Tag: atheism

The glorious return of Uber Dawks

Speaking of social autism, Uber Dawks offers this timely reminder that atheists who believe in reason don’t actually tend to utilize it well:

I see that your and fellow idiot fundies at WND who are somehow trying spin the Florida School Board shooting story into an anti-atheist screed because the shooter listed his religion as “Humanist” and was obviously ultra-liberal. I am now anxiously awaiting the typical Vox Day commentary bereft of logic and reason, much like your belief in Jesus.

This is typical conservative bait and switch and it disgusts me. You and your WND comrades should be ashamed. The world would be a better place if you idiots would just realize that you are fighting a losing battle against progress, including atheism and social equality. You just don’t understand that the human society is evolving into a better social construct, much like humans themselves have evolved into creatures that transcend racial inequality and sexual biology. We are no longer driven by the need to herd and procreate but have progressed into a society where freethinking is encouraged and sexual preference has transcended basic biology.

I’ve said it before an I’ll say it again – YOU IDIOT FUNDIES ARE LOSING! Humanism is a philosophy that will take over because it is based on REASON – and no smear campaign against it like linking a crazed Florida shooter to humanism will change that. Learn to give up your myths and this season celebrate reason. You people infuriate me and I anxiously await the day that you have been pushed out by science reason and are gone from our society.

Ah, yet another atheist arguing that the actions of a humanist [and probable atheist] should not be cited as an argument against atheism even though he has cited the actions of religious individuals as an argument against religion in the past. No doubt he would similarly argue that mass murders committed by atheists cannot possibly be attributed to their atheism even as he “anxiously” awaits the day that “science reason” has pushed theists out of his society. No doubt that’s just a coincidence and has nothing to do with his own atheism, right?

And who but an atheist would ever think to take the example of a humanist committing suicide and attempt to spin it into evidence for the ultimate triumph of humanism. Remember, these people genuinely believe they are more intelligent than you are.

UPDATE: Uber Dawks adds the following: You are missing the point entirely. The man did not shoot at others and then kill himself BECAUSE he was a humanist or an atheist, which is the same mistake you make when you mention Stalin or Mao or Pol Pot. The conservative media is already pointing to his atheism/humanism in order to paint the same sort of idiotic argument you make when mentioning the atheism of Joseph Stalin, etc. Epic fail.

Interesting. And leads to the question, would Uber Dawk hate “IDIOT FUNDIES” and dream about “Science Reason” pushing them from his society if he were not an atheist? Isn’t it his atheism that is behind his hatred? Some people really need to stop deifying reason and start using it.

League of the juvenile godless

Despite their best efforts to conceal it under a facade of reason, they always eventually reveal the essential lack of intellectual and emotional development that underlies their social autism:

But nowhere has the reaction of believers been so forceful as in Fort Worth, to the delight of Fred Edwords, the national director of the United Coalition of Reason. The coalition’s local chapter spent only $2,400 for four bus ads, which will run through the month in a city with about 200 buses.

“That’s more brouhaha for the buck than we have seen anywhere,” Mr. Edwords said.

And thus are all the claims that their various ad campaigns are about anything but annoying Christians at Christmastime belied. Can you even imagine how upset Jews would be if Christians began running ads directly attacking Jewish beliefs during the high holidays in a similar manner? Or how ballistic Muslims would go if similarly attacked during Ramadan? Atheists constantly attempt to portray the public celebrations and positive assertions of Christian belief as some sort of attack on their non-belief, but that is nothing more than absurd and juvenile drama-queening. Consider the lack of equivalency here:

Christian: “God loves you.”
Atheist: “You know it’s [the Christmas story of the birth of Jesus Christ] a myth.”

The Christian statement doesn’t say anything about the atheist or his atheism. While one can correctly deduce that if it is true that God loves you, then he must exist and therefore contradict the atheist belief that he does not, it cannot possibly be considered an attack on atheism of any kind. The atheist statement, on the other hand, is nothing but an attack on a specific belief of a specific religion. This isn’t to say all of the atheist ads are attacks; millions of people most certainly are good without God. They’re simply not good enough to enter into His presence come Judgment Day.

