CarbonBlog

Free Speech Rules OK!

2012-02-02T10:08:00.000-08:00

"He's a free speech martyr," sneered my close relative across the table. He said it in the same way he might have said 'flat-earther' or 'water diviner'. We were discussing David Irving's imprisonment in Austria, for planning to make a speech questioning the historicity of the holocaust.

I do not agree with David Irving, and I believe that the holocaust did happen. However, I was recently engaged in an email debate by a former colleague, who asserted that the evidence for the mass murder of six million people is extremely thin. I was quite indignant at first; unable to comprehend how an educated, well-read, former headteacher could earnestly make such a bold and ridiculous claim. I spent some time surfing relevant websites on both sides of the debate. I learned a great deal. Assumptions which I'd previously assumed were historical facts suddenly appeared differently. The points made by holocaust deniers deserved to be taken seriously, and rebutted with eloquent, corroborated clarity. I had previously carried a vague mental picture of fields full of buried bodies discovered by the Allies as they liberated Europe. This never happened, and there was much speculation in the immediate aftermath of the war regarding the whereabouts of the millions of murder victims. I must reiterate that I am not a holocaust denier, and my former colleague and I emerged from our robust yet civilized debate, both convinced that the holocaust is indeed reliable historical fact. However, exposure to counter-arguments gave me cause to unearth relevant evidence and to learn much of which I had been unaware.

That, I think, is a powerful argument in favour of free speech. Let the nutcases state their views, and let them give us pause. Let them question our comfortable, long-held prejudices. Let them set us surfing and clicking, reading and thinking. Let them impel us to examine critically and thoroughly that which we believe simply because we have been told repeatedly that it is true. Rigorously tested by healthy scepticism, history is reinforced and we gain a clearer, truer picture of what really happened. By simply assuming and never doubting, we become complacent, and find it difficult to expound the basis of our standpoint.

Making scepticism illegal is a very dangerous game indeed. It grants unwarranted respectability to the nutbar views of the deranged extremist. It diminishes truth, suggesting that truth cannot stand up for itself and needs the protection of law. It makes nauseating trash-speak like "free speech martyr" admissible at the dinner table. It creates a climate in which free speech martyrs can exist, and flourish. It is a myopic, backward step.

I am soon to read Nick Cohen's new book on censorship, You Can't Read This Book. I'm stimulated by commentaries I've read on the book, including a blog post published today by the author himself. However, I can't help tending slightly toward the stance of Devil's Advocate when reading his assertion that successful censorship must, by definition, go unreported and unrecorded. Nay, the censors who silenced David Irving advanced their cause, promulgating after-dinner air pollution of the type described above. Visibly successful censorship brings out the ovine liberal in otherwise intelligent adults. Complicity of sovereign governments in the suppression of scepticism buttresses people's innately perverse desire to gainsay the obvious and thereby score points in conversation. Legally condoned censorship changes the landscape subtly, and makes all censorship that bit more acceptable; that bit harder to argue against. Thus creeps the pernicious, contagious, dark side of the zeitgeist.

A serious case of reality disconnect

2011-11-11T00:05:00.000-08:00

It’s Armistice Day, 2011. Ninety-three years ago the guns fell silent, ending four years of protracted slaughter that wiped out a generation.

Some years ago I was privileged to visit WWI battle sites in Belgium and Northern France. Before that trip, I’d heard the word moving used in various ways, but until that time I’d never really felt its impact. Standing there in those now-tranquil, breeze-blown fields, my overwhelming and lasting impression was of senseless waste on an unimaginable scale.

Millions of young men were cut to pieces by deadly accurate, high power machine gun fire, vapourised or shredded by heavy artillery, or burned alive from the inside by poison gas. And for what? A few yards of land, or, in most cases, nothing at all.

Many of those men had no choice in the matter. They were drafted, transported and annihilated. The entire war was prosecuted incompetently, occasioning an obscene casualty rate. That is what Eric Bogle means when he writes of ‘Man’s blind indifference to his fellow man.’

I believe it vital that we remember this dark stain on history, even though it happened long before our lifetimes. We must remember the anguish, the futility, the suffering, the pain and the loss. We must do everything we can to prevent anything like it ever happening again.

Would that we were unanimous in that sentiment. Some years ago, while listening to a cover version of The Green Fields of France, I came upon a set of alternative lyrics penned by one Stephen Suffett. At first I could not believe what I was reading. My stomach turning, I read to the end, the melody playing in my mind behind the lyrics. A dark shadow seemed to chill the room. I felt the presence of something I thought no longer existed: an adult who glorifies the foul obscenity of war, as though it were something admirable and noble, a path to be chosen by all who uphold the values of liberty and democracy.

Mr Suffett’s stance is, I believe, motivated by a local political agenda, rather than by a desire to see young people butchered and their lives terminated, but I think he has a nerve nevertheless. Willie MacBride, in Eric Bogle’s original lyrics, represents a six-zero number of bewildered, shellshocked boys whose futures were wrenched laceratingly away in a Dantean hell of choking gas, bone-shattering bullets, lung-crushing artillery bursts, slowly grinding gangrene and septicaemia, or landscape-altering subterranean caches of amatol. How many of those children, in their dying moments, retching up gouts of blood and trying vainly to hold in their own intestines, would have thought themselves privileged and noble upholders of global freedom? Suffett’s lyrics, portraying millions of obliterated Willie MacBrides as grinning, gung-ho action man dolls, are insolent in the extreme to the memory of those poor wretches. Mr Suffett, you are seriously disconnected from reality.

The last line is perhaps the most ironic. ‘And I’d do it again, says Willie MacBride.’ Mr Suffett, the whole point of Eric Bogle’s lyrics is that Willie MacBride will not do ANYTHING again. Neither will his contemporaries, on both sides of the conflict. Sir, your assumption that war is necessary to defend freedom is deeply flawed. Look to the local conflict to which you allude in your lyrics. Where did the violence get us all? Is the situation worse now that peace has replaced routine murder? I think not.

A N Wilson's attempt to hijack a brave man's grief

2011-08-13T08:53:00.000-07:00

Tariq Jahan's courage and fortitude, in the face of his surely almost unbearable loss, are undeniably exemplary qualities. Unfortunately, A N Wilson has hijacked Mr Tariq's admirable appeal for calm, in pursuit of his own rather nauseating agenda.

Wilson thinks that moral absolutes come from religion, and that the 'bedrock' of morality is being 'steadily eroded' by secularism. Yet his own confusion is apparent: he points out that this morality, which he believes comes from God, needs to be instilled in children at an early age. Why so, when Wilson, after Immanuel Kant, believes in the 'moral law within me'? Why can't morality be placed in children before birth, along with their ability to feel hunger, pain, fatigue and love?

Once again we see indefensible, irrational nonsense published in a major national newspaper because it is based on the mutely accepted ideas that (a) religion is, at bottom, all about being good, and (b) any pap with the religion badge attached deserves automatic respect for no other reason.

Wilson claims that Mr Tariq is 'guided in his conduct by his religious belief'. What a disgusting insult to an honourable man. Surely, if Wilson's assertion were true, then if Mr Tariq had not been born into Islam he would be a thoroughly immoral blackguard. If you find that difficult to believe, then you must doubt Wilson's assertion also.

Of course there are many religious people like Mr Tariq. And there are many secularists like him, too. One does not need religion in order to be good (although, it seems, nothing leads potentially good people to do evil as effectively as does religion).

Wilson claims that Sikhs build gurdwaras inspired by their awe of Kant's starry heavens and inner morality. This is pure cant, as opposed to pure Kant. Sikhs build gurdwaras as a form of social control, elevating a textbook written hundreds of years ago by an overrated mammal to the status of immutable, unquestionable law which must be followed by all who enter the gurdwara. Check out any Sikh website for the list of admonitions and prohibitions forced upon any 'welcome' guest who sets foot in such a place.

Wilson admires people who 'go to the mosque and fall prostrate before the mystery' which so impressed Kant. Why should we be proud of behaving like abject serfs before a capricious, despotic master? What's so good about falling prostrate? If Wilson has ever flown on an aeroplane, or benefited from modern medical procedures, he has due reason to salute those who stood upright and confronted mystery head on. Yesterday's mystery is today's solution. The fascination with mystery comes from the bawling, terrified infancy of humanity, when there were no proper explanations and the authoritarian pronouncements of the witch doctor held unquestioned sway.

How dare Wilson write of 'the fundamental truths of the great religions' that have 'stood the test of time for thousands of years'. Religions far, far older than the modern few that inspire his pitiable awe have passed into history. The Olympian gods of Greece and Rome; Horus, Seth, the Aten and Osiris; all of these dealt in 'fundamental truths' for longer than Wilson might care to acknowledge, and those truths are dim memories in the wind.

Particularly evil is Wilson's implication that Jade Goody ought to be held accountable for the drug addiction and unfashionably sordid death of her father. Perhaps Wilson's inerrant morality extends to punishing children for their parents' sins to the third and fourth generation (Exodus 20:5).

Hitler gets a mention, as a 'satanic Nazi dictator'. Wilson has forgotten the belt-buckle motto proudly displayed by every Gestapo sadist: Gott mit uns. Moreover, when Wilson bangs on about how morally pure London was 100 years ago, has he anything to say about 75 years ago when Cable Street cheered the Nazi Oswald Mosley to the echo?

Wilson cannot resist a sideswipe at the modern intellectuals Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens. Each of these men has more common sense in his little fingernail than Wilson demonstrates in his entire tradition-inflated ego, and both have separately steamrollered Wilson's tired arguments on many an occasion. It is ever likely that Wilson feels intimidated by such formidable debating opponents. Religion might not be responsible for all the world's evils but, where human beings are involved in perpetrating evil, you can bet that religion plays more than a minor role. Hitchens cites multiple examples from his own personal experiences in Northern Ireland, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Israel, Lebanon and India.

Religion, through centuries of shameful precedent, gives people like Wilson the confidence to spout the most outrageous tripe with impunity. God, the projected embodiment of humanity's darkest, basest, most sadistic, tyrannical nature, enfolds such whining pipsqueaks as Wilson in his leathery wrap, perhaps sniggering inwardly at the prospect of their horror when they discover his non-existence. Wilson and his kind will never understand the horror of the secularist, when contemplating those who would wish God were real.

Scofield gets the wrong end of the stick re. Hitch

2011-05-30T12:21:00.000-07:00

Be Scofield has missed the point by a wide margin. Christopher Hitchens is no more a religious apologist than I am the Pope. Hitch's taxi-driver anecdote is intended to illustrate, by contrast, the point that religion inspires people to do evil. As Hitchens says, if all religious adherents consistently behaved like the taxi driver, taking pains to return property and to behave with humanity and decency toward all others, then the weird exhortations in their holy books simply would not matter. Scofield is in danger of thinking Hitchens meant that religiously-inspired bad behaviour would not matter, so long as some good behaviour arose from religion too. Hitch meant nothing of the sort. Scofield conflates the existence of way-out holy books with actions prescribed by, and carried out as a result of reading, those books.

I have followed Hitch pretty closely since the release of God Is Not Great, the audiobook of which is a favourite of mine, played many times. His position on religion is far from inconsistent. Check out the Four Horsemen discussion at Hitch's apartment, with guests Dawkins, Dennett and Harris. Hitch remarks that he would not wish to see religious belief eradicated, because he enjoys the dialectic arising from its existence. Now I don't doubt for a moment that Hitch, like most of us, would love to see the end of religious fanaticism, 7th century barbarism, genital mutilation, etc., etc., but he is enough of a realist to know that religion of some kind will pop up again, and again, and again as long as the human condition endures. I wish for things I can never have, and I can but wonder at how much happier I might be if I could stop myself wishing for those things. When Hitch says he does not wish an end to religion, I think he means no more than that. He accepts that it is here, if not permanently, then for a very long time to come. And he awaits with longing the time when all religious observants choose the taxi driver's path, not the suicide bomber's.

Dawkins owes nothing to Craig

2011-05-17T12:19:00.000-07:00

A recent article in the Telegraph, implying that Richard Dawkins is answerable to William Lane Craig, has attracted reflexive nods from those whose condyles outclass their cerebral cortices. The nodders include one whose pipsqueak penchant for citing himself in the third person betrays his eminent compatibility with the asininely worshipful flock Gracing the rightmost column of his pretty, but intellectually pretty insubstantial, blog.

Let us be clear on this point. Professor Dawkins (the usage of this title is correct) owes Professor Craig nothing at all. Dawkins is not accountable to Craig, nor to anyone else who seeks to wield authority on the strength of wholly unjustified – and unjustifiable – claims. Craig purports to believe in an invisible, silent supernatural being that ignores prayers and visits calamities indiscriminately on mankind and other sentient creatures, condemning them to everlasting torture if they fail to propitiate it in the correct manner, while it simultaneously professes to love its victims. Such grotesque assertions demand at least a shred of evidence before being taken seriously, and there is none. Craig gets away without being laughed off the public stage simply because his views intersect with a currently fashionable delusion based on the still-popular myths of a bunch of wandering Babylonians, set down a mere instant ago in geological time. That fad will pass, as did much older and longer-lived crazes like the gods of prehistory. Craig has been spouting his so-called ‘proofs’ for years, and they have been roundly debunked. They do not even begin to ratify the baseless suspicion of existence popularly conferred on the God of the Bible.

William Lane Craig is a professional debater, whose set-piece speeches and logically barren numbered ‘proofs’ provoke whoops of delight from his devoted choir of cosy, secure followers. Convinced that his party games prove something, they rest comfortably assured that there is real evidence for the sky-god in whom most of them have passively believed since their brains became infected with the relevant memes in early childhood. Pretentious twerps who blog that one needs to ‘understand’ religion at some deeply significant, esoteric level of prior initiation before one can criticize it, add fuel to the fashionable fire but do little to uncover anything worthwhile. Understand this… if there were a reliable proof of God’s existence, communicable only to learned scholars, salient parts of that proof would have been translated a thousand times and more into lay language understanded of the people, as have the juiciest morsels of Andrew Wiles’s vertiginously highbrow vindication of Fermat’s Last Theorem.

Until His Grace can find a more worthy source than the Telegraph, and can acquire the skill of doing his own thinking, may he find the Grace to remain silent.

The shallowness and dishonesty of theism

2011-05-10T10:01:00.000-07:00

I doubt I’d get away, on Twitter, FB, YouTube or anywhere, with glibly and radically redefining words to make them fit something I wanted to promulgate. And the reason I wouldn’t get away with it is that I don’t seek to ratify my assertions through reference to a manufactured deity.

