypotheses. They have never been demonstrated, with either rationally sound argument or substantial evidence. They remain unsupportable, though irrationally believed to be true. The null hypothesis, that everything conforms to whatever our understanding of physics is, or comes to be, remains intact.

WLC can dress up his arguments all he likes. He can complain that atheists cannot disprove God as long as he likes to hear his own voice profess it – but that’s irrelevant. He misses the point of science entirely. He doesn’t get that science shows us the limitations of our brains to reason about the inaccessible without supporting evidence; and in doing so overestimates his own capacity to know things he claims are true. WLC is just pissing against the wind – and his followers haven’t noticed this because they are too busy admiring his rhetorical big dick.

I do hope (against the odds) that SL doesn’t get bogged down in his favourite ‘problem of evil’ argument. It’s unlikely to survive the irrationality of WLC. Though the problem of evil as dealt with by SL’s ‘God of Eth’ may be convincing to rational minds, it won’t make a dent on the minds of believers if they don’t want it to.

SL should stick to basic philosophy and our current understanding of science. He should call WLC out on the presuppositions that underpin WLC’s otherwise persuasive rhetoric (persuasive to the gullible at least). SL should be thorough in his philsophy and should not try to debate theology. He should just ignore any temptation to try to win the debate and be content with letting his rational arguments land on a few theistic yet open ears.

Fingers crossed.

Update: coincidentally appropriate Jesus and Mo cartoon. WLC thinks he knows more than he can, as do many theists. But to be fair, I’m not a professional philosopher either, so who am I to judge WLC, or my own philosophical capabilities. We have to remain sceptical about our own ability to know stuff – not something WLC seems to suffer from.

Why Islam?

One theme comes out in comments by some Muslims on recent programmes about Islam, “Why pick on Islam?”

I’m not a fan of any faith, given that they all have dodgy interpretations. But Islam seems to be at the centre of many faith conflicts. I just happened to catch a few recent episodes of BBC Radio 4’s Beyond Belief.

Try these episodes, while you can:
07 Feb 2011 – Sunni/Shia Tensions – Islam v Islam
24 Jan 2011 – Ayodhya – Hindu v Islam
17 Jan 2011 – Egypt – Christianity v Islam

In addition to the victim question, “Why pick on Islam?”, there’s also the other element, of minimising the extent to which Islam is often interpreted in a violent manner, such as the persecution of apostates, as described in the 17 Jan episode.

Maybe Muslims feel they are the centre of criticism. But maybe that’s because there is plenty to criticise.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

Belief in Belief & Practical v Factual Realism

I seems to go unsaid by ‘believers’, most of the time, but occasionally on blogs it might be admitted to explicitly, that there might be no God. Or it might be said that it doesn’t matter if there is no God.

To some extent this is a step in the right direction. But I can’t help but feel it smacks of being ungenuine; there appears to be a dishonesty there, buried somewhere deep in the otherwise honest view that faith is good for us, even if it’s a faith in something that doesn’t exist. If faith developed by some evolutionary mechanism and had some purpose in the past, is it okay to go on believing now, even if you feel there’s nothing there, or if you feel it doesn’t matter if there’s something there of not?

Dan Dennett, in his AAI 2007, Good Reasons for “Believing” in God talk covers a number of reasons for believing, and addressed this particular notion.

He identifies a self-censorship by preachers, who wouldn’t dream of saying openly that God does not exist. Maybe some are more open in their true beliefs – certainly enough to say it on a blog, and for those this might turn out to be a brave move. Fessing up to this hidden truth is something Dennett concedes is courageous in his talk.

Dennett says the God of old, Yahweh, is like Mount Everest – it’s there for all to see and exists without question. But, he explains, God has been watered down, until it has become like low rolling hills – not quite so obvious. But in the minds of the modern theologian it resembles more of an insubstantial mist, a fog.

What follows is some of Dan’s talk. Towards the end Dennett includes words from David Sloan Wilson’s book, as if in debate. In what follows the two parts are identified by DD and DSW.

DD – Gradually, over the years, the concept of God is watered down. These personal revisions are passed on without notice. not just from preachers, but from parents talking to their children. Gradually, from what started out as a Mount Everest type concept of God, becomes a sort of amorphous cloudy mysterious concept that nobody really knows what it is. Mystery is itself elevated and considered to be wonderful. And we get the privatisation of the concepts – this is particularly true in the cases of the mega churches in this country [USA] where, “We don’t care what your concept of God is, just so long as you’re One With Jesus and you come to the church.” So they’re actually allowing to freelance and come up with your own concept of God. It doesn’t matter what concept of God you have, “[whisper] because nobody believes it anyway.”

