551. The New Atheists

Comment #49384 by Russell Blackford on June 11, 2007 at 6:00 pm

Good article. I think it's terribly important to have powerful intellects challenging the very foundations of the moral authority claimed by religion, by challenging its supernaturalist premises. But there are certainly issues where many religious moderates will side with atheists/sceptics/blah blah. Plenty of scientifically-literate Christians would be horrified by the current attacks on evolutionary theory and by the irrational bioethical positions adopted by the Vatican.

It may be difficult to see how some of the people concerned are being absolutely consistent, and I realise that we care about truth, not just policy. But I'd actually settle, at least in the short term, for some rational policy. The problem that I see is how to go on attacking the foundations of religion (which I see as essential) while also working productively with moderates on at least some issues. In practice, this might be a balancing act - not impossible, but needing a lot of care.

552. Teaching assistant quit in protest at Harry Potter

Comment #49379 by Russell Blackford on June 11, 2007 at 5:46 pm

JorgeGreen: Different publishers will have different concerns. I think your wife really should just write what she thinks appropriate, and perhaps the best person to give her advice on the limits might be a school librarian - apart, of course, from the editor of the relevant book or magazine (if we're talking about short stories). Other concerns are likely to be the obvious ones: e.g., those relating to violence, sex, and what Americans call "cursing". Even when writing for the YA and YA/adult crossover markets in the US you have to be aware of some of those things with some publishers.

Although some publishers associated with the US schools market won't publish anything containing "witchcraft", I'd hate to be discouraging people from writing fantasy - which kids and teenagers love - because of that.

553. Teaching assistant quit in protest at Harry Potter

Comment #49265 by Russell Blackford on June 11, 2007 at 8:02 am

Will this "witchcraft" foolishness in the US school system never end? Grrrr, this is a pet hate of mine.

I can tell you for a fact that this incident is not an aberration. A lot of fantasy material never even gets written because there are publishers of fiction who market to the Americsn school systems and whose guidelines to potential authors include "no witchcraft" (read "nothing like magic - no sorcerers, magicians, blah, blah, of any kind"). I've fallen afoul of this in a small way, myself. It's not as important an issue as the attempts to subvert biology teaching, but nor is it trivial. These wingnuts are actually having some success in keeping harmless fantasy material (material that that is likely to encourage kids to read) out of American schools.

554. Manliness is next to godliness

Comment #49209 by Russell Blackford on June 11, 2007 at 2:49 am

The wingnut fairy has certainly been busy.

555. The Myth of Secular Moral Chaos

Comment #48994 by Russell Blackford on June 10, 2007 at 12:13 am

People seem to mean all sorts of different things when they talk about an absolute morality. If it means a morality with exceptionless rules, for example, then I have no idea why we would want a morality like that. If it means an objective morality Out There somewhere, I have no reason to imagine that any such thing exists, or why it should be thought of as desirable.

Morality is a desirable thing to the extent that it reduces suffering, aids social cohesion and coordination, enables us to live better lives than if we tried to live as egoists, and conduces to other such outcomes that most of us favour (and have evolved to favour). But to achieve that, it's not something that must be absolute in any sense.

Morality is also open to revision if it is not actually achieving the outcomes that make it desirable in the first place. A lot of our inherited morality could do with rational revision.

This is where religionists are particularly dangerous. They make typically make a fetish of moral rules, instead of keeping in mind what morality is for. This can lead them to be irrational and even cruel, wanting to enforce a morality that is narrow, warped, and harmful.

556. Can we really learn to love people who aren't like us?

Comment #48989 by Russell Blackford on June 9, 2007 at 11:00 pm

Bonzai is right - for example, an alien species that discovered the space shuttle would be able to tell that it had a designer because they would recognise it as an artifact. How would they know? Well, not because it is complex. Many things that are complex are not artifacts (and assuming that they are is begging the question). However, not all materials or combinations of materials occur in nature (yes, I realise that we are part of nature in the broadest sense - I mean "nature" in the sense of what exists prior to the development of technology, etc.).

There are many things that we could discover that would be of such a design, or of such materials, or of such behaviour that we would infer that an alien intelligent species made them. An object approaching our solar system on a path that showed it was self-powered would be a very good candidate for being the creation of an alien intelligence, for example (other explanations would be far-fetched). If we then discovered that it was made of materials that don't occur naturally, such as plastics and metal alloys, we'd be pretty certain it was an artifact ... and we'd infer the existence of another intelligent species in the universe.

This is the big problem - or one of them - with Paley's teleological argument. He wants to argue for the existence of an artificer from the existence of things that show no hallmarks of being artifacts.