Around 8 minutes into the linked video, the issue of forgiveness is raised. Richard Dawkins asks why God needed to arrange a revoltingly violent killing before he could forgive the sins of mankind. The Right Reverend Michael Nazir Ali responds:

“Real forgiveness comes from restitution, from cost, from sacrifice.” (8:40)

This is utterly at odds with the definition of the word forgiveness, which is the idea of concluding resentment without demanding punishment or restitution. The former bishop is not taken to task for his bare-faced re-writing of the dictionary in order to provoke brainlessly sanctimonious nods and grunts from the studio audience. Pressing home his point, the bishop adds:

“There can be no forgiveness without cost.” (9:20)

Ovine applause follows. The bishop justifies a public lynching by lying about the definition of a word. Or perhaps he means that God simply chose to withhold forgiveness until he had exacted his pound of flesh with attendant suffering and anguish. Was omnipotent God forced into such a callous act, or did He exercise His divine free will in the matter?

Suppose a member of my family had been convicted of cold-blooded child murder, and I were to go public in the Sunday tabloids to the effect that his action was entirely justified. My argument? Murdering a child is fair, because there can be no fairness in the world without cost. Do you find yourself able to agree with my assertion? Of course not (although, please note, it concurs more closely with the accepted definition of fair than the bishop’s mangling of the word forgiveness matches its definition). Why, then, does the bishop get away with instant revision of the English language? He gets away with it because, in the minds of many, religion is, at bottom, all about being good. Many of those who profess no belief in a deity, and who pledge allegiance to no partisan confession, still think that the religious impulse is basically an admirable one. Hence, any silly assertion from a clergyman, provided it be delivered in pious tones and superficially varnished with shallow plausibility, stands a good chance of going unchallenged in the public arena.

This needs to change. It will not change by itself.

Postscript: I anticipate that some may respond by pointing out patiently to me, while kindly and inwardly sympathising with my moronic lack of understanding of the central message of Christianity, that the cost of forgiveness was incurred by God at the crucifixion. In other words, God had himself publicly tortured in order to demonstrate the 'cost' of his forgiveness. To borrow modern vernacular, EPIC FAIL on two counts. Firstly, since each sin committed by man is supposedly injurious to God, the cost had already been paid, and forgiveness could have been issued without bloody red tape. Secondly, if God is bound by rules (such as no forgiveness without 'cost' as the Bishop puts it) then where is his omnipotence?

Finished listening to Craig and Harris

2011-04-09T09:49:00.000-07:00

Heard the debate to the end now. One thing became obvious during that most revealing part of any debate - the open questions at the end. Harris, who had spoken with spontaneity and sincerity throughout his allotted time periods, continued in exactly the same vein when responding to questions. Craig, no longer supported by his carefully rehearsed, set-piece speeches, came across like the proverbial fish out of water. A lady questioner pinned him down neatly and brilliantly, extending his analogy of light as an idea long described but only recently understood. The questioner suggested that light was once ascribed to a supernatural creator, and later its true nature became known. Perhaps, she offered, the same might be true of morality in our own future? Craig affected not to understand the question. When the moderator summarised it for him, he resorted to simple repetition of his analogy, and had the temerity to suggest that the questioner had misunderstood it. I believe that he knows that she did not misunderstand it.

Harris hit the nail on the head when he explained psychopathy in the sense of blindly receiving rules from an authority without distinguishing them on grounds of morality. This ranks among Harris's best taken points during the debate.

Another questioner pointed out that Craig's arguments are based on nothing, and Craig simply diverted his response onto repetitive definition of the terms ontological and epistemological. He also ducked the question about homosexuality, resorting to an ad hominem dismissal of the questioner on the grounds of insincerity. Oh, the irony.

More on Craig v Harris

2011-04-09T07:25:00.000-07:00

I've heard more of it now. Craig repeats his assertion that he is not arguing for the existence of God, but then goes on to assert that moral rectitude comes from God because the difference between moral good and bad cannot come about without a lawgiver. If he's not arguing for the existence of God, then he must be simply assuming the existence of God, or whence his lawgiver? To try to divorce the debate from the issue of God's existence is a slippery act of intellectual dishonesty.

Craig attacks Harris for irrelevancy, yet he (Craig) holds forth at length on the distinction between ontology and semantics, an issue with little relevance to the question under discussion, and a blatant attempt to impress by obfuscation, blinding his audience with philosophical pseudo-intellectual rot. As it happens, Harris's argument was sharply relevant to the debate, since he was demonstrating how morality can arise without God.

Craig's assertions are baseless, and go largely unchallenged in public only because they are about Christianity and religion in general, a topic which still unfortunately carries its own free gate pass. If he were making similar baseless assertions on another subject, such as crackpot 9/11 conspiracy theories, he would be laughed off the stage or required to produce evidence.

Harris is right to label Yahweh a psychopath, and to imply that his followers and promoters are psychopathic sympathisers. Yes, that includes all the paragons of virtue among the august assemblage of dignitaries at Notre Dame, and all who defend such a perverse, archaic world view as that propounded by Craig and his kind. Craig can play the 'insulted' card if he wants but he has asked for all the insults he gets.

William Lane Craig's opening remarks in his debate with Sam Harris on 7 April 2011

2011-04-08T04:17:00.000-07:00

So far I've listened only to Craig's 20-minute speech but I want to comment while it's fresh in my mind. I'll listen to the rest of the two-hour program later.

Craig's opener was largely centred around his old claim that there would be no objective moral values without an absolute authority to provide them. That authority, he assumes and asserts, is God.

My problem with objective moral values - i.e., moral rights and wrongs that are independent of human minds - is that we have only the human mind with which to consider them. Craig seems to think we can observe and comment on things that are outside our minds, but in doing so he awards himself a kind of omniscience. Consider an example. You come upon a man in the act of cutting off a child's finger with a penknife. The child screams in pain and shock. Surely there can be no doubt that the man's action is wrong. But then we learn that the child had just been bitten by a venomous snake, and the man with the knife is a reptile expert who knows that the only way to save the child's life, in the absence of antivenom, is to amputate the bitten extremity as quickly as possible. He judges that the pain, risk of infection, and permanent mutilation are a better option than certain death, which is the only alternative. Please note that I am not defending cruelty to children here. My point is that in order to judge the man's actions as moral or otherwise, we need to know everything about his actions.

No doubt a theist would respond to this in two ways. Firstly, God knows everything, so he knows that the man's actions are not morally wrong. Secondly, the concepts of moral rightness and wrongness exist, and that in itself needs to be explained.

Both these responses are hogwash. The first is easily dismissed, for it is asserted without reason or evidence. The second is slightly more interesting, but disappears when it becomes apparent that the idea of moral rectitude comes from human responses to perceived situations.

If, as in the real world, our information is necessarily limited, then the best we can do is to make judgements based on what we have. Obviously those judgements will be affected by our preconceptions. If we have a preconception that people are more valuable than non-human animals, then we can expect to be biased accordingly. Such a bias may prick our conscience less if we can dump the responsibility for it onto an all-powerful, invisible absolute authority who just says it has to be that way.

To my mind there is nothing remotely moral about an all-powerful being who demands that his subordinates must love him with all their souls. This is the proclamation of a despotic tyrant, not a loving father. Besides, love which has to be commanded is worth little, as it is not genuine.

Echoing Pierre-Simon Laplace's remarks to Napoleon, we have no need of the God hypothesis to explain the human capacity to act morally toward other sentient creatures. Moreover, if God does exist in omnipotent form, we have every need for him to account for the plentiful immorality by which we are surrounded.

Carbonblog’s counter-response to “On Dawkins’s Atheism: A Response” by Gary Gutting

2010-08-15T00:41:00.000-07:00

Recently Gary Gutting took issue with some of Richard Dawkins's arguments as advanced in The God Delusion.

I applaud Dr Gutting’s advice that religious faith be questioned, seriously and rationally, by its adherents. I note also that he welcomes impassioned comment, so I’ll try some.

Dr Gutting claims that ‘popular atheistic arguments’ do not establish their conclusions. Specifically he claims that the atheistic arguments of Richard Dawkins are demonstrably faulty.

Dr Gutting provides two so-called summaries of Professor Dawkins’s arguments, supporting these with page references to the paperback edition of The God Delusion. Both ‘summaries’ have numbered steps, and the first ends with the conclusion that […]God almost certainly does not exist. The second ends with the conclusion that God does not exist, with no ‘almost certainly’. That is a misrepresentation – Dawkins states clearly that on a 1 to 7 scale of unbelief he places himself somewhere around 6 – but let’s not dwell on that.

I am not a philosopher (more on that later) but I suspect Dr Gutting of drawing a distinction between the ‘creator’ of the universe and the ‘explanation’ of the universe. To quote Dr Gutting: “…he must be both the intelligent designer of the universe and a being that explains the universe…” Dawkins makes no such distinction. The traditional Argument from Design posits God as creator. That, per se, is the explanation offered by the Argument from Design, and the Argument itself arises from the wholly understandable human desire for explanation. God is not, surely, both a creator and an explanation in separate senses. Having established that, we can (I hope) clearly see that we must immediately question God’s origin, or we have failed to explain anything at all. If we try to sidestep the issue, by defining God as ‘outside our knowledge’ or as ‘eternal and inexplicable’ then we forfeit the right to make any claim at all about God, including whether or not he exists. As such, God’s status is no more interesting than that of fairies, goblins, djinns or an infinite morass of other imaginable and non-disprovable entities, all of whom share one sharply relevant quality: their utter insignificance to the daily reality of our lives.

Following the example of (and citing) Richard Swinburne, Dr Gutting proceeds to posture and stretch in a bone-bending feat of verbal yoga, attempting to reconcile God’s ‘simplicity’ with his ability to answer prayers, forgive sins, monitor and control the behaviour of every particle in the universe, etc. Convinced that he has had his cake as well as eaten it, he refers to other esoteric works that make similar claims. But, Dr Gutting, you, and Swinburne, and Hughes, and Aquinas, and the rest of them, have missed the point by a margin wide enough to handbrake-turn a London bus in complete safety. If you don’t like the words ‘simple’ and ‘complex’ as Dawkins uses them in his argument, then substitute, respectively, ‘pretty much inert’ and ‘capable of making things happen through intention’. Any entity that is capable of making things happen through intention deserves an explanation of how it came to possess its impressive qualities.

And now’s a good time to make another point, against an ongoing theme, lurking weed-like in the undergrowth of Dr Gutting’s article, as well as those of William Lane Craig’s henchmen with whom I’ve had the pleasure of online exchanges. That theme is the patronizing and smug assumption that a layman such as myself has no grounds to question assertions about the nature of God until he has first become acquainted with ‘where the discussion is’ or something equally vague. In every case the intention is to assert, by implication, that high-powered philosophers have demonstrated God’s probable existence in a way that cannot be challenged by anyone except another philosopher of equally learned status. A further assertion is implied, i.e. that the uninitiated cannot really understand such erudite arguments without a good deal of training and study.

Well all of that is utter hogwash. Be assured of this: if anyone, be they philosopher, scientist, saint or knave, really had formulated a robust (although highbrow) proof of God’s probable existence, that proof would have been seized upon by theists the world over and trumpeted to the skies in a triumphantly self-congratulating fanfare of we-told-you-so. Like Andrew Wiles’ proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem, and Einstein’s mathematical demonstration of General Relativity, this theistic proof would have been dissected, popularized and published in so many layman-digestible forms that it might even outsell the Bible.

Dr Gutting attempts to bring in the ontological argument, suggesting that God’s existence may be ‘necessary’. Again he tries to impress by invoking authority, waving ‘formidable’ writings and criticizing Dawkins for failing to acknowledge them. Unfortunately for all those writers, however, it matters little whether or not the rest of us wade through the minutiae of myriad attributes boasted by the products of their imaginations. Until they can provide (even the slightest) verifiable evidence to support their intellectually elevated claims, there is no need at all to waste time taking those claims seriously. That which can be asserted without evidence may also be dismissed without evidence. And if there be real evidence, bring it on.

Dr Gutting completely misunderstands Bertrand Russell’s teapot analogy. He assumes that Russell was arguing, by analogy, that we should not profess belief in that for which there is no evidence, and that we should therefore disbelieve in the orbiting teapot. But that’s not the point at all. Rather, Russell showed that there is no point in imaginatively contriving – and then believing in the actual existence of – a specific entity, about which a great deal is assumed (e.g. spout, handle, lid, space inside for tea, etc.) when there is no reason to suppose the existence of that entity in the first place. Basic common sense requires a-teapotism, as indeed it requires a similar attitude to most other imaginable, describable distant orbiting household objects. Dr Gutting compounds his misunderstanding by claiming that, if a small amount of hard evidence were to become available, then “we should just remain agnostic about it.” This is quite revealing, I think. Surely, remaining agnostic would be the last thing we would wish to do. Would we not actively seek further evidence for the existence of the teapot, our appetites whetted by the small amount of evidence we already had?

To reiterate, the point of the teapot analogy is to show that agnosticism is a full-time job. If we are to be agnostic about the teapot, then we must also be agnostic toward an infinite number of things that we can’t disprove. I don’t know about Dr Gutting, but I certainly don’t have time to list all the things I could potentially be agnostic about, and there is no reason to suppose that God deserves to be anywhere near the top of the list.

Before passing on, it’s worth spending a little more time on agnosticism. I detect an air of virtue in Dr Gutting’s professed agnosticism, as though there were something good and noble about declaredly sitting on the fence. Yet, if we truly wish to understand the world and the universe around us, then we need to inquire actively, and to pursue hypotheses based on the evidence we find, wherever they may lead us. Evaluation – and, where necessary, rejection – of hypotheses that lack any evidence at all is a necessary part of this process.

Dr Gutting winds up by leaving the world of reality and flying a few loops among the cloudy heights of non-materialism. Good trick, that. Invent a new kind of universe and call it non-material, which means of course that no-one can know anything about it. Then, having fenced off your territory, make a series of specific claims about what might be in it. I’ve harped on about this kind of thing before. I call it the Fencing Game and most children try it at one point or another (claiming, for example, that their homework fell from their school bag and therefore no-one can possibly know its whereabouts even though it surely exists) but they grow out of it when they realize it isn’t going to get them anywhere. Dr Gutting, the material world is all we have. If God does not reside in, and does not interact with, the material world, then I submit that either he does not exist, or it makes no difference whether he exists or not.

It’s taken me a couple of days to complete this, at odd times here and there, and of course I’m aware that I’ve said nothing new. But then, neither did Dr Gutting.

Mary Midgley sees all

2010-06-12T02:20:00.000-07:00

Mary Midgley is doing extremely well, maintaining such excellent physical and mental health at her advanced age without relying too much on science. Perhaps her GP draws inspiration from scripture, or from pyramid power, rather than medical science.

But to the point. Here's Midgley at her most revealing:

It [belief in God] is a world-view, an all-enclosing vision of the kind of world that we inhabit.

What, I wonder, does she mean by all-enclosing? Does she mean that belief in God encompasses everything that there is? What breathtaking arrogance. Or perhaps I have misunderstood. Maybe she means that belief in God encloses those who buy into it, in a hermetically sealed little universe where all wrongs are righted and everything has a purpose.

Dream on, Ms Midgley. Ah well, at least you've given me something to write about while I wait for my onward flight here in Dubai.

