Tag: atheism

Free will and the utilitarian objective

Sam Harris disagrees with Daniel Dennett concerning the existence of free will:

Dan seems to think that free will is like color: People might have some erroneous beliefs about it, but the experience of freedom and its attendant moral responsibilities can be understood in a similarly straightforward way through science. I think that free will is an illusion and that analogies to phenomena like color do not run through. A better analogy, also taken from the domain of vision, would liken free will to the sense that most of us have of visual continuity.

Take a moment to survey your immediate surroundings. Your experience of seeing will probably seem unified—a single field in which everything appears all at once and seamlessly. But the act of seeing is not quite what it seems. The first thing to notice is that most of what you see in every instant is a blur, because you have only a narrow region of sharp focus in the center of your visual field. This area of foveal vision is also where you perceive colors most clearly; your ability to distinguish one color from another falls away completely as you reach the periphery in each eye. You continuously compensate for these limitations by allowing your gaze to lurch from point to point (executing what are known as “saccades”), but you tend not to notice these movements. Nor are you aware that your visual perception appears interrupted while your eyes are moving (otherwise you would see a continuous blurring of the scene). It was once believed that saccades caused the active suppression of vision, but recent experiments suggest that the post-saccadic image (i.e. whatever you next focus on) probably just masks the preceding blur.

There is also a region in each visual field where you receive no input at all, because the optic nerve creates a blind spot where it passes through the retina. Many of us learned to perceive the subjective consequences of this unintelligent design as children, by marking a piece of paper, closing one eye, and then moving the paper into a position where the mark disappeared. Close one eye now and look out at the world: You will probably not notice your blind spot—and yet, if you are in a crowded room, someone could well be missing his head. Most people are surely unaware that the optic blind spot exists, and even those of us who know about it can go for decades without noticing it.

While color vision survives close inspection, our conventional sense of visual continuity does not. The impression we have of seeing everything all at once, clearly, and without interruption is based on our not paying close attention to what it is like to see. I argue that the illusory nature of free will can also be noticed in this way. As with the illusion of visual continuity, the evidence of our confusion is neither far away nor deep within; rather, it is right on the surface of experience, almost too near to us to be seen.

Of course, we could take Dan’s approach and adjust the notion of “continuity” so that it better reflected the properties of human vision, giving us a new concept of seamless visual perception that is “worth wanting.” But if erroneous beliefs about visual continuity caused drivers to regularly mow down pedestrians and police sharpshooters to accidentally kill hostages, merely changing the meaning of “continuity” would not do. I believe that this is the situation we are in with the illusion of free will: False beliefs about human freedom skew our moral intuitions and anchor our system of criminal justice to a primitive ethic of retribution. And as we continue to make advances in understanding the human mind through science, our current practices will come to seem even less enlightened.

Ordinary people want to feel philosophically justified in hating evildoers and viewing them as the ultimate authors of their evil. This moral attitude has always been vulnerable to our learning more about the causes of human behavior—and in situations where the origins of a person’s actions become absolutely clear, our feelings about his responsibility begin to change. What is more, they should change. We should admit that a person is unlucky to inherit the genes and life experience that will doom him to psychopathy. That doesn’t mean we can’t lock him up, or kill him in self-defense, but hating him is not rational, given a complete understanding of how he came to be who he is. Natural, yes; rational, no. Feeling compassion for him would be rational, however—or so I have argued.

We can acknowledge the difference between voluntary and involuntary action, the responsibilities of an adult and those of a child, sanity and insanity, a troubled conscience and a clear one, without indulging the illusion of free will. We can also admit that in certain contexts, punishment might be the best way to motivate people to behave themselves. The utility of punishment is an empirical question that is well worth answering—and nothing in my account of free will requires that I deny this.

How can we ask that other people behave themselves (and even punish them for not behaving) when they are not the ultimate cause of their actions? We can (and should) make such demands when doing so has the desired effect—namely, increasing the well-being of all concerned.