Now, when Christians start running historically correct ads featuring quotes like “There is No God” and “Science is My Religion” along with pictures of notorious atheist murderers such as Lenin, Stalin, Pol Pot, Mao Tse-tung, Jeffrey Dahmer, and Timothy McVeigh standing red-handed over the stacked skulls of their many victims instead of “God loves You”, atheists can legitimately complain that they’re being attacked. (Not that such attacks are not merited; they would be provably accurate whereas the atheist “myth” ad is not.) Until then, they’ve got absolutely nothing to complain about except for being alone of their own choice at Christmastime because a statement that contradicts your beliefs without making any reference to them is not only not an attack, it’s not even about them! And while it’s true that atheists happen to be America’s most-disliked minority, perhaps they should consider not behaving in such an annoying and thoroughly dislikable manner.

Not so much, mate

I completely agree with OneSTDV’s criticism of Half-Sigma’s support for the ridiculous and would-be offensive Christmas billboard erected by American Atheists this year, but I would be remiss if I failed to take exception to one of his statements:

HS likely doesn’t spend a lot of time on organized atheist websites or he wouldn’t naively presume the actual intention comports with the publicly expressed reasoning. Sure the atheist community has individuals like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris who can articulate impassioned but logically sound arguments against religious superstition. And surely given the high rate of disbelief amongst scientists, atheism is often a position resulting from reason.

OneSTDV is almost surely right about the probable difference between the stated and actual intentions. However, in like manner, one can only assume OneSTDV has not read deeply in the New Atheist literature or he would realize that while the arguments presented by Dawkins and Harris are impassioned, they are most certainly not logically sound by any measure. If, on the other hand, he has read Dawkins or Harris and genuinely believes they both have presented logically sound arguments against religion, I should very much like to know specifically which of those arguments he means since I am familiar with all of them and “logically sound” is among the very last means I would use to describe most of them, along with “factually accurate”. Is he impressed by Sam Harris’s Extinction Equation or by Sam’s creative resolution of the Is/Ought Problem presented in The Moral Landscape? Does he buy into Dawkins’s philosophical magnum opus of the Ultimate 747 argument or is was he convinced that sexual abuse is indeed less harmful to a child than a religious upbringing? I’m not just being sarcastic here, I would definitely like to know!

As for the scientists, I note that it is incorrect to assume that a preponderance of atheism among scientists should be taken as evidence to indicate that atheism is often a position resulting from reason. It is a non sequitur; consider the implications in light of similarly strong predilections for sporting beards, wearing glasses, or voting Democrat.

As for the billboard itself, it is nothing more than the usual atheist obnoxiousness and Half-Sigma is simply revealing his own inability to reason correctly. He is too intelligent to not be disingenuous when he states: “I would not characterize the billboard as being anti-Christian. It’s pro-reason.”

Half-Sigma has it precisely backward. The billboard is anti-Christian because it is specifically attacking the Christian belief in the historical existence of Jesus Christ by declaring it a myth during the very time that Christians are celebrating the birth of Man’s Lord and Savior. The billboard is not pro-reason either despite the statement “This season celebrate reason”. The billboard is actually anti-reason due to the way in which the preceding statement “You know it’s a myth” is intrinsically illogical. Not only do the passers-by not necessarily know that the Christmas story is a myth, but American Atheists cannot reasonably claim to know it is a myth and unless they are claiming to be mind-readers, they cannot possibly know what the passers-by know or do not know either.

I don’t mind such billboards in the least. It’s mere public trollery and accomplishes little more than highlight the deeply unattractive social autism of outspoken atheists. To the extent they have any effect at all, I suspect they encourage more atheists to identify themselves as agnostics rather than the opposite. It’s rather like seeing a vegetarian try to argue about the evils of eating meat by farting at the Christmas dinner table; no one is going to be convinced that the baked ham is any less delectable, it’s only going to make them want to send Mr. Stinky outside to eat in the snow.

Misplaced faith in reason

Scott Atran scientifically demolishes a cherished atheist belief in his new book Talking to the Enemy: Violent Extremism, Sacred Values, and What It Means to Be Human:

Seeing humans as essentially driven by their passions, Hobbes cherished little hope that they would ever be guided by reason. Still, he never doubted that if people were more rational they would be less prone to violence. How could any sane person not seek peace? After all, everyone wants to go on living – or so Hobbes wanted to believe.

