Tag: atheism

Mailvox: The evidence for God

I really fail to understand why so many Christian apologists have such a difficult time answering such easy questions:

Don’t know if you’ve ever seen this before.  In my opinion this little kid embarrassed Eric Hovind. Eric may even have a valid point he’s trying to make but I’m not sure exactly what it is. I know its hard to present a coherent summary of evidence for God very quickly (your debate with Dominic has really given me some food for thought when thinking about evidence for the existence of a deity) but what would you give as a very short, snappy answer to someone who asked “What is your evidence for God?”

I don’t know who Hovind is, but I tend to agree.  I stopped watching after Hovind said “without God, you can’t know anything.”  Even if that is perfectly true, it’s an incredibly stupid answer.  One might as reasonably answer “without oxygen, you can’t know anything”, and to as little effect.

The correct answer concerning the evidence for God is precisely the same as it is for practically everything else in the historical record, which is to say the copious documentary evidence available.  We can no more reasonably doubt the existence of God than we can doubt the existence of Alexander the Great, Abraham Lincoln, or any other human being who existed before the invention of audio and video recording and for whom there are physical artifacts that support the documentary evidence.

Can skeptics produce plausible explanations for why so much false documentary evidence of God exists if He does not?  Sure.  Just as I can plausibly explain that the myth of George Washington was invented in order to provide Americans with founding Romulus-style figure of reverence in order to compensate for their lack of kings and common history.  I mean, there were no cherry trees in Virginia.  And isn’t it ludicrous to take literally the myth of Washington’s rjection of the proffered crown when the story is a patently a straightforward imitation of the Roman dictator Cincinnatus.

As for the other part of the question, where the boy declares that communication with God is simply a part of one’s brain talking to him, I would have asked the kid how he was able to distinguish between one part of my brain talking to me and an alien transmission from Alpha Centauri.  I would have also asked him precisely what part of my brain was doing the talking, and to what, precisely?  I would have pressed him until it became obvious that he knew nothing of neuroscience, was simply parroting something he’d been told, and that his assertion was actually less credible than the God hypothesis.

It’s one thing to claim that your brain must be talking to itself when you’re the only one who hears it.  It’s another when other people hear it too.

Most modern Christian apologists are incompetent because they approach the discourse as a chance to explicate theology rather than understanding that it is a form of intellectual combat where the goal is to discredit the interlocutor.  So, like Hovind, they explicate a little theology that looks like an irrelevant evasion while simultaneously managing to get intellectually discredited by young boys.  Frankly, I’d be surprised and a little disappointed if I didn’t have the kid in tears and questioning his faith in science within minutes after asking such a pair of stupid questions.

First things first.  Destroy the interlocutor.  Answer every question directly, on his terms, and then go after the vulnerabilities they reveal with a flamethrower.  Only then, when you are standing upon whatever quivering ashes remain, can you explicate further if you wish.

Mailvox: an ignorant atheist

I find it interesting to witness mediocre minds at work.  It is always fascinating when one is able to discern the exact point at which they are no longer able to follow the logic to its obvious conclusion:

I just clicked on the links at right, “atheist demotivators”. God, are they stupid. And I’m not talking about the atheists, either. Seriously, “You can trust biologists. Because Physicists get amazingly accurate results” is the dumbest thing I’ve see lately, Is this Vox’s idea of a devastating putdown of atheism?

It would appear that someone hasn’t read Daniel Dennett’s Breaking the Spell….  Or even recognized his picture.

Richard Dawkins on US politics

Keep in mind, this is the same keen political observer who fell for Sam Harris’s ridiculous Red State argument because he didn’t know that American states are divided into counties:

If anyone is in doubt that Dawkins is a staunch liberal, take a quick look at his Twitter feed. On it, he describes Mitt Romney as an “awful Republican,” and — this might sound familiar
— disdains every Republican candidate and president since Eisenhower.
He constantly, almost obsessively, retweets Barack Obama’s campaign
missives. He approvingly quotes
Obama’s infamous line about those who “cling to guns or religion or
antipathy to people who aren’t like them” and contrasts it favorably
with Romney’s NRA membership, which he characterizes thus:
“No dang libruls gonna take away mah constitootional raht to carry a
gun. Pow! Bang! Weehaaar! Good shoot’n pardner.” Indeed, so partisan is
the man that he even entertained the absurd dual conspiracy theories
that Bush cheated in his debates with a radio (it’s “undeniable,” apparently) and Romney with a handkerchief in his.

