Good Grief, Linus

Can't We Enjoy the Best Bits?

2012-01-26T07:34:00.000-08:00

Alain de Botton has a handsome new book out called Religion for Atheists, and he has launched a little website puffing it. I've never been too keen on de Botton's writing, but his heart is often in the right place. This book gets a stinking review from the rather pusillanimous accommodationist Terry Eagleton, who says:

What the book does, in short, is hijack other people's beliefs, empty them of content and redeploy them in the name of moral order, social consensus and aesthetic pleasure. It is an astonishingly impudent enterprise. It is also strikingly unoriginal.

From Eagleton's description of the book, I find myself agreeing with him on de Botton's project, which is a pretty sorry state of affairs, given Eagleton's daft opinions on matters of faith. The ad campaign for the book is particularly patronising. Consider these:

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St Botolph's

The straw man de Botton is railing against is that atheists cannot enjoy the cultural aspects of religion because we, I suppose, are blinded by our hatred of all things religious. This doesn't apply to me. I'm quite happy rambling around the countryside visiting old churches; I attend the occasional service without heckling the vicar; I have theist friends; I sing carols and celebrate Christmas. Atheists cannot operate in most countries without participating in many religious events, and inevitably enjoy some of them. It's a bizarre misrepresentation of them that they do not enjoy the 'best bits'. Even arch new atheist Richard Dawkins makes it clear he likes certain manifestations of religious life:

I actually love most of the genuine Christmas carols. I can't bear Jingle Bells and Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer and you might think from that that I was religious, that I can't bear the ones that make no mention of religion. But I just think they are dreadful tunes and even more dreadful words. I like the traditional Christmas carols.

And he seems to have a soft spot for the King James bible too. So de Botton's target is close to non-existent. It appears that de Botton pats the religious on the head and says: 'There, there; you're completely mistaken, but carry on because we have no way of producing awe-inspiring songs, architecture or rituals without believing something that is untrue, so have at it; the more untrue things you believe the more inspired you'll be, and the more I'll have to enjoy!'.

But even if it were true that atheists were humbugging their way through the festive season and studiously ignoring all ecclesiastical architecture, would this make de Botton's case any more sound? His point is that, regardless of an ideology's truth, we can encourage it, or at least condone it, because of the good things it gives us. I really don't think that will wash. For example, would pictures from this ad campaign justify National Socialism?

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Now, just to be clear about this: I'm not comparing religion with Nazism here. I'm simply pointing out that there are more important matters at stake than simply enjoying some of the side effects of a particular phenomenon. In fact, it's crass to reduce such an important world-changing phenomenon to a sideshow of amusements, particularly when that phenomenon is causing the harm it is.

Are Atheists Bullies?

2012-01-25T08:08:00.000-08:00

The recent kerfuffle at UCL prompted by overly sensitive religious sentiment has caused a number of folk to say that atheists are bullies, often comparing them to religious fundamentalists. At RichardDawkins.NET there was a rather incoherent poster called Griswold Grim who made the 'bullying' claim, but he never substantiated it, beyond railing against ridicule.

I witnessed a Twitter spat (which I want to call Twat, but had better not) between P.Z. Myers and a statistician called Andrew Dalby. P.Z. had posted a video depicting dreadful intimidation of Irshad Manji by Muslim fundamentalists, pointing out the deep distinction between militant theists and militant atheists. Incredibly, blind to the evidence of his own eyes, Dalby tweeted this:

Once again, my gast is flabbered by someone in the ongoing debate between believers and non-believers. Displaying breathtaking bigotry against a whole raft of people, Dalby says that P.Z.'s post shows that 'the atheists are just the same sort of bullies as the fundamentalists'. So that post is the equivalent of instigating a riot, or demanding someone be executed, or demanding that a book be banned. It's a remarkable claim, and Dalby doesn't appear to be a theist, so much as someone who thinks he's found a way to be superior to both atheists and theists. P.Z. called his lack of critical assessment stupid, to which he replied:

...which made me giggle. Never a good thing to proclaim one's own genius, I find. Or perhaps that's just me, since my inability to 'out intellectual' and 'out science' people has been proved regularly! He followed up with this gem:

That deserves a ROFL. Does he mean lecturers in statistics at Oxford University are automatically correct in any discussion, regardless of the subject? I mean, sure, in a discussion on statistics, P.Z. should probably defer, but in this discussion? It's not clear what relevance this factoid has to Muslim fundamentalism, or handbagging for that matter! Anyway, back to the Twitter spat, and Dalby offers:

So apparently Santayana (and only Santayana?) is foundational to humanist principles? Santayana is all well and good, and wrote much that modern day atheists would agree with, but he was famously sympathetic to Catholicism (presumably because of his background) and few modern day atheists would agree with him on that score. Of course, many theist thinkers would disagree with him on that score too! A pointless appeal to bogus philosophical authority, then. Toleration of religious belief does not entail its immunity from criticism.

I wasn't sure what had upset Dalby so much about P.Z.'s post, but it became clear in his follow up tweets:

The bit that Dalby does not like appears to be this:

...there might be much to admire in her [Manji's] work, as she’s another theist who has taken a step away from the dogma and tribalism of fundamentalism, but she hasn’t yet had the courage or intellectual integrity to take another step and free herself of the folly of faith.

So the accusation of a lack of courage and intellectual integrity is beyond the Pale, Dalby thinks, and it's wrong to tell people what to believe and that they are inferior or wrong. You will notice that he is pragmatically self-refuting here, since, among other things, he is telling P.Z. it's wrong to tell people they're wrong. Of course it's not, and we would not have morality if it were, since our morals not only guide us in our behaviour but we also feel they have a prescriptive effect on others, as Dalby demonstrates. It then becomes clear how this muddle headed thinking arises:

Oh dear; radical scepticism rears its ugly head and we're heading for the barren plains of relativism, where no-one is right and no-one is wrong. Because he's not sure what's true, nothing is true. This would be a strange philosophy if anyone lived by it, but of course no-one does.

Well, obviously objectivism exists as much as any idea does - he presumably means there is no objective truth. An unsustainable pomo position, as the exchange demonstrates, since his own entreaties would have no weight, if it were true. A tweeter called Austin Cline calls him out:

To which, of course, he has no answer, other than 'thinking is always bad for us'! It's lucky we're not all lecturers in statistics at Oxford University, else none of us would think. The ultimate source of his anger is clear, I think, from this tweet:

If there's one thing that new atheists have achieved, it's a wider acceptance that religion and faith are not privileged over other beliefs. Folk such as Dalby demonstrate that even many non-believers cling to an unthinking acceptance of this privilege that religion and faith demand. Of course we tell each other what to think about many things, and there is no good reason to exclude religion and faith from that list of things.

But finally, the outrageous equating of good faith criticism from atheists with genuinely extreme religious bullying has to be called out for the bogus comparison it is. When these sorts of befuddled accusations stop, then it might be that we're getting somewhere in reducing religious privilege.

Notpologetics

2012-01-16T06:37:00.000-08:00

This has really got to stop, says Eric Macdonald, about believers arguing for particular views without admitting their real, religious based, grounding. This is something I've noticed frequently; believers will say they are arguing on prudential grounds, for example, when arguing for abstinence in combating AIDS. It's legitimate to point out these arguments, but by using them believers are not arguing in good faith if they don't make it clear that those arguments do not bind them. Since, if the prudential argument went against them, they would not change their mind, because of their moral (religious) views. Eric also mentions Andrew Brown's latest humiliation, after a particular clueless article, denying the pope was being homophobic in a recent speech which was reported as anti-gay.

Brown's original piece said that the pope "didn't say gay marriage threatens humanity". This was in response to some reporting of the speech, in which the pope said:

In addition to a clear goal, that of leading young people to a full knowledge of reality and thus of truth, education needs settings. Among these, pride of place goes to the family, based on the marriage of a man and a woman. This is not a simple social convention, but rather the fundamental cell of every society. Consequently, policies which undermine the family threaten human dignity and the future of humanity itself.

Now, to me, and surely anyone with half an eye on modern mores and the ways of the Catholic Church, this is clearly linking gay marriage to a threat to human dignity and the future of humanity itself, so Philip Pullella's headline is not an unreasonable contraction. Despite this, Brown insisted, about Pullella's headline:

So far as I can see, Pope Benedict just didn't [say gay marriage threatens humanity]. He did speak in favour of the family "based on the marriage of a man and woman". He did say that "policies which undermine the family threaten human dignity and the future of humanity itself". But there was no suggestion that gay marriage was the most important of these and he didn't mention it at all, whereas he did take up several other sexual issues.

The pope has to actually say "gay marriage" for Andrew Brown to consider it a mention of gay marriage, presumably. In fact, he practically confirms this in a comment:

But the point is that there are lots of things which the Vatican regards as being "an attack on the family" and Benedict deliberately mentioned two, neither of which had anything to do with gay people, or with marriage. He also mentions the economic crisis as damaging to families. That was all. And when you're dealing with a rather Kremlin-esque bureaucracy like the Vatican, these shifts of emphasis really matter. The Pope's speeches are an expression of coherent policy. And, if this one means anything, it means a shift away from seeing gay marriage as a threat comparable to all the ones he did mention.

Yikes; he thinks the pope is saying practically the opposite of what he is in fact saying. Commenters were unimpressed. Muscleguy said:

For goodness sake Andrew, do you have to be so dense and obtuse? If he was so unconcerned with the gay marriage issue then why did he feel the need to insert the apparently redundant words "between a man and a woman" into the bit about marriage? Since the church recognises no other forms of marriage, it would normally have not been necessary to define something twice.
By using that phrasing he is dog whistling to the faithful while trying desperately to Jesuitically claim that 'he said nothing about gays'. I never took you for a Jesuit Andrew, I may now have to reassess that.
If you truly do not understand about dog whistle politics then you are too clueless to be a journalist, so I can only conclude that you are being deliberately obtuse. To what end I'm not sure. I would have thought that as an avowed agnostic you would not hold a candle for pontifical bigotry, but I may be wrong.

Of course it's obvious to non-believers and, more importantly, believers, what the pope means when he says "between a man and a woman". Anthropoid Ape said:

This is an unambiguous reference to gay marriage. What other policy undermining "the family, based on the marriage of a man and a woman" could have been exercising the pope's religiously demented brain here, i.e. other than the current world-wide trend to legalise gay marriage which the Vatican has been resolutely opposing? Are you seriously suggesting that the pope was not intending to allude to gay marriage as one of the policies undermining "the family, based on the marriage of a man and a woman"?

Quite. AB responded:

No. He does believe that it is one of the policies which threaten the family. But I don't think he is such a fool as to suppose it is the most important threat, and nor was it one he selected for explicit mention. I might be wrong about this. Perhaps he does lie awake at night thinking that the elimination of gay rights is a necessary step on the way to setting everything else right that's wrong in the world. But I doubt it.

Yes, the pope is famously philanthropic and not at all concerned with Catholic dogma! We should be grateful that at least Brown shows some doubt in his own judgement here, but he still is not conceding the obvious, and he didn't in his remaining comments on the thread, despite many people pointing out what was staring him in the face.

Now, suddenly, when Philip Pullella himself writes to him and points out the obvious, the penny drops, sort of: he titles the piece "Why I shouldn't have been upset about the reporting on the pope's speech", but offers no apology for his apologetics. Pullella simply states what most the commenters said:

As one of your own readers (metalvendetta) points out in one of the comments ("Seems pretty clear to me"), when the Vatican uses the phrase "marriage based on the union between a man and a woman" it refers to gay marriage. It has used it many, many times before, particularly in cases where countries were preparing legislation allowing gay marriage (Spain, the Netherlands). Otherwise, it would have just said marriage is under threat, and the connotation there would have been heterosexual cohabitation or divorce.

Brown has admitted he was wrong (good), but not apologised for the bone-headedness of his original piece (bad!). Why does he misrepresent the pope to his readers? Perhaps because he is in denial about what the pope really believes and preaches? He cannot be ignorant of it, surely.

We must all examine our motives, but the motives that lead decent human beings, believers and non-believers like Brown, to cover up the evils of the Catholic Church really need to be exposed. Some self-examination of AB's motives might help us all to understand this damaging notpologetic phenomenon.

A Blog Post Concerning John Locke

2012-01-03T14:06:00.000-08:00

In John Locke’s A Letter Concerning Toleration (1689) he presents two minor arguments for religious toleration, and one major one.

The 'Unchristian' argument

If the gospel and apostle may be credited no man can be a Christian without charity, and without that faith which works, not by force, but by love.

His argument goes something like this:

Premise 1 No one can be a true Christian unless they are charitable.

Premise 2 Religious persecutors aren’t charitable.

Conclusion Therefore religious persecutors aren’t true Christians.

It's valid, but P2 doesn't convince; if a persecutor thinks he is doing the persecution to help the persecutee achieve eternal life, that would surely be consistent with charitable principles.

The 'Inconsistency' argument

For if it be out of a principle of charity, as they pretend, and love to men’s souls, that they deprive them of their estates, maim them with corporal punishments, starve and torment them in noisome prisons, and in the end even take away their lives; I say, if all this be done merely to make men Christians, and procure their salvation, why then do they suffer ‘whoredom, fraud, malice, and such like enormities’ which, according to the apostle, manifestly relish of heathenish corruption, to predominate so much and abound amongst their flocks and people?

The suggestion is that persecutors are insincere in their charity; else they would address themselves to those with more obvious moral failings than heretics. But most Christian doctrine allows that simple belief in Christ is sufficient for salvation, not moral probity, so a persecutor could easily sidestep this argument.

The 'Irrationality' argument

…penalties are no ways capable to produce such belief. It is only light and evidence that can work a change in men’s opinions; and that light can in no way proceed from corporal sufferings, or any other outward penalties.

This is Locke's major argument. The state can legislate to affect our actions, but not our beliefs. Beliefs are not the sort of thing that we can simply adopt at will (‘To believe this or that to be true is not within the scope of the will’). This is because we think our beliefs are true. If we think something is false, we cannot will ourselves to believe it. The link between belief and reality would be broken.

If beliefs cannot be adopted at will then there is no point in trying to force them. Torture could change what we say, but not what we believe.

Faith only, and inward sincerity, are the things that procure acceptance with God ... . In vain, therefore, do princes compel their subjects to come into their church communion, under pretence of saving their souls. If they believe, they will come of their own accord; if they believe not, their coming will nothing avail them.

The argument goes like this:

Premise 1 Magistrates’ only sanction is physical force.

Premise 2 Physical force cannot alter religious beliefs.

Conclusion So magistrates cannot alter religious beliefs.

It's valid, and at first blush, the premises appear true. But note that if someone does not understand that belief cannot be coerced, then he wouldn’t be irrational. But if he knows that beliefs cannot be coerced, it is plainly irrational to persecute, per this argument.

Locke did allow a couple of exceptions to toleration: anyone whose religious beliefs threaten society. He cites atheists and those whose beliefs would put them in thrall to a foreign power. Atheists, because they could not be trusted to keep their word since they think there is no divine judgement!

Promises, covenants, and oaths, which are the bonds of human society, can have no hold upon an atheist. The taking away of God, though but even in thought, dissolves all.

A daft thought, as if morality is simply something that operates only through a celestial CCTV, but indicative of the contempt for atheism at the time.

Jeremy Waldron presents a counter-argument to Locke, by distinguishing between coercion by direct and indirect means, and reveals that the situation is more complicated than Locke assumed; a point first made by his contemporary Jonas Proast. The environment could be directed towards the desired end by the magistrate; for example, restricting reading material and discourse for a prisoner, thus achieving a gradual, indirect conversion.

Since coercion may therefore be applied to religious ends by this indirect means, it can no longer be condemned as in all circumstances irrational.

Waldron’s claim is that by curtailing individual freedom of speech, and freedom to read what you want to read, the population’s religious beliefs could be controlled. This casts doubt on P2. Locke has overlooked the rather complex way we come to our beliefs about reality. But Locke’s argument may still apply to direct coercion, although the existence of victims of brain-washing suggest that even this coercion can be effective over time.

Susan Mendus responds to Waldron's response thus:

...the irrationality of coercing belief, even indirectly, is akin to the irrationality of brainwashing; it can certainly be done but it does not generate the right kind of belief or, more precisely, it does not generate a belief which is held in the right way.

Such a belief would still not guarantee one's salvation because, ultimately, one was pushed into acquiring it. Waldron had anticipated this objection and counters that the manner in which one is led to form a belief does not alter the content of that belief. Also, consistency would demand that most of our beliefs are ruled out too, since “In most cases (not just a few), the selection of sensory input for our understanding is a matter of upbringing, influence, accident or constraint”, so an absurd conclusion follows.

Mendus's point makes sense, I think, if we are in the business of judging the 'truthiness' of beliefs; someone whose reading has been restricted to just one book is likely to have different beliefs to someone who has read widely - and it's reasonable to conclude that the more widely-read person is more likely to have true beliefs. This would not be a genetic fallacy because the sources and methodologies being considered do cast a shadow on the beliefs.

Nevertheless, Waldron’s argument hits home, because he's only concerned with what someone truly believes, not what true things someone believes. So, in light of Waldron's objection, Locke’s irrationality argument fails, although could perhaps be moderated to account for the complex way we come to acquire beliefs.

Bibliography:

Warburton, N. (2002) Arguments for Freedom , Milton Keynes, The Open University

Ronald Searle, 1920-2011

2012-01-03T09:14:00.000-08:00

A little diversion, to celebrate the wonderful drawings of Ronald Searle. He illustrated Geoffrey Willlans's Molesworth books, which struck a chord with me at my slightly archaic grammar school. Here are his grips and tortures for masters, which seem to have been studied well by some of mine (particularly the plain blip).

The Tall Tales of Hoffmann

2012-01-03T05:05:00.000-08:00

"Hic!"

I'm not sure if this Hoffmann's first love was Olympia, the automaton, (or was it Ophelia? She's certainly no automaton.) or if his further loves were Antonia and Giulietta, but there is more than a whiff of the old Hoffmann about this New Oxonian. It's as if some gnu atheist Lindorff has gone off with his Stella, leaving him drunk in the tavern crying into his beer, "Muse whom I love, I am yours!". I've been that drunk too, though in humbler company than Hoffmann. He certainly loves the Muse, but perhaps he has spent too long musing while nimbler, more successful courtiers of Stellar Street have taken the plaudits and bouquets. That seems to be part of the complaint (h/t Screechy Monkey):

Part of that has to do with (as I suggested) a record that goes back long before most Americans had heard of Richard Dawkins. Some of us older and old atheists remember what a lonely battle that was. Many who came to the movement since 2000 will not. And that is precisely the pojnt. Without saying jealousy is involved, there are many (not just me) who know that the Dawkins revolution could not have taken place without th almost invisible work of many of my associates in and out of the academy over many many years. On the one hand, we need to be grateful that the New Atheists have been successful in garnering support; on the other hand, and I know this from experience, nothing ensured the death of a book in this country before 1995 like putting the word atheism or humanism in the title. So, there were laborers in the trenches.

But in his latest offering he is far from a-musing, letting off at every gnu he can think of, like a drunk sending texts to former lovers. He starts off with the usual suspects and regurgitates well-worn non-arguments against the Four Horsemen (three of whom he might call Gnu Oxonians?). Interesting that he seems to admire Hitchens the most ("the only true intellectual and by far the best-read of the group"), since Hitch's arguments were always the worst of the four, even if his polemics were the best. More ire is aimed at the gnu bloggers who dare to offer an opinion on religion that has not been informed by years of study in the Divinity School at Harvard. He starts with Jerry Coyne, quoting him comparing religion to leprechauns in their compatibility with science, to which he responds:

Just a flash: While leprauchauns didn’t copy the books that were turned into the books that led to the science Dr Coyne eventually studied, monks and rabbis did. Why does the perfectly reasonable opposition to religious craziness have to descend to this caricaturing of the history of religion?

Strange, isn't it, that religion has morphed into the history of religion? What a befuddled argument. It's difficult to know what Hoffman's point is here. Is it that a deep and complex history justifies an ontology? But Coyne doesn't deny religion's history. It's as if he thinks the involvement of religious people in the history of science invalidates the Conflict Thesis, but none could be that dumb. Leprechauns don't exist so they couldn't have copied early science books, so Hoffmann's comparison doesn't work. Coyne, on the other hand, is pointing out that religion is a superstition, like leprechauns, not that religion doesn't exist, or, even more foolishly, that the history of religion doesn't exist or isn't complex. Hoffmann's argument wouldn't pass muster at infant school, sadly, let alone any philosophy department.

A Gish Gallop of mud-flinging follows, aimed at PZ Myers ("If ever atheism got dumber and less impressive, it is in the work of this dissolute insult- monger"), Greta Christina ("She sees everything as a weird sexual joke"), Ophelia Benson ("...has turned her once-interesting website (I used to contribute regularly) into a chat room for neo-atheist spleen"), Eric MacDonald ("doesn’t seem to know bloody anything about the academic study of religion") and Jason Rosenhouse ("I sometimes wonder why people whose only contribution to blogdom consists of sentences like “Most religious rituals leave me beyond cold,” find themselves titillating?"). Like one or two other misguided critics of new atheism, Hoffmann is often pragmatically self-refuting!

But Hoffmann has an illustrious history, if not an illustrious future, so I do wonder what has got under his skin so much about people who aren't guilty of the things he thinks they're guilty of. Apart from the self-confessed jealousy above, he gives a clue to one of his concerns in a comment below his latest rant:

The new atheists don’t oppose the study of religion. Not true: in fact the famous “Pinker Intervention” at Harvard in 2006 prevented religion from becoming a part of Harvard’s core curriculum, on the premise there was no difference between theology and religion-studies, though Harvard was the first university in America to introduce such study in the 1930′s, apart from its Divinity School. Read all about it here: http://www.somareview.com/godandmanatharvard.cfm Stephen Pinker (who is far more considerate of religion in general) is not the issue here, btw; a number of the newbies have gone on record as saying that the study of theology does not belong in a university, though in some places like Harvard, Yale, and Chicago, this would mean closing down their divinity schools where the study of religion is alive and well. That’s half the problem: the other half is that rank amateurs like the newbies have already pronounced their verdict on such study by mixing up the objectives. Frankly if this confusion is any indication of the state of their information, they’d better hold off on the God thing for a few years. If you want to see the nadir of this imbecilic conversation, here you go:http://www.newstatesman.com/2011/06/dawkins-myers-religion-faith

Interesting. The New Statesman piece compares religion to knitting, which is presumably what upsets Hoffmann, but this is nothing more than Myers's view of what religion's status should be in society, not a judgement of its historic worth, I think. Despite people like Dawkins and Hitchens regularly supporting the study of religion, he genuinely believes they don't, and his evidence is the "Pinker Intervention" and a throw away remark from one of the more strident new atheists. I'm not familiar with the background to the Pinker story, so it would be good to hear some more about this other than what Hoffmann's written, cloaked in dense references as it is ("Pinker Intervention" throws up just one link on Google, to Hoffmann's piece).

So maybe his concern is that divinity schools should not be closed down? But opposition to divinity schools is not opposition to the study of religion, so it's still not clear why he is so exercised about this. In the piece he links to, about the study of religion at Harvard, he says:

In short, all the wrong reasons for studying religion—because it is popular, widespread, and personally significant—triumph over the good reasons for studying it.

I confess, though, that I'm not clear from the piece what the good reasons are for studying it. I could guess at a few. Hoffmann does say earlier:

But religion puts itself forward as something that ought to be studied in its own right, not because in doing so the student learns to value its influence or validate its claims, but so that the student will be able to evaluate it within a particular analytical frame of reference. And it is in providing that context that Harvard excels.

This may be true, but it does not go any way to justifying separate divinity schools - religion can still be studied in its own right without that - so I'm still left struggling to understand the nature of Hoffmann's complaint, once again. Unless he thinks that the only frame of reference that is sufficient for good religious study is in divinity schools? Maybe, but he would have to be clear why he thinks this, or it's just special pleading for religion; something that new atheists are (obviously) against.

