Dinesh D'Souza wites,
A group of leading atheists is puzzled by the continued existence and vitality of religion.What an interesting thing for atheists to ponder. In the modern day one either has to accept some kind of deistic understanding of the origin of the universe or an evolutionary understanding that excludes any sort of deity from contributing to the origin of the universe and all contained therein. I am not saying that one must either be religious or non-religious, for the dichotomy is true even for adherents of non-deistic or nature religions. Either deity (or deities) had a hand in existence itself, or it/they did not.
So why would a deity-denying atheist be puzzled that religion is thriving? If evolution as they describe it is true, then religion is itself a product thereof. Not only that, but Judaism is an evolutionary product, so is Christianity, so is Islam, so is Buddhism, so is Shamanisn, so is ... well, you get the idea.
And so is the theory of evolution itself. And astrology. And tarot-card reading. And medical science. And faith healing. And everything else. So why do materialists single out religion as a particularly puzzling thing to exist? Why religion and not, say, athletics or stamp collecting or consumption of alcohol?
Read the rest at DonaldSensing.com.
The thing that always strikes me about atheists, is that they always realize that their beliefs lack purpose, so they set about defining a purpose. Logically, they hit upon evolution as the purpose for the species, to evolve into greater and greater forms.
However, this has a certain lack of appeal for mere individuals in the species, so they embrace a 'oneness' with the species, and sense of great, gloppy, continuity with offspring and ancestors and whatnot to promote a sense of continuity with the 'flow of evolution'.
Give them another couple of hundred years and I think they'll reinvent....Buddhism. Think about it, take the base precepts of evolutionary atheism, (evolution to greater forms, sense of 'oneness' with the species, etc) and you have sort of proto-Buddhism. Talk about reinventing the wheel (pun intended).
Read some of the later novels by Clarke or Asimov as excellent examples of how this line of thought evolves.
There really is nothing new under the sun.
When people stop believing in God, they don't believe in nothing -- they believe in anything.
G. K. Chesterton
I don't think Atheism could be justify, when, as you say, liberal democracy is based on axiomatic principles known as unalienable rights, endowed by God, which are those that allow them to be Atheists.
I am not religious, and I don't believe in God. But I am still a staunch conservative, simply because I believe the right-wing has ideas that make more sense, and do more to improve the lives of people. The left seeks merely to ruin the lives of others.
So it is possible to be Agnostic, and still staunchly conservative.
Let me also add that 'Leftism', the way it is practiced today, is a form of religion. This is evidenced by their core beliefs that they cling to without explanation, or without consideration of any evidence to the contrary, and also how they hate those who don't subscribe to their religion.
The Right never hated Bill Clinton they way the left hates George W. Bush (wishing for his assassination, calling him Hitler, etc.).
Hence the many commonalities between the Left and Radical Islam...
Can atheism be justified? Not by any transcendent authority it can point to, as Donald Sensing noted.
Still, the question "why religion?" is a good one. No other creature than Man seems to know anything of it.
A related question, in my opinion, is "why honour our dead?" No other species does anything like what we do in that regard. Why us?
It's possible to make up just-so stories about the evolutionary advantage conferred by burying the dead facing the West, as the ancient Egyptians did, or with a coin for the ferry-man, or with other grave goods, or with a wooden cross, but this is not science.
It seems to me that divine worship and a decent regard for the dead are innate in us, meaning either that they are proper for us or that we're so cracked in the head (in alarmingly trans-historical, trans-cultural and global ways) that nothing is really proper for us and we might as well go on building our temples and maintaining our graveyards anyway.
Building a view of religion on the foundation stone of assuming our own insanity as a species seems flawed to me, for the same reason I reject harsh views of fallen human nature. If we're that badly cracked, why should we be confident in our views about anything?
Building a view of humanity that takes for granted that we are reasonably well made and that supposes divine worship and rites for the dead are properly called for and well directed in some sense implies theism of some sort.
#3 from GK: "I am not religious, and I don't believe in God. But I am still a staunch conservative, simply because I believe the right-wing has ideas that make more sense, and do more to improve the lives of people. The left seeks merely to ruin the lives of others."
I see specific benefits from modern Christianity. I don't need to believe that Christ is risen to see the advantages of a large, stable population that thinks certain rights, including freedom of speech and freedom of conscience, are given by God and inalienable.
#3 from GK: "So it is possible to be Agnostic, and still staunchly conservative."
Certainly.
Let me say that again so you know I am intentional: atheists have no right to promulgate their belief. They have no right to challenge me about my religion. They have no right to speak up in my community, no right to live in my community, indeed, no right even to life itself. They have no rights at all, in fact.
Man, I thought it sucked to be a Christian (or a Jew) since they only exist at the pleasure of Muslims. But now I find out it really sucks to be an Atheist since they only exist at the pleasure of Christians!
Let me assert without bothering to argue that the religious have no more supremacy over the concept of "rights" now than they had over the concepts of "facts" and "truth" in the days of Galileo, as they then tried to insist.
Donald, I've generally come to respect you as a thoughtful commentator, but this post is incredibly hostile, and not particularly thoughtful.
Treefrog, "Evolution" is actually a bit of a misnomer. No biologist believes that evolution implies "progress," just random change that either is or is not adaptive to an organism's environment. When it is adaptive, the organism survives to reproduce more than others of its kind and passes the change to future generations. When enough of those changes accumulate, you have a new (not necessarily "better" or more "advanced") species. If the change is not adaptive, the organism dies before it reproduces (I know that's a bit of a simplification. Some changes are neither harmful nor helpful.) Thing is, this is ultimately not incompatible with theism. The book Finding Darwin's God gives a good account of evolution from a theistic viewpoint. The view you're talking about is a Victorian misunderstanding of evolution that does survive in some places.
GK, I'm a conservative, but I remember the 90s quite well. Bill Clinton caused every bit as much foaming at the mouth in certain quarters of the right as Bush does in certain quarters of the left.
Still, the question "why religion?" is a good one. No other creature than Man seems to know anything of it.
Why don't we ask the squirrels?
#9 Fred :
Show me :
1) Which elected GOP official of the 90s has compared our prisons to Gulags, as Sen. Durbin has.
2) Which GOP affiliate of the stature of Howard Dean (DNC Chair) has said that the Democrats are racist, as Dean has said of Republicans.
3) Which GOP elected official has gone to Saudi Arabia to say America treats Arabs badly, as Al Gore (former VP) recently did.
4) Which GOP elected official has said that Clinton's 1998 attack on Saddam for his WMDs was wrong, or 'based on a lie'. This is something EVERY Democrats says now.
ArtD0ger,
You didn't read far enough, nor understand Rev. Sensing's point.
Fred,
Oh, I absolutely agree. I just think it's funny that the 'rationalist' evolutionists so often, in their search for meaning and purpose, keep turning evolution into some grand crusade for the ultimate form.
For some reason, the older the atheist, the further down this road they go...can't quite put my finger on the reason though...couldn't be impending mortality could it? Nah...
#8 Fred: You are correct to assert that evolution doesn't ammount to progress. But the larger point of Darwinism's apparant evolution into something akin to a religion still stands.
Darwin's More Stately Mansion
That's an editorial appearing in one of the big two scientific journals, by one of the big two populist voices for evolution. It's not exactly a marginal opinion.
And it's openly spiritual and evangelical in tone (and as pretentious as any peice of writing I've ever read).
"Three principles might guide our pastoral efforts: (i) Evolution is true--and the truth can only make us free. (ii) Evolution liberates the human spirit...Let us praise this evolutionary nexus--a far more stately mansion for the human soul than any pretty or parochial comfort ever conjured by our swollen neurology to obscure the source of our physical being, or to deny the natural substrate for our separate and complementary spiritual quest."
No fundamentalist ever declared greater exclusivity for his religion than that.
Granted, the editorial got alot of scorn from ordinary working scientists who've better things to do than 'pastoral efforts', but for every biologist that found it distastelful I can promise you that there is one that finds that sermon inspiring. You'd be amazed at the sort of nonsense you here famed biologists behind closed doors, and the surprising amount of head wagging you see when someone goes off on an L Ron Hubbard 'There is only one Gaia, and Darwin is her prophet' tangent like that.
GK, The answer to your questions is "none." However, Clinton was accused of the murder of Vince Foster; Operation Desert Fox was described as a "Wag the Dog" distraction from Monica Lewinsky. If I Googled long enough I could probably find the specifics of these cases and more, but I'm too lazy. Point is, the left has no monopoly on irrational frothing-at-the-mouth hatred of political figures. And I say that as no big fan of Clinton myself.
Treefrog, In the immortal words of Bugs Bunny, "Nyaah, Cooould be."
I don't think it's too hard to explain the reaction. For years they thought that religion was dead (after all, no one they knew was religious). And, indeed, it certainly looked like religion was on the ropes there for a while.
But here it is walking around, big as life. Imagine your surprise if you saw a Tyrannosaurus Rex parading down Main Street. Pretty much the same reaction.
"Why religion and not, say, athletics or stamp collecting or consumption of alcohol?"
Stamp collecting surely needs an explanation. As I get older, though, I begin to think that the consumption of alcohol is the only human activity that really is purely rational.
Except Jagermeister, of course. That makes no sense.
I'm hardly atheistic, but frankly, stamp collecting has always puzzled me.
As befits a snake handler, you set up a straw man, Atheism vs. Religion.
You can believe in an organizing principle to the universe and not be religious. I am opposed to religion; I am not atheist.
Indeed, I believe that "Religion," at least in many of its manifestations, including Judaism, Christianity and Islam, is evil, or as a monotheist would say, a Tool of the Devil.
The evil is subtle, merely setting up division among humans, Saved vs. Damned, or it is blatant.
The rivers of blood shed by Saracens, Crusaders, Conquistadors, Pioneers and colonialists have been justified in the name of the faith. Not to mention Osama Bin Laden and the sexually predatory Catholic clergy.
Humans saying "I have faith in the Ultimate Truth, as revealed in This Holy Text, all others are damned" is very close to the hubris that is described as "Original Sin" by Christians.
Every religion claims to "know" God. For all the talk of mysteries, when it comes right down to it, these religions get pretty specific about what God says and approves of.
Which is demented nonsense: nowadays we call these people cultists, because we all know that the Ultimate Truth was revealed in the first century CE, and not by Sun Myung Moon or David Koresh, right? Nonsense.
observer 5
There you go. Organized religion is evil. Now get a few hundred thousand people who agree with you. Start a newsletter. Occasional dinner parties. Get a fancy name and you're well on your way to tax-exempt status.
Get some political power and you can persecute those heretical organized religious types out of existence before they make any further messes on the carpet.
Or to butcher an old saying, one person who agrees has a belief, two who agree have a friendship, three have an organized religion.
As for me, A shot of Jameson please.
As the Founding Fathers said, "Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy."
Emphisis mine.
I wanted to jot down a few things:
1)Religion can be defined by a series of things, and is typically defined as a belief in a supernatural power. Really, in many ways, beleif in the big bang/evolution is kindof 'supernatural-esque', albeit in a very nerdy sort of way. I do see atheism as a religion, and as a result, it has made the same historical group-think mistakes as every other major religion.
2) to post #1-evolution has no purpose, other than to pass on the genes of each animal. Evolution will not neccessarily bring a 'greater' animal, just more suited to survive in given conditions. Evolution is not a force, or spirit, it just happens slowly over millions of years by natural randomness. Now, evolution is only a theory (ie not law) but it is supported by all certain science, if you want to try and reinvent the wheel, you can examine the data for yourself. But ID has already been throughly debunked as useless.
3)to GK... I agree the left has a bad infleunce, but so does the right. Republicans have similarly tried to regulate our lives: trying to outlaw sodomy (in the privacy of the home), limiting freedom's by legalizing basic moralities (pornography, cable tv, etc), preventing euthansia and reinforcing christianity into the public schools have all been pursued or defended by the republican party as defending 'the american way of life' without any real proof that they will significantly improve or alter american lifestyles. This is not a D/R thing, it's a fringe thing. The far right/left thinking they have the answer for everyone. (And yes, we hate GW the way you hated clinton; but 5 years from now we'll have gotten past it too)
4)Hate to burst your bubble, but we are not the only species that honors our dead. There is a famous case of zoo elephants that started stampeding when a dead animal body was removed. Eventually they returned the bones of the elephant. After the elephants smelled and moved the bones around the age, all stampeding stopped. And have you ever seen dogs go into mourning when a fellow companion dies (this is less ritualistic than our culture, but they also have a simpler pack-life).
I've always wondered at some of the arguments that the religionists throw at atheists. The one that always makes me laugh the most is: "How can atheists live without some greater purpose?" My response is always the question: "How does the existence of a god or gods give your life purpose?"
The answer I get from the religionists is usually something to the effect that the god or gods have delivered us some sort of set of moral and/or behavioral criteria that we must meet before we die to get some sort reward in the afterlife. I'm always puzzled by the certainty with which religionists state this principal.
