Author: Ophelia Benson

Theo Hobson is strange. He starts with a guess about what an atheist might say, then reviews the saying as if it actually existed.

The atheist might respond that they do all these things because they believe the story to be literally true, and want to create propaganda for it. But this is his interpretation, and on close inspection it’s rather odd, and it’s pretentious in the sense of claiming to know more than it does. In reality he does not know exactly why people do these things, or what sort of belief in the story they have. He does not know the motivation of my aunt who sends me a card with a nativity scene on it, or my friend who attends a carol service.

That’s really quite funny, and a sign of a desperately woolly mind – to project a guess, and then in the very next sentence treat his own guess as if it were a well-attested fact. That ‘this’ in ‘But this is his interpretation’ is hilarious – what ‘this’? Where? What are you pointing at, Theo? I don’t see anything. You made it up, don’t you remember? You made up what the atheist might say, and you made up the atheist too – but you forgot your own process so quickly that now you think you even know what gender the atheist is. Tell us, what’s he wearing? Where did he go to school? Does he like quiche? And then Theo races on to fume about the atheist who doesn’t know the motivation of his aunt or his friend. That bastard! That pretentious bastard, with his interpretation! Who does he think he is?

At Christmas religious culture is rich and complex, full of depth and nuance, and the atheist’s little yapping dogmas about what religion is “really” about are just laughable.

[whispers] Theo…Theo…there are no little yapping dogmas – because there is no ‘the atheist’ – you made him up – remember? Scroll up – where it says ‘might’ – that’s you making a guess. Your pretentious dog-like atheist doesn’t exist, Theo, you dreamed him. You really need to learn to distinguish between your own fantasies and the real world.

Before I say Merry Christmas to my readers, I have a modest proposal. Let there be a public Boxing Day burning of all the unwanted copies of the God Delusion that are received at Christmas. Merry Christmas to my readers!

[whispers] Theo…Theo…it’s called persecution mania. I’d take care of that if I were you.

Dembski seems to be losing it. Or maybe he always has been, but regular observers seem to think he’s getting worse. There’s the whole fart joke, which we’re too dignified to discuss. But there’s also a little matter of really pathetic hypocrisy. To wit:

From December 18:

Since Richard Dawkins thinks he has the right to reprint my letters to him by posting them over the Internet (go here), I’ll assume the same privilege applies to me.

That’s (in the technical sense) bullshit. That ‘Since’ is misleading, as is the clause it introduces. That makes it sound as if Dembski wouldn’t dream of publishing or posting other people’s emails to him, except that Dawkins posted one of his so now the rule is overthrown. That is brazenly, shamelessly misleading. Dembski himself posted the emails of a third party, emails that were not to him, without permission, last February. You may remember. I did some comments on the matter here. Michael Ruse emailed Daniel Dennett, there was a short exchange, then Ruse sent the whole exchange to Dembski, who promptly posted all of it on Uncommon Descent. As far as observers knew, Dembski didn’t have permission to post the exchange, but at the time we didn’t actually know that. However, I later emailed all three parties in order to pin down the facts for a news feature for TPM, so I no longer have to say ‘As far as I know…’ Ruse admitted (cheerfully and unrepentently) that he hadn’t asked Dennett for permission to send the exchange to Dembski, Dennett told me he hadn’t given anyone permission to send or post it, and Dembski…Ah well, Dembski now. Maybe there was an email breakdown. Twice. Or maybe not. At any rate, I asked Dembski, twice, why he hadn’t asked Dennett for permission to publish his emails to Ruse, and I got no reply. Maybe my emails never reached Dembski. Or maybe his never reached me. Or maybe he just didn’t reply. If so, why? Well…especially in the light of what he says about Dawkins in that post…probably because he knows perfectly well it’s at the very least not good manners to publish someone else’s emails on the internet without permission. It’s doubly not good manners when the emails in question are not even addressed to oneself but are addressed to a third party. If I email Sally and Sally emails me and then sends our correspondence to Jane, Jane has a damn nerve if she then publishes the exchange on her website without damn well asking me first. So unless in fact there was a surprise double email failure, it seems reasonable to think that Dembski didn’t reply to my two emails asking him why he published Dennett’s emails to Ruse without permission because he couldn’t think of anything to say. What could he say? ‘Because I’m so rude’? ‘Because I wanted to’? ‘Because I’m a Christian so all’s fair’? ‘Because Dennett’s an atheist and that pisses me off so I don’t have to be polite’? ‘I forgot’?

Well, whatever the reason, that’s what happened. He published the exchange, on his website, without asking the other party to the exchange. I thought that was remarkably unpleasant behavior, and I said so at the time. Now here he is bleating about Dawkins publishing emails that Dembski sent (unsolicited, just as Ruse’s to Dennett were) to Dawkins. There’s no third party involved, so Dembski committed a much grosser violation of etiquette himself less than a year ago, yet he has the nerve to complain now. He did it again yesterday:

Richard Dawkins continues to publish my past emails to him without permission and I continue to return the favor.

Without permission. Does he. He publishes your past emails to him; you published Dennett’s emails not to you but to someone else, without permission, yet now you kick up a fuss.

The guy has no shame.

It was a bit unnerving recently to see that he apparently reads B&W. I hope he read the comments about him and felt very hot around the face.

Ten years. I remember that morning ten years ago when the clock radio woke me up by telling me Carl Sagan had died. It was local news; he was here, at the Hutch; we knew he was here, and why, and we exchanged worried gossip. I knew people who knew people who said things looked grim. Then I woke up to the radio that morning – I remember the fury, the no no no no, the damn and hell.

He’s a sort of parent of B&W, Carl Sagan is. As is Dawkins. The two formed a kind of pair in my mind in the mid-90s, and I was oddly pleased to see what Dawkins said of Sagan in his tribute in Skeptical Inquirer:

My candidate for planetary ambassador, my own nominee to present our credentials in galactic chancelleries, can be none other than Carl Sagan himself. He is wise, humane, polymathic, gentle, witty, well-read, and incapable of composing a dull sentence.”…I met him only once, so my feeling of desolation and loss at his death is based entirely on his writings. Carl Sagan was one of the great literary stylists of our age, and he did it by giving proper weight to the poetry of science. It is hard to think of anyone whom our planet can so ill afford to lose.

Just what I thought. Especially right now, we could and can ill afford to lose him. (Look how bad things have gotten since then! So you see what I mean. Never mind about correlation and causation; you know what I mean.)

It was The Demon-Haunted World, especially, that was a kind of parent of B&W. It got a lot of attention, and Sagan did a lot of interviews. I taped a couple of them, on ‘Fresh Air’ and ‘Science Friday’; they were small educations in skepticism by themselves. The book and the interviews coincided with various encounters with New Agey people I kept stumbling into around that time, and the result was a heightened interest in pseudoscience and woolly thinking that has stuck to me like glue ever since. (Thus it is a little dizzying to see that Little Atoms is doing a special tribute broadcast this Friday with Ann Druyan and A C Grayling and several associates of Sagan’s. I’ve been on Little Atoms, thinks I to myself. Full circle, kind of thing.)

A lot of people date the beginnings of their interest in science to a tv programme or book or magazine column of Carl Sagan’s. He got a lot done in 62 years.