557. Atheism is pretentious and cowardly

Comment #48255 by Russell Blackford on June 7, 2007 at 7:48 am

My comment on the Gruniad's site:

So, what I got out of this article is that the author believes that Dawkins and Hitchens are ageing and unattractive ... and yet, inexplicably all those female journalists just will hang around "fawning" over them. To make matters worse, Hitchens is plainly a sexually-liberated cad and a bounder. You never know what he'll do to one of those poor female journos, if he gets half a chance! Alas, the author of the article evidently doesn't have any such luck. "What's wrong with me?" he asks plaintively, before engaging in some last fanciful speculations about Hitchens' motives. "Where are my fawning females?"

This is all very interesting and revealing, at the level of jealousy, gossip, and scarcely-veiled sexism, but maybe The Guardian could choose a slightly less transparently spiteful piece of work next time it decides to print something about Dawkins and Hitchens. This one truly reached a new low. I mean, everybody has their highs and lows, but whenever this subject comes up you folks just seem to go from a low low to an even lower low.

558. Here Comes the Fourth Musketeer.

Comment #48250 by Russell Blackford on June 7, 2007 at 7:40 am

What I said about it over on my blog where I seem to do a lot of free reviewing. ;)

I've just read Christopher Hitchens' God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. What does one say about Hitchens? He's an implacable controversialist with a gift for powerful, memorable phrases; he's steeped in literature, high culture, and the societies of all the world's trouble spots, each of which he knows intimately, and at first hand, and describes with vivid detail and total confidence; he seems like a decent, generous, warm-hearted man, but when it comes to a verbal battle he fights to win, with no inhibitions holding him back.

I don't agree with Hitchens' every opinion. I disagree with him, for a start, about the disastrous war in Iraq, always a dumb idea, always a can of Dune-sized worms. Though he is pro-choice, he seems to me to concede too much to the enemy on the issue of abortion (though I think I now understand his position somewhat better, and I can respect it). I don't even especially like the sub-title of his book; surely religion, whatever its faults, does not poison everything. There are moderate, sophisticated religious positions with which I have no terrible quarrel; there are moderate, sophisticated, good religious people whom I count as friends. Some of the positions we're talking about here are not even supernaturalist, but draw on holy books and long-sustained traditions mainly as a source of inspiring metaphors. I can certainly live with that, and with much more than that.

But even the most moderate and inoffensive religious leaders will sometimes poison the day with spurts of unwanted, unhelpful, unimpressive moralising, so it's always salutary to challenge their assumed authority over our consciences and our minds.

Getting back to Hitchens, he's not infallible, and perhaps not exactly "great", depending on your standards of greatness, but he's pretty good. Let's say it people, he's pretty damn good. His new book mercilessly exposes the primitive, parochial, uncivilised thinking that dwells in the very heart of traditional religious belief as we inherited it.

If religion is ever going to morph into something truly beneficial, something plausible and positive that is worth retention in modern societies - or is at least worthy of our respect for as long as it lingers and shares our social space - it will need to look deeply into its own heart and find a way to change from within (where change must always come from, according to one of Hitchens' little jokes that I'll let the reader find for herself). I don't doubt that the good old Church of England, in which I was raised, and which has never bothered excommunicating me for my sparse attendance of its rituals, has gradually been doing this, living down its persecutorial past and its origin in depotism and kingly greed (not to mention lust). But even my poor, dear C of E has a way to go in consciousness-raising, as evidenced by its occasional acts of moral pusillanimity. See, as a fine example, its current mishandling of the issue of gay clergy.

Religion may not poison absolutely everything, and even Christopher Hitchens can't prove such a sweeping claim, but it sure needs to get its own intellectual and moral house in order before it presumes to lecture the secular world. We can respect it when, but only when, respect is due - I'd respect the current Archbishop of Canterbury, if he'd show us a bit of Hitchens-like tenacity and courage. But its institutions and dogmas continue to attract all too much respect from contemporary secular intellectuals. For God's sake - or whoever's - give religion some contempt, when contempt is due ... as it so often is.

Once we pan out from the well-meaning waverings of nice Anglican bishops, to survey the whole miserable empire of organised religion - the anti-human teachings of the Vatican, under its current and recent stewards; the egregious displays of American fundamentalist televangelists; and the still largely-unreformed world of Islam, with its lush outgrowths of suicidal fanaticism - the scene becomes that much uglier. It then looks all too much as if religion, in its generality, is what Hitchens sees it as: not a living cultural treasure to fuss over and preserve, but an intellectual and moral enemy to be engaged and defeated by all peaceful means.

559. Atheism is pretentious and cowardly

Comment #48189 by Russell Blackford on June 7, 2007 at 2:11 am

My definition of intellectual cowardice is making ad hominem attacks (e.g. on your opponents' age, appearance, presumed psychological motivation) in the pages of a national newspaper. We can all define words however we want, right?

