About tactics and framing

People learn about secular humanism and atheism from their family, local clerics, national clerics, their neighbors, various commercial sources of information, and the like.  In a religious society such as ours the portrayals from such sources will tend to be negative.  People are also taught to adopt a closed, circular mode of belief, where faith in the religious based beliefs is considered to be a high value, where related sets of religious based beliefs are characterized as being true because they are deemed to be necessary for human morality or for an eternal after-life, where self-identity and purpose are deemed to be products of the beliefs. These sets of self-justifying beliefs and negative misunderstandings of the people who reject the beliefs, including its theistic underpinnings, are what I have in mind when I refer to prejudices.

So it shouldn't be surprising that when psychologists examine people's reactions to criticisms of their religious beliefs it is found many people react negatively.  Good people, with the best of intentions, fear losing their beliefs and fear those who don't share their beliefs.    There is an argument that we should avoid arousing these defense mechanisms when communicating to the public. It is argued that we should avoid the topics that promote anxiety, that arouse suspicions, prejudices, disgust, feelings of being under attack. In this view, the new atheists have it all wrong, their plain and direct discussion of taboo subjects, including their rejection of theism, is too radical for the public and counter-productive.   I consider this conclusion to be mistaken and I am going to try explain why here.

There is another way of looking at this psychology.   When trying to treat a phobia, psychologists have concluded that it is usually best to adopt two elements:  1. exposure to the feared situation/object and 2. dealing with the frightening thoughts that are associated with the anxiety.  Prejudice has some of the characteristics of phobia and it is reasonable to think that, at least for adults, exposure to the contexts that arouse the prejudice is often going to part of any process that defeats the prejudice.

Furthermore, prejudice against secular humanism, and against atheism, is a substantial obstacle to promoting more secular government. People who associate only negative concepts to what it means to not share their religious beliefs, including their monotheism, are going to be inclined to judge as bad the policies that they think conflict with those religious beliefs, such as teaching modern knowledge in public schools that describes our universe as functioning without divine intervention. It would be nice if we could frame the policy disputes to hide the conflicts with religious doctrines so that people's prejudices against the non-religious are not aroused.  But even if we could do that, as long as the prejudices against the non-religious persist, secularists will be forever operating in a fire department mode. Furthermore, there are constraints against not arousing the prejudices, such as the opposing institutions that are committed to fighting secularism and inciting against secularism. The prejudices against the non-religious keep igniting and re-igniting the efforts against secular government. This problem is alleviated some by the presence of many liberal religionists within the ranks of secularists, but it is still a problem.

So I think it is a mistake to only focus on the "important" policy issues and to avoid addressing the underlying thinking that constitute the prejudices against the non-religious.  Furthermore, there is no way to do this effectively without confronting those prejudices and thus arousing them.  But instead of being counter-productive, this is actually a necessary step to making progress over the longer term.   It would be nice if we could dissolve, or even just attenuate, the prejudices while avoiding confronting the prejudices without the risk of arousing the prejudices.  But tip-toeing around the tulips isn't a good approach here, it has little chance of being effective.

In my view the "new atheists" are right, we need straight talk that communicates honestly and directly why we don't have, and don't want to have, religious beliefs, or any beliefs more generally that fail to comport with how the world functions.  This is not a negative message, it is more of a mixed message.  It is a message that we are vulnerable to fooling ourselves but also that we can anchor our beliefs so as to more reliably match how the world functions than we do when we follow our imaginations, intuitions, biases, feelings, and historical, tribal, myths.

We don't need to convert many people away from religion to make significant progress.  But we do need to melt away some of that closed-minded over-confidence (or maybe it is as symptom of lack of self-confidence?) by exposing more people to the different, and for many people alien, perspectives of non-theists.  Philosophical naturalists have good arguments and strong justifications for our belief that there is no supernatural realm.  Good enough to make our perspective sufficiently competitive in the minds of more of the public to undermine our isolation.  And that is all we need to achieve.  To get there we have to be willing to express strong convictions while being nuanced, to be judgmental and principled without being harsh, and to be persistent.  But we can't do this if we fear offending people who are too easily offended and if we value avoiding conflict over taking risks to achieve longer term objectives.

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Avoiding conflict is not a primary value

The argument goes something like this: Many people, as a result of evolution, have a genetic predisposition to dogmatically hold onto their existing beliefs, to fear any challenge to their beliefs, to fight against any challenge to their beliefs, to acquire their beliefs for reasons that fail to properly justify the believers conviction that the beliefs are true. This is particularly true of conservatives who hold conservative beliefs. Therefore, liberals shouldn't challenge mistaken conservative beliefs because challenging conservative people's beliefs can only be counterproductive given the innate, genetic psychology of conservatives.

Let's say that historically everyone followed that advice. Then we would have no women's suffrage movement, because that movement upset many conservative people (including some conservative females) who strongly believed that females were insufficiently competent to vote. Then we would have no movement to protect the rights of workers to form unions and strike, because many conservative people (including some conservative wage workers) strongly believed that striking workers and unions were irresponsible and dangerous. And on and on. Every liberal movement against the status quo was supposedly destined to fail because by challenging the status quo such movements only anger biologically intransigent conservatives and are therefore counter-productive. Psychology and sociology scientifically demonstrate liberalism is futile and counter-productive, so don't even try, liberals should surrender and keep silent.

Absolutely, let's try to be reasonable and friendly and nice. But don't try to argue that psychology and sociology shows that liberals shouldn't voice their disagreements with conservatives. The fact is that public opinion does change. It does not change easily. It takes time and it takes effort. Change begins with a few people expressing unpopular truths. Anyone who thinks that popular and mistaken beliefs are going to change without argument, without debate, and without any of the conflict, risks, and inconveniences that this entails, isn't being real. Our civic responsibility is not to avoid upsetting people, our civic responsibility is not to express only agreement with majority opinion, our civic responsibility is not to be uninvolved, third party, objective, non-judgemental, observers. Our civic responsibility is to properly identify and favor the beliefs, policies, and laws that are better on the merits.

When we say we believe something exists we are making a claim about what is true or false. So merit in the context of belief isn't measured by how good it feels to have the belief, or by whether the belief expresses tendencies that were favored by evolution, or by tribal utility, or by anything other than whether the belief is more likely to be true than competing beliefs. Furthermore, the only method we have that we have any good reasons to conclude succeeds in justifying belief is best fit with the weight and direction of the overall available empirical evidence.

Being judgmental is an essential foundation for merit and ethics, and a refusal to be judgmental, an insistence that all epistimologies have equal merit, that beliefs are styles, that everything anyone believes is a product of evolution and therefore equally valid, that merit of beliefs is measured by its other effects, not by its veracity, is to sacrifice merit as the measure of belief justification. You are free to take that path if you want, but if you are someone who expects other people to adopt such an outlook, think again, that isn't a reasonable expectation. People are not going to stop arguing for what they believe is correct on the merits because other people are intolerant and react negatively. If you want people to stop arguing for their beliefs then you need to convince them to change their beliefs. Convincing me that people are intolerant of atheism isn't going to convince me to stop publicly arguing for atheism. On the contrary, the evidence that many people are intolerant of atheism refutes the argument that this is a trivial disagreement so we should focus on the other more important issues instead. I have said this before and I will keep saying it: If people were not so intolerant and fearful of atheism then fewer of the policy issues that secular humanists agree are important would be in dispute. The opposition to secularism is fed in part by intolerance and fear of atheism, so by confronting and challenging that fear and intolerance we are also promoting secularism more generally.