Given his intellectual track record, one of the more powerful arguments for the existence of free will is that Sam Harris believes it does not exist. One could easily go through life with far less effective guides than simply assuming the precise opposite of what Sam Harris asserts to be true. Harris has always been intellectually careless and lazy, but his latest foray into free will appears to border on barely bothering to show up. His new “book” is all of 66 pages and apparently those are generously-margined pages filled with large type as it’s only 13,000 words; a trade paperback has 410 words per page, a mass-market paperback 310; Free Will has only 196. I haven’t read it yet, but I will soon, if the deterministic processes that wholly dictate my actions regardless of my perception of control happen to permit me to do so. Since we are reliably informed that our notions concerning our future actions are illusory, it is entirely possible that I will instead move to Albania and devote myself to writing homosexual love poetry in their guttural, but hauntingly beautiful language.

Isn’t it fascinating how what passes for the thinking of the most popular atheists so closely resembles that of the omniderigent Christians? The sovereign God of the hyper-Calvinist and the nonexistent God of the atheist lead the adherent to the same conclusion: Man is not responsible for his actions.

Harris’s analogy is a poor one because free will is more analogous to vision than to visual continuity. We fail to understand our own motivations and even our actions in much the same way that we cannot simultaneously focus on everything in our field of view. And yet, accurately or inaccurately, we still see something. Regardless of whether our brains light up before our finger moves or afterwards, our finger moves and something connected to our conscious minds made it move. Harris completely fails to realize that the Libet experiment is at least as indicative of a trialist Body-Mind-Soul construction consistent with free will as the mechanistic singular one consistent with its absence.

Harris’s real purpose in attacking free will is no different than his real purpose in attacking both the existence of God as well as Christianity. He’s a pan-global utilitarian and his books are neither philosophy nor science, they are political polemics intended to provide intellectual cover for the global, macro-societal restructuring he envisions. This is not readily apparent, but it is the one clearly identifiable theme besides intellectual laziness that is woven into all his works.

UPDATE: I haven’t finished the book yet, but I got through about three-quarters it in between sets at the gym. It’s that short and it’s that fluffy; the contrast with the Popper I’ve been reading over the last week or so is rather glaring. Anyhow, I’ve already identified the core error in his reasoning and will explicate it tomorrow. The short summary: Harris believes he is his feelings. This goes a surprisingly long way towards explaining the man’s oft-demonstrated intellectual shortcomings.

Christianity is more scientific than New Atheism

And it’s not hard to conclusively prove it. Shadow to Light shines a big spotlight on the intrinsic absurdity of the New Atheist attacks on religion in general and Francis Collins in particular:

Coyne has accused Collins of being an “embarrassment to the NIH, to scientists, and, indeed, to all rational people” and an “advocate of profoundly anti-scientific beliefs.” Myers calls him a “creationist dupe arguing against scientific theories” and “an amiable lightweight” who doesn’t know how to think like a scientist.

You would think that when these three biologists dish out their smug vitriol, it would come from a foundation of having generated more scientific knowledge than the religious guy. But alas, such is not the case.

Recall that Collins has published 384 scientific papers from 1971 to 2007. I’m sure he has published since 2007, as that is where the CV on the web ends. In fact, by searching through PubMed, a database that contains millions of scientific articles, it looks like he has published 483 papers. But we’ll stick with 384 since there could be other “Collins FS” authors out there mixed in with the PubMed search results.

Again using PubMed, I was able to determine that Jerry Coyne has published a very respectable 88 papers from 1971 to 2011. For Myers, I found only ten papers from 1984-1999. For Harris, I did not bother with PubMed. I used his own site where he promotes himself and his publications.

He has published two papers since 2009.