The Ten Commandments

2010-03-05T09:48:00.000-08:00

Christopher Hitchens has published his revision of the Ten Commandments. Here they are.

Do not condemn people on the basis of their ethnicity or color.

Do not ever use people as private property.

Despise those who use violence or the threat of it in sexual relations.

Hide your face and weep if you dare to harm a child.

Do not condemn people for their inborn nature—why would God create so many homosexuals only in order to torture and destroy them?

Be aware that you too are an animal and dependent on the web of nature, and think and act accordingly.

Do not imagine that you can escape judgment if you rob people with a false prospectus rather than with a knife.

Turn off that f---ing cell phone—you have no idea how unimportant your call is to us.

Denounce all jihadists and crusaders for what they are: psychopathic criminals with ugly delusions.

Be willing to renounce any god or any religion if any holy commandments should contradict any of the above.

In short: Do not swallow your moral code in tablet form.

Storm: I like this

2010-02-26T01:41:00.000-08:00

Hadn't come across Tim Minchin before but glad I have now. This is great. Includes a few rude words.

Forum changes at richarddawkins.net

2010-02-26T00:59:00.000-08:00

Recently Richard Dawkins announced the upcoming closure of the old forums at rd.net to make way for a new discussion area. Unsurprisingly this was not welcomed by everyone. Some theists have joined a gleeful chorus of anti-atheist moral climbing, ignoring the high probability that many of the rat-and-turd brigade come from within their own pure, holy ranks.

Changes - for the better - are afoot at richardawkins.net. Like all change, this step will be resisted at first by some, and therefore will need to be driven against that resistance by others.

The thrust of the change, as I understand it, is to provide a more focused, more easily readable, more useful discussion area than the present forums. Like any such open area of the internet, the rd.net forums comprise a swell of background hiss masking a purposeful core of intelligent, worthwhile discourse. The aim of rd.net is to promote science and reasoned thinking. The distracting background noise of cynical, insincere trolling, bigoted proselytizing and sheer hyperbolic obscenity does little to further that aim, and belongs elsewhere.

Some knee-jerk respondents, allowing their spinal reflexes full rein over their rational faculties (if indeed they have any), have pleaded the rather childish 'free speech' argument, bolstered (in their little minds) by graphic descriptions of decaying animal carcasses and digestive waste. Their thesis is spectacularly weak. The basic entitlement to be heard does not extend to an entitlement to say what you like, where you like, when you like. Freedom of speech does not mean complete freedom to derail an ongoing discussion and sound off about anything that takes your fancy. Otherwise, it would be perfectly polite behaviour to stand up in the middle of a college lecture and start banging on about your favourite boy band or which football trump cards you're still missing.

There are plenty of places for free speech. Try starting your own blog if you've something worthwhile to say. Up to now, Richard, Josh and the team have tolerated the megabytes of hot air that have threatened to blow meaningful discussion clean off the page, but enough is enough. All 'good' things come to an end for some reason or another. I guess you complainants would be the loudest ones to cry, 'Aw, Mum!' when it's time to stop playing and come in for dinner.

Grow up, and thank the rd.net team for everything they have done and are doing to make the web a more useful tool for all of us who believe in useful things. Think of something to say that is sharply relevant to reason and science, or go and be heard somewhere else. Welcome to reality.

The Moral Argument on Premier Christian Radio

2010-02-19T10:29:00.000-08:00

The podcast archive on Premier Christian Radio is a well organised, rich source of interesting discussions between theists and others. Today I downloaded and listened to Paul Orton and David Robertson discussing the moral argument. That is, the argument that there are immutable, universal moral absolutes, and therefore God exists.

The discussion opens with an assertion by the presenter, Justin Brierley, that we all accept moral ‘facts’ (scare quotes based on his intonation) about the world: certain things are right and certain things are wrong. He then states that that can only be the case if there is something on which to ground the facts, and that has to be God. A few minutes later he softens this to

“Most people appear to believe in moral absolutes, i.e. some things are definitely right and other things are definitely wrong, and that [moral absolute truth] would hold whether we happened to believe it or not. Can those kinds of beliefs exist without God in the equation? Or do we live in a world where there are no moral absolutes, and our morality is purely a product of purposeless evolution? That is certainly the view that someone like Richard Dawkins would be compelled to hold, as what we might call a materialistic atheist. He doesn’t believe in anything beyond the material, physical world. However complex it may be, that is all we ultimately reduce to.”

Brierley has presented a false dichotomy, laced with loaded terms like ‘reduce’ and ‘purposeless’. His first mistake was to predicate the existence of God upon his baseless assertion that there are moral absolutes. In effect he is trying simply to assert God into existence. Even if moral absolutes were proven to exist, that in itself would not necessitate any connection with the God in whom Brierley professes belief. Besides, Brierley has not demonstrated the existence of moral absolutes. Again, he has simply asserted that they exist.

David Robertson asks, “How do we know whether [externally imposed human morals] are right or wrong?” and illustrates his rhetorical question with the hypothetical example of a majority supporting the racist and xenophobic policies of the BNP. Robertson means that it isn’t morally right to do something simply because people think it should be done, and so moral absolutes cannot come from society.

Both Robertson and Brierley make the error of thinking they can know something that is outside their minds, i.e. that there are moral absolutes that are hard-coded into the way the world is. Yet, like the rest of us, they have only their minds as tools with which to probe the world around them. Therefore they are claiming to know something that they cannot possibly know. Typical theists, they start from the assumption that they have the answers, and construct arguments to fit their pre-existing conclusions.

The atheist starts with no assumptions at all. He looks for moral absolutes and finds no evidence that there are such things. Further, he recognises that proof of the existence of moral absolutes, should it ever be found, would not necessarily provide the slightest clue as to where those absolutes might have come from. Theists leap straight from their ‘moral absolutes’ assertion to the Judaeo-Christian God. Some theists, including David Robertson, have the audacity to suggest that the modern world’s morality arises from Christian teaching. Tell that to the millions infected with HIV as a direct result of the Catholic Church’s meddling in Africa.

I do not think the existence of moral absolutes has ever been demonstrated. Rather, I think morality comes from our responses to situations, real or hypothetical. Why is slavery wrong? It is wrong because we can consider the viewpoint of the slave, his liberty and dignity stolen from him. Murder is wrong for the same reason. We can empathise with the victim and we recognise his right not to be murdered, just as we would not wish anyone to murder us. Those are easy examples. Another such example is child murder. Who would deem it morally acceptable to murder one’s child in order to prove loyalty to a capricious dictator? No-one in their right mind, I would hope. Yet was that not exactly what Abraham, the founder of the three great monotheisms including Christianity, is held up to us as a shining example for being prepared to do? Yes, God stayed his viciously murderous hand at the last second, but that does not legitimise either Abraham’s intended foul act nor the brutal cruelty of the despot who coerced him into it.

Mr Robertson and Mr Brierley, don’t you dare foist your disgusting celestial dictator on me. Don’t you dare assert that I would not know the difference between right and wrong but for his filthy interference in the natural world. Don’t you dare suggest that if it were not for his ordination of divine laws I would not be able to treat fellow humans and other sentient creatures with the compassion and respect that I myself would wish to receive. Such a suggestion smacks of breathtaking arrogance on your part. Moreover, it is a moral abomination to insult the ability of human beings to recognise what is right and what is wrong without supposed divine, dictatorially binding assistance. How do I know that it is a moral abomination? I know because the thought of making such an assertion, and of thus looking down my theistic nose at my fellows, turns my stomach.

I was a little surprised that Euthyphro’s dilemma did not figure in the discussion. The argument goes like this. If God is deemed to be good, then to what standard higher than Himself is He compared? If there be no higher standard than God, and the ideas of good and bad exist because God decreed them, then it is meaningless to say that God is good. If, on the other hand, moral absolutes exist against which we can show God to be good, then we do not need God to exist in order for good and bad to exist, for they are logically anterior to God. However, although the dilemma is interesting, if there be no moral absolutes (as indeed I believe there are not) then it is little more than a word game.

Brierley returns to his point about purposeless evolution. He appears incredulous that simple atoms could give rise to morality. This is of course nothing more than the old argument from personal incredulity that held sway for so long before Darwin. We know that brains have evolved slowly over millions of years by natural selection, and we have no evidence that minds are anything other than the product of evolved brains. Morality is a product of minds, which can recognise the existence of, and empathise with, other minds. So, no matter how personally incredulous we might be, we have no evidence to suggest anything beyond the material, physical universe which we observe. We certainly have no right to bandy around baseless assertions about supernatural beings that ordained fictitious moral laws.

David Robertson makes plain his Christian fundamentalism, observing that transgressors will one day answer to God for their sins, and so he (Mr Robertson) need not worry too much about them for the time being. He asserts repeatedly that we are made in God’s image and it is thus that we derive our morals. This assertion is made without evidence and therefore need not be taken seriously.

“Would that you could be like me, apart from these chains,” says David Robertson, expressing his sincere wish that Paul Orton become a Christian. Mr Robertson would have Mr Orton bow and scrape to a ruthless dictator, who created him imperfect and then made impossible demands of him; who would hold Mr Orton responsible for a filthy human sacrifice that took place twenty centuries ago supposedly to take vicarious responsibility for everyone’s sins; and who would monitor Mr Orton’s every thought, awake and asleep, reserving eternal torture as punishment should he fail to make the right propitiations. To wish that on any fellow human is utterly disgusting even to the most elementary morality. Any morally enlightened person must be mightily pleased that no evidence whatsoever exists for God.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
One of the great tragedies of mankind is that morality has been hijacked by religion.
-Sri Lankabhimanya Sir Arthur Charles Clarke, CBE, FRAS
16 December 1917 – 19 March 2008
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Here is a YouTube video of David Robertson outlining his stance on morality.

A response to William Lane Craig's thirty pages of nothing new

2010-02-06T04:34:00.001-08:00

William Lane Craig has just published Five Arguments for God, which will no doubt impress his loyally unquestioning followers to the same degree that his earlier iterations of the same tired old arguments seem to have done.

I was alerted to the document’s existence by one such, who wowed on Twitter that it contained 30 whole pages! Formidable indeed. I’m not as clever as Dr Craig (I wouldn’t be an atheist if I were, surely) so I might not be able to match his score (and ten). Theist readers, some of whom might even have read Dr Craig’s piece, may as well start proclaiming their triumphant hero’s victory straight away.

William Lane Craig is Research Professor of Philosophy at Talbot School of Theology in La Mirada, California. Such an august title promises erudition and wisdom of inarguable proportions; I may as well give up now. But let’s see what’s on offer.

Overall the essay turns out to be little more than a sustained strawman attack on Richard Dawkins, although Daniel Dennett receives a share of peevish misrepresentation too. Craig’s attempted criticism of Dennett is particularly duplicitous, and as such must be aimed primarily at readers who already support Craig, to bolster their extant impression that he can defeat the arguments of those awful ‘New Atheists’. Craig appears unconcerned that informed readers will spot the cynical deception at once. Cheers and whoops from his adoring home crowd are all he’s after.

The gymnastics around truth begin in the first paragraph on the first page. Craig implies that, when critics point out the harmful effects of religious belief upon society, they are thus attempting to argue against the truth value of religious dogmas. On the contrary, as Craig well knows, such commentators are exploring the potential damage to society resulting from belief in patently false assertions. Harmful effects of religious observance are not being held up as refutations of self-evidently false religious ‘truths’.

Craig is right insofar as his arguments for the existence of God are passé. Contrary to his next claim, however, those old arguments do still merit refutation lest they be assumed (by the ignorant) to have proved their case by default. That said, the arguments have such little merit that there is practically nothing there to refute.

After a couple of paragraphs recounting a thirty-year-old piece in Time magazine heralding a major comeback by God, Craig jumps onto his well-worn soapbox of logical ‘proofs’ with numbered steps. He outlines his case thus: each premise in an argument need not be proven true in order for the proof to work. Each premise need only, he claims, be more plausibly true than false, for the argument to be a ‘good’ argument.

Well that’s rubbish for a start. Every time we allow the grey area of mere plausibility to supplant demonstrable truth, we introduce a degree of uncertainty into our argument. The more merely ‘plausible’ steps we have, the more this uncertainty is multiplied as we proceed through the series of steps. So what do we end up proving, if our premises are not reliable to start with? Nothing worthwhile, if truth be the object of the exercise. If, on the other hand, pseudo-intellectual exhibitionism for the delight of admiring fans is what we’re after, this kind of stuff will serve quite nicely.

Cosmological Argument from Contingency

We have all heard Dr Craig trot out his favourite arguments time and again. This time he departs slightly from his yellowed script, opening with the so-called Cosmological Argument from Contingency. It runs like this.

1. Everything that exists has an explanation of its existence, either in the necessity of its own nature or in an external cause.
2. If the universe has an explanation of its existence, that explanation is God.
3. The universe exists.
4. Therefore, the universe has an explanation of its existence (from 1, 3).
5. Therefore, the explanation of the universe’s existence is God (from 2, 4).

Premise 1 is trivially true, although it is worth adding that we can’t always know which of its two categories any given entity might fall into. In some cases the classification is easy. The mug of tea in front of me has a chain of explanatory causes ending in its delivery to my desk a short time ago by my daughter. But what of an imaginary number, such as i, the square root of -1? Has it always existed by necessity, or was it called into existence by an otherwise unfillable gap in a human-made mathematical proof? As far as the universe is concerned, we have no information about its cause that could help us categorise it one way or the other. It may have an external cause, about which we know absolutely nothing (and neither does Dr Craig, whether or not he is honest enough to admit it) or it may be necessary for some equally unknown reason.

Premise 2 is a bald assertion with no rational justification whatsoever. I could just as well say, if the universe has an explanation of its existence, that explanation is the Great Green Arkleseizure, as imagined by the great Douglas Adams. I am reminded of a video clip I saw recently, of Dr Craig dismissing a similar candidate for the universal cause, the wonderful Flying Spaghetti Monster. The FSM, he argued, cannot be the cause of the universe because it is a material object extended in space and time within the universe. What a shame he did not realise that FSM adherents are not referring to a physical FSM at all, but to the non-physical, immaterial, transcendent, timeless FSM that exists eternally outside the universe.

Recognising that premise 2 is unsupportable, Craig attempts to create a diversion. His assertion A, attributed to a strawman atheist, that if atheism be true then the universe has no explanation, is extremely silly. To begin with, atheism is a lack of religious belief. Even if there were evidence for the existence of a god or gods, it would be possible to ignore it (or be ignorant of it) and remain an atheist. But now Craig is substituting the word atheism for ‘actual non-existence of a god’. Craig spent the first of his thirty pages making a distinction between things that are true, and things that we know are true. It seems ironic, then, that he now seeks to equate atheism with reality. His next trick is to reverse his strawman assertion, creating a false dichotomy. He asserts that if the universe has an explanation then atheism must be untrue, i.e. God must exist. But this is nonsense. If the universe does have a cause, the one fact we can be certain of is that we know absolutely nothing about that cause. Even given that the cause exists or existed, there is nothing to suggest that it is or was God.