What a pity, though, that we can't all be as young and attractive as Mr Hobson (evidently imagines he is). It's a pity that he's not getting the interviews he wants with all those hot, fawning female journalists, but I guess he can at least dream.

560. Pell plans fidelity oath for principals

Comment #48185 by Russell Blackford on June 7, 2007 at 1:56 am

My comments on Pell, for what they're worth:

http://metamagician3000.blogspot.com/2007/06/how-much-foolishness-can-you-take-from.html

561. God is not responsible for war and suffering

Comment #48183 by Russell Blackford on June 7, 2007 at 1:52 am

I don't know how long the Oz keeps its responses open, so I'll place here the same comment as I made over there:

======
Couldn't The Australian have come up with something better than this pile of cliches? How many times do we have to read the same tired arguments about Hitler, etc., as if Hitler was any sort of rationalist?

Nazism was an irrational, quasi-religious belief system, with a strange mix of links to both Christianity and the old pagan gods. It thrived in an environment prepared for it by hundreds of years of vicious Christian anti-Semitism. Stalinist communism, with its Lysenkoist pseudoscience and its rationalised eschatology, was almost as loopy. All such crazed, authoritarian systems, whether or not they are explicitly supernaturalist, are dangerous. In their attempt to control our lives, and our very thoughts, they expel ordinary, decent human values, such as kindness and compassion. They want us to live in accordance with their tunnel-visioned, yet all-too-comprehensive, theories of how the world is supposed to work ... and what human beings are supposed to be like.

With the defeat of Nazism and Stalinism, it's the explicitly supernaturalist totalitarianisms - hardline Catholicism such as we've seen from the Vatican's most recent clowns-in-chief; egregious American fundamentalism in the style of Jerry Falwell or Ted Haggard; and blood-soaked radical Islam, with its genital mutilations, burkhas, and suicide bombs - that are now the biggest danger to any life of freedom and reason.

There's a high priority in rejecting - with all due contempt - the specious claims to moral authority of pontiffs, puritans, preachers, and arrogant pulpiteers. Kudos to Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and others, for getting the process started. You can bet that there's a lot more to come. The current high-profile revolt against religious bullying, and its associated moral charlatanry, was long, long overdue.

562. Pell plans fidelity oath for principals

Comment #47857 by Russell Blackford on June 5, 2007 at 6:50 pm

What did we really expect from a totalitarian fanatic like Pell? All we can do is just keep saying, loudly, that he and his bloated cult have no moral authority whatsoever.

563. Cigarette Smoke Alters DNA In Sperm, Genetic Damage Could Pass To Offspring

Comment #47519 by Russell Blackford on June 4, 2007 at 8:20 pm

This may be one more reason not to smoke, if we needed one.

But that said, I agree with joshuaslocum: we all need to relax a bit about all these moral obligations that get heaped on us. Everyone, let's all just try to be kind, loyal, honest, non-violent, reasonably generous people ... try to vote for some sensible policies that might reduce the world's burden of misery, support whatever causes we agree with, at least in some small way. You know, try to be good by some reasonable human standard.

But don't try to be saints who are always "perfect" by some impossible standard. And don't beat ourselves up at the thought that some problem just might, though we don't know, have been caused, in part, by some aspect of our past behaviour. That kind of thinking could drive you crazy.

Actually, konquererz, don't take this as directed at you at all, if you were just expressing a passing thought. I'm ranting at the more general phenomenon of all the things that we are always being asked to feel guilty about.

564. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath

Comment #47160 by Russell Blackford on June 3, 2007 at 8:37 am

Danielos is doing a good job for the theist side here, IMHO. Better than McGrath did, actually.

It's quite enjoyable to watch, though I did find the last post rather odd, since I don't see how any atheists are assuming anything. No atheist whom I can think of has ever argued something like:

P. There is no God.
Therefore C. There is no God.

But there's no reason to be neutral about it. If someone wants to explain something about the phenomenal world, whuch we all observe and interact with, by conjecturing about some additional immaterial world, or about the actions of a powerful but disembodied intelligence, well, they are welcome to do so. But until there is some positive evidence that such things exist it's all just speculation. Don't expect the rest of us to believe it. We don't rule it out a priori; we just see no reason at all to believe any such claim.

Such speculation is fine with me, actually. If someone wants to speculate away about how some phenomenon - or the universe itself - was created by a powerful, disembodied intelligence ... well, shorn of its cultural familiarity to us that's a pretty bizarre sort of explanation, but it can't be ruled out, and it does no harm as far as it goes.

All I ask is that anyone with that pet hypothesis acknowledge that it's no more than a pet wild hypothesis - with nothing like the powerful convergent evidence in its favour that, say, biological evolution has - that they not teach it to children as fact, and above all that they not elaborate it with a whole lot of additional claims about what such a being wants us to do in our bedrooms, etc., etc.

