Tag: atheism

A skeptic shows he’s a sucker

Whenever you encounter atheists claiming to be skeptical, rational, logical, and intelligent, you can be relatively confident that they will soon demonstrate that they are absolutely nothing of the sort. Consider these two contradictory claims from SkepticBlog:

1. “SkepticBlog is a collaboration among some of the most recognized names in promoting science, critical thinking, and skepticism.”

2. “Why has no one from Wall Street gone to jail for the financial meltdown? Bill Maher has asked this question several times on his HBO show Real Time. I have asked many experts myself, including economists, lawyers, and Wall Street traders. Answer: no one went to jail because they didn’t break any laws.”

Now, I rather liked Michael Shermer’s “The Mind of the Market” when I reviewed it a while back, but this post is almost astonishingly stupid and is so demonstrably clueless that I very much doubt Shermer has genuinely asked a single expert about this. One need look no further than the mainstream media to know that the Obama administration broke the law. Ben Bernanke broke the law. Henry Paulson broke the law. Every single “too big to fail” bank broke the law. Every bank that registered a mortage with MERS broke the law and evaded county taxes. Karl Denninger has a little list of four of the most obvious and egregious examples.

Shermer then goes on to ask “What, exactly, did these Wall Street people do that was so wrong?” That’s quite simple. Fraud, theft, forgery, money laundering, and tax evasion.

And after this preposterous demonstration of willful stupidity, the “skeptic” Shermer declares that “the government should regulate Wall Street more”. Right, because the answer to government regulators failing to enforce the law is obviously more government regulation. That’s some fine criticial thinking right there, isn’t it?

Shermer should know better. I know for a fact that he’s not as economically illiterate as this post makes him look, but it shows that he is demonstrably inept when it comes to logic. Keep this performance in mind when you consider the value of the science he is promoting and the legitimacy of his arguments concerning atheism.

The conundrum of the anti-Christian

Brian Philips examines the dichotomy of the Tebow hater’s cheering for the failure of the Denver quarterback:

I find myself half-consciously rooting for Tebow to fail, even though I have nothing against him, have lots of religious friends, am not especially tribal by nature, and wouldn’t want to be responsible for the nacho-related deaths of any prominent evangelical leaders, even if I detest their politics. Doesn’t matter. The part of me that wants to eat pork and not stone people just switches on and cheers for the blitzing linebacker.

There’s a problem with this, though, a problem that I’m convinced lies at the heart of the minor cultural puzzle that Tebow represents. The problem is that if you’re rooting against Tebow because he’s religious, you’re giving way to the trial-by-combat impulse. And the whole idea of the trial by combat is that there’s a higher power adjudicating the combat. It means something for the blue knight to kill the green knight only if God is moving the swords. So what I, many secular football fans, and Imaginary Daniel Dennett are really rooting for is for God to make Tim Tebow fail as a means of discrediting Himself, God, in accordance with our wishes, and against His, God’s, own interests.

This — arguably — doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.

It all comes down to atheist logic. Which, as FA von Hayek could have pointed out for us, is simply not logic at all.

He bravely ran away, away

Richard Dawkins is still running as fast as he can away from William Lane Craig:

Don’t feel embarrassed if you’ve never heard of William Lane Craig. He parades himself as a philosopher, but none of the professors of philosophy whom I consulted had heard his name either. Perhaps he is a “theologian”. For some years now, Craig has been increasingly importunate in his efforts to cajole, harass or defame me into a debate with him. I have consistently refused, in the spirit, if not the letter, of a famous retort by the then president of the Royal Society: “That would look great on your CV, not so good on mine”.

What a disgusting coward! As I have repeatedly noted, Dawkins is simply not very intelligent. He clearly doesn’t understand how contemptible this makes him look to those who are not disposed to mindlessly cheer his every action. His paltry original contributions to the catalog of atheist arguments are both trivial and defective; of all the various atheist apologists currently extant, only Sam Harris is more easily refuted. He is only comfortable “debating” elderly English churchmen, who are too genteel and polite to directly engage his flawed arguments; one need not be a believer to expose their copious logical and factual flaws.

And his rationale for ducking the debate is just intellectually appalling. Given that I am much more famous around the world than nearly everyone who comments here, should I similarly decline to address anyone’s arguments who does not look good on my resume? If I followed his example, I would be rightly castigated my cowardly pomposity. Dawkins, it is now eminently clear, is more a propagandist and a social climber than a genuine intellectual. He has sold quite a few books, to be sure, but then, so did Bertha Runkle.

Who is Bertha Runkle, you ask? Precisely.