Something like Hobbes’s analysis (though without his refreshing pessimism or his wonderfully terse prose style) has resurfaced today in regard to suicide bombing. If you read evangelical atheists like Richard Dawkins, you will be told that suicide bombers are driven by their irrational religious beliefs. ‘Suicide bombers do what they do’, writes Dawkins in a passage cited by Scott Atran, ‘because they really believe what they were taught in their religious schools; that duty to God exceeds all other priorities, and that martyrdom in his service will be rewarded in the gardens of Paradise.’ What is striking about claims of this kind is that they are rarely accompanied by evidence. They are asserted as self-evident truths – in other words, articles of faith. In fact, as Atran writes, religion is not particularly prominent in the formation of jihadi groups….

Unlike Dawkins’s assertions, Atran’s account of violent jihadism is based on extensive empirical research. An anthropologist who has spent many years studying and talking to terrorists in Indonesia, Afghanistan, Gaza and Europe, Atran believes that what motivates them to go willingly to their deaths is not so much the cause they espouse – rationally or otherwise – but the relationships they form with each other. Terrorists kill and die ‘for their group, whose cause makes their imagined family of genetic strangers – their brotherhood, fatherland, motherland, homeland, totem or tribe’. In this terrorists are no different from other human beings. They may justify their actions by reference to religion, but many do not. The techniques of suicide bombing were first developed by the Tamil Tigers, a Marxist-Leninist group hostile to all religions, while suicide bombers in Lebanon in the 1980s included many secular leftists. The Japanese Aum cult, which recruited biologists and geneticists and experimented with anthrax as a weapon of mass destruction, cobbled together its grotesque system of beliefs from many sources, including science fiction. Terrorists have held to many views of the world, including some – like Marxism-Leninism – that claim to be grounded in ‘scientific atheism’. If religion is a factor in terrorism, it is only one among many.

This is precisely what I pointed out in TIA when criticizing Sam Harris’s error-filled The End of Faith, although I didn’t need to perform any extensive empirical research as a basic knowledge of military history was sufficient. But it is satisfying to see that more and more atheists are beginning to see what I explained two years ago: the New Atheists have not utilized any science in their ideological campaign against religion in general and Christianity in particular, they are nothing more than ideological propagandists attempting to further a specific and virulent form of secularist philosophy. And while they do utilize a good deal of reason – the cases they present are uniformly philosophical cases rather than scientific ones – the more important point is that they seldom utilize it correctly.

Anyone conversant with military history knows that suicide bombing is a fairly conventional weapon of the desperate and the weak. And it’s a remarkably ineffective weapon at that; even if suicide bombing could be reasonably connected to religion, it would make for a strong argument that religion is not only seldom a cause of war, it also happens to be almost completely useless in practicing war.

Mailvox: an atheist reconsiders

A former atheist sends a note regarding his abandonment of atheism:

I write today to point out that, despite the criticisms to which I am sure you are subjected, your writing does in fact have an effect. At about the age of 15, like so many other teenagers, I flatly rejected the concept of God and refused to acknowledge the validity or presence of religion as a determining force in human life. I believed that science and materialism had all the answers and that the very idea of God was ridiculous, having been disproven quite thoroughly by scientific examinations of, for example, the Big Bang and evolution.

However, as I grew older and (hopefully) wiser, and moved from Asia to Britain and then America, I came face-to-face with the natural consequences of secular materialism. I came to understand fully the true horrors that Godless secularism has inflicted upon Man, and as I read and learned more I came to realise that science does not, in fact, offer true answers but only raises more questions. That isn’t a bad thing- but pretending that science can answer all questions most certainly is.

It wasn’t until I became a libertarian and started reading the writings of other libertarians that I came across your blog and your books. Eventually, I did read The Irrational Atheist late last year after reading one of Richard Dawkins’s books. I was much struck by the fact that while I remembered almost none of Dawkins’s arguments in The God Delusion, and found the few arguments that I did remember to be quite poor, I remembered and found myself agreeing with far more of your arguments from a much shorter and more precise book. It was at that point that I fully and flatly rejected the arguments of the New Atheists.

Now that I have started reading the Bible, have watched Lee Strobel’s documentaries The Case for Christ and The Case for Faith, and have read more widely around the issue, I simply cannot call myself an atheist any longer. I’ve no doubt that you have a fair amount of contempt for agnostics- you probably view them as being a bit wishy-washy, and I’ll readily admit you’ve got a point- but that’s about as close as I can come so far to calling myself religious. It’s just that, as I realised not much more than a few months ago, I’ve made my peace with God- or at least, the Judeo-Christian conception of God.