Premise 3 is of course trivially true. No, I don’t mean that the existence of the universe is a trivial matter, at least not from my perspective. I mean that the premise is obviously true to the point that it need hardly be stated. All black and white cows have at least two colours. All men are male.

Conclusion 4 is trivially true because it is defined as true by premise 1. It takes the argument no further forward. Conclusion 5, however, is baseless, because it depends on the ludicrous premise 2. So much for the Cosmological Argument from Contingency, and for the list of ‘philosophers’ (in fact known religious apologists) whom Craig cites as its defenders.

Kalam Cosmological Argument

Craig now moves on to his oldest favourite, the Kalam Cosmological Argument. This is almost identical to the contingency argument dealt with above. It claims to prove, trivially, that the universe must have a cause, but it says nothing at all about the nature of that cause. It is at this point that Craig misrepresents Dennett, twisting his words beyond recognition. In fact, on page 185 of Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, Dennett suggests that the universe ‘created itself out of something that is well nigh indistinguishable from nothing at all’. It’s clear that Dennett is referring to the singularity that gave rise to the Big Bang, which is believed to have contained all the universe’s matter and energy in a dimensionless point of infinite density. What caused the unpacking of that singularity we do not know, any more than we know what causes a particular uranium nucleus to decay at a particular moment, and Dennett does not claim to know either. Craig, however, claims to know a great deal about the cause. Believing (or expecting his audience to believe) that he has refuted Dennett, Craig goes on thus:

‘Dennett’s view is thus logically incoherent. The cause of the universe must therefore be a transcendent cause beyond the universe.’

What? How is this anything other than a blatant non-sequitur? We have no idea how the singularity behaved prior to the Big Bang, or what may have affected it, internally or externally. No idea at all. There is nothing on which to base claims about transcendent anything. As usual, Craig is bending the argument toward his preconception of a personal god.

Following his old script, within three paragraphs Craig gets from ‘The universe had a cause’ to a ‘personal, timeless, transcendent being’. Particularly rich is his conclusion that the ‘personhood of the first cause of the universe is implied by its timelessness and immateriality’. Yeah, right. We all know people who are timeless and immaterial, don’t we. Both those qualities just have ‘person’ written all over them. I hesitate to resort to such sarcasm, but this really is the most transparent gibberish, delivered with the full authority of the Research Professor of Philosophy at Talbot School of Theology in La Mirada, California. It is hardly surprising that in his next sentence Craig asserts that minds are immaterial, and therefore the cause of the universe must be a mind without a body. Dr Craig, when you show me someone who can think without a brain, I will take your assertion of the immaterial nature of mind seriously.

Craig continues to act as though the three brief sentences of his cosmological argument had proved his timeless, spaceless, personal creator. Moreover, he claims, blatantly and falsely, that Richard Dawkins accepts the same silly ‘conclusions’ of the cosmological argument. Quoting a passage from Dawkins, Craig dramatically appears incredulous that Dawkins accepts those conclusions. But of course Dawkins accepts no such thing. Even out of context, the quoted passage makes Dawkins’s point crystal clear. He is simply saying that, even if the universe did have a cause, we can infer nothing whatsoever about that cause from the mere supposition of its existence. Dr Craig, your misrepresentation of Professor Dawkins is intellectually dishonest and morally reprehensible. (More about morality in the next section.) Before leaving the cosmological argument, Craig attempts one further sideswipe at Dawkins, asserting that ‘there can be no physical cause of any sort of the Big Bang singularity.’ How on Earth does he know that? Asserting that the cause must therefore be – yes, you’ve guessed – his personal, transcendent, etc., he then pretends that it is only the name God that Dawkins objects to. Again this is wilfully misleading and highly misrepresentative of what Dawkins actually said. Craig could not care less about the transparent fraudulence of his position. Detection by rationalists does not deter him in the slightest, so long as he continues to hold sway over his faithful flock, awed as they are by this latest in a long line of watertight rebuttals of specious atheist propaganda.

Moral Argument

This is another of Craig’s old favourites. First he explains the distinction between ‘right’ and ‘good’, before going on to quote the three succinct steps of the proof:

1. If God does not exist, objective moral values and duties do not exist.
2. Objective moral values and duties do exist.
3. Therefore, God exists.

Before tackling premise 1 we must confront premise 2, since premise 2 appears within premise 1. Do objective moral values exist? That is to say, are there moral truths which are independent of what people might think? Obviously we cannot know, because the only means of experiencing any candidate for a moral ‘truth’ is to think about it. We have to use our minds so we cannot examine moral claims that are external to our minds. Therefore premise 2 is baseless. But is premise 2 even plausible? Let’s put it to the test. Recently I heard a podcast in which a religious apologist defended the moral argument by stating that it is wrong to torture a child. That wrongness, he said, is universal and unalterable, regardless of personal opinion. If he is right, then I must admit to having transgressed unalterable moral rules, for I have tortured my defenceless, screaming eight-year-old daughter, forcibly restraining her as a nurse stitched together the torn triangular flaps of her recently injured chin. Light anaesthaesia had been administered but my daughter, no doubt having inherited her mother’s cast iron will power, simply would not be sedated. I have no doubt that the procedure caused her immense pain and anguish at the time, but after accidentally falling and splitting her chin she was in no mood for calm reasoning. (Quick stitching was necessary, the doctor said, to avoid subsequent unsightly scarring, and I’m glad to report, three years on, that the nurse did an excellent job.)

There is no evidence whatsoever that absolute moral values, external to minds, exist. When deciding whether or not to subject someone to pain and anguish, we can imagine the situation from their point of view, and act accordingly. That is the basis of the so-called golden rule – act toward others in a way that you would have others act unto you. No overarching authority is required for this simple principle to be upheld by reasonable people. It’s worth commenting, however, that plenty of perfectly atrocious acts have been committed solely on God’s allegedly delegated authority. Apologists such as Craig routinely concede that theists are not necessarily any more moral than atheists, thinking that such a concession exempts them from having to explain the buckets of blood that have stained theistic hands down the centuries. No such exemption has been or will be granted. Those who defend religious belief must justify the filthy brutality carried out daily, solely on account of their faith, by God’s faithful.

Craig’s suggestion – that Richard Dawkins accepts the validity of the moral argument – is false and therefore does not deserve a response.

Craig’s next banana skin comprises a complete misunderstanding of the Euthyphro Dilemma, which says: either good and bad exist because God decreed them (in which case it is meaningless to say that God is good, because there exists no higher standard to which God must answer), or God’s actions are good, rather than bad, independently of the mere fact that he performed them (in which case goodness and badness do not need God in order to exist). Craig asserts that we can escape from the dilemma by taking a third route, i.e. that God wills something because he is good. I am perfectly certain that the Research Professor of Philosophy at Talbot School of Theology in La Mirada, California is fully aware that his ‘third route’ is identical to the second choice of the Euthyphro dilemma. If it is meaningful to say that God is good rather than bad, then goodness and badness are logically anterior to God. Craig attempts to build upon his logical fallacy to perform a superficially impressive mirror trick. God, he says, has a morally good character, which makes him good. (Presumably his omnipotence is insufficiently potent to overcome the constraints of his character, should he choose so to do.) Guided by that good character he then decrees what is right and what is wrong. It is transparently obvious that this catapults us straight back into Euthyphro’s Dilemma: against what standard is the ‘goodness’ of God’s moral character judged, if it be anterior to any of his actions or decrees, and he himself is the absolute standard of everything? Really, anyone persuaded by Craig’s verbal prestidigitation is either too lazy or too brainless to think the matter through. I do not think for one moment that Craig himself is either lazy or brainless. Let’s use the last two premises to create a neat logical proof.

1. Anyone seriously propounding the moral argument is lazy, brainless or seeking wilfully to mislead their audience.
2. Articulate proponents of the moral argument are neither lazy nor brainless.
3. Therefore….

Argument from Fine Tuning

Craig cites the apparently fine-tuned nature of the physical constants, together with evidence that if any one of those constants were even slightly different then the development of life would be impossible. He spends several paragraphs distinguishing ‘fine-tuned’ from ‘designed’, obviously in an attempt to deflect the charge of circular reasoning. But we do not need to apply such a charge in order to demonstrate the speciousness of the fine tuning argument; it has more holes than an Emmental cheese. Here is the argument:

1. The fine-tuning of the universe is due to physical necessity, chance, or design.
2. It is not due to physical necessity or chance.
3. Therefore, it is due to design.

It is immediately obvious that premise 1 is a false trichotomy. We know exactly nothing of how the physical constants came to have their values. For all we know, there may be no other possible values, or there may indeed by so incredibly many universes that a tiny proportion of them happen to be life-supporting. Craig invokes personal incredulity, claiming that no-one can grasp the stupendous improbabilities involved. But he fails to apply that same objection to the stupendous numbers of conceivably possible universes. If we cannot grasp one big number, neither can we grasp the other, so it is not reasonable to disallow one ungraspable number (the improbability of a chance occurrence of the right physical constants) by comparing it with another ungraspable number (the number of potential universes). The mere fact that we are here considering the question proves that our universe is able to support life. It serves no purpose to comment upon the improbability of what we in fact see. When the lottery numbers are drawn, perhaps the organisers should decline to pay the winner, reasoning thus: “This particular unique combination of balls is far less probable than the alternative, i.e. not getting that particular combination, so its occurrence cannot be due to chance. It must be due to design, so you have won unfairly.”

Besides, if the universe is designed, what is the purpose of designing a knife-edge existence for life? Why did God restrict the physical constants to such narrow values? Is there something inherently good about knife-edges? If he is using such an esoteric parlour trick to advertise his existence, then what of the millions who lived and died before science advanced to the point where his handiwork may be detected?

The breathtaking arrogance of Craig’s know-all position is encapsulated in the following sentence: ‘It follows [from the fine-tuning argument] that the fine-tuning is therefore due to design unless the design hypothesis can be shown to be even more implausible than its competitors.’ See how Craig assumes that the ‘competitors’, together with the design alternative, constitute all the possibilities that there are. Nowhere does he acknowledge how vanishingly little we (including he) actually know about the origins of the universe. Nowhere does he admit of possibilities that we (including he) have not even begun to imagine. How boringly, parochially, complacently typical of the theist stance.

Craig quotes others who accuse atheists of unreasonably rejecting the God hypothesis on account of an irrational desire to maintain a different world view. This is simply putting the cart before the horse. There is no reason at all to assert God without evidence, and none of Dr Craig’s arguments provides the slightest evidence in God’s favour. I shall not allow Craig to get away with assuming God and challenging others to disprove him, and then pretending that God wins by default. That is all he is doing.

Several pages follow, misdefining the word ‘simple’ in a lame attempt to claim that God is a simple explanation for the universe. Starting from one’s preferred conclusion, and trying to bludgeon words into fitting it, is not admissible to rational inquiry.

Ontological Argument

The popular version of this ‘argument’ involves imagining a perfect being, and then asserting that its perfection would be greater if it existed than if it did not. From that, proponents claim, it follows that if God can be imagined, then he must exist. This amounts to no more than a claim that imagining something makes it real, a notion popular in early childhood but out of which most of us have grown before reaching double figures. Doubtless aware of this, Craig seeks to obscure the staggeringly weak nature of the argument by dressing it up in some rags borrowed from Alvin Plantinga. The thinly-veiled version thus espoused postulates a gigantic number of possible worlds, each described by a series of logical statements. In some of those imagined worlds, the argument goes, there will exist a maximally perfect being, with (conveniently) a set of attributes that just happen to match those of God. From that, we are expected to accept that the imagined existence of a maximally perfect being in some imaginary world forces the actual existence of a maximally perfect being in all possible worlds. That illegal move, completely unsupported by logic or common sense, occurs between steps 2 and 3 of the following silly word game:

1. It is possible that a maximally great being exists.
2. If it is possible that a maximally great being exists, then a maximally great being exists in some possible world.
3. If a maximally great being exists in some possible world, then it exists in every possible world.
4. If a maximally great being exists in every possible world, then it exists in the actual world.
5. If a maximally great being exists in the actual world, then a maximally great being exists.
6. Therefore, a maximally great being exists.

Craig’s essay discusses only premise 1, falling silent on the other premises, most notably on the conjuring trick that takes place between steps 2 and 3. Without an evidence-based explanation of why an imaginary being in some imagined worlds can give rise to such an imaginary being in every possible world, including worlds whose descriptions explicitly state that no such being exists, the argument is worthless to anyone prepared to give it a moment’s thought. Nothing in Plantinga’s argument renders it any more worthy of attention than the semi-coherent ramblings of his that I’ve endured on YouTube.

So, nothing new in Craig’s thirty pages.

Cranmer: a response to a response to a response

2010-02-01T11:57:00.000-08:00

Recently Cranmer responded, on his blog, to Richard Dawkins writing in The Times.

Cranmer, your smoothly sententious eloquence kept me reading to the end of your unjustifiably ad hominem attack on Richard Dawkins, despite my urges simultaneously to cringe and to heave at your irritating and persistent use of the third person when writing about yourself. Christopher Hitchens has remarked upon the common link between this affectation and megalomania. I find myself doubting any ambition on your part to take over the world; perhaps it is merely a symptom of the complacency so apparent in those who draw comfort from the popularity of their superstitious, faith-based, evidence-free world view.

Look upon this as a response to a reponse to a response. I take issue with your reply to Richard Dawkins, following his comment posted on your blog, after your bizarre critique of his recent article in The Times.

Do not try to dodge the naked fact that you suggested Professor Dawkins should be arrested. If, as you claim, the interrogative makes it ‘not a suggestion’, then I’m perfectly entitled to ask you when you stopped beating your wife, and to expect an unevasive answer. And as for a ‘nuanced point’, the point of your title was about as nuanced as the point of a Zulu spear. You are backpedalling, sir.

Your arguments appear to be founded upon the complexity of written theology. You claim that Dawkins is attacking a straw man, in the same way that ignorant creationists attack evolution by misquoting or over-simplifying Darwin’s thesis. But this is merely obfuscation. Do not, sir, attempt to pass your naked emperor off as decently clad. In order to qualify as a Christian one must profess belief in a supernatural being, omniscient and yet perturbed by his creation’s fall; omnipotent and yet unable to escape subjecting himself to a filthy public execution for which we ought all to share responsibility. If I have misunderstood some complex nuance of theology that renders all this untrue, then please provide me with a reference in order that I may fill the gap in my education.

Some of your claims are either plain ignorant or fundamentally disingenuous. No genuine evolutionary biologist accommodates creationism. That would be directly analogous to Columbus accommodating belief in a flat Earth. Similarly, no true scientist entertains seriously the empty cop-out of intelligent design. To embrace either of those dogmas is to reject science in principle.

