Theological and scientific truths

A new year means time for a bit of blogging, hopefully the present frequency of adding new stuff is not exhausting anyone.

In an age where the positivistic stance has had a renaissance in neoatheistic circles, there is no lack of noise and negativity whenever someone makes attempts at integrating theological and scientific truths.

If you want a calm and constructive take on this, with a kind of case study on the initiation of human spiritual life, there are worse places to look than in Denis Alexander's response to Coyne, MacDonald, Ruse, and Wilkinson.

A pdf of the whole article is also moving upon the waters.

The Bible as science

One often hears that if only the Bible had contained scientific truth, then I would believe.

Russell Blackford is one of those guys.

if a god or angel or similar being has inspired the religion's poets and prophets, or dictated actual text for inclusion in its holy books, the god or angel (or whatever) could easily reveal such facts as the true age of the Earth, the fact that it revolves around the Sun, the fact that it is spherical and rotates on its axis, and the evolutionary origin of human beings.

What then would really happen?

The questioned awakened Unklees' imagination at The Quodlibeta Forum.

Moses: Hey Aaron, how do you spell "quark" in Hebrew?
Aaron: No idea. What do you want to know that for?
Moses: It's Yahweh again. Keeps telling all this strange stuff about strangeness and charm and spin, and quarks and gravitons and dark matter. I don't mind not understanding, but I need to know how to write this stuff down.
Aaron: Tell him we're just stone-age goat-herders living a subsistence existence, and you're the only one who can read and write. Ask Him for something simpler, like why does the sun rise every morning?

Moses goes away up Mt Sinai, and returns 3 days later.

Moses: He says the sun doesn't rise in the morning, its the earth moving.
Aaron: I've felt the earth move once or twice (snigger), but not usually in the morning!
Moses: Nothing like that bro', we live on a giant ball, and it goes round and round on its axis, and that makes the sun look like it's moving.
Aaron: What's a ball?
Moses: Dunno, bro', I asked him that and he started to talk about radii and something called a pie, and the number 3.1412, but then he said "forget it!" and muttered under his breath about next time I'll just say 3.
Aaron: Did he tell you anything else?
Moses: Two more things. One was that when he said we came from the dust of the ground he meant we had gradually evolved for billions of years.
Aaron: What's billions?
Moses: Dunno mate, but I think it's a number greater than two.
Aaron: What does evolved mean?
Moses: He says it actually took him more than 6 days to make all this. I told him I didn't really care how long he took, I wasn't in any hurry.
Aaron: What was the other thing you learnt?
Moses: He said that one day people would find it easier to believe all this came about by chance than believe in him. I said, no, I was willing to believe all the other crazy stuff about quarks and pie if He said so, but I couldn't come at that!
Aaron: What did he say then?
Moses: He said, let's start again. Just write this down: "In the beginning, God made the heavens and the earth" And I said, that's more like it, now you're talking my language! He just smiled and said, thanks.

I guess that's why the Bible doesn't even tell us that the universe had a beginning.

Dawkins getting rational?

Whether it is age or argument, Richard Dawkins at least seems to have changed tactics recently. While earlier denying any intellectual merit at all in holding that a God may exist, he started his latest debate with John Lennox by saying that A serious case could be made for a deistic God.

The report is much of a hoot, some of which of course may be due to it not excactly being written by a disciple of Dawkins. After the previous debate with Lennox, it seems rather revealing that he this time chose to leave his standard arena of distorting Aquinas and arguments for God.

Maybe he has realised that he has been found out? His bluff has been called so many times that it seems appropriate with a new approach.

So then, how does Dawkins now proceed to debate a fellow scientist on the existence of God? By focusing on science? On theistic arguments?

No, by historical arguments against the divinity of Jesus.

Instead, Dawkins was able to move the debate onto a specific attack on Christian belief in the divinity of Jesus, which is a very different argument and obscured the central point of contention – the claim that science had buried God. The fact that Dawkins now appears to be so reluctant publicly to defend his own position on his own territory of scientific rationalism – and indeed, even to have shifted his ground – is a tribute above all to the man he was debating once again on Tuesday evening.

While this may have been a surprise for Lennox, who neither is a Historian, he was at least able to make Dawkins see some historical light.

In the debate, under pressure from Lennox Dawkins was actually forced to retract his previous claim that Jesus had probably ‘never existed’.

That, however, didn't stop Dawkins from committing other errors, revealing his distorted view of the history of science.

And in a revealing aside, when Lennox remarked that the Natural History Museum in which they were debating – in front of dinosaur skeletons -- had been founded for the glory of God, Dawkins scoffed that of course this was absolutely untrue.