UPDATE: The Fowl Atheist comments: “So Richard Dawkins has taken the time to explain why he refuses to debate William Lane Craig. It’s a terrific put-down. I’m going to have to steal from it next time that importuning dweeb Vox Day starts pestering me to debate him.”

I find it amusing that you’re still desperately trying to justify your cowardice, my chubby little atheist friend. And there is one small problem with your attempt to utilize what shall henceforth be known as “the Dawkins Defense”. I am more famous and successful than you are. You’re a professor at a community college. I’ve assisted Sam Harris on his most significant neuroscience project, interviewed John Julius Norwich and Umberto Eco, worked with most of the top entertainment companies, written four Billboard-charting singles, and published seven more books than you. My readership is bigger. One can even reasonably argue that my contribution to science exceeds anything you have done now that my hypothesis concerning atheism being a form of autism has been supported by the research being performed at Boston University, to say nothing of my modification of the core mechanism underlying the operation of the Austrian business cycle.

So, how on Earth is debating you going to help my resume?

Sam Harris is a psychopath?

It is science:

A study conducted by Daniel Bartels, Columbia Business School, Marketing, and David Pizarro, Cornell University, Psychology found that people who endorse actions consistent with an ethic of utilitarianism—the view that what is the morally right thing to do is whatever produces the best overall consequences—tend to possess psychopathic and Machiavellian personality traits…. Bartels and Pizarro found a strong link between utilitarian responses to these dilemmas (e.g., approving the killing of an innocent person to save the others) and personality styles that were psychopathic, Machiavellian or tended to view life as meaningless.

And there is your scientific connection between the man who advocates a happiness/suffering moral metric and the one who also advocates killing people for the mere possession of dangerous beliefs. They tend to be one and the same, and in the case of Mr. Harris, they are.

Mailvox: the hypocrisy of the anti-scientist

One can’t truly appreciate how effectively Dominic has argued the atheist case without comparing it to the conventional talking points usually presented by the average atheist:

Yeah, heaven forbid that we actually learn from our mistakes! Tell me vox, if you have such distrust of our present snapshot, how about you jump off your roof to test it?

But you won’t. And I’ll tell you why. While you know it can be wrong, and certainly is at some points, the chance that it’s wrong regarding your fall is abysmally low. So low that you won’t stake your life on it.

You similarly will not trust historical evidence that says humans flew , for you know well that the chance of them lying as opposed to science being wrong on the subject is really, really huge.

When someone testifies to you that he has seen a dragon in your backyard, you will, like a true hypocrite, impose upon the scientific principles of biology and non-observation of dragons despite the fact that you know full well it can be wrong.

And I’ll tell you why. You know it can be wrong, but you’re pretty sure it isn’t. When we bet, we bet on good odds, not bad ones. There’s the difference between probable and plausible that you’re unable to grasp. There’s a chance that your car will crash, your aeroplane will be hijacked by Islamic fundamentalists, you’ll be mugged while walking, etc. Does that prevent you from going out ?

You just happen to forget this game of odds when it suits you. It’s called hypocrisy, and you play this game well.

The amusing thing about the average atheist is the way they illogically attempt to simultaneously deny the relevance of historical and testimonial evidence while appealing to it under the misapprehension that it is science. I don’t refrain from jumping off my roof because science has confirmed that the effect of Earth gravity will draw me to the ground at 9.8 m/s and I have performed a rapid calculation involving my mass, the distance of the fall from the roof, and reached a conclusion that I will not jump. Instead, I rely upon the testimonial evidence of others, which simply states “don’t jump off the roof or you will hurt yourself.”

The amusing thing about this atheist’s example of flight is that scientists of the early 20th century refused to believe the historical evidence that the Wright Brothers had, in fact, flown, in part due to their reliance upon the scientific consensus of the time which insisted that heavier-than-air flight was impossible. In fact, Lord Kelvin, the leading scientist and President of the Royal Society of England, in 1895 stated unequivocally that “Heavier than air flying machines are impossible”.

If someone testifies that he has seen a dragon in my backyard, I may or may not believe him depending upon his historical record of truthfulness. Science won’t enter into it at all. I have already seen far too many things take place that I previously thought to be impossible to place more confidence in “the scientific principles of biology and non-observation of dragons” than in the truthfulness of an individual known to have been reliably truthful in the past.

The problem with atheists who make a fetish of science is that they simply don’t understand that science is not a universal tool ideal for all purposes, but is rather more akin to a hammer. A hammer works very well for driving nails and rather less well for cutting down trees. But preferring the use of a saw when the task at hand involves cutting down a tree does not make one intrinsically anti-hammer, nor does it make one hesitate before picking up a hammer to drive a nail.

