Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath

1701. Comment #59705 by steve99 on July 30, 2007 at 10:16 am

You must understand, Steve, that when answering questions about my theistic worldview I need not respond in ways that a naturalist would find agreeable.

You aren't responding in ways that anyone who understands rational debate and logic would find agreeable.

And this is an example:

That question is only meaningful if asked about the naturalistic worldivew.

No, it isn't. You are not in a position to state *when* the question is and is not meaningful - you can't make it conditionally meaningful depending on which worldview you accept - that is not a rational approach. You can only declare the question universally meaningful, or universally not meaningful. To claim that a problem is *now* meaningful because you are thinking in naturalistic mode, so you reject naturalism, but *now* it is not meaningful so you don't have to deal with the problem in 'spiritual' mode is logically inconsistent.

You have two consistent choices:

1. The problem is meaningful. In which case, you HAVE to explain it within idealist theism.

2. The problem is not meaningful, in which case it is no reason to reject naturalism.

Which one do you choose?

By the way, you may ask *why* the problem is not dependent on worldview; after all some problems do indeed disappear from a change in perspective. But this one does not, as the problem itself arises from first-person experience. The question 'how does my consciousness arise' is context-free. You either ask it, or you don't, independent of 'worldview'.

Again, you can't possibly understand the hypothesis of idealistic theism (never mind test whether it works better than naturalism) if you insist to keep thinking naturalistically. In order to be able to compare worldviews you must first let go of yours, step back as it were, and compare them with a free mind.

I claim my mind is far freer than yours, as I am open to more possibilities. You have the more closed mind, as you reject possibilities based on the limits of what you personally consider absurd or unreasonable. That is an unmistakable sign of a closed mind! You are rejecting an understanding of what reality may really be like, and substituting one that you feel personally able to cope with.

I am not sure what you refer to here, but I have often pointed out that my objective is this thread is not to argue that God objectively exists

Ah.. so you don't care whether or not Jesus was his son, or whether or not he was resurrected?

(after all a naturalist can't argue that the physical universe objectively exists either),

They certainly can, and I do.

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1702. Comment #59716 by Dr Benway on July 30, 2007 at 11:29 am

steve99:

I wonder if blood tests on people with beliefs like Dianelos would show an enhanced level of the hormone oxytocin?

Be aware that a lot of interesting research gets summarized in the popular press that's actually of no clinical value, as the results describe small differences between large groups.

Example (I'm making this up): men are 72" tall on average, and women are 65" tall on average. You measure the height of someone as 70". What does this tell you? Can you say that this person is male or female? Let's say the person is 64" tall. Probably female, but would you bet your house on that?

Likewise, you can measure someone's oxytocin level, get some value, but you can't say he's "in love" or "not in love."

Hormone levels fluctuate widely throughout the day. This will average out when you look at group data, but it won't when you take a random sample from an individual. You might need to take a sample from that person hourly for several hours in order to get an accurate overall picture of levels. Further, blood levels don't always correlate with brain levels, due to the blood brain barrier. You may need to do a spinal tap to get a meaningful measurement.

Due to parallel feedback loops with different set points in the brain, a high or low level of anything may simultaneously produce opposite symptoms. Because we've no time to tell people how things actually work, we create these half-truths just to get through the day. Example: psychosis is caused by too much dopamine; that's why grandma is prescribed a dopamine blocking agent to make her stop shouting at the windows at night.

Actually, psychosis is likely the result of too little dopamine in the frontal cortex. As a consequence of hypofrontality, frontal neurons sending feedback to the midbrain fail to inhibit dopamine activity there, which becomes excessive. Better drugs preferentially block mid-brain rather than frontal dopamine receptors. And just to confuse you more: some drugs both block and stimulate dopamine receptors.

Nothing is as straightforward as one might like. But I was never bothered by this sort of complexity. What made my head explode years ago, at least for a couple of days, was learning about g proteins. Turns out every neuron in the brain is itself a tiny little brain.

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1703. Comment #59720 by steve99 on July 30, 2007 at 11:59 am

Dr Benway:

Sorry, that was a light-hearted suggestion. I find your posts on this subject very interesting. My first degree was in biochemistry.

Hormone levels fluctuate widely throughout the day.

Indeed - I remember, during my degree, reports of experiments which showed dramatically different results because they researchers failed to take this simple fact into account.

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1704. Comment #59728 by Dr Benway on July 30, 2007 at 12:47 pm

Yeah, you gotta hope people are tearing bad research to shreds all the time. There's a constant pressure to cut corners, either because you can't get enough subjects, or you can't control for other factors, or funders have an agenda. No study is perfect, so it must be tempting to allow a little more imperfection here and there.

Somebody is trying to market oral testosterone for "male menopause." Send a guy for a testosterone level, and a percentage of the time it will come back very low, due to daily ups and downs. And if you read the symptom list, you'll believe you have it.

Capitalism + ignorance = somebody's ka-ching!

As I feel a moral duty to stand up to snake oil salesmen, so I feel we've got to stand against this new age drivel that pours from people like Dianelos.

Dianelos' gnosticism may have nicer packaging than Shariah law, but it's ultimately the same old self-serving lies. You can tell because you have to cheat to let it in. There's no legal way to admit Jesus, the resurrection, the weird community-created Matrix, the virtue scorecard, etc., into our discourse if we're following ordinary rules of evidence.

Reminds me of that Saturday Night Live skit with the landshark. Chevy Chase as a shark rings the doorbell. A woman answers, "Who is it?" He says, "Candygram." She has a reason she won't open the door. He tries again. And again.

Oh I found a way to put up pics of my homies. Go to http://www.flickr.com/photos/tuff_titmouse/show/

This flickr thing is pretty cool. I may take a Dawkins hiatus to figure it out.

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1705. Comment #59739 by steve99 on July 30, 2007 at 1:40 pm

Yeah, you gotta hope people are tearing bad research to shreds all the time. There's a constant pressure to cut corners, either because you can't get enough subjects, or you can't control for other factors, or funders have an agenda.

When I have come across nonsense research and analysis, it was not that - it was plain ignorance of good methodology, and, especially, how to analyse data. For even supposedly well-respected researchers, the 'Standard Deviation' type of statistics available on a pocket calculator was all they ever used, or ever realised they could use.

As for rules of evidence, I think DG's failings go far deeper than that - he reveals fundamental misunderstandings of the processes of logical reasoning.

Nice pics.

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1706. Comment #59745 by SharonMcT on July 30, 2007 at 2:02 pm

Dr Benway:

Re: 1704...Beautiful subjects; amazing photos. Is there anything you are not great at?

Where is the backyard, btw? It's gorgeous.

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1707. Comment #59760 by Lauregon on July 30, 2007 at 3:07 pm

Why should God do as one wished? If I did what my daughter wished I would be feeding her only chocolate ice-cream. We must find in the reality of our God-given experience of life the signs of what God Him/Herself wishes, and I think it is childish when we protest that God does not wish what we ourselves wish. - Dianelos

You've switched tracks. My comments were in response to your views linking the trusting of "God" to the way in which we trust our friends. You said that we don't need to think or know our friends, but simply to "trust" them, that "trusting" them was all that was required. My point was that we trust our friends because we know them well enough to know how they think and behave and can usually be relied on to help us out in common-reality situations, as contrasted to the unpredictable way "God" (allegedly) responds to human wishes, prayers, and desires.

But your question is not why did God cause that tragedy, but rather why did God allow that tragedy to happen. The short answer is: Because if God did not allow such random tragedies to happen our experiential environment would not be optimized for growing in virtue. - Dianelos

You've continued to sidestep the issue. My point was, and remains, that we trust our friends because we think and because know them, and know how they behave and think, whereas "God" behaves according to his mysterious will. If our friends behaved as capriciously as "God" does, we probably wouldn't retain them as friends. In short, Dianelos, your trust-your-friends/trust in God analogy was flawed. We trust our friends because we know them, and because we think . Knowing and thinking precedes trust; trust doesn't develop magically---and unlike as is supposed to be the case with trusting "God," "trust" of our friends isn't bestowed through "grace." It comes through thinking and knowing.

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1708. Comment #59774 by Lauregon on July 30, 2007 at 3:43 pm

If you should care to answer, in your experience did the people around your granddaughter become better people because of her disability? (If they have, I do not mean to say that your granddaughter's tragedy was therefore a good thing – that's not what I am saying. Hers is a true tragedy, a terribly bad thing that any person would like her to have avoided - my heart goes out to her parents too. - Dianelos

Have the people around my granddaughter become better people? Well, her parents divorced, and her mother now has the job of raising three girls alone. I suppose her independence might be counted as a plus.