565. Beggars belief: Robin McKie on The God Delusion

Comment #47143 by Russell Blackford on June 3, 2007 at 5:59 am

The author is using little touches of irony. Nothing wrong with that.

566. Man to die over insult

Comment #47140 by Russell Blackford on June 3, 2007 at 5:54 am

In the processing of writing - thanks for the info, Logicel.

567. Man to die over insult

Comment #47045 by Russell Blackford on June 2, 2007 at 11:34 pm

Another example of how cute and cuddly these "people of faith" are - what with their religions of love and peace, etc.

568. The Atheism FAQ with Richard Dawkins

Comment #47019 by Russell Blackford on June 2, 2007 at 7:08 pm

reggiedixon : I agree, which is why I actually call myself a metaphysical naturalist. There are lots of things apart from deities whose existence I don't believe in. Still, it's important at the moment to challenge the moral authority of religion in particular.

569. Atheism shall make you free

Comment #46883 by Russell Blackford on June 2, 2007 at 4:16 am

I don't think the egg explanation is very orthodox. The yolk, white, and shell are all merely parts of the egg. I think you'll find that the idea that Big Daddy God, God Junior, and Spook are parts of God is not accepted by theologians. After all, it implies that they could be separated, like when you make a meringue with the white, put the yolk in a quiche or maybe feed it to the cat, and crush the shell into your compost. A belief like that probably would have got you burned at the stake not that many centuries ago.

570. Atheism shall make you free

Comment #46833 by Russell Blackford on June 1, 2007 at 10:04 pm

I like Pamela Bone's journalism, but I do wonder about some aspects of this article. E.g. I think that she should be prepared to use some term other than "agnostic", which is little more than a euphemism to avoid offence ... at least when used by someone who clearly has no belief in any deity and is not even attracted to the idea.

I also wonder about this business of not depriving billions of people of their "comfort". Now, there may be many people who live lives so miserable and circumscribed that their acceptance of a fundamentally false worldview is the least of their worries. Perhaps it is harsh to want to take away their comforting lies which may be a large part of what makes life seem bearable and worthwhile to them. But it's a tragic situation.

It's also tragic that many other people who are not otherwise in any terrible situation are living with a comprehensive view of the world that is actually comprehensively false, and which circumscribes and distorts how they live and think and judge the actions of others. In the case of these people, I do want to take away their "comfort" ... or, rather, I want to persuade them to let it go.

My further thoughts here:

http://metamagician3000.blogspot.com/2007/06/more-on-michel-onfray.html

571. Debate between Richard Dawkins and Robert Winston

Comment #46803 by Russell Blackford on June 1, 2007 at 5:41 pm

I'm always a bit uneasy about references to "angels on the head of a pin". Wasn't this a pre-Cantorian thought experiment about the nature of infinity (can you have an actual infinity, as opposed to an indefinite and potentially infinite series?), rather than a theological speculation about the nature of angels? My understanding has always been that the puzzle is well-regarded by modern mathematicians.

We'd all be in trouble if, in a few hundred years' time, people took our thought experiments literally. If it's taken that we are talking literally about utility monsters, whether to push fat men onto railway tracks, hooking ourselves up to Nozickean experience machines, and so on, it might make us seem even loopier than we doubtless really are, if judged by 25th-century standards. *grin*

Sorry, folks, I realise this is a tangential point. It's just that I'm reminded by it every time I see a reference to angels on pinheads.

572. Photos of The God Delusion Event in Second Life

Comment #46799 by Russell Blackford on June 1, 2007 at 5:09 pm

The building doesn't look much like a church at all - it just looks like ... a generic building, and the inside just looks like the inside of a small, comfortable theatre.

Anyway, my account of the experience, including a couple of pics that I took, is here:

http://metamagician3000.blogspot.com/2007/05/richard-dawkins-broaches-second-life.html

573. Battle of the New Atheism

Comment #46632 by Russell Blackford on May 31, 2007 at 11:13 pm

^I didn't know about them, either. There are various small organisations here in Australia that I've decided really would justify sussing out. This is the website for the Rationalist Society: http://www.rationalist.com.au/home.htm.

My own talk is on 15 August at 6.30 pm, I gather, in the Trades Hall Meeting Room. And the day before, I'm going to talk to the local Atheist Society about religious vilification legislation (which I oppose). One very small thing that Richard Dawkins can take some of the credit or blame for is making me feel that I should do more to address these sorts of issues in public. Unfortunately, I don't have the charisma and panache of Dawkins or Hitchens, or the fabulous Ayaan Hirsi Ali, but I'll do my best.

574. Battle of the New Atheism

Comment #46626 by Russell Blackford on May 31, 2007 at 10:09 pm

I wonder where he's doing his degree. Anyway, he seems to be a full-time journo, so maybe he's not super active in the Melbourne philosophical community. I'll let you know if our paths ever cross.