Scientific evidence and historical evidence are complimentary, not intrinsically adversarial. They may overlap at times, they may conflict at others, but in no case are they the same thing and both types of evidence are capable of being wholly unreliable if applied in an inappropriate manner. It is far from hypocrisy to recognize the limits to a type of knowledge and restrict one’s use of it to the situations when it is relevant, especially since doing otherwise is misguided at best and quite possibly delusional.

TIA: it is science

Okay, you can all stop sending this to me now. Look, I don’t think anyone should have been terribly shocked by news of the scientific link between atheism and autism which supports my original hypothesis from four years ago:

People with ‘mild’ forms of autism are more likely to be atheists, according to a controversial new study – and more likely to shun organised religion in general. The study, which looked at posts on autism forums, focused on people with high-functioning autism such as Asperger’s. The study, from University of Boston, speculates that common autistic spectrum behaviours such as ‘a preference for logical beliefs’ and a distrust of metaphor and figures of speech, could be responsible.

The amusing thing about the vehement reaction by many atheists to my description of their observable tendency towards socially autistic behavior is that it was not only based on my personal observations over the years, but also by the Asperger’s Quotient results proudly reported by dozens of the Internet’s most militant atheists. But the link should have always been obvious because it is logically inevitable. Even if one believes that a god is nothing but a social construct, it should not be hard to grasp that a degree of social dysfunction would tend to inhibit one’s understanding of those constructs.

Now, obviously god-blindness will take a variety of forms, just as color-blindness does. My belated discovery of my own very mild color-blindness has, in some ways, helped me understand what Brent Rasmussen once described as a missing sense more than my longtime agnosticism ever did. You can explain it to me all you like, you can walk me slowly and patiently through all the lines on the image, but I am still not going to see it. Even if I trust that it is there, I simply cannot see it and no amount of desire allows me to detect it. It is perhaps worth recalling that just as my color-blindness is totally undetectable by others whereas the total or red-green versions are readily observable to anyone paying attention to the individual’s behavior, god-blindness is not going to automatically translate into full blown New Atheist social autism.

What is slightly misleading about the article’s description of these socially autistic individuals is that what is described as a “preference for logical beliefs” should actually be phrased as a “preference for beliefs that appear to be logical”. For, as we have repeatedly seen, socially dysfunctional atheists tend to be extraordinarily illogical, to such an extent that they will deny the existence of straightforward dictionary definitions in use for hundreds of years in order to cling to their pseudo-logic.

It’s not so much logic as static rules that appeal to them. Where the cognitive deficiency is revealed is in their inability to understand that the decision tree they have adopted with quasi-religious fervor is insufficiently dynamic. I suspect it is somehow related to their concomitant emotional immaturity, as I see a similar problem with static decision trees all the time in children’s soccer.

For example, you might tell a young defender to closely mark #12 because he is the most dangerous striker on the other team. Then you will watch in disbelief as that defender obediently stays wide and out of the play at #12’s side instead of moving into the center and attacking the other striker who has the ball and is heading for a shot on goal. What the young defender doesn’t understand that the order to mark the one player is a conditional one and that the order should no longer be considered in effect once a greater danger to the goal presents itself. So, it’s necessary to keep building more and more complex decision trees as the player develops until the light bulb goes off, the logical bases underlying all the various trees are finally understood, and the defender can begin thinking and analyzing the situations for himself rather than simply attempting to identify which branch of the decision tree applies to the present situation.

An inability or dislike for processing dynamic if-then situations has nothing to do with logic per se, it is simply a need for clear-cut rules that remove any necessity for active thinking. To the socially autistic, both “Science” and “Reason” are perceived as The Legitimate Rulegivers and they represent far more than the simple tools they are to the neurotypical. Of course, it is more than a little ironic that those who claim to be freethinkers and paragons of logic are actually exhibiting illogical behavior that is fundamentally based on an aversion to thinking.

A new secular calendar

Why one wonders, does the Common Era just happen to start at the same time as Anno Domini? What is this “common era” of which they speak?

The BBC has been accused of ‘absurd political correctness’ after dropping the terms BC and AD in case they offend non-Christians. The Corporation has replaced the familiar Anno Domini (the year of Our Lord) and Before Christ with the obscure terms Common Era and Before Common Era.

I find it hard to get too worked up about this sort of thing. It’s not new for the enemies of Christianity and it won’t last. Common Era and Before Common Era have been bubbling around the more absurd peripheries for a while, but they are going to last in the mainstream about as long as Thermidor and Fructidor did. And even if I wasn’t a Christian, I would think it was the height of lame faddery to ditch a tradition of more than one thousand years for no valid reason.