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Sean Carroll on Naturalism

A ten minute video defense of philosophical naturalism. Sean Carroll, for those who do not know, is a theoretical physicist/cosmologist at the California Institute of Technology.

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Colorado Day of Prayer ruled illegal

Today the Colorado Court of Appeals unanimously ruled against the state's Day of Prayer. They concluded that "the six Colorado Day of Prayer proclamations at issue here are governmental conduct that violates the Preference Clause" of the Colorado constitution. "We reach that conclusion because the purpose of these particular proclamations is to express the Governor’s support for their content; their content is predominantly religious; they lack a secular context; and their effect is government endorsement of religion as preferred over non religion". The judges correctly observe that “religious liberty protected by the Constitution is abridged when the State affirmatively sponsors the particular religious practice of prayer" and 'an individual’s right to choose his or her religion “is the counterpart of [his or her] right to refrain from accepting the creed established by the majority"'.

The Establishment Clause principle is unpopular and it is absent from the law of many other nations. It is also a valuable legal principle that protects individual liberty and the common welfare. Kudos to the judges for siding with the principle.

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Theism provides no answers

Peter Harrison, a former Professor of Science and Religion, has published many books on the history of science and is editor of The Cambridge Companion to Science and Religion. An article by Peter Harrison titled "DOES SCIENCE MAKE BELIEF IN GOD OBSOLETE?", published by Australian Broadcasting Company, tries to argue that religious beliefs are beyond the reach of, and therefore impervious to, challenge by empirical evidence.

Peter Harrison begins by pointing out that early scientists such as Copernicus, Kepler, Boyle, and Newton, were Christians. In those days the concept of galaxies was unknown and the germ theory of disease had not yet been formulated. What people believed in the 17th century is anything but a compelling argument that religious beliefs are consistent with modern knowledge given how much of modern knowledge was unavailable four centuries ago.

Peter Harrison then argues that the "difficulties for some Christian beliefs ... are not insurmountable" by citing "the religious support for "Darwin's views", both "in the nineteenth century and in the present". However, people are capable of supporting incompatible beliefs. The mere fact that people hold two sets of beliefs does not demonstrate that by reconciling themselves to both beliefs such people have established that such a reconciliation is properly justified. Indeed, Darwin himself characterized citing "the judgment of many able men who have fully believed in God" as an argument for theism this way: "I see how poor an argument this is."

Peter Harrison quotes Darwin as saying that someone can be a theist and an evolutionist. People can be astrologers and evolutionists. So what? It should be noted here that in the 1800s (and for hundreds of years before that), publicly speaking for atheism was illegal under the British Blasphemy laws. Peter Harrison must know this, yet when citing what Darwin said he omits acknowledging that Darwin had good reason to consider himself obliged to publicly counter any efforts by his critics to associate his views with atheism due to widespread intolerance against atheism.

Peter Harrison claims that Darwin lost his faith because "of suffering in the world", not because of "his theories". Yet Darwin did directly attribute his lack of Christian belief to "the habit of scientific research" in this quote: "Science has nothing to do with Christ, except insofar as the habit of scientific research makes a man cautious in admitting evidence. For myself, I do not believe that there ever has been any revelation". He also attributed his loss of faith to the conflicts between evidence and the stories in the Hebrew bible: "But I had gradually come, by this time, to see that the Old Testament; from its manifestly false history of the world, with the Tower of Babel, the rainbow as a sign, etc., etc., and from its attributing to God the feelings of a revengeful tyrant, was no more to be trusted than the sacred books of the Hindoos, or the beliefs of any barbarian." In other words, contrary to what Peter Harrison claims, suffering in the world was one of several different evidences, no doubt including the evidences for evolution by natural selection as the agent for generating humans and all other varieties of life, that contributed to Darwin losing his Christian beliefs. Nor is this a mutually exclusive, either or choice, as Peter Harrison is claiming, since evolution is built on a foundation of a history of millions of years of suffering by animals that experienced pain in their struggles to live.

Peter Harrison argues "it would be a gross overgeneralization to conclude from this single episode that science and religion inevitably compete for the same explanatory territory. In any case, such a view rests on a conflation of two different kinds of explanation." That first remark misses the point, which is that religion, and ideology more generally, has no capability at all beyond that of fictions to distinguish what is true from what is false. Only logic together with evidence, the methods that undergird the natural sciences but that are utilized by everyone more generally, have the capability to increase knowledge. Religions self-assert that they offer another, similarly non-fictional basis for acquiring explanatory insight, and each religion claims it is better than the others in revealing the most important truths. Such assertions have no merit.

He then draws the distinction between atoms, molecules, neurons and brain states on the one hand versus personal interests, intentions, and concerns to illustrate his concept of two kinds of explanation. He claims that only the first kind of explanation is the scientific one and "if your reasons for thinking about these important questions boil down to nothing more than physics, why bother?" Well, I suppose all atheists could just starve ourselves to death since nothing ultimately matters, but somehow that sounds more like a childish and silly attitude that has nothing to do with determining if a theistic god exists. Peter Harrison's question about motivation is irrelevant to demonstrating that there is a non-empirical alternative for grounding explanation, let alone for demonstrating his claim that religion qualifies as such an alternative.

Peter Harrison then discusses a question asked by Socrates: "Why I am here?" He says that the empirical explanation cites the disposition of bones and sinews while the allegedly non-empirical explanation cites purpose in life, divine mission, and quest for truth. The latter explanation is characterized as being of greater consequence for having ultimate import to human beings. The implicit assumption here is that the latter explanations, unlike the former explanations, constitute independent, non-material phenomena. Without that assumption there is no need to associate purpose, mission, and quest with divinity, although Peter Harrison tries to sneak in divinity by pre-declaring mission to be divine. The problem here is that this independent and non-materialistic phenomena assumption is counter-evidenced. All of the evidences we have are that purpose, mission, and quest are emergent properties, that are attributed to minds, that reside in brains, which are part of living bodies. The living bodies consist entirely of matter and energy (mostly in the form of water) embedded in space and time.

Peter Harrison argues "While there is no doubt that science can offer powerful explanations in its own sphere, it seems premature to insist that the only questions worth posing are ones that science can answer." Of course, if we define science narrowly as the peer reviewed results published in scientific journals then that is correct, but what does this have to do with determining whether or not theism is properly justified? Theism is not a question, it is an answer, and answers that are contrary to the direction of the overall evidence are unjustified. Period.

Obviously, the natural sciences answer some questions, not all questions. Some evidences are forever beyond our capability to obtain, but it doesn't follow that therefore God exists. Peter Harrison sidesteps the real issue here, which again is the overall evidences being in contradiction to theism. The gaps in our knowledge do not justify beliefs beyond the "we don't know" conclusions. Furthermore, it is the overall evidences, and what those evidences logically infer, that is the basis for justifying our beliefs, not just the much smaller subset of conclusions that have been directly demonstrated by reproduceable laboratory experiments. Those experimentally demonstrated conclusions, where available, cannot be disregarded, nor are they the only conclusions that we can properly reach from the overall available evidences.

Peter Harrison then says "For all their differences, most philosophers in the Western tradition, and indeed most of the world's religious traditions, have held that a satisfactory account of the things of greatest concern to human beings requires reference to some transcendent reality." But the only transcendent reality supported by the available evidences is the laws of physics, not a creator God. Again, our empirical evidences, including evolution by natural selection, and going beyond that to also including empirical evidences from many academic areas, favors the conclusion that all religions are human created fictions.