In other words, it’s obviously not Christianity that hinders science. Collins has not only produced considerably more science than his critics, he has published more than twice as many papers as Richard Dawkins, Jerry Coyne, PZ Myers, and Sam Harris combined. He has published infinitely more scientific papers than the late Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett, and Michael Shermer, all of whom have nevertheless made similarly false claims about the incompatibility of Christianity and science.

As is so often the case, the atheist argument is based entirely on incorrect logic and not on the empirical evidence that they claim – also falsely – to value so highly.

Mailvox: the divine metric

G asks a question that is much easier than many who ask it suppose it to be:

I was brought up in a Presbyterian church and settled in Church of God (national headquarters to boot). I have been a staunch believer and keeper of the faith for well over 30 years. I have begun to question why the Bible is the Truth. I’ve spoken with members of more than a few faiths (and others without faith) & as we know they all KNOW their God is the true & powerful force in the universe, all galaxies, clusters, solar systems, planets, but most significantly our lil inhabitable asteroid. I was raised a Christian and the only way to get to the promise land is through Christ. Allah and others have a different plan for the ultimate prize. Folks are dieing and have killed for gods that their parents told them was real and true. Why am I blessed to have parents that taught me the “right” religion. My Jewish pal & atheist pals are more than pleased with what they have been taught.

As far as the Bible,(noted that I did not do the research myself) tis my understanding that several books were left out or added to the original work? That a group of men decided which books would be in the teachings that the world would learn and preach as the truth. Some say they were guided by a divine hand (no free will?). Also, I know it is a tired argument but I have not ever received a answer that quite satisfies me- the talking serpents, forbidden fruit, adam and eve- who recorded they info,a rib, much of Jesus’ time written about was well after his death (accuracy?). Some things are to be taken litteraly & some are fables – which ones – who decides – each church and divisions within have different interpretations. I seem to get the “He works in mysterious ways & some things we’ll never know”. That is a whole cart load of bison dung. I don’t know- guess im rambling now with errant thoughts but I’m beginning to question my faith as measured by others faiths & those with a lack of a belief in a god or gods. Using Occams Razor, it is pretty well deduced that I well have been wasting my time. I non-trivially pray that I’m wrong and will once again see the light.

First, G reveals that his “research”, such as it is, doesn’t even rise to the level of reading Wikipedia about the major world religions. He hasn’t actually spoken to “members of more than a few faiths”; we know this because only a very small number of religions are even monotheistic and therefore make the sort of claim of God that G erroneously declares they do. Of the five religions with a globally significant number of faithful, precisely two of them believe in a ruling divinity, Christianity and Islam.

And it is a tremendous misapplication of Occam’s Razor to think that it favors atheism in any way. The correct divine metric is to compare the truth claims of a religion or anti-religion with observable reality. Is it true, for example, that the poor will always be with us or was Marx correct and the elimination of poverty is merely a matter of first establishing the worker’s paradise? Does Man have free will, as the Bible teaches, or are two of the leading New Atheists right to declare, like the Muslims, that he does not? Is Sam Harris correct in insisting that religion is the greatest current threat to human existence, and if so, how has it failed to destroy the planet for the previous 8,000 years of recorded human history?

The Bible says “seek and ye shall find”. But, of course, it is necessary to do so in a genuine spirit of honest inquiry. If it is patently obvious to me that G’s “search” has hitherto been superficial and unserious, I tend to doubt it is capable of fooling God. Furthermore, before attempting to wrestle with the queen of all sciences, I strongly suggest G cut his teeth on some easier ones. The fact that he appears to believe that he presently dwells upon an “inhabitable asteroid” suggests that his ability to correctly distinguish between fact and fiction is rather limited.

The real persecution today

Remember that some atheists are treating Christians and others deemed “irredeemables” in this manner today, right now, as their co-godless in the West whine that religion is somehow oppressing them:

His first memory is an execution. He walked with his mother to a wheat field, where guards had rounded up several thousand prisoners. The boy crawled between legs to the front row, where he saw guards tying a man to a wooden pole….