And that brings up my final point in this missive: I’ve discovered that religions are not, in fact, created equal, and I now wonder why it took me so long to figure that out. For instance, the God of the Old Testament strikes me as having a massive case of OCD, judging by His incredibly obtuse fussing over the details of the Ark of the Covenant, His Temple, and the manner in which He is to be worshipped in the Book of Exodus. The various pagan religions of the world are often deeply disturbing in their lack of respect for human life, and offer only conflict between one divine entity and another as the answer to even the most basic questions about “why things happen”. And I have a particular dislike of the anti-Semitic, delusional, sociopathic, warmongering, deceitful paedophile that Allah calls his “prophet”. I doubt I can fully accept Christianity either, but I guess I’ll figure that out as I go along.

So I write to you simply to say thank you for forcing me to think more clearly about economics and faith. I think I’m a better man for it, and I doubt I would have been able to do so had it not been for your blog posts and books. I don’t always agree with what you write, but I do find your arguments to be thought-provoking, and that’s what’s important. I hope you continue to write and educate others, and look forward to much more of your writing in the future.

First, let me be clear in stating that it is Richard Dawkins and the New Atheists who think poorly of agnostics, not me. (For example, Dawkins addresses what he calls “the poverty of agnosticism” and describes it as “fence-sitting PAP”.) Having been an agnostic for more than two decades, I am deeply sympathetic to those who can neither believe nor disbelieve. And second, while I primarily write for my own entertainment, I am pleased to learn that from time to time some individuals believe it to have a salutary effect on their intellectual development.

On a tangential note, one thing I found particularly interesting was the age at which the emailer decided he was an atheist. It appears many atheists become atheists in their late childhood and early teens; this was the case for both Dawkins and Hitchens, among others. This is potentially signficant because in many cases, it also appears that their intellectual and emotional development largely comes to a halt at that point. One cannot read the New Atheist books without marveling at how fundamentally juvenile they are despite the age of the authors. The possibility of a connection between these two observations makes an amount of sense given how much more certain we are of our knowledge in our youth than we are once we have the benefit of more experience. And following this train of thought, it becomes apparent that it may even explain, at least in part, the disproportionate number of atheists in academic science. It is at least the very possible that this over-representation is more the result of a dearth of real-world experience than a surfeit of high intelligence.

Mailvox: a tale of two atheists

JM writes:

I was born of two avowed atheists, along with two sisters, one older, one younger, and we were raised with the highest of social values and principles, and this was done by taking us to church from our earliest days, and learning morality from Christian religion, even though my parents both deny the correctness of the theology. They considered their options, concluded they could find no fixed means of inculcating moral behavior in us any other way, and chose to use what worked on them and for so many others, while making no personal claims at all about religion, what they believed in, but let their examples show, and let us assume they were connected to the moral lessons we were learning in Church, fully supporting those lessons, but with no means of connecting the dichotomy. I was certain I was an atheist at eleven, but could not come up with any possible way to put together a rational morality without presuming for the sake of argument, a superior being who would ultimately judge our behavior according to an established set of standards….

Of my parents and two sisters, and myself, I alone am a believer, and while I am assailed every time we are together, and challenged at every turn, I can do no more than Galileo did, as he accepted his rebuke, and turned away saying to himself, yet we still move around the sun.

I know science does not give moral answers, I’ve lived through enough of this world to know this for a certainty, yet I know that science does give accurate answers to so many reasonable questions, I don’t deny its validity. I also know that morality is an absolute, and it is fixed, and accept that it is made law, just as a part of Creation, and is a part of God himself. I know much about the history and lineage of man, and accept my place in society, and in God’s will, knowing it is of the greatest consequence of all, and I simply accept it is not subject to dissection by science, or if it is, the beginnings of that work are not within our grasp yet.

It is hard to deal with quantum mechanics, entanglement, dark energy and matter, and also deal with faith and God, good and evil, all as truths, and all directly impacting us, but just because it is hard does not take away the self evident truths which we base our moral standards on, nor does it remove the necessity of pursuing good, because failing to do so inevitably provides the opening for evil to enter into one’s choices and one becomes evil by do it.

I think perhaps it is easier to recognize the limited scope of scientific utility if one’s training is in fields where the state of science is not so much inexact as hopelessly inaccurate. Economists such as Paul Krugman are every bit as convinced of the mathematical verity of their pseudoscientific dogma as Richard Dawkins, but it is much, much easier for the skeptical economist who rejects the various forms of Keynesianism to demonstrate the falsity of mainstream economic science than it is for the skeptical biologist due to the much shorter time frame in which the economists operate. Having witnessed the repeated construction of economic epicycles in order to explain away the theory’s extensive panoply of failures, it is not at all difficult to see exactly the same process at work in biology and even physics.