Peter Harrison is claiming that the laws of physics are "unsatisfactory" explanations, but the opposite is true. The laws of physics as the ultimate explanations have no viable competition. No alternative "explanations" are as well-evidenced or as complete as the laws of physics. Relative to the laws of physics, theism has nothing. It isn't even clear that theism qualifies as an explanation by any proper measure. People who cite God as a catch-all "explanation" are really saying that they have no explanation. Theism has never produced any knowledge. Nothing of substance that Copernicus, Kepler, Boyle, and Newton learned which contributed to modern knowledge was provided to them by a God, it was all obtained by their own pursuit of the empirical evidences.

Peter Harrison concludes that "God provides one possible answer ... to the problems of life." One possible answer to the problems of drought is a rain dance. There are many such "possible" and mistaken answers. Peter Harrison completely fails to show that the theistic God hypothesis, unlike empirically based theories such as evolution by natural selection, uniquely provides any correct and additional answers to any knowledge questions whatsoever.

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Paleontologist Robert Asher's accommodationism

In his Huffington Post article Science, Religion and the First Amendment, paleontologist Robert J. Asher writes "Never mind that the winning side of major U.S. court decisions supporting evolution in public schools has regularly featured experts who recognize compatibility between science and religion. If they are 'creationists,' then so was Charles Darwin." Unlike Darwin, these experts sometimes claim that ancient miracle stories, such as the resurrection and the divinity of Jesus, are true. These experts who claim compatibility between their own religious beliefs and science make arguments in defense of their claim that are in conflict with the overall evidence. In contrast, Darwin stopped attending church and stopped calling himself a Christian. He wrote "Nor must we overlook the probability of the constant inculcation in a belief in God on the minds of children producing so strong and perhaps an inherited effect on their brains not yet fully developed, that it would be as difficult for them to throw off their belief in God, as for a monkey to throw off its instinctive fear and hatred of a snake." Given the contexts that atheism was a crime in those days, and that we know so much more today about plausible materialistic mechanisms for origins than we did in those days, Darwin expressed views that hinted his beliefs leaned in an atheistic direction, even though he was a Christian as a younger man.

Robert Asher then wrote: "However, it is not 'creation' itself that conflicts with science, but the implication of certain processes (involving for example a ridiculously short period of time) by which this 'creation' took place." Although theists will deny it, the implications of our knowledge about the universe are also unfavorable for a creation of humans by deity process. The evolutionary process replaces
as creator of humans with biology and natural selection. To keep insisting that a god created humans is thus also similarly ridiculous. Theism requires almost as much mental gymnastics to refuse accepting the evidence to the contrary as does belief in young earth creationism.

Robert Asher continues: "Asserting that a deity is behind a given process leaves the material basis for that process completely open to further investigation." This is true to the extent the person making the deity assertion is willing to abandon that assertion if the evidence better fits the assertion that no deity is behind a given a process. Evolution is behind the process of speciation. So asserting that God is behind the process of speciation can, and sometimes does, close the material basis referred to as biological evolution from at least some further investigations.

Robert Asher then argues: "Analogously, regarding Thomas Edison as the inventor of the light bulb says nothing about how it actually works, and no reasonable person would conclude his non-existence from our understanding of electricity. In other words, understanding a natural mechanism is generally independent of a potential agency behind it." Obviously, there is no conflict between a scientific understanding of electricity and the existence of Thomas Edison. On the contrary, we are rationally compelled to believe in the existence of Thomas Edison because the evidence for his existence is very strong. But it would be wrong to assert that a deity is responsible for the light bulb instead of Thomas Edison and it is similarly wrong to assert that a deity is responsible for homo sapiens instead of biological evolution. We should always be following the evidence instead of contradicting the evidence. In other words, a natural mechanism can, and more to the point in this case, does, provide an explanation that functions as the agency behind something else.

Robert Asher then comments on the first clause of the 1st amendment of the U. S. constitution: "The U.S. constitution was written by individuals who viewed nature and its laws as consistent with the existence of a deity. I too believe in God, and am grateful to the framers for crafting a system by which religious beliefs cannot be legislated. Yet this constitutional assurance is double-edged because it seeks to balance the protection of society from popular superstition with each individual's right to religious expression. This balance lends itself to one of the most pressing issues of our society today: distinguishing superstition from religion, and ensuring that the right to believe does not cripple an understanding of our planet and ourselves." This is mistaken. Our laws speak for distinguishing religion from government. There is nothing at all about distinguishing superstition from religion in our laws, nor should there be. People are free to be "superstitious" and to express their superstitions via their religion. Insofar as such "mixing" is one of the more pressing issues of our society, it is a protected right of individuals under the second clause of the 1st amendment. Taking the superstition out of religion is like removing the water from lakes. Eliminate the former and the latter becomes nothing more than an artifact from the past.

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Stanley Fish's untenable post-modern relativism

In his New York Times opinion article, "Citing Chapter and Verse: Which Scripture Is the Right One?", Stanley Fish, professor of humanities and law at Florida International University, argues that all "original authorities" choices are equally parochial, equally tribal, equally partisan, equally ideological, and equally arbitrary. Stanley Fish has his own beliefs, and he views himself as one of many other equally parochial, tribal, partisan, ideological advocates. What is important, in his view, is that while we hold and advocate for our beliefs, we simultaneously recognize that all competing beliefs have equally valid foundations. He criticizes modern atheists for placing "the tenets of materialist scientific inquiry" above other equally valid authorities, such as "revelation and conversion".

He points out that any defense of empiricism is circular because "the reasons undergirding that belief [in empiricism] are not independent of it." Such circularity is necessarily true of any possible method of belief justification (what Stanley Fish calls "original authorities") that is uniquely correct and successful. If there is only one method that reliably works then the only way to justify that method is to utilize that method to justify itself. But that doesn't mean all methods of justifying belief are equally valid. There is a way to compare the methods to each other. Consider the hypothetical: What would happen if we did not rely on this method?

Let's start with abandoning the methods of religious revelation and conversion, because those were the only two other methods Stanley Fish mentioned, and rely on empiricism (what Stanley Fish refers to as "education" or "materialist scientific inquiry"). What would happen? Well, generally speaking, people who convert from one religion to another other religion, or to or from no religion, and people who cite one religion based revelation as against another revelation, or no revelation, do equally well, more or less. So, for the sake of argument, lets just say that without relying on revelation and conversion people can, and do, proceed with living their lives as modern atheists (or, if you prefer, as "scientists") without major negative or positive impact.

Now let's try abandoning empiricism. Without empiricism we ignore our senses of smell, touch, hearing, and sight. We can stay perfectly still and within about one week we starve to death for lack of water sitting or lying in our urine and feces. Or maybe we move around, cut ourselves, break our bones smashing ourselves into things, burn ourselves, bleed to death, get run over by a car, walk over a cliff. The details don't matter, there are lots of possibilities, all of them leading to death within a few days.

Of course, outcomes are evidence, and we learn of these outcomes through the "original authority" that Stanley Fish refers to as "education", not from "revelation and conversion". So pointing to outcomes is an empirical way of defending empiricism. Stanley Fish thinks that makes the justification for empiricism circular, and he is right. But he is foolish, not just wrong, to claim that therefore empiricism is no better than any other authority for justifying beliefs. It is foolish because outcomes matter. The only method that reliably works is empiricism. Unlike all other ineffective methods, our lives literally depend on this one method, no one can survive as an independent person without many beliefs that are empirically justified. Everyone, even dependent young children, even dependent adults in adult care institutions, relies on empiricism to navigate our world.