I dare say he has other complaints; if only he could write clearly, without so many distracting straw men and errors of fact, then we might have a better chance of understanding them. Maybe one day he'll sober up and tell us fellow drunkards what he means.

Rhyme or Reason?

2012-01-02T06:46:00.000-08:00

Richard Dawkins suggests that Rowan Williams and other sophisticated theologians are being poetic about their beliefs - perhaps that they are metaphorical. I'm pretty sure that Williams thinks, however poetic he gets, that there is an underlying real truth behind what he says. And this is surely true of most senior Anglicans, despite the suspicion some have (or had, like Julian Baggini?) that they don't really believe in the unlikely things they say they believe in. Consider this, from Michael Nazir-Ali, the former Bishop of Rochester, in the Daily Telegraph:

The proper relation of religion to science is also vital. Young people must be taught to appreciate both the experimental methods of science and the ultimate values which religion offers. Such a conversation must take place in the classroom if we are not to continue being divided by “scientistic” and religious fundamentalists.

Mr Cameron reminded us that inalienable human dignity is founded on the biblical idea that we are made in the image of God. But to whom does this extend? And are there circumstances when a person might lose such dignity?

Nazir-Ali implies that we have sources of reliable knowledge other than science, with his false opposition between scientism and fundamentalism, then notes that human dignity is based on 'the biblical idea that we are made in the image of God'. This is very debatable, of course, but, further, is 'made in the image of God' a literal truth or a poetic metaphor? Science shows that we are inextricably a part of the animal kingdom with no need for such a notion, so should we not conclude a contradiction between science and religion here? I think we should, but liberal theists might say that I am being too scientistic and literal in my interpretation of the teaching; lacking poetry, perhaps?

As an aside, read Russell Blackford's discussion of scientism, and other things, here, which explains well how the charge of scientism lacks teeth - anyone who appeals to a worldview based on reason and evidence (practically everyone, I should think) is automatically not scientistic; but that does not allow anyone to claim truths in opposition to science.

Nevertheless, Nazir-Ali clearly wants public policy based on this 'idea', linking it to the 'special nature of the human embryo' which suggests he, at least, thinks it's a literal truth that we are created in the image of God, in opposition to the huge weight of scientific evidence:

It was for these reasons that the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act recognised the special nature of the human embryo and established an authority to regulate scientific work involving embryos. I support the Coalition’s desire to trim the quangos, and the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority is not perfect. But we need a body, perhaps modelled on the US President’s Council, that can consider the moral implications of developments in bioethics.

If he doesn't think it's a literal truth, should we base such decisions on ancient metaphors? I think metaphors could be useful if they highlighted an underlying truth revealed by our explorations of reality, but the image of God and the special nature of the human embryo would need to be connected by something more than a biblical idea, since biblical ideas have a wretched record in the marketplace of ideas and, in any case, they should not be grounds for public policy in a secular, multi-cultural world, unless they can be supported by secular, multi-cultural arguments and evidence. Even good poetic reasons would not suffice, in my opinion.

The moral implications of developments in bioethics should be considered, but, like all morality, they should be considered by us all, in a mature group negotiation that considers all the facts as we understand them, in concert with mutually acceptable values.

Bizarrely, Nazir-Ali also says:

As Mr Cameron reminded us, the value of equality comes from the biblical teaching, confirmed by science, of the common origin of all humans.

He appears to blind himself to the evolutionary view which shows our common origin with other animals, and to ignore biblical teachings such as descent from Adam and Eve and the massacre of the Canaanites, which suggest that some humans are more equal than others.

The Commission on Assisted Dying will be reporting this week, and it has taken on board evidence from Robin Gill, an advisor to the Archbishop of Canterbury, that the current status quo should be maintained, preferring to limit patient choice to a denial of treatment, with all the potential for pain and suffering that that entails. This stems from another supposed truth (poetic or otherwise) that human life is a gift from God and thus not our own:

10. The sanctity of human life: This principle is crucial to Christians. It encapsulates their belief that life is in and of itself sacred because it is given by God. Life has an inherent value, not just a conditional one. The principle is enshrined in law in the form of an absolute prohibition on the intentional killing of innocent human beings. It is not normally taken to mean that any life ought to be preserved at all costs. But it does ‘protect each one of us impartially, embodying the belief that all are equal’ (quoted by the Archbishop and the Cardinal from the 1994 Select Committee’s report, included in Appendix I).
11. For a Christian, this principle also encapsulates the simple belief that God owns my life, not I, and I have, therefore, no right to end it.

(from the Church of England briefing paper to the Lords Select Committee on Assisted Dying)

The consequence of such literal beliefs is Anglican opposition to humane measures which recognise each individual's autonomy. But, it's a logical corollary to the view that our lives are not our own. Let us hope that the Commission recognises the evil nature of such warping ideas, poetic metaphor or not, since these beliefs have neither rhyme nor reason to my ears.

Clifford and Faith

2011-12-31T07:46:00.000-08:00

It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence. So says W. K. Clifford in The Ethics of Belief (1877). Does he make the case for this very strong condemnation of faith, and endorsement of empiricism? Sadly, I think not, but along the way he makes powerful points toward this view, and against faith.

He starts his article with a story of a shipowner about to send his ship full of emigrants across theoceans. The seaworthiness of his ageing boat is doubted, but he banishes thesedoubts and, with a light heart, sees off the passengers and crew, who perishmid-ocean while he picks up the insurance money. Clifford considers theshipowner truly responsible for the deaths, but cites the reason for this guiltthat ‘he had no right to believe on such evidence [that the ship wasseaworthy] as was before him’. For Clifford it follows then that evenif the ship had not sunk the shipowner is still guilty of this wrong, ofbelieving on insufficient evidence. He cites another example, where seriouscharges are made against a group of professors by agitators who fail to verify thecharges. He considers the agitators guilty, whetheror not the charges are true, because they entertained their beliefs oninadequate grounds.

Clifford allows that a belief doesn’t inevitably lead to a particular action, and that a person may stillinvestigate what is the right course of action. But he considers beliefs have such influence on actions that the two cannot be separated.He notes that no belief is worthy of the name that doesn’t affect our actions in some way, either now or at somefuture date. Layers of belief build to form a matrix that is implacablyinterknit, forever affecting our character. He goes on to observe that nobelief is a purely private matter, and that inevitably we bear a burden in thefashioning of beliefs for posterity.

In the final paragraphs of the first section, The Duty of Inquiry, Clifford says the people in his examples arewrong because ‘in both these cases the belief held by one man was of greatimportance to other men’. Since this is the reason for their guilt and, further, because all beliefs arepublic and affect mankind, we have a duty to investigate all our beliefs. This not only applies to those in power orauthority, but also to ‘[e]very rustic’ and ‘[e]very hard-worked wife’.A belief based on insufficient evidence ‘is sinful because it is stolen indefiance of our duty to mankind’. An atmosphere of credulity becomes permanent, and credulity betrays our 'duty to mankind'. I see this as an appeal to the common good of humanity, a concern for human civilisation. So his argument goes something like this:

Premise 1	Human civilisation is good.
Premise 2	Actions that harm people are anathema to human civilisation.
*Conclusion 1*	We should avoid actions that harm people.
Premise 3	Actions are inseparably linked to underlying beliefs.
Premise 4	Sufficient evidence leads to correct beliefs.
Premise 5	Without correct beliefs our actions may unwittingly cause harm.
Premise 6	Our beliefs form a matrix such that any incorrect beliefs corrupt it.
Premise 7	Everyone’s beliefs have an effect on the body of belief passed down to posterity and civilisation.
*Conclusion 2*	It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.

P1 is implicit throughout, and I think most people would accept it (includingthe religious) although it is not axiomatic. However:

1. If universal fallibilism istrue and we do not know, and maybe cannotknow, every last foundational fact, and grounding axioms are unavailable, thiswould invalidate our matrix of beliefs, per Clifford. So his standard may beunattainable.

2. Beliefs born from values, such as P1, may put them beyond evidence other than the presenceof those values in humans. If so, believing P1 corrupts Clifford’s own matrixof beliefs.

Allowing the argument for now, how does Clifford view religiousfaith? He barely alludes to faith, and it’s not homogenous, so what was histarget? In an article in April 2011, The New Statesman asked some notables to explain their faith, and this suppliessome illustrative quotes:

First, astronomer and creationist Hugh Ross says ‘The accumulating evidence [fromresearch] continues to point compellingly towards the God of the Bible’. He isconvinced by the evidence, having movedfrom a secular upbringing to belief.

Secondly, biologist Kenneth Miller:

Now, I certainly do not "know" that the spirit is real in the sense that you and I can agree on the evidence that DNA is real and that it is the chemical basis of genetic information. There is, after all, a reason religious belief is called "faith", and not "certainty". But it is a faith that fits, a faith that is congruent with science...

Finally, Cherie Blair: ‘It's been a journey from my upbringing to anunderstanding of something that my head cannot explain but my heart knows to betrue.’ Her belief cannot be explained but she thinks her feelings provide aroute to knowledge.

Hugh Ross’s ‘faith’ barely conforms to the popular definition.Clifford might argue over Ross's evidence, but he wouldn’t blame him for his investigations. Clifford doesn’t explore whatconstitutes sufficient evidence, nor does he consider the difficulties ofestablishing the facts of a matter based on evidence. Peter Van Inwagen, in a 1996 piece contra Clifford, observes that intelligent political opinion is sharply divided despite exposure to the sameevidence, and it’s the same for many philosophical controversies.If intelligent people with a full grasp of the evidence have different beliefs,this casts doubt on the extent to which evidence leads to truth. Maybe Cliffordjust asks that believers make best efforts to confirm their beliefs, not thatthey should all agree? But Clifford implies that evidence leads to correctbeliefs (P4). Opinions couldjustifiably vary when they reflect different values, or different presuppositions,and this shows his premise is wrong. However, where faith makes claims about anobjective reality, contradictory conclusionspoint to an invalid mechanism for uncovering that reality. Van Inwagen makes goodobjections to Clifford’s conclusion, if not his drift.

Miller’s faith is closer to Clifford’s view of faith. He places his beliefbeyond scientific enquiry (‘What I do not claim is that my religious belief, oranyone's, can meet a scientific test.’) Nevertheless, by claiming it’s ‘congruentwith science’ he hints at reasons for believing.

Miller draws a distinction between knowing and believing.When I move house, I will generally assume that my new neighbours are harmless and benevolent – I might ask about them butI wouldn’t make exhaustive enquiries to confirm the fact. It’s rare that onewould know such a thing. Is thiswrong? Or I might believe the localhospital is in Brown Street, but not necessarily know it. Would that be wrong? As William James points out in The Will to Believe (1896), we are all ‘chock-full’ of such beliefs. Thereare prudential reasons for ensuringwe know the truth in these two examples, but it’s not clear there is a moral duty, which is Clifford’s charge.However, if someone with a serious injury approaches us and asks for directionsto the hospital, we would feel a moral duty to ensure our knowledge iswell-grounded, in case the hospital was in Green Street, on the other side oftown to Brown. Here there does seem to be a moral element in addition to a prudential one, because of the strength of our beliefs and the potential consequences of being wrong. Clifford does not consider the strength of our beliefs, and the benefit of the doubt we affordmany day-to-day beliefs built into our culture because of their trivial consequences. This supports Clifford’s premisethat such ‘community’ beliefs are significantto the body politic, but it shows that we cannot operate without presuming manyof them. So, while a moral basis for justifying some beliefs seems imperative,it cannot apply to all beliefs,contra P6. James’s pragmatism wins out.

The existence of scientists like Miller is an empirical strikeagainst P3, since he acts scientifically without his faith affecting him.Clifford might respond that Miller’s work is tainted by his faith in some way,but if Miller’s work has been subject to the full rigour of scientificconfirmation, this is hard to maintain. Or he might point to Miller’s viewspoisoning the well of knowledge for ‘mankind’, increasing their credulity. Butif we have Miller as an example of someone who can partition his science and credulity,we have no reason to believe that others cannot either.

Blair’s claim to know something without explanation is a primetarget for Clifford. James, contra Clifford, argues for the probity of our‘passional nature’ deciding our beliefs where there are no intellectual grounds, which appears to be Blair’s contention. James argues that choosingbetween faith and non-belief is a genuineoption that faces us, because it’s:

1. Living; both options are apossibility

2. Forced; the choice cannot beavoided, and

3. Momentous; the options are nottrivial and the stakes are high.

James's example for the living option is:

If I say to you: "Be a theosophist or be a Mohammedan," it is probably a dead option, because for you neither hypothesis is likely to be alive. But if I say: " Be an agnostic or be Christian," it is otherwise: trained as you are, each hypothesis makes some appeal, however small, to your belief.

But by dismissing being a ‘mahomedan’ as a dead option, James’s case for faith collapses, since it exposes the false dichotomy hepresents, between agnosticism and Christianity. There are many, probablycountless, possibilities other than those that he considers live. Nevertheless, Cliffordshould have considered similar qualifications to those James discusses, sincethe urgency of some actions and their momentousness bears on the morality of howour beliefs are adopted, whereas the presence of many trivial unevidenced beliefs cannot be fatal to our moral character.

So values may be held with no more justification than their brutepresence in our natures. The Millers and Blairs of the world appeal to suchvalues and presuppositions to justify their faith, as does Clifford in hisargument, and as we all must at bottom. Furthermore, Clifford sets an unattainablestandard, if universal fallibilism is true. He could moderate his claim andmake it more defensible. I think a powerful case could be made to show that beliefs that are held recklessly are always wrong. Or, just as Hume said ‘a wise manproportions his belief to the evidence’, one could claim that a wise man shouldproportion investigations into his beliefs according to a reasonable assessmentof their potential for harm (or something snappier!). Or a case could be made thatit’s immoral to say one’s beliefs are beyond scientific tests, as Miller does, becauseit places them outside objective democratic enquiry (if that’s what it does).

In the end, sadly, Clifford himself goes too far, and fails to offera convincing view of religious faith.

Bibliography:

Brown, S. (2002) Destiny, Purpose and Faith , Milton Keynes, The Open University

Arguments for Vegetarianism

2011-12-27T05:32:00.000-08:00

Peter Singer, Tom Regan, James Rachels, Stephen R. L. Clark, Henry Spira, 1979

Here I consider two contrasting philosophical arguments for vegetarianism. Peter Singer's rests on his flavour of utilitarianism; Tom Regan's on the notion of inherent rights. Both utilise the notion of speciesism.

Peter Singer’s argument is a little involved, but goes something like this:

Premise 1	We should do what minimises suffering for all affected
Premise 2	We consider equally the interests of humans in avoiding suffering
Premise 3	There is no morally relevant trait that humans have that some non human animals don’t
*Conclusion 1*	We should consider equally the interests of some non human animals in avoiding suffering
Premise 4	Intensive farming causes great animal suffering
Premise 5	For most of us the pleasure from eating meat does not outweigh the suffering of the animals intensively farmed
Premise 6	Most of us cannot know the provenance of what we eat
*Conclusion 2*	Most of us should not eat meat

P2 and P3 derive from the wrongness of speciesism, per Singer. He argues that speciesism is wrong by comparing it to racism. Racists draw an unjustifiable moral distinction between races. Just as the colour of someone’s skin is irrelevant when deciding who or what has equal moral standing, so too is the furriness of their skin, say. It’s speciesist, then, to treat beings unequally based simply on their species - the species boundary is not morally relevant. Singer starts from the respect we show other humans; he establishes a line has been drawn between those beings we consider to have moral standing and those we don't, and then questions whether we draw it in the right place. P1 assumes that minimising suffering is good. So, we don’t baulk at kicking a rock, but we would baulk at kicking a child, because the child suffers. Suffering is a morally relevant trait, then, he thinks; so sentience is paramount, not species. Many might refer to human rationality, for example, as a morally distinguishing feature, but that introduces its own problems. J.B.S. Haldane summed these problems up thus:

Has a hopeless idiot the right to life and care, though he or she is not a rational being nor likely to become one? If so, has a chimpanzee with considerably greater intelligence similar rights, and if not, why not?

The difficulty of finding a morally relevant trait makes speciesism a powerful argument, but it does not go unchallenged. Mary Midgley, for example, while accepting many of the comparisons with sexism and racism, also notes another -ism that we might not all agree is wrong: we might call it family-ism:

...we would have to show that the differential response to our own species was a far stronger emotional tendency than our differential response to our own tribe or our own children, because nobody doubts that our duty can sometimes call on us to subordinate tribal or family interest to that of outsiders. It would have to be so strong that all attempts to extend consideration to animals were doomed to failure as unnatural.

If Singer had a mentally incapacitated daughter, for example, and if during a visit to the ape house at the zoo a fire broke out, would he save his child in preference to the adult chimpanzees? I think we all would (save our child), and if Singer did not, in keeping with his principles, I think we would consider that the wrong decision. It seems to me that Midgley is right to point out that speciesism might not always be wrong, even if we can allow it is often wrong.

Note that Singer is not arguing for an absolute ban on eating animals; if meat could be produced in a way that reduced suffering or increased utility in the world, then he would conclude that it was morally right to do so. But premises 4 to 6 show that this is not the state of affairs in the world today, so we should not eat meat as things stand. P4 and P6 I agree with; P5 I think could be challenged for some. But these premises are empirical, and I want to stick to the philosophical issues as far as possible.

When he discusses whether or not we should kill, Singer appears to flirt with rationality and self consciousness as relevant traits. He defines a person, distinct from a human, as ‘a rational and self-conscious being’. Do these traits distinguish homo sapiens? The more we discover about other species, the less unique these features appear. And, more problematically, they’re not universal in humans. Some animals appear to be as rational as babies or mentally retarded humans. We either concede these humans have a moral standing less than or equivalent to animals, or we fall foul of speciesism.

Singer's definition of person has a whiff of speciesism about it, since it appeals to characteristics (rationality and self-consciousness) that many see as peculiarly human. A person in Singer's sense has desires and plans which will be frustrated if killed (and desires satisfied and desires frustrated are definitions of happiness and suffering that utilitarians like Singer also use). Non-persons will have no such desires and plans, so nothing to frustrate. Killing humans, then, is worse than killing chickens because humans are aware of their lives in ways that chickens aren’t. It’s not worse because the human’s human. So Singer isn’t being speciesist, because he isn’t using rationality etc. to arbitrarily draw the moral line, but is using it to quantify the utility in his calculations. But in other circumstances animals may suffer more than humans because of ‘their more limited understanding’, so a different calculus would apply.

So, if we can adjust for the capacity that different animals have to satisfy desires in Singer's scheme, can factory-farming chickens, for example, be justified because they have fewer desires? I think not, because we are not comparing cramped chickens with cramped humans, but cramped chickens with the difference between eating meat and eating vegetables. The suffering of factory chickens surely does outweigh this marginal difference (Singer has made great efforts to establish animal suffering empirically, to support P4 - see The Ethics of What We Eat, for example). His argument compares the like suffering involved, and the beings are only relevant as their characteristics affect the amount of suffering.

Direct utilitarianism suggests that non-persons can be painlessly killed if replaced. Singer seems dissatisfied with this, since he invokes indirect utilitarianism and concludes it may not be right to kill non-persons, to encourage a respect for them that, if absent, would result in their mistreatment. Does this justify factory-farming then? Again, I think not. Singer isn’t expecting an immediate move to vegetarianism, and in a gradual change-over, much lost utility will be replaced by new utility; for example, in the vegetarian food chain.

Tom Regan objects that aggregating suffering in utilitarian moral theories leads to dire consequences for individuals – a good end justifying evil means. For example, it suggests that secretly transplanting organs from, say, one orphaned child to five sick people is good. As we’ve seen, Singer could counter with an appeal to indirect utility, and argue that the benefits of such a ‘general practice’ should be included in the calculation, to safeguard individuals. It’s not at all clear to me that this does provide sufficient minority protection. If we are to include the indirect suffering caused by the general practice we must also include the indirect utility gained by five individuals going on to lead healthy lives, which could be substantial.

Furthermore I think that a sacrifice of happiness in excess of the suffering relieved would be appropriate in some cases, reducing aggregate utility. For example, if a heavy table was on a person’s toe causing some discomfort, but hardly agony, I’d still feel obliged to ask five people enjoying lollies to help lift the table, even if their lollies melted. The suffering of those who lost five lollies could be more than the suffering of the toe-crushed, but if the suffering of the toe exceeds the suffering of the lost lolly for each person, it seems right that a number of individuals make that small sacrifice. Singer would no doubt reply that this is irrational if looked at in toto, and we should jettison our intuitions. But since we are looking for a system that explains and justifies our moral intuitions it seems to me that this highlights a flaw in utilitarianism.

In summary, I agree with Singer that speciesism is wrong in a similar way to racism. If suffering is the primary consideration, the charge of speciesism sticks if we treat babies with more respect than all animals. So I agree suffering is a relevant trait, but I am not convinced it is paramount. I would note that speciesism doesn't mean we should deny our natural urge to look after our own, as even animal rights campaigners surely would. Further, the flaws I see when we make moral judgements using aggregate suffering lead me to reject P1, so I cannot endorse Singer’s argument for vegetarianism.

As mentioned, Tom Regan finds the focus on suffering objectionable, since it gives no value to the being per se that has the feelings. His argument tries to rectify this perceived failing:

Premise 1	Every person has an equal inherent value, affording them the right to equal respect
Premise 2	Treating a person’s inherent value less than another’s is immoral
Premise 3	A person is a being who is an experiencing subject of a life
Premise 4	Some animals are experiencing subjects of a life
*Conclusion 1*	*Treating some animals as if they have less inherent value than humans is immoral; they have a right* to equal respect**
Premise 5	Treating a person as a resource breaches their right to equal respect
Premise 6	Using animals in science, agriculture and sport is treating them as resources
*Conclusion 2*	Using animals in science, agriculture and sport breaches their right to equal respect, so is immoral

Regan also makes a speciesist appeal, with P3 and P4. Observing inherent values grants rights to those who are ‘experiencing subjects of a life’. Many animals may not fit this description, but we should be cautious and accept that many farmed animals do experience life in this way.

The Legend of the Wolf of Gubbio - Sassetta

Roger Scruton objects that only members of a moral community can have rights, because they need to be the ‘kind of thing’ that can have duties and responsibilities (to others). And David Wiggins agrees that a moral community only includes those who can owe ‘things’ to one another, ‘not least a duty to negotiate conflicts of interest’. We recognise that the events depicted in Sassetta’s The Legend of the Wolf of Gubbio, for example, where townsfolk draw up an agreement with a wolf to stop it terrorising them, are just not possible, since wolves do not understand the background duties and responsibilities to such agreements that humans do.

But it’s plain that not all humans would belong to this moral community either, since babies and the mentally retarded cannot adopt these responsibilities either. If we grant vulnerable humans a particular right, then the speciesist argument forces us to concede that we must grant animals that particular right. Regan wants to grant animals the right not to be used in science, agriculture and sport, so if we think vulnerable humans have this right, and we surely do, then his argument succeeds, or we have to show how vulnerable humans are different from animals, in a way that is relevant to the issue.

Scruton argues that babies are potential moral beings - they could sometime adopt responsibilities the way animals never could. This seems a plausible and relevant difference to me, although it raises questions about when potentiality is recognised. A human egg has the potential to be a moral being, but I doubt Scruton would grant it rights. However, to defend the standing of the mentally-incapacitated, who cannot even be potential moral beings, he claims human life is sacrosanct, which is blatantly speciesist.

P1 and P2 argue for personal rights, by suggesting that every person has an immutable value that demands respect. Regan has the laudable aim of protecting individuals, including many animals, from abuse by the majority. But in eliminating ‘evil’ means to achieve good ends, he also stops us avoiding bad ends, if ‘evil’ means are the only way to achieve that, because his approach takes no account of consequences. So, for example, if the killing of a cow is the only way to save 100 children, he would still consider the killing of the cow evil, and to be avoided. He might argue that there would always be a moral, rights based approach available to solve such dilemmas, but I cannot see this is always true. His rights based approach is too absolutist for many dilemmas that face us.