Sometimes I point out that there seem to be a lot of religionists out there, each with a different picture about what the deity or deities have given them as their moral and/or behavioral pass/fail criteria. "But surely you see a moral thread that's shared by all religions?" these earnest religionists protest. Yes, I suppose a Christian recieving the body and blood of Christ and an Aztec priest cutting out the heart of sacrificial victim share that same certainty that they're doing the will of their deity.
As for me, I'm a slacker. I find endless enjoyment in my life without having to resort to praying to a deity; without worrying if I'm going to pass or fail the afterlife test; or (gasp!) whether I'll pass or fail the damnation test. Soon enough I'll know -- or perhaps I won't if my consciousness does not exist beyond my death.
"But doesn't death without the promise of an afterlife scare you?" Well, I enjoy my puttering in my garden, cooking my gourmet meals, drinking wine with my friends, and reading a good book now and again. Certainly this enjoyment will come to an end as all things do. Too bad. But I often suspect it will just be like before I was born -- i.e. nothing. In the meantime, I don't want to get a headache worrying that if I don't choose a faith I'm going to get left behind. I suppose that's the good thing about religions -- there's so many to choose from! But there's so little time to make any rational decision -- that is if you don't want to just act on impulse.
As for me, I'd rather not bother. I'll send the Witnesses and Saints on their way when they knock at my door (but not before offering them a beer). And Dawkins and his ilk are just as tiresome for me. It is funny how atheists can be so much like religionists in their certainties and intolerance.
And in reflective moments, I might discuss god things with my close friends. But I don't expect them to believe what I believe -- nor they I. And isn't it really better that way? -- not having to depend on other people for the validation of your beliefs?
cheers,
--Beo
#23
2) to post #1-evolution has no purpose, other than to pass on the genes of each animal. Evolution will not neccessarily bring a 'greater' animal, just more suited to survive in given conditions. Evolution is not a force, or spirit, it just happens slowly over millions of years by natural randomness.
Not only did you apparently miss my point, you missed the spear, spear-carrier and the entire phalanx...
First, go read, for example, one of Isaac Asimov's or Arthur C Clarke's or Carl Sagan's later writings (just to name a few of the most egregious examples I can think of off the top of my head). Or the (essay, screed, sermon?) linked by Celebrim above.
Then go explain what you just said to THEM.
My point was that the 'evangelic atheists' are very much turning evolution into a supernatural force guiding mankind towards some perfection of being. And that if you evolve (pun intended) their beliefs a bit, and flesh them out, you get something that looks very much like Buddhism. Hence the reinventing the wheel remark...
Now, evolution is only a theory (ie not law) but it is supported by all certain science, if you want to try and reinvent the wheel, you can examine the data for yourself. But ID has already been throughly debunked as useless.
I'm totally lost as to why you felt you needed to tell me this.
If Anthony Flew (to me, the Dean of Atheism) has abandoned the creed and now calls himself a Deist, Atheism has gone through some troubled times over the past few decades. But look at the crappy company it's been keeping:
1. Marxism. Or as Richard Wright called it, "the god that failed". Failed at everything except mass slaughter, that is. You can toss Fascism and Nazism in here, too, with their attempts to replace Christianity with a sort of neo-pagan statism.
2. Scientism. 19th and early 20th century atheism just substituted science for God. Science managed to survive this - in fact, science became the first "religion" to debunk itself as a religion. Richard Dawkins is probably a holdout here, which shows that Scientism is bad enough when you combine it with bad science and a nasty personality.
3. Objectivism. The whole Ayn Rand thing. Junior league materialism, not helped by bad logic and a nasty personality. (Before any Rand fans jump on me, I'll just say the world was lucky not to have missed Ayn Rand, who is definitely more fun than Daniel Dennett.)
4. Behaviorism. Not only does God not exist, but apparently nobody does.
5. Philosophical Materialism. Of course, all of the above are predicated on this, which amply demonstrates its problems.
But I think nothing demonstrates the crisis of atheism so much as its impotence in the face of radical Islamism, which represents exactly everything that atheists have always claimed to fear. But in this debate the atheists have been drowned out by cricket chirps. In a sense, I think some atheists look hopefully on Islam as the harbinger of a conflict that will destroy all religion. Or at least destroy the Christian religion that they despise so much.
Either that, or materialist atheism has just retreated into negativism, bigotry, and anti-intellectualism. Why not? They've been trying to do away with the existence of the mind as well as the soul for so long they probably no longer see any difference between the two. And they are less concerned with the metaphysical questions than they are with the fact that religion might impose some kind of rules on them.
#23 from alchemist: "4)Hate to burst your bubble, but we are not the only species that honors our dead. There is a famous case of zoo elephants that started stampeding when a dead animal body was removed. Eventually they returned the bones of the elephant. After the elephants smelled and moved the bones around the age, all stampeding stopped. And have you ever seen dogs go into mourning when a fellow companion dies (this is less ritualistic than our culture, but they also have a simpler pack-life)."
I'm not looking for mere evidence of distress, which is well known in many animals, such as whales, but for things like grave goods - the intentional sacrifice of the resources of the living, buried with the dead.
Of course, one wouldn't expect to see such things, since they conflict with what a theory of evolution would lead us to expect.
However, a theory of evolution would lead us equally to expect that homo sapiens would not do such things. Yet we do. That's interesting.
I just finished a course on the philosophy of relgion
I highly recommend it to anybody looking for some grounding in the material. I also blogged about the conclusions I've reached about the existance of God
I grew up in a very religious house, but as I reached my late teens I threw much of that away -- it just didn't make sense. It wasn't self-consistant, it didn't seem to have the power that it used to have, and most practitioners seemed more happy to feud over nit-picking phrases than accomplish anything of lasting value. After 20 years or so of thinking and analyzing, some of what I experienced is starting to make sense to me again. I think if you think of the entire world in literal and scientific terms, perhaps you are missing the point of a lot of things, not just religion. As of today, I feel sorry for both camps at the extremes: the atheists and the fundamentalists. To me both camps are looking for the wrong thing in the wrong place. But that's just my opinion.
As far as the guy who said he was a slacker -- well, I guess I can understand that. The problem I have is that, as a parent, my kids ask me questions like "Dad, is there really some kind of life after this?" I would never claim to know the answer, but I feel a moral obligation to have put forth some kind of effort to provide a well-reasoned response.
Glen Wishard (#26)
(Applause)
ArtD0dger (#7)
Let me assert without bothering to argue that the religious have no more supremacy over the concept of "rights" now than they had over the concepts of "facts" and "truth" in the days of Galileo, as they then tried to insist.
This arises the problem linked with Glen's point #1:
Marxism. Or as Richard Wright called it, "the god that failed". Failed at everything except mass slaughter, that is. You can toss Fascism and Nazism in here, too, with their attempts to replace Christianity with a sort of neo-pagan statism.
Rights have to be endowed by God in order to keep them out of the hands of persons like Hitler. Liberal Democracies need God.
Again Chesterton:
When people stop believing in God, they don't believe in nothing -- they believe in anything.
Glen,
You forgot:
Nietzscheanism--The "superman" becomes the god we have killed and, being "Beyond Good and Evil" is free to do whatever the hell he wants.
Postmodernism--Which extends unbelief in the creator to unbelief in the creation--cf Althusser, "the world of words creates the world of things" or Foucault, "Discourse creates its own object." Therefore there is no truth and no falsehood, only power.
"And they are less concerned with the metaphysical questions than they are with the fact that religion might impose some kind of rules on them."
That sums up my experience as well. In my experience, the compelling and overarching desire behind atheism is abhorance of the idea that some outside force may in fact impose duties and responcibilities on you. Aethism is the opiate of the comfortable. Aethists as a rule believe that they are living good lives, that they are good (smart, moral, strong, successful) people, that they are happy and will continue to be happy, and so forth.
From a religious perspective, they remind me of the parable of the rich man, who upon harvesting such a large crop that his barns could not contain it, felt that his problem was that he needed bigger barns.
But with me, most everything has a gamist perspective as well. Aethists most remind me of D&D players who insist that they don't need for thier character to have an alignment, that the alignment system is too confining, too unrealistic, too simplistic, and can't really capture the full complexity of human beliefs. All this may be true, for one thing it was never intended to capture the full complexity of human belief (for example, there could be 'stingy' or 'lustful' people of any alignment, but how they express this (and how they feel about this quality would differ), but I've discovered over the years that that is not what lies at the heart of the argument no matter how elegantly it is made. At the heart of the problem is that the player percieves the character as a game device, and wishes to have the flexibility to treat it any way that he believes is suited to 'winning' the game, and does not want to treat the character as being restricted in his behavior in any way if it might interfear with 'winning'. He fears the imposition of an alignment might force him to inconvienant behaviors at some point in the future.
Now that I know the root of the problem, I simply tell them to write 'neutral' on thier character sheet - because that's the way they intend to play the game.
Aethists and agnostics to me seem to be people who have written 'neutral' on thier character sheets.
Incidently, from my perspective as a religious person, the greatest benefit of my faith is that it makes me uncomfortable.
Dungeonmaster Celebrim;
Congrats...I haven't seen an argument turned on it's head so blatantly in a long time!
I don't have time to dissect your backward logic, but I'd just like to point out that atheists (myself included, of the Dawkin's variety) believe that there are A LOT of outside forces acting on humanity, constraining our activities both physically and metaphysically. It's just that we don't believe those forces are the product of a "super-being" or whatever other anthropormorphic construct deists like to invent to explain things in order to bring confort to their petty mortal existences.
Now you can go back to Gondor or wherever the hell it is that you normally reside, mentally.
I'll add to Glen's list too:
Freudianism - religion is man's coping mechanism for suffering that one may not realize one is experiencing.
#31
If these forces aren't of a deistic or supernatural nature, than they are merely part of our environment, correct? Another section of the natural universe.
And if they are merely part of our environment, isn't it in human nature to attempt to overcome them? To use an old definition of humanity, man is the animal who controls his environment.
Our species evolutionary advantage is that we're tool users, we alter the environment around us to suit our needs, at our whims. It's how we survive. If your moral forces are merely part of that environment, that means they're just another element to be manipulated at our whim.
And now you're just back to power being the be all, end all of all morality.
d. blue: "why honour our dead?"
Not all Christians honor their dead. Early reform Protestants buried their dead without ceremony or service at night in unmarked graves outside town. Nocturnal burial particularly creaped out Catholics and laws were passed against this practice. But I believe eventually Reform Protestants relaxed these practices to allow for some service for the bereaved. The views on this are probably diverse, but I would imagine a number of Protestants would not agree that their services honour the dead. As Jesus said, Let the Dead Bury the Dead.
Aethists most remind me of D&D players who insist that they don't need for thier character to have an alignment, [...]
Oh that recurrent problem! In the Second Edition the most popular in my group was Chaotic-Good, the Rebel, benevolent but following his own rules, probably for the same reason celebrim mentions.
alchemist: Evolution will not neccessarily bring a 'greater' animal, just more suited to survive in given conditions.
True, but there are "Social Darwinists":
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Darwinism that do advocate social policies on the basis of that belief. I would agree that not all Darwinists or Evolutionist do so. I would also point out that not all Christians reject evolution.
Andy L, A nit picked by an ex-English teacher: You're confusing "Deism"--belief that an abstract, impersonal deity set the world in motion to work according to certain principles and lets it run itself with no interference--and "Theism"--belief that some kind of God or gods exists.
#33
"Our species evolutionary advantage is that we're tool users, we alter the environment around us to suit our needs, at our whims. It's how we survive. "
I think you have it exactly backwards: our enviroment has shaped us, and everything living within it. Appreciating this is one of the most profound and wonderful things that I think science and biology has provided humanity in modern recent history.
We have survived not because we've manipulated or controlled this purposefully, clearly, but because we've adapted to it genetically through natural selection over the course of evolution. Do you disagree with this?
As far as "manipulating" moral forces, I suppose this discussion couldn't proceed rationally without providing a definition thereof. For example, would you consider the recent torture bill signed by George Bush to be a moral compromise or manipulation? It seems to me religion is pretty clear on human torture and the infliction of suffering by people on each other...
I'm an atheist and I'm against war and torture. Seems pretty clear to me that morality dicates that we treat others as we wish to be treated ourselves. This is not a religous concept, but an evolutionalry adaptation.
If anything, the morality espoused by Christianity and Islam, as Dawkins ably describes, are counter-evolutionary in their moral certitude, contradictions, flexibility, and delusions of superiority.
At any rate, I see no point in trying to have a rational conversation about the irrational.
I'm an atheist and I'm against war
Well, there's your answer Rev. Sensing, atheists could not have supported the Declaration of Independence.
About ten years ago through some volunteer work I was doing, I wound up having lunch with this very entertaining guy who just happened to be a Catholic priest.
