Tag: atheism

Most atheists have sub-normal intelligence

I mean that quite literally, not that this is any news to those who have read TIA and understand the two churches of atheism or have been forced to slog through the reasoning exhibited by some of the atheists commenting on this blog. The Inductivist points us to empirical evidence that proves 56.8% of all atheists have IQs below 100.

Should you wish to verify this information for yourself, go to the GSS 1972-2008 database, type “god” in the column field and “WORDSUM” in the row field, then hit the “Run the Table” button. Be sure to select the unweighted numbers if you want to see the raw results.

So, while it is true that a slightly higher percentage of atheists have IQs in the highest range, 8.8 percent compared to 8.0 percent of those who believe God exists, because there are so many more theists than atheists, there are 9 highly intelligent theists who are sure that God exists, (and 13 who believe in God’s existence), for every highly intelligent atheist who believes God does not exist. And on a personal note, visiting atheists who believe that they are more intelligent than theists by sheer virtue of their non-belief and/or commitment to Science Reason would do well to keep in mind that less than nine percent of all atheists reach the level that is from twelve to six points lower than the very minimum you know my IQ could be.

It should come as no surprise that the highest percentage of highly intelligent individuals are agnostic since it is the only position fully supported by all the material evidence. Nor should it be a surprise that atheists so often attempt to claim agnostics as atheists, as there are nearly three times more highly intelligent agnostics as there are atheists. The GSS data is more evidence for the idea that atheism is little more than a less intelligent form of socially maladjusted agnosticism.

Cue attacks on the scientific validity of the General Social Survey or an abandonment of the appeal to intelligence argument in 3… 2… 1….

UPDATE: Contrary to their self-advertising, atheists are actually more over-represented at the low end of the intelligence spectrum than they are on the high end. 8.4 percent of atheists have IQs below 63 (nearly as many as have high IQs) whereas only 1.9 percent of believing theists do.

The source of evangelism

Christians are driven to evangelize out of duty or out of a sympathetic desire to prevent others from destruction. Other religions proselytize for similar reasons. But why do militant atheists evangelize so fervently? I suspect one reason may be from an instinctive demographic fear:

The World Values Survey, which covered 82 nations from 1981 to 2004, found that adults who attended religious services more than once a week had 2.5 children on average; while those who went once a month had two; and those who never attended had 1.67. Prof Rowthorn wrote: “The more devout people are, the more children they are likely to have.”

As Rowthorn notes, people do fall away from their childhood religions, although as I have shown in the past, this is also true of those with no childhood religion. But the demographic disadvantage means that the atheist community has to keep all of their children within the godless fold and deconvert one out of every three religious children just to keep pace with the growth of the religious community.

No wonder their evangelical efforts are so feverish. And no wonder their writings are so frequently tinged with despair, because their own children are converting to religion faster than religious children are converting out of it.

Science Reason in action

Telic Thoughts presents an amusing chronicle of PZ Myers and his response to the Arizona shooting:

Upon hearing that a democratic congresswoman had been shot, the scientist PZ Myers immediately discards science to make this rather unscientific hypothesis about a man who’s name he didn’t even know yet.

“I’ll take a wild guess here. The scumbag who committed this crime has been caught; I’ll bet he’ll turn out to be a Teabagger who listens to a lot of AM talk radio.”

PZ’s only evidence comes in the form of a Palin campaign poster featuring a map of targeted campaign races with “targets” over the congressional districts that were targeted. Then facts start to come in. The shooter had exhibited disturbed behavior. The shooter was an atheist. The shooter read Marx, Hitler, and Rand. Rambling nonsensical web screeds?

PZ responds to the evidence with more emotional, partisan non-science:

“What I see are people who are far too quick to dismiss the right-wing hate speech as a causal factor. Yes, this shooter was a lunatic; that doesn’t mean he wasn’t hearing the drumbeats from the right.”

More evidence comes in fast. Former acquaintances and friends call him a liberal activist. Radical. An atheist. A 9/11 truther. A pothead.

PZ doubles down.

Now, there is certainly nothing wrong in making guesses about why something happened. And those guesses are bound to reflect our biases in one way or another. But it is interesting to compare the irrational reactions of left-wingers like Myers and Paul Krugman, who have clung to their immediate and biased suppositions rather than abandoning them in the face of the documentary and testimonial evidence, with a more rational albeit equally incorrect reaction.

The left-wing supposition was based, as Telic Thoughts notes, on pure personal prejudice. There simply wasn’t any reasonable justification for the conclusion. There haven’t been any shootings by members of the Tea Party and or many shootings inspired by talk radio; the example that has been cited on various sites is a fictional one from a movie called The Fisher King.

Now, my initial suppositions were also incorrect. My very first thought when I heard about it was that the shooting was probably immigration-related because Arizona has been such a national hotspot on that issue. I didn’t know if it was more likely to be someone who was pro-immigration or anti-immigration because I didn’t know the congresswoman’s position on the matter. I initially assumed the shooter was an anti-immigrationist since Giffords is a Democrat and most Democrats are supporters of unlimited third world immigration. But I looked up her record, discovered the woman was considered to be somewhat of a restrictionist on the issue, and therefore concluded incorrectly that the shooter was likely to be some sort of La Raza fanatic disappointed by the failure of the DREAM act.