The choice is simple, Sam Harris’s envisioning of a utilitarian moral landscape notwithstanding. Either there are rules of the game as well as an original provider of those rules or there is no game. Consider the following definition: “GAME – a competitive activity involving skill, chance, or endurance on the part of two or more persons who play according to a set of rules.” No rules, no game. The same applies to life; either there is a purpose to life and a set of rules related to that purpose or there is no purpose and no rules. This is not an original thought, as numerous philosophers of various creeds have pointed out, the choice has always been between God and the Void. Attempting to disguise that choice by appealing to science, self-interest, or collective humanity is doomed to failure by logic as well as historical observation.

The intellectual poverty of Harris’s case can be seen in the arguments of his followers. I don’t know what it is about atheists, but they do seem remarkably prone to thinking that they can argue in ignorance. Consider the following exchange with KH:

KH: Sam Harris made a point in one of his books that God doesn’t heal amputees. I don’t find that to be an “intellectual failure.” He’s right. Just a straight-shooting, blue-collar observation. Christians don’t pray for a worker’s severed arm to regrow. What would you say to counter such a statement?

VD: That’s amusing. You do realize that one solitary point, correct or incorrect, is insufficient to make a book an intellectual success or failure, right? You clearly haven’t read TIA or you would be aware that both The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation are full of logical and factual errors. As for how would I respond, I would ask him what his evidence is for such a statement. Has he done any scientific surveys of amputees and the Christians who know them? There is no reason to believe his statement about amputees to be any better evidenced than his statement that all the research shows corporal punishment to have a negative effect on children’s behavior.

KH: I was simply using one example from Sam’s works to illustrate how I thought he was correct. Another question you cannot answer, Vox, but he can (because he’s right) is: Why don’t we find rabbits in the layers of Cambrian rocks, next to trilobites, if they were all created together? This gradual increase in complexity as you go upward from older to younger rocks is empirically evident. I seriously would need you to convince me on this simple point to believe that his works are an intellectual failure.

VD: One or two correct examples do not suffice to prevent an entire book from being an intellectual failure. The intellectual failure or success of a book is determined by the success or failure of its central thesis; all three of Sam’s books are failures by this reckoning. And, contra your incorrect assertion, of course I can easily answer what is not actually Sam’s point, but one that he cribs from J.S. Haldane: circular reasoning is used in the geological dating of rocks and fossils. Furthermore, there is no “gradual increase in complexity”; you clearly know very little about either the fossil record or geology if you genuinely believe “you go upward from older to younger rocks”. Do you even know what “punctuated equilibrium” means, much less why the concept was developed in the first place?

You must realize that it is as ludicrous to attempt to criticize my critique of Sam Harris as it would have been for me to attempt to criticize Sam Harris without first reading his books.

Neither amputees nor trilobites have much, if anything, to do with the central theses of The End of Faith, Letter to a Christian Nation, or The Moral Landscape. But this doesn’t prevent dogmatic atheists desperate to find spiritual leadership from leaping blindly to defend Mr. Harris from substantive criticisms of his works.

And, as we all know, when rabbit fossils are eventually discovered in Cambrian rocks, (actually “Precambrian”, KH didn’t even get the Haldane quote right), scientists will trample each other in the stampede to claim that a) the fossils are not rabbits, b) the rocks are not Precambrian, and c) evolution is “a large package of ideas, including: that life on Earth has evolved over billions of years; that this evolution is driven by certain mechanisms; and that these mechanisms have produced a specific “family tree” that defines the relationships among species and the order in which they appeared” and therefore a single impossible anachronism should not be sufficient to destroy such an important and glorious edifice constructed over so many years by so many famous scientists.

UPDATE: KH emailed again to complain that I did not directly answer the question about why we don’t find rabbit fossils next to trilobite fossils. (He also complained I didn’t answer the first one, which is simply not true.) The reason I answered the implied question rather than the direct one is because the direct question is very stupid. But, at the risk of belaboring the obvious, the reason we don’t find rabbit fossils next to trilobite fossils is not because they lived in different eras, (even assuming that they did, in fact, live in different eras), it is the same reason we do not find giraffe fossils next to sperm whale fossils. Barring the discovery of the hitherto unknown Sylvilagus oceanus maximus, the present state of scientage indicates that rabbits are land animals and trilobites are marine animals.