There is no other method of belief justification that has any record of success whatsoever for distinguishing what is true from what is false. The reason that people who rely on revelation and conversion survive at all is that they are inconsistent. Religious people invariably rely on empiricism when they face important decisions that risk their health and welfare, such as whether to walk on water. These same religious people then arbitrarily rely on revelation and conversion when they make decisions that are relatively unimportant, such as whether to spend some time each weekend in a house of worship. Many religious people don't seem to recognize how inconsistent they are and fail to acknowledge the complete failure of revelation and conversion as methods for distinguishing what is true from what is false. Those religious people who really do follow revelation and conversion over education when making health decisions, also known as faith healing, such as Christian Scientists, sacrifice their, and their children's, health and welfare as a result.

At least one professor of humanities and law, maybe thinking he is being sophisticated by being non-judgmental, tragically appears to be unwilling to publicly acknowledge this substantial and important difference. Stanley Fish himself probably relies on medical doctors, not on faith healers, when it really matters to maintain his health, even though the medical knowledge database is obtained indirectly through second hand education that requires some trust in the sources of that information. He argues that because empirical evidence is often obtained second-hand, it is is no better than any other method. But almost all group activities require trust, such as the market economic system and democracy. It doesn't follow that a mixed market and command economic system and republican democracy are no better than North Korea's strictly command economic and political model. It is by inter-person and inter-generational sharing of empirically obtained knowledge that we continuously build up our knowledge base for better outcomes in the future than we had in the past. Yet according to Stanley Fish's relativistic argument, anyone with real and serious injuries who seeks assistance from faith healers instead of medical doctors has acted on equally valid evidence, and for equally good reason, as everyone who opts for medical doctors. The post-modern relativism that Stanley Fish is peddling is foolish nonsense on stilts.

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Atheism is not scientism

Philip Kitcher, John Dewey professor of philosophy at Columbia University, in his recent New York Times article titled "Science is Unbelieving", identifies "scientism" as a major flaw in modern atheism. He defines scientism as "this conviction that science can resolve all questions known" including "questions about morality, purpose, and consciousness" and places this label, which he acknowledges is intended to be pejorative, on Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens.

He then elaborates that scientism "rests on three principal ideas. The facts of microphysics determine everything under the sun (beyond it, too); Darwinian natural selection explains human behavior; and brilliant work in the still-young brain sciences shows us as we really are." However, none of these three assertions, neither individually nor in combination, imply that science can resolve all questions known. Everyone with any common sense, including modern atheists, recognizes that science is a human endeavor, that humans are limited to operating within the confines and limits of their location and time and abilities, and that humans never have, and never will, have access to all evidence about everything, everywhere, over all time, past and future. Accordingly, science does not, and will not, resolve all questions known. Indeed, all questions do not have answers because many questions have no relevance to what is true or false or are incoherent. The issue of what questions should be asked is itself an issue that can only be reliably resolved by following the available evidence.

And when we follow the evidence, as all rational people are obliged to do, the assertions that physics is “the whole truth about reality”, that we should achieve “a thoroughly Darwinian understanding of humans”, and that neuroscience makes the abandonment of illusions “inescapable", are not scientism, as Philip Kitcher asserts, they are simply the conclusions that arguably are most consistent with the available evidence. Those are short quotes that Philip Kitcher excerpted from a book by one particular atheist ("The Atheist's Guide to Reality: Enjoying Life Without Illusions" by Alex Rosenberg). He is using his critical review of that book as his launching pad for his more general attack against modern atheism. I have not read that book, but taking short phrases like that out of context is not conducive to fair criticism of the author's argument. I can imagine such short phrases appearing in paragraphs whose context gives them a more nuanced interpretation than Philip Kitcher appears to be trying to attribute to this author. Philip Kitcher clearly dislikes these sorts of conclusions, but his mislabeling these conclusions as scientism fails to demonstrated that they are "premature".

It is true that "very little physics and chemistry can actually be done with its fundamental concepts and methods, and using it to explain life, human behavior or human society is a greater challenge still. Many informed scholars doubt the possibility, even in principle, of understanding, say, economic transactions as complex interactions of subatomic particles.". But again, science is a human activity, and humans are limited in many ways. So none of these limitations in science as a human activity counter the conclusion that physics underlies the whole truth about reality. Quantum indeterminacy, the necessary incompleteness in the description of a physical system, is one of the characteristics of the universe as understood by modern physics. So even if some predictions are impossible "in principle", it still doesn't follow that it is mistaken to conclude that physics underlies the whole truth about reality. What Philip Kitcher derides as "imperial physics" makes complete access to the future forever inaccessible to us. Furthermore, nothing in basic physics requires that the properties of complex systems be identical to the collection of the properties of that system's constituent parts. It is well established in physics that entirely new properties sometimes appear in complex systems. Nothing about this emergent properties phenomena supports the conclusion that god exists. Philip Kitcher may not like that physics rules over us and the universe, but that doesn't make the evidence that it does any less convincing.

Philip Kitcher then disparages the generalizing from evidence to conclusions "unfettered by methodological cautions that students of human evolution have learned". Indeed, atheism is a generalization, not a conclusion of science. Generalizing from the evidence is something we all do. It is a basis for sound philosophy, so it seems kind of odd to hear a philosopher criticize such activity in such general terms. We need to make decisions on the basis of the available evidence, and since the available evidence often falls short of being complete in the context of answering the questions relevant to making our decisions, we generalize on the evidence. Shame on atheists for being like everyone else in this regard!?

Philip Kitcher then points out that "others hold the equally staunch position that some questions are so profound that they must forever lie beyond the scope of natural science. Faith in God, or a conviction that free will exists, or that life has meaning are not subject to revision in the light of empirical evidence." The first two questions are existence questions and the only reliable basis for answering such questions is by matching the answer against the available evidence, not on faith or conviction. The evidence disfavors both, and the people who argue that empirical evidence can have no relevance when trying to answer those questions are no less mistaken for being adamant. The last question is an attitude question. But even human attitudes, to be properly sustained, need to be anchored in facts and therefore should be built on a foundation of evidence, not on counter-evidenced possibilities such as God and free will. And what in the world does the measure of profundity have to do with a question being beyond the scope of natural science? Profundity is irrelevant here. Questions are either inside or outside the scope of natural science primarily in relation to the availability of evidence.

Not surprisingly, Philip Kitcher tries to divorce his attack against "scientism" from disrespect for natural science. He notes that "The natural sciences command admiration through the striking successes ....". But "... the natural sciences have no monopoly on inferential rigor. Linguists and religious scholars make connections among languages and among sacred texts, employing the same methods of inference evolutionary biologists use to reconstruct life’s history. Attending to achievements like these offers many alternatives to scientism." With that last sentence, Philip Kitcher appears to be implying that modern atheism (a.k.a "scientism") is inconsistent with "employing the same methods of inference evolutionary biologists use to reconstruct life’s history" in contexts beyond the natural sciences. This is nonsense. Modern atheists very much support and favor "employing the same methods of inference" on the empirical evidence beyond the confines of the natural sciences. Inferring from the evidence is what we are doing when we observe that the available evidences favor the conclusion that gods are human created fictions.

Philip Kitcher then asserts "Instead of forcing the present-day natural sciences to supply All the Answers, you might value other forms of investigation — at least until physics, biology and neuroscience have advanced." But that is what atheists are doing. Atheists look to psychology, to anthropology, to sociology, to history, to evidence grounded philosophy, etc., and the evidences available from all sources that relates to this particular question is consistent in its direction wherever we look. That is why we are atheists. This has nothing to do with natural sciences supplying "All the Answers", it is about the best fit with the overall evidence answer to a particular question. There are human tendencies that explain the common bias against accepting the evidences that our universe is all space-time and matter-energy, such as the tendency to internalize the beliefs of the people around us during childhood. Maybe in the future we will have evidence that our universe consists of something more than space-time and matter-energy, or maybe not, but it is a mistake to insist that there is also a god without the evidence.

