151. The God of the Bible is No Delusion!

Comment #15006 by JohnC on December 28, 2006 at 4:20 am

Mark, there are probably more people who believe that Nostradamus has produced accurate predictions than partisans for the Deuteronomist. This kind of delusional thinking has all the hallmarks of a mental illness, except that sufferers in most other respects seem to exhibit "normal" behaviour. We are a long way from understanding how such delusional thinking can arise and sustain itself, but it is clear that debate about the details of the delusion with the afflicted person is generally a waste of time. Perhaps you might try some therapy ..

152. A Christmas thunderbolt for the arch-enemy of religion

Comment #14997 by JohnC on December 28, 2006 at 1:30 am

That (A)"evangelism" is an example of (B) "trying to convince others of your point of view" does not make all (or any) instances of B a subset of A. Binx, however, want to extend this lazy, illogical argument by analogy indiscriminately to show that atheism is just another form of religion, and even of fundamentalism. Silly and, as Jared points out, simply wrong for anyone who wants to spend any time browsing through the threads on this site.

But Jared's post also brought back to mind one of the most outrageous passages of Cornwall's diverting piece of rhetoric: Witness the admission that you allowed Mrs Dawkins, the former Lalla Ward of Doctor Who fame, to declaim out loud ...

Mrs Dawkins? Former Lalla Ward (news to her, no doubt)? Why not Professor Ward? And "allowed"! Clearly Richard has not taken his responsibilities as master of his household seriously enough. If there were ever a sign that Cornwall, who has writen sensibly about a range of topics, is a reactionary medievalist when it comes to not just religious dogma but its application to the modern world, this is it. He does his Pope proud.

153. 10 myths - and 10 truths - about atheism

Comment #14963 by JohnC on December 27, 2006 at 12:57 pm

David, in now rejecting the "myths" on the altogether reasonable basis that "there is enormous danger in making sweeping statements about any group of people" for the weaker proposition that "most of them have some truth as regards the philosophical belief system of atheism", you have changed the terms of the debate. Indeed, it is highly questionable that there is such a thing as "the philosophical belief system of atheism", certainly in the singular. Which parts of which beliefs? Your case, in short, has collapsed.

Meanwhile, you are "certain that Jesus rose from the dead" on the basis of both evidence and revelation ("the power of the risen Christ in my life"). Well, the latter is a purely subjective phenonemon that can be legitimately quoted to support your claimed sense of personal certainty but cannot be enlisted in any rational definition of a truth statement (since we have no way of distinguishing between the thousands of such mutually incompatible claims made by religious adherents throughout history). So we are left - surprise, surprise - with the evidence.

Now the largest group of New Testament scholars (as distinct from apologists) to examine this evidence using modern methods, the Jesus Seminar, concluded that the resurrection, and even the empty tomb, are not supportable empirical conclusions from the evidence (primary, secondary and archealogical). Specifically, that belief in the resurrection is based soley on the visionary experiences of Peter, Paul and Mary (of the 1st century, not the folk group).

Many Christians of course reject this conclusion, some going so far as to declare the Jesus Seminar a tool of Satan. But you cannot both claim your belief rests on the evidence and then summarily reject the most comprehensive scholarly effort to test that evidence. Bummer.

154. Huw Edwards Interviews Richard Dawkins

Comment #14952 by JohnC on December 27, 2006 at 8:00 am

Garry,

While I have no qualms about recommending Neil's "sermon" to anyone, I must admit to feeling genuinely conflicted about Mel's sometimes mean-spirited - sorry, I can think of no more appropriate adjective - attack on Richard and Sam. I perhaps might have felt better if he had bothered to stay for the remainder of the conference and engage in some dialogue on his viewpoint ...

155. The Komodo Dragon's Tale

Comment #14950 by JohnC on December 27, 2006 at 6:17 am

Seals, of course the genealogies make no sense from a modern point of view (as well as contradicting each other). But the question is what were the authors of Matthew and Luke trying to achieve? The object was to place Jesus within the House of David, as per Messianic prophecy, but as a patrilineal society this could only be done through the father (even if the son was adoptive, as was also true for slaves, which is why an important part of the story was the angel convincing Joseph not to cast Mary aside).

So similtaneously propounding the genealogies and the Virgin Birth is a logical contradiction for us, but clearly not a concern for them. Rather it is a compelling demonstration that the interests of the Gospel writers were theological, not empirical or logical. This should give any reader pause for thought when trying to read the nativity stories as some kind of historical document.

It also goes to explaining why the origin of the Virgin Birth involves more than simply a translation mistake - the blurring of lines between the historical and mythic was a strength not a weakness for the early Jesus movement as it sought to claim the prestige of Jewish monotheism while disconnecting it from its ethnic exclusivity.

156. Huw Edwards Interviews Richard Dawkins

Comment #14949 by JohnC on December 27, 2006 at 5:34 am

Garry, you parade a series of non-controversial propositions: the mind is not just inspired by reason, the beauty of Bach's music, current scientific knowledge will be overtaken by new discoveries and understandings. Yes, yes and yes. Indeed, such observations border on the banal, but they do not justify placing the truth claims of religion and science on the same footing. In the spirit of your post, and as New Year present to those who missed it, have a listen to this short excerpt from Neil DeGrasse Tyson's closing contribution at the recent Beyond Belief conference.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=jJOpDLjpSYI

157. 10 myths - and 10 truths - about atheism

Comment #14947 by JohnC on December 27, 2006 at 4:50 am

David A Robertson places himself in an absurd position in his reply to Sam Harris. Does he really want to affirm all these propositions about atheists? If belief in a personal God is required as a basis of morality, then were Spinoza and Einstein, to take two examples, amoral or have no basis for the morality they professed and practised. Perhaps they were deluded, and unfortunately died before Mr Robertson could point out the error of their ways.

As a matter of empirical fact these myths held by a large number of Americans about atheists (a classic in-group, out-group phenonemon) are false. There are hundreds of millions of atheists around the world who are living testament to this reality. Sam's rhetorical (in the non-perjorative sense that Cicero used the word) article is not about proving this blindingly obvious fact; it is trying to get Americans to think through their silly prejudices and question their own beliefs.

We can have a stimulating discussion about the basis of human morality and free will, for instance, but such a debate does not alter the fact that all human beings possess a sense of morality, whatever their beliefs about matters supernatural. Ditto for the other nine myths, for myths they are.

158. Orr on Dawkins

Comment #14936 by JohnC on December 27, 2006 at 12:03 am

Ok, so we've moved from debate to conversation. So some things to talk about ...

1. On cosmology I think you are dead wrong. It's just getting going - pessimisim about a discipline that has origins and development of the universe as its subject is surely wrong. We don't know, we want to know, and we have the discipline of science to guide us. I am an optimist.