WND column

The Moral Landscape

Sam Harris’s first two books were commercial successes and intellectual failures. Riddled with basic factual and logical errors, The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation served as little more than godless red meat snapped up by unthinking atheists around the English-speaking world. His third book, The Moral Landscape, is also a challenge to established wisdom, but it is a much more sober, serious and interesting book than its predecessors.

The basis for the book is Harris’s own neuroscience experiments, in which he tested his hypothesis that when hooked up to an fMRI scanner, the human brain would produce an observable difference in its activity when contemplating non-religious beliefs than when considering religious beliefs. As it happens, the hypothesis was found to be incorrect, as the same responses were elicited from both the believing group and the non-believing group for religious and nonreligious stimuli alike. (Full disclosure: I was one of the Christians asked by Mr. Harris to review the religious stimuli to ensure their theological verisimilitude. In my opinion, the questions utilized were both reasonable and fair.)

NOTE: For those who happen to be interested in the subject, I will be posting the bookmarked notes I made in the course of reading The Moral Landscape here later this week.

“Science” vs History

I have to admit, Scott Locklin identifies the invention of science long before I had imagined; I always assumed that it was considered to have begun with Galileo, the so-called Father of Science. Of course, neither scenario fits at all well with the revisionist history of the atheist secularists and their passionate attachment to the ridiculous idea that science and religion are intrinsically at odds:

Pope Benedict’s trip to Ole Blighty is over, and that sanctimonious gasbag Dawkins didn’t manage to arrest him in the name of secular humanism. While I’m not a believer myself, I often wonder at such professional atheists who cover themselves in the mantle of “science.” Don’t they know any history?

What we refer to today as “science” is something which was invented by humans, rather than springing forth from Jove’s forehead in some ancient time before time. There is a definite date before which there was no science and a date after which there was science. This isn’t controversial or mysterious: We know exactly when it happened, and some of the original manuscripts which invented science and modern thought still exist….

History’s first scientist was Robert Grosseteste, although his work is little known in popular education today. He was born in 1170 or so to a humble Suffolk family. He found his calling in the Catholic Church, as important a source of social mobility then as the university system is now. It was Grosseteste who formulated the first description of the scientific process. He was the first European in centuries to study Aristotle’s works and the first to study Arab natural philosopher Abu Ibn al-Haytham’s writings. From these thinkers he developed the idea of “composition and resolution,” which is the scientific method in itself.

Interesting. And of course, as we know from other areas of their demonstrated ignorance, the short answer is: no, the professional atheists don’t know any history. And as a general rule, when science and history happen to conflict, it’s usually wise to bet on history.

Initial impressions of The Moral Landscape

I tend to do a lot of light reading while I travel, but amidst gorging on a cornucopia of PG Wodehouse novels I also managed to bookmark my way through Sam Harris’s latest book, The Moral Landscape. It was every bit as disjointed, illogical, and rife with incompetent and incoherent arguments as his first two books would lead one to expect. It was also disturbingly petty in parts; I don’t think he has any idea how bad his quixotic public jihad against Francis Collins has made him look in the scientific community. Despite the plethora of reflexive anti-religious cheap shots, the book is actually much more an attack on the greater part of the secular scientific community, (especially Jonathan Haidt and Scott Atran), than it is on the theistic community. While the Nobel laureate’s minor scientific achievements do tend to render one of Sam’s core arguments laughable, that doesn’t suffice to account for his decision to devote nearly an entire chapter of a five-chapter book to a completely irrelevant attack on single individual.

Here is one example of classic Harrisian illogic of the sort that litters the book from a recent Wired interview:

WIRED: [H]asn’t religion made some people behave more morally?

HARRIS: The problem is that religion tends to give people bad reasons to be good. Is it better to alleviate famine in Africa because you think Jesus Christ is watching and deciding whether to reward you with an eternity of happiness after death? Or is it better to do that because you actually care about the suffering of your fellow human beings?

First, note that Harris doesn’t answer the question, except to implicitly accept it. Second, observe that he fails to make the rational response that a) it doesn’t matter why you do something, the morality is primarily to be found in the act, not the intention, and b) there is no reason to believe that the two motivations are mutually exclusive, in fact, there is substantial evidence to indicate that the two usually coincide. It’s a false and irrelevant dichotomy. And third, you really can’t understand the degree to which this response demonstrates Harris’s inimitable incoherence if you haven’t read his section declaring himself to be a consequentialist. Apparently he is that rare breed of consequentialist who doesn’t care about the consequences.