What I am saying is that maybe random tragedies like the one you describe can ultimately make sense within a theistic worldview according to which our growth in goodness will in the end join us all - including your granddaughter who is not going to be handicapped in the afterlife - with God, who is the ultimate good.) _ Dianelos

I appreciate your sympathy and your offering of hope in eternity; it's very kind of you, but really, Dianelos, pie in the sky is a very long way away from here and now. My granddaughter will probably never be able to support herself or live alone. That's reality. I seriously doubt that any truly loving human being would ever contrive such a program for the development of human virtue.

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1709. Comment #59779 by Lauregon on July 30, 2007 at 4:00 pm

The way to understanding God is by understanding ourselves and our experience of life. We are all persons, and God, if you wish, is the ideal person. - Dianelos


Would any "ideal person" do something as sadistic as condemning women to suffer agonizing pain in childbirth as a punishment for disobedience as the "God" of Genesis is supposed to have done? Would any ideal person use the threat of eternal punishment in "hell" as a means of extracting divine allegience? I don't think so. Do you?

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1710. Comment #59784 by Lauregon on July 30, 2007 at 4:07 pm

Lovely tit-mice, Dr Benway! Delightful pics. So is your argumentation. :)

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1711. Comment #60086 by Downunder on July 31, 2007 at 11:37 pm

To all, but 1st re the 3 points in BMMcArdle's 1694. 1. Agreed there are gaps in science and worse: there are gaping holes in my knowledge but should I then just close my mind or is it up to myself to deal with the gaps, or should I, as of old, follow a religion?
2. This TGD site is evidence that we bother to critically discuss stopgaps. I am very conscious that my style of expression is nowhere near the convincing quality and intelligence of the high standard of those at the top; who I must refrain from naming in case they implode with humility.
3. Life is an abstract concept, but it does exist. The philosophy of living has been extensively discussed but life, the essence in all beings, has not received much attention on this TGD site.

This leads back to my TGD thread where almost all posters object to religions, while I see the miss-use of God as the real issue. I have asked myself for years why "my" Catholic church has kept its head in the "Cardinals" sand(pit). Rome has a long established enormous, world-wide following, with ready access to the best intelligence and to the most powerful political leaders in the world, but Rome has failed to regularly adjust its preaching and listen to its flock. The other religions have failed similarly. However there is no denying that people demonstrate an overwhelming need for religions; evident e.g. from an enormous, modern, newly established "hallelujah" church in Sydney where the talented owner draws crowds, young and old, not hiding that he wants a share of their money. He puts on popular music, works-up his audience into an arm-waving body-swaying happy trance, does so well that the news media spread the word and politicians jump on the bandwagon. This convinces me that RD's attempt to eliminate religions is futile and whether we like it or not, religions will be around for generations yet.
I too, want religions to change but I realistically concede that it will take a long-time approach. Wanting is one thing doing is another. I have therefore sought for a way of slowly changing that ingrained delusion about God. The God concept is wrong because God is NOT human and I do not believe that such a God exists. However, if we could take a head count from the total population of the earth, I "believe" that a majority of mankind, indoctrinated by religions added to its in-born respect for thunder & lightning and natural disasters, will fearfully stand on the God-side (I note that it would also demonstrate the shortcomings of democratic principles).
It was an encouraging surprise to me that Dianelos with a very complex mind, from whichever part of the world, entered this site and revealed that he too takes the bible with a grain of salt, but he has maintained human traits of God and molded the God image to suit his own reasoning. His 1304 reply to DrBenway's list of christian teaching revealed his choice to get away from the norm. Dianelos has gone to great depths in philosophy and into consciousness and if you read this Dianolos, I would like to see your ideas about what life is. To avoid any Godly implications could you restrict it to: what makes an animal alive, and a plant; same question at death and where do you think life comes from and goes back to.

To me "life" is the common denominator for cooperative discussions with the objective of promoting peace in our world. It strikes me as illogical that in times of peace a few single lives involved in abortions and capital punishment fill the news media with emotional brainwashing but when politicians fail in their duties of maintaining peace, individual lives are ignored and countless lives are sacrificed. Respect for life appears a matter of indoctrinating the population. It deepened my curiosity about life. If in the end life goes to wherever, it follows logically that life must have come from there at birth. I never dreamt that I would live long enough to see the year 2000. Only one of my 4 grandparents lived long enough for me to remember. It is now 2007 and I am still here only because our lifespan has been increased by scientific discoveries that enabled man walking on the moon and we have people living in a space station; meantime we do still not know where life goes to on death. Even the very keen and gifted DrB did only suggest that life changes into "nothing" at death. Thus not having found as yet the answer to what is life (a crucial point for The God Delusion) it must be pertinent to pursue that subject on this site. Awaiting the scientific answer, I have looked for a common thread in the posts and found that "belief", although the initiator to reach any goal, is a bad word on this site because Dianelos applies it as a stopgap. Science evolves from beliefs and assumptions. Assumptions have to be made to construct a test-rig for proving the initial belief. The instruments used to confirm observations of life still present or of life having departed are made to measure in our dimension but do not tell us anything about whatever dimension life disappears into. To find "that" dimension requires searching until someone's mind "believes" to have found a possible track for exploration. There will be numbers of scientists to whom "believing" is no problem but even they have as yet not produced the answer for: what is life?

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1712. Comment #60088 by alovrin on August 1, 2007 at 1:02 am

Down under, although I cant say it with any authority, life outside of living things is a phantom.
Anyway I was rattling on about a spark that could escalate into a global conflagration. It looks like some politicians, with our best interests at heart, or is that their heads up their own self-interest might be in the process of building a luverly little fire.
http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2007/07/31/drumming-up-a-new-cold-war/#more-1075

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1713. Comment #60090 by keith on August 1, 2007 at 1:19 am

Dr. Benway,
Why does the juvenile tuffted titmouse in one of your photos have a broken piece of pencil lead in its mouth? Or did you have it catching miniature bullets in its beak, a la Penn and Teller?

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1714. Comment #60096 by Goldy on August 1, 2007 at 1:57 am

Downunder, I can sort of see your thinking. Sort of :-).

meantime we do still not know where life goes to on death

My understanding is that at the end of life, it stops. Think of a battery - when it dies, it's dead. We are born of two parents, inheriting from them the materials to start life. As the individual grows older, processes within the body slowly break down from the order they started with and begin to not work as well (I have an old Triumph which very well explains that!). Our skin sags because of collagenous crosslinking which results in loss of elasticity, among other things, that sort of decay (for want of a better word). The body is, basically, a receptical for DNA. Once we are dead, it continues on in its decendants.
Now, if you want a "where is life from" in a physical sense, I can say...right here. Apart from the odd asteroid slamming into Earth bringing goodies from "outside", what's here is here. We are pretty much an enclosed lump of bacterial infested rock. Just as we breath same air molecules that apparently Jesus breathed, so I guess we have the same life that he had too. Maybe the "life" you seek is like that air - something here, recycled endlessly from generation to generation in all organisms. Did you know you have a record of viral diseases suffered by your ancestors? That your cells are symbiotic organisms? There's life, prepetuating itself, never letting go, replicating and reproducing, mutating to ensure changes in the outside can be countered.
Sounds a bit deep - maybe another glass of red wine, then off to the garage.
Oh, and God and gods - they are just feelings and thoughts of a person, made "holy" to conceptualise said thoughts. There are no god (unless you happen to worship a pre-pubescent Nepali girl, the name of which I forget), just you. Your god is your thoughts, your fears, your counter to those fears. Not an entity.

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1715. Comment #60097 by BAEOZ on August 1, 2007 at 2:01 am

Downunder:

meantime we do still not know where life goes to on death

Unless you want to violate the 1st law of thermodynamics; there is nothing after death. There's no net loss of matter or energy, thus everything is still there, just your organism has stopped. C'est la vie (ou C'est la morte)

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1716. Comment #60411 by Dr Benway on August 1, 2007 at 8:31 pm

Been thinking about the strangeness of knowing your own thinking is flawed. Had to dig out Doug Hofstadter's Metamagical Themas. For no reason in particular, I'll share a bit of fun with sentence self-reference:

This sentence contains exactly threee erors.

I am the meaning of this sentence.