“[T]his could be the result of a personal issue, for all we know right now…. I would guess that it’s a Hispanic college student who is an illegal alien and has lived in the USA all his life. I can’t imagine it was anyone even loosely associated with the Tea Party in any way since they tend to be more focused on Washington players. It’s probably not a pro-lifer either, since they would be more interested in targeting abortion doctors than politicians.“

When one takes a logical approach to observing and interpreting the world’s events, one is forced to consider all the various possibilities regardless of one’s biases. Hence my consideration of the various possibilities that the shooter might have been an anti-immigrationist, a Tea Partier, or a pro-lifer. (I never considered the gold standard or anti-federalism to be even remote possibilities since the shooter might as reasonably have targeted a Cardinals cheerleader as a congresswoman if one of those issues happened to be his motivation.) And while my conclusions could certainly have been skewed by my own biases, at least there was a coherent and logical basis unrelated to them for reaching it. This also meant I had no vested interest in clinging to my initial surmise. So, once it became obvious that the shooter was not a Hispanic, but a young white male who was not a military veteran, I correctly concluded that the shooter was an atheist with personal problems. “Schizoid atheist” was the term I used. The schizophrenia hasn’t been confirmed yet, but the atheism has. Again, I did not reach that conclusion because of my personal biases, but because it fit the model of numerous recent shootings by other young white men around the world.

Myers, on the other hand, believed as he did only because he very much wanted to believe it. His initial conclusion was based on absolutely zero evidence, and he has continued to stick with it in the face of all the available evidence. As one of his commenters correctly pointed out, there is no indication that the shooter had any knowledge of the Palin “crosshairs” map that has the hysterical Left in full point-and-shriek mode. What passes for Myers’s reasoning in this incident goes a long way towards explaining the central basis of his criticism of religious beliefs; he is quite clearly projecting his own habit of belief for belief’s sake upon those who possess them. Moreover, it is amusing to note how his inability to adjust his thinking on the basis of the evidence is consistent with the inflated importance he ascribes to scientific evidence; because he has to reject the validity of documentary and testimonial evidence in order to justify his belief in the non-existence of God, he cannot permit himself to be swayed by those forms of evidence with regards to matters he considers less important. And so, the truth of what was written nearly 2,000 years ago is made evident.

“For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse. For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened.

Claiming to be wise, they became fools…”

It is particularly amusing to see the ready willingness of a self-proclaimed skeptic who disdains documentary evidence to fall for a forged document. And this comment by Lou Cypher related to the forgery nicely underlines the aforementioned Pharyngulan predilection for projection.

“It doesn’t matter what the facts are, if the teabaggers repeat a lie frequently enough it evidently magically stops being a lie in the eyes of the public, so once they decide to posthumously change his party affiliation to ‘D’ that’s basically the end of the discussion right there.”

How I love the smell of irony in the morning….

UPDATE: And there goes the remnant of PZ’s “right wing talk radio incitement” meme. “He did not watch TV. He disliked the news. He didn’t listen to political radio.”

Does anyone doubt that this won’t slow any of the brainless Lefties from continuing to argue that even if right-wing discourse didn’t have anything to do with this incident, it might next time.

“An ardent atheist”

As some of the usual suspects have been attempting to pull out Sam Harris’s classic “No True Atheist” argument to which they retreat every time the atheism of a mass murderer or spree killer is mentioned, I thought it would be pertinent to quote this Associated Press article about Arizona shooter:

Over time, Loughner became increasingly introspective — what one of the friends described as a “nihilistic rut.” An ardent atheist, he began to characterize people as sheep whose free will was being sapped by the government and the monotony of modern life.

Thus perishes Uber Dawks’s claim that Loughner’s atheism was “highly debatable”. I further note that the atheist killed six times more people than did the secular Catholic authorities following the trials of Giordano Bruno and Galileo combined… more than 375 years ago. Now, atheism doesn’t cause anyone to kill by itself. The vast majority of atheists, like the vast majority of theists, will never intentionally do physical harm to anyone. But there is no question that the rejection of objective divine morality that atheism necessarily entails removes considerable rational obstacles from murder and other moral offenses. The danger created by this rejection is that it leaves the atheist answerable to nothing more than his subjective and dynamic morality, which despite the partial barriers of intellectual pretensions and moral parasitism, ultimately consists of emotion, desire, and passing fancies.

Answering an atheist’s question

An atheist asks why believers are hostile toward atheists, then answers her own question in a manner she probably didn’t intend:

Why are believers so hostile toward atheists? Is there anything atheists can say about our atheism — or even just about our lives — that won’t make people look at us with revulsion?

The short answer is no, not really, because the self-styled atheist is usually an intrinsically repellent individual for the very reasons that caused him to primarily identify himself on the peculiar basis of one very specific non-belief. The reason that believers, agnostics, and even other atheists all dislike atheists who identify themselves as atheists is because they don’t like annoying, dishonest, and literally self-righteous people with social handicaps who reject every objective moral or ethical code. You don’t have to be an asshole to call yourself an atheist, but it quite clearly helps. After all, as the 2008 ARIS study showed, the even vast majority of atheists are not willing to call themselves atheists!