But it was true. Construction of the museum was instigated between 1855 and 1860 by the Regius Professor of Medicine, Sir Henry Acland. According to Keith Thomson of the Sigma XI Scientific Research Society, the funds for the project came from the surplus in the University Press’s Bible account as this was deemed only appropriate for a building dedicated to science as a glorification of God’s works.

While Dawkins may not walk the way of Antony Flew yet, he seems at least to have become wise enough to drop or hesitate about several of his arguments from The God delusion.

Since we've been there

A not so raving review.

Well deserved, though. So take care not to hurt your shoulder.

One important issue is the relation between religion and war. Here Maher is even more off base than usual:

But what happens when we hold Maher to his own standard? For instance, what about his claims that religion is the only cause of man’s woes and if it were gone, all would be well. Given his constant request that one base his beliefs on evidence, and scientific study, Maher frequently drops the ball on his own end. For example, take his belief that religion is the cause of war. He fails to engage in any scientific investigation on how it is that religion is to blame for all the troubles in the world. He doesn’t, as Plato said, “carve nature at its joints” but he “hacks off parts like a clumsy butcher.” One rightly wonders, especially since Maher offered no sources, from where did he draw his scientific data from? Or, is he meaning to give us a rant based on loosely cobbled facts mashed together from some of his own personal experiences, and concluding with a fallacious hasty generalization that “religion poisons everything?”

The truth seems as so often more to be that anti-religion poisons everything.

Not the least by dropping any pretense of doing science.

One thing you do in an objective, scientific study of something is take into account all the relevant empirical information. Those who exclude empirical data that bears on their thesis are not engaged in honest scientific inquiry. They’re engaging in a witch hunt! Maher doesn’t mention sociological, economic, political, historical, ideological ethical, or geographical factors, all of which play a huge part in wars. He doesn’t reference the influential work of Robert Pape, for example, who concluded in the book Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism: “There is little connection between suicide terrorism and Islamic fundamentalism, or any one of the world's religions.” After studying 315 suicide attacks from 1981-2004, Pape, a University of Chicago political science professor, concludes that suicide bombers' actions stem from logical military strategies, not their religion. Pape claims that the fundamental motive is political. The desire to force the withdrawal of foreign forces occupying land believed to belong to an oppressed people who have seriously limited resources at their disposal (McGrath, Dawkins Delusion, 80), is demonstrated by Pape through serious scientific study.

Unfotunately for Maher, science demands a bigger brain than bite.

The simple fact of the matter is, and it is one that Maher is too lazy to take note of or account for, the causes of war are just too complex a thing; we must, as atheist David Livingstone Smith puts it, “resist the temptation to box the causes of war in tidy categories hedged about with arbitrary distinctions.” Smith, our Darwinian atheist philosopher, offers his views on the cause of war in his book. He claims that, “War can be approached from many angles. We can consider it from the standpoint of various disciplines. All of these are important, but there is one dimension that underpins them all: the bedrock of human nature.” (p. xiii)

Other atheists that are more level headed than Maher on this matter are those like Michael Shermer. Shermer claims that he “is not convinced by the New Atheists argument that without religion there would be, "no suicide bombers, no 9/11, no 7/7, no Crusades, no witch-hunts, no Gunpowder Plot, no Indian partition, no Israeli/Palestinian wars, no Serb/Croat/Muslim massacres, no persecution of Jews as 'Christ-killers,' no Northern Ireland 'troubles'…. In my opinion, many of these events—and others often attributed solely to religion by atheists—were less religiously motivated than politically driven, or at the very least involved religion in the service of political hegemony.”

Pseudoscience is a big problem today, and something that should be countered by all parties. Not the least those claiming consistent support from science.

The New Atheists, however, seem to eager to remove the carpet beneath their feet to notice.

Worries about the hack scholarship of some like Maher and the New Atheist led University of Hawaii political scientist R.J. Rummell to introduce the term “democide” to cover all forms of politically motivated government-sponsored killing apart from warfare. Maher seems to think that all genocides are religiously motivated. But estimates of the death toll from 20th century democide ranges up toward the 170 million mark according to Rummell’s book Death By Government. How can Maher's theory explain all the relevant data. As a worshiper of "Science," Maher should know that hypothesis that cannot account for a lot of the data should be dropped. But Maher is one of the faithful. He refuses to let facts and evidence get in the way of his jihad.

Irreligulous

As expected, the ridiculous Religulous is rather smack full of dumb distortions, not to mention delusions. In short dysfunctionally dim.

