451. Our Lives, Controlled From Some Guy's Couch

Comment #63783 by Russell Blackford on August 15, 2007 at 10:34 pm

^The talk seemed to go well. I was preaching to the choir, but it led to a lot of good discussion about what we can/should be doing, here in Melbourne, to fight the forces of evil religion. Pity you weren't able to stay. (It was nice to meet you, though ... as well as other people from the Rationalist Society, etc.)

452. Our Lives, Controlled From Some Guy's Couch

Comment #63776 by Russell Blackford on August 15, 2007 at 9:29 pm

I have to defend Nick here. He quite openly says that the 20 per cent gut feeling is no more than that. He doesn't expect anyone to agree; he doesn't think that the figure should carry any weight at all with anyone. Also, he doesn't conclude we are living in a computer simulation. He just does this thought experiment which says, this or that or the other, based on certain assumptions that lots of materialist philosophers find plausible (including a computationalist account of mind). As far I can see, he makes quite a good argument, based on his premises.

While I don't take the thought experiment as seriously as he does, I can't see why a bunch of open-minded people should be hostile to it. Nick isn't like a religionist claiming to know the truth, let alone like one who wants to impose his "truth" on others or terrorise children with it. It's all playful and full of admissions of uncertainty. Surely these are virtues. Enjoy it for what it is.

453. Atheists and believers have got religion wrong

Comment #63618 by Russell Blackford on August 15, 2007 at 5:32 am

This Mark Steel bloke certainly comes out with a lot of dumb, trite observations for someone who is so smart (according to some of you above ... I'd never heard of him, myself). I can see how some of it might have been mildly funny if it had been fresh and original, but it could almost be a pastiche of sooo many others that make similar points, seemingly based more on what Dawkins, etc., somehow must be like than on any fair reading of what they actually say.

454. Church and State: Divided we stand

Comment #63561 by Russell Blackford on August 14, 2007 at 8:42 pm

I recommend Kingdom Coming by Michelle Goldberg.

455. Interview with Richard Dawkins

Comment #63549 by Russell Blackford on August 14, 2007 at 7:02 pm

I don't know why theists rely on the supposed complexity of the universe. What is interesting about the universe, for current purposes, is not any "complexity" but the fact that it contains specific evolved structures, such as neurological systems, that genuinely are complex. Of course there is an evolutionary explanation as to how that happened. It would be much more interesting if philosophically-inclined believers relied entirely on the fine-tuning argument, i.e. the evolution of complex structures such as the above requires a specific kind of universe that "looks improbable".

I think that then opens up a lot of interesting questions: whether we have a bias towards explanations involving agency when confronted with such situations, the dismal track record of such explanations, etc.

However, the "complexity of the universe" argument is a non-starter. What leads us to draw an inference of design is not complexity but the presence of features (e.g. materials) that are not found in pre-technological nature.

456. These preachers of hate must be exposed

Comment #63523 by Russell Blackford on August 14, 2007 at 4:51 pm

I'm not British but Australian, so I can't follow Professor Dawkins' suggestion, but it certainly seems like a good one. Go for it, all you Brits.

I hope we never have such problems here, with police bothering the creators of socially valuable television documentaries, but there have already been other problems with religious vilification laws here in Melbourne.

I actually think that David is right about the simplistic equation of race and religion. That is one of the problems that well-meaning moderates and secularists have created: religion is treated as if it were some kind of unchosen essence of the person in the way that race is often considered to be. (I don't actually believe in "races", either, but the fact is that "race" is imputed to people on the basis of birth, colour, etc., and people are vulnerable to negative treatment on the basis of their imagined "race"). As a result of this stupidity, robust criticism of religion gets equated with expressions of racism, or at least we get people whose attitudes to legitimate and valuable criticism of religion are (mis)coloured by some kind of anti-racist concern.

Dr Benway, I roughly agree with you about religious moderates and well-meaning secularists. Both provide some cover for extremist religionists. It would, as you say, be good for the moderates to place value on uncertainty and reason ... and to say they do. (By the way, when I talk about genuine moderates I do not mean all mainstream religion, and I emphatically do not include the leadership of the Vatican.)

It seems to me that, apart from the misleading religion/race equation, the main enabling that gets done by otherwise good and reasonable people lies in the idea that faith is a virtue. The trouble is that a lot of secular people also seem to believe that, so I don't think the moderate religious people in particular are to blame on this. We should, of course, be trying to persuade everybody who holds that view to re-examine it. The real virtue is reliance on reason and evidence.