While atheism is defined as a belief that gods do not exist,(or sometimes an absence of belief in gods, although in practice it is really just a subset of a materialist philosophy), identifying oneself an atheist is a conscious choice to announce to the world that one’s disbelief in gods is a defining and important aspect of one’s life. I don’t believe in fairies, but I never describe myself as an afairiest because that does not define me in any way, shape or form. When asked about his religion, an atheist could just as easily say that he does not have a religion instead of making a contentious assertion that God does not exist – in fact, most de facto atheists do precisely that – but the self-proclaimed atheist prefers the latter. And therein lies the heart of the answer.

Only an atheist could possibly find it a mystery why believers might be just a little bit hostile towards atheists like Uber Dawks, who sent this email yesterday: Color me not at all shocked that your kind hastily pointed out Jared Lee Loughner’s highly debatable atheism. This only serves as further evidence that the religious right is completely intolerant of those who hold to an atheistic view. Like McVeigh or Seung-Hui Cho or James Jay Lee before him, Loughner’s atheism has absolutely nothing to do with his actions [Or Stalin’s, or Mao’s, or Pol Pot’s… they keep saying that and their co-non-religionists just keep inexplicably killing more people. It’s a mystery – VD] and to make any claim to the contrary is tantamount to bigotry-fueled profiling. It is more than obvious that the man was mentally unhinged and given his reading material was reacting irrationally and violently to the barrage of capitalist and biblical rhetoric coming from the right-wing. If you “money, guns n’ bibles” types would stop forcing your silly notions upon the rest of us, we might be able to prevent misguided and mentally ill young men like this one from taking this kind of action.

Unless religion is finally replaced with science and reason, this illness and the violent reaction to it will keep on perpetuating. That is what religious belief is, an illness. Whenever a Christian asks why religious scientists are not hired for certain positions in academia or do not get their contracts renewed, the answer is simple. It is because their religious affliction affects their ability to do their work, just as the affliction of an alcoholic or serious drug addict leads to a similar inability. Like the illness of alcoholism and drug addiction, we need to treat these harmful behaviors for the good of both the individual and the society.

There is an impressive abuse of logic in that little atheist rant. Unlike the small-a de facto atheist who merely doesn’t happen to believe that gods exist, the self-styled atheist is much more accurately described as an anti-religionist in general and anti-Christian in particular. And again, only a socially autistic Capital-A atheist would find it hard to understand why religious people might be hostile towards anti-religious people who actively want to eliminate their holidays, their jobs, and in some cases, even their lives.

Moreover, no one likes a liar and most atheists lie about the source of their atheism. Greta Christina herself is clearly not telling the truth when she writes: When atheists make it clear that we gave religion a sincere try, that we considered the question seriously and thoughtfully and finally came to the conclusion that the god hypothesis was implausible and unsupported by any good evidence… religious believers then have to come up with an explanation for why God hasn’t revealed himself to us.

We can easily confirm this to be untrue on several levels. First, while most atheists claim that they gave religion a sincere try, it is patently obvious when they haven’t because one can reliably expose an atheist’s ignorance of even the most basic Christian doctrine, let alone more obscure religious doctrines, with only two or three simple questions. Second, the age at which most people become atheists indicates that it is almost never an intellectual decision, but an emotional one. (This is why most self-identified atheists are angry, bitter, and immature. The anger, bitterness, and immaturity are usually the cause of the atheism, they are not, as many Christians erroneously suppose, the effects.) Third, Greta reveals her own ignorance of the Bible and Christian doctrine and her own dishonesty as well when she claims that “religious believers then have to come up with an explanation for why God hasn’t revealed himself to us”. No, as a matter of fact, we don’t. There are a number of explanations provided in various religious scriptures, including both the Old and New Testaments, among others.

He does not answer when people cry out because of the arrogance of the wicked. Indeed, God does not listen to their empty plea; the Almighty pays no attention to it. How much less, then, will he listen when you say that you do not see him….
– Job 35:12-14

“The true light that gives light to everyone was coming into the world. He was in the world, and though the world was made through him, the world did not recognize him. He came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him. Yet to all who did receive him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God.”
– John 1:9-12

Or, to put it in omniderigent terms, atheists are among the vessels made to be broken.

The combination of ignorance, epistemic incoherence, and ill-founded arrogance that is necessary to label oneself an atheist is as distasteful to the average individual as it is contemptible to the intellectual. When one combines those qualities with the social autism and hate-filled evangelicalism that is all too commonly displayed by atheists, it is a wonder that they are tolerated as much as they are. All evangelicalism is not the same. If someone is attempting to save you from fiery destruction, their intentions toward you are clearly good. If, on the other hand, someone is attempting to kick the crutch upon which you are leaning out from under you, their intentions are clearly evil.