I am the thought you are now thinking.

I am thinking about myself right now.

I am the set of neuronal firings taking place in your brain as you read the set of letters in this sentence and think about me.

This inert sentence is my body, by my soul is alive, dancing in the sparks of your brain.

Disobey this command.

You and I, alas, can have only one-way communication, for you are a person and I, a mere sentence.

What would this sentence be like if pi were 3?

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1717. Comment #60419 by Dianelos Georgoudis on August 1, 2007 at 9:56 pm

BMMcArdle (post 1694, or #59636):

There are gaps in science so I use my own wishes, ideas, hopes, imagination, to fill those gaps. It is what I believe, no matter what anyone else has to say about it, because it is a gap, of course.

I am not talking about gaps in science which are all solvable, but about gaps in naturalism - that's an entirely different matter. And many of naturalism's gaps appear to be very hard in the sense that nobody has even an idea of how to solve them (e.g. the problem of consciousness) and paradoxical (in relation to what kind of naturalistic reality could produce consciousness, in relation to what kind of naturalistic reality could produce the quantum mechanical phenomena we observe, in relation to how naturalistic hypotheses about reality are increasingly diverging and becoming increasingly complex, in relation to how any naturalistic understanding of reality clashes with our intuitions about free will, ethics, value, etc – and so on). Naturalism is really a mess; but most naturalists appear to ignore that fact.

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1718. Comment #60421 by Dianelos Georgoudis on August 1, 2007 at 10:03 pm

_J_ (post 1695, or #59637):

Take a step back: the supposition that there is a god at all is an expression of how you would like life to be. You would like there to be a god, and therefore like the question 'how God would like life to be, and why' to be important and meaningful. This is issue I was addressing in my previous post. It's not addressing the argument to just assume your way past it!

If I understand you correctly you mean that I would like reality to consist of a benevolent God who gives meaning to my experience of life, and that's why I have constructed a detailed worldview that somehow manages to fit the existence of such a benevolent God with my experience of life. Fine; you may be right about my motivation. I cannot deny that I would like reality to be deeply meaningful and beautiful; who wouldn't? But so what? The end result I get is a worldview that works better than naturalism under all criteria I can think of. On the Apollonian side it explains much better than naturalism the whole of my experience, both the third-person and the first-person data I have. On the Dionysian side my worldview makes me feel better by making everything I experience more beautiful, and also makes me ethically stronger and therefore helps me to live closer to how I would like to live – that is my worldview brightens both the passive and active aspects of my experience of life. So, what exactly is the problem with that? Maybe you think that the fact that my worldview sounds like wishful thinking is a problem? But if a benevolent God exists then the correct worldview is bound to sound like wishful thinking, don't you think? Or maybe you think the correct worldview must necessarily sound undesirable? :-) If so, why would you think that?

Well, first of all the most important thing in life is not loving God, but loving all persons.

In your god conception, yes. Your personal theism is laudable in this, and is also in a small minority.

Well, as long as we are talking about truth who cares about my ideas belonging to a small minority? What possible relevance could that have?

Certainly, the Christianity that I have personally experienced differs from this in its core doctrine. It sees loving all persons as part of Christianity, but only as a consequence of the essential act of loving god.

I am not sure that's true in orthodox Christianity. But in any case, the Christianity you have personally experienced should not cloud your judgment one way or the other. I mean it's quite possible that a benevolent God exists and, also, that you have experienced a Christianity whose dogma is full of errors. Surely you see the fallaciousness of the syllogism: "The Christianity I experienced teaches a lot of obviously wrong things; therefore its core teaching about the existence of a benevolent God must be wrong too." That's the throw-away-the-baby-with-the-bathwater fallacy.

All good flows from god, such that the (observable) good cannot possibly exist without the (unobservable) god. (I have presents, therefore there is a Father Christmas.) This kind of buggered up, morality-perverting, backwards thinking seems to be a lot more common than your version of theism.

It's not true that all good flows from God. All good flows from good persons, even though of course, as God is such a good and powerful person, a lot of good flows from Him/Her. On the other hand what you write above kind of sounds like a different argument, which goes like this: Goodness is defined by how God is; therefore anything else that is good is good because it's similar to how God is. Which I think is a correct argument. Look around you: Everything you experience that's beautiful or true or loving is such to the degree that it reflects or approaches God's beauty or truth or love.

As for the argument that if I have presents there must be a present giver, I think that argument is basically sound too. After all the concept of a present entails a present-giver. The question then is only whether it's reasonable to consider the good things we have in our life a present or not.

I too think that common Christianity is full of errors. The gravest common error, as far as I am concerned, is the dogma of hell, a belief that is common to the great majority of Christians even though it's completely wrong not to say unintelligible. But then again if one is interested in truth one should evaluate the strongest theistic idea not the most common one.

You may ask: "Why is it that so that popular Christian beliefs are wrong? After all, if the truth of theism is there to be discovered in the whole of our experience one would expect people to have discovered that truth by now." Well, I suppose Dawkins's meme theory goes a long way to explain why false beliefs can become quite popular. The popularity of false beliefs is not something that only happens in the context of religious knowledge by the way; it happens in about any other field of knowledge I can think of. Think of astrology and how absurdly wrong it is and even so is seriously believed in by billions of people. Think of how virtually the entire US society thought that invading Iraq was a good idea. Think of how virtually everybody believes that getting rich is a good idea. Think of how virtually everybody believes that science and naturalism are connected. Think of how virtually everybody believes that to return evil is a good idea because it feels good and because otherwise bad people would be allowed to run amok. Think of how so many non-religious people believe that religion is at the root of all evil. Think of how so many Americans think it's a good idea to vote for the party who promises fewer taxes. Now let's call beliefs that are good reproducers even though they are wrong "sexy". (Why did I pick that name? Because there are also sexy genes, say the ones that produce a long peacock tail, that are in fact "wrong" in the sense that even though they reproduce well it would be better for all peacocks if they did not exist.) Well, there are sexy Christian memes too. One of the sexiest is that by accepting Jesus Christ as your personal savior you are in fact saved :-P (I can hardly think of anything more stupid than that belief in the context of religion). Now why some memes propagate better than others is a scientific question. The answer to why sexy memes propagate efficiently is not to be found in reason but in the emotional reaction (positive or negative) that these memes tend to trigger. And the only way to help our own brain to not get populated by wrong beliefs is critical thinking: to always test one's assumptions and to always study the opposing point of view. Which of course religious fundamentalists don't normally do. (Why? Because their memeplex entails that to question faith is a damnable sin.) But also naturalists like Dawkins do not do that either; for example Dawkins expressively ridicules the study of serious religious books. (Why? Because his memeplex entails that anything non-scientific must be wrong.)

First I think our experience is such that it can't be understood naturalistically.

I disagree with you. See entire thread! ;)

With all due respect, I think that many of the posters here have not studied naturalism's claims about reality closely enough to find out how badly it works as a description of reality. What about every naturalist believes as an article of faith (including probably Dawkins as well as many theists) is that naturalism is science's understanding of reality. And as we all agree that the manifest and huge success of science evidences that scientific knowledge is true, virtually every naturalist believes this implies that naturalism is true also. But the belief that naturalism and science are intrinsically connected is simply and rather obviously false. Naturalists' implicit confidence (or should I say "faith") in naturalism is based on this fallacy, a fallacy so broadly and unquestionably believed in that it represents a modern-day myth.

In any case I disagree even more strongly with your belief that non-believers can be as happy and fulfilled as they might be through religion […]

I can't be sure about this. It clearly varies from person to person – propensity to be religious looks to be highly variable. I admit that it seems a logically reasonable hypothesis that actually being religious – even if religious beliefs are universally factually erroneous, as I contend – may be the best way of being happy and fulfilled, bar none. (To me, this argument seems quite similar to saying 'it's possible that the placebo effect is the best form of pain relief, bar none'.) Personally, I think that as we continue to understand ourselves better and better, the consolations of religion will become increasingly available to us through means other than religion. We'll see.

Think of the experience of my friend stricken with breast cancer. Do you think it's at all possible for a non-religious person, no matter how well they understand themselves, to experience cancer as something beautiful? I really don't think so. Religious belief has really exceptional power for good. Naturalists often criticize religion for that power, pointing out that through religion people can even overcome the fear of their own death, and point out how this facilitates suicide bombings. But clearly to not fear death (or to fear death less, or to clutch less to the quantifiable aspects of life) is in almost all ethical contexts a very empowering thing.