If creationists ‘sustain all manner of disjunctive contradictions and inconsistencies’, how does that contribute to their understanding of the world around them? And if they are not trying to understand or explain anything, what is their purpose?

I believe that by positing ‘the varieties of literary genre’ to be found in the Bible you are in fact saying that the Bible is not literally true. That gives us a small island of common ground at least. What, then is the Bible? You list several things that it is not, and cite the importance of knowing what it is in order to discuss it, but fail to enlighten us as to what ‘what it is’ is. And what of all those who believed – and those who still believe – that the Bible is the inerrant word of God? Perhaps the word was somewhat errant after all, if it needed the Wisdom Literature in order to clarify it. It is quite bizarre to claim that a later, external revision somehow validates a self-contradictory muddle of ancient man-made texts, and even more bizarre to expect such a ludicrous claim to be taken seriously, however ostentatiously erudite the high prose in which it be couched.

Dogma is not a prerequisite to the dismissal of belief that Adam existed. I don’t require any dogma to dismiss the existence of Tinker Bell. Rather, I require credible evidence before asserting the reality of fairies. The same goes for Adam. Besides, if Adam existed, the whole of biology goes out of the window in one. Please don’t be so silly.

Your overly-long diatribe, displaying as it does the peacock’s tail of an admirable classical education and a well-thumbed library, says little that is sharply relevant or even helpful. Away with the veil of assumed complexity, hiding the pitifully weak set of claims beneath. If you have a clear, unequivocal point to make in favour of your position, bring it on.

Response to Nancy Graham Holm and others

2010-01-06T11:47:00.001-08:00

Recently Nancy Graham Holm wrote on the Guardian Comment is Free website following the attempt on Kurt Westergaard's life on New Year's Day 2010. Her views turn my stomach. Here are the points, as I understand them, belched out from her poisoned pen, and the points made by some commenters.

The cartoon by Westergaard is offensive to Muslims, who were/are unable to see it as satire.

This assumes that a Muslim’s beliefs are unalterably part of him/her, like skin colour or race. Rather, a person who subscribes to the belief system known as Islam is free to throw over that belief should they feel the need to do so. I know that many Muslims face peril if they declare their apostasy but the religious authorities cannot see into their minds. I suspect that many so-called Muslims are silent atheists. A few have spoken out but most do not, for genuine and respectable reasons of pragmatism. A vocal Muslim apostate in rural, ultra-fanatical Saudi Arabia would be of little help to his/her family dead.

How dare Holm claim to know what a Muslim – or anyone else – can do and cannot do. How does she know what it feels like to be them? All too often we see those like Holm who ‘believe in belief’ bestowing the gift of omniscience upon themselves. They can see the point of view of the believer, and that of the atheist, with crystal clarity against a backdrop of reality. How breathtakingly arrogant they are, as they point out the merits and demerits of each position before adopting a criticism-immune, cravenly politically correct middle ground.

And before anyone tries to conflate that conceit with the atheist’s position, let’s be clear that the atheist simply asks for evidence in support of assertions made about the world and those in it, especially those assertions that affect directly the lives of others. Scepticism is not arrogance. It is a necessary part of healthy and open discourse.

Muslims felt devastatingly humiliated by the cartoon and this feeling of humiliation is justified.

This is surely the weakest of Holm’s pathetic arguments. Why should a Muslim be humiliated by a cartoon? Humiliating someone means deliberately making them feel small and useless in a public situation. I have been humiliated; I know what it is like. I have been publicly and repeatedly ridiculed - several times in front of large audiences - by a grossly unprofessional former employer. I can still feel the outrage and injustice of each separate attack. But if my erstwhile boss had drawn a cartoon of someone important to me, and presented it as an object of amusement and derision, I am sure I would not have felt anything like the abject embarrassment or acute, severe depression that accompanied his direct personal campaign against me. For instance, I dearly love my wife and my daughter and would gladly defend them to the last of my strength against any form of attack, be it physical or verbal. However, if someone were to draw a cartoon of them wielding sticks of fizzing dynamite, I don’t think I’d feel any response at all. It would be utterly unimportant to me. I know them both intimately and they are not terrorists, so there would be no association. Moreover, if in my view the object of the cartoon was the immortal messenger of the omnipotent creator of the universe, what might I think he had to fear from such an ineptly humourless prank? If I believed (as a true Muslim surely does, according to the Qur’an) in judgment day and my ticket to paradise, together with the cartoonist’s assured eternal perdition, I think earthbound rage and violence would be very low on my list of priorities. There would be no point, for the matter would surely be settled, devastatingly and pyrotechnically, by the supreme authority.

Intentional humiliation is an aggressive act.

This is a true statement but it has little bearing on the cartoon, since the alleged link between it and humiliation is false.

An apology from the Danish prime minister would have defused the situation and prevented the recent attack on Westergaard and his granddaughter in their home.

This cannot be proven, and seems most unlikely. The actions of the imams who toured the Middle East whipping up mass religious fervour suggest to me that they welcomed the cartoons as a means of firing up the congregation and exerting powerful control over them. Could it be that this is a core part of the Islamic belief system? The powder-keg latency of pent-up rage, able to be triggered at the drop of a hat, constitutes a formidable arsenal in support of a jihadist agenda. All the more reason why this debate should go on and on, forcing the Islamic clergy to defend their beliefs by rational argument, or shut the hell up about them.

The lack of such an apology compounded the humiliation.

As there was no humiliation (see above) then there was nothing to be compounded.

Cartoons that mock Islam are cruel and in bad taste.

Cartoons are intended to mock. But what is so special about Islam? Nobody claims that cartoons mocking politicans are in bad taste. Jokes may be cruel but adults can shrug them off and move on. At the risk of repeating myself, if I believed in an all-powerful supernatural being, I’m sure I wouldn’t worry about people making fun of it. It could deploy its omnipotence in support of its own campaign.

The ‘free speech’ precept is no more than a cover for prejudice against, and suspicion of, religion.

The author of such corkscrew-twisted logic has a great deal of mental unscrambling to do. If religion is a set of unsupported beliefs that adversely affect the lives of those who don’t want to know about them, then it deserves prejudice against it. Most people today are prejudiced against racism, and that prejudice is not reckoned to be a bad thing. As for suspicion, when those who say their religion is peaceful turn around and blow up a crowd of people, we owe it to ourselves to be suspicious in the interests of self preservation. Airport security is all about suspicion, but who complains about security personnel being suspicious of air travellers? As Salman Rushdie says, making any set of ideas sacred is an abandoment of the right to free speech.

Muslims are in love with their faith.

This debauchery of words is dishonest in the extreme. It is as though something precious and inseparably connected were being wrenched from a victim’s arms by the publication of a cartoon. If a person’s faith is such a huge part of their world view, involving as it does an all-powerful father figure, what harm can possibly be done by ink on paper? Let them love their faith if it makes them feel better, but let them do so quietly and privately, and let them respond to newspaper articles that they don’t like either by ignoring them or by writing letters of protest to the editor.

Another attacker lurks somewhere out there, waiting to attack Westergaard again.

This is tantamount to a threat. It is certainly intended to foment anxiety and foreboding, and I sense a streak of smug relish in the delivery of such a vile payload. Ms Holm, I feel physically sick, and your words have caused my nausea. Were it not for my genuine wish to retain and digest my wife’s excellent cooking, I would gladly send you a greaseproof bag of vomit in tomorrow’s mail.

Points made by commenters at RD.net

The cartoon was insulting to Muslims, and those who think it is fun to insult others should not be excused.

The cartoon insulted a set of beliefs – namely that it is acceptable to murder people over theological differences – not a person or persons. Thus the second clause falls, bereft of the supporting crutch of the false main clause.

There is a false dichotomy between not caring about being savagely rude and holding ideas sacred.

It is savagely, horribly, bloodily, bone-crunchingly, agonizingly, tragically, murderously rude to detonate explosive belts amid crowds while screaming of the glory of one’s favourite sky god. A belief system that condones – or fails to condemn, to a man – such disgusting barbarism deserves to be outlawed, let alone ridiculed. Savage rudeness toward baseless, dangerous assertions is commonplace and frequently justifiable. Moreover, the holders of such beliefs deserve absolutely no respect for failing to examine and question their beliefs sceptically. In fact they deserve contempt for such abrogation of their responsibilities as sentient humans. And that goes for the imams most of all, as they are the authority figures to whom the masses will surely flock.

The cartoon is a form of bullying.

Rubbish. Bullying is direct, cynical victimisation within an asymmetric power relationship. If Islam is true, then the power is all within the hands of Allah and his Muslim followers. They have nothing to fear from puny man and his insignificant works.

Dinesh D'Souza on life after death

2009-11-29T10:37:00.000-08:00

Dinesh appeared on IssuesEtc radio promoting his book on life after death. I’ll summarise his arguments and italicize my responses.

The commentator (Todd Wilken) asks Dinesh why he wants to make the case for life after death without appeal to Biblical truth or revelation. Dinesh responds that, as atheists do not accept the authority of the Bible, he intends to use their own weapons of reason and scepticism (and evidence and science) against them instead. This is the best way to empower believers and challenge atheists. This is an effective way to reach the seekers and fence sitters. Christians are intimidated by modern biology because atheists have been using evolution as a battering ram against Christianity. Believers’ sons and daughters, having been to college, come back and ask questions which their parents, who can cite only scripture, cannot necessarily engage.

Reason and scepticism are not weapons. They are valuable attributes of open and inquiring minds. Yes, they empower those who practise them, enabling them to distinguish between plausible assertions and silly ones. The more reason and scepticism the better. And if reason and scepticism lead to a credible case for life after death, supported by verifiable evidence, then so be it. No honest seeker of truth need be intimidated by modern biology. Rather, I hope they would be fascinated by it, whether they learned it from their college-educated children or not. Arguments based on authority alone need not be taken seriously. That remains true whether the authority is ancient scripture or more recent proselytizing from the likes of Dinesh.

The atheist has no evidence for his belief that there is no afterlife. Richard Dawkins’ statements show ‘craziness’. A Christian believes in life after death because of biblical revelation. The atheist laughs at this because the Christian has no evidence. He has interviewed no dead people and has not been to the ‘other side of the curtain’. There is some validity to that. But the atheist would declare his confidence that there is no life after death, which is why Richard Dawkins is willing to go to his death with the tape recorder on. However, the atheist does not know either. He has not interviewed any dead people and has not been to the other side of the curtain. What information does the atheist have that the religious believer doesn’t have? It turns out that he has none at all. So the atheist position, like the believer’s position, is a guess in the dark. Both are taking a faith-based position, but whereas the theist is honest enough to admit that his stance is based only on faith, the atheist deludes himself into thinking his position is based on reason.

Firstly you have misrepresented Richard Dawkins. He has said clearly that the purpose of the tape recorder will be to prevent rumours of a deathbed conversion to theism. This has nothing to do with life after death. There may be an automatic connection between theism and life after death in your mind, but there is none in Dawkins's (I'm sure he'll correct me if I'm wrong). Dawkins is a clear, logical thinker. You, sir, appear to be neither.

Rather than asserting that there is no afterlife, the atheist has no reason to believe in an afterlife. Furthermore, neither does the Christian. Dinesh is right insofar as the Christian’s belief in an afterlife is based on faith. But the burden of proof lies with the one making the claim. Suppose you are called as a witness at the trial of a man you have never seen. Imagine that the prosecuting counsel challenges you to produce evidence that this man is innocent of a crime. Never having seen the man, and knowing nothing of his actions or whereabouts at the time of the alleged crime, you protest that you can provide no evidence at all. “Aha!” shouts the prosecutor. “As no evidence against the prosecution’s claim can be offered, we are entitled to assume him guilty if we so wish.” No court worth its salt would tolerate such nonsense, and neither will we tolerate it from you, Dinesh.

The belief in life after death is near-universal, in every culture. The west is the only civilization in which life after death is denied. The atheists cite Freud’s wish-fulfilment theory. We all want to survive death so we make up a wonderful life that never ends. This explains belief in heaven, but it does not explain belief in hell so it is a bad theory. No-one would come up with the idea of hell through wish fulfilment.

Freud was right. The wish for life after death is universally popular. Those who sought to wield power over others in this life concocted the vile fiction of hell to frighten people – especially children – into doing as they were told. This has led to untold fear and misery among those convinced that their friends and loved ones have been roasting away for years, but I am getting off the point. Your wish-fulfilment argument is spectacularly weak, Dinesh.

Near-death experiences first came out in the 1970s and were anecdotal and hard to take seriously. We, however, haven’t had a near death experience, and there are thirty years of data showing great similarity and uniformity. Everybody goes through a tunnel, sees a bright light, encounters a celestial being etc. Atheists dismiss this as a dream similar to that caused by hallucinogenic drugs, but if a hundred people took LSD they would have a hundred different dreams, not similar ones. Other atheists say this is the brain breaking down, but the problem is that a dying brain does not recover the ability to perceive clearly. Near death experiences are among the most vivid experiences people have ever had. The atheist explanation is dubious, and on balance near death experiences do suggest that consciousness might outlive death. If the atheist is correct, near death experiences that point to an afterlife should be very rare or completely impossible. Even if only one of them is valid it is showing that some form on consciousness does survive death, although it doesn’t say for how long. Near death experiences constitute valuable empirical evidence because those experiencing them have gone right to the edge.

Read the first sentence of the last paragraph again. 1970s? There are no documented near-death experiences before then? So all the ‘data’ are recent and probably hugely cross-contaminated. As for uniformity, if you randomly select pebbles from a beach and keep only the grey, rounded ones between 3cm and 4cm long, you will, amazingly, end up with a very uniform set of pebbles. The same will happen if you collect stories from people who recall near-death experiences and select them according to a strict set of criteria (light, tunnel, undefined being etc.). As for the vividness of the experience, it is only the memory that is vivid, and the memory may be completely false. It is well known that brains temporarily starved of oxygen undergo weird experiences, often with intensified sensory perception. Dinesh, you simply assert without evidence that near-death experiences point to an afterlife. Moreover, what has all this to do with atheism or theism? Even if you proved that consciousness survives death – which of course you have not proved at all – that does not prove the existence of a deity. You are multiplying assumptions based on nothing. Occam’s Razor, please.

The physical laws that govern the universe have recently been rewritten by science, and Christians should find this very thrilling. Physics 200 years ago would have had nothing to say about life after death because heaven is outside of space and time, and we will have incorruptible material bodies. 200 years ago the atheists would have said the universe extends infinitely so we cannot get outside it, and matter breaks down so resurrected incorruptible bodies are impossible. But now scientists talk routinely about multiple universes and multiple dimensions where different laws apply. Scientists speak of dark matter and dark energy which is unlike any matter or energy that we know about and is completely undetectable by any scientific instrument. The dark matter adds up to 95% of the universe. So we should say to the atheist, “Sorry, pal, the matter you know about is only 5%!”