Few, if any, believers are hostile to people who simply don’t believe in God on the mere basis of their not sharing the believer’s beliefs. Pity is the much more common attitude. But hostility towards anti-religious, untrustworthy individuals with evil intentions is not only explicable, it is entirely justified. And if Greta genuinely wants believers to look at her with less revulsion, perhaps she should simply concern herself with living her life according to her own beliefs rather than spending it attempting to interfere with the lives and beliefs of others.

On a final note, let me explain one aspect of this very slowly for the less socially adept atheists. Let us suppose, for the sake of argument, that you are correct and that there is no God. We shall suppose that you are right and I am wrong. Let us also suppose, again for the sake of argument, that I am more beautiful than you are. Now, neither your being more right than I am nor my being more beautiful than you are has to have any affect on how we regard the other living his life. But how would you look at me if I went so far as to define and label who I am as being “not ugly like you”? What would you say if I asked you if there was anything I could say about your relative lack of beauty when compared to me that would not make you look at me with revulsion? And why do you think you can do that sort of thing to believers without suffering the obvious social consequences?

Mailvox: one less god and the banana

Lithp wishes to respond to my critique of Stephen Roberts’s One Less God argument:

All right. I’m interested in addressing your critique:

“1. No, we are not both atheists.
2. No, you are confusing God with gods. If you simply take the First Commandment into account, you will know that this is incorrect. Few atheists understand that monotheism concerns the worship of one supreme Creator God, not belief in the existence of only one supernatural being that demands worship.
3. Unless an atheist dismisses the Christian God because they believe Him to be an evil supernatural being falsely posing as a deity worthy of worship, he is not doing so for the same reason that Christians dismiss the pagan gods.”

On Point 1, the first part is not meant to be taken literally. Of course a monotheist is not an atheist. The point is that disbelieving in deities is not such a novel concept. I can proceed no further unless you clear up a point for me: Are you saying that you DO believe in pagan gods, you just don’t think they are what they claim?

“It is so eminently fitting that atheists should rely upon fake quotes to argue in support of their supposed dedication to reality.”

I should think the point matters more than who said it.

“Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens, and Myers are no more philosophically sophisticated than the teenagers and make pretty much the same arguments.”

Okay. You really aren’t going to get a more in-depth rebuttal from anyone other than “no they aren’t,” because you didn’t actually demonstrate how this is so. This is especially problematic for someone such as myself, who doesn’t really follow any of these people. Additionally, I don’t see why you keep using the phrase “teenager” to describe an ignorant person. I’m 19 and I can tell you why Ray Comfort’s banana argument is a load of nonsense.

1. I am aware that Roberts’s first statement can be viewed as mere rhetorical exaggeration, even though most atheists who quote it do take it literally. That doesn’t make it any less false. The fact that he begins with a demonstrable falsehood doesn’t bode well for his argument, since it indicates he is more interested in the superficial sound of his argument than its substance. If you’re going to pose as a philosophical champion of material fact and reason, shouldn’t you really stick to strict factual accuracy?

2. That’s a reasonable question. Yes, I do believe in the literal existence of intelligent and supernatural beings that are not the Creator God and may or may not seek human worship. Some of the pagan gods in the written historical record are these creatures whereas others are mere human invention. The Bible describes both kinds. I would put Zeus and Amaterasu in the fictional category and Baal, Wotan, and Damballah Wedo in the non-fiction one based on the behavior of their human worshippers. As I have repeatedly written, atheists like Roberts and even some Christians fail to make the vital distinction between “God” and “gods”. There are many gods but only one Creator God who merits our worship and who sent His Son to die on our behalf.

Please note that one needn’t believe in the existence of either the Christian God or the pagan gods to understand that the distinction renders Roberts’s argument invalid.

3. Again, if you are claiming to be devoted to fact and reason, basing your self-proclaimed most effective argument on a fictitious statement at the very least renders your devotion to fact more than a little suspect. That being said, if the point stands, it stands, though obviously without the benefit of the presumed authority of the erroneously quoted individual who didn’t actually supply the quote. It also calls either the knowledge or the intellectual honesty of the individual providing the false quote into question.

4. First, the overlap between the arguments presented by the Reddit “teenagers” and the New Atheists is easily confirmed by comparing them. Second, I have actually demonstrated how the arguments of Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens, Myers, and others are philosophically unsophisticated and have gone into considerable detail explaining precisely how those arguments are incorrect. Since I have published an entire book on the subject, I don’t believe it is either necessary or possible for me to rehash several hundred pages of material every time the subject comes up again. Of course, until someone reads the book, their opinion on the matter is entirely irrelevant.

Moreover, numerous atheists have reached precisely the same conclusion about the lack of philosophical and theological sophistication on the part of the New Atheists as I have. Dawkins and Myers have both openly admitted their own ignorance of philosophy and/or theology; you should note that the Courtier’s Reply is a feeble attempt to justify that ignorance. You may also wish to note that only Harris, Dennett, and Onfray even pretend to have any knowledge of philosophy.

5. Teenagers are, for the most part, almost completely ignorant without realizing it. They have very little experience of the world and the vast majority are badly educated and poorly read. Even the most intelligent seldom have enough information at their intellectual disposal to use that intelligence to any significant effect. However, in this particular case, it was asserted by someone else that the people who were posting quotes in the Reddit thread were mostly teenagers. Not being familiar with that site, I simply accepted his assertion, even though I consider it to be questionable.