The South Korean government estimates there are about 154,000 prisoners in North Korea’s labour camps, while the US state department puts the number as high as 200,000. The biggest is 31 miles long and 25 miles wide, an area larger than the city of Los Angeles. Numbers 15 and 18 have re-education zones where detainees receive remedial instruction in the teachings of Kim Jong-il and Kim Il-sung, and are sometimes released. The remaining camps are “complete control districts” where “irredeemables” are worked to death.

It’s an incredible story. It is arguably the most horrific situation on the planet today. And yet, none of the “Never Again” crowd appears to give even the slightest damn about what is happening in the Hermit Kingdom; they’re too busy worrying about the persecution inherent in a Christmas greeting.

As for Christians, this is what real persecution looks like. The martyrs of North Korea have stubbornly held to the faith for decades despite it. How many of us could do so? The Cambridge Medieval History reminds us:

In the middle of the third century the Emperor and the Empire learnt to dread this organised force within their midst. The despised “third race” had become indeed a nation within the Empire. The first impulse was to exterminate what seemed to be a source of danger. One well-organised universal persecution followed another. From each Christianity emerged with sadly diminished numbers (for the lapsed were always a larger body than the martyrs), but with spirit unbroken and with organisation intact and usually strengthened.

The Church will always survive. But note that the lapsed always outnumber the martyrs. So when you pray for the persecuted of North Korea, remember both the fallen and the fallen away.

Mailvox: the autoneurotic atheist

EC wonders who is reading whom:

I love the blog and your book TIA; TIA is actually the best polemic I’ve ever read. Anyway, I saw that Edward Feser recently posted a blog article in which he says that the New Atheists engage in “mutual mental onanism”. That’s pretty close to your “atheist circle jerk”. So, who owes whom a royalty check here?

I think it is readily apparent that the use of the similar phrase – and it says much about the difference between Mr. Feser and me, mostly to his advantage, that he prefers the relatively genteel description “mutual mental onanism” to “bukkakelypse” – is nothing more than straightforward observation. It is simply an obvious metaphor for the autoneurotic activities of the leading New Atheists. The only significant difference between Mr. Feser’s independent observations and my own is my preference for the vulgate. It’s interesting to note that he also pins down the intrinsic anti-intellectualism of the Fowl Atheist’s misguided foray into philosophy.

“[T]hat Dawkins’ arguments are directed at ludicrous straw men has been demonstrated time and again (for example, here). Yet he resolutely declines to answer those who have exposed the numerous errors and fallacies in his writings — dismissing them as “fleas,” without explaining how exactly they have got his arguments wrong — or, in general, to debate anyone with expertise in the philosophy of religion. Meanwhile, the even more vitriolic P. Z. Myers’ main claim to New Atheist fame is his “Courtier’s reply” dodge, a shamelessly question-begging rationalization for remaining ignorant of what the other side actually says. New Atheists will ridicule their opponents, but actually read only each others’ work. Hence Christopher Hitchens derives his main arguments from Dawkins, Lawrence Krauss learns everything he needs to know from Hitchens, and Dawkins has his confidence in the atheist worldview bolstered from reading Krauss. And now this mutual mental onanism will be expanded across the National Mall. Somewhere Joycelyn Elders is smiling.”

You’re not alone

I’m a little hard on Team Calvin and their insistence that there is no free will. But perhaps they will be reassured by the fact that they have an intellectual giant in their corner, as Sam Harris has announced that his new book on the illusion of free will is forthcoming:

I briefly discussed the illusion of free will in both The End of Faith and The Moral Landscape. I have since received hundreds of questions and comments from readers and learned just where the sticking points were in my original arguments. I am happy to now offer my final thoughts on the subject in the form of a short book, Free Will, that can be read in a single sitting.