Physics today, like that of 200 years ago, has nothing to say about life after death. You seem to be saying, “Hey, we know more than we did 200 years ago, so things that we still know nothing about are therefore more likely!” That is a non-sequitur. There is no connection between multiple dimensions and immaterial bodies that survive death. Your reference to dark matter doesn’t help either. You’re saying that we’re ignorant about most of the universe. That’s true, but it means you’re ignorant too. You can’t fence off an ‘unknown’ part of the universe and then start making a set of specific claims about it, viz. supernatural deity, heaven, afterlife, immaterial eternal bodies etc. Grow up, man. You’re like child in the playground shouting, “Can’t tag me; I’m on den, ner nerny ner ner!”

The modern atheist denies consciousness – they say that the entire repertoire of our mental life; all the immaterial things that we experience directly are nothing more than the firing of neurones in our brain. But if thoughts and consciousness were just firing neurones we should be able to scan the brain’s neurones and say what someone is thinking. This cannot be done; in fact a brain scan cannot reveal whether someone is conscious or not. The only way a neuroscientist can tell whether or not you are conscious is to ask you. The mind cannot be reduced to the brain because the mind is in the non-physical, immaterial realm whereas the brain is just the physical operation of atoms and molecules.

Dinesh, I am holding in my hand a deck of 52 cards. You are welcome to examine them. You can note the sequence of the cards; the orientation of the deck and the height from the floor. You can measure the air currents in the room, the frictional characteristics of the floor tiles, etc. All that information should enable you to predict exactly where each card will land; which way up, etc. What do you mean, the problem is too complicated? Don’t be silly. You have all the available data. All you have to do is analyze it. After all, decks of cards aren’t part of the non-physical, immaterial realm, are they? They’re just atoms and molecules, surely. OK, sarcasm mode off. The brain contains some 100 billion neurones, interconnected by a net of amazing complexity. The world’s population is currently a mere 6 or 7 billion. Noting the current position and actions of every citizen of the world is about 15 times less complex than noting the state of every neurone in a single brain. Do you see that the problem is simply one of complexity, to coin a phrase?

There is a point that the atheist brain has not conceived of. The atheist says that the mind and brain are exactly the same thing, but here is an example. Think of your mind as software and your brain as hardware. The software requires the hardware in order to run. But it does not follow that the hardware is the cause of the software, or that the two are identical. The brain could be a transmitter or receiver for the mind. You require a CD player to play music but the sound waves are not caused by the CD player. The body may die but the immaterial part of us may live on, even though here on Earth the two go together.

A child’s brain, let alone an atheist brain, could easily conceive of this amateur science fiction without really trying. But what reason do we have to suppose additional, unseen entities? Every human death has involved the brain ceasing to function. Thinking of the mind as a piece of software is a neat analogy but there is no evidence whatsoever that the software can exist without the hardware of the brain. The mind may live on, or it may disappear up the ring around Uranus. The evidence in favour of both contingencies – and infinite others – is equal, and zero.

The book Life After Death is a stunning confirmation of religious faith. Schopenhauer makes a claim about life after death that has never been refuted. Like the transition from the caterpillar to the butterfly, life after death is a factual question.

Yes, the question of life after death is a factual one. So is the question of life before birth. Your recollection of that is…?

We are like detectives who have come upon a crime scene with no witnesses. Each clue by itself does not make the case but all the arguments collectively constitute an overwhelming case. That is very good news for believers and for anyone truly open to the evidence.

Overwhelming case? Then why is life after death not an established fact taught in school science classes? Dinesh, there is no case at all. A few anecdotes, probably either fabricated or imagined, do not constitute a case. Don’t take my word for it. Take me to a law court and prove your overwhelming case.

Wilken: we have the testimony of Christ who experienced death for each and every one of us. Because death cannot hold him he returned victorious after three days, incorruptible and unable to be touched by death again. Because of his sacrifice for us, we too will be like him.

Todd, I hope that ‘us’ and ‘we’ refer only to a specific group of people whose permission you have already sought to be included in your statement. Don’t you dare include me in your obscene claims of vicarious redemption, through the scapegoat of a filthy human sacrifice, for crimes allegedly committed thousands of years before I was born. Keep your fantasy stories to yourself and other consenting adults. You may recognise Christopher Hitchens’ words in this paragraph. I cannot put it any better than he has.

Accommodationism is patronising, misleading and hypocritical

2009-11-29T03:29:00.000-08:00

Michael Shermer seems a tad confused. At least, that's the impression some of his recent writings give me. He's confusing ideas with people. On the one hand, he presents science as a set of facts and explanations whose acceptance is essential to a true understanding of ourselves and the world we live in. On the other hand, he sees religious people as belonging to a 'type' whom we must not antagonise if we are successfully to spread the word.

Let's try reversing this asymmetry. What if scientists were to claim that their science is an indelible part of their make-up which must not be questioned lest they take offence and leave the room? Would theists start to accommodate science as a means of spreading their beliefs to a more sympathetic audience? How insufferably patronising that would be. If I felt I was being humoured by someone who thought my scientific world view was wrong but pretended to go along with it so that I'd go on listening, I'd be the first to head for the door.

Whether or not people believe in the fact of evolution depends on whether or not they are prepared to consider the evidence, which is available to anyone. Exactly the same applies to whether or not people believe in sky gods. People deserve courtesy and respect during discourse. Their crackpot beliefs deserve neither.

Christopher Hitchens has pointed out that belief in the supernatural is now optional, private and irrelevant. As far as I'm concerned, theists can believe whatever the hell they like as long as their beliefs adversely affect no-one but them. If it makes them feel better to imagine that they will survive death and be reunited with loved ones, let them believe that, provided their belief does not cause them to act in a way detrimental to others. But the moment they start to assert their beliefs, they must expect to have those assertions questioned. The onus is upon the assertor to substantiate his assertion or to stop making it. There is no reason whatever that we should tiptoe respectfully around ludicrous assertions based on no evidence at all.

Craven accommodationism, disguised as it may be behind the mask of well-intentioned liberalism, simply postpones the day when professed belief in god will attract the same well-deserved ridicule as professed belief that one is Napoleon.

Labelling children with the religion of their parents

2009-11-21T10:45:00.000-08:00

Power to the new ad campaign, aimed at raising consciousness. Raising consciousness means making people aware of something they don't know they are doing, and should perhaps stop doing. It has long been unquestioned, automatic practice to label children at birth with the religion of their parents. Richard Dawkins has pointed out that this is just as inappropriate as labelling the children of sportspeople with their sport (e.g. a cricketing child, or a figure-skating child) or politican's children with their party (e.g. a Liberal Democrat child). In the last example it is clearly silly to attribute a complex socio-political ideology to a newborn infant. But why is it any more sensible, or desirable, to attribute a specific set of beliefs about the universe to someone not yet able to understand language?

This consciousness-raising will drag a whole host of issues into the public spotlight and facilitate a great deal of very valuable discourse. Assumptions that have remained unquestioned and unchallenged for far too long will be subjected to rational inquiry. Even theists like Jeremy Vine, Joanna Bogle and Ruth Gledhill, who miss the point entirely, raise related issues onto the stage of public awareness. For instance, it is obvious to any rational thinker that the principal reason for the survival throughout centuries of unsupported sky-god myths is that they are taught to children at an age when they are highly credulous. Although this point is not raised directly by the 'Don't label me' campaign, it is a closely related point and one that will surely arise many, many times. The assertions of different religions are incompatible with one another, and most religious adherents follow the same religion as their parents. Therefore, childhood labelling and childhood indoctrination ensure that the divisiveness of religious tribalism will persist down the generations. Moreover, the teachings of the world's major faiths cannot all be correct, so at least most of them must be wrong. This simple fact alone places an enormous responsibility on parents. Ought they to teach 'absolute truth' to their children, when they themselves cannot be sure that what they are teaching is absolutely true? And if they are sure, where does their faith fit in? It seems that faith develops later in life, following the inculcation of fixed ideas which are learned as undeniably true. Only later, when the growing child confronts doubt, does it learn to use the crutch of faith to shore up the rubbish it learned at its parents' knees.

My solution? Continued, rigorous questioning of the right to label children at birth, coupled with thorough education in comparative religion, whatever the denomination of the parents. Add plenty of encouragement to think rationally, and to question teachings that are based on assertion alone.

Here's to the future.

The Atheist Blogroll

2009-11-21T07:40:00.000-08:00

CarbonBlog has been added to The Atheist Blogroll. You can see the blogroll in my sidebar. The Atheist blogroll is a community building service provided free of charge to Atheist bloggers from around the world. If you would like to join, visit Mojoey at Deep Thoughts for more information.

Michael's R-useless outpourings

2009-11-02T11:39:00.000-08:00

Michael Ruse has written this appalling piece of tripe on the Guardian 'Comment is Free' site. I think my response is a bit too wordy for the site so here it is on my blog.

‘Is there an atheist schism?’ asks Michael Ruse. I think the question as posed is meaningless. Is there an a-Zeusist schism? Have the non-followers of Quetzalcoatl split into multiple factions? Has there been a schism among those who doubt that vitamin supplements are good for you?

Michael Ruse opens by reminding us that he is a professional philosopher. I am a professional teacher but I don’t expect to begin each one of my lessons by stating same. I hope my daily work makes it obvious. But I can see why that’s not the case for Michael, having read his pitiable offering.

I absolutely and utterly believe that there is no god. That is the same as saying that I believe there is no god. It is the same as saying that I do not believe there is a god. However, were any credible evidence for god’s existence to come to light, I would be only too happy to change my stance.

Religion’s big problem is not that it is ‘evil and corrupting’, although much of the time it is both of those things. The major issue is that religion is all about spreading ideas that are patently false, and protecting those ideas by means of threats ranging from being offended to blowing up those who disagree with them.
Michael claims that religion motivated the abolitionists to oppose slavery. Yet slavery was abolished only a couple of hundred years ago, whereas Christianity claims to be twenty centuries old, and other religions are much older. Why did the divine message take so long to make a difference? Oh, I almost forgot – Michael is an atheist. How silly of me. He can see that the beliefs of the religious are false, but they can’t see that for themselves so let’s protect their belief system despite the complete lack of evidence in its favour. If this is not an insufferably arrogant and condescending stance, then arrogance and condescension have no place in reality.

The September 11th hijackers were almost exclusively Saudis, groomed and trained by Osama bin Laden. Michael, have you been to Saudi Arabia? I lived and worked in bin Laden’s home city for twelve years. Believe me, neither desperation nor poverty features large in the experience of the typical Saudi male aged 18 to 35. Five-times-daily indoctrination in the necessity of jihad, and the paradise that awaits the martyr, are right at the forefront of their consciousness, however. Put from your mind any picture of desperate, heroic young men seeking valiantly to redress the imbalance of western imperialism. Without their mediaeval belief system none of them would have been motivated to act as they did. My evidence? The complete absence of secular hijackers from among the nineteen, and the declamations of bin Laden himself in gloating over the attacks while describing the eternal virgin-soaked bliss which he believes his footsoldiers are now enjoying.

As for the Irish troubles, if all the children could have been Pied-Pipered away at the height of the conflict, and brought up free from sectarian labels, then old wounds would have likely been forgotten within a generation. Segregated schooling, according to parental religion, was largely responsible for dragging the troubles on and on and on.

If everything needs a cause, then so does god. If not, not, and uncaused things can happen. There is no profound truth here. There is no insight that requires years of study and meditation. The emperor’s equipment dangles freely in the wind. If god is necessarily uncaused, provide explanatory proof. Do not simply say that because some fools take silly things seriously the rest of us should too. Baseless twaddle is nothing but baseless twaddle.

Mary Midgley was either too lazy to read, or too stupid to understand, Dawkins’s point about selfish genes. Either way she was just plain wrong. Like Dawkins I would be indignant if I had written a carefully researched, ground breaking book, and had it dismissed by someone who clearly either hadn’t read it or hadn’t understood even the title.

If beliefs are wrong then they are wrong. It doesn’t matter how bright or how educated the holders are. Michael appears to be saying that wrong beliefs deserve respect simply because people hold them. That is utter rubbish. No belief deserves so much as an ounce of respect unless it can be defended on reasonable grounds. If someone wishes to believe fantastic things privately then so be it. The rest of us need never know. But as soon as those beliefs start affecting – or shortening – other people’s lives, they become public business, and open to public debate, no punches pulled.

The truth, Michael, is ever so simple. God very probably does not exist, and anyone who claims otherwise needs to back up their claim with evidence if they wish to be taken seriously. If you don’t like that, bad luck. Live with it.

Craig's self-contradiction

2009-10-23T10:50:00.000-07:00

I have been listening today to the mp3 of Craig's debate with Arif Ahmed. I wasn't surprised to hear Craig trot out his pat list of empty proofs. But he scored a peach of an own goal, more than once, in his responses to Ahmed's clear and incisive rebuttals.

As in every one of his debates, Craig 'proved' the existence of a transcendent, timeless, spaceless, personal being of unimaginable power; a being about which he claims to know a great deal. In the fifth of his 'arguments', the one he always says is not an argument at all but he gets it in anyway, he described his own directly experiential loving relationship with this being.

Later, when Ahmed challenged him to justify god's lack of intervention to mitigate atrocities such as the gruesome gassing of countless young men in the trenches of the Somme, Craig argued that we mere humans cannot know the complexities of the divine purpose, and that the suffering that goes on in this life may well be necessary to enhance the experience of the next. The own goal is this: Craig is prepared to sweep the problem of theodicy under the carpet of god's mysterious inscrutability, a most convenient hiding place for debating points you've no answer to. Yet, when it suits him, Craig goes into great detail about god's actions and rationale, creating the universe out of nothing, waiting fifteen billion years or so and then sending his only begotten son to absolve fallen man of his sins.

Dr Craig, you cannot have it both ways. If, as you say, we cannot determine god's rationale in presiding over obscene suffering on a global scale, then neither can we comment on any of his other alleged actions, such as creating the world or establishing lovingly dictatorial relationships with individuals.

At one point in the debate Craig rose in my estimation, albeit slightly. In his closing address he gave an account of his path to Christianity, a credible and genuine tale culminating in a decisive encounter with a female fellow student. Thus was Craig's position honestly displayed: he is a theist for his own private reasons, and his so-called proofs of god are nothing more than affirmations of his own faith. They prove nothing that is external to him. Those among Craig's supporters with whom I've so far been privileged to interact appear to share that position, i.e. they have already made up their minds that god exists during some prior chapter in their lives, and they now go around bolstering their confidence by trotting out 'proofs'.

Responses to Dinesh D'Souza's arguments

2009-09-26T13:05:00.001-07:00

The rebuttals below are aimed at Dinesh D'Souza's case as presented in a debate with Christopher Hitchens. Click here for the mp3 of the original debate.