What I am saying is that the idea of religion that Dawkins, Harris, and fundamentalists all share is grossly wrong. The only theistic idea that should be taken seriously is one that claims that God is present and reachable within every one of us, but that all anyone of us may say or write about God may be wrong.

If this was the commonly-held theistic perspective, Dawkins and Harris would not have written their books.

I agree. They are fighting not for truth, but against common fallacies. There is an important difference between the two. If Dawkins and Harris had concentrated their critique on the errors of common religion their books would had been just fine. Buy they over-generalize beyond any reasonable measure.

The world's major religions slip off your definition like water off the proverbial duck's back.

Actually I think my worldview contradicts mayor premises of the world's major religions. So? Is that a bad thing?

So the naturalistic belief that the physical universe objectively exists is immoral too because there is absolutely no evidence, corroborative or not, for that belief. [etc.]

No, you've again slid into an ontology argument that we've done to death. It's as though the repeated statements to you that Dr Benway is ontologically agnostic and instead concentrating on the realm of observable experience in which 'corroborative evidence' has some worthwhile meaning have never been made. This is the slipping and sliding, sidestepping and backtracking that you are often accused of!

Dr Benway may be an ontological agnostic in the question of God's existence (even though I see him criticize theistic belief systems much more than atheistic belief systems). But surely most of the other posters here are not agnostics in the question of God's existence. So my argument stands: Naturalists keep arguing that there is no objective evidence for the theistic worldview while ignoring the fact that there is no objective evidence for the naturalistic worldview either. One of the worse logical fallacies one can commit is to violate the "what goes for the goose goes for the gander" principle, and it seems to me that naturalists fall into that fallacy all the time. For example even very intelligent naturalists like Dawkins and Harris argue on the one hand that the fact that many crimes have been committed by religious people implies that religion is evil, and argue on the other hand that the fact that many (and actually worse) crimes have been committed by atheists does not imply that atheism is evil. It's really a case of believing something blindly or on faith (in the sense of not grounded in reason), or else of grounding a belief on the flimsiest of arguments, such as quoting something a religious nutcase has said.

Who said that God is unseen, unheard and unfelt? Not me. According to my worldview everything you see, hear or feel is basically caused by God (except those parts that are random or are caused by other people), and how it is like to see, hear or feel is also caused by God.

…ie, the 'I have presents, therefore there is a Father Christmas' argument. How do presents from Father Christmas look different to presents from real people? How can you isolate the supposed God from the 'everything you see, hear or feel'? Unless you have a way, your god has no more claim on existence than the famous dragon in Carl Sagan's garage.

No. The presence or absence of that invisible dragon in the garage does not explain anything at all. The God hypothesis works because of a) its explanatory power, and b) its practical usefulness. Look. The question of God's existence is not the only ontological question around. When one wonders if one's wife loves one, one is making an ontological question. When a detective visits a murder scene and wonders who the murderer is, they are making an ontological question also. In all these cases the epistemology that leads to an answer is the same: To consider various alternatives and see which works best.

But, don't worry - I know your answer to this involves your doubts about naturalism (your contested objections on consciousness, morality, QM), and your feeling that your theism 'works better' (which you don't see as an unjustified step in the direction of the theoretical simulated 'Happyland', which you reject as 'nightmarish'). And so on.

Indeed. But I have not really understood what you find wrong in my answer, or what you find wrong in my epistemology (i.e. in my method for reaching an answer). Do you know of any other method to pick between alternative views about how reality is than to test which works better?

This is why I was trying not to post – five minutes have become forty.

I am sorry. Maybe I should stop answering your posts, but these issues interest me very much. I think ontology is very important because one's understanding of reality affects the quality of one's life, and peoples' in general understanding of reality affects the quality of society.

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1719. Comment #60422 by Dianelos Georgoudis on August 1, 2007 at 10:08 pm

Goldy (post 1696, or #59647):

But above I were not describing something I don't understand, but rather something that naturalists don't understand.

Physics, I believe. Well known to naturalists - and getting more known with research.

Yes, naturalists believe that physics has to do something with consciousness, but that does not imply they understand something about consciousness. It only implies that they hope or trust or have faith that physics (or science in general) will somehow explain how some material systems produce consciousness.

According to my worldview everything you see, hear or feel is basically caused by God (except those parts that are random or are caused by other people)

So what I feel and describe as the natural world, you think "God". Those parts that are random or are caused by other people, I see as part of the natural world....and since you can't see God there, I guess that's what you think as natural too. Odd.

What's odd in that? God causes all our experiences but leaves some of these experiences to be caused by the free actions of people around us, and allows some of our experiences (indeed our experiences of physical phenomena) to be random at bottom.

Goes to show - you are your own god. You experience your feelings and have your opinions and say "Oh, that's God". What jars you don't see as natural, ie of a god, so you don't put God into that picture - doesn't fit with that god in you.

Here you completely lost me. I see everything as natural, in the sense of being consistent with God's nature. I see many things that jar me (for example pain and tragedy, social unfairness, end so on) but I find they too are consistent with my understanding of God – in fact I can see the meaning in them. And I am very certainly not my own God :-) I don't know were you got that idea. It's not even true that my ideas about God are my very own, they are ideas that have been around for millennia. One advantage I have is that today naturalism's failures have become much more apparent than they were in the past. Also science has falsified several of the claims of religious belief systems, having thus clarified what religious knowledge is not (e.g. an explanation of physical phenomena). So I have the advantage of access to more knowledge, but the basic ideas of my theistic worldview are certainly not mine.

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1720. Comment #60424 by BAEOZ on August 1, 2007 at 10:19 pm

Hi Danielos, what is the problem you see with naturalism and consciousness? I know there's been a heap of posts but can you give a concise defintion of naturalism as you conceive it and why this poses a problem for that philosophy? Apologies if you have already.
Also, how do you get around the problem that you assume god, then look for him? Answering the question about god when you've already assumed god is begging the question. How can you know that you're world view is not just wishful thinking?
By the way, what is your view about Hitler being atheist now?

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1721. Comment #60427 by alovrin on August 1, 2007 at 10:56 pm

It's not true that all good flows from God. All good flows from good persons, even though of course, as God is such a good and powerful person, a lot of good flows from Him/Her. On the other hand what you write above kind of sounds like a different argument, which goes like this: Goodness is defined by how God is; therefore anything else that is good is good because it's similar to how God is. Which I think is a correct argument. Look around you: Everything you experience that's beautiful or true or loving is such to the degree that it reflects or approaches God's beauty or truth or love

There ya go again tacking your god onto everything (Well the good bits cause god dont do bad) Soooo unnecessary.
I just know you are wanting to put all this in a book...well your bits.. Easy way to write a book and find the flaws in your argument. Also to find ways around any objection, no matter now reasonable. Go to a website where the people arent dummies yet opposed to your basic propostion and get them to pose the problems that need to be, oh so elegantly skirted or ignored, hey presto instant book.
I even know the title you will use.

Idealistic Theism (True Christianity Resurrected)
or subtitle: How I found God at Richarddawkins.net

Im outta here...

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1722. Comment #60429 by Downunder on August 1, 2007 at 11:21 pm

