Setting the record straight on atheism and agnosticism

The author of this recent article from Slate is seriously mistaken: http://www.slate.com/id/2258484/

Atheists share only one thing in common: freethinking nonbelief in the existence of a supernatural deity. That’s it. Some atheists may believe that science will eventually answer the question of "why there is something from nothing?" but certainly not all. Atheists make no positive claims and bear no burden of proof. We are merely skeptics who are all technically agnostics in the sense that most (including Richard Dawkins) admit the possibility of a supernatural creator, we just don’t see any evidence to support it.

I am probably best described as an “atheist agnostic”. This article provides a decent explanation: http://atheism.about.com/od/aboutagnosticism/a/atheism.htm

If I believe anything, it is that there are things that are forever beyond our comprehension in much the same way as a spider will never understand the theory of special relativity. What I don’t understand is why people feel the need to fill the gap of the unknown with a sky daddy!

Worship is a bit of an overkill. Wouldn't a "really big thanks" suffice?

Vanderbilt philosopher Scott F. Aikin has written a great essay entitled The Problem of Worship which appears in the current edition of Think. The essay (which can be accessed online here: http://people.vanderbilt.edu/~scott.f.aikin/The%20Problem%20of%20Worship.pdf) puts forward the thesis that we shouldn't worship god because we shouldn't worship anything. He then proceeds with a logical argument that convincely results in a finding that there is no god.

Christopher Hitchens has been packing lecture halls for years with his "the idea of god is totalitarian" shtick. However, it's refreshing to see someone like Aikin present a coherent anaylsis of what I think most people already understand intuitively.

Readers also might be interested in one critique of the essay by Micah Tillman (currently a Ph.D. candidate in the School of Philosophy at the Catholic University of America) that resulted from my twitter posting of the link: http://micahtillman.com/2010/06/28/must-one-worship-god/ I don't agree with Tillman but he is one smart cookie. Quite frankly, you have to be smart to navigate the intellectual dissonance created by trying to reconcile belief in the tenets of Christianity with reasoning like Aikin's.

What happens if you write an atheist column in Ontario's Bible belt

I received this message on at 8:30 a.m. on the morning that this column ran in my local newspaper: http://www.atheistmissionary.com/2010/06/introducing-irreligiosity.html

Hi, it's [name withheld - the father of one of my daughter's friends] calling, I just got my paper and I read your column and I just wanted to express to you that I was disappointed that you had to find a reason to print that in the paper .. uuhm, it just seems to be like ... if it's your view, you can have that view but why put it in the paper? I really have a hard time understanding that because religion is a big part of alot of people's lives and it saw my brother through an illness that was horrible and I know that's my view but I don't go around telling people about my view either ... uuhm ... you're a businessman in this community with a business ... I find that hard to believe that you would offend potential clients ... I'm really, really at a loss but wanted to let you know. Talk to you later. Bye.

Message that I left in response:

Hi [name withheld]. I left a message for you to call me back last Saturday after receiving your message but perhaps you didn't get it. I'm sorry that you find the article offensive because, I've got to tell you, I think it was pretty benign. If you read it again, you'll see that all I did was pose a few questions that I thought might make religious believers reflect on what they profess to believe. You mentioned your brother - I know religion provides comfort to plenty of people. However, I don't think that any belief system is immune to criticism and, whether I have a business in this town or not, I trust you agree that I have the right to express my opinion (an opinion I might add that is shared by alot more people than you might otherwise think). If anybody decides not to use my services because I'm an atheist, believe me, I don't need their business. Take it easy.

Postscript - The good news. I have practiced law in my city for the last 11 years and I have never had more new referrals than in the week following the run of my first Irreligiosity column.

Death, taxes and Christian apologetics

This letter to the editor, in response to my first article (reproduced in the post below), was so predictable I almost could have written it myself:

http://www.owensoundsuntimes.com/ArticleDisplay.aspx?e=2638086

Introducing Irreligiosity

I have come out of the closet, so to speak, by the debut of my new column Irreligiosity in the Owen Sound Sun Times. Here is the inaugural piece from the June 19, 2010 edition:

If we had photos contradicting the Bible, would Christianity die?

Last year, Sotheby's auctioned off a photograph of a scene from New York city (actually called a daguerreotype but, for all intents and purposes, a photographic image) for $62,500 US. The image was created in 1848 - 162 years ago.

What is most fascinating about the photograph is that there can never be any debate about what comprised that scene even though every person present at the time the photograph was taken is long since deceased. Of course, the same can be said of photographs taken far more recently than this one. It's just that this one strikes the imagination because it is so old and taken at a time when so few places, things or people were being photographed.