The question of free will touches nearly everything we care about. Morality, law, politics, religion, public policy, intimate relationships, feelings of guilt and personal accomplishment—most of what is distinctly human about our lives seems to depend upon our viewing one another as autonomous persons, capable of free choice. If the scientific community were to declare free will an illusion, it would precipitate a culture war far more belligerent than the one that has been waged on the subject of evolution. Without free will, sinners and criminals would be nothing more than poorly calibrated clockwork, and any conception of justice that emphasized punishing them (rather than deterring, rehabilitating, or merely containing them) would appear utterly incongruous. And those of us who work hard and follow the rules would not “deserve” our success in any deep sense. It is not an accident that most people find these conclusions abhorrent. The stakes are high.

It will certainly be interesting to see if his contortions in attempting to hold responsible helpless puppets sans free will are similar to those produced by The Responsible Puppet and others.

Mailvox: Richard Dawkins is not an atheist!

I’ve been getting a fair amount of email and one or two people have been dropping OT bombs in the comments concerning this discussion between Richard Dawkins and Rowan Williams:

There was surprise when Prof Dawkins acknowledged that he was less than 100 per cent certain of his conviction that there is no creator. The philosopher Sir Anthony Kenny, who chaired the discussion, interjected: “Why don’t you call yourself an agnostic?” Prof Dawkins answered that he did.

An incredulous Sir Anthony replied: “You are described as the world’s most famous atheist.”

Prof Dawkins said that he was “6.9 out of seven” sure of his beliefs. “I think the probability of a supernatural creator existing is very very low,” he added.

While it pains me to have to defend the vastly overrated intellectual charlatan that is Richard Dawkins, I have no choice but to do so. Nothing has changed and Dawkins is being entirely consistent with his previously declared position of being a technically agnostic de facto atheist here. Consider these quotes from The God Delusion, published six years ago.

“The view that I shall defend is very different: agnosticism about the existence of God belongs firmly in the temporary or TAP category. Either he exists or he doesn’t. It is a scientific question; one day we may know the answer, and meanwhile we can say something pretty strong about the probability.”

“6 Very low probability, but short of zero. De facto atheist. ‘I cannot know for certain but I think God is very improbable, and I live my life on the assumption that he is not there.'”

“I count myself in category 6, but leaning towards 7 – 1 am agnostic only to the extent that I am agnostic about fairies at the bottom of the garden.”

In fact, when Dawkins says he is “6.9 out of 7” sure of his beliefs, he is explicitly referring to this seven point system. So, Dawkins is not only holding his atheistic ground, he is actually strengthening it from 6.0 to 6.9 out of 7. While the fact that Dawkins declared himself a literal agnostic in the very book in which he declared the importance of atheist evangelism is both ironic and incoherent, it will surprise no one who has read the chapter of The Irrational Atheist entitled “Darwin’s Judas”.

This article very nearly approaches the Platonic Form of a non-story.

Dissecting Divine Hiddenness

This is one of the more feeble arguments against the existence of God I have encountered, but since I haven’t actually critiqued it before, I thought I would take the opportunity to do so now. From Wikipedia:

The argument from nonbelief (or the argument from divine hiddenness) is a philosophical argument against the existence of God, specifically, the God of theism. The premise of the argument is that if God existed (and wanted humanity to know it), he would have brought about a situation in which every reasonable person believed in him; however, there are reasonable unbelievers, and therefore, this weighs against God’s existence. This argument is similar to the classic argument from evil in that it affirms inconsistency between the world that exists and the world that should exist if God had certain desires combined with the power to see them through. In fact, since ignorance of God would seem to be a natural evil, many would categorize the problem of divine hiddenness as an instance of the problem of evil.

1. If there is a God, he is perfectly loving.
2. If a perfectly loving God exists, reasonable nonbelief does not occur.
3. Reasonable nonbelief occurs.
4. No perfectly loving God exists (from 2 and 3).
5. Hence, there is no God (from 1 and 4).