Re: Goldy1714 and BAEOZ1715. I could compare DNA with the memory in a computer. You switch on your computer and the memory comes alive, it loads things up but nothing will be produced until an intelligent human adds life to it and directs it by hitting the keys. It is only an analogy so let us not go further down that path. DNA does not have consciousness. (I hope Dianelos does not read this he'll drown me in meta-something). DNA is only a program to assemble the foetus until ready to be born and not until then does it receive its own life to continue the DNA path. To save you looking back to one of my earlier posts: until some one convinces me that my observations of quads of lambs being born are in error, I have seen that before birth the lambs are all fully grown. After birth the Vet lines them up side by side, they look identical but two may move and two are lifeless. The Vet manipulates the lifeless ones and (with luck) one may suddenly come to life. Before birth a foetus can be checked to be alive but it still is a part of the mother. It is as alive as my arm over which I have control, as alive as my liver over which I have no control. After birth life may or may not enter. A foetus has no life, no consciousness (I await proof of the contrary), no independent breathing or moving-about outside the womb until it receives its life after birth, which then makes it into a new individual. At death life can be seen to have disappeared in an instant. I agree with BAEOZ's "no net loss of matter or energy" but I added for myself immediately: what energy? Was the life, that has just left, not THE energy that livened up the system? What is that energy? Before nuclear science exposed nuclear energy by a chain reaction of splitting atoms, did anyone have any idea about that hidden energy? And that is only in OUR dimensions. Our intelligence does not reach into any other dimensions, and "I feel with my little toe" that there will be more dimensions than we can imagine. DrB may come out and flatten my toe. We "know" and "can do" bugger all; speaking for myself of course. We think we are smart but we cannot even keep peace between neighbours, nations and religions. To me and most of us on this site, God is a delusion, but I know, having been there, that the God concept serves a purpose. "God" is misused and religions are blamed while in fact it is the misuse of the individual's free will and brainpower. I suggest that religions be reminded to live in peace. Peace requires respect for life. We can place a man on the moon but we know not where LIFE comes from? It is not clever to just assume that life goes nowhere when we can see perfectly well that it must have gone somewhere. Life is NOT nothing; it is the driving force in anything alive from birth to death for the brief duration of a blink of the astro-eye. Life is a difficult abstract. I see it in the same dimension as beauty of music, which may thrill me but bore you, or vice versa. Science knows all about how music is produced but why does it produce such different abstract sensations? Am I wrong to believe that beauty and abstracts give a glimpse into another dimension? If all the effort (=money) spent on "defense"(spindoctored attack), were spent to concentrate on what is life, there would be peace. While awaiting science to tell us what life is, and so that we do not have to hold our breath while waiting, would it harm science to meantime assume that life comes from the universe? It should cause no problem for religions, they can use God for the universe but it may create a common ground for all.

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1723. Comment #60431 by BAEOZ on August 1, 2007 at 11:49 pm

Downunder:

Before birth a foetus can be checked to be alive but it still is a part of the mother.

I'm not aware of any way that a fetus can be said to be part of the mother. You're refering here to placental mammals, which develop from a single cell to viable lifeform during a certain period then are delivered.
This cell and later lifeform is a essentially parasite taking nutrients from the mother. The method of obtaining nutrients and ridding itself of waste is of course via the placenta (hence placental) which touches the interior of the uterus. It is never part of the mother. In fact, if zygote didn't implant itself in the uterine wall via chemicals and release hormones the mother's natural defenses would rid her body of the cell like a bacteria or any other foreign body.
As to your example about lambs. Are you saying the vet gives them life? I too have seen vets and farmers revive newborns, but they weren't dead to start with, just close to death.

Was the life, that has just left, not THE energy that livened up the system? Was the life, that has just left, not THE energy that livened up the system?

Then if life were energy and it left the system, there's been a net loss of energy which would be measurable. This never has been measured. So your concept of life as energy doesn't work. I know there's an urban myth about loosing 21 grams upon dying, but it is a myth.
You seem to have a metaphysical conception of life that does violate the laws of nature. Your analogy about music seems odd to me. To me music is vibrations in a medium, that is sounds. The fact that the human brain interprets these vibrations as beautiful suggests some sounds had or have an evolutionary usefullness. Similar to sugar seeming sweet. We perceive sugar as sweet, that makes us crave it. A useful adaptation, it is a high source of energy available only when fruit is ripe. These days it's not so useful due to overabundance of sweet foods. There's nothing intrinsically sweet about sugar. Likewise, there anything intrisically beautiful in sound. And I love music, but that's just because my brain adapted that way.

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1724. Comment #60526 by BMMcArdle on August 2, 2007 at 6:15 am

Sometimes people lose the ability to recognize that they are lost in their own world of fanciful beliefs.
How can anyone claim to know and understand a god and its desires?
By imagining every sense or thought so that the god is the result.

From Wikipedia:

Although non-specific concepts of madness have been around for several thousand years, the psychiatrist and philosopher Karl Jaspers was the first to define the three main criteria for a belief to be considered delusional in his book General Psychopathology. These criteria are:

1. Certainty (held with absolute conviction)
2. Incorrigibility (not changeable by compelling counterargument or proof to the contrary)
3. Impossibility or falsity of content (implausible, bizarre or patently untrue)

These criteria still live on in modern psychiatric diagnosis. In the most recent Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, a delusion is defined as:

A false belief based on incorrect inference about external reality that is firmly sustained despite what almost everybody else believes and despite what constitutes incontrovertible and obvious proof or evidence to the contrary. The belief is not one ordinarily accepted by other members of the person's culture or subculture (e.g., it is not an article of religious faith).

It seems that this would apply to people who maintain their own personal idealism or philosophy.
Delusion exists only when you're aware of it.

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1725. Comment #60549 by Dr Benway on August 2, 2007 at 7:51 am

I am not talking about gaps in science which are all solvable, but about gaps in naturalism...

Bullshit. You want Jesus and the Resurrection. These are alleged physical, not metaphysical, facts.

Dr Benway may be an ontological agnostic in the question of God's existence (even though I see him criticize theistic belief systems much more than atheistic belief systems). But surely most of the other posters here are not agnostics in the question of God's existence.

More slip-sliding. With respect to metaphysics, you may have deism with no objection from me. But once you posit an interventionist God, you've moved from metaphysics to physicality and history. Reasonable people must demand evidential answers, not metaphysical answers, regarding an interventionist God.

Your metaphysical misdirection, to distract from your lack of evidence, is getting really annoying.

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1726. Comment #60551 by Dr Benway on August 2, 2007 at 7:56 am

It is not clever to just assume that life goes nowhere when we can see perfectly well that it must have gone somewhere.

It's probably off with all those left socks that mysteriously go missing.

Peace requires respect for life.

At least until lunch.

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1727. Comment #60762 by Downunder on August 2, 2007 at 7:53 pm

BAEOZ's 1723. How can the placenta with the fetus not be part of the mother when it is attached to the mother and the chemical building blocks come from the mother to develop the fertilised egg?
If you have seen new born animals "revived", you'll have to judge from you own observations whether latent life had already entered, or if it entered later.
Re energy. Life and abstracts such as joy, fear, beauty, etc. we cannot hold, "bottle", because these are in a different dimension. Life, the most important concept on earth deserves more respect than writing-off a lost sock. We can not measure if life includes energy because it is beyond our measuring capacity.
Music has physical dimensions that we can measure, but what is that abstract non-measurable part which pleases some but offends others, it registers in our brain but triggers different senses to make groups of like-sensed individuals. Such likes and dislikes are the cause of human friction, within families, between neighbours, religions, leading nations into wars.
My objective here is to find ways of promoting peace. All the above I have raised only to illustrate that religion has eventuated from a "holy" respect for nature with all its peculiarities, pestilence, contrasts and conflicts. The well-read very intelligent main contributor on this site produced for himself many answers but still found to need a God to guide him; evidence of the need for religion by many, even in our sophisticated modern age. If we can be flexible with accepting and respecting a demand for both classical and pop music, why don't we accept that those who need religion can have it? Sure if the "music is too loud" we must have police to keep the order, which means on a world scale an international police force. We should force our politicians to stop wasting money on "defense" armory and use it instead to reduce famine and poverty. The fanatics of Islam or whichever can be changed by use of modern communication. For instance: the USA Forces could flood Iraq with TV sets and computers as ready access to the rest of the world which will counter fanatic teaching.
We must keep pushing. Science needs to be flexible. One may be dead tomorrow, why be so difficult?

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1728. Comment #61013 by Dianelos Georgoudis on August 3, 2007 at 10:23 am

Dr Benway (post 1698, or #59675):

Give you an inch, you take a mile. Propositions accepted on the basis of intuition still must pass peer review before they get on our collective map.

Fair enough. But surely intuitions such as that we have will, or that some acts are objectively wrong – have passed peer review long ago. As far as I am concerned only a person who is really dogmatic about naturalism could ever even consider believing that they don't have will or that there are no objectively wrong acts. And I am happy to notice that Sam Harris, for example, is not dogmatic in this sense. On the contrary he dedicates a fair part of his book in defense of the need to use intuition in reason, and then uses his own intuition about ethics quite effectively I think.

We've agreed intuition can be misleading, so we don't normally allow it.

Objective observation can be misleading too, but "we" normally allow it. Einstein, for example, was a scientist who worked only with objective observations, was monumentally intelligent, and even so was mislead by all that objective evidence to believe with virtual certainty that non-local phenomena cannot possibly exist. And, incidentally, who exactly is the "we" who are in the position to allow or disallow one epistemology over the other anyway?