I'm an agnostic (as Michael Palin once said, there's nothing an agnostic can't do if he's not really sure if he believes in it or not), and when the conversation inevitably turned to religion I asked him this (this is ten years ago so I'm paraphrasing here):
Me: So for example, if a man is a wonderful human being, does good works all his life, never breaks the law, treats everyone with respect and kindness, donates lots of money and volunteer effort to charity, that sort of thing, but doesn't believe in God, what happens when he dies?
Him: He goes to Hell.
Me: Hm. Okay. So, what happens if he's, say, a Mafia Godfather and he spends his entire adulthood engaging in thievery, prostitution and murder, cheats on his wife, and is in all other ways a terrible human being. Then, on his death bed he confesses and asks for forgiveness. What happens to him?
Him: He goes to Heaven.
Me: Really? That cut and dried, huh?
Him: Yep.
That was pretty much the end of my interest in organized religion.
-Boo
I've found it interesting that organized religious champions and your average atheists are always at loggerheads, far more than their supposed certainty in their beliefs would suppose.
Evangelists, particularly those that decry atheists at every opportunity, always run the risk of appearing defensive in their beliefs- ie, needing universal consensus to validate their faith. I know nobody is going to admit to that (even to themselves), but in my opinion thats how it comes off. The most profoundly spiritual people i've ever encountered are, to a person, the least likely to condemn anyone elses beliefs (or lack thereof). Unless asked to anyway.
Atheists behave in the exact same way, and i suspect for the exact same reasons. Its not enough for your average atheist to not believe in god, they have to have everyone agree with them that this is the logical and wise conclusion. This is even more bizarre, because at least for the evangelical their faith is the most critical thing in the world to them. One would think that to an atheist their belief vis-a-vis god is the least important part of their life. After all- it makes sense that a UFO conspiracy theorist that is a true believer could think of little else (the implications are so huge), but to a UFO skeptic its got to be a tiny annoyance at best. Certainly not believing in UFOs isnt something to base your worldview around. Most people dont go around arguing for what they dont believe exists very passionately.
BTW- I didnt mean to compare the faithful to UFO believers. The analogy was meant to click from an aethists point of view.
J Aguilar #28: "Rights have to be endowed by God in order to keep them out of the hands of persons like Hitler. Liberal Democracies need God."
You're asserting the same thing as Rev. Sensing did in his full piece, but I just don't get it. Surely the problem in totalitarian societies is that few are willing to defend human rights, not that they are confused about the philosophical justification for those rights. Surely you've never heard the famous Niemöller quote "First they came for the Jews and I did not speak out..."
I'd say instead that liberal democracies need a broad segment of society willing and able to defend human rights. It doesn't matter whether those defenders do so out of religious conviction or self-interest or political philosophy, so long as they defend them.
Self-Righteous Andy L: It seems to me that someone that knows enough to refer to me as Dungeon master, and knows where Gondor is has no business trying to dismiss anyone else as a nerd.
"Congrats...I haven't seen an argument turned on it's head so blatantly in a long time!"
Funny, I see logic turned on its head all the time. So often in fact, that when you stand an argument right side up, people complain about it.
Your rant is ultimately funny in how much it reveals unintentionally.
Take for example:
"If anything, the morality espoused by Christianity and Islam, as Dawkins ably describes, are counter-evolutionary in their moral certitude, contradictions, flexibility, and delusions of superiority."
Moral certitude? You mean like the dismisal of everyone that doesn't agree with you? There sure were alot of words like "petty" flying around for someone who lacked moral certitude. Contradictions? You mean like refering to the meta-physical while arguing that there is nothing which is meta-physical? Flexibility? You mean morality being the product of 'evolutionary forces'? Delusions of superiority? You mean like arguing that my existance is "petty" and that I need religion to bring me "comfort".
Only the impious can believe religion serves as a comfort.
You should not dismiss Gondor so quickly. You could learn abit, however superior you deem yourself to such learning. Near the beginning of the Lord of the Rings, in the chapter 'Shadow of the Past' in which Gandalf reveals the nature coming quest to Frodo, Gandalf tells Frodo that 'someone' meant to for Biblo to find the ring and that that 'someone' was 'not its maker'. Gandalf is hinting at the divine providence of the unrevealed (to Frodo) creator diety. Gandalf suggests to Frodo that this may bring him some comfort, which it might if Frodo was a fool, but Frodo is not a fool (and neither is the author). Rather than responding in the way the impious might expect, Frodo responds that the thought that someone might have meant for him to have the ring brings him no comfort at all.
That's because Frodo is not a fool. He knows that if someone means for him to have the ring, then that someone means for him to go to Mordor.
Only athiest and (some) children imagine the thought of a personable diety staring down at our little lives to be merely comforting. The great contridiction of the belief that 'religion is the opiate' of the masses, is the self-righteous belief that 'the masses' find Faith comforting because they are 'weak', but he (strong as he is) himself does not need such 'comfort' - all the while not acknowledging to himself the terror it causes him if he ever allows himself to believe such a 'silly' thing. Ahh, the self-empowerment myths that athiests tell themselves amuse me to know end.
"At any rate, I see no point in trying to have a rational conversation about the irrational."
I have a different belief. I see no point in trying to convince the irrational with reason, which is why you aren't (as you might have noticed) really the audience I'm addressing.
"Seems pretty clear to me that morality dicates that we treat others as we wish to be treated ourselves."
When you understand why this is not at all 'clear' and 'self-evident' (any more than it is 'self-evident' that 'all men are created equal, and endowed by thier creator with certain inalienable rights'), and least of all the self-evident conclusion of believing that morality is the product of evolutionary forces, then we'll be ready to have an amicable conversation with each other.
Mark: I'm convicted by that as much as the next guy I suppose.
In my defence, I try to act as if my religion is the most important part of my life - even though I (to my own great discomfort) rarely live up to that.
But here, rather than attempting to witness (and you could convict me for that too I suppose) I'm mostly trying to explain the seemingly inexplicable behavior you mention, a question to which I feel I have more than the ordinary qualifications to address, because nothing so quickly gets the athiests to come out of the wood work as the mereist mention of religious belief. This leads me to be introduced to more than my fair share of athiests seeking to convert me from my 'silly' 'primitive' beliefs which no intelligent person can in thier mind have.
Doug:
"Surely the problem in totalitarian societies is that few are willing to defend human rights, not that they are confused about the philosophical justification for those rights. Surely you've never heard the famous Niem?r quote "First they came for the Jews and I did not speak out..."
I've heard it, I just don't particularly put alot of stock in it. From my perspective, the reason Europe didn't speak out was pretty obvious. It wasn't that they were cowards (the Germans were anything but), it was that they were (and are) confused about the philosophical justification for those rights. They had stopped believing in them. They believed instead in a philosophy that suited what they felt inclined to do at that time. It was among other things, convienent to do so.
"I'd say instead that liberal democracies need a broad segment of society willing and able to defend human rights. It doesn't matter whether those defenders do so out of religious conviction or self-interest or political philosophy, so long as they defend them."
I agree. I've relatively little doubt that say, Andy L will not stand up to defend human rights (as he understands them). But, in part I'm convinced of this because Andy L is still grounded in the belief that those core moral values which Christianity holds to be true are self-evidently true. The problem with atheism though, the problem with Europe under the Nazi's, is that when you've put 'nuetral' on the character sheet of your life, its all too easy to see self-interest as the over riding purpose of your life and excuse yourself for not taking an interest is something else. It's all too easy then to rationalize not speaking up. There certainly would have been nothing 'rational' to resisting the Nazi's, as there was no rational reason to believe that such resistance had any chance of success and carried a very high and obvious cost of failure. But, as Andy L has pointed out, if your motivated by a 'non-rational' morality - these feeling of duty imposed upon you - you can never rationalize away your silence. Doing what is in your own obvious interests is no longer the point, and you've got a reckoning to deal with when its all over. For the atheist, you have nothing to be accountable to in the long run except yourself, so ultimately why bother?
Oh, no, I see I've walked right into the trap laid by the Dungeon master himself!
My "rant" seems to have "unintentionally" revealed a lot about myself!
Where does that place your rant, then, on the scale of self-disclosure?
Since most of what you wrote does not reflect accurately on what I did, is it just another effort to construct a hall-of-mirrors scenario?
I hereby decline to venture into the dark and twisted passages herein referred to as "celebrim".
LMAO!!
I think you have it exactly backwards: our enviroment has shaped us, and everything living within it.
It's both, we evolved into a niche as tool users, and now we depend upon our ability to alter our environments.
If you don't believe me, divest yourself of all tools, clothing and equipment and try and survive without using any of those.
I'm an atheist and I'm against war and torture.
Why? Conflict is the essence of evolution. Without conflict and resource limitations there can be no evolution as there is nothing to select out genes. You can't have winners without losers, if everyone breeds equally, there is no progress.
You say that being against torture is a natural part of evolutionary adaptation.
Seems pretty clear to me that morality dicates that we treat others as we wish to be treated ourselves. This is not a religous concept, but an evolutionalry adaptation.
This is obviously false. If that were true, why is torture, and has torture been such a constant part of human behaviour and history? From the dawn of recorded time to the current period, torture and sadism have been constant companions with history. Bullies, sadists, rapists, torturers, etc etc etc. If they aren't evolutionary advantages, why do they still exist in such strength? Why haven't they gone the way of the dodo? Such things are just as common today as they were a hundred years ago and a thousand years ago and far further back.
Evolutionary advantages fill their niche and survive. Disadvantages fall to increasingly smaller and smaller niches until they vanish. Torture doesn't seem to be vanishing, does it?
You have decided that torture is immoral because it's against 'evolutionary advantage'. I think I can make a far stronger argument, based on evolutionary advantage being the guiding principle for morality, that torture is moral than you can against it.
Actually, based upon worldwide population growth patterns and the current flow of history, I'd say decency, respect, courtesy, and honor are a dying breed about to be consigned to the evolutionary dustbin and nice traits that never worked.
"Me: So for example, if a man is a wonderful human being, does good works all his life, never breaks the law, treats everyone with respect and kindness, donates lots of money and volunteer effort to charity, that sort of thing, but doesn't believe in God, what happens when he dies?
Him: He goes to Hell.
...
Me: Really? That cut and dried, huh?"
No, not really. Bad logic on the priests part, and not a particularly careful reading of the text - particularly Romans and certain parables of Christ. We have certain promises of who will go to heaven - the repentant Mafia Don, if truly repentent, qualifies. We have certain promise of who will suffer judgement. But for people who don't fall into obivious categories, like your virtuous pagan, we have something murkier and harder to understand. I would not take particularly seriously anyone who claims to fully understand God's law and reasoning. I find it the height of hubris to suggest that you know how God is going to pass judgement over anyone in particular. It's simply beyond our knowledge and I find the Bible interesting for how much it doesn't say about God and his workings as it does reveal about him.
My reading of Romans is that its clearly better to know the revealed God, in the way that knowledge is better than ignorance. But Paul argues that those who do not know the reveal God, still have intuitive knowledge of right and wrong and that they will be judged according to how well they adhered to this law written on thier hearts. I think its possible to argue - and certainly orthodox - that Paul does not mean to suggest that anyone actually is capable of keeping this law (I don't believe that they can), but I don't think that it is possible from this to restrict God from counting something as righteousness. After all, noone was capable of following the Mosiac revealed law either, but that didn't keep God from counting people's faith as righteous. So, I think we should be careful in suggesting that God may not decide in His authority to account this person's life or another as righteousness and extend grace to them. We have authority to judge actions, but we've not the authority to judge souls.
But how much better to know the revealed God and obtain the assurances of His salvation?
And in my reading of the parables of Jesus, there is no reason to think that 'the sheep' who knew not that they were ministering to Jesus when they did acts of kindness to thier fellow man excludes entirely those that did not know Jesus at all.
But, here is the catch. The more you understand about what it takes to live a good life, the more you are uncertain about walking up to the gates clothed with no more than the list of your own good works. Or in other words (another nerd reference here), I think that Neil Gaiman may have gotten it backwards. In the Sandman comics, he makes the astounding claim that the ones in hell are the ones that believe that they deserve to be there - the ones that judge themselves to be morally unfit, the humble, the meek, the penitant. Quite the contrary, I think that logic dictates that (on the whole) you'd rather put the ones that don't think they deserve to be there in hell, and the ones that think they deserve to be in hell are safer to put in heaven. The last thing you'd want was to fill heaven with the proudful, the self-righteous, and such who believed themselves entitled to its rewards. Jesus's parables seem to bear out this view of things, and I'm thinking in particular of the one where the Bridegroom rejects those who were invited to the feast and goes out and gathers up the homeless, the downtrodden, and the undeserving.
"If you don't believe me, divest yourself of all tools, clothing and equipment and try and survive without using any of those."
How do you think our progenitors survived, then?
Or are you arguing that humanity can't sustain itself without the comforts of the modern world?
And I didn't say I was against "conflict", just war. Of course I was stupid to make such a broad claim on this pro-Iraq war site withought the pages of qualifications that are necessary for people who live and breath war and weapons. Let's just say that I accept conflict and even some kinds of war (defensive ones, e.g., as occured during the American Revolution, PD Shaw), but not aggressive ones or those enacted as a first and not final solution (e.g., Iraq).