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Why is there something instead of nothing? Part 1.

One of the reasons many people shy away from atheism is the conviction that a creator God is a reasonable explanation, and the only viable explanation, for how the universe came to exist. The commonly held assumption is that nothingness was the initial condition sometime prior to the Big Bang and that nothingness is a condition from which something cannot appear. This perspective underpins deism, although many agnostics and theists also share this perspective and see this need for something to originate from nothing as being the Achilles Heel of atheism. The new book, "A universe from nothing: Why there is something rather than nothing", by Lawrence M. Krauss, disputes this assumption. I will discuss that book in a future blog post. For now, let's take a quick look at another cosmologist's overlapping commentary on this topic.

Sean Carrol of the California Institute of Technology, in his article "Does the Universe Need God?", says this: "Most modern cosmologists are convinced that conventional scientific progress will ultimately result in a self- contained understanding of the origin and evolution of the universe, without the need to invoke God or any other supernatural involvement." Furthermore, citing Hawking, he notes that "nothing in the fact that there is a first moment of time ... necessitates that an external something is required to bring the universe about at that moment." Indeed, "the issue of whether or not there actually is a beginning to time remains open." Instead, the Big Bang may be a "transitional stage in an eternal universe." He also explains that "the multi-verse is not a theory, it is a prediction of a theory", based on combining string theory with inflation. Furthermore, contrary to what theistic critics sometimes assert, a multi-verse complies with the preference for simple explanations because "the simplicity of a theory is a statement about how compactly we can describe the formal structure ..., not how many elements it contains."

Sean Carrol points out that a compelling argument for God "would consist of a demonstration that God provides a better explanation (for whatever reason) than a purely materialistic picture, not an a priori insistence that a purely materialistic picture is unsatisfying." Furthermore, "to refer to this or that event as having some particular cause .... Is just shorthand for what's really going on, namely: things are obeying the laws of physics." Accordingly, "there is no reason ... to think of the existence and persistence and regularity of the universe as things that require external explanation." Furthermore, with theism "we're not simply adding a new element to an existing ontology (like a new field or particle), or even replacing one ontology with a more effective one at a similar level of complexity .... We're adding an entirely new metaphysical category, whose relation to the observable world is unclear." Sean Carrol then notes the discrepancies between the universe we should expect if traditional theisms were true and the universe as it is. God "isn't needed to keep things moving, or to develop the complexity of living creatures, or to account for the existence of the universe." At 14 pages, his article is worth the time investment required to read.

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Theism is an existence claim

By Mathew Goldstein

Janet Daley, writing for the British newspaper Telegraph, cites the "clash between President Obama and the Roman Catholic Church over the matter of whether Church institutions should be obliged by federal statute to provide free contraception. There can be no question of where the Constitution stands on this issue: if a case should ever come to the Supreme Court, it is the Church that will win." in her article "A good week for the smiting of the ungodly". Did Janet Daley miss the news that the Obama administration granted religiously affiliated Institutions an exemption that allows their employees to acquire the contraception coverage from the insurance companies without employer subsidies? Any lawsuits would now be against the contraception coverage subsidy required for institutions not affiliated with a religious institution. Legal precedent says that government can enforce a "neutral law of general applicability" that conflicts with some citizen's religious beliefs provided that the law can be shown to benefit the general welfare of citizens.

She then points out that there are questions whose answer is not based on evidence such as: Is it wrong to hurt people unnecessarily? She correctly points out that it is a mistake to require evidence for "those kinds of belief that do not rest on empirical evidence but which are still central to human experience." She then incorrectly concludes that theists are therefore correct to believe without evidence. That final therefore is incorrect because theism is not one of "those kinds of belief" that is exempted from the need for empirical evidence. Claims that theism has moral benefits are derivative, they come after acceptance of the existence claim. Therefore theism is not a moral axiom like the axiom that it is wrong to hurt people. Theism is an existence assertion like the claim that God the Holy Ghost exists as part of a Holy Trinity. So atheists are correct to look to evidence for evaluating the merit of theism.

She then calls it "a very odd kind of obtuseness in people who clearly see themselves as possessing superior intelligence. Do they really not understand what it is that it is so unsatisfactory about “scientific” accounts which reduce life to the ticking over of sensory apparatus?". This is also mistaken. First of all, atheists really do understand that both theists and atheists posses a full range of intelligence. The difference here is that atheists are applying their intelligence better on this question. Secondly, accurate explanations do not "reduce" that which is being explained. Life continues to be exactly the same phenomena, neither enhanced nor reduced, by the availability of previously unavailable explanations for how it originated and evolved. The obtuseness here is on the side of people like Janet Daley who have this very odd notion that an explanation should be rejected if it is subjectively deemed to change the value of that which is explained in a direction that some people decide is undesirable. We are obliged to follow the evidence wherever it takes us. Since we are not the creators of the universe we don't have carte blanche to redefine the explanations to match our preferences. When a preference conflicts with the evidence the proper way to resolve the conflict is to abandon the preference.

Janet Daley then asserts about Dawkins "Most to the point was the comment that he had failed to “understand the nature of faith”. It is that incomprehension which is perhaps the weakest element in the scientific rationalist atheist case." On the contrary, the irony is that it is the atheists who understand faith better than those who live by it. If the people of faith acknowledged how vacuous this reliance on faith is as a source of knowledge about what exists then they wouldn't be so proud to publicly assert their beliefs are faith-based as if that was a positive attribute or sufficient justification.
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In defense of faith, Janet Daley returns again to questions of morality, asking: "Why do they, and we, feel such unbearable compassion even for those unknown to us – even, indeed, for hypothetical tortured children who have been invented for the purpose of argument? Why is sympathy, and revulsion at the pain of others, such a characteristic feature of our condition that it is actually called “humanity” and its lapses regarded as “inhuman”? Presumably, the Dawkins lobby would say it arose from the need to preserve our collective genes. What an impoverished view of life and its moral complexity, that is.". Having previously mischaracterized the correct insistence that evidence be provided to support the existence claims intrinsic to theism as " facile atheism", it is actually Janet Daley who is the one being facile here. The explanations for moral sensibility, and life, provided by biology are rich. They combine a deep simplicity with incredible complexity, have broad implications, and are anything but "impoverished". Most to the point, we are justified in believing that this "view of life", unlike theism, is true because the evidence tells us it is true. And that is what counts here, everything else is hot air.

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Identity versus evidence

A common theme of those who argue in favor of government establishment of a majority's religion is "religious identity". In her speech against "militant secularists" promoting "totalitarian regimes" and "denying people the right to a religious identity", British Cabinet Minister without Portfolio, Sayeeda Warsi, mentioned identity three times in the first three minutes. "In order to encourage social harmony, people need to feel stronger in their religious identities and more confident in their beliefs", "in a globalized world it is easy to think that, to relate to others, you must water down your religious identity", and "it demonstrates similar traits to totalitarian regimes, denying people the right to a religious identity". What is the relationship between belief and identity and secularism?