457. These preachers of hate must be exposed

Comment #63441 by Russell Blackford on August 14, 2007 at 6:31 am

David's initial post on this thread was good, and he did have a point about rokort's post, with all respect to the latter. I don't actually think it's fair to say that all religion all the time is miserable, based on fear, etc. I'd argue that it applies to a helluva lot of religion a helluva lot of the time, but there are genuinely moderate religious views around.

By all means, let's criticise the truth claims of all religions, but we can be discriminating about how harmful different religious views actually are. And I don't think see the need to bite David every time he says anything, even when it's reasonable.

I also have to say, yet again, that I'm not very impressed by the moderate-religionists-enable-extreme-religionists thesis. I'm not saying there's nothing in it at all, but I think that extreme religionists are enabled by lots of people, and not necessarily more by religious moderates than by a lot of misguided secularists of various kinds.

458. The Bible's literary sins

Comment #63246 by Russell Blackford on August 13, 2007 at 4:33 pm

I have to agree that the Book of Revelation is a blast, provided you don't actually believe anything it says or try to apply it.

459. Amnesty to defy Catholic church over rape victims' abortion rights

Comment #63061 by Russell Blackford on August 13, 2007 at 3:31 am

Well, what can one say? These folks are not fundamentally about relieving human suffering; they are about maintaining their ridiculous version of natural law. It's a totally different mindset. There's no simple way of arguing about it, I agree, but the message has to be put out there: the Vatican's morality is not fundamentally about compassion, or relieving suffering, or anything similar. The same applies to at least some of the Protestant traditions. At its worst, which is all too often, Christianity is a cult of misery.

PS. No need to apologise to me, V; your passion about this is totally understandable.

460. The Out Campaign

Comment #63056 by Russell Blackford on August 13, 2007 at 3:23 am

^lol, I know what you mean ... I came here to see what you had to say. Yeah, it would be really good if we could keep socialising more to pm's and emails and the social network thingie if we can all get it working properly. Or so it seems to little me.

461. Why Richard Dawkins is right on alternative medicine - but not when it comes to religion

Comment #63051 by Russell Blackford on August 13, 2007 at 3:00 am

Do Platinga and Swinburne presume god as their starting premise, or do they do an Aquinas and put forward reasons they believe god exists? Must read their books one day....

Good question. I think Plantinga and Swinburne probably have slightly different agendas, though there is this question about whether you can treat your religious claims as somehow "basic", and argue from them (which seems nonsensical, but showing exactly how it is nonsensical is another thing).

Honestly, I'm only just working my way back into the detail of what's been going on in philosophy of religion over the past 30 years. One of my themes is that secular philosophers have dropped the ball on this, thinking that the game was over and we could worry about other things; we now really need to engage with the epistemic content of religion's claims, rather than assuming that they have little contemporary relevance.

My excuse is that I was doing completely different things, mainly outside the academy, but I think that a lot of people inside the academy, and even in philosophy departments, treated philosophy of religion as a backwater during the 1980s and 1990s, and up until now.

To illustrate the thinking I have in mind, I have a great quote from Kai Nielsen in the 1990 edition of his book Ethics without God. He says that such things as his own earlier works and J.L. Mackie's The Miracle of Theism were "essentially mopping-up operations in the wake of the philosophical and scientific developments since the Enlightenment."

But now, a quarter of a century after Mackie's book appeared, things look very different!

The intellectual struggle of ideas is not over, and the Enlightenment is under attack from many sides. You actually have to give the religionists of various kinds credit for stubbornly defending their positions throughout that time when those positions didn't look tenable. Then again, many secular intellectuals have helped them, whether by neglecting to challenge or scrutinise them ... or by positively giving cover to religion by treating it as a nice "other way of knowing", or whatever.

462. 'Delusion' Revisits Faith Vs. Reason Debate

Comment #63020 by Russell Blackford on August 12, 2007 at 11:46 pm

If a criminal behavior is based on the criminal's genes, how are we to condemn his actions?

This makes no sense. How could we condemn the criminal's actions any more, or any less, if they were based on how he'd turned out from environmental influences? Or if they were based on the interaction of his genes and environment? Or if the actions were caused by some random quantum event in his brain, if it comes to that? Indeed, how could we condemn him, any more or any less, if he acted the way he did because of how he'd been shaped by a supernatural being?

Just what alternative is the reviewer trying to imagine? Presumably, some naive concept of free will is lurking behind his question, but I can't even work out what it is.