I don't see how any pious or religous person can justify the killing of hundreds of thousands of completely innocent women and children and think themselves moral; but we know where that conversation generally leads around these dark parts so please don't engage me on it because I won't return the favor.
Time to come out of your tree, treefog, and see the world through the eyes of a modern human who has at his disposal the wisdom and knowlede provided by science, not religion.
"Where does that place your rant, then, on the scale of self-disclosure?"
Hopefully, as self-disclosing as possible.
"...is it just another effort to construct a hall-of-mirrors scenario?"
Indeed, I believe that that is precisely the objective.
"I hereby decline to venture into the dark and twisted passages herein referred to as "celebrim"."
Yes, I know.
_How do you think our progenitors survived, then?
Or are you arguing that humanity can't sustain itself without the comforts of the modern world?_
A club is a tool. So is a spear, a snare, a coat, a plow, and a cup.
We're defining these as the comforts of the modern world?
I don't see how any pious or religous person can justify the killing of hundreds of thousands of completely innocent women and children and think themselves moral;
I'm not justifying it, the point your conveniently avoiding is the fact that you are justifying it. That's the entire point of this article. Boiled down to bare essence, the point is that without some form of supernatural authority source, you inevitably end up with a 'might makes right' philosophy, because only the survivors get a say in evolution.
And I didn't say I was against "conflict", just war.
War is just conflict writ really large. Hate to burst your bubble on that one. Or are you attempting to deny my point that war (as conflict writ really large) has been the primary motivator of human advancement?
Time to come out of your tree, treefog, and see the world through the eyes of a modern human who has at his disposal the wisdom and knowlede provided by science, not religion.
Fun fact, it's possible to logically argue down a line of reasoning one does not personally believe in. But that would require the ability to read and provide logical reasoning and the backing for one's statements.
For example, you are avoiding my question. How, based upon the incredible commonality of various sadistice behavior sets, can one argue against them on the basis that they are 'an evolutionary disadvantage'?
#52
The Peackock's Tailfeathers.
The Panda's Thumb.
Not every trait, even common ones, are necessarily the product of direct selection. My short answer to you is that they're byproducts of other evolutionary pressures or traits.
Also, selection works at the level of the individual but evolution at the population level. The system can tolerate "fringe" traits such as sadism if other components are strong.
Go read Stephen J. Gould. I guess it would help to understand what natural selection is before attempting to discredit it....and I'm no expert.
Ok, so we've gone from evolutionary disadvantage to mere fringe trait, not directly linked to either an advantage or a disadvantage, or at least not strongly linked enough to make any real difference in long term outcomes.
Wouldn't that mean (to map this into your moral space) that torture is just a kinda icky but not really important moral failing, that society can easily tolerate because it doesn't really make any significant long term difference?
And that's assuming I decide to buy your theory that sadism is a 'fringe trait', overpowered by other beneficial traits, which seems to be based on nothing more than wishful thinking on your part than any real evidence.
The default assumption in evolution is that all traits have a benefit until proven otherwise, not the other way around.
They used to think tonsils were worthless too...
"The default assumption in evolution is that all traits have a benefit until proven otherwise, not the other way around."
Well that's news to me.
#41 Mark Buehner -- I like the UFO skeptic analogy. I don't think it's at all inappropriate to point out that the religious issues that the faithful constantly grapple with simply do not often enter the thoughts or affect the worldview of nonbelievers.
As for Dawkins, an apparent exception to this rule, I think it is fair to say that he is evangelizing for a faith of absence rather than professing an absence of faith. And in his ridiculous Huffpo piece, he desperately tries to drag both religion and science down to the level of politics. Science is no more on Richard Dawkins' side than God is on George Bush's.
See, I get to cheat. Being one of those 'irrational' religious nuts, I get to have my moral certitude handed to me on a silver platter.
You being one of those rational, modern, scientific types, are forever forced to have to defend your positions by logic and reason.
I merely have to prove my faith, you have to prove your logic.
Sucks to be you.
Speaking of explaining by logic, explain to me how an evolutionary fringe trait like sadism, unimportant enough not to make any major difference in trait selection, rates a categorical, blanket moral condemnation?
The American Revolution was defensive? What were the colonists defending? The right to cheap oil, I mean tea?
Andy L, you have adopted the civil religion that these truths are self-evident without questioning whether those truths are supported by the evidence. You have undertaken the leap of faith.
And the belief that we do good so that others may treat us good is fairly providential or karmic in its assumptions.
[The unveliever] goes to Hell
Not all Christians necessarily believe that. Billy Graham would be one example.
J Aguilar #28: "Rights have to be endowed by God in order to keep them out of the hands of persons like Hitler. Liberal Democracies need God."
Doug (#43)
[...] I'd say instead that liberal democracies need a broad segment of society willing and able to defend human rights. It doesn't matter whether those defenders do so out of religious conviction or self-interest or political philosophy, so long as they defend them.
celebrim answers the question in #45. I just want to add that, if Rights are endowed by God, men cannot legislate a change. If they are not the work of God, then they are product of mankind, and therefore could be changed if a majority of the people think it is right to do so, as did Hitler in Germany during the 1930's. Democracy becomes the Dictatorship of the Majority, and minorities, of any kind, not only religious, suffer.
Therefore, Classic Liberalism states (Classic Liberalism curiously being a set of mostly pretty scientific ideas) that those fundamental Rights are protected by God, and can be change by no majority, by no man. They are out of reach of humans.
Therefore, Classic Liberalism states (Classic Liberalism curiously being a set of mostly pretty scientific ideas) that those fundamental Rights are protected by God, and can be change by no majority, by no man. They are out of reach of humans.
And the genius of the founding fathers was to predicate those rights not as a requirement towards actions, or even a ban against, but as limitations on the power of government.
They trusted the implementation to the people, on an innately flexible basis, according to a longstanding philosophy within Christianity that though there is an absolute good and evil, our human understanding of how to recognize and implement these is fuzzy, and thus a certain humility and flexibility are required to find the best way to govern and live.
We see the alternative approaches in the aggressive 'moral' enforcing of the EU that attempts to dictate the good, and on the other hand the brutal inflexibility of Sharia on the other.
C: "In my experience, the compelling and overarching desire behind atheism is abhorance of the idea that some outside force may in fact impose duties and responcibilities on you. Aethism is the opiate of the comfortable."
I don't usually engage in religious discussions on the web. Like most skeptics, I'm just not all that interested in something that can't be measured, sensed, or tested in anyway. I think that debating such a thing would be like having a tennis without the little green balls.
But all snark aside, I was amazed by your comment: on several levels.
Most importantly, because you seem blissfully unaware that your attempt to ascribe nefarious motives to those who don't share your belief system is simply a mirror image of the condenscention with which they treat your "need" to believe in a father figure to validate your existence.
Nowhere more than religion should the idea of inherent truth have more import. Do you think that many athiests and agnostics - I now count myself among them - don't agree with you simply because they are skeptics? Perhaps they can't swallow the metaphysical system in which you believe because they see no evidence for it whatsoever around them?
Hmmm. "Atheism is the opiate of the comfortable?" That was a clever turn of phrase.
Question for you: are you familiar with Kant's Categorical Imperative?
#34 from PD Shaw: "Not all Christians honor their dead. Early reform Protestants buried their dead without ceremony or service at night in unmarked graves outside town. Nocturnal burial particularly creaped out Catholics and laws were passed against this practice. But I believe eventually Reform Protestants relaxed these practices to allow for some service for the bereaved. The views on this are probably diverse, but I would imagine a number of Protestants would not agree that their services honour the dead."
I was referring to a characteristic oddity of homo sapiens across different cultures, ages and geographic zones, without which archaeology would be much less informative, not claiming that this was something all men everywhere do.
#34 from PD Shaw: "As Jesus said, Let the Dead Bury the Dead."
Yes, and he's been roundly ignored, just as I think he ought to have been.
Fred:
Nietzsche said that God is dead, murdered by man, and that we live in a world that is trying to pretend that this awful event never happened - as if everything could go on just as it did before.
The atheist correctly says that he does not need God to live an ethical and law-abiding life, even more perfectly than most religious people do. You don't need to be a carpenter to live in a house. If it's your parents' house, you don't even need to pay the bills. You can hate your parents and deny the existence of carpenters, yet the house will not fall down.
We all live in a house like that, built from the time of Moses. All of our ideas about humanity, individual human dignity, and just society were learned in this house. The atheist can live there as happily as anybody. But to Nietzsche, such a person is blind or a coward. He doesn't realize that by killing God he has demolished the house, too. His imitation of religious morality, however perfect, is an empty hypocrisy; instead, he needs to face up to a "re-valuation of all values".
So you have the Superman, the individual who takes the responsibilities of God on himself, not because he's arrogant but because he understands that he has no choice. Anything else is a lie. He must define (and continually re-define) his own values and enforce them.
Armed Liberal often quotes, "Be the change you want to see in the world." But the Superman says: "The change that I am IS the world, it's the world that I create, and there is no other world."
Nietzche was influenced by his contemporary, the theist Dostoevsky. In Dostoevsky's novel The Possessed, an engineer named Kirilov commits suicide in order to make himself God:
Nietzsche could not disapprove of this. If Kirilov thinks that he can kill God, become God, and free the human race - all with the same gunshot - he is living out a superb example of Superman ethics. The Superman is not only the judge of his own values, but of the value of existence itself.
Interesting discussion, a little petty at times, but interesting.
Treefrog: There's lots of theories on how evolution 'may have' developed trends in our sociology. I recommend 'the moral animal', which mainly just theorizes why we developed social communities based on imperical evidence. He admits that most of his logic is just musings, but they are quite interesting. He theorizes at one point that both sadism and nurturing are necessary for the best survival of our species.
I often have discussions of those who attack agnostics/atheists by saying without a moral framework, man will naturally fall into immorality. There's a certain truth to that, however a moral framework does not de facto protect you either. All we have to do is go back in history: The spanish inquisition, the catholic church condoning attacks on jews several hundred years ago, the cross-killings of protestants and catholics, and the torturing of africans until they submitted to christianity.
Religion may be a good guide, but it does not guarantee a different outcome than atheism. Of course, atheism also has it's notable massacres: Nazi germany, Communist anywhere etc. The most important factor is that a group becomes so convinced of their answers that they force them on others.
I have no problem with religious members of any group. It's when they seek impose that structure that I have an issue. And of course, there are groups in christianity, islam, and atheism that fall into this category. These groups are all equally abhorent to me.
Nietzsche always seemed like a pimple-faced teenager to me, throwing everything away and declaring the only rules were the ones he created.
I mean you're in college, you read Nietzsche, you go out and have a few beers and talk like you've been visited by some great revelation. He's not a nihilist, just he's sure got a durn pessimistic outlook on things. I'll go with Peirce, James, Dewey, and the early American pragmatists over Nietzsche any day.
(Note to moderator)
I've had a post in the queue for about 10 hours on this topic because of multiple links. If there's something out of line about it I would appreciate somebody letting me know. Thanks!
#64 from Glen Wishard: "We all live in a house like that, built from the time of Moses. All of our ideas about humanity, individual human dignity, and just society were learned in this house."
I disagree. There was much of value before the Abrahamic religions became so dominant. Much.
If you don't like your father's house, maybe the best thing to do is remember that before he redecorated it it was the house of your grandfather, whose customs you like better.
"But all snark aside, I was amazed by your comment: on several levels."
Good.
"Most importantly, because you seem blissfully unaware..."
Seem is not the same as is.
"...that your attempt to ascribe nefarious motives..."
I am blissfully unaware that I'm describing anyone as having a nefarious motive. A concealed motive perhaps (concealed even from the actor himself), but certainly not a nefarious one if you mean it in the common English usage of extremely wicked. (But perhaps you are being more subtle?)
I do not accuse someone who finds comfort in the idea of an empty universe of being nefarious in this belief, any more than I think you can say that anyone that found solace in an inhabited universe was acting on a nefarious motive. I do not accuse atheists of having evil motives, or more particularly, of having especially evil motives.
And I'm certainly not unaware of irony which the duality which has the atheist evangelist and myself arguing over the nature of the infinite with each other. In fact, I'm rather reveling in that irony, because I think that I see it (and have said I see) it - but I don't think that evangelical atheists necessarily realize how much like a religion that they've become.
At least, I'm not offended by the comparison.
"Nowhere more than religion should the idea of inherent truth have more import. Do you think that many athiests and agnostics - I now count myself among them - don't agree with you simply because they are skeptics?"
As someone who is himself very skeptical, I don't think there is anything "simple" about disagreeing "because they are skeptics". Even a formal Skeptic, of the sort we don't usually talk about when we talk about being skeptical, is not disagreeing for trivial reasons.