Btw, Brian, if you're in Melb I'm going to do my own gig on exactly this subject a bit down the track. I'll be speaking to the Rationalist Society on 15 August on "The 'New Atheism'", and this thread has been a good trial run for it.

575. If It Feels Good to Be Good, It Might Be Only Natural

Comment #46625 by Russell Blackford on May 31, 2007 at 10:04 pm

I do wonder whether we need the category of "morality" at all.

We have perfectly good reasons, grounded in our natural desires, as modified by the application of reason, to develop certain dispositions of character and try to instil them in our children. We also have perfectly good reasons - from the same sources - to support some laws rather than others. We can ask the questions directly: "What kind of character do I want to have?" "What kind of character would it be good for children to develop?" "What kinds of laws do I support?"

I'm not sure why we really need the category of "morality", with all its implications of something objective or God-given, in order to address those questions. There are perfectly useful ways to discuss what dispositions of character we favour, what laws we support, etc., without talking about "morality" at all.

Or so I am just about prepared to argue (I'm using this forum to kick around some ideas that I'm working on for a paper I need to deliver in a few weeks).

We would still, I don't doubt, want to bring up our children to be loyal, honest, and kind, and to aim at having these characteristics ourselves. I suspect that virtue ethics would largely survive a total rethink of the foundations of what we call morality. And we could still call discussions of all this by the label "morality" or "moral philosophy" ... however, those discussions might take a very different form from what they take in the imagination and language of the average god-botherer.

576. Battle of the New Atheism

Comment #46590 by Russell Blackford on May 31, 2007 at 6:24 pm

^I wasn't still around, but I popped back. :)

I don't know anything about him, though I did read his hatchet-job review of Onfray's book last week: http://www.theage.com.au/news/book-reviews/the-atheist-manifesto/2007/05/25/1179601646002.html.

577. Battle of the New Atheism

Comment #46580 by Russell Blackford on May 31, 2007 at 5:46 pm

And, re-reading the whole thing, I find all this business about "prophecy" such a red herring. No one is setting out to be martyred or to intone the words of a new totalitarian belief system. No one is calling us back to some set of supposed moral fundamentals in the manner of an Old Testament prophet.

Instead, we have smart, concerned people expressing their dissent from the presumption of religion's moral and intellectual authority, and seeking to get some support, so that the dissent becomes louder and more widespread, until the political process has to accommodate it.

Why call this something that it is not, and why deny that - when you look at it for what it is - it is essentially a good thing? What was in Wolf's mind when he couldn't just reach that straightforward, reasonable conclusion?

578. Battle of the New Atheism

Comment #46568 by Russell Blackford on May 31, 2007 at 4:46 pm

Interesting article, but I have no idea what the last paragraph means. It seems to dissolve into a mass of tangential rhetoric (what on Earth do our "democratic values" have to do with it?), just when rigorous analysis is desperately required.

Going back to Gary Wolf's explanation in his post, for which I thank him, I'm afraid I'm not much wiser. The middle para is, with all respect, very woolly. It looks to me as Wolf has an emotional aversion to what he sees as strident attacks on religion, but is finding it very difficult to articulate some kind of rationalisation for it, so we end up getting all this stuff about Dawkins, etc., seeming to be absurd, vague comments about our own fallibility, appeals to democratic values, and so on.

No one has to be as up-front about opposing religion as Dawkins. There's no reason to feel uncomfortable if that doesn't suit you. But there's also no reason to denigrate those who are more comfortable with it. If religion is false, then many people are living their entire lives in the service of a non-existent deity. Now that is absurd. Perhaps some would lead very similar lives even without their theistic beliefs, but many would not - they are unnecessarily living in a way that does not suit them, and they will spend their whole lives in that situation.

Worse, religious believers typically want the rest of us to live in a way that cannot be justified on purely rational naturalistic grounds. On issue after issue - abortion, gay rights, stem-cell research, therapeutic cloning - we see religious believers taking up positions with cruel consequences and no secular justification. Yet, these very same religious believers often claim some moral authority that they expect the rest of us to defer to - even as they act out of their socialisation in, and perhaps study of, a false belief system. It's no use insisting that they debate issues with us on purely secular grounds, because, as long as they retain their belief systems and the emotional legacy of those systems, purely secular grounds will not be accepted by them as a boundary to political and moral discourse.

It seems to me that we have no choice but to engage with the epistemic content of religion - actually to scrutinise and criticise its claims, and to deny its moral authority. We may not be able to eliminate religion from the world, but we can at least articulate our rejection of its authority.

In that context, what is known as "the new atheism" is absolutely necessary, and its appearance as a contemporary phenomenon entirely heartening.