I mean, this is not a malicious or totally one-sided review, but it is full of half-baked assumptions.

463. Believe it or not: the sceptics beat God in bestseller battle

Comment #62850 by Russell Blackford on August 11, 2007 at 9:38 pm

^I just fell off my chair, laughing.

464. Believe it or not: the sceptics beat God in bestseller battle

Comment #62846 by Russell Blackford on August 11, 2007 at 8:55 pm

More strength to Grayling's arm. I hope to meet him when he's in town in a couple of weeks' time. But he must go to very boring dinner parties, judging by this:

[At a dinner party in the old days] You would no more speak about your religious belief than you would your sex life.

I mean, if you can't talk about your sex life or about religion, what's the point of getting together for dinner with your friends? At dinner parties I've been to, these have usually been among the main topics of conversation.

465. Richard Dawkins, TV evangelist

Comment #62840 by Russell Blackford on August 11, 2007 at 7:47 pm

Dr Benway:

Secularists are not calling for forceful suppression or elimination of religion or other nonsense ideas. Secularists simply want to be free from government intrusion, coercion, and taxation, for the sake of stupid, unproven supernaturalist notions.

Why is this straight-forward, explicit objective given such a fearful spin? Isn't secularism worth defending?

That was sooo well said.

466. Richard Dawkins, TV evangelist

Comment #62825 by Russell Blackford on August 11, 2007 at 6:38 pm

This business about the "sheer ferocity", yadda, yadda puzzles me. It makes it sound as if all the books involved adopt the same tone. That is simply not true. The tone adopted by Dennett is very courteous and considered. The most angry books are probably those by Onfray and Hitchens, but here's an important point: even they are less aggressive than much other material that is presented in public debate, and I'm not just thinking of party-political material.

For a quite different purpose, I've been re-reading some of the well-known radical feminist material on pornography and prostitution, and I can assure you all that the rhetorical ferocity displayed by Catharine MacKinnon and others exceeds that of anything that I've seen from any of the "New Atheists". The same applies to some of the material that one sees in the debates about biotechnology. As for the tone adopted by anarcho-primitivists when they condemn modern, technological civilisation, well ...

Now, as it happens, I think that some of this material by radical anti-pornography feminists, bio-Luddites, anarcho-primitivists and others does go too far. I'd be happier if it were more measured. But my point is that even Hitchens and Onfray do not actually go that far. It seems to me as if a double standard is being applied here. You can denounce anything else (pornography, biotechnology, modern civilisation, or anything else that you seek to condemn) with as much passion as you like, and a few eyebrows may be raised, but what you're doing will be considered legitimate. But if you show any passion at all in denouncing religion, the whole legitimacy of your enterprise will be challenged and you'll be accused of being some kind of hatemonger.

As for the main book of the so-called "New Atheism", The God Delusion, I re-read it just last week. I can report that there were about half a dozen occasions in the book's 400 large pages (trade paperback edition) where it contained a sentence that I found uncomfortably snarky. In each case, there was some arguable justification for it. The book does, indeed, contain a lot of robust satire, but all of it well-targeted and not hateful. On the contrary, The God Delusion is good-humored in tone and often funny. What's more, Dawkins devotes page after page, whenever a new issue comes up, to treating his opponents' claims with meticulous fairness.

It seems that a lot of Dawkins' critics are completely unable to read his book for what it actually is, rather than for what they imagine, a priori, that any condemnation of religion must be.

467. Science and the Islamic World

Comment #62815 by Russell Blackford on August 11, 2007 at 4:49 pm

I'm not going to get into the debate about how golden that golden age was, though it's interesting seeing the opinions pro and con above. For myself, I'm just worried that right now we see are a seeing a huge, nuclear-armed country on what might well be the path to theocratic rule. Any opinions on that?

468. Why Richard Dawkins is right on alternative medicine - but not when it comes to religion

Comment #62673 by Russell Blackford on August 10, 2007 at 8:09 pm

BAEOZ ... I think I've about run out of thoughts. :)

You are doing some of the heavy philosophical work here, and my response is really just that it has to be done. Do your points stand up? Well, I can immediately see that Richard Swinburne and Alvin Plantinga, etc., are going to reply in various ways. It's difficult to come up with a really knock-down argument against them because we are dealing with people who are thinking and arguing from different premises. Take your point about thermodynamics. I actually have a friend who is no religionist but has looked at this argument closely and concluded that it fails, and he may be right for all I know. But say your argument works and shows that mind-body dualism violates the laws of thermodynamics. Someone who is sufficiently convinced that mind-body dualism is true will argue from it as a premise to deny that the laws of thermodynamics hold in such situations (after all, what are they to God?), and/or may even fall back on some kind of epistemic relativism as a last resort. Similarly, I'm sure you will get all sorts of arguments as to why revelation is a trustworthy source of truths.