Let me answer your implicit question and get it out of the way. Did you notice how verbose I am? I do that in order to be clear about what I mean. It seldom works, but I try. But, I know from experience that if I tried to put down my full nuanced position, not only would I be so verbose that no one would read me, but after doing so they wouldn't understand me either. So, I settle for reasonable slices.
I certainly am not arguing that noone believes in religion because the idea of a benevolent eternal care-giver is comforting to them, nor am I arguing that everyone who is an athiest does so out of terror of being held accountable for thier actions or an abhorance for being beneath some authority. What I am doing is challenging the normal, unquestioned, reflexive, unreflective argument that it is one way but not perforce also the other.
For example, I'm amused by the fact that of all the people arguing in this thread, only Andy has given 'an altar call'.
"Perhaps they can't swallow the metaphysical system in which you believe because they see no evidence for it whatsoever around them?"
I think the point is noting the difference between what they can swallow without evidence and what they make such a vehement point about not being 'taken in' by.
"That was a clever turn of phrase."
Thank you. I do try.
"Question for you: are you familiar with Kant's Categorical Imperative?"
Not well enough to discuss it formally.
At risk of making a full of myself by talking about something I've little understanding of, I can say that I'm not unsympathetic to the idea (I am myself a moral absolutist) and think that in many ways Kant was on the right track, but that in my experience most people who are moral absolutists also want the truth to be simple and fit some human created idea of what is aethetically elegant. My God is one that prefers things like quantum dynamics, and my mantra is that there is no such thing as a simple truth - including this one. Kant may have made some strides toward understanding why God's laws are the way that they are, for instance I'm inclined to agree with Kant that lying is never justifiable and that there are no 'white lies', but I'm also familiar with Victor Hugo's famous passage in which the nun of impecable character lies something near to a holy lie on behalf of Jean Val Jean. Mere fiction or reality? How should one act in such a situation? There in that fuzzy one hundredth of one percent lies mystery which is well beyond my reasoning powers.
But it has been my experience that as often as you have absolutists denying the existance of the fuzzy margin and the subtle distinctions, you have relativists going from the fuzzy margin to argue that black is white, up is down, right is wrong, and nothing has real meaning. That is clearly not the case.
"If you don't like your father's house, maybe the best thing to do is remember that before he redecorated it it was the house of your grandfather, whose customs you like better."
Sure enough, as long as you also remember your grandfather lived in a cave and ate his offspring for dinner. But gosh! Those bay windows are sure cool.
Where's Hegel when you need him?
David Blue: "If you don't like your father's house, maybe the best thing to do is remember that before he redecorated it it was the house of your grandfather, whose customs you like better."
#71 from Daniel Markham: Sure enough, as long as you also remember your grandfather lived in a cave and ate his offspring for dinner. But gosh! Those bay windows are sure cool.
No, those would perhaps be our great, great, great grandfathers.
#71 from Daniel Markham: "Where's Hegel when you need him?"
Still dead I hope and suppose, and dead or alive still useless on astronomy and in general. History is just one damn thing after another as far as I can see.
My religious advice would be along the lines of the conservatism of Edmund Burke.
Patch up your system as best you can, as long as it is flexible enough to be susceptible to being patched up. Better the devil you know - and the god too.
But if you think your system is so unsatisfactory that you should junk it, look around for some system that has worked well for a long time for a lot of people, preferably including your own ancestors or people who lived in the area you now inhabit, adapt it to your conditions, and try that.
A sweeping, thoroughgoing radicalism, proceeding from ideal abstractions in violent disregard of human experience and tradition, will likely be the worst idea you could come up with.
From this point of view, there's a lot to be said for Jesus, something to be said for Jupiter Optimus Maximus, and nothing good is to be expected from the atheism of Richard Dawkins.
David Blue:
Well, our Hebraic heritage is older than the legacy of the Greeks and the Roman republicans, but their contributions (including their ideas about divinity) are also part of the house we live in. Nietzsche was well aware of that, being a classicist and a philologist by training.
None of which makes any difference to the Superman, who has no more use for Socratic notions of truth than he does for God. All the same thing to him.
How super is your (well, his) Superman? Can he deflect bullets harmlessly?
Didn't think so.
Many mortals turn out to have no more use for N.'s Superman than for a mouth-foaming stray dog.
Funny flawed symmetry there; I probably state only the very obvious.
Which leads handily to the No True Scotsman fallacy {which I just found out about decades after its first appearance in print, thanks to a little birdie on this thread intorducing me to the name "Antony Flew". Ta}.
No TRUE Superman could EVER fall prey to mehums.
Riiight.
David Blue: "I disagree. There was much of value before the Abrahamic religions became so dominant. Much."
#74 from Glen Wishard: "Well, our Hebraic heritage is older than the legacy of the Greeks and the Roman republicans, but their contributions (including their ideas about divinity) are also part of the house we live in."
Still part of the house we live in I agree.
#74 from Glen Wishard: "Nietzsche was well aware of that, being a classicist and a philologist by training.
None of which makes any difference to the Superman, who has no more use for Socratic notions of truth than he does for God. All the same thing to him."
Hebrew dates back to the 10th to 6th Centuries BCE, Ancient Greek to the 11th to 6th Centuries BCE, Latin in the Italian peninsula to the 9th or 8th century BCE.
Israel is admirably ancient, but it has not got the superior antiquity its Scripture gives it, unless you start granting divine claims about who was here first. But then you have Muslim claims, including that Australia was Muslim in prehistoric times. (And you know, once Muslim, forever Muslim land...)
Our oldest influences would be Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, Persia, Greece, Rome, with Israel in there about equal to Greece. Among these, the Jews have a justified superior prestige for having survived and for the massive (though not always benevolent) influence of spinoffs from their religion. The Greeks and the Romans will be with us to the very end of our civilisation (which looks like it may not be far off in Europe). And Ancient Egypt is far the most ancient real influence, by virtue of having built its great religious artefacts in stone, rather than mud-brick, but a long way short of the big three in terms of influence, due to Isis having lost out to Jesus.
I judge religions by the character of the civilisations and the individuals they produce. (With a heavy bias to antiquity, and another to our own best traditions.) If there are impressive people and there has been a truly great, noble civilisation that one could hardly imagine without that religion, then that religion is to some extent at least justified.
We can point to the greatness of Egypt, though not quite as much as one would like to great individuals within it. The cud chewing bureaucrat seems to have been too much favoured, and Pharaoh was too exalted and the common farmer too low to make for heroes. Still, if you want Man's first and in my opinion best views on many religious topics, here they are, with ample evidence that good doctrines made good men and a truly great civilisation.
We can point to the greatness of Greece, and of Greeks, to speak only of Homer, Socrates and Alexander. You could hardly do better than to pour a libation to Apollo, or Athena or Zeus, because great things were done and built by men who did that.
We can point to the greatness of Rome and of many Romans such as Virgil and Scipio Africanus. So hooray for Roman rites.
We can point to Christian civilisation, and its many great and truly weird products. I never tire of praising Joan of Arc, who is unimaginable without her Christianity. (And barely imaginable with it.) Be nice to a priest today!
We can point to Friedrich Nietzsche's Ubermensch ... and laugh scornfully.
It may well be that formal religion, which derives eventually from less developed beliefs, is at its root a survival mechanism, and hence selected by evolution.
Why? Well, the basis of most religions is belief in an afterlife. Belief in an afterlife is a defense against despair; the feeling, which most people over about 15 get occasionally, that there is no point in struggling because it will all be over in a few decades (or less) anyway.
If you don't think there is any point in struggling, then you won't struggle as hard; and one thing for sure is that those who won't struggle will lose to those who will. And those who don't think it's worth carrying on will have less kids (or at least less surviving ones, which is all the same to evolution).
It doesn't take much of an advantage for it to be selected for, over hundreds or thousands of generations.
In other words, a lot of people are religious because the ones who weren't didn't leave any descendants. Of course, this argument is completely independent of whether there is an afterlife (or any basis in religion) or not.
I don't claim priority for this idea. I very strongly suspect that someone with better qualifications has said it before, although I can't remember ever seeing it in print.
#77 from Fletcher Christian: "It may well be that formal religion, which derives eventually from less developed beliefs, is at its root a survival mechanism, and hence selected by evolution.
[...]
In other words, a lot of people are religious because the ones who weren't didn't leave any descendants. Of course, this argument is completely independent of whether there is an afterlife (or any basis in religion) or not.
I don't claim priority for this idea. I very strongly suspect that someone with better qualifications has said it before, although I can't remember ever seeing it in print."
A very reasonable view, though I haven't seen a well-built academic argument for it either.
You'd have to be careful in making such an argument, because the Jews (survivors second to none) have no great interest in an afterlife, classical Greek ideas on the afterlife were not such as to fill a man with hope (unlike the much more optimistic Egyptian views), and there are the different views of many other religions to take account of.
Also, some people who are interested in the afterlife get far too caught up in it, and become non-breeders and often useless or worse than useless in other ways. It's not obvious that centuries of moving your most intellectual and religiously inclined individuals into celibate priestly and monastic orders is about evolutionary advantage.
On the other hand I do see a clear advantage in religious taboos on abortion and systematic infanticide, which can otherwise consume vast numbers of lives (chiefly girls) as the killing is so utterly easy and safe. It's a tragic fact that people often don't see injustice in killing, even truly vast-scale, chronic killing of their own flesh and blood, unless they also see danger or difficulty in it. I think that's a hugely under-rated factor in history.
Recommended:-
Selective female infanticide as partial explanation for the dearth of women in Viking Age Scandinavia, by Nancy L. Wicker, in: Violence and society in the early medieval West, ed. Guy Halsall.
Unfortunately, the fierce, nasty and stubbornly aggressive seem to have a great advantage over the reasonable, and as mankind masters nature more, the advantage is tipping further to religions focused on overcoming humans as opposed to those engaged in various way with forces of nature or with a next world.
This article (link) well illustrates how Islam is chasing Christianity out of the stadium, both in its own lands, where Christianity is being obliterated, and in lands which till very recently have been Christian, where Christianity is also being obliterated.
As a practical matter, militant atheism seems to act only against less harmful beliefs, those that have long had their crueller edges ground off them, while giving a free pass to the truly dangerous. It's almost the worst option: thoroughly unsatisfactory in itself, and an open gate for things far worse, such as militant Islam.
New King Stork is prevailing over old King Log, because Christian-haters would have it so (as well as for other reasons). In some ways, this is the worst piece of religious folly since the ruin of Rome and the ringing in of the Dark Ages.
David Blue (#72) "History is just one damn thing after another as far as I can see."
That seems to be a rather strange thing to say, especially when you are typing the message in on a CPU constructed at the micro-meter level and transmitting it by a layered OSI model to a distributed world-wide network.
But they still bake bread, so maybe it's all the same year after year. I'm betting that relgions are key parts of a civilization's tacit knowledge and accounts for things like The Enlightenment and Civil Rights.
(#77) Fletcher Christian: looking around the world and in archeology, we certainly seem wired for religion, no matter whether God exists or not. Yes -- it is an old argument. I think Hegel's point was (roughly) stuff changes and evolves over time due to these types of conversations we have about what works and what doesn't work. Religion works for a bunch of humans: some religions better than others. You can believe that it's a big circle: we keep making the same mistakes and nothing much changes (which I think is what David was saying) or you can see various forms of tangible progress, like technology and philosophy, and you can make the linkage with the underlying cultural spirit.
I choose the link: we didn't get this far because we were believing that Jupiter was watching from Mount Olympus. Monotheistic traditions are more capable of formenting civilization's progress than poly-theistic or pan-theistic ones. Likewise, I would argue that the Christian tradition of self-sacrifice fighting a warlike tradition has produced much more over time than other configurations.
Now perhaps we move on -- maybe the spaceship lands on the White House lawn and some green creature gets out and claims to have been mucking around with all of our recent history in an effort to help us. Or maybe it says that it has it's own God, which it has met, and his name is Beetlehead. Whatever. Maybe the Bible gets another sequel (although usually by the third or fourth sequel the plot lines wear thin) The point is that something will challenge us, and we will adjust. The religion we call Christianity today would be unrecognizable (except for it's main characters and stories) to first-century christians. And the crusades! Don't get me started. It's an evolutionary thing. In fact, I would argue that having a form of advanced religion is more evolutionary profitable to the species than atheism by a long shot.
Re: #79 from Daniel Markham: "That seems to be a rather strange thing to say, especially when you are typing the message in on a CPU constructed at the micro-meter level and transmitting it by a layered OSI model to a distributed world-wide network."
I don't find it strange at all.
Karl Popper: "You never know today what you will learn tomorrow."
Something that we could not have anticipated happens or is discovered, and then something else, and then something else. And we do our best, or fail to. That is history in a nutshell. There is nothing Hegelian about it.
Popper? I'm swimming in the deep water here, but let me have a shot.
I think what Popper was saying was that the trust in science as a classically empiricist notion was unfounded, that life was a continuous hypothetical reaching out (much akin to what Pierce said a few decades before, I might add) That one counter-example was all that was needed to upset the apple cart and bring about a new paradigm (Kuhn's word, I know, but let's synthesize)
My point is that sure, the sand is shifting. But let's not fall back into pure relativism. Obviously some of the constructs we have are very detailed and elaborate -- and are unlikely to change whatever our future knowledge tells us. Apples still fall from trees. The beauty of seeing the mileu as both the product of science and religion is that both are inter-supporting yet separate entities. If religion is about the good and the non-provable, then science has the rest -- the twain shall never meet. Each is incomplete without the other. I would argue from history that religion supports science in a much more fundamental way than science supports religion. In fact, most philosophy seems to be looking for that "truth" with a big "T", which as Rorty points out, in the end is based on intermediate constructs of symbolic relationships. Religion seems very good at constructing these maps of meaning without any phenomenology at all -- there is a symbiosis here.
I would provide more links but I'd like for my comment to appear today! LOL! I sure am glad I finished that mail-order philosophy course. If there ever was a course, that is. And if I exist, which is also debatable.
Glen,
I have read Nietzche; I know the "reasoning" behind his ideas. But what they boil down to is that the "superman" has absolute freedom. If he wants to be generous, kind etc, fine. If he wants to kill people, rape women, break things, and take stuff, fine too. Whatever he has the power to do. He is above man. Everybody else is the herd. That's why despite his objections to nationalism and antisemitism, I don't think it takes too much intellectual acrobatics to see Nietzche as the official philosopher of fascism. I think his great insight was that this is the kind of world we're left with when we get rid of God.
"A very reasonable view, though I haven't seen a well-built academic argument for it either."
There has been alot of interesting theory work on the evolutionary advantage of being religious. Some of it has been pretty compelling. I don't have the papers in front of me, and its not my field, so bear with me if my memory of the argument is fairly loose and untechnical.
Theory #1: Religion is about building social trust. The biggest danger to a society is the mooch who takes from the members of the social group but who does not recipocate when the other members of the group. Religion exists to minimize mooching. Celebrants of a religion make various public sacrifices. These sacrifices convince the other celebrants of the loyalty of the person to the social group, which means that they can safely trust the person to not be a mooch. The celebrant then gains a much larger net benefit than the sacrifices he makes. The more stringent the religion and the more difficult it is to practice, the more likely it is that anyone practicing it is loyal to the members of the group. This explains why religious groups which reduce the strictness of thier behavioral demands (in order to encourage new members) tend to lose members instead. Without sufficient demands on a person behavior, there is no way to prove loyalty and the whole institution becomes pointless (from an evolutionary standpoint).
Theory #2: Humans have a proven two path information processing system. One path analyzes the information logically, to produce a result - "This person is my wife." The other simultaneously assigns a value to the information, "I feel strong affinity for this person." which most people 'feel' rather than think. The value of the information and not the logical meaning of necessarily it determines how we behave. Otherwise, you get people acting very irrationally because they've assigned high ammounts of value to relatively unimportant information. (Incidently, this means that emotions are probably a logical part of any high level intelligence and the old SF convention of AI's not feeling anything emotionally is probably utter bunk.) We know this because we've beene able to study people who've had damage to thier emotional processing center.
Religious values serve as a calibration for the whole system. The way the brain works, something must occupy the value of 'most important' information so as to be able to assign relative value to everything else. The most rational thing to attach this highest value to is a set of abstract principles that broadly govern the individuals behavior. Otherwise you get someone continually walking around in a state of religious euphoria, continually assigning high value to ordinary things that they see, which we've observed in some brain damaged individuals) By observing religious ritual the brain keeps the emotional value that it assigns to everything calibrated.
One result of this theory is that its not possible for humans to not be religious. If a human decides to not be religious, the brain will latch on to something else that the person values highly and assign it 'divine level' value. This explains why atheists are compelled to act in a highly religious fashion regarding thier new non-belief in religion. It also explains why no society has ever been able to forgo religious ritual - even ones ostencibly built on anti-religious principles. Maoism, Nazism, Stalinism, all ended up becoming religions in thier own right, complete with priesthoods, saints, symbols, religious texts, holy days, pilgrimages, and so forth. Fighting against that is fighting against very basic biology.
See, for instance, Darwin's Cathedral (and follow 'also bought' links from that page.)
The social evolution thread of reasoning makes sense - our ancestors were social long before they were 'human'. There's likely another contributing factor - our tendency to want to make stories out of everything. That's itself a natural part of the survival value of intelligence itself, the prediction of future outcomes to avoid danger and pursue opportunity. Rather than trying to remember every instance, we instinctively try to build a story that explains the pattern. The notion that you would then subject those stories to exhaustive scrutiny - science - had not occured in the evolutionary timeframe.
Wow Celebrim,
Yes, I noticed that you ARE verbose. :)
And point to you: you didn't ascribe athiests as having "nefarious" mostives for their beliefs... my mistake. Clearly my choice of words was too strong.
But this is what you did?:
C: "Nor am I arguing that everyone who is an athiest does so out of terror of being held accountable for thier actions or an abhorance for being beneath some authority. What I am doing is challenging the normal, unquestioned, reflexive, unreflective argument that it is one way but not perforce also the other."
I don't think so.
People speak. Sometimes the mask slips. Perhaps your argument is morphing in real time... but I think you wrote what you really think of those who don't share your belief system.
C: "In my experience, the compelling and overarching desire behind atheism is abhorance of the idea that some outside force may in fact impose duties and responcibilities on you."
"Overarching and compelling."
Sorry... I don't buy it.
Most athiests and agnostics in MY EXPERIENCE don't share your belief system because they have no proof, personal experience, or even intuition which would convince them to believe. In other words, they have an overarching and compelling respect for reality... and are reluctant to depart from it.
I particularly find your use of the term "desire" strange. Some - perhaps many - people choose what they believe according to what they WANT to believe... as though inherent truth were somehow reponsive to their desires. Outside of religious conversations, that's usually described as delusion or magical thinking; among the religious, it's described as faith.
But it's delicious to see a Christian - a skeptic?! - accusing athiests of such behavior.
If I can presume adherence to the Nicene creed, you believe that a man was born of a virgin, died and came back to life, ascended to heaven, and will return. Depending on the depths of your fundamentalism, you also might believe that God parted the Red Sea, and that he murdered - er, "killed" - the firstborn children of all Egyptians because their Pharoa refused to free his slaves on Moses' command. Jacob wrestled an angel and kicked his ass. Jonah rode out a storm in the belly of a whale. You might also believe that Noah outfitted an ark, loaded it up with provisions and two of every kind of creature on the face of the earth, and went cruising for a few months...
And you're a skeptic? Huh?
You allude to some "true skeptics," which are apparently different from the kind I am familiar with: those that I know feel that evidence measurable by our physical senses, not desire, is the beginning to recognizing truth... and the more fantastic the thesis, the more convincing need be the evidence.
What kind of skeptic are you?
Interesting discussion. Apropos of the neurobiology of religion thread in this discussion, Wired did a great piece on Persinger's work on the induction of religious experience using E-M fields.
Simplified considerably, the idea goes like so: When the right hemisphere of the brain, the seat of emotion, is stimulated in the cerebral region presumed to control notions of self, and then the left hemisphere, the seat of language, is called upon to make sense of this nonexistent entity, the mind generates a "sensed presence."
Persinger has tickled the temporal lobes of more than 900 people before me and has concluded, among other things, that different subjects label this ghostly perception with the names that their cultures have trained them to use - Elijah, Jesus, the Virgin Mary, Mohammed, the Sky Spirit. Some subjects have emerged with Freudian interpretations - describing the presence as one's grandfather, for instance - while others, agnostics with more than a passing faith in UFOs, tell something that sounds more like a standard alien-abduction story.
It may seem sacrilegious and presumptuous to reduce God to a few ornery synapses, but modern neuroscience isn't shy about defining our most sacred notions - love, joy, altruism, pity - as nothing more than static from our impressively large cerebrums. Persinger goes one step further. His work practically constitutes a Grand Unified Theory of the Otherworldly: He believes cerebral fritzing is responsible for almost anything one might describe as paranormal - aliens, heavenly apparitions, past-life sensations, near-death experiences, awareness of the soul, you name it.
This certainly suggests to me that Deism, or at least the ability to "sense" an invisible observing Presence (from which all sorts of interpretations can be inferred), is hardwired into the human brain, and sociobiology aside, the ability of a brain to make it's owner think it's being watched even in the absence of direct proof has a LOT of survival value - particularly in a species that's spent an inordinate chunk of it's evolutionary existence as prey. It might really help a tasty, smallish mammal to be a bit more paranoid, and it'd be interesting to see if this brain function exists in other social mammals, or is "weaker" in solitary or predator species...
It seems to me (in a sort of Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind kinda way) that as we continue to map out consciousness, a lot of "Mystery" will become increasingly explicable, but no less interesting for that. People can induce trance states all sorts of ways (meditation, chanting, fasting, whirling, botano-pharmeceuticals, electical stimulation etc.), but knowing the underlying neural mechanism(s) informs, but certainly doesn't cheapen, the subjective experience.
I forgot to make a point; that evolutionary selection applies to memes as well as genes. I suspect, for example, that very few members of the Heaven's Gate cult reproduced after their conversion.
As for the apparent counter-example of celibate priesthoods; well, as far as I know priests tended in mediaeval times and earlier to be second or third sons - those who wouldn't inherit anyway and were therefore disadvantaged. It may well be that the evolutionary advantage of a cohesive society, with a purpose for life for its individuals, outweighed this disadvantage.
After all, you share half your genes with your brother or sister. If he/she has three kids, you're ahead.
This reminds me of the comment by someone famous that he would "give my life for two brothers or four cousins". Sorry, I can't remember who it was.
Wastelandlive to celebrim:
Oh, come on. Who appointed you the knuckle-rapping nun of this thread?
What I understand celebrim to say - and I think he qualified it well enough - is that there exists such a thing as unreflective anti-authoritarianism. Not the worthy anti-authoritarianism that informs the better libertarians, but the anti-authoritarianism of a child who doesn't understand why his mother won't let him play in the street. The number of Americans who grow to adulthood with that instinct completely intact is disturbing.
This phobia for rules and moral judgments militates against religion - as well as against reasonable restrictions on motor vehicles, guns, and marijuana, if they would affect the phobe personally - and goes well with a nihilist philosophy. It doesn't "explain" atheism, which is not the same thing as nihilism, and I don't think celebrim said so.
Fletcher Christian:
Dawkins' selfish gene keeps coming up in this thread - not surprisingly, since the internet is the only environment in which such a silly thing actually exists. Likewise his annoying meme-thingies.
But people who want such things can have them. I only want to point out that understanding the history of ideas as an aspect of biological evolution is obviously interesting, but if taken too seriously we might as well all be nihilists. Evolution has no purpose or progress whatsoever, unless it is by accident, and would just as soon go backwards as forwards - if it understood the difference between backwards and forwards or anything else. It certainly cares nothing for anything we value - it's Nietzsche's Superman turned creator god.
Julian Huxley once wrote that the advent of humanity made evolution conscious of itself for the first time, finally able to purposefully direct its own course. Put that down as one of the worst ideas anybody ever had. I hear a lot of that echo in Dawkins. I'd much rather have Hegel's welt-geist, or Teilhard de Chardin's Omega-Christ, even if they're all nonsense.
This certainly suggests to me that Deism, or at least the ability to "sense" an invisible observing Presence (from which all sorts of interpretations can be inferred), is hardwired into the human brain,
No, this just proves that when you deliberately short-circuit the human brain, it malfunctions and produces all kinds of weird sensory/memory/perception errors. I can run a low-voltage electrical current across my CPU in my PC and have it access and misprocess all kinds of random data out if it's cache too (course my PC is engineered to shutdown when this happens, unlike the human brain). Does this mean my PC believes in supernatural phenomenen?
Also, religious people (barring the inevitable few nuts) don't base their faith on fuzzy sensory perceptions of seeing God/Angels/etc. His theory does not match observed data.
#83 from celebrim: "Theory #2: Humans have a proven two path information processing system. [...] Religious values serve as a calibration for the whole system."
This is pretty much what I think. And if you think that, then you expect big consequences to follow from what people and entire civilizations fix on as calibration values.
Since the effects are likely to be complex, pervasive, subtle, long term and felt most strongly in the social aggregate rather than on an individual level where we can most easily see what's going on and decide how to maximise benefits and head off any emerging problems, I think the case for going with gods and religions that have a track record with substantial plusses is good. (Perfection is not to be looked for.)
Leaving your calibration values blank, to be filled in by advertising or a catchy pop song, seems a less promising idea. You might get lucky and catch something good, but the odds seem long.
Filling in values that have proven terrible consequences and hardly any good ones is an even worse idea. Communism would be my prime example of a broken set of peak values that produces a bad "new Socialist man" and bad states and societies.
Treefrog,
Thanks for the response (I usually get to these discussions pretty late!).
I can run a low-voltage electrical current across my CPU ...Does this mean my PC believes in supernatural phenomenen?