Religious conservatives have a tendency to assert that a primary purpose of belief is to define individual and group identity. However, that isn't generally true. We believe that cows exist and dragons do not exist, not as a means to give ourselves an identity, but as a result of the evidence for the existence of cows and against the existence of dragons. What religious conservatives are doing here is inconsistent. They are insisting on two conflicting standards for belief justification, one rational, based on the evidence, and another arational, based on maintaining a self-confident identity.

Maintaining self-confidence isn't an issue with rational beliefs. We are self-confident in our rational beliefs in proportion to the evidence. Because rational beliefs are not about self-identity, there is no need for a preset and never changing self-confidence in our beliefs. As additional evidence is accumulated over time, rational beliefs adjust to fit the available evidence. The past is not the future, and rational beliefs are flexible enough to respect and accommodate future changes. Neither self-identity nor self-confidence are dependent on rational beliefs.

In contrast, the religious belief based self-identity, having thus entangled itself with self-confidence, does not like being confined to individual expression. Because religious belief is insecure and entangled with self-confidence, it seeks support from the nation as a whole. Without active and ongoing governmental expression of the majority's religious practice, the otherwise insecure majority religious beliefs are "sidelined, marginalised and downgraded" in the words of Ms. Warsi. Confidence in religious beliefs merges with self-confidence, religious beliefs merge with self-identity, self-identity merges with national identity, and the government sphere merges with the non-governmental sphere. There is then just one comprehensive and indivisible identity and public sphere, and that identity and public sphere are themselves merged together with, and defined for everyone by, a majority religious belief.

Thus, according to Ms. Warsi, merely forbidding a prayer ritual at the start of government meetings becomes a denial of "the right to a religious identity" for people generally. But of course, it is no such thing. Government meeting prayer rituals are not even a denial of the right to an atheist identity. If not having a prayer ritual were a denial of the right to a religious identity then the right to a religious identity would necessarily be incompatible with the right to an atheist identity, or to any conflicting, unrepresented minority religious identity, since the government meeting cannot simultaneously have an opening ritual affirming all conflicting beliefs. That is nonsense, and that is the real core problem here. The people who are insisting on government establishments of their preferred religions are in effect asserting a right to impose promotion of their insecure and arational religious self-identity, practices, and beliefs on all the citizens of the nation through the common government. There is no such right.

Starting with the false foundations that individual identity is the same identity as national identity, government actions are the same public actions as non-government actions, confidence in a particular set of beliefs is the same confidence as self-confidence in one's self, and the purpose and function of beliefs is to define and maintain an identity, is it any surprise that arguments for establishment of religion go awry, descending into bombast and ending in self-contradiction?

The applicable right here is for individuals to freely form and express their own beliefs and identities without government interference. This requires unbiased government with no religious identity. Practice your religion as you wish, in public or privately, government has nothing to say about which religious beliefs, or identities, or rituals and practices, are preferred or patriotic. People do not need their government to practice their religious beliefs for them, or define a national religious identity for them, and there is no civic right to a government favoring your own religious beliefs or identities over competing beliefs or identities. If Ms. Warsi really thinks that is an intolerant prescription that is reminiscent of totalitarian regimes then she is a very confused lady representing a very confused government.

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The Clergy Project's Evolution Weekend

By Mathew Goldstein

The goals of the Clergy Project's Evolution Weekend are to support the teaching of science in public schools and promote moderate religion. Yet the founder of the Clergy Project, Michael Zimmerman, indulges in superficial, false, negative caricatures of the "new atheists" that are irrelevant to, or at cross-purpose to, these goals.

In his Feb. 9 Huffington Post article, "Evolution Weekend: Protecting Both Religion and Science", he writes "These new atheists will attack the clergy who are participating in Evolution Weekend even though those very same clergy should be their biggest allies when it comes to combating the assault on science taking place in our public schools. But these new atheists can't see past their own biases and recognize that only a combined effort will protect science."

There is something odd and revealing about the words "should be" in the phrase "those very same clergy should be their biggest allies when it comes to combating the assault on science". Either we are allies, or we are not allies. If we agree then we are allies. We do agree here, therefore we are allies here. Why is the organizer of this project expressing doubt about this alliance? In the next sentence he asserts that the new atheists fail to "recognize only a combined effort will protect science". I have seen no evidence whatsoever that the new atheists oppose a combined effort to protect science. In fact, every new atheist I know of supports alliances with all people, including the people that we otherwise disagree with, to support all common goals. On what grounds is this incredible accusation otherwise being made? It is the pot calling the kettle black.

Now it is true, obviously, that new atheists and the clergy attending this Evolution Weekend have substantial differences on the question of religious faith. For example, Michael Zimmerman also says of the participants "they understand that a deeper understanding of the natural world will only enhance their faith. And they are not so insecure in their faith that they feel compelled to condemn all other belief as false and demand that everyone else be forced to accept their singular perspective." On the contrary, a deeper understanding of the natural world enhances atheism and being compelled to declare false those beliefs that are counter-evidenced is rational and proper. Furthermore, there is no proper basis for Zimmerman's correlating the "condemning" as false those beliefs that are counter-evidenced on the one hand with the "demanding" everyone else be "forced to" accept a singular perspective on the other hand. .

No one has any obligation to never criticize (a.k.a. "attack") other people's mistaken beliefs as a pre-condition to working together with those same people for a shared goal. Sincere differences over the proper role of faith (including the disagreement over whether faith is itself incompatible with a scientific approach), the direction of the evidence, proper epistemology, and the like, do not translate into substantial reasons for refusing to combine efforts to defend science education. New atheists, like all thoughtful people of good will, agree that people should be encouraged to adopt the better justified perspectives by argument and persuasion.

Michael Zimmerman also slanders the new atheists with this additional absurd accusation: 'Some of the attacks on participants in Evolution Weekend 2012 will also undoubtedly come from "new atheists" who like to lump all religious individuals in with fanatical fundamentalists. In their eyes, anyone who expresses religious sentiments to even the slightest degree is no different from a Biblical literalist.' We lump them together only as theists who believe with no supporting evidence, and despite substantial contrary evidence, in a parental deity that created the world and takes a special interest in human affairs. As anyone with eyes can see (or who reads Braille or hears or whatever the case may be), in all other respects theists are a very diverse group. Their beliefs are so diverse because theisms are a free-floating fiction lacking the anchor of empirical evidence that produces the voluntary international consensus seen among scientists. But by pointing out the differences between religion and science we atheists are failing to combine our efforts to "support science" under Zimmerman's theological re-definition and mis-definition of that concept.

If Michael Zimmerman was really as fully committed to a combined effort on behalf of "protecting science" as he self-declares himself to be then why is he restricting the discussion of strategies to defeat anti-evolution laws to religious congregations? He advocates for diversity and pluralism as a strength while excluding atheists and the non-religious from the discussion. This self-contradiction is blatant and damning. All these different religions have no single religious belief in common. He acknowledges that they are meeting to promote a secular goal that is shared with atheists and the non-religious. If the commitment of these clerics to pluralism is the basis for his proud claim that they "are not so insecure in their faith" then, again, why the exclusion of the non-religious and atheists? And how is blaming atheist's atheism for this decision by theists to exclude atheists ethical? This is akin to men excluding women from participating in group discussions while blaming the female voice.

But moderate religionists claim to be better than that. Unlike narrow-minded and exclusionary religious fundamentalists, they wouldn't play blame the victim games to avoid taking responsibility for their own self-centered intolerance, right? Science does not have to support, or even co-exist comfortably with, religious beliefs to be defensible or to merit being taught, learned, and actively supported. If scientific results conflict with, or otherwise undermine, religious beliefs then the loser is the religious beliefs, not the science. Anyone who doesn't recognize this doesn't really understand why science should be taught in the first place. Don't you agree Dr. Zimmerman?