Just imagine, for the sake of argument, that the ongoing investigations into time travel (see Dan Falk's recent book In Search of Time for a fascinating discussion of this issue) were to allow us to take aerial photographs of scenes from Biblical times. If this suggestion sounds absurd, just imagine how unlikely the technology of an iPhone would seem to one of your ancestors who lived a mere century ago.

No paradoxes would be created if this technology were developed - we wouldn’t be able to go back in time and change the past. We would just be able to obtain pictures from the past in much the same way as we can obtain images of the earth through Google Earth at present. In other words, we could obtain precise records of what actually happened on the ground with a resolution equal to what our modern day satellites are capable of (i.e. read license plate numbers of moving vehicles). In so doing, we could obtain photographs from whatever period in history we wished - you name it: from the Jurassic period to the Roman/Carthaginian Battle of Lake Trasimene and everything in between.

Obviously, this kind of technology would allow us to track whether miraculous events described in the Bible actually occurred. The question posed by this thought experiment is simple: if the time travel photography established that events described in the Bible (such as Noah’s Ark, Moses parting the Red Sea, the physical resurrection of Jesus, etc.) simply did not happen, would Christianity as we know it die a quick death? If not, why not?

Author’s note: Irreligion includes the absence of religion, indifference towards religion and/or outright hostility towards religion. The term can encompass skepticism, atheism (i.e. disbelief in god), deism (belief in a creator but rejection of religious dogma), agnosticism (belief that the existence or non-existence of god is unknowable) and secular humanism (a philosophy promoting the advancement of reason/ethics/justice and rejecting supernatural and religious dogma).

To kill or not to kill ...

This video features the Trolley Problem which is one of the best examples I have seen (aside from the phenomenon of religion) to prove that human emotion will always trump logic:



If you are intrigued by this issue, I commend a reading of NYU philosopher Peter Unger's "Living High, Letting Die".

The execution of Ronnie Lee Gardner

DRAPER, Utah (CBS/AP/KUTV) At 12:17 a.m. Friday, convicted killer Ronnie Lee Gardner was pronounced dead after a Utah firing squad fired a volley of bullets into the murderer's chest, where a target was pinned over his heart. It was the first execution by firing squad in the United States in 14 years.

If the state of Utah is willing to kill someone, why don't they make live video available of the killing? I'll tell you why: the public can't stomach it. It's the same reason why people who consume meat prefer not to visit slaughterhouses. The only way we can surmount the moral schitzophrenia associated with our actions is to become wilfully blind.

Why do I oppose capital punishment? Let me count the ways:

1. It's barbaric. Pure and simple. Surely we have evolved to the point where we understand that the principle of "an eye for an eye" is unacceptably flawed. Is this how we want our children to deal with conflict in the schoolyard? If it's not ok for them, why is it ok for us?

2. It's premeditated murder. ALL modern, civilized societies outlaw murder.

3. Free will is a mirage: http://www.atheistmissionary.com/2009/07/michael-vick-determinism-and-mirage-of.html If you accept this argument, the only purpose for imposing punishment is to deter the offender (and others) from committing similar crimes in the future. If anyone is aware of a single study to support the argument that capital punishment deters murder (i.e. which suggests that murder rates are lower in jurisdictions which impose capital punishment), please send it to me - but you won't find one.

Will I shed a tear for Ronnie Lee Gardner? Of course not. There is a part of me (one that I am not proud of) that would have enjoyed pulling the trigger myself.

I will shed a tear for a society that stoops to the level of committing the base conduct we despise.

Did Christianity really sow moral intuitions in human consciences?

I just finished David Bentley Hart's Atheist Delusions (2009, Yale University Press). It was recommended by the papist Paul who regularly comments on this blog. Perhaps the simplest way to summarize the book is to reproduce the synopsis from google books:

Currently it is fashionable to be devoutly undevout. Religion’s most passionate antagonists—Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, and others—have publishers competing eagerly to market their various denunciations of religion, monotheism, Christianity, and Roman Catholicism. But contemporary antireligious polemics are based not only upon profound conceptual confusions but upon facile simplifications of history or even outright historical ignorance: so contends David Bentley Hart in this bold correction of the distortions. One of the most brilliant scholars of religion of our time, Hart provides a powerful antidote to the New Atheists’ misrepresentations of the Christian past, bringing into focus the truth about the most radical revolution in Western history.