I don't think this analogy holds well. Human cognition and perception is notoriously buggy, and when malfunctioning, or tricked, or pushed beyond its limits can be made to 'sense' all sorts of predefined errors (the book Mind Hacks is a catalog of them). From the research, we know that under some conditions people can be deliberately induced to sense the Invisible Other Watching. Hence, this is a capability of human brains. A computer isn't sentient, but a human will try to make sense of the input (angels, Gods, UFOs, ghosts...). The subjective difference between a deliberately induced 'short circuit' and the natural ones that occur with some frequency elude me.
Also, religious people (barring the inevitable few nuts) don't base their faith on fuzzy sensory perceptions of seeing God/Angels/etc.
A cursory inspection of any of the major religion's holy texts suggests otherwise. Prophets (Vyasa, Jesus, Elijah, Mohammed, Baha'u'llah, Joseph Smith, Shri Guru Nanak Dev Ji) seem to play an inordinately relevant role in founding religions, and most (all? Not sure about Vyasa) of the prophets listed claim angelic or divine visitation - often after severe physical deprivation (Jesus's trip to the desert comes to mind). Most religious people (at least demographically) base their faith on the visions and writings of prophets - people who claim "sensory perceptions of seeing God/Angels/etc.". So I guess I disagree with you here.
As for most religious people, I'd probably agree with you that many (most?) won't have blatantly divine experiences during their lives - but some do, and the rest seem to take it on faith.
"I don't think so."
Really. Well, I do think so.
"People speak. Sometimes the mask slips."
Yes. I see that.
"Perhaps your argument is morphing in real time..."
No.
"...but I think you wrote what you really think of those who don't share your belief system."
First of all, I didn't write anything about what I think of people who don't share my belief system. Such an all encompasing category (which would include many Christians) simply would defy any sort of simple description. I have a great deal of respect for alot of people who don't share my belief system. In fact, my belief system is pretty unique to myself, something say the Pope would worry about (to mention only one person who doesn't think I'm qualified to be formulating doctrine) - and I think he's got good reason for worrying about that.
No, I didn't say anything about what I think of people who disagree with me. Instead, I said something about a narrow category of people - self-identified agnostics and aethists - a group which represents only a tiny slice of the people in the world who don't believe as I do.
So, let's not make my brush any more broad than it is, however much it may suit you. Contrary to your strawman, I'm not particularly troubled by people who don't agree with me.
"Sorry... I don't buy it."
Well, sorry, but I don't buy it.
"But it's delicious to see a Christian - a skeptic?! - accusing athiests of such behavior."
I've yet to discover two types of people. The software can be very different, but its running on the same underlying hardware. The vast majority of people in this world who don't believe in the divine don't give the question of what to believe all that much thought. When a person takes the step of self-identifying as an atheist and of arguing for those beliefs passionately, he's gone from a state of believing he doesn't have any evidence to believe as I do (a skeptical position), to a state of believing he has very strong evidence to believe the way he does.
Atheism when it sticks is a belief in something - in a certain system of the world - and not merely a non-belief in something. The atheist - at least the ones that care to argue this - doesn't merely have the conviction that what I say lies out of thier sight might not exist (which is not a very strong conviction at all), but they have the firm conviction that what I say lies out of thier sight does not in fact exist.
The problem with this is that in my experience they are willing to accept incredible things which lie outside of thier sight, lie outside of thier ability to confirm, and lie outside of thier experience. In other words, they are not really any more skeptical than the population as a whole. An aethist has no problem imagining the 'big bang' or the genesis of life through a random chemical process or the universe existing as a 9 dimensional membrane embedded in a higher order continuim, and most in my experience have no real problem putting faith in socialism or humanism or any number of other things for which thier isn't alot of evidence of success.
They accept without questioning (or with very little questioning) things which fit into thier existing system of belief (just like everyone else). They just don't notice that they do (just like most everyone else). In fact, because they are so convinced that they are the sorts of people who can't be taken in, in my opinion they tend to be less skeptical than the population as a whole. They tell so many stories about thier own 'strength' of mind, the special 'respect for reality' that they have, the special valor that they have for facing the world without a 'crutch', and so forth. This seems like a overly self-flattering description of the world, and the fact that it gets repeated so often only makes me more skeptical.
"And you're a skeptic? Huh?"
I question everything. You should hear some of my own personal lines of attack on the existance of God. Why should you suppose, if you are a skeptic, that your reasons for believing any sort of final truth are more compelling than mine?
"You allude to some "true skeptics," which are apparently different from the kind I am familiar with..."
Yeah, they mostly died out with classical Greece (though I suppose you could say that the 20th century existentialism marks some sort of revival). First you accept the proposition that no one can truly know anything, a proposition which I don't think either of us relish the idea of.
"...those that I know feel that evidence measurable by our physical senses, not desire, is the beginning to recognizing truth... and the more fantastic the thesis, the more convincing need be the evidence.
What kind of skeptic are you?"
One that is skeptical of my own ability to separate my biases from my apprehension of reality, skeptical that my own limited powers of comprehension to truly grasp anything, skeptical of my powers of immagination to contain the universe, and one which finds 'just so stories' to be 'just so stories' no matter who is telling them. One that also finds the universe rather oddly anthromorphic, and whose faith in random chance is stretched beyond credulity by the complexity of a single cell, and who I dare say has had experiences that you haven't had and so who might have somewhat more evidence of the divine than you do.
GeneThug
The discussion of whether or not the various religious prophets actually saw what they claimed to have seen, or were liars, insane, or just tripping isn't a particularly useful one.
It either becomes a he said/she said question their credibility game, or else an existential nightmare (is that coffee cup on my desk real, or just in my mind).
I was just making fun of the guys science. It's one of those "scientists discover water is wet" discoveries, followed by a completely over the top analysis of the implications. Guy shorts human brain out, weird things happen. No...really...imagine my shock. Also, in order for something to actually get to the point where a sensory misfire is noticed by the personality, it'd have to be huge and last several seconds. Not a condition that happens in nature in a healthy brain. If humans were that prone to sensory/perceptive malfunctions, you'd think we'd, err, notice (what do you mean that pink bunny isn't real...).
Shorting people's brains out = weird visions = Unified theory of Religion?
Somebody needed more grant money this year...
Whether major religious figures were actualy prophets, funny in the head, or just into the special mushrooms is a rather different can of worms.
I was just re-reading this thread (I do that with the ones that interest me most) and noticed I attributed the quote "The world of words creates the world of things" to Althusser. It was, in fact, Jaques Lacan in case anyone cares. I also notice that no one has addressed postmodernism. I fully concur with those who dismiss it as nonsense, but it is one influential strain of atheist thought (though there have been attempts to reconcile it to or use it to justify religion).
Donald Sensing: “In the modern day one either has to accept some kind of deistic understanding of the origin of the universe or an evolutionary understanding that excludes any sort of deity from contributing to the origin of the universe and all contained therein.”
No. That is a false choice. For many existential questions the most informed answer is that we don’t know.
The evidence for the evolutionary development of animals is overwhelming. The relationship tree for all multi-celled life forms is written in their genomes. The molecular history of each gene and each protein can be traced back hundreds of millions of years. To doubt all that evidence is to doubt our senses, our memory, and our very existence.
Does that mean that scientists have proven that life developed on earth though chance and selection? No. At present, scientific knowledge of how single-celled life forms came into being is very sparse. As more details of microbiology are discovered the understandings of the origins of life will be pushed back in time. But there may never be enough data in microbes or fossils to know how life originated on earth. The best answer may remain that we don’t know.
Donald Sensing: “So why would a deity-denying atheist be puzzled that religion is thriving? If evolution as they describe it is true, then religion is itself a product thereof. Not only that, but Judaism is an evolutionary product, so is Christianity, so is Islam, so is Buddhism, so is Shamanisn, so is ... well, you get the idea.”
Yes. I believe brain evolution and cultural evolution have produced “God belief” in the majority of humans. Of course that indicates nothing about the truth of those beliefs. All human beliefs are constrained by the limitations of innate biology and culture. Atheists aren’t immune. How much of what I believe is wrong?
Donald Sensing: “Why religion and not, say, athletics or stamp collecting or consumption of alcohol?”
Stamp collectors haven’t forced schools to teach stamp collecting in biology class.
Belief systems based on “revealed truth”, faith, or feelings conflict with belief systems based on scientific evidence and falsifiable theories. When scientific theories conflict there are peaceful means to resolve conflict and enhance understanding. When faith-based systems conflict, there is often bloodshed. (Faith-based systems can take on the trappings of science. E.g., true believers in Communism. Even scientific beliefs can become so entrenched that skeptics are treated as heretics. All human systems suffer from human failings.)
Fly #95: I almost made the very same line of attack on that very same sentence and was structuring the post in my mind when I realized that Rev. Sensing had not actually created the false dichotomy that I thought he had.
Choice A) Believe that some diety created the world.
Choice B) Choose to believe that no diety was involved, and therefore you are left only with some random process and no known prime motivator to explain the world.
The fact that choice B is limited in no way limits choice A. You can for example believe in the random process and a diety as a prime motivator, a sort of post-quantum mechanics deism. Or you can believe in evolution generally but special acts of creation where the creator meddles in the process to achieve particular results.
I believe Rev. Sensing point was that if you remove a prime mover from the equation, your choices get stark indeed.
"But there may never be enough data in microbes or fossils to know how life originated on earth. The best answer may remain that we don?t know."
A very skeptical answer, and one that fits the available evidence. I don't think he was suggesting that belief in evolution was incompatible with religious belief.
Treefrog,
It's one of those "scientists discover water is wet" discoveries
That's a pretty ungenerous interpretation of the research - did you read the article? It's a puff piece, sure, but it's the specificity of the induction of spiritual experiences (as opposed to a randomness of response that 'shorting people's brains out' implies) that I think is relevant to this topic. If you think that mapping out the inducibility of religious experiences doesn't have interesting implications (and potentially commercial and/or sinister applications), well, you're entitled to your opinion, but we'll see what the future holds. The technology advance in this work is far less banal than your writing suggests, IMO.
Shorting people's brains out = weird visions = Unified theory of Religion?
If spiritual experiences are an emergent property of neural architecture (now inducible in a lab, and hence correlatable with mri and eventually gene activity and sequence variance data &tc.), that information both informs these discussions and maps out what the future of these discussions about the intersection of science and religion will look like (since we won't be purely speculating about the biological origins of faith/religiousness, and there'll actually be some quality data to chew on). Some people may be biologically or neurologically incapable of religious experience, color blind to the Divine, and the converse might also be true - people who're having spiritual visions all the time, and knowing that these conditions are readily explicable, perhaps they'll be less likely to think the worst of the other. The future of this research looks bright. Perhaps you'll be less sanguine as the science and technology improves. OTOH, perhaps you're not very serious? It's hard for me to infer tone in writing.
Just as an observation, if science discovers the "religion button" in the brain, so what?
I mean, really -- some folks have a lot of religious experiences and some folks don't. There doesn't seem to be any way for me to feel one thing is more significant than the other. I like chocolate ice cream, my kid can't stand it. If you find the chocolate ice cream section of the brain, does it really signify anything? Maybe I'm missing it. Looks an awful lot to me like scientists trying to quantify metaphysics -- is there a God or not because of our brains, or do we believe there is a God because of our brains? Big difference. I can also see this being used ad infinitum in debates: Sally is a Christian only because her brain is configured some way. I'm all for the research, but gosh if I can see any benefit in it except as atheist debating points. Once we completely map out the mind, and all of the ways we experience things, life is still out there, and we are still perceptive creatures. Seems to me more like a discussion of bio-mechanics than meaning.
Daniel: I'm not sure I would put it that way.
But I would agree that even if we discover the God in our brains, it doesn't really solve any of the interesting questions.
Are our brains configured that way so that we are predisposed to believe in God, or are we predisposed to believe in God because are brains are configured that way? It's like discovering life on another planet. At first, someone who believes one way may think that it is evidence in support of his position, but on further reflection it really isn't.
Even if we discover that our brains are configured so that some people believe in God more easily and naturally than others, it doesn't really get us anywhere theologically that we weren't before. Ok, so now we are back to arguing over predestination. What else is new?
Thats a great point Daniel. Something scientists try not to think about is that all of science is based on an unproveable assumption- that our sense can be relied upon. Now we can point to areas of the brain that control sense of sight, hearing, smell, rational thought... does it follow that everything we think we know about the world is filtered through a biological device prone to error and even hallucination such that any attempt to quantify the universe boils down to brain chemistry? Maybe, maybe not. But we will continue to do science just as we will continue to explore faith. If anything this is an indication that we are capable of both and not by accident- designed if you will, or crafted by evolution if you prefer. I dont really care that something in my brain is telling me these are good things to think about- any more than i care it is my brain telling me loving my family and my girlfriend is a good thing, or excersizing, or drinking a beer. I believe all these things to be true regardless of where the compulsion originates. Maybe thats what makes us human to begin with.