This argument is a dreadful one because it manages to be unrelated to the Biblical God as well as logically fallacious. Even if it wasn’t outright admitted in the very description, it is trivially easy to demonstrate that the argument cannot possibly apply to the Christian God by simple reference to the Bible. Contrast these two statements:

a) If there is a God, he is perfectly loving.
b) ““Because of all their wickedness in Gilgal, I hated them there. Because of their sinful deeds, I will drive them out of my house. I will no longer love them; all their leaders are rebellious.” Hosea 9:15

Since perfect love both proscribes hatred and is not equal to conditional love, the argument clearly fails to apply to the Biblical God at the very first step. As can be readily verified, the verse from Hosea is only one of the many verses in the Bible that describe, in some detail, those whom God hates, in some cases, with a self-described passion. Therefore, it is patently obvious that the argument from Divine Hiddenness has absolutely no relevance to the Christian God.

As is so often the case, the atheist argument is dependent upon an intellectually dishonest bait-and-switch. The argument doesn’t, and can’t, apply to the Christian God, and yet is presented as an argument against the Christian God, thus relying upon the failure of the interlocutor to notice the substitution of a hypothetical and nonexistent “perfectly loving god” for the actual God worshipped and described in the Bible.

Moreoever, the argument against the imaginary “perfectly loving God” even fails in its own right for the following reasons:

1. It is false to say that God must be perfectly loving since the available evidence, both observable and documentary, indicates that God is not.
2. “No reasonable nonbelief” does not follow from “perfectly loving”.
3. There is no evidence that reasonable nonbelief occurs. There is, to the contrary, considerable evidence that most nonbelief is both unreasoning and unreasonable.

To understand how astonishingly illogical the argument is, consider the following variant utilizing the same “logic”.

1. If there are frogs, they are purple.
2. If a purple frog exists, no ribbetting will be heard.
3. Ribbetting is heard.
4. No purple frog exists (from 2 and 3).
5. Hence, there are no frogs (from 1 and 4).

Thus by the Argument from Ranine Hiddenness we are able to conclude that no frog exists, even though our conclusion flies in the face of the observable fact that something out there – though clearly not a frog! – can be heard going ribbet, ribbet. And frankly, I think I’d be more impressed with the intellectual prowess exhibited by the average frog’s ribbets than by the cretins who produced this illogical drivel.

So, I will now pose the obvious question to Smiley, who was good enough to bring this argument to our attention earlier this week. Do you still find the Argument from Divine Hiddenness to be “infinitely more convincing than any argument ever proposed by any Christian?”

UPDATE: In the interest of spelling things out more slowly for those who are too ignorant to realize that the Christian God is the God of the Old Testament as well as the New, and are too lazy to bother looking up the various other references I mentioned, I will point out the obvious. “But you have this in your favor: You hate the practices of the Nicolaitans, which I also hate.” – Revelations 2:6.

A dance of desperation

In addition to proving the old adage about scientists finally struggling up to reach the final peak of knowledge, only to find the philosophers already ensconced there, this latest attempt to dance around The Great Why shows the increasing desperation of the scientific godless:

It is, perhaps, the mystery of last resort. Scientists may be at least theoretically able to trace every last galaxy back to a bump in the Big Bang, to complete the entire quantum roll call of particles and forces. But the question of why there was a Big Bang or any quantum particles at all was presumed to lie safely out of scientific bounds, in the realms of philosophy or religion.

Now even that assumption is no longer safe, as exemplified by a new book by the cosmologist Lawrence M. Krauss. In it he joins a chorus of physicists and cosmologists who have been pushing into sacred ground, proclaiming more and more loudly in the last few years that science can explain how something — namely our star-spangled cosmos — could be born from, if not nothing, something very close to it. God, they argue, is not part of the equation….