Wolf does not have to be as forthright and active as Dawkins or even Dennett. But does he accept the intellectual and moral authority of religion or not? If not, then I think he should say so, clearly, and join with the rest of us who are saying this. Dismissing people as absurd or irrelevant is not a useful response. There is something very important at stake here, and I think that we all have to work out precisely where we stand on it.

Do we reject the intellectual and moral authority of religion, or don't we? When we do so, does Wolf stand with us or not? This is an issue that can't be fudged.

579. Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath

Comment #46555 by Russell Blackford on May 31, 2007 at 4:17 pm

I watched most of it, but was pressed for time and didn't make it to the end (will try again later). I enjoyed this discussion very much - McGrath was courteous and articulate, not someone I'd be interested in denigrating, at least going just on this. Much of what he said made sense to me, though my experience is pretty much the opposite of his: i.e., I found that the religious way of looking at things didn't make sense as a good explanation of how the world works, after trying to get by with it through my teenage years.

I was a bit surprised at his manner, i.e. the courteous, conciliatory approach, as some of his written comments that we've all seen have been very nasty and personal.

It is, indeed, regrettable that this wasn't excerpted in The Root of all Evil? as it was a high quality conversation.

580. If It Feels Good to Be Good, It Might Be Only Natural

Comment #46426 by Russell Blackford on May 31, 2007 at 7:13 am

Hauser and Greene are perfectly reputable people who certainly do produce peer-reviewed stuff. Joshua Greene's PhD thesis, which is on his website and will be published in an expanded form by Penguin, I believe, is a wonderful piece of work. I expect the book to make a big splash when it finally appears.

581. Hitchens and Prager Debate

Comment #46419 by Russell Blackford on May 31, 2007 at 6:58 am

Morality is a bit more than altruism. For example, there's a fair bit of rational self-interest involved in it as well. But when someone starts saying that morality is a lot more than altruism I start to wonder what kind of overreaching, authoritarian morality they are thinking of imposing on me.

On another note, am I really the only person here who could work out how to stop all that ... er, goddamn ... bold text?

582. Here Comes the Fourth Musketeer.

Comment #46365 by Russell Blackford on May 31, 2007 at 3:26 am

I finally picked up a copy of Hitchens' book the other day - same day that I picked up Michel Onfray's The Atheist Manifesto and got him to sign it for me. :)

Now I just need to find some spare time to read them both.

583. Why Do Some People Resist Science?

Comment #46321 by Russell Blackford on May 30, 2007 at 11:09 pm

This is an important article. It puts together a lot of information about why seemingly irrational ideas persist.

Behind the psychological data there is presumably an evolutionary explanation, though the authors don't address the question in those terms.

The short answer is, perhaps, that scientific ideas - such as biological evolution and the dependence of mental experience on the functioning of the brain - are correct but not intuitive to beings with our particular evolved psychology.

To elaborate that idea slightly, we evolved in circumstances where a lot of unscientific ideas were good enough for our survival and reproduction. Back in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness, there was no reproductive benefit in understanding that the Earth is not actually flat, or that mental states supervene on the material complexity of the brain, or that objects at sub-atomic level behave in bizarre ways, or that objects travelling at relativistic velocity have certain odd properties. Evolution had no stake in giving us the truth about all this, but only in giving us dispositions that would get us by and get us laid.

All this stuff in the modern scientific world picture is massively counterintuitive for most people, and it has had to be worked out slowly, against the grain of what we are naturally inclined to think. What's more, our natural inclinations take us in the direction of peopling the world with spirits and their purposes. For some people, realising that it just isn't like that causes the kind of anxiety that Camus, for example, described so well.

It's rationally explicable why so many people don't "get" the scientific worldview, and why religion and other intellectually untenable belief systems persistence.

More research needs to be done on this, but a picture is beginnning to emerge, and the work of Bloom and Weisberg will certainly help.

It might also offer us some insight into the thinking of religionists, and why they can be perfectly rational people in most ways. Rationality in most things does not oppose our intuitive ideas. It's only when we get to these large-scale clashes of scientific and religio-magical thinking that a lot of human intuition is actually in tension with the propositions that have the best rational support from evidence, theory, and more evidence.

584. Hitchens and Prager Debate

Comment #46051 by Russell Blackford on May 30, 2007 at 4:37 am

Excellent post jonnec, but I wonder what the best way is to answer such a question when you've agreed to answer "yes" or "no". If it were in court, such a question could only be asked in cross-examination, since it's leading. You could then be re-examined and asked to explain why you gave the answer. Maybe with a radio interview you have to say, "I'm prepared to give a yes/no answer but I insist on being able to explain my reasoning because it might not be what you assume."

What do other people think?