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Non-religious religious institutions and the law

The conflicts between religious beliefs and secular laws are numerous. Our taxes pay for alcohol production and sales regulation enforcement, but alcohol consumption is prohibited under Mormonism. Businesses are open on Saturday, but working on Saturday is prohibited by Judaism. Tattooing regulation is funded by taxes, but Islam prohibits tattoos. Regulation of hair cutting businesses is funded by taxes, but cutting hair is prohibited by Sikhism. Meat production and sales regulation is funded by taxes, but meat consumption is prohibited by Hinduism.

The empirical evidence demonstrates that availability of contraception correlates positively with better health outcomes for women and children such that the additional cost of covering contraception in health plans is more than offset by the overall health benefits. So government has an obligation to require that employer health insurance covers contraception. But some religions prohibit contraception, so isn't such a law a violation of the Free Exercise clause? The Catholic church, among others, argues that it is whenever the employer is affiliated with their church.

Notre Dame and Saint Mary's, to give two examples, are Catholic universities. Religious corporations, associations, educational institutions, or societies are exempt from the federal laws that EEOC enforces when it comes to the employment of individuals based on their particular religion. So can government require that Notre Dame and Saint Mary's subsidize health insurance that covers contraception?

No statement of faith is required to attend or teach at Notre Dame or Saint Mary's. There is no doctrinal control over what is taught in the classroom. Faculty, staff and students are encouraged to seek the truth in whatever form it takes, including that of scientific research.

Institutions like Notre Dame and Saint Mary's must make a choice. Either they commit to being modern universities and accept all that entails, or they commit to being primarily Catholic. They cannot plead special exemptions from generally applicable laws on the grounds that they are a religious institution on the one hand while placing no religious restrictions on the beliefs of employees and students on the other hand. Religious institutions have no free exercise right to impose their religious beliefs on their employees against the will of those employees when those institutions do not require their employees to profess or practice those religious beliefs in the first place.

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Criminal blasphemy laws

By Mathew Goldstein

Human Rights First’s 2011 report, Blasphemy Laws Exposed: The Consequences of Criminalizing “Defamation of Religions,” documents over 100 incidents from 18 countries. They include "Outbreaks of Mob Violence as a Direct Consequence of Blasphemy Laws" in their count of blasphemy law incidents. Their report cites over 40 incidents in Pakistan. Other countries with governments that are cited for abusing their power by making criticism of religious beliefs a punishable offense are Kuwait, Bangladesh, Egypt, Jordan, Iran, Malaysia, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Afghanistan, Tunisia, Ethiopia, Nigeria, India, Sri-Lanka, Palestinian Authority, and Algeria. There are also a few Christian majority countries cited for imposing fines: Austria fined a citizen for asserting that Islam's prophet Muhammed would today be considered a pedophile for marrying a six year old and Poland fined a citizen (a popular singer) for characterizing the authors of the bible as writing as if they were intoxicated by alcohol and marijuana.

One of the victims is an atheist. Walid Husayin was arrested in Oct 2010 for his criticisms of theism on Facebook and in his blog posts. He correctly observed that all religions are "a bunch of mind-blowing legends and a pile of nonsense that compete with each other in terms of stupidity". At its peak, Husayin's psuedonymous Arabic-language blog had more than 70,000 visitors. He also posted English language translations of his essays in the blog "Proud Atheist". His lawyer asserts "there are limits to freedom of speech" and that he faces a sentence of up to three years, although the law actually has a maximum penalty of life in prison. Public opinion in his home town appears to be universally against him, with some residents calling for his death. His own family expresses shame. Several months after his arrest, Husayin apologized for offending Muslims and characterized his Internet writings as " stupidity".

He remains in prison more than a year after his arrest with no trial and no end to his detention in sight. France, to it's credit, dared to go so far as to publically express "concern" after his arrest. Apparently worried about their own credibility with public opinion in the Islamic world, the United States and other countries have not commented publically about this incident. Will Western countries find their voice if he is convicted or if his detention continues indefinitely without trial?

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Why gravity is real but god is not

Christian Platt, in his recent article "Atheism: A Null Hypothesis on God", admits that "I have tried in vain over the years to understand atheism.". He then goes on to make various analogies for acquiring knowledge of various phenomena empirically, such as our seeing things from reflected light, and our verifying gravity by its effects, with his claims of witnessing god by god's reflections and effects. He, and other people like him, will continue to have difficulty understanding atheism because he is not understanding the difference between arguments based on empirical evidence and his arguments for god. This distinction is not difficult to grasp, and after understanding this distinction, he may come closer to his positive goal of "getting" atheism.

But first, lets dispell the unbalanced notion, which Christian Platt mistakenly promotes, that agnosticism is consistent with Christian theism but inconsistent with atheism. He appears to confuse uncertainity that god exists with faith that god exists, and since atheists don't have faith that god exists he concludes atheists are not agnostic. But all agnostics do not have faith that god exists. Not having perfect and direct knowledge that something exists does not equate with faith that it does exist.

Christian Platt is correct that everyone should be agnostic because humans are not omniscient. But he is incorrect to say that atheism precludes agnosticism. Richard Dawkins, for example, has acknowledged that he has such uncertainty. All atheists who are thoughtful acknowledge agnosticism. He also claims that atheism 'implies the same kind of certitude that a religious fundamentalist might claim is arguing they "know without any doubt that God exists."'. Some atheists may say that, but in my experience most atheists either say they don't believe and stop there, or say they believe there is no god, instead of saying they "know without any doubt". This notion of disbelief isn't difficult, and there is no good reason for intelligent people to have difficulty with this concept of disbelief in the singular context of god belief when everyone disbelieves lots of things. The real issue here isn't whether someone has any particular conviction, nor whether that conviction is definite or indefinite, nor whether the conviction is in the middle, or towards one end, of a true versus false spectrum line. The real issue is whether the belief, or disbelief, is well justified and held in proper proportion to the evidence.

Christian Platt then approvingly quotes John D. Caputo for his argument that God belief "insists, so that the rest of creation might exist.". This sounds like an argument that the universe must have a creator. That is a dubious assumption. For example, insects exist, but they do not have a creator. Insects exist because of abiogenesis and evolution. Some cosmologists think that the universe was spontaneously created, or self-created, and most cosmologists think that a self created or spontaneously created universe is consistent with all of the known laws of physics. While the notion of a creator is intuitive, we know from the very long list of non-intuitive and counter-intuitive conclusions found within modern knowledge, that intuition is not a good guide to, let alone a good source of, knowledge.

Christian Platt then declares: 'God is the impetus, the spark, the divine breath, the "inspiration," if you will from which all the rest of creation finds meaning.' I think this is silly, and I will try to explain why. Meaning is found in our experiencing and living our lives. Merely declaring otherwise does not constitute a justification for claiming otherwise, let alone constitute a compelling argument for a god. The notion of creation finding meaning makes no sense. There is no meaning to be had outside the context of minds capable of contemplating the concept, and all such minds that are known to exist reside in physical brains that are attached to physical bodies of animals. Saying that "creation finds" a concept or sentiment, such as meaning, is a category error. This is poetic language, but evidence and argument is not found in poetry. If it were then we would go to poets instead of medical doctors for our annual medical health checks.