I suppose my point here is that you can never ultimately win these arguments against the truly determined and committed religionist - not if "win" means come up with an argument that will persuade them. Their worldview is so comprehensively different that they will never accept premises that are shown to lead to an anti-religious conclusion. The problem of evil (which RD underrates IMHO, but that's a discussion for another time) is another case in point. The truly determined and committed religionist won't admit that God must be limited in power or goodness, but will probably end up defining goodness in some new way.

Nonetheless, I think we need to keep putting the arguments. There are plenty of religionists who are not that committed and will eventually see that they are being led into a very contrived and uncomfortable worldview if they keep opposing every argument that could be fatal to their system. For some, this will eventually strain their credulity too far, and their faith will collapse, to be replaced with a different overall paradigm. That is exactly how it happened for me (thirty or more years ago now).

The other benefit is that even if not a lot of people are won over from being committed religionists, many waverers will be. Furthermore, everyone will at least see that there is a helluva lot of doubt about religion's credibility, and surely that has to help with the political situation ... why make political decisions on something so doubtful?

I do agree with Yorker though, in this sense. Just organising politically and being visible, to the extent that the herding cats problem allows it, will probably do a lot of good, above and beyond all the arguments and debates.

469. Why Richard Dawkins is right on alternative medicine - but not when it comes to religion

Comment #62664 by Russell Blackford on August 10, 2007 at 6:10 pm

You know, if religion only instructed its adherents how to behave well when dealing with others, it wouldn't be so bad, though there'd still be cause to worry that all those adherents would be getting some pretty undesirable instructions.

However, what is worse is that religion actually tries to instruct all of us, including governments. In a way, you can't blame them. If they believe, for example, that stem cell research is morally equivalent to killing babies, how can they be expected to shut up about it - or to instruct their adherents not to partipate, while letting everyone else do so? First, you can't disentangle the roles of adherents and non-adherents so simply (what if some adherents are on government funding bodies, or in the legislature? aren't their hands dirty, as individual adherents, if they fund stem cell research or allow it to remain legal?). Second, how can the religionists just sit by while, in their perception, all those "babies" are being killed by non-adherents?

I just don't think you could characterise religion as being not a problem anymore, even if it did make some effort to do no more than give moral instructions to its adherents. It would never work out like that. As long as there are folks going around who have social prestige and clout when they talk about moral issues, and as long as those folks get their morality from sources other than secular argument about reducing misery, keeping social order, etc., we will have a problem on our hands.

None of this is meant to detract from the other points that have been made above - in practice, religion does not confine itself in this way. I'll come back to that. But even if religious leaders made every attempt to restrain themselves in the way that Lawson says, there would still be a problem with it. We can't try to ban or persecute religion, as everyone here seems to agree, but we do have every reason to argue against it, even if takes the most benign realistically imaginable form.

Anyway, the current reality is almost the opposite. I think that a lot of secular intellectuals became complacent about religion during the 1980s and 1990s, thinking it had become entirely benign. People like Terry Eagleton still seem to think like this ... as Lawson does.

And if it had become as benign as Lawson imagines, I guess the problem would at least be less urgent.

However, contrary to Lawson's view, we have been seeing religion flex its muscles more and more. In Italy, it has quite recently managed to get draconian laws passed with respect to reproductive technology; in the US, a form of Christian fundamentalism is exerting huge influence on the federal administration, and there is a powerful Dominionist movement that wants to establish a Christian state; even here in relatively-secular Australia, I am appalled every day to see how Howard and Rudd are openly trying to outbid each other to buy the Christian vote. Things may be better in the UK, but I see that you have issues over there, as well, with faith schools and what they are trying to teach. Then there's the ambitions of Islamists, which don't even bear an attempted description in this comment.

In all, I'd say two things: even if religion were at its most benign, we'd have cause for concern about it; in any event, it is far from like that ... and the need to oppose religion and its pretensions and ambitions has become truly urgent.

470. Why Richard Dawkins is right on alternative medicine - but not when it comes to religion

Comment #62574 by Russell Blackford on August 10, 2007 at 7:01 am

Well, it's a civil piece, so kudos for that, but I'm not at all relieved if some religionists are concentrating on ethical opinions. Those opinions are often cruel and irrational ones (and, yes, there is sense in which ethical opinions can be "irrational"). Importantly, religionists have no particular authority to pronounce on ethics for the rest of us. This can't be pointed out often enough.