Further, I think rights are unnecessary to establish obligations to animals, and these obligations could include Regan’s aims: to remove their use from science, agriculture and sports. By granting rights, duties are imposed on others. But not every duty is spawned from a right; for example, we feel an obligation to the environment without granting it ‘rights’. So we can treat animals, and other things, well without giving them rights.

In summary, Regan’s speciesism argument works well, once we grant an inherent value to experiencing subjects of a life, and subject to the issues I raise above surrounding 'family-ism'. But inherent value would take too little account of the consequences of an act, and is an overreaction to the problem. Therefore, I cannot agree with Regan’s argument for vegetarianism either. Both Singer and Regan give good reasons for why we should treat animals better than we currently do, however.

Bibliography:

Hursthouse, R. (2002) Humans and Other Animals (A211 Book 2), Milton Keynes, The Open University

The Observer Fails to Observe

2011-12-04T03:05:00.001-08:00

As Andy Lewis at The Quackometer reports, The Observer have responded to the online storm caused by their failure to question the facts surrounding The Burzynski Clinic's range of treatments.

It's a poor article that ends with this:

I'll leave the last word to the deputy editor. "We had no intention of endorsing or otherwise the treatment that the Bainbridge family have chosen for Billie. The focus of the article was the extraordinary campaign to raise money for the course of action that the family, after careful consideration of the benefits and risks, had decided to pursue. It is a story of courage and generosity involving thousands of people. Of course, it is entirely legitimate to raise issues about the Burzynski clinic as a number of readers have done, and we should have done more to explain the controversy that it has provoked. But some participants in the debate have combined aggression, sanctimony and a disregard for the facts in a way which has predictably caused much distress to the Bainbridge family."

So, they admit their failure to report the facts properly, but can't resist a dig at the blogosphere (presumably), calling 'some participants' aggressive, sanctimonious and with a disregard for the facts. This is a cowardly way to smear a whole range of people who have posted on the subject, including Andy and Rhys Morgan, the 17 year old blogger from Wales, who are mentioned in the article.

This is ironic, since it's The Observer who are now coming over as aggressive, sanctimonious and with a disregard of the facts, in this piece.

It's worth noting that Andy and Rhys, among others simply raised concerns about the Clinic, and these concerns are justified. What caused the ensuing storm were the actions of an agent of the Burzynski Clinic, who adopted rough-house bullying tactics to try to silence these legitimate concerns. The Observer fail to make clear the nature of these bullying tactics. This is a serious omission.

I’ve not read any blogger who blames the families for pursuing the possibility of a cure – who wouldn’t clutch at such straws in similar circumstances? That’s what makes it important to examine the claims of potential miracle cures, and this is a duty that The Observer have failed to observe.

Donate to Cancer Research...

UPDATE: David Gorski on Burzynski's “personalized gene-targeted therapy”; "cancer is complicated":

...skirting the line between science and pseudoscience, Dr. Burzynski gives every appearance of recklessly throwing together untested combinations of targeted agents willy-nilly to see if any of them stick but without having a systematic plan to determine when or if he has successfully matched therapy to genetic abnormality.

Bloggers Bullied by Burzynski

2011-11-28T01:58:00.001-08:00

Somebody has been issuing illiterate threats on behalf of the Burzynski Clinic, against The Quackometer and 17 year old Welsh schoolboy Rhys Morgan. Orac gives a good account of this and the controversy surrounding antineoplastins here. I'm linking to these stories to raise their web rankings. Sadly, there's the possibility that blameless individuals like the Bainbridge family and comedian Peter Kay are simply working hard to obtain an expensive treatment that doesn't work. In the interests of all, after such a long time treating patients, the Burzynski Clinic need to get their treatment approved by medical science.

Cameron Opts for Blinkered Dogmatism

2011-11-26T06:34:00.001-08:00

The Guardian has arranged for various prominent figures to ask Prime Minister David Cameron some searching and not so searching questions. Terry Wogan asked "What does the PM think the public think of him?". I mean, really, what sort of answer is that going to elicit? Nothing that is going to tell us anything interesting about Cameron or his views.

Richard Dawkins did ask an important question:

Why do you support faith schools for children who are too young to have chosen their faith, thereby implicitly labelling them with the faith of their parents, whereas you wouldn't dream of so labelling a "Keynesian child" or a "Conservative child"?

This is an important question in a modern, secular society. Peter Robinson has today announced his intention to appeal to the whole community in Northern Ireland, to try to create a united Northern Ireland. This is probably a fool's errand until measures are taken to reduce sectarianism in that blighted province, and it's hard to see how he could get from here to there without removing the deep divide that is caused by faith schools. Of course, I don't pretend this change would be sufficient; just a necessary one.

The situation is less serious in Great Britain, probably due in no small part, I suspect, to Catholic persecution in the centuries after the Reformation - Catholicism has simply had very little standing in the body politic, so it has been unable to influence policies and attitudes sufficiently to generate conflict within communities. But in an increasingly pluralist society, the ghettoising effect of faith schools is unlikely to decrease inter-community tensions. So, can we hope for a serious engagement with the issue from David Cameron? He replies:

Comparing John Maynard Keynes to Jesus Christ shows, in my view, why Richard Dawkins just doesn't really get it.

Clearly that would be too much to ask!

Notice, first, that Cameron simply dismisses Dawkins's view out of hand, mockingly, as the over-arch Anglican blogger Cranmer notices. So, it's often said that Dawkins mocks believers and that he fails to take their beliefs seriously. Yet here we have the Prime Minister of this country, half voted in by the populace, responsible to us for his decisions, refusing to engage with Dawkins's question seriously and effectively mocking him.

Is it fair to say he doesn't engage? I think so. Dawkins is not comparing Keynes and Christ, although I dare say Keynes's contribution to the well-being of society may be the greater. He's comparing what it's appropriate to teach kids in our publicly funded schools. Is it appropriate to teach them that Keynes's policies are the right and only way an economy should be run? I don't think so. Is it appropriate to teach them that Christ's way is the right and only way to run one's life? Again, no, I don't think so.

Now, to be charitable I suspect that what Cameron may be hinting at, but not expressing, is that there are normative elements to teaching children about Christ that are missing from an economics lesson. But this makes his case even poorer, because, in a secular society, peculiarly normative elements of any religion, or dogma, must be excluded to ensure pluralism isn't threatened by state sanction of one particular view. This point, if that is what he is hinting at, tells against faith schools.

Cameron goes on:

I think faith schools are very often good schools. Why? Because the organisation that's backing them – the church or the mosque or the synagogue – is part of the community.

The organisation that's backing the school is part of the community? This is almost tautological. Of course they're part of the community, as is the local council. Just being part of the local community is not sufficient qualification for running a school, else local political parties, or even hoodie gangs, would qualify.

And it brings a sense of community and the backing of an institution to a school.

Again, we have many institutions that don't run schools; being an institution is not a sufficient qualification to run a school.

The church was providing good schools long before the state got involved, and we should respect the fact that it's not just the state that can provide education but other bodies, too.

Well, churches have provided bad schools long before the state got involved too, so this point has little purchase. But, more importantly, we're talking about state-funded faith schools here, not private religious schools. Again, Cameron offers an argument that barely qualifies as one, and refuses to engage properly with the important issues that are at stake. Plainly other bodies can provide education, but the question is what sort of society do we want to build? Do we want a society populated by well rounded critical thinkers, or do we want it populated by blinkered dogmatists? If the first, then what do we need to do to provide such a population?

Faith schools are more likely to teach one dogma in preference to another, else why Cameron's initial dig at Dawkins? So my contention is that faith schools are more likely to teach a specifically Christian/Muslim/Jewish dogma in preference to all others, and Cameron seems to think this is a justification for faith schools. So they are more likely to deliver blinkered dogmatists. I suppose it's possible that Cameron would prefer a society of blinkered dogmatists, in which case I understand his answer to Dawkins's question.

UPDATE 28th November 2011:

It's ironic that Cameron is being so cavalier with his approach to faith schools when, as I mentioned above, Peter Robinson is wrestling with their effects in Northern Ireland. Here is what he said on the Today programme this morning:

We bring children up in different schools and then we scratch our heads when there's division in society.

He called for an end to "religious apartheid" in NI schools.

Islamic Templeton?

2011-11-17T06:48:00.001-08:00

Oddly enough, shortly after I write a piece pointing out that Templeton is just an organisation that promotes Christianity, not 'science and religion', they announce an initiative to encourage research into science and religion that includes other religions:

As productive as it has been, we at the John Templeton Foundation believe the science-religion dialogue has yet to investigate the full range of possibilities. In particular, it has largely been carried out from a perspective that is theistic (usually Christian), Western, methodologically focused, concerned primarily with the physical sciences, and has often been pitched at an introductory level. We believe that there is value in more work, particularly advanced research, which engages other scientific fields, more of the world’s religions, a wider spectrum of cultural foundations, and a greater breadth of specific topics.

Interesting that there is an admission that the science and religion meme they've pushed has indeed been Christian. I'm sure it had everything to do with my article! Previously there was this million dollar study on Islam and science, but I can't find any fruit for all that cash.

It will be interesting how far they will go with this, particularly with regard to Islam. I don't see that Islam is any less antithetical to science than Christianity, so there really is nothing different about its relation with science - I mean, they're similarly bad for scientific advancement because they promote ways of knowing objective truth that are inscrutable. But, any reconciliation of Islam with science would undermine the efforts that Christians regularly make to establish that Christianity is peculiar in its encouragement of science. It's good to see Ronald Numbers in a lecture for the Templeton funded Faraday Institute say:

...although Christians, as I’ve already pointed out, often contributed and made crucial contributions to the growth of science in the 16th, 17th and later centuries, I think it’s a conceit for Christians to argue that only Christianity could have produced science as we know it today.

However, Peter Harrison, in another Faraday lecture, on The Royal Society, argues for a social legitimacy for science among the religious scientists who founded it:

Whereas we often tend to think of religious influence manifesting itself unhelpfully in the content of scientific ideas, far more important for the period in question is the manner in which religion lent social legitimacy to scientific activities and institutions, provided motivations for key individuals in those institutions and, not least, informed their goals and methods. When we pose these kinds of questions, the importance of religion in the establishment of the Royal Society and in the public justification of its activities seems undeniable.

He goes on to argue against Harry Kroto's views that "religious commitment, and certainly the clerical vocation, is necessarily inconsistent with ‘the scientific mindset’ and ‘intellectual integrity’". But while Harrison draws on much evidence for how religious people participated in the formation of The Royal Society, and how some of the ideas that sprang somewhat from their religious views informed their scientific approach, and allowed them to work at their science, he does not consider the basic religious proposition that is incompatible with science: that there is something objectively true that must be paramount to one's study of the universe. Surely everyone realises that even the most hardened dogmatist can 'do science' at some level, and most of the time this will not make the slightest difference. This still makes it incompatible in some way to free enquiry. It would be like saying that a football Premiership season is compatible with free competition if all teams competed against each other on an even footing throughout the season, but at the end Manchester United were declared the winners regardless of their standing (OK, sometimes it seems like that happens anyway). What is more likely, one can conclude, is that something mitigated the chilling effects of the religious approach, and with that in mind things look very different for science and religion.

Further, if Harrison's view are to be taken seriously, then presumably he must agree that Islam did not offer social legitimacy for science in the same way (since we're trying to figure out why science sprung up when and where it did, after all), in which case the approach that provided the encouragement for science is independent of religion. Furthermore, we can point out that secular approaches can provide social legitimacy for science too, so, all in all, these arguments for science and religion stand up to very little scrutiny. They go together like oil and water.

So a series of Templeton funded studies on how science and different religions are compatible, or not, would be a worthwhile project and may break the Christian hold on the science and religion meme. They can either hold to the idea that Christianity is pre-eminent and true, or let go and allow that any religion may be true, and Christianity therefore holds no special flame for truth. We shall see.

Test of Science

2011-11-10T15:47:00.001-08:00

Massimo Pigliucci has declined funding from The Templeton Foundation, a decision I applaud, and would urge any academic to follow. The reason he cites is:

...I simply don’t like having my name associated with right wing and/or libertarian organizations like the JTF, the American Enterprise Institute or the Institute for American Values.

Fair enough, and while surely right wing organisations have every right to operate as they see fit, within the law, I think the JTF may be too right wing for comfort. Sunny Bains conducted a study of its activities and noted:

For instance, the Templeton Freedom Awards are administered by the Atlas Economic Research Foundation, a group that is perhaps most notable for its opposition to taking action against climate change and for being a defender of the tobacco industry that has traditionally given them funding.

Certainly tobacco and climate change are the typical bugbears of right wingers, but from what I've seen of Templeton, Bain's conclusion is a more disturbing aspect of the JTF:

Its agenda can at best be called unclear. At worst, its agenda is pro-religion and anti-science.

Further she says:

I call on the scientific community to boycott Templeton Foundation research funding and events. If that is too much to ask, I suggest that all those accepting Foundation funding, through whatever route, investigate the Foundation and the other activities that it funds, and to put on the record what they think about that work.

and,

Of course, if the Templeton Foundation is benign and open-minded, as their advertising claims, then this dissent should not cause anyone to lose their funding. On the other hand if, as I suspect, the Foundation is more interested in promoting pro-religious activities than doing real science, then some people may find that their grants are not renewed when the time comes.

Well done to Pigliucci for carrying out his research, but my view is that Templeton are aiming to further the meme of science and religion so as to undermine the proper conduct of science to protect Christianity from criticism. What I mean by this is that Templeton want the Christian presuppositions to be the norm when science is conducted. For science to be untainted, it needs to follow the evidence, wherever it leads. The Christian project makes that impossible, in principle, since a dogmatic belief in the truth of Christ must always trump science, for a believer.

I've written a few times about the Templeton Foundation before, noting the corrupting effect it may well have on the proper conduct of science, and indeed, perhaps, aims to have. For example, here's a 'paper' from the The Faraday Institute for Science and Religion (note the science and religion), a Templeton funded organisation. It's called Human genomicsand the Image of God, by Graeme Finlay. In the summary at the very start, it says:

Our DNA tells a storythat describes our biological origins during mammalian evolution, but that is not sufficient to account for ourorigins as persons. We are formed as persons only as we hear and assimilate stories transmitted in our familiesand communities. Christians believe that the story that is essential to the development of a fulfilled humanityis that which relates God’s redeeming action in Jesus Christ.

What Christians believe is wholly irrelevant to the science of DNA. Now, by all means, Finlay is welcome to publish papers reconciling with science whatever odd beliefs he has, but to publish such a paper under the auspices of a reputable sounding organisation (with science in its title, don't forget), based at one of the leading universities in the world is calculated to undermine the scientific project. Other dubious papers, in the scientific sense, are also listed.

A recent news bulletin from Templeton pointed me to their Test of FAITH project. Its aim is to supply "accessible materials on science and Christianity for everyone who is interested in these issues". They have sections for youthworkers, schools and kids (a work in progress at time of writing). They have produced a film which "explores the relationship between science and religion, and the generally perceived idea that they are in conflict. Scientist believers discuss how they fit their faith and professional science work together." There is a sample lesson plan for teachers, with session one entitled The myth of conflict. The myth? Oh, really? Under a section discussing evil and suffering, they suggest the teacher:

Point out that science specialises in knowledge, but wisdom tends to be associated with religious traditions. They could use Einstein’s quotation, ‘Science without religion is lame; religion without science is blind.’

References are made to the good that science has done for us, but apparently only as an excuse to also point out the bad things it has enabled. It's plain that the subtext of the whole project is not science-friendly, but Christian-centric.

Now it may be that there are areas of reality immune to scientific investigation, but that doesn't allow us to claim a compatibility between religion and science. Every claim that religion has made that science can test has been found to be wrong. Religion has no track record of successful epistemology; in fact, since competing religions come to different conclusions, we can be confident that they are more wrong than right, and possibly completely wrong.

More to the point, Templeton isn't pursuing a way to reconcile science and religion, but a way to reconcile science and Christianity. Under the heading Schools & Youth - UK - Test of FAITH: Live!, we find:

This is an exciting new youth and schools initiative led by Chip Kendall, former lead singer of thebandwithnoname, and DJ Galactus Jack. Events include music, video, live science experiments and a short talk from a scientist. If you are interested in hosting Test of FAITH: Live! at your school or youth event, please contact us for details.

Spreading the Christian message to schools - the promo makes it very obvious this is an evangelical operation:

The Chip Kendall Band and Test of Faith: LIVE! in Caithness Promo from Far North Film on Vimeo.

"It's a great way of providing a vehicle for the gospel for people to engage with". That's pretty up front. I must say it disturbs me that these people are visiting schools spreading this unscientific message under the guise of science. I have only found evidence of two school visits though, shown above, to Wick and Thurso High Schools.

This is outside of school time, but is this really an appropriate use of state schools? What about their obligations to religious diversity? These are supposed to be non-denominational schools. The distribution of lesson plans preaching a Christian message, and rock musicians and scientist believers spreading a science and Christian message is just not what I expect our schools to be used for.

Jerry Coyne has posted a quote from physicist Robert L. Park about Templeton:

Not everyone was happy about the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) selling its soul to Templeton. Why had the most important scientific organization in America, perhaps in the world, allowed the voice of antiscience to assume the guise of a dialog between science and religion?

I agree that Templeton are simply promoting science and religion to promote their antiscience voice, as Park says,and I think the evidence above shows that.

Help!

2011-11-04T16:54:00.000-07:00

Misunderstood Presentations or Misrepresentations?

2011-11-04T10:22:00.000-07:00

Science and Religion: Are They Compatible? October 12, 2011 Q+A with Jerry Coyne and John Haught from UK College of Arts & Sciences on Vimeo.

I've now seen the Q & A for the Coyne-Haught Symposium, and it's a relief to see that this is where the missing scientism 'argument' appears, rather than in John Haught's presentation.

In answer to a question asking if Haught would consider not pre-supposing God before looking at his own beliefs (a good question), he ignores this and says that Coyne thinks that:

There's only one explanatory slot for everything.

But this is a bizarre misunderstanding, or wicked misrepresentation, of what Coyne said, and clouds Haught's thinking throughout the Q & A. This is perhaps the explanation for Haught's remarkable decision to try to suppress the video of the event. Because Haught starts by making such a disastrously wrong assessment of what Coyne has said (and is apparently disturbed by this figment of his imagination), he quickly runs down cul-de-sacs. He obviously considers Coyne's position to be one of scientism, but that isn't it at all. He never said there could only be one layer of explanation for phenomena (there usually is), he never said that science is the only way of knowing. The question on the table is, are science and religion compatible? Haught needs to address Coyne's case that they are not, rather than pursue his imaginary demons.

Layered explanation, which Haught is proposing, is fine. All that people ask is that arguments and evidence are presented for any particular explanation offered. Even if we have a phenomena with layers of explanation that doesn't mean we simply adopt any layer that anyone proposes; we must have a reason to consider the layer a viable explanation. We can only go on argument and evidence, not wishful thinking, at least if we are being scientific. This is not scientism, but science. To describe Coyne's ideas as scientism is an abuse of the English language.

But even if Coyne were guilty of scientism, it's still an inadequate argument to place to the assembled throngs. Scientism doesn't then mean that theology tells us something real about the world. An argument has to be made to show that, and Haught doesn't offer us one. He says:

There is no contradiction between a theological way of understanding the universe and a scientific way.

Don't say it, show it! - contra Coyne. This really is a hopeless response from Haught.

Haught is then asked where he sees the evidence for a loving God. Here he distinguishes between publicly accessible, scientific evidence, and transformative evidence - the overwhelming encounter with something that is so true and so good that it carries you away. So, he's talking about subjective experience here, and I'm rather surprised that he can't see that this is fatal to his contention that science and religion are compatible. Every inch of his tall frame seems to be denying the truth that science tells us, even if we allow that his revelations carry some weight as evidence.

Oddly he also says although this is evidence too, it's not something you can get your mind around. Well, how does he then? It's this sort of doublespeak that will be the death knell for theology, I think.

In a discussion on Occam's Razor, Haught again makes the mistake of noting that different understandings can have explanatory value, and therefore his understanding has explanatory value. It's very odd to see a senior academic making such a basic error. He needs to show that his understanding has explanatory value with argument and evidence, not just by logical compatibility. Almost anything can be logically compatible with a set of phenomena, but it doesn't follow that scientific explanations and theological explanations that are logically compatible with the same phenomena are then compatible. Maybe that's another of Haught's errors.

This was a disappointing end, since Haught didn't address any of Coyne's arguments about the methodology of the two disciplines, which to my mind are the source of claims of incompatibility. His hand waving insistence that his beliefs about the world are compatible with science flew in the face of the rest of what he said. A very odd performance.

Coyning It

2011-11-03T08:04:00.000-07:00

2011 Bale Boone Symposium - Science & Religion: Are They Compatible? from UK Gaines Center on Vimeo.

Jerry Coyne starts by pointing out the various pointers to a conflict between science and religion, such as organisations like the Templeton Foundation who search for a resolution to the problem, how scientists are more likely to be atheist, how more people in the US believe in angels than in evolution. The suggestion here is, I think, that there is an incompatibility which gives rise to these activities and beliefs.

I think this is fine as an indication of a problem, but it doesn't show that science and religion's incompatibility is true any more than people acting and believing that science and religion are compatible makes that true. If everyone in the world but me agreed that science and religion were compatible, I think I would still think they weren't (although it would make me pause!).

Coyne then moves onto a description of scientific methodology, which he characterises as 'qualified common sense'. 'The first principle is that you must not fool yourself..'. Religion on the other hand is based on 'dogma, authority and revelation'. He notes that religious ideas have changed because of scientific advances in our understanding of the world around us (such as evolution) and secular morality. And for the better - our treatment of women and gays, for example.

This is stronger ground for Coyne. To my mind there is a fundamental incompatibility between the methods of religion and the methods of science that is almost bound to result in differences. Now, it's possible that they don't; it may be that dogma, authority and revelation are different ways of finding out the same thing as scientific methodology uncovers. The problem with this view is, it never has. On every occasion that science has come up against religious 'knowledge', the scientific knowledge has won out. So, the religious might offer that dogma, authority and revelation are a way to uncover knowledge that science cannot uncover. Again, this is possible, but the evidence suggests otherwise, because we have a history of divergent beliefs about anything that cannot be shackled in some way. How do we shackle our beliefs? Well, the scientific method is the best way, and so far, the only reliable arbiter we've discovered.

Coyne says that in science, faith is considered a vice, but in religion, a virtue.

Maybe this is a little too broad brush? I understand what he means, but there's a danger of making the same mistake that Clifford made, in The Ethics of Belief (1877) when he says:

It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.

I think William James shows in The Will to Believe (1896), that this is a practical impossibility, and a moment's thought confirms this. We are a social animal, and one of the reasons for our seemingly exponential advance in recent times is our ability, well in advance of other animals, to pass knowledge on to our offspring, and to share knowledge. This process is impossible without an element of faith in the institutions that supply this knowledge. Certainly as children we aren't in a position to gather evidence; trust in our nearest and dearest seems to be built into us without any need for evidence. One might speculate that evolution has determined that a propensity to trust without evidence when we are children has been a successful evolutionary ploy. Not surprising, if that's so, that this also spills over into our adult life. We conduct our daily lives through many trivial acts that are not fully evidenced, since we have to get on and it's impractical to gather evidence for every minor thing one does. Maybe this is equivocating between faith as trust, and faith as believing without evidence, but it seems to me there are sufficient occasions when we really do not have any evidence to discount Clifford's as a general rule.

Coyne's rule is better, however, because it notes that in science, faith is considered a vice. This, it seems to me, allows us to sanction the rule, since it lets us have faith in our every day lives as a pragmatic necessity. But in matters of scientific import, it is not fit for purpose.