This is a shame, but it is not a surprise. I’ve very much enjoyed
Dawkins’s books on science, biology, and evolution, and I enjoyed The God Delusion,
too. The lattermost, however, made it clear that whatever genius
Richard Dawkins has for science does not extend into politics or current
affairs. (His passage on how to set up the “ideal society” is one of
the most excrutiatingly infantile things I’ve read.) If anybody could
profit from Thomas Sowell’s advice that experts should stay in their
fields, it is Richard Dawkins.

On the lecture circuit, Dawkins likes to explain to his audiences
that faith corrupts thinking people. Alas, his love affair with Barack
Obama appears to have proven him correct.

Charles Cooke fails to follow the logic to its obvious conclusion.  Richard Dawkins does not possess any genius at all.  I’ve read his books on science, biology, and evolution too, and while I find him to be a generally engaging writer, I find his reasoning to be ever bit as abysmally bad with regards to science, biology, and evolution as it is to US politics.  Keep in mind that of the two “scientific” concepts for which he is most famous, there is no material evidence for the one and the other is looking increasingly dubious.

Mailvox: the existence of evil

JB has a question:

I have never heard this question answered before.  If there is no God (or Devil) why is there evil?

The reason you haven’t heard it answered before is because most atheists shy away from explicitly revealing the true extent of their beliefs.  I’ve pinned a few atheists down on this, and to a man, they have admitted that they don’t actually believe in the existence of evil.  Of course, this doesn’t prevent them from making rhetorical use of the concept and insisting that it is the Christian concept of God that is truly evil and so forth.  In doing so, they are either being deceptive or inconsistent.

But the only position on evil that is consistent with rational materialism is that there is no such thing as essential evil or essential good, these are merely subjective labels that are inconsistently applied to various human behaviors and natural events.  Of course, this is not an aspect of atheism that most atheists are eager to advertise, since so many people already tend to consider them amoral or even immoral by definition.

This is one of the reasons I entitled my book on the subject “The Irrational Atheist”.  Most atheism is irrational, as the atheist attempts to reconcile his continued belief in the existence of some sort of objective good or evil while simultaneously denying the existence of its only possible source.  Of course, it’s not the irrational atheist one has to worry about, it is the rational atheist who realizes that in the absence of a lawmaker, there is no law except that which he wills.

That is the reality, though.  If there is no God, there is no good or evil.  This is also the core of my argument for the existence of God; because we materially experience evil, we must logically conclude that God exists.

The intellectual atheist

One of the more interesting atheist arguments is that there cannot be a God because smart and educated people are more likely to be convinced that He does not exist.  Setting aside that this is a logically fallacious appeal to intelligence and education, there are other reasons to find it dubious:

A math professor at Michigan State University allegedly stripped naked, ran naked through his classroom and screamed “There is no f*cking God!” before police apprehended him, according to several reports…. “He was screaming profanities and things you really couldn’t understand,
and something about religion,” David Grabowski, an MSU senior, told
MLive.com.

That being said, I do find the professor’s unique argument to be rather more convincing than most of the public testimonies presented by various Pharyngulans.  The sad thing is that running around naked and screaming like a lunatic is more coherent than most of their irrationalizations.

Mailvox: the bonfire of the brights

MP writes of an amusing run-in with his intellectually superior atheist boss:

I’ve been following your blog for several months now after reading The Irrational Atheist, and have recently come across a particular situation which I feel will not only provide you with quite possibly severe bouts of hysterical laughter, but also, rather worrying food for thought.