DD – So we get the almost comical confusion of today. It’s very important this happened [the change in what God is] imperceptably. If it was sped up it would just be hilarious; the revision piled on revision; and all in one direction.

[…]

DD – Here’s a quote:

“It is the final proof of God’s omnipotence that he need not exist in order to save us”

DD – Now, that’s a wonderful joke by Peter De Vries in his hilarious novel The Mackerel Plaza, back in 1958. But…

“God is so great that the greatness precludes existence.” – Raimon Panikkar in The Silence of God: The Answer of the Buddha (1989)

DD – That is not a joke. That is said in all po faced seriousness.

[…]

Dennett finally addresses one of the ways of treating this God that isn’t there, as a myth, as another form of reality. He tackles David Sloan Wilson’s account of ways of believing, form Wilson’s book, Darwin’s Cathedral, 2002, in which Wilson uses the terms:

Factual Realism and Practical Realism. He quotes from the book…

DSW – It’s true that many religious beliefs are false as literal descriptions of the world, but this merely forces us to recognise two forms of realism: a factual realism based on literal correspondence, and a practical realism based on behavioural adaptiveness. An atheist historian who understood the real life of Jesus but who’s own life was a mess as a result of his beliefs would be factually attached to and practically detached from reality.

DD – So he ought to believe a myth even at the expense of his factual knowledge in order to keep his life not a mess? That seems to be the implication.

DSW – Rationality is not the gold standard against which all other forms of thought are to be judged. Adaptation is the gold standard against which rationality must be judged, along with all other forms of thought.

DD – If this were a philosophical audiance and it weren’t so late at night I’d take issue with that, but I just draw your attention to these passages.

DSW – It is the person who elevates factual truth above practical truth who must be accused of mental weakness from an evolutionary perspective. If there is a trade off between the two forms of realism such that our beliefs can become more adaptive only by becoming factually less true, then factual realism will be the loser every time.

DD – So he seems to be giving what he thinks of as an evolutionary endorsement for practical realism over factual realism.

DSW – Many intellectual traditions and scientific theories of the past decades have a similar silly and purpose driven quality once their cloak of factual plausability has been yanked away by the hand of time. If believing something for its desired consequences is a crime, then let those who are without guilt cast the first stone.

DD – I want to point out the fundamental difference betwee factual realism and practical realism is that the truth or faslity of factual realist theories is always an issue. Imagine if a priest were to say, “of course there really isn’t a God who listens to your prayers; that’s just a useful fiction, an over simplification.” No, even the Unitarians don’t just blurt out the fact that these may be useful fictions, since it’s quite apparent that their utility depends on their not being acknowledge to be fictions. In other words, practical realism as recommended by David Sloan Wilson is paternalistic and disingenuous.

DSW – It appears that factual knowledge is not always sufficient by itself to motivate adaptive bahaviour. AT time a symbolic beliefe system that departs from factual reality fairs better.

DD – At what? At motivating behaviour. Well, you know I think he’s right about that. Is this a recommendation that one should lie when it will lead to adaptive behaviour? Does Wilson recognise the implication of his position?

[Dennett shows a photo of the Bush Adminsitration team: Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld]

DD – Let us consider, practical realism of Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld. In a chilling article several years ago by Ron Suskind, White House correspondent, we get the following quote, “The aide said that guys like me were ‘in what we call the reality-based community,’ which he defined as people who ‘believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.’ I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ‘That’s not the way the world really works anymore,’ he continued. ‘We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.’“

DD – There’s practical realism for you. It seems to me that David Sloan Wilson hasn’t thought this through. He maybe though actually saying that we are confronted with a sort of tradgedy. It may be that our quest for scientific truth has somehow trapped us: It’s too late for practical reality, that was for bygone days, we’re stuck now with factual reality, which some times won’t motivate us. We just know too much. We can never again act honestly, and honestly follow the path of practical realism.

DD – I don’t believe it. But that might be the position that he holds. Well if so we will just have to do the best we can guided by our knowledge. We will have to set ‘practical’ realism aside; it’s too late for that. there’s no going back.

DD – But, I’m actually optimistic. here we see the Vatican [picture]. Twenty years ago If I had stood up and said in a few years the Soviet Union woill evaporate, it will not exist any more, people would have laughed. If I’d sai Aprteid will be gone in just hew years, people would have laughed. Sometimes institutions that seem to be massive and have tremendous inertia can just pop like a bubble. So, how do we know until we try? Maybe within our childrens’ lifetime the Vatican will become the European Museum of Roman Catholicism. And maybe mecca will become Disney’s Magic Kingdom of Allah. If you think that’s funny just bare in mind that the hagia Sofia in Istanbul started off as a church, then it was a mosque, and today it’s a museum.