Dinesh D’Souza’s Arguments with italicized responses

1. The militancy of atheism and the importance of reason

We are living in an unusual time in which atheism has emerged as a kind of militant phenomenon. This is a little odd. If you are an unbeliever, why be militant? I don’t believe in unicorns but I haven’t written any books on the subject. I don’t denounce unicorns; I live my life as if unicorns do not exist. But what we have from the atheist side is a belligerent attack on theism and specifically on Christianity. I want to answer this attack by using the same tools of reason, of scepticism, of science and of evidence that is the banner under which the atheists march. I shall not rely on scripture or any other kind of theology to make my points. I am going to focus entirely on reason and evidence.

A short distance from the window to my right stand two turreted buildings. Six times each day, often at unsociable hours, they blast out a tinny, invasive, penetrating, powerful, electronically over-amplified wailing, proclaiming to the faithful (and to everyone else, interested or not) that it is time for prayer. One of the mosques is frequented by Shia Muslims; the other by their Sunni counterparts, and it is an article of their faith that each group must one day overpower and destroy the other. Insofar as they can agree on some common ground, they share the objective of complete eventual extermination of people like me, as well as those of other religions, should we refuse to convert to Islam. They believe themselves in possession of the inerrant, unalterable and final words of god. No further inquiry or other work is needed as far as they are concerned. Everything mankind could possibly need is written in the Holy Qur’an.

If all of this is not a belligerent attack on reason, on freedom, on common sense and ultimately on life itself, then what is it? Mr D’Souza, as an atheist I would like nothing better than to forget about the obscene and dictatorial figure of god once and for all. I would love to live in ignorance of the vile fiction of his history and the equally disagreeable fantasy of his petty despotic intentions. But I cannot, for they are forced down my throat daily, if not hourly, by the constant haranguing tirade of the faithful. Never mind a belligerent attack on theism. Atheists are amateur beginners when it comes to belligerence. If you want to find examples of communities that can really show us how to do belligerent with a capital B, look to the world’s major religions.

Islam is of course not the only offender. Bible bashers and Jehovah’s Witnesses knock on doors to interrupt family life and to spread their filthy message far and wide. I and others are constantly patronized by theists who consider themselves on a holier plane than we. Not long ago a Christian theist invited himself to my apartment and stayed for much of the day, during which time he tried to persuade me of the merits of ‘intelligent design’ and the historical accuracy of the Bible. When I offered counter-arguments, mainly to suppress the urge to chew off my own leg through sheer boredom, he told me quite bluntly that I should take Ludwig Wittgenstein’s advice and remain silent on matters for which I have no evidence. The irony of his statement is almost as delicious as the irony of his failure to see that there was any irony at all.

I think, Mr D’Souza, that you would get on well with my garrulous theist friend. You too have opined that atheists should just shut up because we don’t believe in god, and there is no sense in being militant about unbelief. You have likened atheism to a lack of belief in unicorns. But I have yet to see a unicorn-led theocracy assemble a secret uranium enrichment plant for some sinister single-horned purpose at which we can only guess, and neither have I seen a stable of nineteen unicorns force a series of human-packed airliners to crash into densely populated buildings. Quietly enjoy living your a-unicornist life, but please remember that you and your kind routinely deny me the similar luxury of a quiet life of atheism.

2. Christianity as the source of values

In reading atheist books, I see that the values the atheists cherish the most are individual dissent; personal dignity; equality of men and women; antipathy toward oppression and slavery, and compassion as a social virtue. These values came into the world because of Christianity. We know this partly by looking outside western civilization where we see that these things we take for granted – a tsunami devastates part of the world; all the western, i.e. Christian, nations rush to help and no-one else seems to – something unique is going on that’s internal to our civilization. You might respond that western civilization isn’t built only on Christianity; it’s built on Athens, i.e. classical reason, and also on Jerusalem, which is Judaism and Christianity. If you look at the world of Athens, i.e. Greece and pre-Christian Rome, you discover that those civilizations were based on slavery. Women were treated very badly and human life didn’t count for much. The Spartans would leave feeble children on the hillside to see if they were still alive in the morning. The great philosophers of Greece and Rome viewed these incidents with equanimity. It is only from Christianity that these things which had been uncontroversial for a long time become controversial for the first time. Sam Harris tries to blame slavery on Christianity but slavery was a universal institution practised in every known culture. The Greeks, Romans and Chinese had it. There was slavery in ancient India. The American Indians had slavery long before Columbus. Christianity was the first movement in the world to oppose slavery. First the Quakers and then the evangelical Christians took a theological idea – that we are all equal in the eyes of god – an idea that for some centuries was seen as a mere spiritual truth – and they gave it a political application. If we are all created equal in the eyes of god, no man has the right to rule another man without his consent. This idea became the moral engine of the anti-slavery movement in Europe and America. It is also the basis of democracy.

The cherished values are good ones. I would add, though, that a free and inquiring mind is a highly valuable and respectable virtue. I do not believe that any of the listed values came into being because of Christianity, for all of them can be dated to pre-Christian times. Confucius knew all about reciprocity as a social virtue, and compassion derives itself from such empathy. Some non-human primates display social behaviour and altruism. Did they learn this from Christianity? I’ll go on doubting it because I’d like to think our apish cousins too intelligent to become distracted by religion in the way that much of humankind has.

Perhaps your failure to complete a single clear sentence while asserting that only Christianity can explain tsunami aid is indicative of your hesitancy to be too direct in such a blatant falsehood. Aid for the tsunami victims came from around the world, from Buddhist, Muslim and secular communities, united in the horror of what had happened, and imagining the desolation of those who had lost their loved ones and homes. Such feelings are basic human qualities shared by all, regardless of the religion into which they may have had the misfortune to be born. May you quickly come see the wicked arrogance of your unwarranted elevation of Christendom to a supreme moral pedestal, in order that you may publish a full retraction with all dispatch.

Good for the Christians, eventually realizing that slavery was a bad idea after they themselves had supported it for generations. Good for the Christians for realizing women are intelligent enough to vote, after reserving that pleasure for men only throughout centuries. Mr D’Souza, Christianity claims to be twenty centuries old. Slavery was abolished within the last couple of centuries or so. What were Christians doing in the centuries before abolition? Did it take the world that long to read Christ’s divine message? God would have done better to use pigeon post.

The idea that all people are equal is most emphatically not a theological concept. Moreover, religion does an extremely good job of rendering people very unequal indeed. You have undertaken not to refer to scripture in this debate but theists often cite scripture in support of their supernatural claims, and it is scripture that speaks of god’s chosen people and of separating sheep from goats. The scriptures endorse slavery and genocide. Please do not mention religion in the same breath as equality.

3. Incompatibility of Christianity and science

This is one of the rallying cries of modern atheism. That is puzzling because the leading western scientists of the past 500 years were mostly not only theists but specifically and devoutly Christian. Hitchens and Harris posit a conflict that was not apparent to the great scientists of the west from Kepler to Newton. Modern science is based on three Christian assumptions that are, at root, metaphysical.

(i) The universe as a whole is rational. The universe embodies rationality. That is odd. It’s easy to say that my friend Bill is rational, but it’s another thing to say that matter and objects and planets follow rational principles.

(ii) The universe obeys laws that are comprehensible in the language of mathematics. That is very strange. Drivers can follow laws, for example stopping at a stop sign, but how does matter obey laws? How does the electron know what to do? Matter is unbelievably well behaved. It follows Newton’s inverse square law and Einstein’s laws. This is a metaphysical proposition.

(iii) The laws of nature are mirrored in our minds. We can apprehend and understand the laws. This is very odd. Why should the goings-on within our head match the goings-on of the universe? Believers know why. God is believed to be omniscient, i.e. super-rational. He built the universe to embody rationality. God is a lawgiver and the universe reflects his laws. We are made in god’s image; we have a spark of the divine. The atheist cannot take any of that for granted. This is faith-based science.

Up until the 19th century practically every thinking person was a theist, which in the western world meant being a Christian. Children were born and forcibly baptised into it. There was no choice. Before Darwin it seemed quite reasonable to believe in a supernatural creator so it’s not really surprising that most scientists did. However, Christianity by its very nature comes into direct conflict with science. As Richard Dawkins has said, a universe with an all-powerful god in it would be a very different kind of universe from one with no god. (Theists often misunderstand this, believing that Dawkins means ‘the universe would look different than it does now if god were real,’ but what he’s actually saying is that god, whether he exists or not, is a scientific hypothesis.) Science is all about understanding the way the world works from the bottom up. As Daniel Dennett puts it, science deals in cranes, not skyhooks, because skyhooks have no explanatory power and science is all about explaining. Virgin births, resurrections, water turning into wine, little fishes feeding thousands of people… all of these things conflict directly with what science tells us about how the world behaves.

Now for the three points.

(i) The universe as a whole is rational.

No, Mr D’Souza. The universe is pretty irrational on the whole. Read a book on quantum physics and tell me how rational you find that. As for the macroworld in which we live, our minds have evolved to be rational, because being rational was highly advantageous back in the Pleistocene when lots of clever critters were trying to eat our ancestors while they themselves were trying to avoid starvation. More of this in point (iii).

(ii) The universe obeys laws that are comprehensible in the language of mathematics.

Not really. It’s more meaningful to say that the universe behaves in a way that can be described and predicted, to a close degree of approximation, using a mathematical language that has been developed to fit the way the observable universe behaves. Mathematics is only an approximation, though. It is not a perfect description of reality, as Bertrand Russell and others proved when they showed the contradictory nature of set theory by considering the ‘set of all sets that are not members of themselves’.

(iii) The laws of nature are mirrored in our minds. We can apprehend and understand the laws. This is very odd.

It is not odd at all. We would not have got far on the African plains had we evolved capricious minds that did their own thing rather than running a virtual reality simulation through which we could make reasonable predictions of the immediate future and act accordingly. Our minds are shaped by the world in which we are evolving. You, sir, seem to assume that the world was shaped in order to fit the mind of god, which happens to be similar to our minds. You have your cart before your horse. The so-called physical ‘laws’ are not like laws set down by Parliament, which set out a standard of behaviour to which we must aspire. Judicial laws need police and judges to enforce them. Physical laws are generalized descriptions of how matter behaves. They are arrived at by observation. The behaviour of matter comes first, and ‘laws’ are written down by scientists to describe what they observe repeatedly happening. If we liken that to judicial law, governments would have to observe the behaviour of the population and write down laws that fit what they see happening. What a fascinating book of statutes might be thus produced.

4. Evil done by Christianity

We hear how Christianity has been terrible for the world. In truth, the casualties of Christianity – the Inquisition; the Crusades; the Salem witch trials (at which only 18 people, not thousands, were executed) inflicted quite light damage. Over 300 years the Spanish Inquisition killed two thousand people. Compare that with the crimes inflicted by atheist regimes not 500 or 1000 years ago but within our lifetimes. Stalin, Mao and Hitler caused over 100 million casualties in just five decades. Atheism, not religion, is responsible for the mass murders of history. Christianity has done a lot for the world. We would be a lot worse off without it. Thank god for Christianity.

The Inquisition, the Crusades and the Salem witch trials were all direct results of scripture as interpreted by the religious authorities of the day. Stalin’s regime may have been secular but it had all the hallmarks of a theocracy, capitalizing as Stalin did upon his people’s prior orthodox conditioning. Stalin certainly did not carry out his wicked deeds citing atheism as his motive in the way that the inquisitors and crusaders chanted scripture as theirs. Hitler never renounced his Roman Catholicism, and his discrimination against the victims of the holocaust was based on theological differences. Mao’s totalitarian state had many of the attributes of religion: reverence toward a single god-like leader, and severe penalties for doing, saying or thinking the wrong things.

If you had been present at the Salem witch trials, Mr D’Souza, knowing what you know today, perhaps you would have said, “Sorry, ladies, as there are only eighteen of you to be hanged, it’s not really a problem.” No doubt each one of the condemned would have congratulated you heartily on your exemplary Christian values as they were led to the scaffold. I am sure none of them would have felt moved to condemn you for your apparent callousness toward innocent victims of idiotic, theologically inspired mass hysteria. You do of course realise that none of the eighteen can possibly have been guilty as charged, since their alleged misdemeanours could not have been carried out at all, by anyone. As for the two thousand who were brutally tortured to death by the inquisitors, if they could have heard your case I am sure they would have been only too happy to suffer and die in furtherance of the Christian values of their murderers, soothed by the knowledge that Christianity would go on to do all the good in the world that you have described.

And what of the great good that Christianity is doing in the world of today? The continent of Africa, birthplace of humanity, is subject right now to a massacre of Biblical proportions as a result of HIV/AIDS. It is absolutely vital that men and women be educated properly in limiting the spread of the virus, and that condoms be made available to all, if we are to avoid an extinction event. The response of the Catholic church? To speak forcibly against the use of condoms, filling people’s minds with corrosive theistic garbage and ensuring that millions more children will be orphaned before this terrible disease has run its course. I would have his Holiness the Pope held personally responsible for this holocaust, and would have him manually carve the name on the headstone of every AIDS victim who became infected as a result of his noble Christian values. And I would have you follow him round, sir, with a second hammer and chisel, adding your closing words to each stone: Thank God for Christianity.

2009-09-23T01:39:00.000-07:00

Dr William Lane Craig and others have been engaging in public debates for years, against adversaries such as Christopher Hitchens, Peter Atkins and Lewis Wolpert. Every time the theistic arguments advanced are much the same. Here they are, with my responses in italics. I must add that many of the points I list are not original. Fellow secularists will, I am sure, detect herein the borrowed thoughts of Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins and others.

Click here for the mp3 of the Craig-Atkins debate.

Dr William Lane Craig’s Arguments with italicized responses

1. Origin of the universe
Why is there something rather than nothing? Astrophysical evidence suggests the universe began 15bn years ago. Matter, energy, space and time were created at that moment. The Big Bang theory requires the creation of the universe from nothing. Nothing can come from nothing without a cause so there must have been a cause that brought the universe into being. We can summarise as follows:

(i) Whatever begins to exist has a cause
(ii) The universe began to exist
(iii) Therefore, the universe has a cause

This cause must be an uncaused, changeless, timeless, immaterial being of unimaginable power. It must be timeless and changeless because it created time. Because it created space it must transcend physical space and be immaterial, not physical. It must also be personal, because a changeless impersonal cause cannot exist without its effect, e.g. the temperature dropping below zero always causes water to freeze into ice. The cause must be a personal being which made a free choice to create a new effect without any prior determining conditions. For example, a man who had been sitting for eternity could freely choose to stand, and thus we would have a new effect arising from an eternal cause. Thus we are brought not merely to a transcendent cause of the universe, but to its personal creator.

Peter Atkins suggests in his book that the universe may have originated in a swirling dust of mathematical points which finally came by trial and error to form our space-time universe. This is obviously self-contradictory as it assumes time and space in order to explain time and space. Dr Atkins suggests that time brought the points into being, and the points brought time into being.

The Christian view – that there is a personal creator of the universe – is not only logically consistent, but follows from the logical premises laid out.