585. Dawkins' Christmas card list

Comment #46018 by Russell Blackford on May 30, 2007 at 3:01 am

Veronique: I just love (not) people who think they can destroy things by force. Once you start to use force to resolve a situation, you open up the gates of the unexpected - and the unexpected can turn out to be pretty damn nasty and ugly when it lurches out at you.

To be clear, I'm not a pacifist; there are situations where force is justified to achieve a discrete, realistic outcome ... and when any alternative to using force is even worse. But the idea of deploying the military to wage some open-ended war to end Islam - or any other religion or idea, if it comes to that - is totally barking mad. No one can predict the full ramifications, but we can be totally confident that they'd turn out to be morally catastrophic.

The person you are dealing with is a nutcase.

586. Hitchens and Prager Debate

Comment #46013 by Russell Blackford on May 30, 2007 at 2:47 am

I normally like Hitchens a lot, but he disappointed me on this occasion. He makes too many concessions to an irrational moral viewpoint. I wish he'd told Prager bluntly that, yes, the morality you arrive at from a purely naturalistic, rational viewpoint is not the same as religious morality ... and so much the worse for religious morality. That thought might not go down well, but so be it. I realise that he's sincere in his wishy-washy views on abortion, for example, but he evidently hasn't reached the point in his thinking of saying firmly, "Yes, our morality does have to change. Let's start working on it."

587. Sam Harris Strikes Back

Comment #45964 by Russell Blackford on May 29, 2007 at 8:26 pm

I agree that there's common ground, and I wonder why Sam sounds quite so angry. Perhaps it's at being misrepresented or at how Hedges behaved in person. Without tracking everything down, it looks as if Hedges used some unfair tactics - rhetorical appeals on extraneous points, trying to attack his opponent's credibility, rather than his arguments, and so on.

It looks to me as if Hedges treats his religion as just a set of inspiring metaphors. I can live with someone like that, as long as their particular metaphors don't lead them down some authoritarian path.

But re all this "meaning" stuff. It is possible for almost anyone to lead a life that is meaningful to them in the sense that it seems to them to be worthwhile, with its share of joy, its times when they live and work with deep involvement and zest, and so on.

The scary thing is that so many people think that they have to reify this sense of "meaning", turn it into something outside themselves. And so many people cannot imagine a meaningful life without religious belief.

588. Scientists divided over alliance with religion

Comment #45962 by Russell Blackford on May 29, 2007 at 8:16 pm

The Raelians are as nutty as fruitcakes, but compared to Christian and Muslim fundamentalists, and to the Vatican, they are harmless. When was the last time a bunch of Raelians threatened our freedoms or our welfare? Not that I'd like them to take over, with their loopy pseudoscience, but worrying about fringe cults like this, while wanting to be buddy buddy with mainstream religionists, is a bit like straining at gnats and swallowing camels.

589. Richard Dawkins to appear in Second Life

Comment #45675 by Russell Blackford on May 28, 2007 at 11:12 pm

The opening session is in about two hours from now, yes? I'll have "Metamagician Apogee" there if all goes well.

590. Aiming for knockout blow in god wars

Comment #45494 by Russell Blackford on May 28, 2007 at 2:50 am

It's not obvious to me what the mechanism might be by which anything Dawkins has said would exacerbate differences between Muslim and Christian fundamentalists.

I mean, we can speculate: when we're talking about social outcomes, there's always some bizarre path by which almost anything just might lead to anything else. But I wonder whether that is what he actually said at all. It's not quoted as direct speech, so perhaps it's, shall we say, journalistic interpretation.

591. Aiming for knockout blow in god wars

Comment #45444 by Russell Blackford on May 27, 2007 at 7:39 pm

I don't doubt that Somerville is sincere.

However, it's a bit rich when she accuses other people of being "fundamentalist". She totally misunderstands the meaning of the word. Also, while she is open to evidence about some things, she carries around a lot of metaphysical baggage without any evidence whatsoever. Moreover, this is a woman who wants to ban certain practices because they allegedly cause some kind of spooky "metaphysical harm".

Finally, she is authoritarian in a way that Richard Dawkins is certainly not: while he wants to raise consciousness, and persuade people to a viewpoint, she wants to use the coercive power of the state to stop things that she disapproves of - such as not only reproductive cloning but also therapeutic cloning. This authoritarian streak, which is typical of religionists, in my experience, rather makes a mockery of her "let's all get along" rhetoric.

592. Aiming for knockout blow in god wars

Comment #45436 by Russell Blackford on May 27, 2007 at 6:44 pm

BAEOZ: Without wanting to send this thread off at too much of a tangent, if you want to work your way into the field of ethical philosophy start by reading The Elements of Moral Philosophy by James Rachels and Practical Ethics by Peter Singer. I don't fully agree with either, but the Rachels book is an excellent little primer, and the Singer book a beautifully-written, accessible, exposition of secular utilitarian ethics. The book that is much closer to what I happen to think, for whatever that is actually worth, is Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong by J.L. Mackie, but it's much more difficult ... not the first thing to tackle.