Read more about it in these comments.

Even if not every single adjective starts with a D.

Weinberg recovers

Russell’s Syndrome (whereby intelligent atheists turn stupid when they talk about religion) may not be incurable after all.

At least if we are to believe Bede's as usual perceptive observations , this time on how Steven Weinberg seems on his way to recovery.

Stark discovers irreligion

One of my favs, Rodney Stark (though I must admit some mixed feelings as he sometimes is a bit too hasty) is out with a new book - as is his habit every year.

This time it is about What Americans Really Believe.

One important finding is that the new atheism never really happened.

During the past 63 years, several polls show the percentage of atheists has not changed at all, holding steady at only 4 percent of Americans who say they do not believe in God. Not only is atheism not growing in the United States, the majority of Europeans are not atheists (Ch. 14, "Atheism: The Godless Revolution That Never Happened"). Russia now claims 96 percent of its population believes in God, while a recent poll of China showed that atheists are outnumbered by those who believe in God(s).

In both the 2005 and 2007 Baylor Religion Surveys, researchers found than 11 percent of the national sample reported they had "no religion." Although nearly a third of the "no religion" group are atheists who reject "anything beyond the physical world," the Baylor Religion Survey found that two-thirds of the "no religion" group expressed some belief in God and many of those are not "irreligious" but are merely "unchurched" (Ch. 17, "The Irreligious: Simply Unchurched-Not Atheists"). Delving into the actual religiousness of those who report having no religion, the Baylor Survey found that a majority of Americans who claim to be irreligious pray (and 32 percent pray often), around a third of them profess belief in Satan, hell and demons, and around half believe in angels and ghosts.

The importance of Dawkins and his disciples then may not be so much in converting people to atheism (whatever that is), as to train Christians for public debate. It speaks volumes that The God Delusion is now being used as a textbook at several Christian Schools and Universities.

It has in short proven to be a rare gift to theists, just like the equally badly researched The da Vinci Code.

Another of a myriad of Stark's sometimes surprising findings (which naturally will lead to a lot of checkings and denials), supports one of the most famous things Chesterton never said - When a man ceases to believe in God, he doesn't believe in nothing. He believes in anything.

In short, to be a skeptic, it helps to be a Christian.

The Baylor Survey found that traditional Christian religion greatly decreases credulity, as measured by beliefs in such things as dreams, Bigfoot, UFOs, haunted houses, communicating with the dead and astrology (Ch. 15, "Credulity: Who Believes in Bigfoot"). Still, it remains widely believed that religious people are especially credulous, particularly those who identify themselves as Evangelicals, born again, Bible believers and fundamentalists. However, the ISR researchers found that conservative religious Americans are far less likely to believe in the occult and paranormal than are other Americans, with self-identified theological liberals and the irreligious far more likely than other Americans to believe. The researchers say this shows that it is not religion in general that suppresses such beliefs, but conservative religion.

"There's an old saying that a man who no longer believes in God is ready to believe in just about anything, and it turns out our data suggests it's true. That is to say, religious people don't believe this stuff, but there's no education effect," Stark said.

Among other interesting findings on paranormal or occult beliefs: People who have read The Purpose-Driven Life or any book in the Left Behind series are less likely to believe in the occult and paranormal, while those who have read any book on dianetics or The Da Vinci Code are more likely to believe.

Something we never doubted.

All barrels blazing

Julie Burchill has a go with all barrels blazing in Guardian:

First of all, let me tell you what this isn't. It's not some "I-was-lost-and-now-I'm-found" sob story. These days, many people reach out to faith "to find peace". I had too much peace in my life already. In faith, I was looking to be troubled – on behalf of other people. Every film and pop starlet, trawling after a reason to exist, says, "I'm not religious – but I am spiritual". I don't have a spiritual bone in my body; but what I am, is religious. I believe, literally, in the God of the Old Testament, whom I understand as the Lord of the Jews and the Protestants. I'm a Christian Zionist, as well as a Christian feminist and a Christian socialist. But over the past two decades, almost without me knowing it, the Christian part has become the most important.

Even if I probably don't quite see face to face with her theology (that would be a rare treat), I wholeheartedly enjoy her polemics.

My favourite vicar, the Reverend Gavin Ashenden of Sussex University, never says, "I am a Christian," but rather "I'm trying to be a Christian". Me too. Between the darkness that faces me from within and the darkness that faces me from without, it may just prove to be the hardest thing I've ever done. I love it.

Maybe no coincidence that her name to a stray foreigner rhymes so perfectly with Churchill.