Sam is to be congratulated, however, for being a man about the disappointing results of his neurological research. I helped him refine a few of the religious questions for the fMRI experiments he discusses, and as it turned out, his hypothesis that there would be an observable difference in brain activity when contemplating factual beliefs versus religious beliefs was incorrect. This was Sam’s conclusion: “Our study was designed to elicit the same responses from the two groups on nonreligious stimuli (e.g., “Eagles really exist”) and opposite responses on religious stimuli (e.g., “Angels really exist”). The fact that we obtained essentially the same result for belief in both devout Christians and nonbelievers, on both categories of content, argues strongly that the difference between belief and disbelief is the same, regardless of what is being thought about.”

What Sam neglects to mention is that it also indicates that there is no difference between the two categories of belief, thus removing from his potential arsenal what he had hoped would be a substantive scientific argument in his war on faith. If he had been able to show there was an observable material difference between the two types of belief, he would have used that to make a case for the superiority of one over the other; I surmise that was the primary motivation for the experiment. However, his experiments did produce some interesting results, including the fact that it appears to give atheists a sense of pleasure to deny religious statements. So, ironically, Sam Harris would appear to have produced the first scientific evidence in support of my hypothesis that it is often the assholery that causes the atheism rather than the other way around. On which note, I would be remiss indeed if I did not quote to the following comment from the appendix:

“Given my experience as a critic of religion, I must say that it has been quite disconcerting to see the caricature of the overeducated, atheistic moral nihilist regularly appearing in my inbox and on the blogs. I sincerely hope that people like Rick Warren have not been paying attention.”
– Sam Harris, The Moral Landscape, Chapter 1 Note 2

Anyhow, I don’t intend this to be either a review or a critique of the book, I merely intended to pose a question to those of you who are interested in this subject. How would you like me to review The Moral Landscape, in an overall summary, a chapter-by-chapter deconstruction, a thematic critique, or a simple list of the erroneous arguments I noted in the course of reading the book. I can tell you right now that I’m not going to write an entire bloody book as I did with TIA; the book doesn’t even begin to justify that sort of time and effort. I’m not a big fan of the chapter-by-chapter approach since most people who use it make the mistake of anticipatory criticism since they don’t read the whole book before jumping in, but in this case that wouldn’t apply since I have read the entire book as well as the notes. On the other hand, the book is only five chapters and the chapters don’t really stick to coherent themes, so it may not make sense anyhow.

The honest atheist

And there goes Richard Dawkins’s argument, presented in The God Delusion, that atheists are more moral than theists. Clearly he is an exceptional judge of human character and well-suited to pronounce judgment on morality, given his superior personnel skills demonstrated in selecting people to run his web site and now his charity.

Josh Timonen was one of a small coterie of young protégés around Richard Dawkins, sharing his boss’s zealous atheism. But now he and the evolutionary theorist have fallen out spectacularly. Professor Dawkins’s charity has accused Mr Timonen of embezzling hundreds of thousands of pounds. The two atheists had become close in recent years, with Dawkins, the best-selling author and Emeritus Professor of Biology at Oxford University, even dedicating his latest book, The Greatest Show on Earth, to him. But Mr Timonen and the Dawkins foundation are now preparing for a legal wrangle.

The Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science, has filed four lawsuits in a Californian court alleging that Mr Timonen, who ran its online operation in America, stole $375,000 (£239,000) over three years. It is claiming $950,000 in damages, while Mr Dawkins is suing him for $14,000 owed to him personally.

With the exception of the hapless Sam Harris, atheists repeatedly insist that despite having no externally imposed morality, there is no reason for them to behave worse than those who do possess a morality imposed upon them by their gods. And yet, again and again, we see that their moral behavior, (as measured by the theistic systems in which they do not believe), is completely dependent upon the circumstances in which they find themselves and the temptations they face.

In the same way that an atheist leader with sufficient power is more likely than not to murder at least 20,000 people, we now know that atheist charities, (if I recall Dawkins’s claims correctly, the foundation for Reason and Science was the first explicitly atheist charity in Britain), are one for one in corruption. But I suppose that’s what happens when you turn yourself into the godless version of a big-haired televangelist.