Coyne continues and notes that in religion there is no way of knowing you are wrong.

A key point, this. Two religious ideas have no method, in principle, of resolving which one is right.

Coyne notes that methodological naturalism has led to the view that metaphysical naturalism is true. There's no God, just material processes, and that works. He lists a number of areas about the cosmos where religion could have got reality right, but didn't, such as special creation, Adam and Eve, the Flood and so on. He wittily observes that falsified scientific claims are discarded, but falsified theological claims are made metaphorical. Religion does make existence claims, and the Nicene Creed is used as an example. He points out that the answers to the bigger questions haven't been answered by religion, because they do not agree with each other.

And as I wrote above, there is no method of reconciling different beliefs in principle.

Coyne quotes Haught as saying that "the transience and expected death of the cosmos defy our attempts to state clearly what the 'point' of it all may be."

Funnily enough, this is the point I make in my post on Haught's talk. however, it's worth noting that this quote from Haught's Deeper than Darwin ends with this sentence:

On the other hand, recognizing the possibility that the universe is still barely emerging from the cosmic dawn, we may take them as promissory symbols of the ultimate depth into which all things are being drawn.

...so he was saying this as a set-up to this assertion. But like his talk, he seems to have nothing but wishful thinking to back up the notion. Perhaps he's left his arguments in the book.

Coyne runs through some unscientific behaviour typical of religion, such as denying that the Bible says what it appears to say, that it doesn't involve an honest search for truth, but a rationalisation of what is already believed to be true...

I'm guessing that Haught found such accusations beyond the Pale, since I'm sure he would disagree that this is what he does. I think it's certainly clear that William Lane Craig's arguments are rationalisations, since he admits he doesn't believe in god because of the arguments he puts forward. Coyne hilariously includes a quote from Haught that certainly suggests he puts wishful thinking above scientific endeavour. To say that all religion, or all theology, is guilty of this may be unsustainable, however.

...that they make stuff up, they rationalise every new scientific observation as part of God's plan, that they understand the nature and intention of God.

Coyne quotes Haught again as 'making stuff up'. Again, I'm sure Haught denies this, but it's hard to see how what he says is anything but made up. Without some method of knowing, with verification, how does Haught know? It's not clear, I should say, that the quote that Coyne uses of Haught's is referring to the hiddenness of God exactly. It's certainly true that Haught's quote on the problem of evil doesn't come close to addressing the issue.

Coyne gives a good example of fitting science around the God idea when discussing Haught on evolution, where Haught says it is a tribute to God that the world is 'an inherently active and self-creative process'.

Before science showed it true, no theologian would propose evolution as the obvious way for a god to make the world, but afterwards it becomes a 'tribute' to him. With this sort of post hoc analysis, there really is no hope for theology.

Coyne ends, I think, with an appeal to why science and religion shouldn't be compatible, because the consequences of the poor methodology of faith are the evils of religion, some of which he lists. These are allowed to persist because of dogmatic thinking.

This is fair, I think. None of these consequences of religion are solely a problem of religion - it's people in the end who enshrine these evils, and people can ignore the dogma. But, as a matter of principle, dogmatic thinking can more easily lead to such abuses. This is the power of Coyne's presentation. I don't see that these attacks are ad hominem, since Coyne is making an argument about the incompatible methods adopted by science and religion, the abuses of method by religion, and he illustrates these using Haught's own words. Haught could, I think, complain about the quotes if they have been quote-mined, so I would encourage him to explain that in an article as soon as possible, if that's the case.

Haughtiness

2011-11-02T18:46:00.000-07:00

2011 Bale Boone Symposium - Science & Religion: Are They Compatible? from UK Gaines Center on Vimeo.

I here summarise and briefly analyse John Haught's presentation at the symposium he conducted with Jerry Coyne at the University of Kentucky (video above).

Is there anything of lasting value working itself out in this vast universe that science has given us recently?

Haught starts his talk with this question; he doesn't question its pertinence, but assumes we all think it important. There is an assumption that lasting value is the only value that matters or, at least, that it matters more than temporal value. But he offers no argument or evidence for this view.

He wonders if science rules out any cosmic purpose, and thus any divine presence. As one would expect, he clearly understands the traditional mind-first view of the cosmos, which has come down to us from Aristotle, featuring concentric circles from the heavens above down to Earthly matter below. And this coincides with a theological and moral order too; so higher morality is in the heavens above us, and baser morality below us.

We aspire, like Faust, to the heavens above; but all too often, like Faust, we are pulled down to hell below.

He says that if there is an ultimate purpose, it would, by definition (by the above definition, of course!), be beyond human comprehension, because of the hierarchy. But traditional theology suggests we can be 'grasped' by the higher levels, to have an awareness of them - and this awareness we call faith. The 'only evidence' for it is the awareness of being carried away by 'something very large, very important, of ultimate value'. The language of symbol, metaphor and analogy is all that can be used to describe it. But that's a sign of the eminence of the thing we're describing. And it must be personal or it would be less than us.

He presents no evidence for his views here, other than personal revelation; there is no argument. It's simply a re-statement of the views of traditional theology. We have no reason to believe it, in fact, since we have no mechanism for distinguishing personal revelation from every day brain activity, other than science, and science gives no support to religious revelation. Further, it's clear that he understands that science threatens the theological hierarchy. As Daniel Dennett points out in Darwin's Dangerous Idea, evolution by natural selection has the effect of 'universal acid' on these ancient ideas:

Did you ever hear of universal acid? This fantasy used to amuse me and some of my schoolboy friends ... Universal acid is a liquid so corrosive that it will eat through anything ! The problem is: what do you keep it in? It dissolves glass bottles and stainless-steel canisters as readily as paper bags. What would happen if you somehow came upon or created a dollop of universal acid? Would the whole planet eventually be destroyed? What would it leave in its wake? After everything had been transformed by its encounter with universal acid, what would the world look like? Little did I realize that in a few years I would encounter an idea – Darwin’s idea – bearing an unmistakable likeness to universal acid: it eats through just about every traditional concept, and leaves in its wake a revolutionized world-view, with most of the old landmarks still recognizable, but transformed in fundamental ways.

Haught summarises briefly the cosmos according to science and it's clear he sees the disjunct between these two stories, since he asks "Can we map the hierarchical view to this new view that science has brought to our attention? Does the idea of God make sense any more?"

He urges us to be transformed by reading the New Testament. Christians believe there is an 'unspeakable, incomprehensible, infinite mystery that we call God'. It gives itself away in 'unreserved, self-emptying, self-giving love to the finite world'. This is the meaning of the Christ event. The process of self-transcendence is evolution - there is absolutely no contradiction between the two.

Again, he still hasn't presented any form of argument to reconcile science and religion, the subject of the symposium; in fact, he's made it clear that prima facie they are incompatible, and he concedes that by asking the question how we should reconcile the two views.

So how to map one to t'other? Finally Haught brings us his revelation: think of God not pushing evolution from behind, but pulling it from the future. And think of the hierarchy as an evolving story, as matter emerges, and later life, and then faith and morality. Faith is the way that the universe, now it has become conscious of itself, opens up a new future. So faith is the way we can guarantee the evolution of the cosmos into the indefinite future.

The important thing is, that evolution is compatible with the hierarchy if we knock it onto its side, and see what is above us as what is in the future. He topples the hierarchy onto its side. And, somehow, it is faith that is required for the evolving future, and so science is compatible with religion.

Obviously, that doesn't follow, and, again, he offers no evidence or argument for his view. He doesn't address the whole point of why science threatens the hierarchy - because it shows no need for anything pushing evolution or pulling it from the future. It's what matter does when it's not being guided. Now, I can imagine arguments being posed to show that evolution is guided in some way, but Haught doesn't present any. He simply asserts his view. There is no evidence or argument presented of how faith guarantees evolution. And what he says assumes that evolution is progressive to some mysterious transcendent future, but offers no argument for that. Science suggests the cosmos will end in heat death; is that compatible with this 'hierarchy on the side' vision? I don't see how. It is, finally, an argument free talk.

This is very disappointing because in his open letter allowing the release of the above video, Haught says, addressing Jerry:

Rather than answering my point that scientism is logically incoherent–which is really the main issue–and instead of addressing my argument that the encounter with religious truth requires personal transformation...

But he doesn't make any argument that I can discern that the encounter with religious truth requires personal transformation, and he doesn't even make any argument that there is such a thing as religious truth! He just asserts it, perhaps based on the discredited mind-first view of the cosmos. To be fair, personal transformation is logically consistent with this view of the cosmos, but that's the notion that science is destroying, and he doesn't argue against that, but suggests a reconciliation that is, frankly, pure hand-waving. He doesn't explain why the 'universal acid' isn't eating its way through his theological ideas as we speak. And I see no hint of an argument that scientism is incoherent (which it may well be, but that doesn't then mean that religion is compatible with science); perhaps I missed it (was it on a slide?).

All in all, it's a poor talk, if it's supposed to be presenting some forceful arguments for the compatibility of science and religion, because surely anyone would come away more convinced that they weren't compatible!

UPDATE: Link to the slides here.

Free Will

2011-10-21T16:34:00.000-07:00

More from Susan Blackmore's excellent Conversations on Consciousness, and a perennial problem: do we have free will?

As before I will only offer outlines of and quotes from their answers; buy the book for the Full Monty. Be aware that quote context is important, and I'm focussing on those comments that seem particularly relevant to me.

Bernard Baars: not asked.

Ned Block: "Yes...on free will I'm almost exactly of [Dennett's] view [a compatibilist view]. The trouble with free will is that it's both compatible and incompatible with determinism - and it's at once incompatible with determinism and incompatible with indeterminism." Of course, the last line shows that free will (traditional concept of) doesn't exist, since determinism and indeterminism together are jointly exhaustive contradictories. His first remark suggests that he realises that any notion of personal responsibility relies on determinism, so there may be some revised type of free will that can be formulated to account for this.

David Chalmers: "I don't know...[because]...I don't know what it means to have free will." He makes the pertinent observation that we do what we want, but what we want is (probably) determined. But who would want to choose what they want? I would add that if your choosing what you wanted wasn't determined, then why should you be responsible for it? In fact, no-one would be responsible for it, if it's uncaused, by definition, surely. An infinite regress beckons.

Patricia & Paul Churchland Pat - "If you mean 'Are my decisions not caused?' surely not." Paul seems to take comfort from our unpredictability, and the way two similar brains will diverge in their chosen actions due to complexity - "So one mustn't fear the story science seems to tell, that we are just robots."

Francis Crick: He thinks the feeling of will is an illusion, and that free will "must be deterministic."

Daniel Dennett: "Yes...The model that we want for free will is of an agent that is autonomous, not in some metaphysical sense, but in the sense of being able to act on the reasons that matter to the agent, and who's got the information that is needed to act in a timely fashion."

Susan Greenfield: She gives a rather confused answer which suggests she believes in her own free will but admits it might be an illusion. She expresses concern that responsibility cannot be laid if there is no free will, which strikes me as incoherent, and that she believes in a mistaken understanding of responsibility that also leads those of a theological bent astray.

Richard Gregory: Not asked, as far as I can see.

Stuart Hameroff: "I have no choice but to believe in free will!" Hameroff's explanation of free will in his and Penrose's model will appeal to those who see quantum indeterminacy as a factor in consciousness; it will exasperate those who cannot see how it helps!

"...we have quantum computations in the microtubules inside neurons that reaches the threshold for collapse 40 times a second, to coincide with the 40 Hz gamma oscillations that exist in the brain. And the outcome of each reduction is a process of quantum superposition, quantum computation which follows the Schrodinger equation, which is basically deterministic. However, at the instant of collapse there's another influence that enters. This is Roger's non-computable influence which is due to the fine grain in space-time geometry. This has a little influence on the choices, so that choices result from both the deterministic quantum computation and this non-computable influence. The experience of that is free will."

Well. I'm quite willing to believe there's a 'random' effect in there somewhere. The problem, of course, is that this doesn't appear to offer any explanation of the experience of free will. Just as mental content appears to be irreducible to scientific description when we are talking deterministically, so it does if we just bring in an indeterministic element, as Hameroff and Penrose have done. I mean, it's asserting that adding indeterminism is what causes the feeling, but not offering any way for that to achieve the feeling. I might just as well assert that the massive deterministic neuronal computations are what achieve the feeling. Sue Blackmore makes the point in reply, quoting Pat Churchland: "pixie dust in the synapses is about as explanatorily powerful as quantum decoherence in the micro tubules." It's hard to see that she's wrong.

Christof Koch: "Probably not...I only mean I am free in the sense that it's not you who is determining my actions; it's not blind force or destiny..."

Stephen LaBerge: He thinks we create an illusory conscious self, and he doesn't think that that 'I' has free will. "But 'Does who I am, and all that I am, decide how to answer this question?', then yes."

Thomas Metzinger: "If I didn't, could I ever have given you any other answer than this one?" His reply highlights a problem with free will; it suggests that people would vary their behaviour even in identical circumstances. If they don't, then it what sense is the decision not determined? This, it seems to me, just shows that the traditional concept of free will is incoherent, and if it were true, would not deliver the results people seems to expect.

Kevin O'Regan: "Yes, everybody does [believe they have free will]. Even robots believe they have free will, even if they don't." Good answer, I think, to a slightly different question to the one I ask above.

Roger Penrose: "...the simple answer is I don't know." To be fair, unlike Hameroff, he says his non-computational influence is not free will.

Vilayanur Ramachandram: He really only discusses what could be causing the feeling, rather than the philosophical implications. Interesting, for the scientific implications.

John Searle: He points out that free will only makes sense with the concept of self, but thinks the self may be an illusion. It's plain he thinks we must believe we have free will; it's not too clear what his final position is, though.

Petra Stoerig: Not asked.

Francisco Varela: Not asked.

Max Velmans: "...my sense of being free is, I think, a genuine sense. That's not in any way to argue against determinism in science, but I am the kind of creature that's capable of choices - I can do what I want. But I can't want what I want, so there are deep inbuilt constraints." Echoing the comments by Chalmers.

Daniel Wegner: "It certainly seems as though I do." He notes that we don't have this sense of free will about all our actions, and thinks this may be because sometimes thoughts and actions are linked by our brains, and sometimes not.

These responses reflect the current consensus that we don't have free will, except possibly some compatibilist version. It's good to see that a few articulate the fatal problem it has; the traditional concept is not compatible with determinism or indeterminism.

I should point out that this is not a unanimous view; there are some incompatibilist theories of free will; they seem pretty hopeless to me, but knock yourself out reading about them.

The God That Hides Himself

2011-10-11T16:27:00.000-07:00

In a piece called The mystery of faith that is baffling but beyond doubt in Saturday's Times (behind a paywall, sadly), the Bishop of Gibraltar in Europe, Geoffrey Rowell wrote about something that does indeed baffle; what is the justification for belief?

Natural theology looks to establish good reason for belief in a god, and revealed theology looks to persuade toward a particular flavour. Neither is successful in their project, often by their own proponent's admission. William Lane Craig, for example, who runs a website called reasonablefaith.com only believes because a 'radiant' girl told him that god loved him, not because he was persuaded by the arguments.

The believer is on the horns of a dilemma: if you have reason to believe, why should you be rewarded with eternal life - you're just doing what any reasonable person should do. On the other hand, if you don't have reason to believe, well, you shouldn't, and you won't be rewarded with eternal life! Either way, I don't see why belief with or without evidence deserves eternal life.

Rowell grabs this dilemma by both horns, and gets gored by both:

The biblical writers recognised that the God who makes himself known is at the same time a hidden God - as the prophet Isaiah exclaims, "Truly thou art a god who hidest thyself!"

Great; hidden but 'seen', somehow. This is the common refrain of the believer who wants to privilege his perception over non-believers'.

In Elijah's flight, God reveals himself in "a still small voice", or the "sound of thin silence":

It is this silence, almost the absence of God, which is the presence of God which awes Elijah into worship.

When almost absence is equated to presence, then we know we're skating on thin ice, not thin silence.

Centuries later the poet, R.S. Thomas, would speak of God's "absence which is his presence".

Now we seem to be getting into straight apophaticism. He then quotes Gerard Manley Hopkins as writing in a letter:

You do not mean by mystery what a Catholic does. You mean an interesting uncertainty... But a Catholic by mystery means an incomprehensible certainty.

I think we're familiar with the Catholic certainty supposedly delivered by 'divine light'.

But this is hand-waving; if the certainty is incomprehensible, it is unjustified. If something is absent, it is not present. If it's hidden, it cannot be seen. If something is baffling, it cannot be beyond doubt. Embracing contradictions like these will simply result in absurdities. We are all allowed our own private absurdities, but it's time we grew up as a society and banished them from respectable public fora.

The P-Zombie

2011-10-09T15:39:00.000-07:00

Continuing to summarise responses in Susan Blackmore's excellent Conversations on Consciousness, I now come to the problem of the philosopher's zombie - a being indistinguishable from any other human being but which lacks any mental content, such as feelings, thoughts and, in fact, consciousness: do you believe in the possibility of the philosopher's zombie?

As before I will only offer outlines of and quotes from their answers; buy the book for the Full Monty. Be aware that quote context is important, and I'm focussing on those comments that seem particularly relevant to me.

Bernard Baars: not asked.

Ned Block: Block distinguishes between beings that are functionally equivalent to us, like his famous China Brain thought experiment, which he supposes functionalists would think had a phenomenology, but he doesn't know (he thinks possibly not), and beings that are physically just like us, which I think was Chalmers original idea. "My view is that no-one who takes the biological basis of consciousness seriously should really believe in that kind of zombie." So, no to the second type.

David Chalmers: "I think they're probably not possible in the sense that no such thing could ever exist in this world." He doesn't think it's contradictory ("at least in the imagination") that a p-zombie could exist, however, so he denies they're logically impossible. I'm not sure that conceivability quite helps here, though.

Patricia & Paul Churchland Pat - "Of course it's logically possible, but that's not interesting...we're interested in knowing whether or not it's empirically possible. And it does not seem to be, so far as we know." Paul says you can imagine a universe in which electromagnetic waves are bouncing around but it's still pitch black, but this doesn't get away from what light is as a matter of fact.

Francis Crick: "No. Contradiction in terms."

Daniel Dennett: "...we get a bifurcation of theorists into those who take the zombie hunch seriously, and those who, like myself, have sort of overcome it. I can feel it, but I just don't have it any more."

Susan Greenfield: "No, I think that consciousness is part of feeling, part of seeing; so I don't think you can separate out vision and emotion from consciousness, no."

Richard Gregory: "No. It is for simple behaviour."

Stuart Hameroff: A certain amount of talking around the problem, but basically, yes, because he thinks there is something specific that 'adds' consciousness - "...consciousness, or perhaps something proto-conscious, is fundamental to the universe..." Hameroff has some idea about microtubules generating consciousness, so anything that functioned the same as humans, but without these, wouldn't be conscious. The difficulty is to know what these add, of course. I think he would say that anything physically identical could not be a p-zombie.

Christof Koch: "No...But there's going to be something specific about the neurons that give rise to consciousness..."

Stephen LaBerge: Not asked.

Thomas Metzinger: "I am not a possible world surfer. As long as 'consciousness' is such an ill-defined term, many things remain conceivable."

Kevin O'Regan: "...I knew I was a robot...", which I think means, no, there is no difference between us and p-zombies.

Roger Penrose: "A philosopher's zombie is something which I would say couldn't exist." Possibly some confusion surrounding the distinction that Ned Block draws.

Vilayanur Ramachandram: "No, they're not possible. I think if you create a creature which is identical to us - it doesn't matter how you create the zombie - it'll be fully conscious in the human sense."

John Searle: He is asked if the p-zombie could in principle exist and he answers, "In principle, sure." He thinks there is something extra that adds the consciousness, but it's not clear to me if 'in principle' means logically or empirically. Again, because of his anti-functionalist stance, I think he's talking about the possible existence of a functional zombie.

Petra Stoerig: "I think they are logically possible...as a biologist I think it's a waste of all the trees that go into this paper, because it's not biologically possible."

Francisco Varela: "I just don't grock it...I say it's just a problem that you create by inventing problematic situations. So what?"

Max Velmans: "...I think I would personally rule out the possibility that it didn't experience as we do."

Daniel Wegner: Not really asked, but seems to be an advocate of humans as robots, so probably no.

I think I was quite surprised that they all thought that physically identical beings could not be internally empty, but I suppose this just shows that they are all physicalists, so any other conclusion would be incoherent. There were one or two demurrals on the idea of a functionalist zombie (functionalism, very basically, is the theory of mind that posits that a mind is determined by what it does, rather than what it is made of). I think Ned Block, Hameroff and Penrose thought that this could exist. I'm pretty certain about the first type and less sure about the second, simply because I'm less sure about functionalism than I am about physicalism. In fact, I could imagine that there is something special about the particular combination of material and function that gives rise to consciousness, although I'm baffled what microtubules might add. I think I'm still much more inclined to believe that complexity in function will deliver consciousness than some ineffable I-don't-know-what in the biological make-up, because whatever biological detail is added, it still doesn't seem to solve the problem we're being asked to solve - intentionality, qualia and so on.

Gene-machine Darwinism and Responsibility

2011-10-05T17:36:00.000-07:00

Many folk complain that an 'ultra-Darwinist', or 'gene-machine' Darwinist, view of the world renders us incapable of assigning blame to individuals. The implication is that we are creatures at the mercy of our genes, mere puppets, so cannot be blamed or praised for our behaviour. Is this true?

The view sometimes assigned to sociobiologists, or evolutionary psychologists, that we must follow our genetic blueprints,gains traction from the analogies drawn to illustrate their ideas, such asDawkins’s ‘lumbering robots’. This inference is unfair, since they do accept culturalinfluence on behaviour, but, relevant to this question, they would expect thesexes to have evolved differently (even competitively) because of theirdiffering physical characteristics. Women have larger sex cells than men, andcarry the foetus for nine months. Because men can afford more reproductions in a lifetime, sociobiology would suggestthat emotions would evolve differently to motivate men to spend more than women; i.e., have more promiscuous tendencies. Does this mean that some of the more rabid accusations aimed at evolutionary psychology are true? If we consider this statement, typical of the sort of thing:

If gene-machine Darwinism is true, then we cannot blame a man for sexual infidelity, nor praise a woman for being faithful.

To tease out the implications of this conditional statement, we can consider it the outline of an argument, with the antecedent as the premise and the consequent as the conclusion:

Premise	Men’s genes give them a tendency to sexual infidelity
*Conclusion*	Men cannot be blamed for sexual infidelity

This is invalid; there is a hidden premise or two. We could complete it like this:

Premise 1	Men’s genes give them a tendency to sexual infidelity
Premise 2	People cannot be blamed for their tendencies
*Conclusion*	Men cannot be blamed for sexual infidelity

This looks valid, although there is a slight equivocation on theword ‘men’. Not all men will have atendency equally, so we cannot conclude that all men are blameless for sexual infidelity. But we’ll pass on this and assume ‘men’refers to the average man.

The implication of P2 is that our tendencies are overwhelming intheir force. This doesn’t seem to be true at all. We are all aware oftemptations and understand we can resistthem. In such circumstances, other inclinations and reasoning help us to resist. Sociobiology claims we are a basketof competing traits and tools evolved for dealing with the world, and it’s toosimplistic to say we blindly followour tendencies. And to say we blindly follow one tendency, such as a sexual imperative, is even more so. The lawrecognises in cases of diminished responsibility that in some circumstances,including natural aberrations, we cannot be held wholly responsible for ouractions. But this principle acknowledges that the average person is responsible for their actions, andit’s the average person we’reconsidering.