As for Ray Comfort’s banana, I have no idea to what you are referring. But what little I have read of Comfort does not lead me to conclude that it would take much in the way of either intelligence or experience to successfully address one of his arguments.

An out-of-date evolutionist

David Sloan Wilson not only presents a fallacious and remarkably self-serving analogy for our edification, he also demonstrates why most scientists should probably stay very far away from logic, rhetoric, and philosophy. In the process of launching an inept attack on the potential legitimacy of creationism, he shows that he is neither up on the present state of science nor able to reach a correct logical conclusion from the facts on hand:

Imagine playing chess with someone who insists on continuing after his king has been taken. Or imagine a basketball game where the losing team insists on continuing after the final buzzer has sounded. These vignettes are so absurd that if they actually happened we would regard the protesters as insane. Yet something comparable happens all time when creationists protest that it is unfair for them to be ignored–including some recent comments on my blog.

The idea that it is unfair to be declared a loser and to be made to retire from the field profoundly misunderstands the nature of fairness in all contest situations. Science is a contest situation, no less than chess or basketball. In the ideal scientific contest, alternative hypotheses make different predictions that can be tested with empirical observations. When the predictions of a hypothesis are not confirmed, it is declared a loser and is made to retire from the field. New hypotheses are always welcome to enter the competition, including modified versions of rejected hypotheses, but science without losers would be as pointless as chess without checkmate and basketball without the final buzzer….

Nevertheless, the scientific contest does result in the accumulation of durable knowledge. The earth is extremely old. Continents do drift. Species are descended from other species. Those who claim otherwise and demand that it is only fair to be heard are either deluded or cynically making a manipulative argument, a point to which I will return below.

Now, Mr. Wilson is certainly free to respond or not respond to whomever he likes on his blog and I have little doubt that he is tired of shooting down the same arguments from fourth-rate, ankle-biting creationists over and over again. I certainly get bored with hearing the same ignorant and illogical arguments put forth in such a tiresome manner by the fourth-rate evolutionists who infest the Internet. But that does not justify Mr. Wilson’s attempt to claim that he is acting fairly when he is not or his pretense that science is something it quite clearly is not.

If you actually know what you’re doing, it’s no problem shooting down the invalid arguments presented by the clueless and the uninformed. When they’re presented again, as they surely will be, simply point them to the previous smackdown. But if you really don’t, well, you’re not fooling anyone by claiming that you’re too busy, important, or credentialed to deny them taking their best shot, hapless as it might be.

Now, Wilson’s imagined sporting vignettes are indeed absurd, but they are not legitimately comparable. Let’s first consider the accuracy of his analogy. Most sports and games have clear-cut rules to which both sides are equally subject, a definite authority, more or less impartial referees, and are based primarily upon ability rather than credentials. Sporting competitions end when the clock runs out or a specific and predetermined event happens. Science, on the other hand, has no rules, no definite authority, extremely partial referees to the extent that “peer review” can even be considered refereeing rather than gatekeeping, and operates on a hierarchical, credential-based paradigm that makes no allowances for talent and would exclude most of the great uncredentialed scientists of the past. Not only do scientific “competitions” never end, logic dictates they cannot possibly end insofar as science is supposedly dedicated to “the accumulation of durable knowledge” and the possibility of new information exists.

In other words, science is observably so intrinsically unfair to those both inside and outside the profession that it makes the old Jordan Rules look like a paragon of fair competition. To claim that scientific contests, ideal or sub-optimal, are in any way comparable to a basketball game or a chess match is so demonstrably false that it requires either willful stupidity, careless error, or the cynical manufacture of a manipulative and invalid argument. Which would it be, Mr. Wilson?

Wilson somehow manages to not only commit Daniel Dennett’s error in his Doctrine of Transitive Doxasticism, but goes Dennett one better by appealing to scientage (the knowledge base of science) rather than one specific disciplinary application of scientody (quantum electrodynamics). Following a classic Dawkinsian bait-and-switch in which he brings up “the ideal scientific contest” in which “alternative hypotheses make different predictions that can be tested with empirical observations” in order to defend his quasi-scientific discipline wherein inferences take the place of testable predictions and empirical observations, Wilson then commits a logical blunder of Harrisian proportions when he cites the historical dismissal of group selection without realizing that it makes precisely the opposite case from the one that he is attempting to make.

Sloan states that the evolutionary revival of the concept of group selection, which was considered to be as much of a scientific loser as the phlogiston and Lamarckism for nearly 50 years, is evidence that the scientific playing field is fair even if it can become, in Wilson’s own words, “highly uneven”. However, the group selection example completely undercuts the original argument that a scientific contest is comparable to a sporting contest by demonstrating that there is no buzzer in science. Are we to conclude that there is a 50-year post-buzzer grace period and that Creationism has missed the scientific statute of limitations? Apparently not, as Wilson goes on to admit that there is no final buzzer. But since there is not, then what is the logical basis for Wilson’s division between the legitimate revival of group selection and the illegitimate revival of Creationism?