We grudgingly allow a few minimal ideas on the map without evidence. But that doesn't mean God, Jesus, and the resurrection are then allowed as well. Sorry.

I have never argued that one is justified to believe in God without evidence. On the contrary I have spend lots of time arguing that the evidence for God is overwhelming and inescapable – all data we have, both third and first-person data point to God. But the fact that evidence exists does not imply that is easy to understand. The rainbow is evidence for quantum mechanics, but prehistoric people did know nothing about quantum mechanics even though they saw a lot of rainbows. As for the resurrection of Jesus I have explained why I tentatively believe in it, and I have also explained why I don't think it's a big deal one way or the other. I think it's telling how so many posters here seize on this one point as if it were in some way critical for my overall argument. It isn't. Suppose I am wrong about what the closest disciples of Jesus experienced for a few days after his crucifixion: it doesn't make any difference whatsoever to my argument here that idealistic theism works much better than naturalism as a worldview about how reality is.

You were nonresponsive to my point, so I'll repeat it with the small bit you don't like left out:
Atheism does not come with a holy book, creed, or policy & procedure manual.

That's not entirely true. I find that atheists' belief system, argumentation, fallacies, and even manner of debating, to correlate quite positively. And I find that very popular books such as Harris's and Dawkins's both reflect and guide these. I even see a sense of nascent tribalism; it's striking how often atheists use the pronoun "we" to explain their individual thoughts, not to mention how often they express a sense of pride for belonging to the atheist class that is openly considered to be superior and to consist of especially intelligent, well-educated people, and realistic people. Or consider how often atheist posters spend their time congratulating each other or ridiculing those whose ideas put them outside of their group. Atheism is becoming tribal.

The Catholic Mass in Hitler's Germany included the words, "perfidious Jew." Prolly didn't give the Germans warm, fuzzy feelings toward all those folks they sent to death camps.

Right. Greek Orthodox mass, beautiful as it generally is, is shamefully full of anti-Semitic sentiment too. So, what's your point?

This was in response to a point you were making above it, regarding atheism being responsible for more bad stuff than religion. If you want to be cruel toward someone, you'll have a difficult time finding a legal justification in atheism. But most religions will provide a legal basis for cruelty against certain other people.

Ah, that's your point :-) Gosh, where do I start. Have you seen the Harris - Hedges debate? There comes a point latter in the debate where the moderator (rather clearly an atheist himself) gets frustrated with Harris's insistence that religious beliefs caused all the recent conflicts and violence in the Middle East (including the 9/11 attacks), as Muslims unreasonably believe that the Qur'an is the literal word of God. So he asks a simple question: the Qur'an has been around for centuries but it's suddenly now that some Muslims in some countries strike so violently. I think Harris didn't really understood the argument (which obviously is that something else than the Qur'an unleashed that hate, and that religious fundamentalism was apt to fan the most extremist expressions of that hate), or else he spins an answer claiming that Muslims have always been very violent (which is a historical fallacy by the way, Muslims have been much more tolerant with the populations of the countries they conquered than Christians. Even at wartime the only case of people being mass-murdered by Muslims I know of is the case of the Armenians in the hands of the nationalist and expressively non-religious Turkish army in the beginning of the 20th century). Hedges on his part argued the obvious: that the West's (and especially Britain's and the US's) policies in the petroleum producing part of the Muslim world as well as in Israel during the last 6 decades lies at the root of the popular and violent Muslim reaction, which not being blessed with modern military capacity finds expression in terrorism as the only available method to inflict pain to the enemy. Indeed terrorism has often been used by many desperate peoples with a strong sense of being subjugated or denied their rights, for example by the Vietcong or by the Jewish liberation movement in Palestine. As I mentioned in another post suicide bombings have been used in desperate situations by people who had nothing to do with Islam or even with theism or any kind of God-given scripture, for example by the Kamikaze when the US forces started to close in on their homeland. So it's really amazing how flimsy Harris's argument of a causal connection between terrorism and religion is. (I have continued to read his "End of faith"; a case in point I was reading only today is this: Harris, as well as Dawkins, make the rather strong claim that not only some but all violent conflicts are caused by religion. So, when apparently somebody pointed out to him the current conflict with North Korea, Harris manages to find a connection between religion and this avowedly non-religious country. Can the reader imagine what connection that is? --- "The problem of North Korea is, first and foremost, a problem of the unjustified (and unjustifiable) beliefs of North Koreans" (note #17, page 242). Did you spot the connection? Religion is unjustifiable belief, North Koreans hold a lot of unjustifiable beliefs, therefore religion and North Korea are connected. :-P It seems to me that what counts is not so much the difference between people who believe God exists or not, but between people who think critically or not; people who deal with data and people who spin data. )

Most violent conflicts in the last centuries have obviously been caused by nationalism and tribalism and/or individual regimes' or groups' quest for more power. Nations and tribes in conflict are often distinguished by religion (but far from always – consider the many wars between Germany and France), but that's peripheral. You say that religion sometimes offers "legal basis" for cruelty and I agree. People who decide for cruel courses of action are the kind of people who will use anything that serves their goals, including religion or science - and I need not remind you how many of the great crimes against humanity have used science as a tool. But to argue that therefore science is evil makes as much sense as to say that therefore religion is evil. And, I don't really see people stop from cruel decisions because they lack a "legal basis", frankly. The decisions to destroy entire German and Japanese cities enjoyed of no such "legal basis", was taken by leaders we today fairly admire, and was nonetheless clearly against the laws of war, according to which one must not only abstain from attacking but actually must try to protect the enemy's civilian population.

Rather I think that leaders who decide for courses of action that will result in enormous cruelty only care to identify any justification for public consumption, which often turns out to be imaginary. So the cruelty of the Holocaust was justified on the imaginary threat that Jews represented for Germany (and Western civilization), the cruelty of dropping the atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki was justified on the imaginary need to avoid an invasion of Japan's mainland, the cruelty of the resent invasion of Iraq by the US (up to and including the snippets we saw in the Abu Ghraib photos) was justified on the imaginary threat that the Iraqi regime represented for the security of the American public, the cruelty of the Israeli policy towards Palestinians is justified on the imaginary threat for the very survival of the Jewish state, the cruelty of the US and USSR to threaten the entire human race with annihilation through their MAD policy was justified on the imagined threat that the other country's political ideology represented for humanity, the cruelty of Stalin's, Mao's or Pol Pot's policies that led to the killing or starvation of millions or tens of millions of their own people was justified on the imaginary threat of "bourgeois" elements in their midst. In none of these justifications for public consumption, and by no stretch of the imagination, is there anything that has to do with religion. Now I can understand that some fine minds as Dawkins's and Harris's can be led astray by anger and see some imaginary threat where none exists; what I find much more worrying is that apparently many millions of educated people read their books so uncritically as to not notice the falsity of their claim.

Now I am not saying that religion is some kind of undiluted power for good. Religion (in the sense of religious institutions and religious ideologies) has not only been abused for evil but has also been a power for evil itself. So it's not only true that many religious beliefs have historically been grown out of ignorance and superstition, but also that religion has become and still is a cover for ignorance and superstition. Also, even though religious institutions have at times helped civilization along, at other times, undoubtedly, they have been an obstacle to the advancement of civilization. That's reality; one need not whitewash it but neither demonize it. I think that religion still effects some serious negative influences, for example the fundamentalists' hold on American society's voting tendencies (but that's democracy), the fundamentalists' gaining ground in Arab world politics (but that's an effect of Britain's and America's shortsighted - to put it mildly - policies in this region for the last six decades), and maybe more seriously, many a religious institution's ideas about human sexuality and their negative influence on national policies related to human sexuality and family planning. (When I lived in Costa Rica the Pope himself spoke against the use of a particular book on sexuality that was to be taught in Costa Rican secondary schools, a book that the local Catholic hierarchy had previously sanctioned and that had already been printed. The shameful result? The government retired the book. I remember the President's actual explanation: "If the Holy Father disapproves of this book we are naturally not going to teach it in our schools". - In Latin America the first cause of death for young women is that abortion is illegal. Many a religious institution's stance towards contraception and abortion is nothing but criminal I think.) Some fundamentalists' efforts to influence the teaching of biology in American schools is beyond stupid of course, but I also think it's beyond ridiculous to get all worried up over this issue as if there were a chance in hell that the fundamentalists' daydream of teaching Biblical biology in American schools will ever become reality. It rather seems to me that this issue has been exploited beyond any reasonable proportion by those who have an ax to grind to show how bad religion is. On the other hand, remarkably, the one institution that stood up in the US against the invasion of Iraq was - not academia, not journalists – but the local Catholic Church. Truth about human affairs comes in shades of gray, and those who expound a black and white understanding – be it religious fundamentalists or people like Harris and Dawkins (not to mention Hidgen's) - belong to the extremist fringe.