"Thats a great point Daniel. Something scientists try not to think about is that all of science is based on an unproveable assumption- that our sense can be relied upon."
Science is based on alot of unprovable assumptions. However, those assumptions have proven to be over time quite 'strong' in the sense that science has proven quite sucessful beginning with those assumptions. For example, science has an assumption that anything which happens can be repeated, and that anything that happens under some conditions will happen in the same way under the same conditions. The success of science is akin to a mathematical assertion which has been proven true for all 'small' numbers. It may not be proven true for all cases, but its a pretty compelling argument for believing it. And, science has - over the years - added tacit assumptions because they have also been proven strong. One of those added assumptions is that everything which exists can also be observed (in some fashion). This assumption has proven so strong over time, that many scientists (and certainly our atheist friends here) would claim it is a fundamental assumption of science. (I would make the contrary claim that it simply doesn't become the business of science until you can observe it, which is slightly different.)
I think that the assumption that are senses are reliable enough to comprehend the universe is, at least in the sense that we are not always hallucinating, a strong one. I think that we can indeed know things based on our perceptions. But I think its also safe to say that we're beginning to discard the notion that we are capable of knowing everything that there is to know. We have Heisenburg's uncertainty theorem. We have Godel's incompleteness theorems. We have the recognition that complex events depend so subtly on their exact conditions, that small differences produce large deviations. We have the recognition that information - unlike matter and energy - is not conserved and can disappear from the universe - making it impossible to know everything that has happened from observing everything beginning with the present. And we have branches of science like string theory where scientists are dangerously questioning whether in fact the universe we live in is one in which everything that exists is observable to its inhabitants. Some details of the universe may be too small to ever be percieved by any possible instrument. Some details of the universe may require more energy to unlock than can be harnessed. Some details of the universe may operate primarily in dimensions which are undectable by any means direct or indirect. Figuring out whether we are dealing with simply unknown unknowns or in fact unknowable unknowns seems to me to be a major challenge of the next few centuries, in no small part because the incredible success of the 18th century to the present has given people what I think is a false impression that everything is knowable and that everything that is imaginable is also possible.
We are running into places where the universe justs says 'no', and 'no' absolutely based on what we know. I think it is very 'unskeptical' (to use what has become an overly worn phrase in this thread) to assume that for each unsolvable problem there exists some unknown unknown which will allow us to solve it.
Cerebrim, I understand that one can believe in God and also believe that God works through works through naturalistic means such as mutation and selection. My point is different and reflects how I view the world.
Suppose that behind a closed door there is either a red box or a blue box. Someone says that my only choices are to either believe that the box is red or to believe that the box is not red. However, I don?t believe either choice. I just don?t know what color of box is behind the door. Perhaps in the future I?ll be able to open the door and then I will know and will have a belief. For now, I just don?t know.
When it comes to existential questions such as the nature of reality, I don?t believe we have the answers. Human minds are poorly equipped to understand reality. For many questions we don?t know the answers and shouldn?t pretend that we do.
Fly: You are correct in your example, but you aren't understanding the formal proposition Rev. Sensing made.
The state you question is of the form, either A or !A->B. 'A' or '!A' is a valid space covering proposition. You can choose between the proposition that there is some sort of external first cause to the universe (you don't have to believe in a particular one), or you can choose to not believe this, but if you choose not to believe it you must accept B - the universe as the result of a random evolutionary event - as a consequence. But, if you choose to accept A, it says nothing about B at all. !A->B does not mean that A->!B.
A valid argument with Rev. Sensing would be to suggest that !A does not imply B, that is, that you can both not believe in a external prime motivator and not believe in evolution, but this leaves most people I would think at loss to propose anything meanful about how the universe came to be. There are a couple ways to do it though. One is that you can propose that the universe has always existed and therefore !A does not imply B, but I think most people on both sides of the A or !A debate accept now that the universe had a definate beginning. This - and other revelations of science if you accept them - leaves you with just Rev. Sensing's stark choice.
GeneThug
Yes, I am completely dismissing this guys research. Unless the Wired article got him completely wrong (and this being Wired that's certainly a possibility), he seems to have basically decided that artificially stimulating in a fashion that does not occur in nature produces supernatural experiences, that he's found the religion button.
Water is wet indeed. If, as he claims, he's found the place where people store religious based data, and upon stimulation it coughs up that data, proves what? The human brain works?
The only thing of interest here is that apparently UFO belief is stored in the same place as other religious beliefs.
Except I don't think he's even managed that. The far more likely, and I don't see him even addressing the possibility, though it's the simplest and most likely explanation, is that he's simply producing a sensory phenomenen beyond normal human experience. The human brain, being a great pattern matcher, desperately tries to match something, anything to the bizarre experience in order to define it, and what we have is the world's newest Rorschach test.
In other words people are merely labeling it as being like a religious experience not because it is one, but because that's the only way they can describe it.
The article may be horrible, but this seems more junk science to me.
Atheism must be in the air today. Maybe it is part of the culture war posturing that goes on before an election?
I just read this blog article about atheism from a link over on Digg.
Mr. Celebrim -
(And your lacky yes man Glen Wishard.)
You wrote what you wrote. These are your words:
C: "In my experience, the compelling and overarching desire behind atheism is abhorance of the idea that some outside force may in fact impose duties and responcibilities on you."
Did you mean them, or no?
You seem to wish to hide among ever more convoluted arguments over classifications.
And I get it! For my money, I think you accurately describe the difference between Athiests and Agnostics.
But I'd differ with this:
C: "In other words, they are not really any more skeptical than the population as a whole. An aethist has no problem imagining the 'big bang' or the genesis of life through a random chemical process."
There is evidence for the Big Bang. There is evidence for the genesis of life through a random chemical process. Evidence - perhaps not proof - but evidence which might lead a skeptic to say, "Well, that's the best answer we've got for now.
What's that got to do with religion? As an agnostic who would love to believe for many reasons, I'm wondering:
C: "Who I dare say has had experiences that you haven't had and so who might have somewhat more evidence of the divine than you do."
Care to share? Seriously? I'd love to have some experience of the divine.
"(And your lacky yes man Glen Wishard.)"
More masks keep coming off.
"What's that got to do with religion?"
It's the best answer I've got for now.
Seriously, you think I live in a silly universe where the creator murders Egyptian first born, and you find me unskeptical for accepting that. I think you have a bigger problem, one that a classical education was supposed to alleviate. I think you live in a silly universe without a first cause, that just happened from nothing, and in which coincidences so astronomically impossible as to defy comprehension fly by you as mere dumb luck, but widely attested belief seems beyond the pale. I find you to be incredibly incredulous for believing that.
Now, if you had wanted to argue that I could not possibly know anything about the creator, and that the creator is as likely to turn out to be as brainy and as caring as a supernova, then perhaps you'd have some cause claim to be who you say that you are. But right now, you are pretty much living up to my preconceptions.
"Care to share? Seriously?"
You aren't exactly endearing yourself as someone with whom I want to share my private experiences. Besides which, would it matter? You'd only insist on emperical evidence, which I not only don't have but would find as contrary to the universe as I understand it as a babelfish.
"I'd love to have some experience of the divine."
How hard have you been looking?
PS: "There is evidence for the genesis of life through a random chemical process."
No, there isn't. Not a shred. It's an area I'm intensely interested in. There is evidence for the evolution of life through a random chemical process, but there isn't anyone that has gotten even close on the genesis question. Some of the papers I've read on the subject are more laughable than flying spaghetti monsters.
PPS: "Evidence - perhaps not proof - but evidence which might lead a skeptic to say, "Well, that's the best answer we've got for now."
You seem utterly confused as to the nature of skepticism.
I'm assured by my reading of Dumas that every gentleman has a lackey.
Jejejej...
Ya... I have one or two lackies myself.
Mr. Celebrim: you've got me wrong. I'm an agnostic... that is to say, an athiest who lacks the courage of his convictions. So I don't necessarily believe in "a silly universe without a first cause." That remains a mystery to me.
Your hostility, does not however.
This is usually where religious debate goes, especially when Christians start mixing psuedoscientific nonsense with scripture... which is why I rarely engage in them.
I don't know whether you believe the tale of Exodus literally or not. You seem to have avoided that question in favor of lecturing me on classical education.
As you have articulated nicely, between the athiest and the snake-handling, speaking in tongues-types are every flavor of belief systems. You could be a Deist, or a Unitarian for all I know. Hell, once had an amazing conversation with a Catholic priest who don't believe in the immaculate conception (which seemed inconsistent, at best, but then I don't work in the Pope's HR department.)
I simply find it amazing that the guy who wrote:
C: "[I am] is skeptical of my own ability to separate my biases from my apprehension of reality, skeptical that my own limited powers of comprehension to truly grasp anything, skeptical of my powers of immagination to contain the universe, and one which finds 'just so stories' to be 'just so stories' no matter who is telling them."
also wrote:
C: "the compelling and overarching desire behind atheism is abhorance of the idea that some outside force may in fact impose duties and responcibilities on you."
I thought I'd challenge that.
Apparently, you don't enjoy challenges. For the same reason, I imagine you are very unlikely to articulate what you actually believe at this point.
I'm not really sure what your preconceptions of me were. Sorry if I haven't endeared myself to you. My search for truth rarely has anything to do with that... but then I don't suppose I have any emnity against the folk I argue with, either: so that's a bummer that I seem to have earned yours.
I was looking forward to learning about your experience of the divine. I guess that won't be forthcoming. I'll have to swealter in the dark with the rest of the heathen masses.
And BTW - point to you (again!): I've never seen evidence for the spontaneous creation of life, either. Evolution, sure, but spontaneous life, no.
Goodday!
Treefrog,
Yes, I am completely dismissing this guys research.
Aned therein lies the beauty of science as an agent of progress. If the research is valid, it'll open up new avenues of intellectual exploration and technological innovation, regardless of either of our beliefs and/or respective faith in it, and if not, then not. In this sense, our opinions are irrelevant (barring the unlikely event that you have executive authority at a research granting institution or venture capital firm).
While I remain confident that neurobiology will, if not now, Real Soon, illuminate Rev. Sensing's musings on the evolutionary origins of faith/faithlessness (by identifying the underlying neural structures responsible and allowing us to determine their lineage by, say comparative neuroanatomy and sequence analysis), some here differ, or choose to downplay the existential or philosophical significance of mapping the brain's "God button" and related structure/functions (faith, epiphany, &tc.).
Here is my take on the significance: the reason that some people live in a demon haunted world and others simply don't, that difference between individuals may be as straightforward as color blindness once the underlying biological mechanism(s) are understood (ah, but who are the blind ones? I suppose it depends on the mechanism...and there may be better analogies than color blindness - gender preference maybe?). You are of course entitled to disagree - you can lead a horse to water and all that. But the work will continue.
"Your hostility, does not however."
My hostility?? You introduced the hostility into this conversation - for which I have your own admission when you said, "But all snark aside..." Then you proceded to continue immediately with the hostility, "You seem blissfully unaware..." which is merely a backhanded insult (one of many). Each time I've responded - largely defensively I might add - you've intensified your hostility, to the point that you are now playing schoolyard name calling games.
"This is usually where religious debate goes, especially when Christians start mixing psuedoscientific nonsense with scripture... which is why I rarely engage in them."
There is nothing 'psuedo' about my science. There are papers in respectable journals with my name on them, which I would link you too but I prefer the anonymity of a 'psuedo'-nym. I've worked in academia and my wife is currently a working scientist. I'm not a noble prize winning leading figure blah blah blah (or even an important one), but I'm not faking this either.
"I don't know whether you believe the tale of Exodus literally or not."
I thought I was quite clear that I did, or at least I believe that the tale is believable.
"For the same reason, I imagine you are very unlikely to articulate what you actually believe at this point."
I have already taken great pains to articulate exactly what I believe. But, to repeat myself, I still think that the important and compelling attraction to atheism is that the belief in a universe which cannot hold them to account is comforting. There are similar related facets to this, for example that emptying the universe of 'the other' makes humanity central to it, and so forth but I think they all are essentially the same comfort at root. Now, you are right to suggest that this is not a univeral statement, and that there will exist some fuzzy margin, some ammount of atheists who are atheists for different reasons. I concur that that qualification of the statement is needed - affirmed my general belief in the fuzzy margin to most everything, and I made a qualification of my statement at length. But I stand by my belief, based on my experience and observation of the habits of atheists, that this is the central and most common thing which transforms vague disbelief into conviction. (If I had to pick another root cause which was common to most atheists I've met, it is rebellion against some injury (real or perceived) that some particular religious person inflicted on them.)
But now you tell me, "Well, I'm not really an atheist... I don't really have the courage of my convictions." So why does your humbrage seem so personal, if my thesis never applied to you in the first place? Why are you exhibiting sterotypical 'defense of the tribe' behavior, drawn out of what you say is your usual silence into this prolonged debate? Why do you bristle such when I meet your openly hostile challenges?