The ‘gene-machine’ charge might be levelled by a 'blank-paperist' (abeliever in the social science model that holds that alarge part of our nature derives from the cultural environment), in which case we can ask if their counter position can be justified. This would have to look something like this:

P1	People’s behaviour is determined by their culture
P2	People determine their culture
P3	People can be blamed for what they determine
*Conclusion*	People can be blamed for their behaviour

Some say that people dodetermine their cultural environment. In a sense, that’s true about theircurrent situation. But the development of traits that occur pre-adulthood isinaccessible to us as adults. Many traits form in the years before 16, so theremay be an opportunity for the blank-paperist to determine them in childhoodthat is not available to the gene-machinist. That may be relevant to the widercommunity, but no individual, contraP2, can determine their own culturein their formative years. And there is no reason to believe that how these traits are formed makes themmore or less mutable in adulthood.

So, once determined, however that may be, the problem of blamepresents itself. To determine one’s own traits, one would have to exist priorto one’s own conception – a logical impossibility. So determinism seems to be theenemy of blame, not geneticdeterminism.

Looking at P3, we do blame people for what they do, often ignoringprior causes. This arises from a sense of localisedor ordinary responsibility because, perhaps,it’s more important to understand immediatecauses. Consider a house underneath a cliff that suffers from rock-falls. If therock-falls are due to an unstable rock face, the instability can be addressed.If they’re due to someone pushing rocks down, then they should be heldresponsible and prevented from re-offending. Observing that, ultimately, boththe unstable rock face and the vandal are simply following causes deterministically aspart of one long chain of causality from the Big Bang doesn’t help us to decide a futurecourse of action.

Consequentialists and deontologists would take different approachesto the vandal; the consequentialist would see little value in blame unless it resulted in greaterbenefits than other responses. Deontologists would lay blame because of theinherent wrongness of the act. But neitherwould blame, morally, the unstable rock face for falling on the house, becauseit lacks agency. If agency is a temporary phenomenon, it would not beappropriate to say that someone is, or is not, ultimately to blame, but to say that they are locally to blame is pragmatic. We recognise prior agencies asmitigating factors; if the miscreant has been unduly influenced by another, forexample. But the further back from the current moment we move the lessresponsibility we assign. So the passage of time is relevant to the level of responsibility, in conjunction withagency, and neither rests on the truth of gene-machine Darwinism.

The charge from immaterialists,typically theists, is that determinismfollows from materialism (immateriality is redundant in gene-machine Darwinism).Science suggests that materialism may not entail determinism, but we’ll allowthis assumption for the sake of argument. Immaterialists suggest that morality is meaningless without ‘free’choice; if our actions follow unavoidablyfrom prior events, blame cannot be laid:

P1	Materialism entails determinism
P2	Determinism dictates that every cause has a prior cause
P3	Responsibility rests where the causal chain stops; at a cause without a prior cause
*Conclusion*	Materialism precludes responsibility

We blame the person responsible,but if the causal chain doesn’t stop, neither does the responsibility. Theargument looks valid; P1 we are allowing, P2 is just determinism defined, butP3 looks suspect. As discussed above, a local responsibility is understandable, even with a chain of events extending back intothe past to other ultimate causes. Infact, to rest the responsibility where there are no prior causes can prevent us laying blame. Consider thefollowing scenario: a woman sees a man advancing toward a baby with his armsoutstretched. She hits him with her handbag, knocking him out. Among the reasons for her actions could be:

a) She knew the man meant to harmthe baby.

b) She’s a lunatic out to hit thefirst man she sees.

c) She made the decision to hitthe man, or acted to hit the man, with no prior cause.

The first two explanations allow us to draw on further evidence and perhapsassign praise (a) or blame (b, with diminished responsibility). But (c) leavesus helpless, because intentions are amajor factor in moral judgements. Indeterministic acts happen for no reason. Further, it’s hard to see why someone could dosomething without prior cause; how would they know what to do without theknowledge of the situation? Perhaps knowledge of the situation exists, but doesnot count as a prior cause? But the woman is hitting the man because he’s there, else she’d beflailing at nothing. It is a necessary precursor to the act, so must be acomponent of some prior cause. So indeterminismstops us placing blame, and gene-machine Darwinism is not to blame for that!

The expanded argument for the second part of the conditional we're considering shares thesame problems:

P1	Women’s genes give them a tendency to sexual constancy
P2	People cannot be praised for their tendencies
*Conclusion*	Women cannot be blamed for sexual constancy

The implication is we have nochoice but to follow our tendencies. To expand further:

P1	Women’s genes give them a tendency to sexual constancy
P2	People have no choice but to follow their tendencies
P3	People should only be praised for choosing to act well
P4	Sexual constancy is acting well
*Conclusion*	Women cannot be praised for sexual constancy

P2 is false per gene-machinists, but P3 is troublesome too. ComedianRichard Herring cracks the joke “I was very moral as a teenager; I was a virginby choice, but also because no-one would have sex with me.” We recognise adifference between acting well by choice rather than by circumstance (imagineif Herring's setup was that he was trying to be promiscuous, but failing). But the charge againstgene-machine Darwinism is a little deeper than this; it’s the suggestion that wehave no choice because of our nature andcannot choose to act well, so neveract well. But we hear stories of people acting ‘heroically’ and afterwards saying‘I had no time to think’ or ‘It all happened so quick’. Heroes often actinstinctively, not through choice,but we think they are praiseworthy still. We praise them because of the nature that compelled them; the hero could have done otherwise in a way thatthe rock from the previous example could not, but didn’t, and wouldn’t. The idea that they might dosomething else in the same circumstances would just make their actions arbitrary, and them unreliable, which would hardly attract plaudits. Natural compulsion, then, doesn’tpreclude praise, and gene-machine Darwinism’s supposed denial of choice is notfatal to praise-giving, either.

Whether we can praise or blame, then, may still be an issue, but thefact of it does not turn on the truthof so-called gene-machine Darwinism. The arguments to support the conditional could beconstructed differently, so we have not exhausted all possible justifications.Nevertheless, based on the arguments considered above, it's clear that the implications often ascribed to ultra Darwinism are quite unwarranted. Ultimately, all that it argues for is the origin of personality traits, not their strength or immutability. As Dawkins says in The Extended Phenotype, when he complains about the unjustified reputation that genes have acquired as 'sinister' and 'juggernaut-like':

Educational, or other cultural influences may, in some circumstances, be just as unmodifiable and irreversible as genes and ‘stars’ are popularly thought to be.

Quite.

Bibliography:

Radcliffe-Richards, J. (2000) Human Nature After Darwin (A211 Book 4), Milton Keynes, The Open University

Suffer Little Children

2011-09-27T06:28:00.000-07:00

There's been a lot of articles recently from people like Colin Tudge and John Gray saying that religious believers are caricatured by atheists, and that they don't believe the things they say they do. Perhaps, but how do they behave? Do they act as if magic happens, for example?

The Kingdom Faith Church is an evangelical church based in Horsham, Sussex, run by 'neo-charismatic' Christian, Colin Urquhart. According to Wikipedia, he spent some time in the seventies as an itinerant minister "with his living costs arising solely from donations - living on faith." Living on faith? Well, not exactly; living off other people might be a more accurate description. Anyway, he's managed to leverage 'living on faith' into a much bigger enterprise which includes a number of ministries, a training college and some expensive camera equipment too, by the look of their videos.

You'll see from their website that they're very 'Good News' about faith. Not my cup of tea, but I accept that if grown adults want to give their money to such a place then they have every right to; presumably the congregation feel they're getting some benefits from the community values on offer.

However, I'm not happy with what I've seen from the Youtube clips of their faith camps. Consider this:

'GoGen' is the name they give to their activities for 10-11 year olds. All sounds innocent enough and heart-warming. Until we see the testimonials from Faith10, the previous year's camp:

Listen to what these poor kids are saying:

"God showed me that I should speak faith over people" !

"This week I've been prayed for by a leader, for my bladder [??] problems, and I've been completely healed."

These are dangerous things to be indoctrinating in children as young as 10. One of the youth leaders says it's been a 'week of the supernatural' and 'the things that God has done to the children have been deep, have been real'. They do not know that there is supernatural healing going on here (there isn't), so to tell these kids that it's real is an abuse of their position. But this is even worse:

The leader of the 'Bouncies' says 'Monday we started with salvation', when the children learned that Jesus died to make them 'clean' (nice), and were asked to put sparkly men on a cross if they wanted to be made clean by Jesus! Which most of them did, surprise, surprise (I'd like to meet the kids who wanted to retain their uncleanliness). It was the Holy Spirit on Tuesday, then on Wednesday they listened to God; 'amazing things the children heard' (no kidding). One boy said that Jesus wants to heal his eczema, and his mother the following day said his skin wasn't inflamed any more, and the leader announces that 'he'd already got his healing'.

Finally, one of the Bouncies' testimonials:

Evie was singing about God's healing power over her. She's had a persistent cough all week, and since last night she's not coughed once, so we thank Jesus for her healing.

(Praise be, child recovers from the common cold! Did she thank Jesus for her catching it in the first place?)

The 'Bouncies' are just 3-4 years old.

This is all entirely inappropriate. If the faithful really want to teach their kids that Jesus is their salvation, I can't stop them. But it can't be healthy to tell such young children that they're unclean (unless, you know, they've got some dirt on them), and they should not tell them that Jesus can heal them. The little 'uns aren't equipped to see that this is nonsense. Every regression to the mean will be classed as a miracle, and there's a chance they'll grow up thinking that praying is a suitable course of treatment. There really should be a law against such dangerous mendacity.

This is in the heart of England, in a pretty secular country in a pretty secular continent, and it's a growing church. It seems clear that, even here, there are plenty of believers who still think that magic happens.

The Problem of Consciousness

2011-09-24T10:02:00.000-07:00

Susan Blackmore's excellent Conversations on Consciousness (recommended by my friend Quine, I think) documents a number of chats she has had with eminent researchers on the subject over the years. The strength of the book for a layman like me is the conversational approach. No doubt this isn't appropriate for peer review papers, but it's great for getting some of the ideas across to science dunces like me!
Blackmore asks each subject the same questions (mostly), and I thought it would be a handy guide to summarise their answers in individual posts, starting with a question which attempts to frame the whole subject: what is the problem of consciousness?

I will only offer outlines of and quotes from their answers; buy the book for the Full Monty. Be aware that quote context is important, and I'm focussing on those comments that seem particularly relevant to me.

Bernard Baars: slightly avoided the question, but I could summarise as: what is the difference between knowledge which is conscious and knowledge which is unconscious?

Ned Block: "The problem is, what is consciousness? More specifically, I'm interested in what consciousness is in the brain." Consciousness is the "technicolour phenomenology; the 'what it's like'."

David Chalmers: "We can be terribly objective, but something very important about being a human being is left out. As human beings we all know that it feels like something, from the inside. We have sensations, thoughts and feelings...We all know this, and it's central to being a human being, but for some reason, in the last 50 or 100 years science has tended to ignore this."

Patricia & Paul Churchland (treated as one mind, amusingly): Pat - "We don't know how neurons code information. That's a lot not to know." Sue objects that Pat has slipped from 'What's so special about consciousness' to "something we don't know about the brain". Pat responds: "Many people suppose that by sheer contemplation of a problem, they can tell whether it is hard or easy. This is self-deception, and usually self-aggrandising self-deception, to make it worse." Then..."People think that because we don't understand how consciousness is produced in brains, this must be telling us something really deep and interesting." She finds Chalmers distinction ridiculous. Paul cites examples of consciousness, like the difference between being awake and being asleep, and qualia (!), and says: "It's not clear how they knit together. It's not clear how the brain produces them."

Francis Crick: "[H]ow can you explain the redness of red in terms of physics and chemistry?"

Daniel Dennett: "[W]e have evolved a certain capacity for self-knowledge, a certain access to ourselves which gives us subjective experience - which gives us a way of looking out at the world from where we are. And this just turns out to be very hard to understand. How can something have that perspective?"

Susan Greenfield: "[I]t's a subjective phenomenon that we can't really define properly...it's very hard to know how to even frame the question as to how a subjective inner state is associated with something physical."

Richard Gregory: "[T]he huge gap between what qualia are like and what the physical system of the brain is like. In other words, how the hell does physics produce something which is so totally unphysical?"

Stuart Hameroff: "The brain is an excellent information processing system, but there's no accounting for how and why we have subjective experience, emotional feelings, an 'inner life'."

Christof Koch: "Well, the problem is to explain why sometimes I see something and sometimes I don't"

Stephen LaBerge: Not really asked directly, but he does say ""The problem to be explained is experience...".

Thomas Metzinger: "[C]onsciousness is opposed to all other states." Other states are only known from the outside. "Consciousness is different in that we gain knowledge about it from the inside as well as from the outside - and we don't really know what that statement actually means."

Kevin O'Regan: "A pseudo-problem." Then... " ...the problem is making the link between the experience and the brain process. And nobody seems to have found any reasonable physico-chemical mechanism that could make that link." He gives the move from vitalism as a comparison and says: "I think exactly the same paradigm shift could solve the problem that people call 'the hard problem of consciousness'."

Roger Penrose: "[T]here's nothing in our physical theory of what the universe is like which says anything about why some things should be conscious and other things not."

Vilayanur Ramachandram: "[A]ll the problems we have tackled and solved so far have to do with the external world...But we're now finally confronted with in some ways the biggest problem of all, namely, understanding the very organ that made all those other discoveries possible, turning on itself and asking, 'Who am I?'."

John Searle: Not asked directly, but says "[W]hat is the difference between the conscious brain and the unconscious brain?"

Petra Stoerig: "[W]hy does consciousness come about, what is it good for, how is it made?"

Francisco Varela: "There is the world, and there is me."

Max Velmans: "If you accept...that neural causal processes in the brain in a sense produce these experiences, and that indeed there might be neural correlates in the brain going on at the very same time as you're having those experiences, but that there is something deeply mysterious about the fact that these neural states seem to be completely different from these phenomenal worlds - then what kind of explanations would start to count as explanations of what is going on?"

Daniel Wegner: "[E]veryone has a consciousness but they have no access whatsoever to anyone else's."

Some fascinating thoughts. Many highlight the gap between first person and third person; some think it's not such a problem. What Penrose says is also a common theme, and close to how I've often puzzled over the problem; how do the cells in my brain produce this feeling but all the other cells in the universe not? Assuming that consciousness is limited to brains, of course. But Penrose goes too far, I think.

Abuse and Positive Liberty

2011-09-07T16:16:00.000-07:00

Isaiah Berlin famously made the distinction between negative and positive liberty in his essay Two Concepts of Liberty, which he delivered in a lecture at Oxford University in 1958. It seems plain to me that totalitarianism had been much on his mind (and why not!) and he wanted to show how some forms of liberty could be abused. It's tempting, because of the negative/positive nomenclature, to think they are two sides of a coin, but this is wrong. Berlin is talking about two distinct concepts of liberty.

By negative liberty Berlin means the freedom to conduct our lives without obstruction from other people or groups of people, including the state.

How free we are in the negative sense depends on the range of options available to us, and their nature. Berlin illustrates this liberty by comparing it to the availability of doors:

The extent of a man’s negative liberty is, as it were, a function of what doors, and how many are open to him; upon what prospects they open; and how open they are.

We needn’t take advantage of the opportunities available to us; they should simply be there. For example, as a child growing up in the sixties, I spent Sundays in a fug of boredom. Sunday specific laws shut down shops and entertainments that were available on other days of the week, thus reducing my negative liberty. Today, my daughter regularly shops on a Sunday, visits the cinema and goes bowling. In that respect, she is freer, in Berlin’s negative sense, because those ‘doors’ are unlocked. However, I may ground her, and once again reduce her negative liberty. I am freer than I was too, even if I never go shopping, to the cinema, or bowling on a Sunday; it’s sufficient that I can if I want. Conversely, the religious might think that opportunities for worship have been reduced by this relaxation of Sunday laws, adversely affecting their negative liberty in this respect.

Berlin is concerned with political freedoms only, so natural constraints are excluded. If Sunday bowling was available to me, but I couldn’t play because I was disabled, this wouldn’t be an infringement of my negative liberty, since the restriction has not been placed on me by another person, group of people, or the state. So there is an element of coercion in the concept.

By positive liberty Berlin means the freedom to choose the ideal life; ideal, that is, according to informed reason.

Berlin draws the distinction between two inner selves – a ‘higher’ rational self and a ‘lower’ empirical self. If we behave according to our higher self we would act in the ideal way to fulfil our potential and goals as human beings. Our baser instincts and desires corrupt this ideal mode of behaviour.

So we may have been granted a completely free hand in Berlin’s negative sense, but still be unable to play that hand. To return to the Sunday example, I now have a number of activities available to me, on that day, which were not there before. Despite these distractions, I might spend the day sorting out some jobs around the house, doing some gardening, and enjoying time with my daughter baking a cake. Let us assume these are the proper goals of my higher rational self. However, if there’s a big game on I may ‘find’ myself down the pub watching Sky’s Super Sunday, and neglect those higher callings. Ironically, in this instance more negative liberty (the pub’s open and there’s Sunday football on TV) has resulted in less liberty for me, in Berlin’s positive sense. If I manage to resist the call of the pub, I would increase my positive liberty.

In some cases, coercion is employed by the state to help people realise these higher goals. For example, down the pub, it is now illegal to smoke inside, and this reduction in negative liberty is aimed at increasing our positive liberty, by gently coercing a healthier lifestyle. This is a paternalistic control imposed by the collective, to help us achieve more well-being; something we ‘really’ want; that is, what our rational higher self really wants.

Because some limited paternalistic coercion is understood as acceptable to increase positive liberty, a danger presents itself. Berlin argues that misuse of the notion of positive liberty can occur when this paternalism is extended, and a ‘final solution’ imposed by groups of people, or states, on the individuals within. By ‘final solution’, he means that those in authority come to believe there is one ideal way of living that reconciles every person’s ideal way of living, and so maximises freedom for the person and the state. Berlin does not think that such a reconciliation of a population’s aims is possible, so such a project would be ill-conceived from the start.

Coercion by the group is then seen as an extension of the individual higher self, and a judgement is made that what an individual truly wants is better known by the group than the individual. And, further, that the individual being coerced actually wants these things, only sub-consciously, to achieve more positive liberty. The result is paradoxical: coercion is employed to make folk ‘free’. Berlin saw the dangers of such misuse in the totalitarianism of the twentieth century, in Nazism and communism; an authoritarianism which coerces individuals for their own supposed good. Although I think Berlin had twentieth century totalitarianism uppermost in his mind when describing these concepts, it's plain to me that they also apply well to that other seat of authoritarianism - religion. Once a church gains sufficient power to wield over the populace, primarily through indoctrination, they wield that power by asserting their knowledge of the 'real' greater good and demanding believers follow their unlikely doctrines, for their own good.

It’s a rule of law that would be hard to argue against. If a citizen agrees with a course of action, all well and good; if she disagrees with it the authority could say that the higher self ‘really’ agrees, and assume a mandate for the greater good of the state, or religion. It’s a rule imposed against the wishes of the people but supposedly for the wishes of the people, in the mistaken belief that a set of unified wishes can be established. And so institutional cover-ups of massive abuse to further the institution become the norm. As Enda Kenny said:

The rape and torture of children were downplayed or 'managed' to uphold instead, the primacy of the institution, its power, standing and 'reputation'.

One can't help thinking that throughout, the Catholic authorities believed they were protecting the priests because it was the best for the Church, because they know what is best for everyone.

That sort of approach cannot be allowed to continue in any institution. Until religious ones drop their claims to a divine truth, the danger of this abuse of positive liberty, and therefore children and adults, continues.

Bibliography:

Warburton, N. (2002) Arguments for Freedom (A211 Book 1), Milton Keynes, The Open University

It's All Chinese to Me

2011-08-25T17:57:00.000-07:00

Searle’s Chinese Room argument addresses the notion of strong artificial intelligence (AI) – that simply running a computer program constitutes thinking. This he contrasts with weak AI – that computers can model aspects of the mind; an uncontroversial idea. Models are used to test theories of reality against reality itself; there is no illusion that the model is reality itself. A climate model doesn’t produce phenomena the way that climate does, for example.

Computers process algorithms. An algorithm is a series of unambiguous (at each step) instructions that deliver an expected result. Since this is all computers do, any biological process that cannot be represented by an algorithm cannot be computed. Algorithms are executed by manipulating symbols, represented at the lowest level by binary on-off states. All popular machines are based on the von Neumann architecture. The relevant elements of this are: step-by-step processing; storage of symbols in one memory location; a unique address for access; all controlled by a central processing unit (CPU). With this common architecture in mind, it also follows that the same instructions (programs) on different computers will produce the same results. Such machines, with sufficient capacity, are dubbed universal Turing machines (UTMs) - after Alan Turing, computer pioneer. Strong AI advocates consider that all mental processes can be represented algorithmically and therefore all UTMs can think – that there is nothing about the brain necessary for thought apart from what qualifies it as a UTM.

Searle allows that machines can think, since he considers we are machines and we can. But he doesn’t think that a program by itself constitutes thinking, and, more specifically, he thinks that algorithmic rule processing (syntax) is insufficient for mental content (semantics). He offers a ‘simple and decisive refutation’ with his Chinese Room thought experiment. Imagine we’re in a room with baskets of symbols we don’t understand (Chinese, in his example) and a rule-book we do understand. People outside pass in symbols and we pass out symbols according to the book’s instructions. If the rule-book is adequate, the ‘room’ appears to understand Chinese. But inside, we have no understanding of Chinese before or after.

Searle argues that this counts against computers based on the von Neumann architecture, but not against brains, because in brains the physical causes the mental in a way that is absent from computers. The biochemical processes are responsible for the mental contents, not the rule processing, so minds are not computer programs.

Searle’s argument is plausible. We see how processing can produce an output without apparent understanding. In fact, we experience this when we learn another language. Initially, we apply rules to translate the foreign language, delivering output without understanding. With practice and exposure to the language, we come to understand it, in a way we didn’t before. What is this difference between translating and understanding? Furthermore, if the brain is simply processing algorithms, how do these step-by-step unambiguous processes come to be creative, or even wrong? Error-prone computers fail catastrophically, rather than creatively. None of this lends support to the brain as algorithmic processor.

Searle asks us to consider what the person in the room understands (nothing). But he places the person in the position of the CPU, whereas his argument is against thinking being the running of a program. For the room to respond adequately, this does, as a matter of fact, require the CPU (the person) and a program (the rule-book) and data storage (the basket), as well as input/output. So we must ask: does the person, in conjunction with the program and data, and input and output, understand Chinese, not just the person? This is the core of the systems reply objection and the answer to its challenge is less clear-cut than Searle suggests. Agreed, it’s still hard to see how adding a hard disk with data and a program to a silicon chip, attaching a keyboard and monitor, could allow the ensemble to think.

The Loebner annual prize is awarded to the computer that performs best against other contestants in a Turing Test - Turing suggested that if a machine responds so that interrogators cannot distinguish it from a human, we should conclude that it’s thinking. It’s a measure of the difficulty of the test that no machine has come close to passing it in twenty years of competition. For example, in 2010 the winning computer told a joke and its interrogator said “Well, I believe that’s worth a LOL!”. The program responded with “Should I know that?”, misunderstanding a phrase that almost anyone would understand. As Daniel Dennett observes in Consciousness Explained, countering Searle’s argument, any program that responds to such comments sensibly would have a vast ‘world knowledge’ and complexity. Just understanding ‘LOL’ requires knowledge of textspeak and its background. But the rest of the sentence requires knowledge of how some people wouldn’t just say ‘LOL’, but would distance themselves from the exclamation by commenting on it in a more detached way. It gives a completely different impression of the interlocutor than just ‘LOL’, but still delivers the news that she found the joke amusing. All this ‘meaning’ would feed back into and inform the subsequent conversation. This is how minds embedded in the real world operate, and is the challenge for AI. So the test poses a valid question. If anything passes the test, shouldn’t we conclude that it’s thinking - displaying an embedded knowledge of the world?