Actually I am having trouble thinking of a single serious crime against humanity - not to mention a serious threat for civilization or the survival of humankind today - that was primarily motivated by religion. It seems to me that even the burning of witches centuries ago was not so much motivated by religion (I am not aware of any injunctions in Christianity that call for the burning of witches), but by superstition – the explicit justification was the once again imagined threat that witchcraft represented for society. Some of the punishments (cutting off hands, stoning of women, female circumcision, etc) that may be practiced in some Muslim countries today are barbaric, but so is the not religiously motivated execution of prisoners in the US – and incidentally the world record in executions belongs to non-religious China. The closest case of a crime against humanity that was primarily motivated by religion I can think of is the handling of prisoners by some pre-Columbian civilizations.

So, how could Harris and Dawkins get it so wrong? Re-thinking the above I think what happened in their case is this: They are so absolutely convinced that religion is nothing but irrationality and ignorance, and they are so obsessed with religion's role in public affairs, that they mentally subscribe any state of affairs of irrationally and ignorance to religion – and it is reasonable to hold that irrationality and ignorance lie at the root of all evil. So here we have a logical fallacy, motivated by passion, based on a false premise, and given in the context of a true premise. Now I understand that Harris and Dawkins's stand against religion cannot possibly be similar to mine; after all they consider that any good effects notwithstanding religion teaches a lie based on humankind's irrational/superstitious impulse – whereas I consider that any failings notwithstanding religion represents humankind's best understanding of the deepest structure of reality. Even so, I think that Harris's and Dawkins's claim that religion lies at the root of all evil and today represents the greatest danger there is for the survival of civilization or of humankind is so grossly wrong as well as against reason and evidence as to be a failure of cognition comparable to Biblical literalism. Of course Harris and Dawkins are much more knowledgeable and intelligent than the typical religious fundamentalist – a fact that I am not sure I should find reassuring or upsetting. In any case I notice that, in his recent debate with Hedges, Harris clarifies that his position now is not that religion is the cause of all conflict but just one cause of conflict, which is certainly a step in the right direction.

To describe Harris as pro-torture is a misrepresentation of his argument. In fact, he says this:

While many people have objected, on emotional grounds, to my defense of torture, no one has pointed out a flaw in my argument. I hope my case for torture is wrong, as I would be much happier standing side by side with all the good people who oppose torture categorically. I invite any reader who discovers a problem with my argument to point it out to me in the comment section of this blog. I would be sincerely grateful to have my mind changed on this subject.

Thank you very much for this quote. Do you know where his blog is? I would certainly like to point out to him how his premise that the measure of ethics is the increase of happiness and not of virtue has led his ethical thinking astray – and that's why he is unhappy with the final implications.

And have you considered how come Harris is unhappy with the implications of what he sees as flawless reasoning? Because you can't keep truth down; we humans are built for truth.

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1729. Comment #61020 by Dianelos Georgoudis on August 3, 2007 at 10:53 am

BAEOZ (post 1697, or #59672):

Danielos, a requiem mass only goes to a catholic. Any catholic in fact. Only a Cardinal would bother with a head of state. It was Cardinal Bertram, who the church now tries to portray as against the Nazi's neopaganism, that may be true, but he wasn't against Hitler's catholicism.

Here's a list of quotes, by Hitler himself about his beliefs.

http://www.nobeliefs.com/hitler.htm

Oh, come on. Hitler was first a foremost a politician. You do not think that what a politician says in public is good evidence for what they think, do you? Hitler was the head of government in a Christian nation which he later led into all-out war; would you expect him to have come out and announced "Mein Volk: I don't believe in God myself and I think those who do believe in that unscientific nonsense are just a bunch of morons."?

For me Hitler's atheism is evident in the whole of his ideology which is 100% nationalist and 0% religious despite a sprinkling of religious sounding wording here and there (and I find it telling that atheists go at great lengths to uncover any morsel they can of Hitler using religious language). Hitler's atheism is also evidenced in what he and those closest to him said in private about Christianity. Further we know that he displayed zero religious behavior in his own public or private life (say going to church, praying, consulting with religious authorities, or whatever). For me the evidence is more than clear, but if you, evaluating the same evidence, find it points to Hitler having a Christian worldview, that's ok. Evidence is seldom if ever conclusive, especially in the context of historical claims.

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1730. Comment #61027 by Lauregon on August 3, 2007 at 11:21 am

On the contrary I have spend lots of time arguing that the evidence for God is overwhelming and inescapable – all data we have, both third and first-person data point to God. - Dianelos

Whose God, Dianelos? "God" as defined by what person or group? The God of Christian orthodoxy? The Jewish version? The Muslim version? Or, perhaps the literary-type "God," the poetic construction "God" that embodies human dreams and yearnings suggested by Bonzai in reference to Hedges "God" some pages back? Perhaps a psychological tool "God" constructed to make life seem easier and joyous? Whose version of "God," Dianelos?

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1731. Comment #61038 by Lauregon on August 3, 2007 at 11:48 am

Actually I am having trouble thinking of a single serious crime against humanity - not to mention a serious threat for civilization or the survival of humankind today - that was primarily motivated by religion. It seems to me that even the burning of witches centuries ago was not so much motivated by religion (I am not aware of any injunctions in Christianity that call for the burning of witches), but by superstition – the explicit justification was the once again imagined threat that witchcraft represented for society. - Dianelos

The injunction "Thou shall not suffer a witch to live" is found in the Bible (Exodus 22:18). Because the entire Bible is believed by devout Christians to be the very word of God, the killing of witches was dutifully performed by Christians. On whose authority can it be said they were wrong to ignore the Biblical injunction?

Some of the punishments (cutting off hands, stoning of women, female circumcision, etc) that may be practiced in some Muslim countries today are barbaric, but so is the not religiously motivated execution of prisoners in the US – Dianelos

I agree that the practices are barbaric, but I don't agree that capital punishment in the US isn't religiously motivated. It's not unusual for religionists to be a celebratory presence at executions. It's also not unusual for religionists to quote Biblical "an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth" defenses for capital punishment.

The problem, Dianelos, is that argumentation for the character and edicts of an unseen, supernatural Supreme Being are inescapably capricious.

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1732. Comment #61049 by Dr Benway on August 3, 2007 at 12:31 pm

Dianelos,

The legal basis is everything. Sure, people can be hypocrites and lawbreakers. We still have a duty to remove bad rules or laws from our books, religious or civil.

I don't think it's helpful to think in terms of religious vs atheist. Better to think legal vs illegal. Rational vs irrational. Non-theists can be irrational. That doesn't mean theists are allowed to be irrational. When it comes to civil discourse about the complex problems we face, everyone ought to be rational.

The "we" comes from a shared understanding of the scientific method and ordinary rules of evidence and argument, as used in court. This is how I define "rational."

If one person is allowed to assert first person data as equivalent to third person data, then everyone may do the same. If we allow you, we must allow Osama Bin Laden.

There are two ways to pursuade: reason and force.

I googled "sam harris torture" for the link; don't remember what it was.

Sam may not be impressed with the circularity of your argument, i.e., ethics, or that which we ought to do, is about being virtuous, or doing that which we ought.

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1733. Comment #61054 by steve99 on August 3, 2007 at 1:03 pm

If one person is allowed to assert first person data as equivalent to third person data, then everyone may do the same. If we allow you, we must allow Osama Bin Laden.

Absolutely... and this is where all the intricate framework of the worldview that Dianelos has constructed fails.

At the core, it is based on what *he* feels is right, and what *he* feels is absurd. The arrogance of that position is frightening. It is precisely the same arrogance shown by religions fundamentalists and terrorists.

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1734. Comment #61068 by alovrin on August 3, 2007 at 2:11 pm

Dianelos

Have you seen the Harris - Hedges debate?

Yes and I gained a completely different impression(first person data) of that question that you. Who's right me or you? Hm

Atheism is becoming tribal.

You and other theist wish!
As for Hitler, why do you go to such lengths to say he wasnt religious? The evidence is there you draw your conclusion, I'll draw mine.
You are starting to sound very arrogant.