Dr. Krauss delineates three different kinds of nothingness. First is what may have passed muster as nothing with the ancient Greeks: empty space. But we now know that even empty space is filled with energy, vibrating with electromagnetic fields and so-called virtual particles dancing in and out of existence on borrowed energy courtesy of the randomness that characterizes reality on the smallest scales, according to the rules of quantum theory.

Second is nothing, without even space and time. Following a similar quantum logic, theorists have proposed that whole universes, little bubbles of space-time, could pop into existence, like bubbles in boiling water, out of this nothing.

There is a deeper nothing in which even the laws of physics are absent. Where do the laws come from? Are they born with the universe, or is the universe born in accordance with them? Here Dr. Krauss, unhappily in my view, resorts to the newest and most controversial toy in the cosmologist’s toolbox: the multiverse, a nearly infinite assemblage of universes, each with its own randomly determined rules, particles and forces, that represent solutions to the basic equations of string theory — the alleged theory of everything, or perhaps, as wags say, anything.

There is, of course, a fourth type of nothingness. And that is the amount of scientific validity contained in Krauss’s desperate attempt to use a fraudulent veneer of science to avoid the obvious conclusions driven by the relevant philosophic logic. This isn’t even science fiction, it’s just purely evasive fantasy. If I were to seriously propose that full-grown unicorns, little rainbow-colored horned equines, could simply pop into existence, like bubbles in boiling water, ex nihilo, people would rightly dismiss me as a fantasist and a possibly insane one at that.

But substitute “universes” for “unicorns”, and suddenly, we’re talking science!

The sins of the Dawkins

It would appear that Richard Dawkins is only the latest in a long line of societally destructive assholes named Dawkins, as there has been a Dawkins on the wrong side of history for centuries:

He has railed against the evils of religion, and lectured the world on the virtues of atheism. Now Richard Dawkins, the secularist campaigner against “intolerance and suffering”, must face an awkward revelation: he is descended from slave owners and his family estate was bought with a fortune partly created by forced labour.

One of his direct ancestors, Henry Dawkins, amassed such wealth that his family owned 1,013 slaves in Jamaica by the time of his death in 1744. The Dawkins family estate, consisting of 400 acres near Chipping Norton, Oxfordshire, was bought at least in part with wealth amassed through sugar plantation and slave ownership. Over Norton Park, inherited by Richard Dawkins’s father, remains in the family, with the campaigner as a shareholder and director of the associated business….

In 1796 the oldest son James Dawkins (1760-1843) voted against Wilberforce’s proposal to abolish the slave trade, helping to defeat it by just four votes. In 1807 he was one of a small rump of die-hards opposing the provisions of Slave Trade Act, which abolished selling slaves in the British Empire. He is believed to have been among just 18 MPs who supported an amendment to postpone the act’s implementation by five years. They were defeated by the votes of 174 MPs.

On religious matters James Dawkins was throughout 1813 an opponent of ‘Catholic relief’, one of the acts which lifted restrictions on freedom of worship, property and electoral rights for Catholics.

I note with no little amusement that there is a material overlap between those who are defending Dawkins against the sins of his fathers and those who previously attempted to attack me through my father, who is presently enjoying a 15-year, taxpayer-funded retirement at a minimum security campus in a sub-tropical location courtesy of the Federal government.

Pity the poor Dawkster. He can’t help it. His obnoxious behavior is only the consequence of his selfish, selfish genes.

UPDATE: What a cowardly little bitch he has become.

Remarkably, Dawkins stipulated that his Sunday Times interview must be carried out by someone who is ‘not religious’. This reinforces the suspicion I’ve always had that he wishes only to preach to the converted and sneer at the rest. There is no real attempt to engage; like so much of the evangelistic, atheistic, liberal left it is simply fashionable attitudinalising and means less than a handful of dust.

I suspect what is bothering Dawkins most these days is that is beginning to suspect that he’s going to be trashed unmercifully for years, if not decades, after his death. I don’t think he anticipated the way in which Christians were initially holding their fire or that his side would be so badly intellectually outgunned.