Dragons can be created

Sometimes one does not quite know what to say. Or one has so much to say, that is is hard to decide where to start.

Reading Michael Onfray, provides not a few such occasions. Here is a brief comment by the admittedly rather less than disinterested Dinesh D'Souza, at a less than disinterested site. However, as it fits my own impression from having read his Atheist Manfesto, a few passages are worth quoting.

British atheists like Dawkins and Hitchens are eager to assure us that while they reject the Judeo-Christian God, they do not reject the values of compassion, human dignity, and equality that were introduced by Christianity and are widely shared in Western society. Dawkins and Hitchens insist that we can be moral without God. But Onfray, like Nietzsche, insists that this is an illusion.

Onfray describes the Dawkins-Hitchens position as "atheist Christianity," which he describes as an attempt to preserve Christian values while eliminating the Christian God. Onfray wants to move beyond this to what he calls "atheistic atheism," which requires the wholesale invention of new values that have never existed before.

What these values will look like, Onfray does not specify. He merely says that utilitarianism and hedonism should be our guides. His startling conclusion is that "atheism is not an end in itself." Rather, atheism exists in order to get rid of Judeo-Christian values that constrict our lifestyle. This is an atheism more honest, more darkly appealing, and ultimately more destructive than that of Dawkins and Hitchens.

Then the question naturally arises, is Onfray more consistent or just more crazy than other New Atheists? I am in a bit of a doubt about what I prefer.

But I am in no doubt that Onfray is into such stuff as dragons are made of.

Friday again

Time for some blasphemy.

La Fe del Ateo

My friend Jose (on Bede's discussion group) has translated some interesting passages from his fellow atheist, the Spanish philosopher Gustavo Bueno. Who sometimes is even more Catholic than the Pope.

It is from Bueno's latest book (La Fe del Ateo (The Faith of the Atheist), Temas de Hoy, Madrid, 2007):

"Sometimes 'rationalist' fundamentalism, in the shape of atheism, is presented as the prior, necessary, and even sufficient condition for the advancement of the nations, while religion (in general) is deemed responsible for backwardness and barbarism in human societies. This is purely idealistic naivety, a throwback to the Enlightenment mentality of the 18th century, which not only traditional Christian philosophers have responded to, but also Comte's positivists, Marxists (especially Lenin), and other critical movements such as the Frankfurt School led by Horkheimer and Adorno, wuth their renovated criticism of the Enlightenment.

Tertiary religions in general, and Christianity in particular, cannot be regarded as an irrational antithesis to the development of science and culture, as so many of those who espouse scientific fundamentalism (i.e. atheist 'radical rationalism') would have us believe. On the contrary, tertiary theology, and especially Christian theology has, thoughout its history, built a doctrinal edifice which can be seen as one of the most refined examples (when it comes to cultural development) of propositional science in the Aristotelian sense.

Anyone who is familiar with the Thomistic doctrine of transubstantiation cannot help but admire the refinement and subtlety of the theological theories, which have in turn often paved the way for ulterior philosophical or scientific concepts or ideas, even materialist ones.

We have no alternative but to heap scorn on those who speak, in general, of the 'crudity' of theological reasoning and its backwardness, and who, in their naive adolescent idealism, believe that once religion is removed and atheism established, progress, welfare, peace and happiness will naturally follow."

Jose doesn't quite avoid to mention a certain set of new atheists (or El Nuevo Ateo, I presume) in this connection.

However, as Bueno does not, we will leave it to the reader's imagination.

Secular Anti-Humanism

It is often illuminating (or making one pause a tad, depending on my mood) to look at some of the slightly hyperatheistic blogs out there.

This time it is the fearsome pharyngula that raised my brows. One of Darwin's present bulldogs, PZ Myers, has read a rather humane Secular Humanist, Richard Norman's thoughts about the New Atheism.

Myers is as usual frank

"First, I have to confess: I'm not a humanist. I'm just not that keen on defining myself by my species, and I'm not going to join a group that willfully excludes squid. Still, I sympathize with the aims of secular humanism and I'm willing to work alongside them, just as I'm willing to work with reasonable Christians and Muslims - I'm just not ever going to be one of them, and I'm not going to hold fire and abstain from criticizing them."

Myers touches here one fundamental dilemma when attempting to build a basis for values in an atheistic universe.

a) How to establish the dignity and value of humans (and human values at all)?
b) How to make sure this does not exclude animals (but bacteria)?