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1735. Comment #61072 by Lauregon on August 3, 2007 at 2:16 pm

Dianelos, a correction to this paragraph in my post, #1731:

I wrote:

The injunction "Thou shall not suffer a witch to live" is found in the Bible (Exodus 22:18). Because the entire Bible is believed by devout Christians to be the very word of God, the killing of witches was dutifully performed by Christians. On whose authority can it be said they were wrong to ignore the Biblical injunction?

The last sentence should have been, "On whose authority can it be said that the (alleged) word of God as recorded in this Exodus passage was wrong and shouldn't be taken seriously?"

Further, concerning your argument that the idea of witches was a superstition, the fact is that the worldview of the biblical writers included belief in the reality of witches. Who determines which elements of the Biblical worldview are superstitions and which are not?

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1736. Comment #61147 by Dianelos Georgoudis on August 4, 2007 at 12:31 am

Theistic myths.

We all, whatever worldview we adopt, are living in what is basically the same experiential environment (the first and third-person data we have) and which follows the same laws (first-person data follow laws too). Where we differ is in our interpretation of that environment, or, if you prefer, in our understanding of it. That is we differ in our answering questions such as: What does it all mean? What's the deepest order present in it all? What reality is objectively (i.e. independently from us) there producing it all? What should I be doing with my life? Now this thread has helped me identify a series of fallacious beliefs that are broadly believed in both by theists (who are an important class of super-naturalists) and by naturalists. I call these fallacies myths, precisely because they are so broadly believed and are so uncritically considered to be true by virtually everybody. Here I would like to list two myths, that both theists and naturalists believe are entailed in theism – the difference being that many theists manage to live with them (and hence adopt an incoherent worldview) whereas many naturalists reject the theistic worldview because of them. (In future posts I think I will list the myths about naturalism, as well as the myths about reality in general.)

1. A fundamental claim of the theistic thesis is that reality is governed by the will of a particular person, whose character or way of being is such as to objectively define all goodness. The first myth consists in attributing to God's character all-too-human and all-too-imperfect properties, such as a commanding, angry and vengeful nature. And, unfortunately, God being God is then supposed to display these qualities to the utmost possible degree. Rather shamefully and evidencing their lack of freedom of thought most theists manage to integrate these mythological properties of God into their worldview which therefore becomes incoherent. Naturalists intuitively understand that an ideal person is nothing like that, and therefore quite sensibly reject these theistic worldviews altogether. Naturalists' error consists in not realizing that not all theistic worldviews entail such mythological/incoherent properties of God. Or else, when confronting a theistic worldview that does not include these errors, they reject it as "wishful thinking" – as if there were good reason to believe that reality must be so as to be undesirable.

2. The second myth resides in misunderstanding of the concept of "faith" (or "pistis" in the original Greek). The correct understanding of that word is "trust", but is often interpreted by both theists and naturalists as meaning belief (in general or specifically in the context of God) that is at least to some degree unfounded in reason, in other words an impulsive belief, a belief that is based on an act of will rather than on thought. This interpretation is particularly confusing because even though it's basically false (namely confuses Apollonian belief with Dionysian trust), it is in part correct as the idea of trust itself does entail an element of personal self-transcendence; it's an act of will not purely an implication of reason. In other words, the concept of trust entails that one trusts the other person beyond what is strictly reasonable based on one's knowledge of that person. Should one absolutely know how a person will act in a particular context it would be misleading to speak of "trusting" that person in that context. (To give a stupid example: if you throw a child in the air it would be meaningless to say "I trust that the child will want to fall back".) So we use the concept of "trust" in order to express that one trusts a person implicitly and beyond what is strictly speaking based on reasoning. Persons are fundamentally non-mechanical (i.e. free) so perfect knowledge about how they will behave is impossible anyway, and thus trust is a necessary aspect of all loving relationship between two persons. Indeed a major fact in our condition is that one cannot love or be close to another person without the self-transcending realization of trust for that other person. But which is not therefore unreasonable, because as persons are free, to trust (at least to some degree) another free person is necessary to do as long as one wishes to be close to them. Trust need not be blind of course, but cannot be fully based on reason either.

So, my thesis is that by misunderstanding the original meaning of faith, both theists and naturalists are misled about one major fact of our relationship with God: both think that what theists are called to do is to believe in God not based on reason whereas the correct meaning is to trust in God (which cannot be completely based on reason). Further we are to trust in God not because the other person is God but because trusting is an intrinsic and fruitful ingredient of any close relationship. As in this context the other person is God trust is especially important for us as well as deserving by God.

A second corollary of the confusion about the concept of faith is that both theists and naturalists believe that belief in the very existence of God must follow the same principle, i.e. must transcend reason. That's why naturalists endlessly speak of there being no evidence for God and some theists actually conceding the same. That's completely wrong: Not only is there evidence for God, but that evidence consists of the whole of our experience of life and therefore is inescapable (nobody can really say to have lacked that evidence). And it is evidence for God because it cannot be understood without recourse to God. In other words far from there being no evidence for God, there is no evidence that is not for God: the whole of our experience displays, and every bit in it form part of, a deepest explanatory pattern or order which spells God. That, of course, is my theistic claim – the naturalist need not agree with it. But the only reasonable negation of that claim is that the whole of the evidence we have can be best understood without recourse for God – but not that belief in God entails not having evidence. So, the reasonable naturalistic stance vis-a-vis theism can be "Theism misunderstands the evidence" but not "Theism has no evidence". The difference is subtle but important, as it concentrates peoples' minds in better understanding the evidence of the whole of our experience of life, and not, as it often happens today, to assume that belief in God is supposed to be reasonable in a way that goes beyond evidence – a fallacious and incoherent assumption that virtually all naturalists and many theists make. And it goes without saying that once somebody falls for this erroneous assumption, the only reasonable implication must be to reject belief in God. Which naturalists do. But many theists don't because they think that that's precisely what God expects of them: to believe in His/Her existence without evidence, or else believe based on "holy scripture", i.e. text that is claimed to have been written directly by God, or at the very least especially and directly inspired by God. Which in turn is an intellectual stance that naturalists (as well as I) find endlessly irritating. The idea that God who is supposed to have given us our capacity for reason would also want us to base the most important knowledge there is (namely knowledge about reality) on an ancient and clearly flawed text is unintelligible beyond words. In fact, God's "Word" is the whole of our experience of life. And only a small (but arguably not insignificant) part of our experience of life consists in reading what other people have thought about reality, and it goes without saying that all people no matter how inspired (whatever that exactly means) are fallible.

So these two mythological beliefs about theism explain many of the common misunderstandings of theism. The first myth is ontological (concerns claims about how God is) and the second myth is epistemological (concerns claims about how one is to find out how God is).

Other Comments by Dianelos Georgoudis

1737. Comment #61156 by BMMcArdle on August 4, 2007 at 1:20 am

Delusion:
(A)
1. Certainty (held with absolute conviction)
2. Incorrigibility (not changeable by compelling counterargument or proof to the contrary)
3. Impossibility or falsity of content (implausible, bizarre or patently untrue)


(B)
A false belief based on incorrect inference about external reality that is firmly sustained despite what almost everybody else believes and despite what constitutes incontrovertible and obvious proof or evidence to the contrary. The belief is not one ordinarily accepted by other members of the person's culture or subculture (e.g., it is not an article of religious faith).

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1738. Comment #61158 by steve99 on August 4, 2007 at 1:22 am

Not only is there evidence for God, but that evidence consists of the whole of our experience of life and therefore is inescapable (nobody can really say to have lacked that evidence).

Yes they can. All that our experience of life is evidence for is that... we are experiencing life - nothing more. There is not the slightest reason to extrapolate a God from that. This is not a naturalistic argument - it is a simple logical one.

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1739. Comment #61169 by Dianelos Georgoudis on August 4, 2007 at 2:41 am

Lauregon (post 1707, or #59760):

My point was that we trust our friends because we know them well enough to know how they think and behave and can usually be relied on to help us out in common-reality situations, as contrasted to the unpredictable way "God" (allegedly) responds to human wishes, prayers, and desires. [snip] My point was, and remains, that we trust our friends because we think and because know them, and know how they behave and think, whereas "God" behaves according to his mysterious will. If our friends behaved as capriciously as "God" does, we probably wouldn't retain them as friends.

I agree that to trust a friend we need to know something about them, but I do not agree that that's all there is to trust: We trust friends because we love them, and we cannot lov