My boss falls under the category of what I would like to describe as an Unread Atheist, an Atheist who has not read The God Delusion, God Is Not Great, End of Faith and other select works in ego-fondling, nor has he done further research into the field. He just plain doesn’t believe and feels that everyone that does is a moron. Now, this is not to mean that in contrast, a Read Atheist is one who is a well-read and intelligent person, it would just mean that via High-Pope Dawkins, First-Saint Hitchens and Court-Jester Harris, that this Read Atheist believes that they have some form of misguided ammo to make a convincing case against God’s existence.

While having post-work talks about all sorts of miscellanea, my boss led it into atheism. Generally, I remain quiet, as you can only imagine the general drivel that he could come up with; ‘Religion causes war’, ‘They don’t believe in science’, ‘Big Bang made the Universe’, ‘The Vatican Deathstar opposes gay contraception in Zimbawania, because they think the Earth is 2,000 years old’ and ‘Jesus never created the Big Bang because I read half of Thus Spoke Zarathustra once’. But then, it happened…

“The European Economic Crisis is the Vatican’s fault and it could be fixed if they weren’t so greedy, all they need to do is sell everything that they’re hiding in their treasury and catacombs and Europe would be back to normal”

I’d like to think that this is one of the most idiotic things that either of us have read, but I honestly don’t even know where to begin with tackling the problem. What do you have to say on this matter?

I say do the math. Vatican City’s assets are estimated to be worth between $1 billion and $3 billion in total. Total global debt now over $190 trillion, about one-quarter of which is European debt. So, I would ask him how $3 billion is going to pay off $47.5 trillion in debt. It may be a hard lesson for some to learn, but not believing in God doesn’t magically make you smarter. Or, as we first learned from the example displayed by Richard Dawkins, particularly numerate.

Atheists and Daddy issues

Behold science in action. We’ll begin with the well-known observation that many atheists have serious problems with their fathers. To this, we add the fact that scientists at Boston University, the University of British Columbia, and UC Davis have all reported evidence supporting my original hypothesis that there is a connection between atheism and higher than normal Asperger’s Quotients, as well as this new study, which has the potential to explain the reason for that connection.

Older men are more likely than young ones to father a child who develops autism or schizophrenia, because of random mutations that become more numerous with advancing paternal age, scientists reported on Wednesday, in the first study to quantify the effect as it builds each year. The age of mothers had no bearing on the risk for these disorders, the study found….

The overall risk to a man in his 40s or older is in the range of 2 percent, at most, and there are other contributing biological factors that are entirely unknown.

My random thought of the day is that older fathers not only increase the number of random mutations, but also tend to behave differently than younger fathers. Certainly everyone who has multiple children knows that the youngest is brought up somewhat differently than the eldest, and at least part of this may have to do with the increased age of the father rather than “been there done that” syndrome. This means that the children of older fathers are likely to experience a double-whammy of Nature and Nurture teaming up against them with regards to the probability of their turning out neurotypical.

This all leads to my hypothesis that the reason atheists are less likely to be neurotypical and less likely to believe in the existence of gods and the supernatural is because their fathers are, on average, older. This hypothetical causal connection between the age of the father and the atheism of the child is interesting in that it would have the potential to explain both the relatively recent increase in the number of atheists as well as the reason Europe is more atheist than the United States and other religious countries.

The testable prediction generated by this hypothesis is that there will be a statistically significant difference in the average/median age of fathers of atheists and the rest of the population. The average age of the atheist’s fathers should be older than the norm, while due to their much greater numbers, the average age of religious individual’s fathers will very closely approximate it. Unfortunately, the USA doesn’t track the age of fathers, only first-time fathers, but Australia does.

1. The average age of a first-time dad in the U.S. was 29.65 in 2010, considerably younger than a Western European equivalent of 32.51 (based on the average of UK, France, Germany, Netherlands, Italy and Spain only).

2. Between 1988 and 2008 the median age of married fathers increased by almost three years, from 31.0 to 34.1 years, while the median age of unmarried fathers who acknowledged the birth of their child also increased, from 27.0 years to 29.8 years. In 2008 the median age of all fathers was 33.1 years. [This indicates that the median age of all fathers in Australia was 30 in 1988.]

