Hit and Myth

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.

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The Power of the Bible

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.

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Orders must be followed, however evil

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.

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Reason-able?

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!

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More Rees Pudding

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.

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Harris on Divine Morality

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.

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A Compliant Quisling?

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.

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