The dishonest atheist

This statement by Cabal demonstrates why one always has to assume, until it is demonstrated otherwise, that an atheist is a lying snake who will deceitfully redefine the language to suit his arguments at need.

Darwinism…a meaningless expression that only exists in creationist literature.

It doesn’t surprise me that some atheists, particularly the militant and evangelical ones, should practice their own form of Taqiyya. They reject the source of morality, after all, so they have no rationale for behaving in a truthful, moral manner. But what astonishes me time and time again is that they should choose to tell such stupid, easily exposed lies over and over again.

From the Oxford English Dictionary:

Darwinism
Pronunciation:/ˈdɑːwɪnɪz(ə)m/
noun

the theory of the evolution of species by natural selection advanced by Charles Darwin.

Derivatives

Darwinist
noun & adjective

No doubt we’ll soon be hearing new fictions about how the Oxford English Dictionary is creationist literature. And then I’ll have to point out that “Darwinism” is also in the Collins, Merrian-Webster, and World Heritage dictionaries as well.

Dar·win·ism

noun
the Darwinian theory that species originate by descent, with variation, from parent forms, through the natural selection of those individuals best adapted for the reproductive success of their kind.
Origin:
1855–60; Darwin + -ism

The PZ Myers Memorial Debate update I

While I can’t say many of the atheists who have been demanding that I make a positive case for the existence of gods for literally years have exactly covered themselves with glory in their willingness to step into the intellectual Octagon and take their chances, I have to give due credit to Gay Germ, Mark DiStefano, Roffle, and Thrasymachus, who, unlike the rest of their fellow non-believers, were willing to publicly defend the atheist position.

However, since Dominic Saltarelli did not hesitate to step up to the plate, and because he is known and respected as an intelligent commenter who originally hails from richarddawkins.net, I have decided to accept his challenge as the atheist champion. Just to make it interesting, Dominic and I have decided that the first round will be in English, the second round in Italian, and the third round in Latin.

The first PZ Myers Memorial Debate features Dominic Saltarelli vs Vox Day and concerns the evidence and logic for the existence or nonexistence of gods.

Now, as to the judges, we appear to be rather light on agnostics, which I suppose isn’t all that surprising because agnostics are naturally less interested in the subject and can’t be bothered with it. Here are the proposed judges, and I invite the relevant groups to discuss them. Please do not suggest any new names now, as everyone has had sufficient time to come forward.

Christian: Markku, Ms Pilgrim, cl, Stilicho, Josh, Gene, Gregory, Salt.

Agnostic: Crowhill, Alexamenos

Atheist: Mark Di Stefano, Thrasymachus, Roffle, ScottScheule

Now is the time to for discussion among the three groups in order to settle upon a judge who is deemed to be representative, impartial, and intelligent. I have no preference on either the agnostic or atheist judges, but for the Christian judge, I suggest that cl might be ideal because he is not a reader of this blog. However, I leave that for the Christians here to decide. After the three judges are selected, I will ask Dominic if he has any objection to any of them, and then we can move onto a discussion on how the scoring will be done. After that, Dominic and I will send our first round submissions, (which will consist of an initial statement and a response to the other’s statement), to the judges; the following day all four pieces will be posted here for general perusal. The judges will be expected to post their scores, along with any relevant comments supporting those scores, within two days of receiving the submissions.

E se non è gia tutto chiaro, la cosa delle lingue era solo un scherzo. Naturalmente faremmo tutto il dibattimento in latina, come i clàssici.

WND column

The Christian Nation

“While I was in America, a witness, who happened to be called at the assizes of the county of Chester (state of New York), declared that he did not believe in the existence of God or in the immortality of the soul. The judge refused to admit his evidence, on the ground that the witness had destroyed beforehand all the confidence of the court in what he was about to say. The newspapers related the fact without any farther comment. The Americans combine the notions of Christianity and of liberty so intimately in their minds, that it is impossible to make them conceive the one without the other; and with them this conviction does not spring from that barren traditionary faith which seems to vegetate in the soul rather than to live.”
– Alexis de Tocqueville, “American Institutions and Their Influence,” 1851

One of the repetitive themes that developed in The Irrational Atheist over the course of its writing is the profound historical unreliability of atheists. Atheists, particularly the aggressive variety, tend to repeat the same talking points over and over with such assurance that the average historically illiterate individual, regardless of his religious faith, has a tendency to accept them at face value. But this is foolish, as historical arguments presented by atheists almost invariably rely upon taking one small piece of historical evidence and twisting it beyond all recognition while simultaneously ignoring the larger part of the historical record.