Incidentally, the author has a rather naive understanding of Humean ethics, and it seems a bit odd to try to shield moderate religion behind Ayer's logical positivism, which Ayer himself ultimately renounced as unsustainably paradoxical.

471. Another Flea is Born

Comment #62472 by Russell Blackford on August 9, 2007 at 9:17 pm

Something should be done.

This raises a very interesting issue. I don't think anything can be done ... at least not by the state (but I'm not sure that that is what J had in mind, since he's talking about direct responses from opponents of this horrible nonsense from hellfire religionists).

I actually think that a certain amount of morally bad behaviour from theists has to be officially tolerated on separation-of-church-and-state grounds. I'd like to see atheists be principled about this, as Richard has been (if I understand his position correctly, e.g. on emphasising consciousness raising, rather than legislation). But it's a complex issue. I'm going to try to develop some of the argument when I talk to the local Rationalist Society in Melbourne on Wednesday night, but I need to think it through a lot more. Yes, this is a shameless plug to any Melburnians who are reading. :)

Generally, though, it doesn't surprise me if we atheists are like other people who have to accept (at the level of the role of the state) a certain amount of behaviour that (at a personal level) they consider immoral. That seems like an inevitable outcome if you are both an atheist and something like a Millian liberal.

472. Scarlet Letter Campaign Update: A Victory

Comment #62471 by Russell Blackford on August 9, 2007 at 9:01 pm

Sorry to be so terse in my earlier comment. I thought the regulars would pick up on this, partly for the reasons given by Yorker.

I do understand why some of you were taken in, though: when you read some of the actual propaganda from the likes of Brownback and his followers it is almost as extreme and absurd as the parody.

473. Dissing Deism

Comment #62469 by Russell Blackford on August 9, 2007 at 8:57 pm

Nice article ... though, like others, I don't like the title (probably chosen by a sub-editor). Deism is not the problem. Deists are cool. Deists are hot. Deists are good kissers. Or whatever.

It's actually theism that we have to worry about. There's a big difference.

474. Scarlet Letter Campaign Update: A Victory

Comment #62270 by Russell Blackford on August 9, 2007 at 7:18 am

ROFL. (This is a joke, in case it's not obvious to infrequent visitors.)

475. Atheist 'Metaphysics' and Religious Equivocation

Comment #62244 by Russell Blackford on August 9, 2007 at 4:05 am

Did I see NOMA mentioned? Sorry, but that idea is totally bankrupt. It is inconsistent with all of the following:

1. Religion as traditionally understood has never confined itself to the domain of morals and values.

2. More importantly, the claims of religion to any authority in that domain are spurious.

3. Science does have important things to say about the domain of morals and values. This domain is quite open to rational inquiry, even if it is a particularly difficult inquiry to conduct in a way that will generate consensus. Okay, so therefore call it "philosophical inquiry", rather than "scientific inquiry", but it will be philosophical inquiry that is informed by and continuous with science. It is nothing to do with religion.

NOMA was the dumbest idea (maybe the one truly dumb one) that Gould ever came up with. It (1) assigns religion a "magisterium" that it is not entitled to, (2) wrongly takes that magisterium away from science and reason, and (3) forgets that it is of the essence of religion to make dubious claims about the empirical universe.

I stand by what I said about Rocks of Ages when it first appeared ...

http://www.users.bigpond.com/russellblackford/gould.htm

... so I won't repeat it all here.

476. Could these books be part of the problem?

Comment #62078 by Russell Blackford on August 8, 2007 at 5:30 am

stevieb, I don't think you'll like The Intelligent Person's Guide to Religion. According to the discussion in Pataki's Against Religion, it's by a theist philosopher, John Haldane, who apparently brings out a lot of the by-now-familiar epistemic relativism type arguments to support religious faith.

Maybe someone who is familiar with the book at first hand can confirm or correct this information.

477. The Out Campaign

Comment #61857 by Russell Blackford on August 7, 2007 at 6:31 am

Just by the way, my scarlet letter T-shirt turned up in the mail. It looks stylish in real life, and actually fits me. Now I just need some weather warm enough to be able to go out in it.