Why, indeed, is there something rather than nothing? I do not know, and, insofar as the question seeks a reason for the beginning of the universe, neither does anyone. One difference between me and Dr Craig is that he claims that he DOES know. He claims to know precisely why the universe was created: it was the personal choice of the Christian god. Having made such a bold and specific claim, Dr Craig has a great deal of work ahead of him as he must find specific evidence to support it. Let us see how he gets on.

Dr Craig’s three-step ‘proof’ seems reasonable at first, but he has walked straight into a logical fallacy based on inductive reasoning. He cannot imagine anything beginning to exist without a cause, so he states that whatever begins to exist must have a cause. This is rather like saying that all swans are white – that is, until a black one turns up. All beginnings are caused, until an uncaused one turns up. The ‘proof’ proves nothing. It’s worth saying at this point that such a trick is typical of the theist in debate. Starting from his comfortable set of conclusions, i.e. that the god of the Bible created everything, he concocts facile ‘proofs’ which he thinks (or rather, wants his audience to think) support his claims. In contrast, the scientist starts by assuming nothing, and formulates hypotheses based on evidence alone, without postulating complex entities for whom not a shred of evidence has been presented.

However, let’s grant Dr Craig’s point that the universe may have had a cause. What do we know of that cause? Nothing at all. We know that the universe began billions of years ago in an event popularly termed the Big Bang, but beyond that all is speculation. Nevertheless, listen to Dr Craig, out of whose magician’s top hat comes ‘an uncaused, changeless, timeless, immaterial being of unimaginable power.’ Where is his evidence for such a being? He has no evidence at all. Philosophical word games are not evidence. Why could this ‘being’ not be caused and ever-changing, based on what Dr Craig has said? His description is nothing more than a series of unfounded assertions.

If, as Dr Craig would have it, this unimaginably powerful being created the universe, space, time and everything, then presumably it also created the rules of logic. Yet Dr Craig requires the creator to obey a sequence of logical events, namely making a free choice without prior cause. The choice – to create, or not to create – is constrained by the rules of logic. If the creator chooses to create, then he denies himself the choice of not creating. He cannot have it both ways, i.e. he cannot simultaneously create and not create without violating the rules of logic, and that rule applies before he has carried out the act of creation and created logic in the first place! Dr Craig seeks to apply logic to a ‘time’ before the beginning of the universe and the beginning of logic. His words are meaningless.

I have not yet read Peter Atkins’ thoughts on the beginning of the universe but, whether they be plausible or not, they do nothing to support Dr Craig’s assertion that the Christian god created everything. Dr Atkins depicts an imaginary scenario consistent with what little is as yet known. Dr Craig presents an imaginary scenario involving an unexplained complex creator. Such a scenario does nothing to explain what really happened.

The Christian view – that there is a personal creator of the universe – fits their belief system very comfortably. Unfortunately for that belief system, though, not a shred of evidence for such a personal creator exists.

2. The complex order in the universe
Life-prohibiting universes are vastly more probable than life-permitting universes like ours. Many physical constants – such as the rate of expansion of the universe – would prohibit life if they were even very slightly different. Such claims can be made for around fifty other quantities and constants present in the big bang. It is incomprehensibly improbable that these constants should have ideal values by accident.

(i) The fine tuning of the initial conditions of the universe is due to either natural law, chance or design.
(ii) It is not due to either law or chance
(iii) Therefore it is due to design.

We are here; there is no denying it. Who knows how many universes may exist? We do not know. There is no reason to suppose that our universe is the only one, or the only possible one. There could be an infinite number of universes, almost all of them life-prohibiting because they have the wrong set of physical constants.

There is no law against improbable events occurring, especially if you have long periods of time for them to occur in. Yes, it seems very improbable to us that the initial conditions of the big bang were just right for the development of life, but nevertheless life is here. Our astonishment at our good fortune may be profound indeed but it proves nothing at all about how the universe came to be. What if this universe had turned out differently, and we weren’t here. Would we now be saying, “Ah yes, our non-existence is exactly what we should expect, based on a probabilistic analysis.”? What a silly idea. It’s no good applying probabilistic prohibition to events that have already occurred.

Dr Craig’s argument is just the old Argument from Design using different words. That argument used to be applied to the complexity of living organisms, until Darwin’s explanation, based on gradual evolution by natural selection, banished it from biology. Now the creationists have become interested in the world of physics. Physics has not yet had its Darwin, so we don’t know how the initial conditions came to be, or what other values the salient physical constants could have had. We can’t conclude anything at all from what we don’t know. Our ignorance most certainly does not provide evidence for the existence of the Christian god. The greatest problem with god as designer comes from the argument from design itself: god must be highly complex, so who designed god? The argument shoots itself in the foot before it starts. If god (a) exists and (b) was neither designed nor caused, the onus is on Dr Craig to prove those claims without falling into logical fallacy.

The 3-step proof in this section is laughable. It’s a variation on the classic false dichotomy, except that it’s a false trichotomy. Theists are fond of trinities. Consider this alternative:

(i) The fine tuning of the initial conditions of the universe is due to either natural law, chance, or some other factor of which we have no knowledge as yet, and may perhaps never know.
(ii) It is not due to either natural law or chance.
(iii) Therefore it is due to some other factor of which we have no knowledge as yet, and may perhaps never know.

3. Objective moral values in the world
If god does not exist then objective moral values do not exist. Michael Ruse argues that morality is just an aid to survival and reproduction, and any deeper meaning is illusory. Nietzsche said that without god there is no meaning or value in life. It is not necessary to believe in god in order to behave morally or to recognize moral values. The question is this: do objective moral values exist? In the absence of god, the morality evolved by Homo sapiens is not objective. Acts such as rape are socially disadvantageous, and so in the course of human development have become taboo, but that does nothing to prove that rape is really wrong. Without god there is no absolute right and wrong. However, objective values do exist and deep down we all know it. There is no more reason to deny the objective reality of moral values than the objective reality of the physical world. Actions like rape, cruelty and child abuse are moral abominations. Love, equality and self-sacrifice are really good.

(i) If god does not exist, objective moral values do not exist.
(ii) Objective moral values do exist.
(iii) Therefore god exists.

Dr Craig’s opening statement in this section needs close scrutiny. Do objective moral values exist? That means, is it true that some things are simply right and others are simply wrong, regardless of one’s point of view? Examples like murder and rape seem easy because they are so obviously bad. But is the matter always clear-cut? Torturing a prisoner during interrogation seems morally reprehensible, but what if he knows the location of an atomic bomb which will blow up the city of New York in an hour? Should we act morally toward the prisoner and allow millions of people to be killed, or should we use unpleasant means to learn the whereabouts of the bomb and thereby act morally toward the potential victims? We can’t escape acting immorally toward one party or the other. So much for objective moral values. Morality is nothing but a series of judgments made according to circumstance.

From my university days I recall a discussion between two students - a medical student and a historian - about a landlady's plans to have her adopted pet cat neutered. The historian was all for the operation, carried out humanely under general anaesthetic, to prevent future suffering by averting the potential births of hundreds of stray kittens, most of whom would die young and horribly amid the garbage bins of Liverpool. The medical student was aghast, considering such mutilation an immoral act against an animal that had no choice in the matter. Who was morally right? I agreed with the historian and I still do, but I could and can see the future doctor's point. Can objective morality rescue us and settle the matter?

What about assisted suicide? A patient in extreme pain, with no prospect of recovery, may wish to end their life artificially before their condition does it for them. Many thinking people would agree that a person should be allowed to choose when to end their own life, claiming that it would be immoral to interfere. Others are just as convinced that suicide is morally wrong. Again, where is this clear-cut objective morality that can decide the matter for us?

Objective morality is a myth. Some things are obviously right and others are obviously wrong, but that has nothing to do with objective morality. It has more to do with empathy. A questioner put exactly this issue to Dr Frank Turek during questions in a recorded debate, and Turek rather embarrassingly demonstrated that he didn't know what empathy means. His voice rising in pitch and volume, he cried, "And what makes empathy right?" Dr Turek, the questioner's whole point was that it does not need to be right in order to become widespread practice. Empathy means feeling what another person or creature is feeling. Obviously we have to use imagination in order to do this as we can't wire directly into their feelings, but if we are asked whether it's right or wrong to commit rape we are likely to consider the potential experience of the victim before giving a response. It is wrong to commit rape because the effect on the victim would be horrible. Moreover, someone contemplating rape might imagine his feelings after the event, when he would know he had inflicted terrible harm on another person. Wishing to avoid those feelings might be a factor in his decision not to be a rapist. We don't need a celestial dictator to help us see those things for ourselves.

Is there a difference between right and wrong which is a hard-wired feature of the world, external to us all? I don't believe there is, but I think Bertrand Russell dealt neatly with those who do in Why I am not a Christian. I'll paraphrase his argument rather than pasting verbatim. Someone like Dr Craig, who says there is a clear difference between good and bad, must face this question: is that difference due to God's fiat or not? If it is, then for God there is no good or bad, and it means nothing to say that God is good, a claim that most theists make. If the difference is not due to God's fiat, then we do not need God in order for good and bad to exist, and the distinction between good and bad is logically anterior to God.

Russell snookers completely those who keep insisting that God is good. God is just as bad as he is good, because in creating the distinction between good and evil he created evil as well as creating good. Dr Craig is similarly snookered because, if God is (as he claims) a good and loving creator, then logically the separation of good and evil must be external to God.

Returning to Dr Craig’s 3-step proof, we can now see that his first premise simply does not follow. There is no such thing as objective morality so the proof falls before it starts. Interestingly the collapse of the proof does nothing to disprove the existence of god. It doesn’t have the slightest bearing on the matter one way or the other.

It’s also worth noting that the ‘proof’ assumes that god’s existence is a default position. Dr Craig seems to think that, because he believes he has shown that objective moral values exist, he has somehow proved god’s existence by disproving god’s non-existence. This is logical nonsense. If objective moral values did exist they could have been caused by something else, outside Dr Craig’s ken and mine. His reasoning is not reasoning at all.

Finally on this point, the logic itself of the 3-step proof is false. The first step follows the model:
If (not A) then (not B). But you can’t go from that to if (B) then (A). It’s rather like saying:
(i) If Winnie the Pooh does not exist, the honey would not have been stolen.
(ii) The honey was stolen.
(iii) Therefore Winnie the Pooh exists.
That’s not logic. It’s circular reasoning thinly disguised as logic. Poor Pooh’s guilt is assumed, and the assumption is used to prove his existence. Is this the best the theists can come up with?

4. The historical facts concerning the life, death and resurrection of Jesus
Jesus was a remarkable individual with an unprecedented sense of divine authority. He carried out miracles and exorcisms. He was resurrected from the dead – a divine miracle, which is evidence for the existence of god. There are three established facts best explained by the resurrection.
(i) Jesus’ tomb was discovered empty on the Sunday following his crucifixion.
(ii) Several people saw Jesus alive after his death. Jesus appeared to his disciples as the risen Christ. Sceptics and unbelievers also witnessed these appearances.
(iii) The disciples suddenly came to believe in the resurrection despite having been predisposed not to. There is no explanation for the rise of early Christianity unless the resurrection really happened.

There is no plausible naturalistic explanation of these three facts. Therefore Jesus rose from the dead and was who he claimed to be, which entails that god exists.

This entire section of Dr Craig’s arguments is nothing more than a simple affirmation of faith in the historical accuracy of the New Testament. Let’s deal with each of the three ‘established facts’ in turn.

(i) The empty tomb
Jesus’ tomb was not the first to be found empty, and it will not be the last. Tombs have been emptied by perfectly mundane, non-divine means since burials became fashionable in the earliest civilizations. The empty tomb proves nothing. Before leaping toward divine intervention as an explanation I might as well claim that god was responsible for the empty Ferrero Rocher box I found in the refrigerator.

(ii) Jesus seen alive after his death
Aside from the controversy over precisely when the gospels were written – largely accepted to be decades after the events they describe are supposed to have taken place – they do not of themselves provide evidence for supernatural goings-on. Suppose I were an unscrupulous historian who wanted people to believe my particular version of events. What could be simpler than to concoct a few emotive and plausible-sounding eyewitness stories and insert them into my narrative? We require more than a few tales in an old book before we throw over our acceptance of repeatable scientific laws. Dead people do not get up and walk about, days after being executed. Such antics would require suspension of natural laws, i.e. they would be miraculous. But, as David Hume argued, eyewitness testimony for the miraculous may be admitted only if its falsehood would be more miraculous than its truth. Lying and exaggeration have been practised by humans since the dawn of language, and they offer a much more believable explanation for ‘fact’ (ii).

(iii) Belief in the resurrection became popular
Well there wouldn’t be much point in writing a story about the beginning of Christianity unless, later in that story, Christianity was seen to have caught on. Once again, unscrupulous historians with their own agendas are known to exist in this universe. Based on what we know, the Biblical account of the spread of early Christianity is far more likely to be a result of their work than god’s. Does Dr Craig believe Christianity the only religion in the history of the world? If he is arguing that a religion’s popularity is an indicator of its truth value, surely he must grant the same status to all religions that have stood the test of time, including the cult of Olympian Zeus and the meteorological pranks of Thor and his hammer.

5. The immediate experience of god
This is not really an argument for god’s existence. It’s the claim that you can know that god exists, wholly apart from arguments, simply by experiencing him. This was the way people in the Bible knew god. To them god was not an idea but an experiential reality. Proofs for god can actually distract your attention from god himself. Draw near to god and he will draw near to you. If we concentrate too much on the proofs we may miss hearing the voice of god speaking to our hearts.

An opponent in debate must tear down all five of these arguments, and in their place must erect an argument proving the non-existence of god.

There are no arguments for god’s existence in section 5 of Dr Craig’s introduction. Indeed, he says as much in his first sentence.

I am sure that god is an experiential reality for the other characters in the Bible, just as Blofeld is an experiential reality for James Bond. However, stories in books don’t prove that the characters in them are real.

If the ‘proofs’ that Dr Craig has described are distractions from god, how do they support his case that god exists? What does god say when he speaks into our hearts? I am listening but I don’t hear him. Theists should not be allowed to get away with stating this kind of wild rubbish. They need to be challenged robustly.

As Dr Craig invites, I have torn down his arguments. It was rather like tearing down a wet tissue. However, I’ve no more need to erect a case proving god’s non-existence than I need to erect a case proving that Lemuel Gulliver wasn’t a real person. The burden of proof lies with him who proposes the existence of a supernatural entity. Dr Craig is not entitled simply to assert that god exists and challenge others to disprove his baseless assertion.

In another debate, Dr Craig was asked by the chairman, during the closing phase, if there was anything his opponent could have said that would have changed his mind. Dr Craig replied that there was nothing that would change his mind or make him depart from his faith in Christianity. The opponent, when asked the same question, immediately stated that simple basic evidence in favour of a supernatural creator would change his mind on the spot. The debate I’m referring to took place in 2007, between Dr Craig and Prof Lewis Wolpert, and was chaired by John Humphrys of the BBC.