Of course Dennett is seeing the possible consequences of the lying that is implicit in this position of holding to a fictional practical realism over a less comfortable factual realism. It’s no good simply saying that continuing to believe in belief, while knowing that the belief you’re believing in is false, is okay because if makes people feel good, or behave well. Those you incite to believe false beliefs have a habit of interpreting those beliefs for themselves.

So, no matter how stupifying the belief is, I don’t think it’s worth it in the end.

According to Dennett, “it’s quite apparent that their utility depends on their not being acknowledge to be fictions. In other words, practical realism … is paternalistic and disingenuous.”

It’s also dangerous.

God Speaks

In the previous post, Psychology of Belief, perhaps the most interesting of the videos is this one: Psychology of Belief, Part 6: Hallucinations.

One of the believers in the video said, “God speaks in a whole bunch of different ways”, and there’s the rub. For the believer who avoids inflicting some of the psychological influences on others, do they check to see if they’ve been influenced that way? I think this particular psychological effect is probably the trick that holds it all together, the self-affirmation, the self-reassurance, that all the other psyche effects are in fact valid, because we’ve experienced God speaking to us. But have we?

Being told to listen and God will speak can lead us to interpret that in any way that seems to fit – confirmation bias – and so maybe our own intense feelings are interpreted as God speaking. When we think of how our brains work, using what little we yet know, we have a mechanism that consists of neurons, chemicals and electrical impulses, and out of that come feelings, sub-conscious events, and conscious awareness and thoughts. The latest thinking is that the conscious thoughts we have are the outcome, the awareness that comes to the fore, of other events in the brain; so that conscious thoughts are post-event stories that we use to monitor what the brain is doing and to plan and feedback down to the sub-conscious and the motor areas. This is a mechanism that builds from birth and is something we take from granted as much as speaking – when in the full flow of free conversation we have no idea how the vague notions that we want to express are formed into grammatical words and syntactic sentences, it just happens.

Using this model it seems plausible that we could mistake rising awareness of feelings and sub-conscious thoughts as being from elsewhere. We have so many instances where thoughts just pop into our heads, and if we have the time to consider we sometimes wonder, where did that come from. We notice it most when we’re with someone and we’ve been trying to remember a name but can’t quite get it, so we forget the search, and sometime later up it pops, and we wonder, where did that come from? This particular type of event is so noticeable that we even comment to each other – if I suddenly say the name, ‘out of the blue’, the other person will ask, where did that come from?

Some pop ups have an obvious cause. If I’m thinking about a topic in full concentrations and something comes into my field of vision, or the phone rings, it’s clear that the interruption, the pop up, has an external source. If I suddenly get an itch, or a stomach ache, I know the noticeable has come from my body. But how do we judge were subconscious thoughts and feelings come from. The sudden intense rush of inspiration or insight or overwhelming awe or a divine intervention such as words from God, I think, are all events that occur in the brain through the stimulation of intense thought, the power of stress, or any number neurological stimulations.

That the brain is capable of intense feelings from neurological events is indisputable – that is how the brain works after all. But to put it in context we can think of the images of brain seizures, such as epilepsy, as an extreme case of brain event that is out of control. I’m not say that clinically these inspirational events are the same in any way – I don’t know the neurophysiology of what’s happening – but as an extreme model it seems plausible. The fact that epilepsy has been speculated to be the cause of many recorded events in history is an indication of the similarity, whether it be possession by demons, appearances of visions or words from God.

This video is one in a series on epilepsy. Though this series is focusing on the clinical condition of epilepsy it does give some insight into how the brain can have extreme events; and it’s something like this I’m speculation could be the mode of operation of inspiring brain events – as opposed to real words from God or possession by demons. Which seems more likely? Video #1 is also of interest in this context.

Having a feeling that we are in touch with God, or that we experience God does have a possible neurobiological explanation. There’s the notion of the ‘God module’ in the brain. I missed this Horizon programme. I don’t know to what extent Dr Daniel Giang, neurologist and member of the church, is right in his medical opinion, or to what extent he has confirmation bias. The important point is not that is a module that is specifically for seeing or hearing or experiencing God, but that it is one area of the brain that has several functions, and one apparent effect, possibly a side effect, is that it causes or interprets brain effects as divinely inspired and generally cause the subject to believe in the divine.

The brain has the ability to convince itself of something, even when on another level the subject knows intellectually that his own brain is mistaken. This is a well know example of a woman experiencing a man behind her. Other direct brain stimulations have been recorded as causing familiar songs to be hear in the brain, even though the subject knows there is no music playing. And in another case it has been possible to cause out of body experiences. Out of body experiences can also be induced with VR.