478. Does the Bible have a place in public schools?

Comment #61768 by Russell Blackford on August 6, 2007 at 8:20 pm

I'd rather see a course that was not focused exclusively on the Bible. E.g., the Iliad and the Odyssey have also had a huge influence on our culture. There are limits to how much can be crammed in, admittedly, but some kind of course that looks at a range of religious/mythological literature from a secular viewpoint would be useful to help give students an understanding of their culture and its history. It would be invaluable for those wanting to go on to study humanities subjects at university, but really everyone should have at least some grounding in this stuff.

479. New age therapies cause 'retreat from reason'

Comment #61645 by Russell Blackford on August 6, 2007 at 4:47 am

Chopra had a book-launch party at his California home and was wearing a toga-like outfit; around the swimming pool were a bevy of nubile young women.

Well, even Jerry Falwell probably had one or two good points.

480. New age therapies cause 'retreat from reason'

Comment #61591 by Russell Blackford on August 5, 2007 at 11:06 pm

I need to be careful, because I don't really agree with discipline and drive1, and I don't want to be interpreted as doing so. However, I may have been the first person here who suggested (pretty much inadvertently) that there might be an issue about going after lesser irrationalists, even though I actually supported the idea of Richard doing it. By and large, I still think it's a good thing, and I've always been cheered to see James Randi, for example, do something like this. I'm equally happy to see Richard do it - and I look forward to seeing the new TV show if it is ever shown in Australia.

Nonetheless, I think that discipline and drive1 are raising a legitimate issue about tactics and priorities. I think it's a healthy discussion for us to have.

My main worry about supernaturalist beliefs is a political one. New Age quackery doubtless does a lot of damage, both at the individual level and (importantly) at the larger level of helping in the cumulative undermining reason and science. That makes it worth fighting. But ...

On the other hand, it lacks the kind of prestige and organisation that mainstream religion (including some of its extreme versions) has, and it's not likely to have the same kind of political clout whenever an issue like therapeutic cloning is voted on. By and large, these lesser irrationalists and frauds are not the ones currently trying to lead us into a theocratic state, even if they do contribute significantly, and especially in the longer term, to a climate where anti-scientific thought can prosper.

So, good for Richard. The job needs doing. However, I think it's legitimate for different people who are all sympathetic to the "New Atheism" to have different personal priorities and to want to discuss them. And yeah, challenging mainstream religion is a higher priority from my personal viewpoint. But hey, I spend most of my time going after a different crowd again: the bio-Luddites who are all too common in bioethics and similar areas.

All cats here, remember.

481. The Gullible Age: Review of 'The Enemies of Reason'

Comment #61408 by Russell Blackford on August 5, 2007 at 4:06 am

Just to be clear, folks, I wasn't being disingenuous or ironical when I said I was glad to see RD going after these wingnuts and charlatans. I hope it wasn't taken that way. There's a war of ideas that has to be fought against all the enemies of reason.

These "lesser irrationalists", as I called them, don't have the immense political clout of (say) the pope and the church cardinals. On the other hand, they do real damage at an individual level. Also, there's a cumulative effect of undermining the scientific worldview and the norms of rational inquiry if these folks are allowed to go unchallenged. The war of ideas has to be fought on a whole lot of different fronts.

482. The Gullible Age: Review of 'The Enemies of Reason'

Comment #61372 by Russell Blackford on August 5, 2007 at 1:29 am

I consider mainstream religious conservatives and extremists to be the most important target for attack because of their great political influence, but I'm happy to see RD going after these lesser breeds of irrationalist as well. It's not as high a priority (not from my viewpoint, anyway), but it should be entertaining and socially valuable.

483. The Out Campaign

Comment #61340 by Russell Blackford on August 4, 2007 at 7:49 pm

It's nice to see that David has mastered blockquote. His posts are still very long and very ad hominem in approach, but they are now much more comprehensible ... so kudos to him for that. Praise where it's due, etc.

484. Atheists of the world: unite!

Comment #61339 by Russell Blackford on August 4, 2007 at 7:25 pm

For some reason, my comment over there, in support of the scarlet letter campaign, won't "take" ... even though I was seemingly logged in properly. (I tried twice, as "Metamagician".) Does anyone who uses the Guardian site more frequently know why that might be? E.g. does it have moderation delays? (Send me a pm, if you like, rather than cluttering this thread with individual communications.)

Edit: Forget it. My comments appeared after considerable delay. For whatever reason (moderation?), they don't appear immediately.