So, for the time being, we’ll use 30 as our approximate average age. And like we did before, let’s take an informal poll here to see if the average age of fathers of the atheists here is, in fact, above 30. Just indicate if you are atheist, agnostic, or religious, and your father’s age when you were born. Here are some examples:

Vox Day: religious-25
Richard Dawkins: atheist-26
Christopher Hitchens: atheist-40
Daniel Dennett: atheist-32
Bertrand Russell: atheist-30
John Russell: atheist-50
Skatje Myers: atheist-32
Friedrich Nietzsche: atheist-31
H.G. Wells: atheist-38
Scott Atran: atheist-26

So the average age of the father of the New Atheists is 32.7. So far so good. Anyone know how old Sam Harris’s or PZ Myers’s fathers were when they were born?

An atheist critique of Sam Harris

A former Muslim, Theodore Sayeed, writes a long article criticizing Sam Harris and his godless militarism on Mondoweiss:

For a man who likes to badger Muslims about their “reflexive solidarity” with Arab suffering, Harris seems keen to display his own tribal affections for the Jewish state. The virtue of Israel and the wickedness of her enemies are recurring themes in his work. The End of Faith opens with the melodramatic scene of a young man of undetermined nationality boarding a bus with a suicide vest. The bus detonates, innocents die and Harris, with the relish of a schoolmarm passing on the facts of life to her brood, chalks in the question: “Why is it so easy, then, so trivially easy-you-could-almost-bet-your-life-on-it-easy to guess the young man’s religion?”

To which historians will answer: Because it is not….

It occurs to me that as much of a renegade as I am from Islam, I’m not alone in my betrayal. Sam Harris too is an apostate from the intellectual atheist tradition of Russell and Mencken that was built on the twin pillars of anti-mysticism and anti-militarism.

I found it interesting that Sayeed begins with precisely the same quote from The End of Faith that I did, and notes precisely the same blunder which many atheists unsuccessfully attempted to defend back in 2008. One thing Sayeed caught that I did not is Harris’s tribal identification with Israel and his continued attempts to defend Israeli militarism despite his repeated condemnations of tribalism. Readers may recall that in my own email exchange with Harris, he admitted that he was actually attacking tribalism rather than religious faith; the primary danger of religious faith was that it had the potential to create and exacerbate tribalism.

But, as Sayeed demonstrates, despite his atheism, Harris himself appears to be subject to a tribalism that is older than either Christianity or Islam, the two religions he primarily criticizes. And it is potentially significant to note how little he criticizes either Judaism or Israel, despite the fact that there is considerable criticism of the latter from secular Europeans who share his atheism.

Now, I don’t dislike Sam. Unlike Dawkins and Myers, I don’t think he’s an intrinsically dreadful individual. But his primary problem, aside from his apparent tribalism, is that he is simply not sufficiently detail-oriented or logical enough to be capable of successfully addressing the intellectual challenges he sets himself.

TIA: the meme spreads

Courtesy of Scott Atran, the argument that religion does not cause war has now reached both Science and The Chronicle of Higher Education:

it’s not the criticism of ecclesiastical overreach that bothers Wilson and Atran; it’s the conflation of science and advocacy. Wilson supports efforts to destigmatize atheism, like the running feature “Why I Am an Atheist” on Pharyngula, and said so in his anti-Dawkins posts. Atran believes that “attacking obscurantic, cruel, lunatic ideas is always a good idea.” It’s proclaiming that religion is rotten to the core that they think is misguided.

That includes laying the blame for much of human conflict at the feet of the faithful. In a recent Science article, Atran and Jeremy Ginges, an associate professor of psychology at the New School, cite evidence suggesting that “only a small minority of recorded wars” have been mainly motivated by religious disputes (though making distinctions between religious and political causes is notoriously knotty). They complain in the article that the New Atheists are quick to remind everyone how fundamentalism fuels Al Qaeda but neglect to mention the role of churches in the civil-rights movement. The New Atheists are, according to Atran and Ginges, cherry-picking the horrors. “Science produced a nuclear bomb. Therefore we should throw away science,” says Atran, to illustrate the baby-bathwater logic. “Sometimes it can be really noxious, and other times it can be quite helpful.”