A program could, by storing any number of associated ‘meanings’ and ‘relations’ in database tables called ‘meanings’ and ‘relations’, deliver answers that appear intelligent. But is it understanding? After all, the computer doesn’t know that a ‘meaning’ entry in the table ‘meaning’ has any meaning – it’s just a record in a table. Like the Chinese Room, it’s hard to see that the computer has conquered semantics internally. But to return to the process of learning a language, maybe the mechanistic translation algorithms become subsumed into the sub-conscious, along with the associated categories. By definition we then only ‘see’ the meaning of foreign phrases and the appropriate responses, not the algorithms and categories underlying. We move from knowledge that ‘this word’ means ‘that word’ to knowledge how to speak the language. If this is so, then we are simply passing our own Turing Test, just as an observer outside the Chinese Room considers the room passes the test, ignorant of the mechanism inside, and Searle’s argument counts against our own minds.

Maybe the most interesting premise in Searle’s argument is that brains cause minds. At one level, this is trivially accepted by any physicalist, but perhaps Searle is addressing issues such as the particularity of a self that forms the mind, and its self-starting nature. If software creates the mind, and that software can run on any hardware, how is the mind individual? And programs seem inert. How could they initiate action?

Searle doesn’t really engage with the case for how complexity might address these problems. His ‘Chinese Gym’ counter argument, to address more complex connectionist architecture, asks us to imagine lots of folk in the room manipulating symbols. He is suggesting that lots of processes will exhibit the same properties, and only those, of one process. This isn’t true of physical things, and I’m not sure it’s true for processes. At some point sufficient complexity will appear individual. We can see that complexity introduces something new; for example, patterns in windblown sand dunes, and flock behaviour in starlings. We have a pattern-seeking mind, and pattern-seeking can be programmed. And, just as we get false-positives (ducks seen in cloud shapes, faces in toast) so would pattern-seeking programs. If this is the source of creativity and synchronicity, this could be replicated by rule-processing.

The apparently self-starting nature of the mind is perhaps a deeper problem. Searle considers that the particular physical architecture of the brain is required for semantics, but we see that different people (and maybe different species) acquire meaning with some difference in the brain, so at least some independence from the physical is allowed. So whether mind is emergent from complex algorithms or ‘fizzing chemicals’ is moot. And if an analogue process is required to initiate thinking, this would be something that doesn’t simply provide input to a digital process, or else that input could be simulated. So it needs to initiate and provide something extra to the digital processing, and it’s not clear what this is. Searle’s contention that the mind is tightly coupled with the hardware, and that something about the brain, biochemicals or similar, causes the mental content is as inscrutable as the Chinese Room, so this is insufficient to discount algorithms as a basis for mind.

Searle notes that simulation is not duplication. For example, simulating digestion does not digest. The analogy appeals to function to dismiss simulated thought as genuine thought, but functionalists would note that some simulations do produce the same output as the thing they’re copying, so perform the same function. Much brain activity is simulating our macro reality in a way that aids our survival. Simulating that simulation is doing the same work in a way that simulating digestion is not. Mental content that has no correlate in reality, like pain, appears simulated. However, if minds can be simulated it does suggest that maybe characters in simulated realities have feelings, which is hard to countenance. Indeed, like the brain-in-a-vat thought experiment, it becomes difficult to discount that we are in a simulation. Nevertheless, it’s not clear that mind is immune to simulation.

So, on a functionalist understanding, Searle’s digestion analogy only stands if semantics derives from a process which does not produce the same outputs as the original. It’s plausible that the output of the Chinese Room is the only output required for semantics, but brain processes, in addition to delivering the intelligent response, also generate some heat, and maybe some biochemical and molecular changes. If these are necessary for true understanding, then only machines that produced them would understand as we do. Searle hasn’t established that, and his argument is inconclusive in discounting algorithmic processing as a route to meaning and mind.

Bibliography:

Wilkinson, R. (2002) Minds and Bodies (A211 Book 5), Milton Keynes, The Open University

Merdophilia

2011-07-29T17:28:00.000-07:00

Stephen Law linked to a curious review of his book Believing Bullshit in THE, by Martin Cohen. I've not read Law's book, but I may well do - I've enjoyed some of the snippets he's posted from it, and his blog is full of useful philosophy. So I was interested to read what Cohen, Editor of The Philosopher, the journal of The Philosophical Society of England, had to say. According to the Society's blurb:

The Society aligns itself with no particular school of philosophy, nor is it a cover for any political, ideological, religious or esoteric movement or interests.

Sounds good. The review presents Law's book as an uncompromising attack on religion, alternative medicine and anti-science. Doesn't sound too bad to me, but I'm aware that Law's philosophy is rarely so absolute, so it surprised me. Then he says that Law thinks the scientific method:

...was invented about 400 years ago and is this: "Scientists collect data by observation and experiment. They formulate theories to explain what they observe and where possible, subject these theories to tests." Now that's what I call bullshit!

Eh? It's a simplistic summary, for sure, but 'bullshit'? How so?

Cohen complains that there is no mention of Thomas Kuhn and Paul Feyerabend, and so the alarm bells start ringing. No doubt their contribution to philosophy of science is considerable, but is it possible the reviewer is in thrall to unworkable post modern social science theories? Then Cohen says:

Law is one of the militant English atheists, led by His Holiness, Richard Dawkins.

Oh boy, the hallmark of the shallow thinker; 'cleverly' equating Richard Dawkins with a religious leader. Ironically, in a review of a book about believing bullshit, we are given a stream of classic examples from Cohen:

Take homeopaths, for example. Law complains that they swap anecdotes with each other about people who got better after taking the little sugar pills. No doubt this happens, yet if homeopathic remedies work for some people, then why the censorship?

Is it possible that this is some elaborate ruse by Law and Cohen to manufacture a review that highlights the problems detailed in the book? I mean, homeopathy? No harm? To the story covered at that link, Cohen says:

An "undercover" BBC reporter once asked homeopaths if they had alternatives to malaria pills. And they did! Scarcely surprising nor, I would say, particularly culpable.

The prospect of people using pills that don't work instead of pills that do doesn't raise any issues of blame for any resulting illness? Bizarre.

Stephen Law comments on the review a few times, and unsurprisingly is pretty livid at what appear to be misrepresentations. Cohen makes a risible defence of his statements, which in no way supports his review. And during the course of one point, in which he defends his accusation that Law is uncritical of the theory of natural selection by quoting Law on the theory of evolution (!), he says:

I argue that Law's book is uncritical of the theory of Natural Selection, which there are good arguments for considering to be unsupported by the 'evidence', whatever one may think about religious explanations for the universe.

This prompted me to berate him for commenting irresponsibly, as an academic (the use of scare quotes around 'evidence'). Water off a duck's back. The evidence for the overall theory is legion, even if many details are still debated. Law posts a comment detailing Cohen's completely inadequate response:

In short, I am baffled how Martin Cohen thinks any of the above supports his bizarre characterization of my views. As others have already spotted, it *very obviously* doesn't.

... which even Cohen can plainly see, since he posts a feeble follow-up:

You say the quotes don't show that you consdier (arguments for) belief in God to be 'bullshit', but I think it is reasonable to read this in. The second quote clearly implies Dawkins' work to be 'intellectually rigorous' and the views of 'theists' to be silly = you use value=laden terms to lead the reader into dismissing the 'theists' as people who use 'immunizing tricks'.

The quote he refers to has had Law's questioning of Dawkins' argument removed! Anyone's ghast should be flabbered by Cohen's effrontery.

Cohen's entirely inadequate data collection does rather point to the problems of folk who don't think that data collection in support of a theory (the very basics of science) has any value. What a sorry state we would be in if scientists like, say, Simon Singh, Christopher French and Richard Dawkins never bothered to check their data, and simply wrote about the impressions they, somehow, culled from the world, just as Cohen wrote about the impressions he, somehow, culled from Law's book.

But according to Cohen, that would be fascistic. Yes, in a masterful piece of Godwining even before the writing starts, Cohen is partly responsible for the website Philosophical Investigations, on which a page called British Science Fascists is prominent. Why Fascists?

But do they deserve to be called 'Fascists', after the 20th century political movement? The term is bandied about carelessly elsewhere. But we use it very, ah 'scientifically', as these reactionary thinkers share with the original fascists:

• a superficial and ideological commitment to Darwin's Theory of Natural Selection, which they attempt to adopt for political ends
• an inappropriate and dangerous reverence for scientific 'progress', coupled with an unwillingness to accept an ethical dimension to science
• an objectionable version of the history of science
• an even more objectionable distinction between 'Rational Man' and 'irrational deviants', with an often vicious antipathy towards the latter.
• hair on their arms and legs

So far, so brainless (and so straw filled, apart from the hair on the arms and legs). Here are slagged off, in order:

Chris French: "In an article for... (where else) The Guardian he trots out merrily the usual scientifically ignorant and politically dangerous call for 'rational' thought to eliminate 'emotional' biases."

Ben Goldacre: "...when confronted with the self-evident notion that his belief system (clinical epidemiology, now pretentiously called 'evidence-based medicine' or EBM), a statistics-based hierarchy of facts, is exclusionary..."

Julian Baggini: "Baggini speaks down to the ignorami from his perch at... the Guardian."

Madeleine Bunting (!): "She has also argued that the Enlightenment is a ‘made-up’ pseudo concept, which it is. In fact, she doesn’t belong in this list, but just fell in her because of her popping up regularly to support her ‘colleagues’." (phew, that's better - didn't think this was right!)

Nick Cohen: "Columnist for the Observer... guess what! part of the Guardian newspaper group."

Richard Dawkins (about time): "Richard Dawkins has successfully combined his day job, Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University, with being the prophet of a new religion, the sole deity of which is Charles Darwin."

George Monbiot: "A columnist for the Guardian."

Simon Singh: "In a laughably bad 'investigation', Singh and others contacted homeopathic quacks, told them they suffered dangerous side effects from malaria tablets, and then asked what they should do? The homeopaths advised homeopathic treatments... Shame on them!"

Jeremy Stangroom (!): "Less influential, but tries to make up for it by the sheer venom of his pronouncements. Fails miserably."

Mark Lynas: "Guardian regular"

They don't like American scientists either! A number of themes appear. A paranoid distrust of science, so that one wonders how the compilers manage in everyday life. An antipathy to The Guardian! Well, it's not my cup of tea either, but I don't immediately consign its contributors to the bin. A slight obsession with CAM and climate change denial. They are keen to call into question the expertise of those mentioned, but it's not clear what expertise they have to talk about climate change, evidence based medicine and homeopathy. The website lists Samuel Hahnemann as a key thinker, for goodness sake!

All in all, the sort of sloppy thinking exemplified on the site plays out in Cohen's review and comments, as we see above. If this demonstrates the best thinking of the anti-science faction, then they are good examples of the unworkability of some theories of post-modernism and social science. I guess I'm in favour of science fascism.

Unreasonable Accommodationists

2011-07-17T05:51:00.000-07:00

The UK's Equality and Human Rights Commission has issued a press release calling for a concept of 'reasonable accommodations' to allow employees to manifest their religious beliefs. They say:

For example, if a Jew asks not to have to work on a Saturday for religious reasons, his employer could accommodate this with minimum disruption simply by changing the rota. This would potentially be reasonable and would provide a good outcome for both employee and employer.

Seems fair enough. But Trevor Phillips, the chairman of the EHRC recently said:

Our business is defending the believer. The law we're here to implement recognises that a religious or belief identity is, for the majority of people in Britain, an essential element of being a fulfilled human being and plays an important part in our society.

Clearly he is wrong here, since his business is equality, not just the concerns of a particular group, like believers. But let's be charitable and assume he meant that in striving for equality, the Commission must recognise the concerns of every group, and he's simply mentioning one group over others because he's expressed himself clumsily.

However, one of the cases that the Commission is supporting is Lillian Ladele's. She's the Christian Registrar who wanted to discriminate against gay people in the performance of her duties. One can only assume that the Commission adopt the position that she should be allowed to discriminate against people based on their sexual orientation, because of her religious belief. If the Commission thinks this falls into the range of 'reasonable accommodations' for religious views, then one wonders what qualifies as unreasonable. Note the duties of the EHRC:

We have a statutory remit to promote and monitor human rights; and to protect, enforce and promote equality across the nine "protected" grounds - age, disability, gender, race, religion and belief, pregnancy and maternity, marriage and civil partnership, sexual orientation and gender reassignment.

So, sexual orientation is on a par with age, disability, gender, race and religion and belief. As an aside, in my view sexual orientation, age, disability, gender and race are qualitatively different to religion and belief, since they are invariable, and cannot be chosen under any circumstances. But, in any case, since the EHRC appear to be including discrimination based on sexual orientation as a 'reasonable accommodation' for religious beliefs, then one assumes that discrimination based on race, gender and so on are also 'reasonable accommodations' for religious beliefs.

So, if the EHRC support Ladele, then this renders the EHRC self-defeating. They will then be campaigning against their own aims. A bizarre situation.

Rosminian Regrets?

2011-06-24T03:51:00.000-07:00

After the BBC documentary detailing the abuse meted out by the Rosminian Order to pupils in its charge, and the subsequent cover-up, they have issued a notpology:

A statement from Fr David Myers, leader of the Rosminian order in Britain:
“I apologise without reservation on behalf of the Rosminian brethren in the UK to all those who
have suffered. Such abuse was a grievous breach of trust to them and to their families. We are appalled by what was done to them.
“I and all my brethren are deeply shocked at what has happened and acknowledge our inadequate response. We are committed to the pastoral care and support of those who have suffered abuse and to the procedures laid down by the National Catholic Safeguarding Commission.”

They 'acknowledge [their] inadequate response'. As with the Catholic Church in toto, acknowledgement is just the first trivial step. What victims want is a full and independent inquiry to stop the abuses, and cover-ups, from continuing. And they damn well are continuing, despite any number of mealy-mouthed statements from clergy saying they're sorry when they're clearly not, or they'd do something about it!

The Cover-up Kings Strike Again

2011-06-19T14:13:00.000-07:00

Colourful priest with a practical grasp of Catholic values.

Whatever his weaknesses – and he readily acknowledged that he was as human as the next man – Cunningham was always redeemed by his sense of humour, his sound judgment as to what the church should really be about, and his willingness to serve whoever needed his help.

Obituary, The Guardian, 6th January 2011

Endowed with a genial Chestertonian figure and a powerful voice...

Obituary, The Daily Telegraph, 13th December 2010

He was greatly loved by many people whose lives he touched.

Andrew M. Brown in the Daily Telegraph Blogs, 12th December 2010

One of the good 'uns.

Comment on that blog.

All descriptions of Father Kit Cunningham, a celebrity priest of sorts, of the Rosminian Order. But, in fact, he was another child abusing Catholic priest:

[John] Poppleton had been repeatedly sexually abused as a young boy by Fr Kit, an experience that he says "broke me down and broke my spirit". The abuse took place at St Michael's, Soni, in the 1960s, in what was then Tanganyika, now Tanzania. Four of the priests who taught there, all members of the Rosminian order, and including Fr Kit, perpetrated physical and sexual abuse that made this boarding school, according to Poppleton, "a loveless, violent and sad hellhole".

Now a new BBC documentary, Abused: Breaking The Silence (Tuesday, 22:35 on BBC One), is to be screened telling the story of the abuse that took place at St Michael's, Soni in Tanzania in the 1960s.

The piece by Peter Stanford in The Guardian is chilling, because it shows how easily these evil but charming and charismatic men can fool the credulous. Stanford penned the Guardian obit, but now has to come to terms with his inability to spot a monster in his midst; it turned out that Father Kit had returned his MBE because of the abuse he committed. Not a hint of this in the fulsome obits above, although there are some ironic (if they weren't so tragic) double entendres. How could this have been missed? Stanford is starting to ask questions, thank dog:

In almost three decades of writing about the church, and a lifetime as part of it, I thought I knew how to read a priest. Since the 1990s, when the scandal of paedophile priests first emerged in the public domain, a question mark has been hanging over almost every cleric as a result of the church's cover-up. Almost every priest, but not, for me, foolishly imagining myself a seasoned observer, over Fr Kit.

Such credulity is, unfortunately, an all too human failing. That is why the Catholic church cover-up is an even worse evil than the original abuse, because it has taken a dreadful abuse of authority and multiplied it by n, placing the welfare of the Church above the welfare of people. This supervenience of the institution over people is the evil of the religious institution in principle. Consider this:

However, Frenkiel [the reporter] points out in her film that on the day that Pope Benedict XVI, during his visit to Britain last September, was in Westminster Cathedral expressing his "deep sorrow to innocent victims of these unspeakable crimes", the Rosminian order was writing to refuse to pay any compensation for what it has openly acknowledged are the crimes of four of its own priests.

This is nauseating. Remember, Pope Benny was saying:

"It is difficult to understand how this perversion of the priestly mission was possible"... He said the first priority was to help the victims to recover from the trauma they had undergone "and rediscover too their faith in the message of Christ".

..while his Church was still denying compensation to its victims. Stanford wonders about the ongoing cover-ups and realises it calls into question the priorities of his Church. He continues:

Such questions might nag away slightly less insistently if I thought the Catholic authorities were genuinely trying to understand the root causes of this scandal. But this month the quasi-official Catholic Truth Society published a booklet on clerical sex-abuse that blames it on the "permissive society" of the 1960s. So while everyone else took sexual liberation to mean you didn't have to wait until you were married, priests took it as licence to abuse children?

I would urge Stanford to leave his Church, but first insist that it opens up its records for a full independent international inquiry into this scandal. It's a disgrace that this priest didn't die in disgrace.

UPDATE: Note that Patrick Wall, working for lawyers for the abused, is quoted as saying that abuse continues:

"I'm working on stuff that happened in the summer of 2010," he says. "It's the same old sodomy."

If this is true, the Catholic Church must be held accountable.

He recommends that the church "completely get out" of child protection, hand over all its files to civil law enforcement, and make bishops sign a legal oath every year that there are no perpetrators in the ministry - which would open them to criminal prosecution if they are found to have lied.
"Otherwise," he says, "I'll be prosecuting priest sex abuse cases for the rest of my life."

We Are Sinners All

2011-06-03T02:55:00.000-07:00

What to say about Jeremy Stangroom's latest flailing effort to marginalise gnu atheists? He says:

I don’t have time for the new atheist idiots right now.

Could one say, that's hardly civil or good behavior?

Or I actually don’t think many 'public intellectuals' would make a comment about folks being idiots in a blog?

Is it evidence that Jeremy doesn't have a good nature?

Karla, if you’re reading this, which I doubt, you probably know by now it’s a mistake to engage with these morons

Hmmm. Perhaps remarking that the targets of your criticism are morons is a bit... well, moronic?

Should one point out that calling gnus morons has nothing to do with [their] argument?

Should we conclude that, because he thinks I really don’t think that many public intellectuals would have said the sort of thing that Dawkins said. I don’t think I would have said it (except maybe ironically), he is calling gnus morons ironically? Or perhaps he thinks he's not a public intellectual? Well, he's certainly public.

In the comments of an earlier attack, he said:

The point here is that it has been stated quite explicitly that the new atheists do not “fall short” (though it’s not expressed quite like that, obviously) enough that they can reasonably be viewed as uncivil; and that the other side – i.e., the “accommodationists” – fall short a damn sight more often and more egregiously. I intend to show that neither of these things are true.

It's amusing that he's proving himself wrong on his own blog. And, for the record, I don't think that accommodationists "fall short a damn sight more often and more egregiously" than gnu atheists. From the start of this self-defeating accommodationist crusade, my objection has been that gnus do not fall short of acceptable standards of discourse any more than anyone else does. But they are cast by theists and accommodationists alike as if they do. I don't know the motivation for this 'othering' of gnus, but it's difficult not to conclude that it's driven, somewhat, by society's privileging of religious beliefs, over and above other beliefs. When this privileging stops, then gnus will have a lot less to complain about, civilly or otherwise. Until then, accommodationists are simply more evidence for its existence.

Hit and Myth

2011-05-30T18:39:00.000-07:00

R. Joseph Hoffmann has been making a lot of news in the blogosphere recently, through his intemperate attacks on gnu atheists - consider this comment highlighted by Ophelia Benson at Butterflies and Wheels:

There are no butterflies there [at B&W] anymore just gasbags like the seminally under-qualified Eric McDonald and clowns like PZ Myers, who could benefit from a reading comprehension course with an emphasis on analogies.

Calling Eric Macdonald 'seminally under-qualified' is indicative of a critical faculty that has become unhinged, and now Richard Carrier has cause to question Hoffmann's sanity:

But in private conversations about some of the problems I had with the book, Hoffmann was a complete dick to me, and wouldn't own up even to the mistakes I had actual proof he had made.

...and...

Thereby tempting me to conclude that he [Hoffmann] must be a lunatic.

This all comes in an analysis of Hoffman's book, Sources of the Jesus Tradition: Separating History from Myth. Sadly Hoffmann also supports the view of Jacques Berlinerblau that new atheists think that:

Unless you as an atheist are willing to disparage all religious people, describe them all as imbeciles and creeps, mock every text and thinker they have ever produced, then you must be some sort of deluded, self-hating, sellout, subverting the rise of the Mighty Atheist Political Juggernaut...

A straw man of dickish proportions, to be sure. I don't know what's happened to RJH, but it's worth reading about Carrier's concerns for his editorial skills. Despite that, the book's still worth purchasing, apparently!

UPDATE: Hoffmann has replied to Carrier's criticism, including this paragraph:

Hoffmann, probably
I am still not sure what “mistakes” he’s referring to other than his own, which were as substantial as his contribution was irrelevant, a long discursus on Bayes’ theorem that never once budges above pedantic lecturing to engage the literary material – the New Testament – to which its application is implied to be relevant. A cautious, or less sympathetic editor would have cut it eo ipso as being totally to the left of the topic, though Carrier shows a fleeting acquaintance with some of the methods (and limits) of conventional New Testament criticism. It does not rise to the level of convincing expertise.

One wonders why he included Carrier's chapter, in that case! He displays little sympathy, so maybe he was just being incautious.

And Carrier's reply.

The Power of the Bible

2011-05-23T02:06:00.000-07:00

After the predictable failure of Biblical predictor Harold Camping, we are now witnessing the ability of the human mind to rationalise its own credulity.

Here is a remarkable example: Peter Lombardi is a 44-year-old from Jersey City, N.J. who had had taken an "indefinite break" from his job in April to preach about May 21, and John Ramsey is a N.J. resident who had rearranged his life in recent months to devote himself to spreading the news of the Rapture.

Followers like Ramsey and Lombardi said they had few hard feelings toward Camping and still agreed with some of the self-taught preacher's views, such as one that says all churches and denominations have been corrupted.
"I have learned to study the Bible really well. This guy has opened my eyes to a lot of truths," said Lombardi.
"If he makes another prediction, I can't tell you what I am going to do," said Ramsey. "But I've really taken an interest in the Bible. I know it's the word of God. And I've been reading into more parts today."
He quoted Mark 13:22: "For false Christs and false prophets shall rise, and shall [show] signs and wonders, to seduce, if [it were] possible, even the elect."

Despite the apparent stupidity of thinking some nut with a radio station can predict an event that is, in any case, a fiction, these guys still think the Bible's worth reading. One of the master-strokes of early Christianity was its forging of a range of old stories and texts into a whole that makes no sense but can be utilised in the service of any agenda that one wants to push. I've spent my life listening to sermons and preachers, Thoughts for the Day and miracle stories, and they've all found something in that hotchpotch of platitudes to support the view they're pushing.

With a text as full of contraries as the Bible, it's easy to make it fit any narrative that arises, and Ramsey manages it here. Oh yeah, shit, that Rapture prediction culled from the Bible was wrong, and here's the Bible telling me why. Here's the Bible telling me the Bible's wrong. But there really aren't any contradictions in the Bible, in the philosophical sense of jointly exhaustive but mutually exclusive stories and morals; it's too complex and incoherent for that. If the book wasn't 'Holy', everyone who used it would be slapped into prison for deception. For nefarious politicians with an agenda, or just for mad old millionaire radio evangelists, it's the Book that keeps on giving, and keeps those who believe in it giving.