2. Contributions to this forum cover a wide gamut of positions and understandings. Let's agree that RD should not have to carry the diversity of those opinions, while we can all be pleased there is a meaningful debate at all.

3. I was initially trained in philosophy, and was actually heartened by the genuine attempt to deal with the science at Beyond Belief. Susan Neiman knew there was something rotten about Stuart Hameroff, and was clearly pleased to hear Krauss and others denounce it as rubbish. As for Paul Davies, he spent a long time on this side of the world (Australia), and what do you expect as a reaction to someone who proclaims to have found (yet another) solution to the problem of the "levitating super-turtle". I didn't see too many scales falling from the eyes of the physicists present, so let's not indict the philosophers.

4. Theists are clever at turning the normal practice of science into propaganda. This is actually a real problem, with biologists starting to second-guess themselves about engaging in their normal debates for fear of being quote-mined by that idiot Dembski and his acolytes. My response is that if we allow ourselves to be intimidated in this way we have already lost. The combative, take-no-prisoners style of TGD is, in my view, precisely the required response to this very real problem. Let's stop apologising for our own skepticism. More power to RD.

159. Orr on Dawkins

Comment #14931 by JohnC on December 26, 2006 at 10:58 pm

Jason's a mathematician, but one who has put in some practical good work precisely in combatting "powerful forces trying to re-run the Middle Ages". Not every formulation in his blog reaction to Orr may have been an expemplar of iron-clad reasoning and phrasing, but neither have your own responses in this forum. Let's try to cut each other a little slack, where appropriate.

160. Orr on Dawkins

Comment #14928 by JohnC on December 26, 2006 at 10:35 pm

@LDmiller
Thanks for your concession on the point at issue (though "versification" was perhaps one polemical step too far).

But you now say: "... [p]hysics (cosmology in particular) appears to be unraveling a bit."

Well, I think the astonishingly new discipline of cosmology (which only really got going with the discovery of microwave background radiation) is, like all children, growing in leaps and bounds - but it is still a child. What is perhaps approaching a crisis of confidence is the commitment of particle physicists (at a real institutional level of funding and staffing) to the string/M theory research project.

But who is saying that science is a "signed, sealed and delivered case"? It was John Horgan in the End of Science (a not unappealling book) who declared that it was all over for major discovery. Break out the champagne and retire. He was hardly met by grateful acclamation from the science community.

I actually watched the 15 hours of Beyond Belief videos in the past week (as my Xmas recreation) and self-satisfied gratification was not my impression. Indeed, scientists seem to be as happily fractious as ever. And on the parenthetical points you identify as your real interest, all I can is: Yes! bring on more confounding evidence, please. There is nothing physicists fear more than being unable to test their many conflicting speculations with new, improved and inevitably more expensive tools.

But none of this empowers for a second the supernaturalist agenda. Like Carl Sagan in his final weeks, I am intensely grateful that I have lived in a time where so much has been discovered about our universe, but this is a happiness shaded by the melancholy that I will not know the many things that will discovered after I am gone.

161. A Mission to Convert

Comment #14923 by JohnC on December 26, 2006 at 9:34 pm

Riley, it should be noted that Richard and Sam are not the same person, and that perhaps your reservations (and mine) may not be particularly applicable to TGD. Dawkins' outrage has always been at the baseless intellectual privileging of religion, while Harris's End of Faith was actually a direct response to 9/11 and his concerns are very much about the political dangers religion poses. This places Sam, who by the way I regard as an unsurpassed polemecist, much more in the political crossfire. Richard, for instance, is content to show that Hitler and Stalin did not commit atrocities because of atheism. But Sam's agenda is about specifically linking religious ideology (particularly Islam) to a clear and present threat to Western civilisation itself, a much taller order.

For example, the mujahideen as an international fighting force was in the fact the direct creation of the CIA, forged as an instrument against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. To use a political nomenclature currently out of fashion, Bin Laden is a creation of US imperialism. Sam cannot say this, even if he believes it, given his intended audience. So he strains to causally link the emergence and behaviour of Al Qaeda and Hamas to the contents of the Koran, against a large body of empirical evidence that directly indicts US foreign policy. Nonetheless, as the recent congressional elections attest, his might be the right intervention at the right time: much of the American public is becoming increasingly nervous - and rightly so - about where religious dogma (Muslim and Christian) will take them.

There is little intellectual purity in politics: I admire Harris while being critical of some of his specific positions; and I am also grateful that Richard treads somewhat higher ground, as is appropriate for an Oxford don :-)

162. Orr on Dawkins

Comment #14920 by JohnC on December 26, 2006 at 8:20 pm

I was waiting for someone to bring out that moment. David Attenborough reports that it was unrehearsed, unscripted and done in a single take. For those who missed this high point of Bruno's astounding series (still the best thing on science ever put on television), here is the YouTube link:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=8mIfatdNqBA

163. Orr on Dawkins

Comment #14918 by JohnC on December 26, 2006 at 8:05 pm

I was interested in LDMiller's criticism:

I found Professor Dawkins' argument of simple -> complex to be one of his weakest. While demonstrably correct in terms of biological evolution (e.g., the fossil record), it is by no means settled in either physics or cosmology.

This is a example of the something of which I myself have at times been guilty - namely, criticising what we think RD has said, rather than what he actually wrote. So here is what TGD actually says about this issue, from the beginning and the conclusion of the argument, respectively:

And although Darwinism may not be directly relevant to the inanimate world - cosmology, for example - it raises our consciousness in areas outside its original territory of biology (p114) ... We should not give up hope of a better crane arising in physics, something as powerful as Darwinism is for biology. But even in the absence of a strongly satisfying crane to the match the biological one, the relatively weak cranes we have at present are, when abetted by the anthropic principle, self-evidently better than the self-defeating skyhook hypothesis of an intelligent designer. (p158)

There are enough people out there shamelessly caricaturing TGD and its argument in an attempt to prop up their shopworn theologies. We should, supporters and opponents alike, resist the temptation on this website.

Meanwhile, on the Stalin furphy I have posted on this at the original Orr thread:
http://richarddawkins.net/article,462,A-Mission-to-Convert,H-Allen-Orr-NYBookscom#14827
so I shan't repeat myself here, except to add that Richard's actual position is again more nuanced than often portrayed, despite the occasional rhetorical excess ;-)

164. Huw Edwards Interviews Richard Dawkins

Comment #14909 by JohnC on December 26, 2006 at 4:26 pm

Scientific truth is also 'a relative truth' which is just as conditional as is religious 'faith' ... Perhaps the 'golden rule' is that everything in the end to some degree is relative ...

Garry, the problem here appears to be your post-modernist epistemology. Science does not claim to find "absolute truth" but that does not put all truth claims on an equal footing. It specifically does not make scientific empirical claims as "conditional" as those made in the name of religious faith. American fundamentalists declare the world to be less than 10,000 years old on the basis of their faith in the literal truth of the Bible. Science tells us that the actual age of the Earth is around 4.5 billion years, and though this estimate could be revised somewhat in the light of subsequent evidence the probability of it ever approaching the fundamentalist claim is so vanishingly small as to render the Biblical estimate "false" by any rational definition of the word.

165. A Mission to Convert

Comment #14904 by JohnC on December 26, 2006 at 3:37 pm

The Pope requested a "study" of the matter, which was submitted last month. The world is now waiting for the Bishop of Rome to make a statement on the matter. Current Catholic policy rejects the use of condoms in all circumstances. And the Vatican study only examined the possible use of condoms by sero-discordant married couples. An unknown number of US evangelical organisations seem to have adopted a similar policy to that of the Holy See.

This is a shocking scandal, a clear case of a religious dogma having genocidal consequences.

166. The Komodo Dragon's Tale

Comment #14840 by JohnC on December 25, 2006 at 7:43 pm

A couple of thoughts on the "mistranslation" theory of the Virgin Birth. While it is true the Hebrew almah does in fact most accurately translate as young woman, it is likely that the tradition of Mary's virginity independently existed as part of the oral tradition that sprung up in the 50 or so years that separated the crucifixion from the writing of Matthew. Virgin birth was an existing mythos among the audience, and would have been a suitable trope for the Jesus movement to attach to the legend.

More generally, the purposes of the nativity stories in Matthew and Luke were not in any sense historical but primarily theological, ie to identify the birth of Jesus as the fulfilment of various prophecies and thus legitimate claims of his Messianic status. The lack of interest in the precise historical details explains why the two accounts contradict each other and the few independently known historical facts. Outside the nativity accounts, it is clearly and repeatedly stated that Jesus was from Nazareth (indeed it is one of those details that lends credence to the notion that there actually was a historical Jesus).

Note also that the treatment of the prophecies themselves are more poetic and pedagogical than literal or analytic, as indeed is the case in the accounts given of Jesus' own discussion of prophecies later on in the Gospels. To take the Isaiah Messiah prophecy as an example: the actual Masoretic text can only be read as stating that Immanuel is the actual name of the child, not a title; and the prophecy is in the past tense, implying that the saviour had already been born at the time of Isaiah and was presumably going to liberate Israel from the Assyrians. So the birth of Jesus "fulfils" the prophecy by being its echo in contemporary, Roman times.

There are of course many debates about these matters, but the point is that outside Christian apolegetics the nativity stories must be seen as as a weaving together of theological concerns and folk traditions that had arisen in the early Jesus movement, with their subsequent "meaning" given something resembling logical coherence by the interpretative labours of the emerging church, including the exclusion of an unknown number of alternative accounts.

167. A Mission to Convert

Comment #14827 by JohnC on December 25, 2006 at 4:12 pm

And this is probably as good a place as any to deal with the Stalinist canard. Orr attempts to move beyond the usual vacuous finger-pointing by specifically linking Stalin's atheism to the liquidation of religious opposition. On face value this has some validity, since other left-wing movements (think for example of the Spanish Civil War) have engaged in similar behaviour.

But one must say straight away that there is still a long distance to travel before one can trace a causal link between this behaviour and the (atheist) ideology of the perpetrators. First of all, forcible liquidation of religious institutions is by no means a component of the Marxism in whose name it was carried out. To quote at somewhat greater length from that most famous passage of Marx:

Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.
The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.

Marx's view was that religious illusions would be abandoned as a consequence of the withering away of class differences. And this position was clearly articulated before the term "dictatorship of the proletariat" had even been coined.

The regimes of Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot were authoritarian dictatorships which - as do all such regimes - sought to crush all opposition by deploying the full power of the State against civil society. They did not play favourites in this regard - there was nothing special about their suppression of religious dissent, as the Left Opposition (and the murdered Trotsky) could well attest. And while nuns were raped and churches desecrated in the Spanish civil war, have we forgotten El Salvador, Archbishop Romero and the murder of nuns by American-backed death squads?

How different then are right-wing dictatorships (from Hitler, Mussolini and Franco, to Pinochet and the Shah of Iran), whose leaders were usually at least nominally religious and in recent times often supported by the US? In fact all such authoritarian regimes, leftwing and rightwing, ruthlessly liquidated opposition regardless of its ideological source, and Orr's claim that there is some "order of magnitude" difference in the "severity of sins" is spectacularly and wickedly wrong.

In reality, religion (and opposition to religion) did not play a central role in the innumerable killing fields of the 20th century, and it is probably time people on both sides stopped cynically summoning the ghosts of the murdered in this debate.

168. A Mission to Convert

Comment #14824 by JohnC on December 25, 2006 at 3:21 pm

gcdavis writes: "The nub here is whether believers are "genuinely" altruistic or whether they give more generously than atheists in order to secure their place in heaven."

Well that's not the "nub", since such motivation would still support the claim of the positive ethical value of belief. So let's take this seriously. In fact, Orr is guilty of highly selective interpretation, to say the least. Of course there are differences between how communities of faith and the more secular behave; we would expect that. But those differences cut both ways. Here is what the survey he cites actually says:

Whether their views stem from their conservatism or their religiosity, our survey suggests, as earlier research has as well, that intense involvement in communities of faith is more likely to be associated with intolerance: i.e., favoring banning unpopular books from libraries, antipathy to equal rights for immigrants, lower levels of support for racial intermarriage and lower levels of friendships with gays. Religious involvement is linked to greater support for needy individuals, but it is not necessarily associated with greater support for social justice. The "social capital" embodied in religious communities is more likely to "bond" individuals with those like them than to "bridge" them to those unlike them. Communities of high religiosity are generous in their giving and volunteering, but they are relatively low on measures of social action (marches, petitions, rallies) and relatively low on tolerance (for immigrants, gays, unpopular ideas in general).

And before anyone goes rushing off to make any more generalisations, let me add that no one has established that these sociological differences between the different community types are generated by differences in belief. Indeed religious faith may itself be a consequence (rather than cause) of closer knit communities, at least in the US. Simply demonstrating a range of behavioural corellates actually tells you nothing by itself. Dawkins was wise, in my view, to not wade into this terrain, and we would do well (as would Orr) to follow his suitably circumspect example. It is sufficient to note that there is no empirical basis for asserting any kind of compelling link one way or the other between ethical behaviour and religious faith.

169. It is possible to respect the believers but not the belief

Comment #14799 by JohnC on December 25, 2006 at 6:51 am

"It seems to me self-evident that we would not have the European civilisation we have today without the heritage of Christianity ..."

Trivially true, but so what? We wouldn't have European civilisation without the heritage of feudalism either. The point is we are the inheritors of our history, not its prisoners. We can appreciate the progressive role of the Magna Carta without wishing to see its baronial prerogatives enacted today.

I don't think anyone should allow themselves to be boxed into the ludicrous position that the history of Christianity is one of unrelieved negatives, in science or anything else. But that Copernicus and Newton, for instance, were devout believers tells us little about the relationship between Christianity and science (and society) in 2006.

Garton Ash's platitudes take us nowhere when we start to look at issues beyond simply being nice to each other: faith schools, gay marriage, stem cell research, etc, etc. In fact, his pseudo-liberalism takes us backwards because it commands one side of the debate to refrain from criticising the basis of the other side's stance. Christian zealots rant with impunity about Godless sodomites, but pointing out that their positions are founded on fantasy is somehow ruled out as intolerant.

170. Oh, we Brits of little faith

Comment #14794 by JohnC on December 25, 2006 at 5:20 am

"A recent survey showed that most Britons associate Christmas with kindness, not with Christ."

And is that supposed to be a bad thing? Very curious.

171. A Christmas thunderbolt for the arch-enemy of religion

Comment #14789 by JohnC on December 25, 2006 at 4:51 am

"Most sensible believers in the book subscribe without demur to Darwin's theory of evolution ..."

No, they didn't. They just lost the argument (remember Wilberforce) and were forced to change their tune to hold onto their credibility.

"Jews were responsible, Nazi propaganda claimed, for actual epidemics in the east ..."

Jews were responsible, Christian proganda has claimed for 2000 years, for the death of Jesus, forming the ideological foundation for antisemitism.

172. A Mission to Convert

Comment #14781 by JohnC on December 25, 2006 at 4:07 am

I have always liked Orr as a reviewer and commentator, but I think he has missed the point here. Rosenhouse hit half the nail on the head when he made the point that TGD is a popular work. But the other aspect is that it is polemical rather than explanatory in design.

The success of a book must in part at least be judged in accord with its intent, and Richard's clear and stated intent was to raise consciousness about the flimsy basis of the claims made by the Abrahamic religions. And in this he has surely succeeded beyond I suspect even his own expectations.

Orr some years ago in his excellent critique of Gould's position adopted the same stance as Richard - namely that the religion Gould had defined actually bore no relationship to the what people in the pews or on the prayer mats actually believed. Now he falls into the same trap himself when RD writes a book that actually does address that real religion. William James? Wittgenstein? Are they the stuff of real religious belief?

While I, like Orr, actually disgree on many specific aspects of the analysis in TGD (which is one of the reasons I enjoy the discussions at this site), neither he nor I are the real target audience. So this major review, in failing to recognise the actual scope and aim of the book, opens itself up to charges of self-indulgence and lack of balance. (Less balanced, in fact, than the well-known review by Terry Eagleton, which while also raising intellectual differences, gave TGD due praise.) A pity.

173. CBC Segment on Evangelist Christians

Comment #14314 by JohnC on December 22, 2006 at 2:25 am

Edutheria, I don't intend to ruffle your political feathers any more than I already have (and you haven't ruffled mine). But I am interested in your strategic perspective. Dawkins and Harris have attracted the ear (not sympathy) of the intellectual elites who had become accustomed to kow-towing to religious nonsense. And the recent elections have demonstrated that the political influence of the religious right has probably peaked. Carpe Diem, but how?

And Logicel, what value do we place on "a much nicer society in which to live"? Perhaps you might have some observation to make about the reasons for the strength of fundamentalist Christianity in the US?

174. CBC Segment on Evangelist Christians

Comment #14295 by JohnC on December 22, 2006 at 1:02 am

@Edutheria
I think our respective positions on the education issue are fairly well outlined (and thanx for your clarification). To carry that conversation forward would require rather more detail than is appropriate here. Suffice to say, I see a strong relationship between the strength of fundamentalism in the US and the kind of politics of education you are supporting. I might also reiterate my earlier point, that the running down of public education is not only strengthening the religious right but is actually failing to deliver overall education outcomes in the US, which was after all what the disagreement over the data was about.

@Neils
Agreed, I initially (since I was not anticipating the reaction) used "Americans" in an unqualified way, though I did try to add further specification as soon as you raised the point. The discussion has however flushed out some interesting stuff, and reaching agreement is not the only possible positive outcome of a conversation.

As to my own exposure, I first spent time (6 months) in the US in 1983 and have been a regular visitor since. I probably know the west coast (LA, SF and Seattle) best.

As for "arguing amongst ourselves", I don't see that anything is gained by pretending real differences don't exist, particularly when in my view the kind of libertarian/free market politics being espoused here must carry a substantial burden of blame for the strength of the Christian Right in the American body politic today.

175. CBC Segment on Evangelist Christians

Comment #14285 by JohnC on December 21, 2006 at 10:53 pm

About half the American population believes the world is 6000 years old and in their lifetimes Jesus will be returning to inaugurate the end of history, which began with the placement of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. The people who believe these fantasies are in the main not stupid, but they are ignorant. The question is: how can this be in the richest, most technologically developed country in the world?

Now in response to my own fumbling attempts to understand this distinctly American problem, avowedly atheist Americans are defending the right of Christian parents to withdraw their children from public education, and indeed denouncing universal public education, one of the great victories of the Englightenment, as a "hallmark of social ineptitude".

Meanwhile, the facts seem irrelevant. Edutheria quote-mines the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education. I correct the misleading impression by extensive citation from the actual source. Absolute silence.

If, as is the case, there are problems with the public education system in the US, the answer is not to sabotage it further but to fight for the investment and commitment from government to provide the education your children deserve and your country can most assuredly afford.

I can guarantee any non-American reading this thread will see the problem pretty clearly. My hope is that some Americans will as well.

176. CBC Segment on Evangelist Christians

Comment #14275 by JohnC on December 21, 2006 at 8:59 pm

Sancus@14272
I agree parents should not have the right to deny their children science education (including biology), but sadly they do - after all, that is what home schooling is all about. And that is a concrete example of "extreme individualism".

The alternative is to assert that society has a responsibility to provide free, universal and secular public education for all children and that parents have a legal responsibility to ensure their children attend such schooling. Here is where Richard is right on the money. Allowing parents to exercise some bogus "right" to brainwash their kids and confine them to Christian intellectual ghettos is in fact a subversion of democracy.

From the point of view of political theory, a free society is not simply a the summation of "free individuals". This is the fundamental error of American libertarianism and its kindred ideologies that deny the "civilizing" role of the state, which is itself an expression of a social contract of its mutually interdependent citizens.

As for Islam, the post-colonial Arab world clearly has its own set of problems but the existence of Islamism provide no kind of excuse for the lunacy of American evangelicals. Let's start by cleaning up our own backyards.

177. CBC Segment on Evangelist Christians

Comment #14269 by JohnC on December 21, 2006 at 7:59 pm

I want to deal separately with the preposterous idea put forward by Greyed that I am some sort of "collectivist" ideologue. Well, in the rest of the developed world providing universal health care and comprehensive public education are not hallmarks of socialism but of social responsibility.

Greyed misquotes me, while (sort of) defending state executions, as saying Texas is the most violent place "on the planet". I actually said "Western world", and it's true. The US has the highest murder rate in the OECD, and within the US Texas has the highest rate. (From memory, Houston tops the bill among cities in the developed world.) There is of course much debate on these matters. The following article from the Skeptical Inquirer throws some light on the (mis-)use of multiple regression tests to muddy the waters: http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/article.php?scid=12&did=1176

But even the mathematically illiterate can see there are corellations in the US between religiosity and the propensity of the state to murder its own citizens, between gun ownership and the levels of violent crime, and more broadly between the levels of fundamentalist Christian adherence and social dysfunction. That was the point of the paper I cited earlier.

Patronising injunctions to "go educate yourself" sit particularly poorly in a debate where I am the one putting out the empirical data (with citation) against ideologically-driven assertions. If religion is a mind virus, so is patriotism, and probably a more dangerous one at that. In the US, these two diseases are clearly symbiotes.

178. CBC Segment on Evangelist Christians

Comment #14265 by JohnC on December 21, 2006 at 7:02 pm

A most interesting range of responses by, presumably, Americans wanting to disconnect the patent social psychosis of mass fundamentalist Christianity from the society that produces it.

First, let's dispose of an obvious canard: "science is not a democracy" clearly does not mean it is a dictatorship; it means the truth of a scientific proposition cannot be decided by popular vote. (In fact, it's actually the evidence that decides between competing theories.) It is simply preposterous that the good citizens of Smallville think they can decide that ID is science and by so voting make it so. They do have a right, I suppose, to deny their kids a science education, but not to redefine science to whatever they think it should be. If that's elitism, so be it.

On some empirical matters. Edutheria makes much of US college degree performance for those aged 39 to 64. Why that age bracket? Because performance starts to deteriorate in the younger cohorts. Here is what his own source (the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education) says in its 2006 Report Card:

The United States is still among the world leaders in the proportion of 35- to 64-year-old adults with college degrees, which reflects the spectacular gains of the four decades following World War II, first through the educational efforts of the G.I. Bill and continuing with the population explosion of the baby boomers. In the 1990s, however, as the importance of a college-educated workforce in a global economy became clear, other nations began making the kinds of dramatic gains that had characterized American higher education earlier. In contrast, by the early 1990s, the progress the United States had made in increasing college participation had come to a virtual halt. For most of the 1990s, the United States ranked last among 14 nations in raising college participation rates, with almost no increase during the decade. This U.S. performance has continued into this decade ... [t]he United States ranks in the bottom half — 16th among 27 countries compared — in the proportion of students who complete college degree or certificate programs. Even states that compare relatively well with other states in college completion fare poorly in international comparisons. For example, when compared with other U.S. states, the best-performing state on degree completion is Georgia. When compared internationally on this measure, however, Georgia trails Japan, Portugal, the United Kingdom, Australia, Switzerland, and Denmark. Moreover, California, Texas, Maryland, New Mexico, and New Jersey rank near the very bottom when compared internationally on degree completion. (at http://measuringup.highereducation.org/commentary/introduction.cfm)

Note that the initial pre-eminence was largely due to government measures, particularly the GI Bill. Also, the recent declines are most pronounced in the very states such as Texas where the problems I tried to identify are most severe.

But let me note a most important point of agreement with Edutheria, who says: "The individual freedom of the evangelical movement is the key to its succes." So at least we agree there is some relationship between what I have termed "extreme individualism" and the Christian groundswell.

Jared points out that I do not deal with economic factors, and may be turning corellation into cause. I agree, and that was not my intention (hence my oblique reference to the Civil War). These are complex matters, and obviously this is not the place for a complete, balanced analysis. But let's for Zeus sake at least admit there is a serious problem (including by looking outside the borders of the USA for some perspective) and take our heads out of the libertarian sand. The "religion problem" in the US is not some inexplicable imperfection on the face of an otherwise flawless society. It is a product of that society.
[Edited to add link and extend quotation]

179. CBC Segment on Evangelist Christians

Comment #14117 by JohnC on December 21, 2006 at 7:33 am

Hi Jared,
First of all, social problems and religiosity are clearly related; that's the whole point of the article I referenced. And their relationship is precisely the reverse of what Christians maintain. So Texas, for instance, is both one of the most religiose and most violent places in the Western world, while practising an appalling level of state executions (23 of the 53 in the US this year). It also not coincidentally promotes itself as the archetypal home of the American individualist. To claim there is no relationship between these factors is to be wilfully blind.

Now no one here, least of all me, is suggesting censorship or thought police or a dictatorship of the enlightened. The point so far in this discussion has been to try to analyse the root of the problem, not provide solutions. And in that regard, I stand by my assertion that the cult of individualism, sanctified by a kind of hyper-democracy and underwritten by free-market mania, is a central part of the problem.

Look closely at the ID propoganda: you'll see naked appeals to wisdom and beliefs of ordinary folk versus the arcane materialism of the scientific elite. Well, I'm sorry, but there is nothing democratic about science; the butcher does not have the same competence as the biologist to decide what goes into a science curriculum. But in the US system, the butcher, joined by the baker and the candlestick maker, get to decide the content of the curriculum without any reference to the biologist, if they so choose.


Now that's not how things are done elsewhere in the world, where generally a professional civil service administers a curriculum whose content is determined by the relevant academic experts. And guess what, such systems deliver better - and more equitable - outcomes than the US school system.

This kind of analysis can be extended to all manner of social and political evils in the US, including its unique outgrowth of evangelical religious lunacy. In all cases, the balance betweem individual autonomy and social contract has been seriously skewed.

This of course is not the only factor. It is difficult to produce any sensible analysis of US social history without taking account of the massive effects of the Civil War, which still form the basis of the red state/blue state divide. But that, as they say, is another story ...

180. Kim Hill interviews Richard Dawkins

Comment #14078 by JohnC on December 21, 2006 at 4:08 am

Thanks for the kind words, Niels. I guess my ultimate position on this stuff is that without a theory of consciousness (to which we are not even close) it is difficult to move beyond the broadest generalisations. However, even at that level it is possible to see that this is not the strongest part of TGD.

181. CBC Segment on Evangelist Christians

Comment #14071 by JohnC on December 21, 2006 at 3:46 am

Cholmonedeley@14064
Crime comparisons between countries is always a bit tricky, but for instance the rate of murder and non-negligent manslaughter in 2000 for the US was (at least) 5.5 per 100,000 and 1.7 for Australia. But that year was an all-time peak for Australia, coinciding with the heroin epidemic. The homocide rate has since fallen 25 per cent.

For a more general take on the comparative social health of the US I recommend Cross-National Correlations of Quantifiable Societal Health with Popular Religiosity and Secularism in the Prosperous Democracies in the Journal of Religion and Society. Full text at:
http://moses.creighton.edu/JRS/2005/2005-11.html
The take-home message is that not only is the US the most religiose Western society, it is also the sickest by almost every measure, bar youth suicide.

182. CBC Segment on Evangelist Christians

Comment #14065 by JohnC on December 21, 2006 at 3:09 am

Greyed: "Religion, especially Evangelical Christianity, is about giving up one's individualism to... God."

Nope. You can't give up anything to an imaginary being. American-style evangelism is precisely about decoupling religion from the institutional constraints that provide the natural limits to individualism. That's why the southern US is awash with independent giga, mega and mini-churches that are run by "charimatic" free-enterprise ideologues in opportunistic shifting alliances with each other depending on political and other circumstances. There is nothing else like it in the world. It requires an explanation. You don't like mine, but really all I'm saying is that the peculiarities of American religious expression must be related to the peculiarities of American society, of which unconstrained worship of the "individual" is the most obvious.

183. CBC Segment on Evangelist Christians

Comment #14063 by JohnC on December 21, 2006 at 2:54 am

Cholmonedeley@14055

1. That you cannot even see there is something deeply disturbing about the gun ownership in the US identifies a gulf of understanding that may be unbridgeable. Where I come from (Australia) most urban people have the uncomplicated belief that no-one should own a gun, and the police being armed is a necessary evil.
2. No one "decides" what ideas are loony but in most of the developed world there is a deep social consensus, for instance, that the overt profession of religious zeal by public figures is undesirable. Here, for instance, is our right-wing and Christian prime minister, when asked about "using God as a credential for office. It's pretty American isn't it?" the interviewer asked

John Howard: Yes well I don't do that. We are quite different from the Americans in that way. There are things that an Australian political leader, no matter what his or her private beliefs are, there are things that an Australian Prime Minister would never say. I mean for example John Curtin was an avowed non-believer. I didn't agree with him but I respected his views, and I think you have to in our society respect that.

Americans, in short, just don't seem to understand that the social limits to individualism are a matter of collective agreement not government imposition.

184. CBC Segment on Evangelist Christians

Comment #14059 by JohnC on December 21, 2006 at 2:31 am

Cholmonedeley, the entire "theology" of the American evangelical right is based on the notion of an individual relationship to Jesus that radically strips religion of the notions of social responsibility, inclusiveness and institutional authority that characterise the practice of Christianity elsewhere in the developed world

185. CBC Segment on Evangelist Christians

Comment #14052 by JohnC on December 21, 2006 at 2:10 am

@neils
Certainly not. The other outstanding feature of the US landscape is the paranoid delusions about the urban or coastal "elites", who actually look pretty conservative compared with even the soft left overseas.

When Colbert addressed the Emmy audience with "Good evening Godless sodomites" his satirical humour bites because for many Americans it's not satire at all.

But arguably this intense polarisation is itself a side-effect of extreme individualism, where the "right" to hold any idea - however loony - takes absolute priority over the content of the ideas.

186. CBC Segment on Evangelist Christians

Comment #14042 by JohnC on December 21, 2006 at 1:12 am

That much of what ails the US is due to individualism taken to excess is surely not an exceptional observation. That it alone among developed nations has no public health system, that it's schools are underachieving while "home schooling" is booming, that it's a society soaked in guns and God, and proud of both ...

Surely this individualism has got to be an essential part of explaining the dominance of "free enterprise" evangelical outfits of which the video gave us only a tiny sample. Americans just don't seem to realise how peculiar they look to the rest of the world, and how dangerous.

187. Kim Hill interviews Richard Dawkins

Comment #14038 by JohnC on December 21, 2006 at 12:19 am

@hopeful
I agree my dismissal was somewhat brisk, so let me put some flesh on the bones. It seems to me that the observation that we acquire our ideas from those closest to us is utterly unremarkable. And of course it explains why not only religion but also our social values are transmitted to succeeding generations. But it tells us absolutely nothing about the origins and persistent reinvention of religious ideas.

A more promising line of approach might start with recognising that if any evolutionary advantage to our big brains can be agreed at all it is probably the capacity for greater foresight, ie the ability to flexibly predict and plan for future events based on past experience.

But this enhanced capacity brings with it the unwelcome consequence that we become aware of our own mortality, giving birth to the quintessential human concern for meaning - of our lives and of existence itself.

Religion, in this reading, is a rational response to attempt to assign symbolic meaning to the world and our place in it. That historically the content of these responses (usually some form of supernaturalism) has been non-rational is hardly surprising given our ignorance about the natural world. And though science has eroded the basis of most empirical claims made by religion, it does not answer the question of ulimate orgins and cannot talk about ultimate destination.

So the religious impulse persists because it is grounded in our biological capacity to be aware of our own finitude, and the question then becomes how this impulse can be made to co-exist with that great triumph of human achievement, science.

You'll note that this line of argument is ultimately Gouldian in character, and somewhat opposed to RD's stance, though neither approach requires any concession to theism. That Richard is, in my view, so weak in his discussion of the origin of religion (and morality) is therefore no surprise since any deepening of the inquiry would open up questions that do not fit well in his particular brand of rationalism.

188. CBC Segment on Evangelist Christians

Comment #14026 by JohnC on December 20, 2006 at 8:58 pm

While this seems to be about Xtianity, it actually makes more sense to see it as an insight into Americans. Holyland is ludicrous, not because of the subject matter, but because American theme parks are ludicrous. Notice that the majority of the audience were adults. In the rest of the world, a theme park is somewhere you take children. The fact of the matter is that vast tracts of the US are cultural deserts inhabitated by naively charming people who have been infantalised by a Disney-fied view of the world. It is no surprise that evangelical Christianity, with its simple dichotomies and absolute certainties finds such fertile ground there. So this doco presents a semi-cynical Canadian "adolescent" interacting with American "children", and not an adult in sight.

189. Kim Hill interviews Richard Dawkins

Comment #13921 by JohnC on December 20, 2006 at 5:43 am

Logicel, that would be Judith Rich Harris, and The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do. Not exactly a "laywoman" (a rather unfelicitous expression) but she was unaffiliated with any institution though had been academically trained.

And as with all this stuff, it proves almost impossible to isolate the social factors, which nonetheless does not stop people like Steve Pinker shoehorning such "findings" into the evolutionary psychology matrix. In the end, her work supports what all parents should know, that what school and what crowd your kid hangs out with are matters in which you should take the keenest possible interest. Trying to assign weightings (eg heritable 40pc, peer group 40pc, parents 20pc), which is the game Pinker plays, is just plain silly. Gould was great in debunking all this nonsense.

190. Kim Hill interviews Richard Dawkins

Comment #13915 by JohnC on December 20, 2006 at 4:08 am

"If it doesn't work for broccoli, why would it work for God?" took us straight to what in my view is one of weakest points in TGD - "the roots of religion" chapter. This seems to me related to both RD's embrace of the altogether dodgy discipline of evolutionary psychology and taking the loose metaphor of "memes" too seriously. The lines of research and discourse about the biological origins of human behaviour has been a source of vigorous and often nasty debate in which RD has tended to favour the wrong side, IMHO. If the best he can come up with is the empirically vacuous notion that children have a "Darwinian rule of thumb" to believe their parents, he would have been better off admitting that we simply don't know ...

191. Atheism, not religion, is the real force behind the mass murders of history

Comment #8895 by johnc on November 22, 2006 at 5:56 pm

I find all this a prior historical generalising more than a bit foolish. The fact some historical agent holds ideology X does not warrant the conclusion that their actions are caused by X, even when they themselves have made the claim. Careful empirical research is needed to determine the varying roles of economic, political and cultural factors, and then on a case-by-case basis. That's why we have historians.

D'Souza is no historian, but then neither are Dawkins and Harris, and I'm afraid it shows in all three cases.

One may be able to accumulate a fair number of specific cases where religion has in fact played a significant role in some atrocity, but it is usually far from clear that it is the supernatural (ie specifically religious) aspect of the ideology that is responsible. And the corresponding case for "atheism" is, if anything, even weaker.

If I were moved to generalise, it would be more in the vein of Jacob Bronowski in the Ascent of Man, wading into that puddle in Auschwitz:

It's said that science will dehumanise people and turn them into numbers. That's false - tragically false. Look for yourself. This is the concentration camp and crematorium at Auschwitz. This is where people were turned into numbers. Into this pond were flushed the ashes of some four million people. And that was not done by gas. It was done by arrogance. It was done by dogma. It was done by ignorance. When people believe that they have absolute knowledge, with no test in reality - this is how they behave. This is what men do when they aspire to the knowledge of gods."

192. BEYOND REDUCTIONISM: Reinventing The Sacred

Comment #8864 by johnc on November 22, 2006 at 2:31 pm

As a footnote to this theme: In every political group I have ever been involved with there were "hard-liners" who denounced the moderates for selling out on the "real" issue, while the moderates complained that the extremists "alienated" potential supporters. That's life. The job of those who've seen it all before is to make sure that such internicene squabbling doesn't overshadow the common cause. E pluribus unum.

193. Dawkins's version of the deity does not exist

Comment #8856 by johnc on November 22, 2006 at 1:46 pm

Quentin, Cardinal Trujilio may be a "dangerous idiot" but his homocidal refusal to condone condom use reflects - to this day - the official position of the Church and its supreme ruler. He may be an unpinned Caterine wheel, but the Church is spinning right along with him. I note that the Holy Inquistion has just received Cardinal Barragan's 200-page report on the matter, so we wait and see whether this Gucci Pope has the guts to restore some sanity. In the meantime CRS, the peak US Catholic aid body, still does not distribute condoms as part of its HIV strategy, and in fact I know of no Catholic aid body which does. And millions are dying.

Your interesting - perhaps idiosyncratic would be a better word - summary leaves the distinct impression that Church teaching operates as a kind of take-it-or-leave-it moral guide for the faithful. This does not appear to be how the either Church or the majority flock see the matter as they struggle with a catechism that equates contraception with murder, regards same-sex behaviour as disordered and denounces masturbation as a sin. And the bottom line, literally, is Hell, whose avoidance requires Catholics to participate in fantasy rituals monopolised by the Church itself (I presume it is still a mortal sin not to attend Mass on Sunday).

The great irony is that you are saying it is possible to be a moral Catholic despite the Church, which becomes a kind of eccentric aunt (to use Steven Weinberg's wonderful recent simile) who you consult, out of a kind of residual respect, when you have a problem but whose dotty advice you will probably end up ignoring.

Anyway, your unanswered question: how can a material process give rise to a moral sense? Well, whether science has so far produced an account that you would find convincing is actually irrelevant. Here's why.

If you accept that a bacterium lacks morality but humanity does not, and you accept the fact (not theory) of common descent (which I presume you do), then it logically follows that a material process (ie evolution) did give rise to a moral sense as component of human consciousness - regardless of whether we currently fully understand how.

The only alternative is the preposterous notion that God at some point descended on the plains of Africa and, like the mysteriou monolith in 2001, infused a randomly selected group of our ancestor primates with an awareness of his moral law. However, rather rather leaving us with some record of this incredible event, or even telling us about it afterwards, he conspired with a bunch of Jewish scribes to concoct a fairy tale about magic apples and talking snakes. (Unfortunately for subsequent theologians, the scribes in question did not have a concept of soul, immortal or otherwise. Morality for them was lesson learnt through crime and punishment, not some infused essence.)

That's the Christian account. Mine would perhaps start with the detailed studies of chimpanzee culture (and there is no other word for it), which show clear signs of behaviour that, at a minimum, are a clear precursor of a moral sense, including both altruism and mutual obligation. But that, as they say, is another story. More broadly, since material processes managed to produce the entire wonderous complexity of life it is surely some kind of hubris to think some quality of ours is beyond the creative powers of natural selection.

194. Beyond belief: In place of God

Comment #8704 by johnc on November 22, 2006 at 3:19 am

"... science can offer all there is to know ..."

Well I guess we won't worry about literature, history, art and architecture, music and dance ... need I go on?

195. BEYOND REDUCTIONISM: Reinventing The Sacred

Comment #8687 by johnc on November 22, 2006 at 1:59 am

maryhelena,
Dawkins's personal views on the Kauffman approach (and vice versa) are actually irrelevant as to whether they are objectively complementary in the struggle for sanity. One might say the same of religious moderates (such as Ken Miller).

As for "a kind of war", I meant with the reactionary advocates of theocracy, whether they be American fundamentalists who bomb abortion clinics or try to thrust superstition into the science classroom or mullahs who declare fatwas on novelists and cartoonists and publicly execute gay men. While I believe (as you know) that TGD errs in ascribing too much ill directly to religion, there is no doubt that there are a great many groups and individuals consciously committed to rolling back Enlightenment values and replacing them with various forms of theocratic rule in the name of their God. They are engaged in global holy wars, and if we do not mobilise in response, all the worse for the world we leave our children.

The role of a clear voice in raising the alarm and denouncing religion as RD and Sam Harris are doing can be debated, but in my view it is proportional to the degree of complacency that exists to the real and present dangers. Yes, we need more Kauffman, but we also need more Dawkins and, one might add, more Lawrence Krauss and Eugenie Scott, ie people who get their hands dirty in the actual politics. And I greatly miss Gould. Of course people will gravitate to whatever voice suits their temperament, but that's why more voices are better than fewer. We, at least, should not fall into the trap of believing there is only one truth and one way.

196. BEYOND REDUCTIONISM: Reinventing The Sacred

Comment #8633 by johnc on November 21, 2006 at 9:36 pm

Jared, I agree my formulation was somehwhat vapid, but the idea is important enough to attempt a clarification. The error of gene selectionism is directly related to the fact that emergence not determinism is the correct model for the genotype-to-phenotype relationship. To quote Gould:

[o]rganisms are [the] primary objects struggling for reproductive success in nature. How, then, can "hidden" genes be the true agents if organisms are doing the fighting, cooperating, generating, and dying? Gene selectionists respond that all the relevant properties of organisms can be described as results of the various genes involved in their construction. Such properties, the argument continues, are therefore only the complex manifestation of genetic action.
But many, undoubtedly most, properties of organisms are not simple summations of contributions from several genes. They are products of interactions among genes and therefore they cannot, in principle, be adequately predicted or known at the level of genes. Since selection acts on such emergent properties of organisms, genes cannot be exclusive units of selection.

The problem in not that reductionism was misapplied but that reductionism is simply the wrong methodology. There has been, I would contend, a theoretical bias favouring reductionism as the only truly scientific methodology and a corresponding distrust of ontological emergence.

197. Dawkins's version of the deity does not exist

Comment #8576 by johnc on November 21, 2006 at 6:04 pm

Quentin, I was waiting for Humpty Dumpty to make a cameo appearance, since it is clear your position is premised on "good" and "evil" existing independently of human society. But this premise can only be a consequence of the very theism that is at issue. Perhaps a look at the real world will break the philosophical deadlock. This from The Guardian.

The Catholic Church is telling people in countries stricken by Aids not to use condoms because they have tiny holes in them through which HIV can pass - potentially exposing thousands of people to risk. The church is making the claims across four continents despite a widespread scientific consensus that condoms are impermeable to HIV. A senior Vatican spokesman [president of the Vatican's Pontifical Council for the Family, Cardinal Alfonso Lopez Trujillo] backs the claims about permeable condoms, despite assurances by the World Health Organisation that they are untrue ...

This kind of wickedness is not the act of some psychopath, but the considered position of a Church that grounds it "morality" in the inhuman fallacy that good and evil are defined by a supernatural divine law of which it is the sole legitimate interpreter.

Secular morality is concerned with suffering not sin, with humanity not heaven. And this morality is clearly a social construct, a historical conquest and a continuing source of cultural contest (whatever biological moorings natural selection may or may not have provided). But the irony is: so is the Church's morality. The difference is that Catholics are definitionally deluded into believing their moral views have some supernatural origin. A secular perspective is therefore the only one that takes ultimate responsibility for its own choices: we are the only source of our own actions, however constrained they may be by myriad external and internal factors, and we have only ourselves to answer to when all is said and done. That is free will, that is moral responsibility

198. BEYOND REDUCTIONISM: Reinventing The Sacred

Comment #8557 by johnc on November 21, 2006 at 4:30 pm

"However much Dawkins' in-your-face style might suit closet atheists, I just can't see it getting through to theists ..." - maryhelena

I think I would like to defend the notion that the Kauffman and Dawkins approaches are complementary not competing. While I have voiced specific criticisms of TGD, I absolutely think there is an important role for his take-no-prisoners style. Nor am I pessimistic about the impact it may have on many theists (and I share his justified pleasure at the "religion as smallpox" survey). We are after all in a kind of war.

But there is also a role for the patient constructivism of Kauffman's approach, and those who would reject his position because of their visceral reaction (as predicted) to his colonising the God-word are really missing the point. Secularism must provide a broader church than any of the organised religions. And sceptical tolerance needs to be a primary virtue if we are to provide a welcoming new home for religion's refugees.

199. BEYOND REDUCTIONISM: Reinventing The Sacred

Comment #8548 by johnc on November 21, 2006 at 3:59 pm

No one denies that reductionism has proved an incredibly productive methodology for science but that does not mean it is the only, or always best, tool for understanding the world.

The "selfish gene", the idea that the gene is the unit of selection, is the best known example of the application of reductionism in biology (of which RD was a brilliant expositor, not an originator). Critics such as Gould were at the time soundly lambasted for promoting alternative ideas such as group selection. But 30 years later group selection is at the centre of many interesting research projects and continues to show great explanatory promise.

So reductionism can mislead; it can also be enlisted in the cause of mischief. To take another example from Gould's oevre, the idea that intelligence can be reduced to some essential, quantifiable integer is both wrong and dangerous. His The Mismeasure of Man is a brilliant critique of this inhuman and racist scientism.

@ John Daigle: that interacting algorithmic agents can simulate certain functional aspects of consciousness does not necessarily bring us any closer to understanding what conscisousness actually is. Part of the problem here is that any theory that abstracts from the subjective in its reduction eliminates the very thing that needs to be explained. There are of course a wide range of views on this problem, but to quote from one important thinker on this question, Thomas Nagel:

What will be the point of view, so to speak, of such a theory? If we could arrive at it, it would render transparent the relation between mental and physical, not directly, but through the transparency of their common relation to something that is not merely either of them. Neither the mental nor the physical point of view will do for this purpose. The mental will not do because it simply leaves out the physiology, and has no room for it. The physical will not do because while it includes the behavioral and functional manifestations of the mental, this doesn't, in view of the falsity of conceptual reductionism, enable it to reach to the mental concepts themselves. The right point of view would be one which, contrary to present conceptual possibilities, included both subjectivity and spatiotemporal structure from the outset, all its descriptions implying both these things at once, so that it would describe inner states and their functional relations to behavior and to one another from the phenomenological inside and the physiological outside simultaneously -- not in parallel. The mental and physiological concepts and their reference to this same inner phenomenon would then be seen as secondary and each partial in its grasp of the phenomenon: Each would be seen as referring to something that extends beyond its grounds of application. The difficulty is that such a viewpoint cannot be constructed by the mere conjunction of the mental and the physical. It has to be something genuinely new, otherwise it will not possess the necessary unity. (from Conceiving the Impossible and the Mind-Body Problem, http://philosophy.fas.nyu.edu/docs/IO/1172/conceiving.pdf)