485. Don't vote for ignorance

Comment #61165 by Russell Blackford on August 4, 2007 at 2:16 am

^I agree that "believe in" is an expression to avoid. If that's what Jolly Bloger was getting at, I guess I have no great problem. But I keep seeing posts here and places like Pharyngula where the ordinary words "believe", "belief" and their cognates are held to be problematic in some sense. They are not, and such posts strike me as - with all due respect to the people concerned - a bit fanatical.

But anything that implies "believing in" a body of doctrine accepted on trust, or on faith, or because it is "nice", comes into a different category altogether.

For myself, I believe the central propositions of Darwinian theory, in that I hold them to be true, albeit without absolute certainty and with a degree of provisionality, but I don't "believe in" the theory in some way that is additional to this ... or distinguishable from it.

486. Philip Kitcher - Living with Darwin

Comment #61113 by Russell Blackford on August 3, 2007 at 5:33 pm

Hi, Flagellant. I've read your post a couple of times, and I'm afraid some of it confuses me - I suspect I'm not getting your point ... although I should mention that I have a lot of reservations about racial vilification legislation, and I'm pretty much totally opposed to religious vilification legislation ("pretty much" because there can be extreme situations, and I'm not an absolutist about anything, not even free speech, much as absolutists get to have more fun with their rhetoric).

Be all that as it may, your final point is one that I totally agree with. Yes, it's not just a matter of stopping their aspirations to obtain more political power, crucial though that is (I've just read Kingdom Coming by Michelle Goldberg, which really reinforces the lesson). We need to find ways of cutting back the political power that they've already managed to gain. Absolutely right!

487. The Flea Circus Invites a Newcomer!

Comment #60938 by Russell Blackford on August 3, 2007 at 6:41 am

Peraonally, I don't think that that chapter was Sam H's finest moment, but that's okay. No one is holding his books up as the inerrant word of God; from my viewpoint, they are just the ideas of one individual with whom I find myself largely, but not necessarily entirely, in agreement. Cthulhu knows, if the book I am currently working on ever sees publication, whatever flaws it may have will be mine. First, they will not discredit the entire body of my own thinking, and second (more importantly) no one else who a naturalistic worldview will have to take responsibility for them.

It's only cats here, not sheep.

488. They let anybody onto the faculty at Oxford nowadays

Comment #60931 by Russell Blackford on August 3, 2007 at 6:31 am

Yeah, 6 pm for 6.30. I have no idea what the audience will be like (in numbers or assumptions). As you know it's the Rationalist Society, but that may not be quite what we expect ... and I haven't had anything to do with that group previously. If you make it, please introduce yourself to me when you get a chance.

I do hope RD will forgive us this peripheral exchange about a local event in Melbourne. Strictly speaking, we should be using email or the pm system, I suppose.

489. They let anybody onto the faculty at Oxford nowadays

Comment #60924 by Russell Blackford on August 3, 2007 at 6:17 am

I decided it wasn't worth the energy. Besides, David's posts are incomprehensible because he doesn't know how to use blockquote.

I believe that you can just turn up. Do you have the details? I'll be giving a sort of defence of the New Atheism, though have my own spin on it ... i.e., the need to challenge religion's claims to moral authority.

490. Don't vote for ignorance

Comment #60923 by Russell Blackford on August 3, 2007 at 6:13 am

Jolly Bloger, I am always confused by comments like yours. Speaking for myself, I actually do believe that propositions such as, "Human beings are descended from non-human life forms" are true. My belief is based on the vast body of observational evidence that supports this statement. I realise that all scientific claims are provisional, but some are so well-corroborated that it is difficult to see how they could turn out to be false. I have no serious doubt about such propositions as: "The Earth revolves around the Sun", "Down syndrome is caused by an extra copy of chromosome 21" and "There were no smilodons during the Triassic period." In any event, to believe a proposition is not to claim certainty. I am happy for any of these propositions to be revised (maybe I'm not up with the latest about Down syndrome, or whatever). The point is that "believe" and its cognates are ordinary English words that have nothing in particular to do with religion or faith.

491. They let anybody onto the faculty at Oxford nowadays

Comment #60916 by Russell Blackford on August 3, 2007 at 5:53 am

A sucker once needed some succour,
So he sought out some spiritual tucker.
He hoped for a feast
When he went to his priest
But the latter said, "Piss off, you misguided individual."

492. The Flea Circus Invites a Newcomer!

Comment #60910 by Russell Blackford on August 3, 2007 at 5:43 am

Reverend David, will you please learn to use the blockquote thing? I find your posts unreadable. It's really not all that difficult.