Wilson confesses that there are perfectly good scientific hypotheses that can be derived from the concept of an intervening creator god. What he fails to admit is that the concept has provided scientific successes as well as failures; the defeat of the “steady-state universe” by Georges Lemaître’s “Big Bang theory” as the standard cosmological model was a huge victory for the Creationists, whose concept of a universal beginning was once dismissed by Wilson’s predecessors in the way that Wilson now dismisses other, less necessary aspects of the God hypothesis.

More importantly, Wilson reveals himself to be out-of-date with regards to the latest scientific evidence on the unreliability of science itself. His “uneven playing field” does not even begin to take into account scientific fraud, the decline effect, publication bias, selective reporting, and the long, sordid history of scientific facts that have been disproven over time by scientists and non-scientists alike. In fact, the more that even the hardest sciences are examined with the same skeptical lens that the likes of Dawkins would prefer to keep focused only on religion, the more it becomes obvious that his faith in it is badly misplaced.

For example, Wilson states that “The earth is extremely old. Continents do drift. Species are descended from other species.” And yet, the scientific evidence for these statements is much weaker, scientifically speaking, than the evidence for medical science that is not experimentally disadvantaged due to the daunting challenges of replicating historical events. So, the fact that “80 percent of non-randomized studies turn out to be wrong, as do 25 percent of supposedly gold-standard randomized trials” means that it is not only possible, but downright probable, that his statements will eventually turn out to be wrong.

Wilson’s attitude and his attempt to sound a buzzer that does not exist in order to declare the game over are both profoundly unscientific. It is not only more unscientific than the behavior of the creationists that he decries, it is actually dogmatic anti-science. The ironic thing is that Wilson isn’t even doing science when he engages in his customary evolutionary speculation, but rather fiction and philosophy because there is virtually no scientific evidence for natural selection, as leading researchers in the field such as Masatoshi Nei of Penn State readily admit.

(The idea that natural selection is the cause of evolution is a perfectly reasonable logical argument, but that’s all it is to date. Despite the oft-heard explanation that polar bears are white due to natural selection, no scientist has ever gone out there and painted polar bears pink, red, and yellow in order to produce evidence that colored polar bears are any less fit than white ones. It’s taken evolutionists more than 150 years to realize this, but now even Richard Dawkins is referring to a theory of evolution by (probably) natural selection and evolutionary researchers like Nei are attempting to retroactively find the evidence that they errantly took for granted all along.)

In fact, the one thing that we can predict with a high degree of certainty about Wilson’s field based upon its past record is that its “durable knowledge” will prove incorrect. Biology is arguably the only science that is more reliably off-base than economics; just last week the discovery of homo sapiens fossils in Israel appears to have once more upended the state of evolutionary scientage. And note that simply calling the consistent unreliability of science “self-correcting” does not turn the bug into a feature, especially since a good part of the “self”-correction comes from outside the scientific community.

A more accurate analogy would have been for Wilson to describe science as a collection of annoying fat kids who declare themselves the world champions of Foosketball, then refuse to define the rules or let anyone else play lest they be exposed, pinned down, and defeated. Despite their academic credentials, scientists are no more to be permitted special pleading than priests. Mr. Wilson’s inability to reach correct logical conclusions coupled with his stated refusal to entertain alternative hypotheses does not speak well for his scientific perspective, so it’s probably just as well for everyone that he works in a field where no actual use of the scientific method is required.

Update: Amy Alkon also posted on Wilson’s post. I left a comment there which I imagine a few of you will find more amusing than she does as the woman is in well over her head and makes what we have all come to recognize as the expected atheist errors. Seriously, what is with atheists and their inability to understand or utilize common word definitions? Not reading the Bible or other religious texts I understand, but what do they have against dictionaries?

Mailvox: let me explain how this works

Modernguy objects to my kicking around a few angst-ridden atheist teenagers:

You’re treating them as arbiters of the best arguments for atheism so you’re doing battle with them. And acting like you just spiked the ball in their endzone is comical considering they’re probably just a bunch of teenagers. In any case they are philosophically unsophisticated, so I would think below your weight class as internet superintelligence.

First, if I only limited myself to those of my intellectual weight class, I’d have to ignore nearly everyone. Second, it has always been my philosophy to take on all comers and give everyone at least one shot. So, if an atheist Neo-Keynesian with Down’s Syndrome wants to take his best shot, he’s welcome to do it. It’s not like his chances are going to be significantly worse than anyone else’s. And third, who is spiking the ball? I’m not celebrating, being from the Emmitt Smith school of having been there before and expecting to be there again soon; it is an unusual defense that cannot be run over with ease. What I find annoying about Modernguy’s protest is that for every atheist who wonders why I am bothering to kick around the ineffectual opposition, there are 10 clueless atheists who genuinely believe the kickees are making really good points and doing rather well.