An accessible and sensible little book about bioethics is Bioethics in a Liberal Society by Max Charlesworth - that's where I'd suggest starting if you're interested in that field.

593. Aiming for knockout blow in god wars

Comment #45428 by Russell Blackford on May 27, 2007 at 5:25 pm

Thanks, BAEOZ. :)

Somebody has to challenge the arguments of neo-Luddites like Kass and Somerville, so for now that's my humble task in life.

594. Aiming for knockout blow in god wars

Comment #45418 by Russell Blackford on May 27, 2007 at 4:52 pm

To joshuaslocum: One of the links I gave was to my original article (basically a long, analytical review of The Ethical Canary), i.e. the whole thing, which is on my website.

Quadrant used to have all its archives ... or maybe it was only a selection ... available to the public freely on its website. As far as I can work out quickly, that no longer seems to be the case.

Unless I'm missing something, then, I can't find a way of making Somerville's similarly lengthy reply freely available. The citation for it can be found here:

http://quadrant.org.au/php/archive_details_list.php?article_id=1634

I then replied to her at some length (that was the extract that I gave yesterday in one of the URLs that I provided). I can put the full document up on my own site, and will do so when I get a minute, on the assumption that a couple of people here would like to read it.

EDIT: I did a very quick and dirty job of this. Hopefully it should come up at:

http://www.users.bigpond.com/russellblackford/somerville2.htm

Hmm, I seem to have done something wrong and I don't have time to fix it right now. Try pasting the URL in your window and see if it works. If not, feel free to contact me by email at russellblackford@bigpond.com, and I can send a copy.

But of course, anyone wanting to follow the debate properly and fairly would still have to find a way of tracking down Somerville's contribution.

595. Aiming for knockout blow in god wars

Comment #45324 by Russell Blackford on May 27, 2007 at 7:16 am

^Well, we've got Michel Onfray in town, in Melbourne, tomorrow. That should stir things up a little.

596. Ministers bow to hybrid pressure

Comment #45277 by Russell Blackford on May 27, 2007 at 4:10 am

No comments from anyone?

I think this is wonderful news. Here's an example of social advance on an important issue, once decisions are made on secular grounds without a whole lot of irrational "moral" responses, traceable to religious socialisation, skewing the debate. It is precisely to achieve these sorts of outcomes that we need to be constantly chipping away at the spurious claims to moral authority made by religionists and quasi-religionists.

597. Aiming for knockout blow in god wars

Comment #45267 by Russell Blackford on May 27, 2007 at 3:11 am

And ... when is the redoubtable Professor Dawkins going to visit Australia?

598. Aiming for knockout blow in god wars

Comment #45260 by Russell Blackford on May 27, 2007 at 2:51 am

Well, whether Richard has encountered her in something like the way she describes or not, I actually did have an exchange back and forth with Margaret Somerville some years back, in the pages of Quadrant magazine. Here, for example, is a taste:

http://journals.enotes.com/quadrant-journals/95445772

Actually, the article I wrote about Somerville that provoked the whole exchange is available in full here, for whatever it's worth:

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

Since I managed in the opening paragraphs to refer to her as a priestess of a new kind of superstition, I guess I was not as mild as Richard.

I also exchanged some words with her from the audience of a talk that she gave in Toronto, Canada a couple of years later. I guess our paths might cross again now she's apparently touring in Australia.

What I find interesting is how she is now coming out openly to defend religion. It's very much at a crypto level in The Ethical Canary. She's basically a bio-Luddite, not much better than the likes of Leon Kass, but these people will try to give some kind of secular gloss to their irrational views about bioethics that can surely be traced back to their religious socialisation.

599. Al Gore on Reason

Comment #45182 by Russell Blackford on May 26, 2007 at 5:37 pm

I said he was on the same side as all of us on a particular issue - and I explained what that issue is, as I see it - and I said that it is not useful to apply the word "creationist" to someone who is on our side on that specific issue. If we are going to call Al Gore "a creationist" we are going to lose a useful distinction between creationists and other Christians.

You are entitled to disagree with the point that I actually made. However, would you please,in future, not quote my words out of their original context so as to convey a completely different meaning? And would you please, in future, not attribute to me a point that is quite different from the one that I actually made? Such tactics just waste everyone's time.

600. Al Gore on Reason

Comment #45175 by Russell Blackford on May 26, 2007 at 5:09 pm

LOL, Combine_Dave. That's a bit of a distortion of what I said - which was just an attempt to acknowledge that I was aware of the fact that I was coming in late to what had become a stale argument for some of the protagonists. But your comment was still funny.