493. Could these books be part of the problem?

Comment #60907 by Russell Blackford on August 3, 2007 at 5:38 am

Of course they're real. So are books like Computing for Dummies. It's mildly funny, but it's also a bit of cheap shot ... that's all. Not the sort of thing that I think should be on the front page like this. I'd rather save my mockery for religious doctrines that are genuinely absurd.

I'd also think it a cheap shot if someone wrote a book called The Complete Idiot's Guide to Evolution and a creationist site tried to get a laugh about how (obviously) only complete idiots could accept evolution.

Oh well, maybe I'm just in a humorless mood. Take no notice of me.

Russ the Grump

494. Could these books be part of the problem?

Comment #60829 by Russell Blackford on August 3, 2007 at 12:49 am

I'm all for a bit of Voltairean mockery of religious dogma, but I think this thread rather misses the mark.

495. They let anybody onto the faculty at Oxford nowadays

Comment #60817 by Russell Blackford on August 3, 2007 at 12:17 am

What I actually find difficult about someone like McGrath is that he can't seem to make up his mind about whether to believe in God as some kind of transcendent explanation of how the universe comes to be ordered, or how reason comes to be trustworthy, or whatever exactly it is that he thinks needs explaining by the ontological prioity of reason and consciousness (or whatever the sophisticated view of God is supposed to be) ... while also believing in the barbaric and parochial doctrines of the Nicene Creed. I realise that there's no formal contradiction here, but the two mindsets are miles apart.

496. They let anybody onto the faculty at Oxford nowadays

Comment #60813 by Russell Blackford on August 2, 2007 at 11:53 pm

Anybody? Hmmmm, I might just test that next time there's a job in my field.

497. The Flea Circus Invites a Newcomer!

Comment #60434 by Russell Blackford on August 2, 2007 at 12:04 am

A species of literary hack
Can be found on a rottweiler's back.
It's the literary flea.
It likes scones, jam and tea
Mixed with blood - what a nourishing snack!

498. The Flea Circus Invites a Newcomer!

Comment #60418 by Russell Blackford on August 1, 2007 at 9:55 pm

All part of life's rich tapestry as far as I'm concerned.

I don't plan to read these books, because I don't have time, and I'll be reading Alvin Plantinga or Richard Swiburne if I want to read some intellectually respectable (however misguided) Christian philosophy. But I don't object to the existence of the "flea" books. Of course, the New Atheist books are challenging the hegemony of religion by appealing directly to a popular audience - a different sort of job from that done by Michael Martin or J.L. Mackie - and of course we can expect religionists to bite back. C'est la vie.

499. Philip Kitcher - Living with Darwin

Comment #60082 by Russell Blackford on July 31, 2007 at 8:52 pm

Donald, I now understand what you're getting at, though I don't actually like the example of seat-belt laws, which are not really peaceful. There may be a justification for such laws, perhaps a paternalistic one, and I don't want to argue against them. But the fact remains that the state will fine me - or in the ultimate, should I refuse to pay the fine, confiscate my assets or send me to prison - if I don't wear a seat-belt. Thus the legislation is backed up by threats of violent acts by the state's servants.

However, I realise you don't say that anything like that should be done with religion. It's just that a successful campaign of ideas could place religionists in a position where they will have little practical choice but to abandon their aspirations of wielding political power. On that, I fully agree. If that's all you mean by "force" them, then we're at one. That's just the situation that we need to try to bring about.

500. A force for good?

Comment #60070 by Russell Blackford on July 31, 2007 at 6:37 pm

I mean, take this:

I start with a sense that there is purpose in existence. That we are connected to something bigger than ourselves. That we find greater fulfilment by relating to that and by seeking the shimmer of transcendence. God is not an "invisible being" who "commands, rewards or punishes. God is not to me a particular "being" at all, but rather the power of Being itself. God is a supreme moral ideal to be reverenced for its value not for its controlling power.

If someone wants to believe something like this, then fine ... as far as it goes. I reserve the right to argue against it (I see no reason to believe that there is any such purpose, or anything transcendent, supreme, etc., in the relevant senses). However, if all religionists went around believing in something vague, touchy-feely, and poetic like this, there probably wouldn't be that much problem. People who believe this sort of thing will often be able to have reasonably enlightened views on specific moral and political issues, and they are unlikely to traumatise children with threats of hellfire, to try to undermine the teaching of science in schools, and so on. They are worth debating. However, as long as they are not merely putting up a smokescreen to hide their real (perhaps less moderate) views, they are not the real enemy, certainly no more so than a lot of misguided secular thinkers.