Tag: atheism

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.

Richard Dawkins, sans pants

This is absolutely and utterly hilarious. In case you still don’t believe that Richard Dawkins is a cretinous ex-scientist long past his sell-by date, I suspect this will suffice to convince you:

If you were trying to come up with a definition of misplaced intellectual arrogance, you could not do better than having the planet’s most famous atheist issuing diktats on who does and doesn’t count as a proper Christian. Prof Dawkins then announced, triumphantly, that an “astonishing number [of Christians] couldn’t identify the first book in the New Testament”.

The transcript of the next minute or so only hints at how cringingly, embarrassingly bad it was for Dawkins.

Fraser: Richard, if I said to you what is the full title of The Origin Of Species, I’m sure you could tell me that.

Dawkins: Yes I could.

Fraser: Go on then.

Dawkins: On the Origin of Species…Uh…With, oh, God, On the Origin of Species. There is a sub-title with respect to the preservation of favoured races in the fight… in the struggle for life.

Fraser: If you asked people who believed in evolution what that question, and then you came back and said two percent got it right, it would be terribly easy for me to go they don’t really believe it after all. It’s just not fair to ask people these questions.

It was a golden minute of radio. But as well as being hilarious, it was hugely symbolic.

As I have said repeatedly, Richard Dawkins is a huge intellectual fraud, and perhaps those who previously expressed incredulity at the idea that I would quite easily trounce the old charlatan in a debate will find it just a bit more credible now. This behavior isn’t an outlier or a momentary lapse of memory, it is entirely characteristic. The man quite frequently pretends to knowledge that he patently does not possess and assumes he knows things that he obviously does not, which is why he avoids debate with those who are aware of his intellectual pretensions and are capable of exposing them.

It’s bad enough that Dawkins couldn’t come up with the name of what he considers to be the most important book ever written immediately after claiming he could do so, but in addition to stumbling a little on the subtitle, he even forgot the rather important part of the title that refers to the actual mechanism supposedly responsible! And furthermore, I am very, very skeptical of the assertion that 64 percent of self-identified Christians were not able to identify Matthew as the first book of the New Testament in a multiple choice question with four answers. I’d quite like to see what the other options were, as my guess is that most of the people who got it wrong didn’t pay sufficient attention to the question and reflexively answered “Genesis”.

Just in case Richard is reading this, the correct answer is: On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life.

UPDATE: Here is the audio recording. It’s actually even better than the excerpt of the transcript provided, which I have updated accordingly.

A tale of two persecutions

Conrad Black notes that 100,000+ Christians are annually murdered for their faith:

Perhaps the gravest under-publicized atrocity in the world is the persecution of Christians. A comprehensive Pew Forum study last year found that Christians are persecuted in 131 countries containing 70 percent of the world’s population, out of 197 countries in the world (if Palestine, Taiwan, South Sudan, and the Vatican are included). Best estimates are that about 200 million Christians are in communities where they are persecuted. There is not the slightest question of the scale and barbarity of this persecution, and a little of it is adequately publicized. But this highlights the second half of the atrocity: the passivity and blasé indifference of most of the West’s media and governments.

It is not generally appreciated that over 100,000 Christians a year are murdered because of their faith.

On the other hand, the Financial Times laments the plight of “persecuted” atheists in the USA:

In Dallas, five of them took turns to list examples of the constant pressures of living in a religious society. One was a businesswoman in Plano, a city that’s part of the Dallas-Fort Worth metropolis and was ranked as the fifth most conservative in America by the Bay Area Center for Voting Research. She insists that, if she came out, she would lose her business. “I’ve worked for years to get these people to trust me, to want to do business with me.” So she constantly has to bite her tongue when Plano City Council opens its meetings with prayers, which it does in defiance of the constitutional separation of church and state….