Also, to figure out whether a divine event is real, consider: are you measuring the misses as well as the hits? Or is a cognitive bias persuading you you’re hearing God speak, when it’s your own internal experiences, of yourself. Watch for the auditory illusion towards the end – “You can’t miss it when I tell you what’s there.” To what extent are interpretations of inner messages influenced by religious priming, so that just a ‘feeling’ can be interepreted as divine?

Hearing God speak, either as an auditory signal in the audio cortex, or as a deep emotional experience, doesn’t seem to need divine intervention – the brain can do this all by itself, and convince the subject that it is a divine intervention. If the subject is primed for this it might even be inevitable that the subject is convinced.

Psychology of Belief

I’ve been discussing the relative merits of a scientific world view versus faith, with Lesley over on her blog. To clarify my view, basically how I get to my world view, I’ve added a couple of posts on this blog:

Contingency of Knowledge – How I get started, about what I can know.

Human Fallibility – Why we have to be careful about what we conclude.

Lesley has responded today with this post on Human Fallibility.

The distinction I would make, between our two positions, is as follows.

What Lesley is describing are the effects of actually believing, some of which are good, but others bad. The problem is that choosing to believe on faith leaves people open to persuasion or even indoctrination, and the way that goes, good or bad, seems to be the luck of the draw. If it goes the wrong way then faith can be used to justify awful behaviours.

The other side of the distinction between religion and a scientific approach is that the critical thinking that is promoted on the science side encourages self-analysis to an extent that faith doesn’t – some Christians being exceptions rather than the rule.

As a result of this, another bad effect of faith is that it provides justification for avoiding the effort to think too much. This can be carried over to other areas of human interaction, where it’s easy to let a view on marriage, sex, law, education, or politics, be so guided by one’s religion that it’s natural to just decide on the basis of what your own religion or you local or personal spiritual leader says. But this is often disguised by the fact that some critical thinking does go on, but only within the framework of the faith – the faith trumps reason.

Further, though each religion may recognise the existence of other religions it tends not to scrutinise them too publicly, too critically, particularly in a multi-cultural society like ours, because, I think, that there is genuine apprehension about exposing it’s own inconsistencies. This leads to an odd form of cultural relativism within religions that is somewhat like the left wing secular cultural relativism – where for the latter, you say anything goes, and for the former, you keep quiet about uncomfortable differences because of the uncomfortable similarities. We end up with daft compromises, like Rowan Williams on Sharia, in order to maintains one’s own privilege.

Here is a guide that demonstrates potential problems with thinking processes, with particular reference to belief in God. It’s a little bit geeky, but if you can get through it, it should shed light on what I think is wrong with religious thinking.

Psychology of Belief, Part 1: Informational Influence

Psychology of Belief, Part 2: Insufficient Justification

Psychology of Belief, Part 3: Confirmation Bias

Psychology of Belief, Part 4: Misinformation Effect

Psychology of Belief, Part 5: Compliance Techniques

Psychology of Belief, Part 6: Hallucinations

And, here’s another quick guide.

Top 25 Creationist Fallacies

Like all theories based on psychological research there are often controversies and new research results, but generally these modes of influence on thinking are well recognised, and identifiable in much religious discourse. Some of the above are also associated with logical fallacies in reasoning.

Of course this requirement for critical thinking applies to our side of the debate too. We too are human and not immune to error, and have to listen to criticism fairly.

Wager On An Atheist’s God

Getting bored with arguing with theists, I thought it might be easier if I just give up and join the club. I’ve been trying to find a God hypothesis that comes close to working for me. There are none out there that completely satisfy my needs.

Though I’m not prone to believing God stuff without evidence, from my point of view it is legitimate to concoct hypotheses and check them against what my reason and senses tell me. Here’s one.

There is a God. He created the universe as we have come to know it through our senses, reason and science. He wanted nothing more than to create a universe to see what would happen. He is not omniscient, so he was curious. Being alone, but otherwise a good scientist, he is very hands-off and observational.

Jesus Statue
“Look, I know you don’t exist, right, … but if you did …”

Continue reading “Wager On An Atheist’s God” →

God On My Mind – BBC

This new programme from the BBC pulls together some strings from evolutionary biology and neuroscience to attempt to explain religious and other beliefs.

I think these programmes will only be available to UK listeners, but if I can find a transcript I’ll put up a link.

From the programme information…

Part 1: Evolution:

We are programmed by our genes to believe in supernatural powers and to obey moral codes. Is this because it gave our ancestors an evolutionary advantage? Iranians, Scandinavians, Papuans, chimpanzees, twins and wedding rings offer some startling answers.

Part 2: Neurology

Almost half the population claim to have felt the presence of a power beyond themselves. But what happens in the brain during religious experiences? If magnetism can produce visions, then what price mysticism and meditation? What’s the difference between sainthood and schizophrenia? And why are many believers convinced that God speaks to them in their dreams?