Orders must be followed, however evil

2011-05-10T04:05:00.000-07:00

A New York Jewish newspaper is banned from publishing photos of women by rabbinic authority, so when it printed the White House situation room photo it naturally removed Hilary Clinton and Audrey Tomason from it.

It's the blithe disregard for what this actually means that shocks. Sexism is prejudice, stereotyping, or discrimination, typically against women, on the basis of sex, according to the online OED. Here's some snippets from the statement issued by Der Tzeitung, the offending rag:

Our photo editor realized the significance of this historic moment, and published the picture, but in his haste he did not read the “fine print” that accompanied the picture, forbidding any changes.

Yes, the 'fine print' is more important than the equal standing of women, apparently.

The allegations that religious Jews denigrate women or do not respect women in public office, is a malicious slander and libel.

Of course! Air-brushing women out of important historical photographs is in every way consistent with respect for them, isn't it?

The Jewish religion does not allow for discrimination based on gender, race, etc.

Well, you just did, and do, discriminate based on gender because, as you go on to say:

In accord with our religious beliefs, we do not publish photos of women...

See. Not, you do not publish photos of men, or children, but women. That is discrimination based on gender.

...which in no way relegates them to a lower status

Again, of course not! Air-brushing women out of important historical photographs is in every way consistent with granting them equal status, isn't it?

Publishing a newspaper is a big responsibility, and our policies are guided by a Rabbinical Board.

That is a surprise.

Because of laws of modesty, we are not allowed to publish pictures of women, and we regret if this gives an impression of disparaging to women, which is certainly never our intention.

Sigh.

So the argument goes, it's not sexist; they're not doing it because they're women, but because the Rabbis tell them so.

They're only following Holy Orders.

Reason-able?

2011-05-09T06:29:00.000-07:00

Chris Mooney has been posting some excellent pieces recently, thankfully avoiding (mostly) his accommodationist nonsense. At Mother Jones he wrote The Science of Why We Don't Believe Science, detailing many studies exploring our cognitive problems. It's well worth a read to get acquainted with some of the studies exercising psychologists at the moment. In it he talks about how emotion informs and, to a degree, poisons one's pre-existing beliefs and affects how one argues.

And that undercuts the standard notion that the way to persuade people is via evidence and argument. In fact, head-on attempts to persuade can sometimes trigger a backfire effect, where people not only fail to change their minds when confronted with the facts—they may hold their wrong views more tenaciously than ever.

This is his standard retort to gnu atheism. But it's quite modest, and doesn't do the work he wants it to. I mean, obviously on many (most?) occasions people are persuaded by evidence and argument. What he means to say is that this may not be the best way when the issue under discussion triggers deep emotions. Later he says:

If you want someone to accept new evidence, make sure to present it to them in a context that doesn't trigger a defensive, emotional reaction.

Again, this, I presume (!) is the reason for his tone trolling, but it's not doing the work he wants. I don't think any gnu denies that tone is important, and these studies indicate some reasons why a sympathetic context can work. But that doesn't mean it's the only way to get results. Ridicule also generates an emotional reaction, and that may produce results too, without evidence and argument. I can remember being persuaded as a child not to do certain things by the ridicule heaped on me by my brothers when I went wrong. There was precious little evidence and argument presented.

More recently he's blogged about a study relevant to that article, calling it Is Reasoning Built for Winning Arguments, Rather Than Finding Truth?. That title's not really accurate, as a read through uncovers. It's based on a study by Mercier and Sperber, called Why Do Humans Reason? Arguments for an Argumentative Theory. Mooney sums it up better in the final line:

When it comes to reasoning, then, what’s good for the group could be very bad for the individual–or, for the echo chamber.

An interesting finding. We have an imperfect reasoning tool in our locker. If we just reason our way around the world as individuals, disaster can strike. So, an example in the comments, the Unabomber living alone in the woods can easily go crazy because no one is there to say, “Whoa, where’d you get that idea?” A better evolutionary survival tactic is to introduce some argument. This, I guess, moderates some of the flaws in our thinking, such as cognitive bias, and is more likely to produce a better result for the genes (this is an evolutionary psychology argument). In the comments it's also made clear that like-minded groups are a problem too. Hugo Mercier pops up to confirm what he thinks the solution is:

What we’re suggesting is that in a normal debate, you try to convince the other guy when you produce arguments, but you’re mostly objective when you evaluate arguments (after all, if you’re better off changing your mind, you’d rather know about it). So a normal debate is the solution, and it has worked very well for ever. There is no need for any new thing really, just fixing institutions that don’t rely enough on genuine debate.

A pretty good addition to the argument for freedom of speech, I think. Further, it counters the accommodationist position that gnu atheists shouldn't confront the moderately religious and dismiss their beliefs. Genuine debate is what gnus demand, and these studies suggest that if moderate religionists aren't challenged, they will operate in an echo chamber that may end up radicalising their views.

No doubt accommodationists can accuse gnus of operating in their very own echo chamber, but this chamber rings very hollow indeed. In a world where atheists are outvoted and outprivileged wherever one looks, it will be a long time before it becomes a dangerous in-group. But one would have to concede that it may happen one day. O, frabjous day!

More Rees Pudding

2011-04-10T11:12:00.000-07:00

In an interview with Jonathan Leake in the Sunday Times (~~behind a paywall, so no link~~ - ~~paywall down?~~ - up again), the new Templeton Prizee Martin Rees continues his apologia against his critics. AC Grayling is quoted as saying:

...I wish Templeton would not bribe scientists into giving them credibility. The Templeton desire to mix religion with science is like trying to mix astrology with astronomy or magic with medicine. A great disservice is done to education and the proper understanding of the world by this and anyone who accepts Templeton money is helping to perpetuate this problem.

Leake puzzles over Rees the atheist's attitude to religion:

What Rees seems to be saying is that he believes religion is valuable and useful - while also believing it is completely untrue. That's a contradiction most of us would find hard to reconcile but for a scientist, whose life has been spent seeking out provable truths, surely it should be impossible.

I think this is what most new atheists complain about when faitheists make their rather vapid apologies for religion. Rees responds:

I think some people even with no belief may see that there is value in the practice of religion...

But that is not the issue; is the value worth the cost?

Let me give you an example: there are lots of Jews who would say they are atheists, but they still light their candles on Friday and participate in some rituals because they think there is some value in maintaining those traditions.

Of course, but some rituals don't end with candles being lit, but fuses.

But to get back to Templeton, Rees cites the rather anodyne version of religion of which he approves while apparently being oblivious of the insidious harm to science caused by the Templeton Foundation, since they took up the 'Science and Religion' meme. As I wrote before, we have them funding scienceandreligion organisations at both Oxford and Cambridge, with such 'scientific' papers as Human genomics and the Image of God. What do Templeton gain from Rees? Bell Pottinger are their PR advisors (Chairman, Tim Bell, who conspired to bring the Iron Lady to power), and Leake ends his report by saying:

Rees was, as ever, reluctant to comment. but for the man from Bell Pottinger discreetly minding Rees throughout his media interviews last week the answer was obvious. "I think the Templeton Foundation have got just what they want out of this year's award," he said, as he whisked Rees off to another interview.

Brilliant. £1,000,000 to be a poodle to the religious lobby. It really is unforgivable that Rees has no response to the problems that Grayling identifies.

Harris on Divine Morality

2011-04-10T10:23:00.000-07:00

This debate, Does Good come from God?, is an interesting contrast of styles. Some have 'awarded' the debate points to William Lane Craig, since he responds more formally to Sam Harris's points, while Harris sticks, mostly, to his agenda, and doesn't really expose WLC's argument. This may be because he didn't want to spend too much time on WLC's nonsense so as not to legitimise it.

But, while not formally objecting to WLC's particular argument, Harris did rather brilliantly expose the poverty of the divine command theory. In his original statement, Harris sets out his stall: because there is a worst possible state of affairs that we want to avoid, we can therefore safely assume that morality is the attempt to make the world better than that. And so, human flourishing determines morality. This is a pretty controversial position to say the least, and not necessarily true; I'm just putting that up there to set the scene for Harris to address WLC's Christian world view:

Ask yourselves: what is wrong with spending eternity in Hell?

So Lane Craig has laughed at the idea that well being could be a sufficient determinant for morality (which it may well not be), but his philosophy is built on the very same idea. And Harris goes on to show how the nature of Christian consequentialism can logically lead to immoral behaviour, and because of that, *is* an immoral doctrine to hold and preach.

Well I'm told it's rather hot there, for one. Dr Craig is not offering an alternative view of morality.The whole point of Christianity, or so it is imagined, is to safeguard the eternal well being of human souls. Now happily, there is absolutely no evidence that the Christian hell exists. I think we should look at the consequences of believing in this theistic framework in this world, and what these moral underpinnings actually would be.

Nine million children die each year before the age of five. Picture an Asian tsunami, of the sort we saw in 2004 that killed a quarter of a million people. One of those every ten days, killing only those under five. 24,000 children a day, a thousand an hour, seventeen or so a minute, that means before I can get to the end of this sentence some few children will have died in terror and agony.

Think of the parents of these children. Think of the fact that most of these men and women believe in God, and are praying at this moment for their children to be spared. And their prayers will not be answered.

According to Dr Craig, this is all part of God's plan.

Any God who would allow children by the millions to suffer and die in this way, and their parents to grieve in this way, either can do nothing to help them, or doesn't care to. Is therefore either impotent or evil. And worse than that, on Dr Craig's view, many of these people will be going to hell because they're praying to the wrong God. Think about that. Through no fault of their own, they were born into the wrong culture, where they got the wrong theology, and the missed the revelation.

There are 1.2 billion people in India at this moment, most of them are Hindus, most of them therefore are polytheists. In Dr Craig's universe, no matter how good these people are, they are doomed. If you are praying to the monkey god, Hanuman, you are doomed. You'll be tortured in hell for eternity. Now is there the slightest evidence for this? No, it just says so in Mark 9, Matthew 13and Revelations 14. Perhaps you'll remember from The Lord of the Rings, it says that when the elves die, they go to Valinor, but they can be reborn in Middle Earth. I say that just as a point of comparison.

So God created the cultural isolation of the Hindus; he engineered the circumstances of their deaths in ignorance of revelation, and then he created the penalty for this ignorance, which is an eternity of conscious torment in fire.

On the other hand, on Dr Craig's account, your run-of-the-mill serial killer in America, who spent his life raping and torturing children, need only come to God, come to Jesus on Death Row, and after a final meal of fried chicken, he's going to spend an eternity in heaven, after death. One thing should be crystal clear to you, this vision of life has absolutely nothing to do with moral accountability.

Please notice the double standard that people like Dr Craig use to exonerate God from all this evil. We're told that God is kind and loving and just and intrinsically good, but when someone like me points out the rather compelling evidence that God is cruel and unjust because he visits suffering on innocent people of a scope and scale that would embarrass the most ambitious psychopath, we're told that God is mysterious. Who can understand God's will? This merely human understanding of God's will is precisely what believers use to establish his goodness in the first place. If something good happens to a Christian, he feels some bliss while praying, say, or he sees some positive changes in his life, then we're told that God is good. But when children by the tens of thousands are torn from their parents' arms and drowned, we're told that God is mysterious. This is how you [Christians] play tennis without the net.

And I want to suggest to you that it is not only tiresome, when otherwise intelligent people speak this way, it is morally reprehensible. This kind of faith is the perfection of narcissism; God loves me, don't you know? He cured me of my eczema. He makes me feel so good while singing in church. And just when we were giving up hope he found a banker who was willing to give my mother a mortgage. Given all that this God of yours doesn't accomplish in the lives of others, given the misery that's being imposed on some helpless child at this instance, this kind of faith is obscene. To think in this way is to fail to reason honestly, or to care sufficiently for the suffering of other human beings.

And if God is good and loving and just and kind, and he wanted to guide us morally with a book, why give us a book that supports slavery; why give us a book that admonishes us to kill people for imaginary crimes like witchcraft? Now, of course, there are ways of not taking these questions to heart. According to Dr Craig's Divine Command theory, God is not bound by moral duties, God does not have to be good, whatever He commands is good, so whenever He commands the Israelites to slaughter the Amalekites, that behaviour becomes intrinsically good because He commanded it.

Here we're being offered a psychopathic and psychotic moral attitude. Psychotic because it's completely delusional, there is no reason to believe that we live in a universe ruled over by an invisible monster, Yahweh. But is is psychopathic because this is a total detachment from the well-being of human beings, that so easily rationalises the slaughter of children.

I should point out here that the well-being of humans is being ignored by theists in this world, because of the pre-occupation with the afterlife, for which there is absolutely no evidence.

Just think about the Muslims, at this moment, who are blowing themselves up convinced that they are agents of God's will. There is absolutely nothing that Dr Craig can say against their behaviour in moral terms apart from his own faith based claim that they're praying to the wrong God.

If they had the right God what they were doing would be good, on Divine Command theory.

Now, I'm obviously not saying that Dr Craig or religious people are all psychopaths and psychotic, but this to me is the true horror of religion. It allows perfectly decent and sane people to believe by the billions what only lunatics could believe on their own. if you wake up tomorrow morning, thinking that saying a few Latin words over your pancakes is going to turn them into the body of Elvis Presley, you've lost your mind. But if you think more or less the same thing about a cracker and the body of Jesus, you're just a Catholic.

A good demonstration of how religion legitimises ridiculous beliefs.

And I'm not the first person to notice that it's a very strange loving God that would make salvation depend on believing in him on bad evidence. If you lived two thousand years ago, there was evidence galore and he was just performing miracles but apparently he got tired of being so helpful. And so now we all inherit this very heavy burden of the doctrine's implausibility, and the effort to square it with what we now know about the cosmos and what we know about the all too human origins of scripture, it becomes more and more difficult. It's not just the generic God that Dr Craig is recommending, it's God the Father and Jesus the Son. Christianity, on Dr Craig's account, is the true moral wealth of the world.

I hate to break it to you here at Notre Dame: Christianity is a cult of human sacrifice. Christianity is not a religion that repudiates human sacrifice, it is a religion that celebrates a single human sacrifice as though it were effective. God so loved the world that he gave his only Son - John 3:16. The idea is that Jesus suffered crucifixion so none may suffer hell. Except those billions in India. And billions like them throughout history.

This doctrine is astride a contemptible history of scientific ignorance and religious barbarism. We come from people who used to bury children in the foundations of new buildings as offerings to their imaginary gods. Just think about that. In vast numbers of societies, people would bury children in postholes, people like ourselves thinking that this would prevent an invisible being from knocking down their buildings. These are the sorts of people who wrote the Bible.

If there is a less moral framework than the one Dr Craig is proposing, I haven't heard of it.

Well said, Sam, imho.

A Compliant Quisling?

2011-04-06T06:33:00.000-07:00

So the Astronomer Royal has won this year's Templeton Prize, worth a cool £1,000,000.

Sir Martin Rees has given this interview to The Guardian, and it contains some interesting quotes. He says he doesn't have a view on what the Templeton Prize achieves. When pushed, he says:

They are very nice people who are doing things which are within their agenda, but their agenda is really very broad. I should say that I was reassured by the rather good piece in Nature a few weeks ago, which talked about the Foundation and I found that reassuring. Certainly Cambridge University, I know, has received grants from Templeton for editing Darwin's correspondence, which is a big Cambridge project, and also for some mathematical conferences. They support a range of purely scientific issues.

This is a rather disappointing comment. It suggests that because people are nice, their agenda doesn't matter. Certainly Templeton's agenda is broad, in the sense that it tries to affect a wide range of disciplines, but it's not broad in its world view. It looks to encourage theism and spirituality, and, more worryingly, it looks to insert faith into scientific work. That should worry Rees. For example, he also says:

...I think doing science makes me realise that even the simplest things are pretty hard to understand and that makes me suspicious of people who believe they've got anything more than an incomplete and metaphorical understanding of any deep aspect of reality. And also I see human beings as not the culmination, but only a stage in the marvellous unfolding of evolution, because the timeline ahead is as long as the time that has lapsed up to now. Those are respects in which my professional interests affect my response to dogmatic religion.

That's well said, and works against faith and the idea that we can have a divine access to the truth, a heavenly broadband connection. Indeed, dogmatic religion is something of a tautology, certainly in the Western tradition. He goes on:

I won't comment on him [Dawkins!], but I'm not allergic to religion. I would say two things. One is that I think all of us are concerned about fanaticism and fundamentalism and we need all the allies we can muster against it. And I would see Rowan Williams et al as being on our side. I admire them more than want to rubbish them.

Rowan Williams on our side? What about the Pope? These people preach misogynistic and homophobic lies for dogmatic reasons, so it's difficult to see how they could be on the side of any right-thinking person. But, of course, they may be nice people for a cup of tea and a sit down, so that's all right then. I'm happy to say that I'm allergic to misogyny and homophobia.

Another point is if you are teaching Muslim sixth formers in a school and you tell them they can't have their God and Darwin, there is a risk they will choose their God and be lost to science. So those are two respects where I would disagree with the emphasis of the professional atheists, as it were.

'Professional' atheists don't say that people cannot believe in God and Darwin; plainly they can. They say that the science is incompatible with most of the claims of the major religions. which is a fact unless one is prepared to indulge in the sort of epistemological relativism that leaves us impotent to move forward. I wonder if Rees can think of a downside to saying that they can have God and Darwin?

Rees does betray some militant tendencies:

Science teachers have to address them [Creationism and ID] if they are brought up, but I am rather opposed to faith schools in general.

That strikes me as quite strident. But he says further:

Interviewer: If there is a clear and obvious boundary between science and religion, how does religion come to be used in these contexts?

MR: I try to avoid getting into these science and religion debates.

He's avoided these debates to the tune of £1,000,000!

But, of course, he hasn't avoided them; he's accommodated, as you can see from the replies immediately before this one. Now, I don't see that there is anything he's done other than a little light accommodation to warrant the prize, so there's no corruption of science here. He's just a good scientist who believes a little in belief, and I dare say always has, regardless of Templeton. Before talking about the science he says:

I am sorry you focused on science and religion rather than what I think are the interesting things I do.

A rather naive thing to say when you've just banked a large sum of money for accommodating religion. It would be a shame indeed if this overshadowed his science.

Cross Purposes

2011-03-23T13:57:00.000-07:00

The European court of Human Rights has allowed an appeal by Italy to allow the display of crucifixes in public schools. The judgement can be read here.

I think this is about where the line is drawn for member states to reinforce their cultural worldview. Religion should be disallowed, because a plurality of beliefs is inevitable in a modern Europe, so a religious component would be an unacceptable infringement of minority rights. This is the secular way, and these European organs are supposed to be secular. Sadly, the court here has ruled to allow such an infringement. Here are paras 67 and 68:

67. The Government, for their part, explained that the presence of crucifixes in State-school classrooms, being the result of Italy's historical development, a fact which gave it not only a religious connotation but also an identity-linked one, now corresponded to a tradition which they considered it important to perpetuate. They added that, beyond its religious meaning, the crucifix symbolised the principles and values which formed the foundation of democracy and western civilisation, and that its presence in classrooms was justifiable on that account.
68. The Court takes the view that the decision whether or not to perpetuate a tradition falls in principle within the margin of appreciation of the respondent State. The Court must moreover take into account the fact that Europe is marked by a great diversity between the States of which it is composed, particularly in the sphere of cultural and historical development. It emphasises, however, that the reference to a tradition cannot relieve a Contracting State of its obligation to respect the rights and freedoms enshrined in the Convention and its Protocols.

So Italy point out that the crucifix is an 'identity-linked' symbol, clearly trying to get round the secular problem. The next para rules that it's within Italy's 'margin of appreciation'. In other words, it's something that the member state can rule on, presumably because they accept that it is not a purely religious symbol, and, in any case, they see no evidence it has any (religious?) effect.

Look at the crucifix above, at St James Academy, Lenexa, Kansas. It's designed to make an impact:

When asked to describe her first reaction to the new crucifix at St. James Academy, Mrs. Nearmyer said, “Wow. How would I explain it? Sadness, I had a hard time breathing, it took my breath away.” She felt like she couldn’t leave Him alone with his suffering, and was overcome with sadness.

No kidding.

The dissenting opinion starts at page 47, observing:

5. The crucifix is undeniably a religious symbol. The respondent Government argued that, in the context of the school environment, the crucifix symbolised the religious origin of values that had now become secular, such as tolerance and mutual respect. It thus fulfilled a highly educational symbolic function, irrespective of the religion professed by the pupils, because it was the expression of an entire civilisation and universal values. In my view, the presence of the crucifix in classrooms goes well beyond the use of symbols in particular historical contexts. The Court has moreover held that the traditional nature, in the social and historical sense, of a text used by members of parliament when swearing loyalty did not deprive the oath to be sworn of its religious nature. As observed by the Chamber, negative freedom of religion is not restricted to the absence of religious services or religious education. It also extends to symbols expressing a belief or a religion. That negative right deserves special protection if it is the State which displays a religious symbol and dissenters are placed in a situation from which they cannot extract themselves. Even if it is accepted that the crucifix can have multiple meanings, the religious meaning still remains the predominant one. In the context of state education it is necessarily perceived as an integral part of the school environment and may even be considered as a powerful external symbol. I note, moreover, that even the Italian Court of Cassation rejected the argument that the crucifix symbolised values independent of a particular religious belief (see paragraph 67).

...and concludes:

8. To conclude, effective protection of the rights guaranteed by Article 2 of Protocol No. 1 and Article 9 of the Convention requires States to observe the strictest denominational neutrality. This is not limited to the school curriculum, but also extends to “the school environment”. As primary and secondary schooling are compulsory, the State should not impose on pupils, against their will and without their being able to extract themselves, the symbol of a religion with which they do not identify. In doing so, the respondent Government have violated Article 2 of Protocol No. 1 and Article 9 of the Convention.

I agree with the dissenting opinion. On the plus side, for Eurosceptics, it shows that European institutions are quite happy to leave such things to the discretion of its members. It's a shame that it's secularism that suffers from such discretion. And of course, for that reason, this isn't good news for the religious, since it means that majority religious institutions will trump minority ones. Evangelicals in Italy have spotted this:

Their coreligionists – evangelicals who actually live in Italy – aren’t so pleased with the outcome. The Italian Federation of Evangelical Churches called the ruling “a decision that does not fully realize a secular state” and “baggage from a society dominated by Catholic culture.”

Perhaps these abuses of secularism will finally convince the religious why secularism is the only way to proceed in our modern pluralist societies.

There's a Ruse Loose Aboot this Hoose

2011-03-21T10:23:00.000-07:00

Michael 'rhymes with goose' Ruse has written a tragic bit of hyperbole over at the Chronicle of Higher Education: New Atheism: A Disaster Comparable to the Tea Party.

What's this? A disaster comparable to the Tea Party?

Do the New Atheists deny science, like Tea Party-ists? Er no.

Do the New Atheists have racist views, like Tea Party-ists? Er, no.

Are they organised in a way designed to achieve political office, like the Tea Party movement, to impose their anti-science, bigoted, libertarian views on the rest of their society? Er, no

So how are they "a disaster comparable to the Tea Party"?

... because they won’t make any effort to think seriously about why they hold their positions about the conflict between science and religion.

That's it? No bodies buried in concrete? No Stalin-like accusations? It seems an oddly esoteric concern with which to brow-beat them. And he backs this assertion up with... nothing; but a vague accusation:

I think if you want to show that science and religion are inherently in contradiction, then you should show why people like Kuhn (and indeed Foucault) are wrong about the nature of science. That I think is morally wrong, namely taking positions with major political and social implications, without doing your serious homework. Just mentioning Galileo’s troubles with the Church or Thomas Henry Huxley’s debate with the Bishop of Oxford is no true substitute for hard thinking.