Hart outlines how Christianity transformed the ancient world in ways we may have forgotten: bringing liberation from fatalism, conferring great dignity on human beings, subverting the cruelest aspects of pagan society, and elevating charity above all virtues. He then argues that what we term the “Age of Reason” was in fact the beginning of the eclipse of reason’s authority as a cultural value. Hart closes the book in the present, delineating the ominous consequences of the decline of Christendom in a culture that is built upon its moral and spiritual values.

Hart is a bright boy and it's not often that I get to learn this many new words - my favorites: obloquy & perspicacious. The most notable problem with his thesis is that he falls into the trap of assuming that correlation equals causation. Here is one of my favorite passages:

"The more vital and essential victory of Christianity lay in the strange, impractical, altogether unworldly tenderness of the moral intuitions it succeeded in sowing in human consciences. If we find ourselves occasionally shocked by how casually ancient men and women ignored lives we would think ineffably precious, we would do well to reflect that theirs was - in purely pragmatic terms - a more "natural" disposition toward reality. It required an extraordinary moment of awakening in a few privileged souls, and then centuries of the relentless and total immersion of culture in the Christian story, to make even the best of us conscious of (or at least able to believe in) the moral claim of all other persons upon us, the splendor and irreducible dignity of the divine humanity within them, that depth within each of them that potentially touches upon the eternal. In light of Christianity's absolute law of charity, we came to see what formerly we could not; the autistic or Down syndrome or otherwise sdisabled child, for instance, for whom the world can remain a perpetual perplexity, which can too often cause pain but perhaps only vaguely and fleetingly charm or delight; the derelict or wretched or broken man or woman who has wasted his or her life away; the homeless, the utterly impoversihed, the diseased, the mentally ill, the physically disabled, exiles, refugees, fugitives; even criminals and reprobates. To reject, turn away from, or kill any or all of them would be, in a very real sense, the most purely practical of impulses. To be able, however, to see in them not only something of worth but indeed something potentially godlike, to be cherished and adored, is the rarest and most ennoblingly unrealistic capacity ever bred within human souls. To look on the child whom our ancient ancestors would have seen as somehow unwholesome or as a worthless burden, and would have abandoned to fate, and to see in him or her instead a person worthy of all affection - resplendent with divine glory, ominous with an absolute demand upon our consciences, evoking our love and our reverence - is to be set free from mere elemental existence, and from those natural limitations that pre-Christian persons took to be the very definition of reality. Any only someone profoundly ignorant of history and of native human inclinations could doubt that it is only as a consequence of the revolutionary force of Christianity within our history, within the very heart of our shared nature, that any of us can experience this freedom."

Only somone like Hart, profoundly ignorant (or wilfully blind) of the history of charity, philanthropy and humanism would credit their rise in human history to the "revolutionary force of Christianity". The word "philanthropy" is generally agreed to have arisen in ancient Greece at least 5 centuries prior to the supposed birth of Jesus. The Greek word philanthropos combined two words: philos meaning “loving” in the sense of benefitting, caring for, nourishing with anthropos meaning “human being”. Philanthropia (i.e. loving what it is to be human) was considered by ancient Greeks to be one of the keys to civilization.

What Hart conveniently ignores is that there is not one iota of proof that "Christian civilizations" were more benevolent or charitable than their non-Christian counterparts. Altruism, the selfless concern for the welfare of others, is a traditional virtue in many cultures and a core aspect of various religious traditions such as Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Jainism, Buddhism, Confucianism, and Sikhism. Hart fails to explain why Christinianity gets singled out for the notable accomplishment of sowing moral intuitions in human consciences.

The real Good News

Watch this in full screen mode. Please circulate it far and wide.

Are ethics a human invention?

Are ethics a human invention? According to philosopher Peter Singer, the answer is yes. The following is a snippet from his discussion with Noel Rooney in 2004 which can be found in its entirety at the website http://www.nthposition.com/:

Rooney: That implies to me that ethics are in some way super-human; and one assumes ethics to be a human product.

Singer: I think that some of it is pre-human. We see proto-ethics at least among our closer non-human relatives. We see things like reciprocity which are fairly central to our view of ethics. But if you're talking about a set of worked-out rules on what we are supposed to do then, yes, it is a human product.

Rooney: And as a human product you wouldn't expect any regional variations?

Singer: At the descriptive level, certainly, you would expect different cultures to develop different sorts of ethics and obviously they have; that doesn't mean that you can't think of overarching ethical principles you would want people to follow in all kinds of places. They tend to be pretty abstract ones then, like doing what will have the best consequences; obviously you wouldn't specify what consequences are best, they may be different in some circumstances, so at a lower, more specific level, you may well get differences.

The Language of God

This is a fantastic example of how you can, quite profitably, sell nothing: