Year: 2010

You can blame Jerry Coyne for pointing out Pete Enns. The damage is done, at any rate.

He’s a condescending bugger, I must say.

To say that God’s existence is detectable with certainty through reason, logic, and evidence is a belief because it makes some crucial assumptions. For one thing, it assumes that our intellectual faculties are the best, or only, ways of accessing God. This is an assumption that privileges Western ways of knowing and excludes other wholly human qualities like emotion and intuition.

See that? He’s calling “intellectual faculties” Western, which is a little bit of an insult to people who are not Western.

It is an old argument but a good one: any god worthy of the name is the source of all being, and therefore not one more being alongside all others subject to rational control. Any god like that isn’t God at all.

That’s a good argument? Saying that any god worthy of the name is the source of all being? Which amounts to saying that humans thought of this special word that is supposed to mean “the source of all being” plus it exists plus it’s not like anything else so ha – that’s a good argument? It’s not an argument at all. It’s a circle. God means the source of all being so it’s different from everything else so everything else can’t look at it or test it or say it isn’t there so it is there because being there makes it worthy of the name.

Why do people accept the principle of uniformity? Because it can be used to construct coherent scientific explanations of the universe, and that is a good reason to accept it. But this is not too far from what religious people say about their faith. Religious beliefs can be used to construct coherent explanations for things like why there is something rather than nothing.

No no! No no no! Sleight of hand alert. Scientific explanations of the universe are not just coherent, they are also based on evidence. Religious beliefs are not based on evidence. Makes a difference!

More from Paul Cliteur’s The Secular Outlook. The first chapter is an extended analysis of atheism, agnosticism and theism. At the end of his discussion of Pascal’s Wager PC says Pascal did have one strong point, which is that we cannot suspend judgment on the transcendental realm – italics his. Quite right. If there is a god and it does want us to act in certain ways and it has given us reliable and unmistakable knowledge on the subject, that does make a difference. We may well think the god is evil and that we’re not going to act in the ways it wants us to, but it would be feckless not to think about it one way or another. If there is no such god, or at least no reliable and unmistakable knowledge about it, that too makes a difference. It’s not something we can just shrug about, not if we have any sense.

The agnostic says [she] suspends judgment while in every act [she] chooses in favor of or against God…So the agnostic can be adequately defined as the [person] “who does not know,” but [her] lack of knowledge is not some superior position that goes back to the docta ignorantia of Socrates or Montaigne, but the ignorance of someone who is unable or unwilling to take intellectual responsibility for a philosophical outlook that [she] honors in [her] deeds. There surely is some ignorance here. But this is not ignorance of a sophisticated kind, as the agnostic [her]self considers it to be. This is the ignorance of the unexamined life.

I like that. I like it partly because I’m so tired of all the superior sneering from jaded non-gnu atheists who wonder why we won’t just shut up about it already. I don’t think it’s as boring as they seem to. I think the many manifestations of zealous, hostile, vituperative hatred of atheism and atheists are 1. surprising 2. interesting 3. alarming. The manifestations themselves make it clear that we can’t just shrug and say “I dunno” and keep quiet.

As a companion piece to the one on Gary Gutting’s suggestions about god’s simplicity, here is Dawkins on why the whole idea is a non-starter (TGD p 121):

Creationist “logic” is always the same. Some natural phenomenon is too statistically improbable, too complex, too beautiful, too awe-inspiring to have come into existence by chance. Design is the only alternative to chance that the authors can imagine. Therefore a designer must have done it. And science’s answer to this faulty logic is also always the same. Design is not the only alternative to chance. Natural selection is a better alternative. Indeed, design is not a real alternative at all because it raises an even bigger problem than it solves: who designed the designer?

You see he’s not just talking about why the failure of the argument from design makes god seem improbable, he’s also talking about why the argument from design fails. This is central. The argument from design fails because the appearance of design is just that; it’s an illusion; and that makes sense because the designer is nowhere to be found, and not at all likely, and that in turn makes sense, because there is no design, so we might as well stop looking for a designer. There is no need to pace to and fro talking about how god can be simple and identical to all its qualities; we can just bag the whole thing. There is no design; there is no designer; let’s go have a glass of wine.

Russell has done a thorough dance on the exiguous “arguments” of Suzanne Fields’s “atheists are poopyheads” in that pride of journalism, The Washington Times, but I thought I would still take just a moment to point out how incredibly lazy it is. There’s no evidence that she’s ever even read anything on the subject before writing about it; all she’s done is string together a selection of very stale atheist-hating chestnuts.

Atheism is fashionable. The Bible sells way more copies. Nobody puts atheist books in hotel rooms. Atheists think they’re nonconformists but atheism is way old. Satan. Smug, shallow and arrogant. Cheap. Hitchens and Hitchens. Zealous. Lenin. The 60s. Muslims. Leftists. The worship of power.

That’s it. Seriously. Sarah Palin could have done it in a couple of tweets, and probably has. They don’t have much intellectual integrity, the “ewww atheists” crowd.

All right, I’ve adjusted my attitude since yesterday and the day before. We had a nice chat on the phone, and it will be okay. The seminar will be mostly discussion and q and a, so I won’t have to give a big long talk while yawning and scratching, so I can handle it. And hey, it will be fun. A conversation with a lot of people interested in women’s rights and the role of religion in interfering with same, in Stockholm. Fun!

And the cover of the Swedish translation of Does God Hate Women? is by Elisabeth Ohlson Wallin, whose Homosexuality in religion exhibit was canceled by one museum in June.

Sweden’s Museum of World Cultures canceled the Homosexuality in religion exhibit after consulting with representatives of the three religions involved in the exhibit, Judaism, Christianity and Islam claiming that it might offend some believers. The exhibit was by artist Elisabeth Ohlsson-Wallin. The pieces in the exhibition depict texts from holy books condemning homosexuality beside pictures of people of the same gender in sexual positions.

In other words a Swedish museum of world cultures gave three religions the right of veto over an artist’s exhibition, because somebody claimed it “might” “offend” “some” “believers.”

Perhaps representatives of the three religions will turn up at the seminar Thursday afternoon and bust all of us, because what we’re talking about “might” “offend” “some” “believers.”

Best fun evah.