The underlying problem isn’t that the atheist teenagers of Reddit are philosophically unsophisticated – and since we’re talking about internet atheists, the chances are good that they are not actually teenagers, it’s just that their intellectual and social development makes them appear to be – it is that self-anointed atheist champions such as Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens, and Myers are no more philosophically sophisticated than the teenagers and make pretty much the same arguments. Dennett and Onfray do somewhat better, but they’re still not in my class as their arguments are riddled with obvious errors big enough to drive fleets of trucks through. But don’t take my word for it, read TIA and make up your own mind. No one – and I mean absolutely no one despite tens of thousands of readers – has successfully argued that my critiques of the various arguments presented by these godless gentlemen are incorrect in any way. Few have even attempted to do so because the facts upon which I draw are so conclusive and easily confirmed. Whether it is the Courtier’s Reply or the Red State argument, the Extinction Equation, the Ultimate 747, One Less God, Extraordinary Claims, the Lancet Fluke, or the Epic Self-Evisceration of Christopher Hitchens, I have shown how their arguments to be both inept and invalid.

So, as I and various others have told Modernguy, if you think there is anything better out there, if you think there are any atheists arguments against religion, Christianity or God that are stronger or more valid, then by all means send it to me. I’ll post it here in its unedited entirety before picking it apart. And in the meantime, I’ll finish my post for later today explaining why a scientist who is apparently rather well-regarded in the field of evolutionary science simply does not know what he’s talking about when he prematurely proclaims a particular triumph of so-called science.

The best they’ve got

In case you’re still not convinced of the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of atheism, consider this list of what atheists believe to be “the big guns” of the best atheist quotes.

Needless to say, I was deeply unimpressed. It was amusing to see that the thread’s creator actually cited the illogical and theologically ignorant “One Less God” quote from Stephen Roberts that Ricky Gervais plagiarized in his recent article: “I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.”

Three errors in just three sentences.

1. No, we are not both atheists.
2. No, you are confusing God with gods. If you simply take the First Commandment into account, you will know that this is incorrect. Few atheists understand that monotheism concerns the worship of one supreme Creator God, not belief in the existence of only one supernatural being that demands worship.
3. Unless an atheist dismisses the Christian God because they believe Him to be an evil supernatural being falsely posing as a deity worthy of worship, he is not doing so for the same reason that Christians dismiss the pagan gods.

There are the expected appearances of Dawkins and Harris, Galileo’s fictional quote, and the concocted quote that David Hume falsely attributed to Epicurus. It is so eminently fitting that atheists should rely upon fake quotes to argue in support of their supposed dedication to reality.

But let us be fair. Whether you are a believer or an unbeliever, select whichever quote you consider to be either the least nonsensical or most effective in support of the atheist case. Mine is the following, which is absolutely true:

“A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything.” – Friedrich Nietzsche

Nietsche is correct in that faith doesn’t prove anything. The problem, of course, is that it isn’t supposed to, by literal definition. Paul writes in Hebrews: “Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen. The very fact that we have faith, is evidence that what we hope for is real.”

Of course, the common atheist confusion concerning the matter notwithstanding, “evidence” should not be mistaken for “proof”. Again, this should be completely obvious, as it is why linguistic concepts such as “competing evidence” and “weighing the evidence” are utilized.

Can you really blame God?

Ricky Gervais provides a vivid demonstration of the way in which many atheists are prone to vastly overrate their own intelligence and ability to reason. Possibly the most amusing thing is the way that a gaggle of less famous atheists fall all over themselves attempting to proclaim the brilliance of Gervais’s ignorant, illogical, and error-ridden article in the subsequent comments:

Why don’t you believe in God? I get that question all the time. I always try to give a sensitive, reasoned answer. This is usually awkward, time consuming and pointless. People who believe in God don’t need proof of his existence, and they certainly don’t want evidence to the contrary. They are happy with their belief. They even say things like “it’s true to me” and “it’s faith.” I still give my logical answer because I feel that not being honest would be patronizing and impolite. It is ironic therefore that “I don’t believe in God because there is absolutely no scientific evidence for his existence and from what I’ve heard the very definition is a logical impossibility in this known universe,” comes across as both patronizing and impolite.

Arrogance is another accusation. Which seems particularly unfair. Science seeks the truth. And it does not discriminate. For better or worse it finds things out. Science is humble. It knows what it knows and it knows what it doesn’t know. It bases its conclusions and beliefs on hard evidence -­- evidence that is constantly updated and upgraded. It doesn’t get offended when new facts come along. It embraces the body of knowledge. It doesn’t hold on to medieval practices because they are tradition. If it did, you wouldn’t get a shot of penicillin, you’d pop a leach down your trousers and pray. Whatever you “believe,” this is not as effective as medicine. Again you can say, “It works for me,” but so do placebos. My point being, I’m saying God doesn’t exist. I’m not saying faith doesn’t exist. I know faith exists. I see it all the time. But believing in something doesn’t make it true. Hoping that something is true doesn’t make it true. The existence of God is not subjective. He either exists or he doesn’t. It’s not a matter of opinion. You can have your own opinions. But you can’t have your own facts.

No, you can’t have your own facts. And yet, that is exactly what Gervais attempts to do throughout his “sensitive and reasoned answer”. First, Gervais is too socially autistic to to understand that the statement “I don’t believe in God because there is absolutely no scientific evidence for his existence and from what I’ve heard the very definition is a logical impossibility in this known universe” is no more patronizing or impolite than science is arrogant.