The most extraordinary story I heard was from a woman in Tuscaloosa county, Alabama. She grew up in nearby Lamar county, raised in the strict Church of Christ, where there is no music with worship and you can’t dance. She says her family love her and are proud of her, but “I’m not allowed to be an atheist in Lamar County”. What is astonishing is that she can be pretty much anything else. “Being on crack, that was OK. As long as I believed in God, I was OK.” So, for example, “I’m not allowed to babysit. I have all these cousins who need babysitters but they’re afraid I’ll teach them about evolution, and I probably would.” I couldn’t quite believe this. She couldn’t babysit as an atheist, but she could when she was on crack? “Yes.” I laughed, but it is hard to think of anything less funny.

One’s heart bleeds for these poor American atheists. While their godless counterparts are among those murdering large quantities of Christians in a number of foreign countries, dreadful Christian bigots are not letting them babysit their children and forcing them to bite their tongues. And note that the would-be babysitter even admits that the parents are perfectly justified in not permitting her to spend any unsupervised time with their children.

I also found it fascinating to learn that the Plano City Council opening its meetings with prayer is somehow supposed to be the equivalent of Congress passing a law to establish religion. This, in a nutshell, illustrates why many people quite rightly despise atheists and want nothing to do with them. If you consistently attempts to take a mile every time anyone gives you an inch, you shouldn’t be surprised when people learn to stop giving you any benefit of the doubt.

The consequences of post-Christianity

One of the things I find so eminently fascinating about atheist evangelicals is the vast gulf between what they say the believe concerning science and evidence and their observable behavior. The hypocrisy they reliably reveal is not only every bit as great as that exhibited by the likes of Jim Bakker, it’s actually far greater because they engage in it much more often than the average shamed televangelist. Ever since Freud, we have been told that religion is injurious to the individual. Ever since Jean Meslier, it has been asserted that religion is deleterious to society. And we are still hearing this despite the fact that all the evidence, documentary, testimonial, and scientific consistently demonstrates that religion is good for the individual and a significant positive for society.

And yet, despite literally hundreds of years of evidence directly contradicting their blind faith in the benefits of irreligion, evangelical and militant atheists are still extolling the promised wonders of their sexy, secular science fiction society. And they are doing so even as its reality begins to take shape around them:

Lying, adultery, drug taking, breaking the speed limit, drink-driving, and handling stolen goods are all seen as more acceptable than they were at the turn of the century, it suggests. Disapproval of so-called “low level dishonesty” has [decreased] irrespective of social class, income level or education, according to research by Essex University. Integrity levels were slightly higher among women than men but the most significant variation was by age with noticeably higher tolerance of dishonesty among the young.

I’m not sure if it is more amazing or amusing that the academics who produced the report, who are most likely advocates of secularism if not outright atheists themselves, fail to connect the observed phenomenon to the obvious. Instead, they cast around for ridiculous explanations. “We think it is because their role models are not very good.”

And why might that be? The idea that a society can simply abandon one of its central foundations with only minor consequences is absurd on its face. Genetic science has amply demonstrated the powerful limits on environmental modifications to human nature. Atheists can continue to produce a panoply of illogical arguments meant to decouple morality from God, but scientific observation, historical analysis, and thousands of years of philosophical exploration clearly demonstrate that this cannot be successfully done.

Dawkins doubles down

I know a lot of people found it difficult to believe that Richard Dawkins’s arguments are as haplessly bad as they are. But every time he speaks out, he reveals that he is both dishonest and as reliably inept as I described in TIA:

“If children are taught, however moderately, that faith is a virtue, they are taught that they don’t need evidence to believe something; that they can believe something just because it’s their faith, then that paves the way for the minority to become extremists. If children are taught that they don’t need to defend their beliefs with evidence, then that does pave the way for extremism.”

He believes that atheism will soon become a more popular framework for people. “There seems to be a correlation with education. It’s certainly true within the US — the more educated people are more likely to give up religion. I’m sure that’s true in India as well,” he says, adding that even US presidents may have been atheists but they’re not allowed to say so or they won’t get re-elected. “I think Lincoln, Kennedy, Clinton, Obama may well be an atheist. Obama’s a very intelligent man. He probably is an atheist,” he says. “There are 535 members in the US congress. Presumably some of them are reasonably educated. It’s inconceivable that only one of them is an atheist. There’s got to be at least 50% of them.”