He doesn't make explicit here his criticism, but perhaps it's that a defining feature of the New Atheists is that they haven't thought through the implications of scientific contingency as it affects the science and religion conflict; that, presumably something rather relativistic must allow that science and religion are ideas competing in the ocean of human ideas, and one cannot be given primacy over the other.

Richard Dawkins has written The God Delusion to counter popular ideas of God and The Greatest Show on Earth to combat creationist misrepresentations of evolution. This doesn't seem like the actions of someone who hasn't thought seriously about why he holds his position on the conflict between science and religion.

Daniel Dennett wrote Darwin's Dangerous Idea, examining the implications for religion of the science of Evolution. This doesn't seem like the actions of someone who hasn't thought seriously about why he holds his position on the conflict between science and religion.

Sam Harris has written The Moral Landscape, looking at a scientific approach to morality. This doesn't seem like the actions of someone who hasn't thought seriously about why he holds his position on the conflict between science and religion.

Christopher Hitchens wrote God is Not Great, looking at the problems religion has caused, and its supposed justifications. This doesn't seem like the actions of someone who hasn't thought seriously about why he holds his position on the conflict between science and religion.

Victor Stenger wrote God: The Failed Hypothesis, detailing how science shows that God does not exist. This doesn't seem like the actions of someone who hasn't thought seriously about why he holds his position on the conflict between science and religion.

Jerry Coyne has started many threads on the compatibility of science and religion. This doesn't seem like the actions of someone who hasn't thought seriously about why he holds his position on the conflict between science and religion.

Ophelia Benson has hosted numerous threads and articles on The Conflict Thesis. This doesn't seem like the actions of someone who hasn't thought seriously about why she holds her position on the conflict between science and religion.

Now they all may be wrong (although I agree with them). But it is simply untrue that they haven't 'thought seriously' about the conflict between science and religion.

So first he compares the New Atheists to a genuinely harmful political movement, when they are plainly not causing the same harms as that movement, and then his reason for doing so is a straw man of positively Edward Woodward proportions.

No wonder most atheists consider his views worthless.

Why Are Jews So Angry?

2011-03-13T17:59:00.000-07:00

Rabbi David Wolpe asks Why are Atheists so Angry? Good question. I've often wondered why Jews are so angry too.

John's Gospel says:

42 Jesus said unto them [the Jews], If God were your Father, ye would love me: for I proceeded forth and came from God; neither came I of myself, but he sent me.
43 Why do ye not understand my speech? even because ye cannot hear my word.
44 Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do: he was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own: for he is a liar, and the father of it.
45 And because I tell you the truth, ye believe me not.

'Ye are of your father the devil'. Jesus says the Jews are the spawn of the devil.

Justinian Law in the 6th century outlawed non-belief in the resurrection, rendering Jewish belief illegal. St Augustine said:

But the Jews who slew Him, and would not believe in Him, because it behoved Him to die and rise again, were yet more miserably wasted by the Romans, and utterly rooted out from their kingdom, where aliens had already ruled over them, and were dispersed through the lands (so that indeed there is no place where they are not), and are thus by their own Scriptures a testimony to us that we have not forged the prophecies about Christ.

Blood libel became commonplace, as Christians persecuted Jewish communities nonsensically. Socrates Scholasticus reported that some Jews in a drunken frolic bound a Christian child on a cross in mockery of the death of Christ and scourged him until he died.

In 1171, Blois was the site of a blood libel accusation against its Jewish community that led to 31 Jews (by some accounts 40) being burned to death.

Thomas of Cantimpré wrote "It is quite certain that the Jews of every province annually decide by lot which congregation or city is to send Christian blood to the other congregations." Thomas also believed that since the time when the Jews called out to Pontius Pilate, "His blood be on us, and on our children" (Matthew 27:25), they have been afflicted with hemorrhages." - Bonum Universale de Apibus ii. 29, § 23

In February 1840, at Damascus, a Catholic monk named Father Thomas and his servant were murdered. The accusation of ritual murder was brought against members of the Jewish community of Damascus.

In 1882, the Jews of the village Tiszaeszlár, Hungary were accused with the ritual murder of a fourteen-year-old Christian girl, Eszter Solymosi. The case was one of the main causes of the rise of antisemitism in the country. The accused persons were eventually acquitted.

In 1928, the Jews of Massena, New York, were falsely accused of kidnapping and killing a Christian girl in the Massena blood libel.

During a speech in 2007, Raed Salah, the leader of the northern branch of the Islamic Movement in Israel, accused Jews of using children's blood to bake bread. "We have never allowed ourselves to knead [the dough for] the bread that breaks the fast in the holy month of Ramadan with children's blood," he said. "Whoever wants a more thorough explanation, let him ask what used to happen to some children in Europe, whose blood was mixed in with the dough of the [Jewish] holy bread."

Accusations of host desecration leveled against Jews were a common pretext for massacres and expulsions throughout the Middle Ages in Europe.

Out of these centuries of Jewish persecution, the Holocaust sent 6 million Jews to their untimely deaths.

Yeah, so, on reflection I've a pretty good idea why Jews, and atheists, are angry at these things. The real question is: why doesn't Rabbi David Wolpe understand this?

H/T Sam Harris.

Lying for Jesus

2011-03-05T18:43:00.000-08:00

I wrote before about the "Tom Johnson" affair, wherein a blog was started by a supposed atheist-butter, bizarrely obsessed with the tone and conduct of new atheists. He indulged in passive-aggressive posting and sock puppetry, and targeted one or two gnu atheists, such as Ophelia Benson. Even after his exposure as a fraud, his identity wasn't revealed.

But Ophelia was on the ball and recently noticed a recognisable signature in the postings of a new commenter called 'Hammill'; she followed up her suspicions, and confirmed it was TJ again.

Because of this perfidy she has also revealed his true identity: Wally Smith, a Grad student at the University of Alabama. And now, Oedipus, who was a catalyst for the original exposure, has presented evidence to show that it seems he is a theist, or at least, contra TJ, was brought up Christian, and Ophelia confirms it.

I suppose one shouldn't be surprised at such immoral behaviour from a theist, but it's indicative of the lengths at least one is prepared to go to, if this is true, to attack new atheism. This is subterfuge on a pretty staggering scale. I guess we should be relieved it's just cyber-terrorism, however. I'm afraid I see a logical connection between belief in salvation after death and this sort of behaviour. When a person prioritises eternal happiness over earthly happiness, action dilemmas will be resolved against the best outcome in this world, in favour of the other (non-existent, as it happens) world. We see this in the actions of theists around the world, in support of doctrine over good sense.

I've always assumed a certain number of atheist-butters are in fact theists and I guess it's to be expected. In future, however, I think well known atheist bloggers will be on the lookout for anonymous commenters who seem oh-so-keen to cosy up to the faithful; without provenance, from now on it must be assumed they could well be believers.

In the meantime, file this under 'theism doesn't make theists behave well'.

Blind Leading the Blind

2011-02-16T09:40:00.000-08:00

Alister McGrath has written another vacuous piece attacking the new atheists. He seems unhealthily obsessed with them.

It's an extended exercise in equivocation on the meaning of faith. He starts by complaining how the naughty new atheists caricature faith:

One of the core New Atheist assertions, endlessly and uncritically repeated on New Atheist websites, is Richard Dawkins's dogmatic statement that faith is "blind trust, in the absence of evidence, even in the teeth of evidence."

...and:

For Dawkins, this means that faith counts as a "form of mental illness." This nasty intellectual perversion is limited to religious people. "Faith, being belief that isn't based on evidence, is the principal vice of any religion."

Fair enough (except it's obviously not limited to religious people, and I have no idea who would say that - the quote doesn't say that); generally speaking the faithful I've met do make the leap of faith in the face of evidence to the contrary; that is certainly how I became a theist. But it's true also that other theists claim a different basis for their belief, including, apparently, McGrath. Since it's not "blind trust, in the absence of evidence, even in the teeth of evidence", it must be because of evidence, mustn't it?

Faith is based on reason, yet not limited to the somewhat meagre truths that reason can actually prove.

So McGrath agrees with the new atheists that faith goes beyond reason! Welcome aboard. Except in one particular; that the truths that reason 'proves' (to be charitable, let's allow that in the non-scientific sense) are 'meagre'. These 'meagre' truths, of which McGrath is so contemptuous, include:

Man was not fashioned from dust and woman from his spare rib
The Earth was not magicked into being before there was any light
Women are not subservient to men
Homosexuals are not doing anything wrong
All religions cannot all be right; they can all be wrong
There is no need to take what another person says on trust
Freedom of belief is a good thing, and religions usually only encourage belief in themselves
Freedom of expression is a good thing, and religions usually discourage questioning of belief

McGrath goes on:

It is not a blind leap into the dark, but a joyful discovery of a bigger picture of things, of which we are part. It is complex and rich idea [sic], which goes far beyond simply asserting or holding that certain things are true.

If it's a joyful discovery of a bigger picture of things, then why can it not be demonstrated? Here's the thing; theists 'discover' bigger pictures all the time. They either relate to reality or are a figment of their imagination. How to decide? Of course, there's only one answer to that, and McGrath won't like it.

Theists present multifarious and contradictory 'bigger pictures' to non-believers, and then moan at them for quibbling about evidence. If we are to accept McGrath's word without evidence, then we may just as well accept a Muslim's, a Jew's, a Scientologist's or Al Queda's. Theists then say, no, you must discover it yourself. No, no, and again, no. Without reason and evidence one cannot be sure one isn't fooling *oneself* any more than the many theists clearly are. To think anything else is to adopt the arrogant mantle of omniscience. Far from being scientistic, new atheists are simply being modest in their claims to knowledge; while theists presume to know more than their fellows. Such hubris.

McGrath promises more of this drivel, so it's going to be a long road to Golgotha.

Templetonia

2011-02-15T07:02:00.000-08:00

After many recent 'Science and Religion' accommodations, noticed by folk like Jerry Coyne and Ophelia Benson, often centring around the activities of the Templeton Foundation, one becomes sensitive to any hints of agenda setting from that source.

Taner Edis highlights the sort of misunderstanding that has been successfully propagated by those who are Templeton beneficiaries. He's been reading Paul Froese and Christopher Bader's America's Four Gods, and quotes them saying:

Although the arguments of the New Atheists are certainly engaging, they tend to misrepresent the current relationships among science, progressivism, and belief in God. Today, Democrats and cultural progressives are overwhelmingly likely to believe in God. Many professional scientists are also devout believers. In sum, a large swath of America is religiously devout, politically liberal, and scientifically savvy—three things we are told cannot go together.

This makes the usual mistake of equating accommodationism between science and religion with the ability for individuals to accommodate both science and religion. This latter fact has always been true, and will no doubt continue to be, for some people, but it has no bearing on their respective epistemic standings. Science is the most reliable way of knowing we have discovered, whereas religion has had almost no success as a way of knowing. In fact, it would appear that anything that religions say that is true, such as certain moral rules, pre-dates those religions. If they have 'discovered' anything that didn't pre-date them (and I cannot think of anything right now), any such discovery would be accidental, because they have no method of justifying their beliefs; the beliefs would simply be held dogmatically.

Froese and Bader's reference to many professional scientists being devout believers is a little dubious; maybe it relates to some research from another Templeton beneficiary, Elaine Ecklund. She claims that fifty percent of scientists are traditionally religious, but as Jason Rosenhaus points out, the data disagrees:

Asked about their beliefs in God, 34% chose “I don't believe in God,” while 30% chose, “I do not know if there is a God, and there is no way to find out.” That's 64% who are atheist or agnostic, as compared to just 6% of the general public.
An additional 8% opted for, “I believe in a higher power, but it is not God.” That makes 72% of scientists who are explicitly non-theistic in their religious views (compared to 16% of the public generally.) Pretty stark.

The worry with Templeton funding is the corrupting influence it may have on the good conduct of science. Tom Rees notes just how bad a Templeton funded divine healing research project, run by Candice Brown, Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Indiana University, and published last year, is:

It's a useless study, then. Now, a lot of people set out to do useless studies, but mostly they don't get funded or published. So what happened here?
Well, it won't surprise you to learn that the Templeton Foundation paid for this pitiful charade of science. They got their money's worth, though, in terms of gullible press headlines.

And the journal (the Southern Medical Journal) that published this nonsense?

They publish a lot of stuff on prayer - 137 articles in the last 5 years alone.

Not too surprising; a simple search on 'prayer' at Templeton yields 4 projects with a total funding of $4.5m. And this doesn't include the Candice Brown study that Rees mentions, since it's been funded from the Flame of Love project, another Templeton waste of money, doing 'Scientific Research on the Experience and Expression of Godly Love in the Pentecostal Tradition', to the tune of $2,326,362.

To draw from this feeble research the, admittedly tentative, conclusion that 'proximity could be the key to success' of prayer is laughable. That money is wasted on so many theo-scientific projects, that could be used to deliver genuine medical advances using real science, is a crying shame.

A Gender Setting Agenda Setting

2011-01-28T07:16:00.000-08:00

Image by Getty Images via @daylife

Sian Massey has been withdrawn from this weekend's game at Corby Town in the Blue Square League.

This is through no fault of her own, but due to the massive media attention brought on by Andy Gray's and Richard Key's ignorant and prejudiced comments on her abilities as an official in a football match. Rather brilliantly, she showed herself to be very good at the job, although even if she had made errors that wouldn't justify the sexism displayed by Gray and Keys; she's allowed to be human.

A major part of the problem here is that their comments come as no surprise to me; I play football regularly and if I pulled up every player who made non politically correct remarks I'd have no time to play any football. Sexism is rife in the game, and probably many other sports. It's good that these two have become high profile victims of their own prejudices, to highlight this endemic problem. I'm not entirely sure one instance of casual sexism is sufficient to warrant summary sacking, but this incident, and this, show that these are not aberrations; it reflects their normal behaviour. And while that can be allowed in the private sphere, in the public sphere, including the workplace, it's completely unacceptable. I don't believe for a second that these are the first such incidents in the last 20 years of Sky football broadcasting. Why has it taken this long to come to light? Richard Keys suggested there were dark forces at work, possibly alluding to the phone hacking scandal - Andy Gray is suing the News of the World for breach of privacy. But such prehistoric attitudes must have been condoned, or overlooked, for decades, so one cannot be hopeful that sexism can be rooted out just by sacking these two offenders.

Which brings me back to poor Sian Massey, a blameless individual who doesn't have the benefit of years of fat salary cheques to fall back on, and whose career has been temporarily blighted by this controversy. Here's hoping she can be given full support to return to her duties. How wonderful if she could progress and referee the World Cup Final eventually? Good luck to her.

Morecambe & Wise Can Stay in Hotel, Court Rules

2011-01-18T18:01:00.000-08:00

The welcome news that a gay couple have won their case for unfair discrimination against the Bulls, of the Chymorvah Hotel, near Penzance, who refused to let them share a double bed, has provoked predictably hysterical responses from Christians. This case was brought under the Equality Act 2010, which consolidated Britain's previously diverse laws on discrimination, and looks to ensure that Morecambe and Wise, and Laurel and Hardy, as well as civil partners, can seek accommodation (and engage with other businesses) without fear of censure, humiliation and no roof over their heads. In fact, in my youth, penury drove me to share double beds with my mates on occasion, for anything but carnal purposes.

One of the problems with this whole area is the equivocation between discrimination and unfair discrimination - 'discrimination' is often used as a shortened version for the unfair one. And the Act doesn't help too much; the preamble includes:

...to reform and harmonise equality law and restate the greater part of the enactments relating to discrimination and harassment related to certain personal characteristics...

Clearly there is a presumption that discrimination based on personal characteristics is unfair. The judgement stated the law as it stands:

For the purposes of these Regulations, a person (“A”) discriminates against another (“B”) if, on the grounds of the sexual orientation of B or any other person except A, A treats B less favourably than he treats or would treat others (in cases where there is no material difference in the relevant circumstances) .

And hear the unfairness is made as clear as it ever is ('unfair' doesn't feature in the Act); to treat someone less favourably because of x, where x is a personal characteristic.

The relevant protected characteristics are age, disability, gender reassignment, race, religion or belief, sex and sexual orientation. So, conversely, a gay couple running a hotel couldn't refuse entry to Christians because of their homophobic beliefs; more debatable, this, I think, since beliefs are far more variable and self determining than sexual orientation. But, on balance, I'd rather err on the liberal side on that one, and agree with the Act.

Anglican blogger Cranmer brings up an interesting conundrum; how can we tell if the Bulls are prejudiced? It's plain we cannot tell exactly, and as long as we resist the thought police, we never shall. But laws must operate on actions, and the actions of the Bulls were unfairly discriminating, so the law can conclude that their actions were prejudicial. If the Bulls maintain they love all things homosexual or, more reasonably, are indifferent to them, fair enough. But the law cannot act on that.

Christians disingenuously point out that unmarried heterosexuals are also banned, so the ruling should not apply. But that is a bogus argument; Christian disqualification of gay marriage ensures the effect is discriminatory. The Act explicitly equates marriage and civil partnership in any case, making the legal case invalid too.

Cranmer objects to (Director of Stonewall) Ben Summerskill's words:

Religious freedom shouldn't be used as a cloak for prejudice.

Why would anyone think that religious freedom was being used as a cloak for prejudice?

Here are a few of the comments:

Rebel Saint says:

The gay mafia are well organised and have lots of friends in high places due to their over representation in the media. However the feeling amongst the population at large - particularly the C2DE's - is still disgust and antipathy (go read the comments on the Sky News website for example). Alas, they can't be bothered to vote so the gay mafia win.

Bred in the Bone says:

They should inform all guest both hetro and homo that buggery is unacceptable on these premises without discriminating.

Then when guests check just ask them do they like it up the arse.

Oswin said:

Bred in the bone

Tee hee ... harrumphs! :o)

And in a subsequent post, English Viking said:

Homosexualists are perfectly capable of getting married, and having children for that matter.

They have exactly the same choice as a normal person; marry a nice lass.

PS Don't call me a bigot for the use of the word 'normal'. It won't work.

No, I can't imagine what gives people the idea that religious freedom is being used as a cover for prejudice.

Finally, Commenter Anabaptist makes clear again the theist obsession with theocracy, just as Catholics and Muslims all too often do:

Christians need to continue to act according to their faith, neither expecting nor demanding privileged treatment by the state, and taking the consequences as did Jesus and Paul. 'We should obey God rather than men,' is the principle that was applied by the apostles, and it needs to be ours.

If anyone honestly believes this, then it renders them a fifth columnist in their own country, prepared to usurp its properly made laws in favour of a barbarous tradition. It's the same madness that drives Catholics to protect paedophiles and Islamists to blow up innocent commuters.

It is simply evil.

Government cares more for Tiddles than for You

2011-01-07T17:40:00.000-08:00

Image via Wikipedia

A little while back I published some correspondence with Francis Maude, my MP and now Minister for the Cabinet Office and Paymaster General, discussing the report on homeopathy by the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee. I urged him to back their conclusions and to stop allowing public money to be spent on a treatment that hasn't been shown to work. In his reply he said:

Where a doctor and a patient believe that a homeopathic treatment may be of benefit to the patient, I believe doctors should be free to prescribe that medicine. All therapies should be considered equally, and decisions on whether or not to provide them on the NHS should be evidence-based, as is the case with all other conventional medicines and treatments.

He took the approach that patient choice was an important aspect in the provision of homeopathy. One wonders, if someone requested hoodoo, or sexual healing, would he be so keen to support patient choice? I wrote back to him pointing out this paragraph from the report:

The Government’s position on homeopathy is confused. On the one hand, it accepts that homeopathy is a placebo treatment. This is an evidence-based view. On the other hand, it funds homeopathy on the NHS without taking a view on the ethics of providing placebo treatments. We argue that this undermines the relationship between NHS doctors and their patients, reduces real patient choice and puts patients’ health at risk. The Government should stop allowing the funding of homeopathy on the NHS.

...noting that the Committee's position was that homeopathy reduced patient choice. He replied:

I think this argument you refer to is flawed. The argument goes that patient choice is meaningless when patients are not properly informed about the implications of the treatments they are selecting, and thus diminishes "real" patient choice.

In arguing this, the Select Committee pass judgement on homeopathic treatments, labelling them a "phoney" or "fake" choice. I am not a medical expert, and would not like to make judgements of this kind in the place of experienced medical professionals. GPs rightly should provide information to patients about different treatments, and must be held to account for the decisions they and their patients make under their advisement. I would not seek to undermine this critically important relationship in this way.

It is difficult to see how taking this choice away from GPs and patients could constitute an increase in choice; in my opinion this is simply taking choice away.

Should patients also be supported by the NHS if they choose urine therapy too? Or would that be taking the piss? Of course, the major flaw here is that GPs are in no position to judge the efficacy of any particular treatment either; that is determined by peer-reviewed clinical trials. Despite not being a medical expert himself, and apparently unacquainted with the science, he still sees fit to support public funding of a treatment that hasn't been shown to work. So far, so inconsistent.

But now the government has decided to add another layer of inconsistency on top of this watered down approach. DEFRA have clamped down on the use of homeopathic remedies for animals:

Some herbal and homeopathic products are claiming medicinal benefits without scientific proof, meaning they may not properly treat or prevent serious diseases, leaving pets at risk.

The Veterinary Medicines Directorate’s (VMD) Director of Operations, John FitzGerald, said:

“Some of these products are claiming to be effective and safe when no scientific evidence has been presented to us to show they are.

“Animal owners have a right to know if a product does what it claims. The products claim to treat diseases which can cause serious welfare problems and in some circumstances kill animals if not properly treated. So in some cases owners are giving remedies to their pets which don’t treat the problem.”

Bizarre; so these are the Government's current recommendations:

Animal owners cannot choose a homeopathic remedy in conjunction with their vet, because no scientific evidence has been presented to show they are effective and safe, but...
Patients can choose a homeopathic remedy in conjunction with their doctor, even though no scientific evidence has been presented to show they are effective and safe.

The government clearly doesn't care about our welfare as much as our pets'.

And note that they even allow us the freedom of choice to catch malaria; oh, sweet liberty!

Catholic FAQ

2011-01-01T01:00:00.000-08:00

(Laminate and issue to all Catholic congregations)

If I fall pregnant and suffer a life threatening illness that requires an abortion to save me, can I secure that life-saving treatment?

There's good news and bad news. The good news is that an indirect abortion, whereby treatment of the illness has the double effect of aborting the baby*, is allowed. The bad news is that if the only treatment available requires a direct abortion, involving an action to end the life of the baby*, that is not allowed. You, and your baby*, must die, which is the greater good.

If I'm serving the community and advising on such abortions, what will happen to me if I approve an abortion that the Church considers direct?

You will be summarily excommunicated, which is the greater good.

If a priest abuses children in his care, what will happen to him?

He will be given pastoral care and help to re-integrate into the community. Well, a nearby community, anyway, which is the greater good.

If I discover that a priest is abusing children in his care, what will happen if I inform the local authorities?

You will be summarily excommunicated, which is the greater good.

If I'm married and my spouse contracts HIV, can I wear a condom to prevent catching the fatal disease?

There's good news and bad news. The good news is that you could become a prostitute and your spouse could then procure your services for sex, in which case condom use would be seen as a step on the road to a greater morality. The bad news is that if you simply want to have a loving conjugal relationship, condom use is a mortal sin, so you must risk contracting the fatal disease, which is the greater good.

I've got five children already and cannot afford any more, but I still want to enjoy full conjugal relations; can I use artificial contraceptives to avoid falling pregnant?

No; you may use hit and miss methods, such as the rhythm method, or refrain from sexual relations altogether, which is the greater good.

If I contract a terminal illness that removes all vestiges of humanity and dignity from my dying days, can I take charge of my life and end my inhumane and undignified existence?

This is all bad news, I'm afraid, which we like to call 'good news'. The answer is No, which is the greater good.

I'm a homosexual. Can I...?

Stop there. No, which is the greater good.

*We mean foetus.