It is Gervais himself that people find patronizing, impolite, and arrogant, not his illogical statement or anthropomorphized science. He is the walking, talking evidence of the existence of the definitive Dawkinsian atheist, who does not believe in God because he is an asshole. Despite his attempts to blame people’s natural dislike of him on other things, there is no irony to be found because there is simply nothing there.

No one accuses science of being arrogant, they accuse scientists of being arrogant, which they often are, sometimes even with reasonable justification. And they accuse science fetishists like Gervais of being arrogant, which they usually are on behalf of science in a weird, cultish, and totally unjustifiable manner. Gervais’s elevation of science into an anthropomorphized quasi-deity in which he places inordinate trust is downright hilarious, as science, by which he clearly means “scientody” or “the scientific method”, does not “know” anything, it is not “humble”, and “it doesn’t get offended” for the obvious reason that it cannot. Atheists like Gervais make a false god of science, place their blind and uncomprehending faith in it, then sputter in outrage when others quite reasonably point to what without question merits being described as religious behavior.

Gervais is not so much incorrect as completely incoherent when he says that science “bases its conclusions and beliefs on hard evidence”. First, he reveals the usual atheist’s inability to distinguish between “evidence” and “scientific evidence”. Second, science does not possess either conclusions or beliefs and it does not base them or anything else upon evidence; Gervais clearly doesn’t understand how the scientific method works because it is used to produce evidence (of the scientific variety), it is not based upon evidence of any kind. Third, his example is spectacularly ignorant, as science not only did not develop penicillin, but the parochial arrogance of scientists actually retarded the development of the effective medical application of what had been the very sort of traditional medieval practice that Gervais disdains for decades. His knowledge doesn’t even rise to the level of Wikipedia: see the story of Ernest Duchesne and his 1897 paper that was ignored by the Institut Pasteur.

Speaking of facts, Gervais blatantly makes up his own when he claims that “75 percent of Americans are God-­‐fearing Christians; 75 percent of prisoners are God-­‐fearing Christians. 10 percent of Americans are atheists; 0.2 percent of prisoners are atheists.” But he has no basis for this and we KNOW he has no basis for this because no reliable statistical study of American prisoners has ever been done. And we also know he is not only wrong, but dishonest because he is using a bait-and-switch on his definition of atheist; only 0.7% of Americans actually call themselves atheists versus the 15% who the American Religious Identification Survey describes as Nones/No Religion.

Moreoever, we actually have comprehensive data regarding Gervais’s own country, the United Kingdom. (In fact, that’s likely where Gervais got his imaginary number for American atheists in prison, from the UK, which reported 122 atheists being held in English and Welsh jails That just happens to be 0.2 percent of the 65,256 prison population there.)

But in addition to those 122 atheists, there also happened to be another 20,639 prisoners, 31.6 percent of the total prison population, who claimed to possess “no religion.” And this was not simply a case of people falling through the cracks or refusing to provide an answer; the Inmate Information System is specific enough to distinguish between Druids, Scientologists, and Zoroastrians as well as between the Celestial Church of God, the Welsh Independent church, and the Non-Conformist church. It also features separate categories for “other Christian religion,” “other non-Christian religion,” and “not known.” At only two-tenths of a percent of the prison population, self-identifying atheists are, as previously suggested, extremely law-abiding. But when one compares the 31.6 percent of imprisoned no-religionists to the 15.1 percent of Britons who checked “none” or wrote in Jedi Knight, agnostic, atheist, or heathen in the 2001 national survey, it becomes clear that their practical atheist brethren are nearly four times more likely to be convicted and jailed for committing a crime than a Christian.

In other words, No Religion atheists are without question much more criminally inclined than Christians even if self-identified Scarlet-A Atheists are not. And since Gervais used the much larger 10% figure, he clearly had the No Religion atheists in mind, which shows the disingenuous nature of his original comparison between the ratio of Christians/Christians and Atheists/atheists. Remember, you can’t have your own facts, Ricky! There are many more errors of fact and logic that I have not troubled to highlight, but the reader should not find it difficult to identify them. Gervais goes on to plagiarize Stephen Roberts’s fallacious “One Less God” argument without crediting Roberts, admits his atheism is quite literally a childish belief, follows that admission with an exemplary demonstration of moral parasitism, and finally closes with a baseless and self-deluded declaration of his own good. This takes us right back to the starting point, which is that it is not science, but Gervais that is an arrogant ass.

Regardless of whether you believe in God’s existence or not,it is very difficult to read Gervais’s ludicrous attempt to justify his atheism and not reach three conclusions. First, it takes a truly epic fool to say, not only in his heart but in the Wall Street Journal as well, that there is no God. Second, this is less a case of atheistic evangelism than the agnostic variety as any intelligent atheist will be tempted to convert immediately to agnosticism out of sheer embarrassment. And third, if God does exist, it would be impossible to blame Him for deciding to throw such a smug and annoying little bastard into Hell when faced with the alternative of being inflicted with his company for eternity.