Being a conventionally clueless academic, Dawkins clearly doesn’t realize that the educational systems across the West are barely capable of teaching children how to read or do math. The idea that it is going to teach them to believe in things only based on evidence is absurd. And the stupidity of the idea is underliend by the fact that it is readily apparent that Richard Dawkins doesn’t even know what “evidence” is! This is a massive blunder and proves that he genuinely is as stupid as his inept arguments dissected in TIA make him appear!

One can only wonder about the logic behind Dawkins’s absurd claim that half the U.S. Congress is atheist. Or what is the evidence upon which he bases this belief, since he presents nothing but a naked assertion. As for Obama being an atheist, everyone knows that’s not true. One can quite credibly make the case for him being a Muslim since he is known to have been one as a child; there is no shortage of documentary evidence attesting to his Islamic heritage. Or one could also make the case that he is a Muslim apostate who converted to Christianity, as he himself declared last year. But where is the evidence that Obama is an atheist? Dawkins offers nothing beyond the fact of Obama’s education.

In trying to claim that all of these men who openly and publicly confessed their belief, not only in God, but often in specific religious theologies, are actually atheists, Dawkins is being blatantly dishonest. This is deeply ironic, given his angry response to those historically misinformed Christians who believe that Charles Darwin converted to Christianity on his deathbed.

Post-Christian nirvana awaits

You would think that the realization of what will fill the post-Christian void is significantly more intrinsically anti-atheistic religion would serve as a check on the atheist hatred for Christianity. But that would require atheists to be rational, and as I have demonstrated in some detail, that simply isn’t the case:

31-year-old Alexander Aan faces a maximum prison sentence of five years for posting “God does not exist” on Facebook. The civil servant was attacked and beaten by an angry mob of dozens who entered his government office at the Dharmasraya Development Planning Board on Wednesday. The Indonesian man was taken into protective police custody Friday since he was afraid of further physical assault….

Atheism is a violation of Indonesian law under the founding principles of the country. Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim nation, recognises the right to practice six religions in total: Islam, Protestant, Catholic, Hindu, Buddhism and Confucianism. Atheism is, however, illegal. According to Indonesian criminal law, anyone who tries to stop others believing in a faith could face up to five years in jail for blasphemy.

Atheists point to the inevitable triumph of atheism because a few very small European countries with birth rates below the replacement level now have statistically significant atheist minorities. (None have an atheist majority). Meanwhile, Islamic nations with populations nearly equal to the entire European Union with birth rates nearly twice those of Sweden, France, and other European countries are, unlike historic Christianity, actively prosecuting atheists.

And from this evidence, the atheist somehow manages to conclude that he is not only winning, but that the triumph of atheism is inevitable. It would appear that the godless must subscribe to the Charlie Sheen school of data analysis. It is little wonder their arguments against the existence of God are so uniformly inept.

A portrait in godless courage

Unsurprisingly, British atheists are discovering that snark and striking a superior pose happens to be less effective against some religions than others:

A student Muslim group is demanding the ‘offensive’ image of Jesus and Mo having a drink at the bar, taken from an online satirical sketch, be removed from the social networking site. The president of the Atheist, Secularist and Humanist society at the prestigious University College London (UCL), Robbie Yellon, has stepped down over the controversy….

Secretary for the National Federation of Atheist, Humanist and Secular Student Societies, Michael Paynter,said: ‘Robbie stepped aside because he signed up as president to organise events and run a student society.

‘He did not appreciate the stress he would be under when dealing with a controversy like this, so he wanted to make way for someone else.’

I’ll bet he didn’t. It would appear that being an antagonistic little prick isn’t quite as much fun when the targets are inclined to hit back with vigor. I wonder how long it will take before the more intelligent European atheists begin taking the long view and arguing on behalf of re-establishing Christendom. By now, it must be fairly clear to even the most optimistic atheist that the shiny secular scientific society of their dreams isn’t in the cards and they have leaped from the frying pan into the fire.

Christians may not always succeed in loving their enemies, but they have been remarkably tolerant by historical standards. Now the atheists of the West are beginning to discover what real intolerance looks like.