It is not an easy excercise if you want animals on your team. However, embracing squids and squirrels, does seem to provide a feeling of a moral higher ground to some (though they rarely mention snakes in the same breath) . That is fine with me, as long as one does not use it to denigrade human value. However, it is hard to avoid some stealthy anti-humanistic attitudes creeping in here, below the radar.

Whatever the psychology and moral notions involved, some atheists definitely don't consider Secular Humanism to be kosher. The very term Humanist is a red flag. Most interesting about Myers' blog this time, however, are the comments. Why is it so wrong of atheists to be Humanists? Here are some replies.

"When I began to deliberately identify as atheist I was encouraged by friends to attend humanist gatherings and I found I was generally put off by the tenets that promoted human proliferation. Although my run-ins with humanism (and Unitarianism) have given me a clear idea of what I don't believe, I'm still at a loss for what we call a philosophy that explicitly rejects speciesist views but still embraces rationality and goodwill as virtues among humans."

When human proliferation becomes a bad sign for some, it is needed to raise not one, but two eyebrows. However, all is not rational out there.

"Over the last dozen years or so I've gotten into the habit of attending humanist, atheist, skeptic, and Unitarian Universalist conferences and events. What I've found in practice is that the skeptic and humanist groups are the most oriented towards method, reason, philosophy, and science. The atheist groups are a bit more political, and I always seem to run into at least one person who's into alternative medicine, psychic powers, or some sort of wacky conspiracy theory -- and thinks that because they are "rational" enough to be an atheist their other beliefs are of course rational, too. Very frustrating."

One can imagine. So that makes for the question "What labels are there for non-humanist atheists to embrace?" Not surprisingly, one answer is

"Scientist. Seriously. It's almost 2 at night, so I won't give it any deeper thought and just say that all philosophy other than science theory is useless."

Fortunately later commentators notes that science theory is a poor basis for any philosophy. However the comment above is one of severel that indicate not only an aversion against Humanism, there is almost as much against Philosophy.

"I tend to look upon philosophizing as nothing more than mental doodling, but not all of it is useless in the real world. "

Where the guy comes from may be derived from him pointing at Jiddu Krishnamurti as

"a very deep thinker, and very worthwhile reading. Of course, I'm not sure you could, strictly speaking, call him a "philosopher"".

No, not quite, which may be why he is recommended. Some, however, are a bit more willing to consider Humanism:

"Mostly, I just think of philosophy as a bunch of really hard to read books. But there is something there. Science can't be the simple answer to everything. Science doesn't give me a reason to give a crap. When I eventually admitted to myself that I was an atheist, it enabled me to answer a lot of difficult questions. But without an invisible man in the sky, I need some other place to root my values and beliefs. So here it is: Human suffering is bad, and human happiness is good. I think that's all I need to be moral. I'm not 100% sure, but I think that makes me a humanist. I'm big on principles and reason, not so much on labels."

And perhaps not on what makes for solid ground to build values on. The commentators may however agree a bit more on making sure to avoid silly and sentimental Christian values:

"I hope the lecture on the ethics of genetic manipulation does not rely on so-called "moral intuitions" that can be traced back to socialisation within a society which has long been influenced by Christian notions of morality and virtue. I'm just saying ...I mean, maybe the person giving the lecture will be a hardline transhumanist. That would be refreshing. But there are too many biocon irrationalists like Leon Kass, Jurgen Habermas, Margaret Somerville, Francis
Fukuyama, Bill McKibben, etc., etc., floating around, all claiming to base their views on secular thinking (and all, surprise surprise, at least deferential to religion)."

And you have the more profound (well, perhaps not, it takes all kinds to make commentators) thinkers:

"We are all human beings here - well, most of us anyway - whether we like it or not. Are we in any way special? In the absence of a god, who is to say? Well, actually, we can if we choose. That human beings done things of which they should be ashamed is, I would say, beyond question. Is it equally true that they have achieved things in which they may take justifiable pride? I would also say:
yes, they have. Does any of that makes us special? In some ways, but not as much as does our capacity to ask such a question."

It boils down then, to our abilty to "choose" (whatever that is to the more avid new atheists) and our capacity to ask good questions (whatever they are). However, few animals are able to ask such questions.

So this guy may be a Humanist, and hence (by the Myers Doctrine) a speciesist.

The horror.

God guarantees success

At Cadre there is a helpfull guide to write an atheistic bestseller.

As present experience shows, you are guaranteed success if you write on God and Jesus. Just take care to remember to be against them. And to vent anger/sarcasm/indignation about all and any religion. Make also sure to get an endorsement from Richard Dawkins on the front page.

Best of luck!