The Science article is entitled “Religious and Sacred Imperatives in Human Conflict” and appears in Science 336, 855 (2012). The relevant passage cites The Encylopedia of Wars and states: “In fact, explicit religious issues have motivated only a small minority of recorded wars. There is little religious cause for the internecine Russian and Chinese conflicts and world wars responsible for history’s most lethal century of international conflict.”

Given the absurd assertions by science fetishists who insist that I do not understand science, I find it more than a little ironic that a number of real scientists are not only making use of my ideas, but my methods as well, in publishing professional peer-reviewed science.

Atheists abandon “religion causes war” argument

Scott Atran is the first atheist to publicly come out and admit the historical nonexistence of the oft-claimed connection between religion and war in Foreign Policy:

Moreover, the chief complaint against religion — that it is history’s prime instigator of intergroup conflict — does not withstand scrutiny. Religious issues motivate only a small minority of recorded wars. The Encyclopedia of Wars surveyed 1,763 violent conflicts across history; only 123 (7 percent) were religious. A BBC-sponsored “God and War” audit, which evaluated major conflicts over 3,500 years and rated them on a 0-to-5 scale for religious motivation (Punic Wars = 0, Crusades = 5), found that more than 60 percent had no religious motivation. Less than 7 percent earned a rating greater than 3. There was little religious motivation for the internecine Russian and Chinese conflicts or the world wars responsible for history’s most lethal century of international bloodshed.

Not only does Atran accept the argument I originally presented in a WND article before refining it in The Irrational Atheist, but his article is actually much less of a Fighting Withdrawal than the misleading subtitle – What we don’t understand about religion just might kill us – would lead the casual reader to believe.

Atran doesn’t mention either me or TIA, but TIA is clearly the source as not only is the argument the same as the one I first presented in 2004, but the war count of 123 also happens to be uniquely mine. The actual count from The Encylopedia of Wars index is not 123, but 121 – they made some errors, in my opinion, counting some non-religious wars such as the Fourth Crusade as religious and vice-versa – but the authors of the encylopedia actually failed to fully recognize the implications of their historical catalog concerning the historical irrelevance of religion to war. This can be seen in their Introduction:

“Wars have always arisen, and arise today, from territorial disputes, military rivalries, conflicts of ethnicity, and strivings for commercial and economic advantage, and they have always depended on, and depend on today, pride, prejudice, coercion, envy, cupidity, competitiveness, and a sense of injustice. But for much of the world before the 17 century, these “reasons” for war were explained and justified, at least for the participants, by religion. Then around the middle of the 17th century, Europeans began to conceive of war as a legitimate means of furthering the interests of individual sovereigns….

The [French] revolution increased the size of the armed forces for European states from small professional outfits to huge conscript armies, whose citizen-soldiers needed more than reasons of state to risk their lives and fortunes for their rulers. The objectives of warfare were broadened from the conquest of this or that sliver of a kingdom to the spread of revolutionary ideals, and through this ideological backdoor something like the fervor of religion slipped back into war along with the mass of conscripts. Once again wars needed to be in some sense “holy” or, in the more secular lexicon of the times, “just”.”

Now, it doesn’t bother me terribly when people actively seek to avoid giving me credit for my more original ideas. I’ve learned to expect it, which is why you’ll never find this argument on Wikipedia even when everyone eventually comes to accept it as the historical fact that it truly is. I only find it genuinely irksome when others subsequently try to take credit for them or to claim they were always part of the status quo. The important thing is that the ideas are getting out there and the memes are spreading, and removing that specific arrow from the atheist’s rhetorical arsenal was always my main polemical object in presenting the argument.

That being said, I do find it amusing that The Irrational Atheist appears to be one of the more influential books that no one of substance will publicly admit to reading. In addition to the Atran admission – to say nothing of the informatively abrupt silence of Dawkins and Harris on the subject of religion and war – let’s not forget the Boston University study that offers initial confirmation of my hypothesis of a link between atheism and Asperger’s Syndrome.