Christian Platt then argues that God is found "conspiring with the physical world to create something that makes sense." Here is where he indulges the flawed analogy with seeing an object indirectly as "the result of the interaction between the light and the observed object.". Light is a physical entity that is measurable, it has amplitude and wavelength, it is empirically observed and evidenced. This is very different from the assertion about the vague concepts "something that makes sense" and "conspiring". This analogy doesn't work at all, since the foundation of our knowledge in the second case is precisely the empirical evidence that is completely absent in the first case.

Christian Platt then tries to argue that empirical evidence is not necessary because in the past we didn't know about atomic particles, or dark matter. He appears to be confusing what we know, a.k.a. ontology, with how we know, a.k.a. epistemology. It would be nice if we could just eliminate the effort and time needed to acquire knowledge and magically skip to having knowledge through some unspecified direct mechanism to this particular truth claim (god). However, such magical and instant capability to directly possess knowledge has not demonstrated much success as a non-empirical, alternative method for acquiring knowledge. There is a time sequence constraint here that applies to everyone. Time travels in a single direction from past to present to future. Before we can have knowledge about what is true we must first obtain the evidence to justify the conclusion that it is true. The latter achievement precedes the former achievement in time, we cannot properly leap directly to a conclusion without the evidence needed to justify the conclusion.

Christian Platt cites gravity a second time, saying it 'cannot be directly observed: only measured as it affects other objects. It's not a "thing" that can be pinned down.'. Gravity is due to curvature in space-time, and space-time curvature is a thing that can be, and is, predicted and indirectly measured. It is true that all empirical measurements and observations and knowledge can be said to be indirectly acquired. But the critical and essential attribute of evidence is that it is repeatedly measureable and observable, attributes that are entirely missing from poetic "evidences", if we can call them that, for god. Even if it is true that everything that is empirically evidenced is evidenced indirectly, it doesn't follow that everything that is argued for indirectly is therefore also properly evidenced.

Christian Platt then asserts "to say that even science is entirely constrained by the scientific method is to ignore the creative imagination required to stretch the boundaries, to imagine what might be, beyond what is now understood to be. It's this kind of imagination that pushes humanity to create new tools that have allowed us to observe things we never knew existed before.". The notion that atheists define the scientific method so narrowly as to preclude a role for imagination is false. Imagination, when married with empiricism, can be an important contributor to getting productive ideas. But imagination is no substitute for grounding existence claims in empirical evidence. Undiscplined imagination unfettered by empiricism has been a path to much fictional fantasy falsely claiming to be knowledge. There is excellent reason to think that imagination by itself is a source of fiction only.

Christian Platt then argues "making room for those possibilities, seem, to me, to be at the heart of science as much as the rigorous processes defined by the scientific method.". If by "those possibilities" he means all of the possibilities that have no empirical support then the fact is that the scientific method does not endorse, and cannot arbitrarily endorse, any such possibilities. But the issue here is not "scientific method". The issue is the need for empirical evidence in support of existence claims to justify the corresponding existence beliefs.

The article concludes with this comment: "However, to leap from that to certitude of God's non-existence is to violate the principles of the scientific method, isn't it?". Explicit atheism is not a conclusion of science. It is a belief based on an assessment that the overall direction and weight of the available evidence favors the conclusion that there are no non-material actors with non-material super intelligent minds that created the universe or that take some special interest in humans or that intervene, monitor, or oversee human affairs on earth, nor that humans continue to live forever as material or non-material entities after they die under circumstances dictated by such a god, nor anything of this sort. Instead, the available evidences best fits the conclusion that all god stories are human created fictions that have no relationship to anything that is true.

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The incomprehensible, everything good, god

When I wrote, in my previous post, that theists argue for irreducible complexity in biology as evidence for god, I was not (of course) referring to all theists. So what about a god that is not to be found in biology, chemistry, or physics? Victor Udoewa, in his recent Huffington article titled "Does Science Make Belief in God Obsolete?", wrote "it is clear that science may make belief in a certain concept of God obsolete. But it is a hard task to make belief in every concept of God obsolete." Seeking funding from The Templeton Foundation to promote his timeless and undefeatable version of theism, he asks: "What if there were concepts of God that had something to offer or add to the fulfilled? What if we had concepts of God based on creativity? On a positive definition of incomprehensible peace? On imaginative joy? On creative, problem-solving love?"

The god that is creativity, peace, joy, imagination, love, and other such general and positive capabilities, outcomes, feelings, and sentiments is a favorite gambit of liberal theists. Its strength is its weakness, in equal measure. There can be no evidence against this god nor can there be any evidence for this god. This god is claimed to be real but is defined as a fantasy. And that is why no one has any proper justification to believe in this god. Evidence is the proper foundation to justify beliefs about what is true or false regarding the reality of entities that are to be worshipped or otherwise asserted to really exist. Conservatives want evidence, but they don't respect evidence that contradicts their theism, so they tend to manufacture their own, alternative world "evidence". Liberals want to follow the real evidence, but they don't want the evidence to contradict their theism, so they tend to place their cherished theism out of harms way by defining their god to be beyond the reach of any possible evidence. Either way, it's the same failure, they are both failing to put the evidence first and follow it.

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V-ATPase proton pump and biological complexity

Vacuolar-type H+-ATPase (V-ATPase) is a highly conserved evolutionarily ancient enzyme. A proton pump is an integral membrane protein that is capable of moving protons across a cell membrane, mitochondrion, or other organelle. The V-ATPase proton pump helps maintain the proper acidity of compartments within the cell. The pump has a ring that is made up of a total of six copies of two different proteins, but in fungi a third type of protein has been incorporated into the complex. There are many molecular machines like this in cells. Theists assert that these molecular machines are irreducibly complex and therefore must have been created by a god (a.k.a. Intelligent Designer). How could a ring that consists of three different proteins be created without an Intelligent Designer?

A team of scientists from the University of Chicago and the University of Oregon worked out an answer: "It's counterintuitive but simple: complexity increased because protein functions were lost, not gained," The lead author of the study, Dr. Thornton said. "Just as in society, complexity increases when individuals and institutions forget how to be generalists and come to depend on specialists with increasingly narrow capacities."

Hundreds of millions years ago the proton pump ring consisted of two proteins, similar to those found in animals today. However, these older versions of the protein were more versatile, their functionality was broader than the equivelant proteins seen today so they could substitute for each other in the ring. A gene coding for one of the subunits of the older two-protein ring was duplicated, and the daughter genes then diverged on their own evolutionary paths. The functions of the ancestral proteins were partitioned among the duplicate copies, and the increase in complexity was due to complementary loss of ancestral functions rather than gaining new ones. In other words, since the proteins were now assembled by different genes, the proteins diverged, becoming more specialized.

"The mechanisms for this increase in complexity are incredibly simple, common occurrences," Thornton said. "Gene duplications happen frequently in cells, and it's easy for errors in copying to DNA to knock out a protein's ability to interact with certain partners. It's not as if evolution needed to happen upon some special combination of 100 mutations that created some complicated new function.". Thornton proposes that the accumulation of simple, degenerative changes over long periods of times could have created many of the complex molecular machines present in organisms today. Such a mechanism argues against the intelligent design concept of "irreducible complexity," the claim that molecular machines are too complicated to have formed stepwise through evolution. "I expect that when more studies like this are done, a similar dynamic will be observed for the evolution of many molecular complexes," Thornton said. "These really aren't like precision-engineered machines at all," he added. "They're groups of molecules that happen to stick to each other, cobbled together during evolution by tinkering, degradation, and good luck, and preserved because they helped our ancestors to survive."

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Free will and fine tuning

There is good reason to think that we do not have free will and that the fundamental constants of physics are not fine tuned. Some people defend theism on the grounds that both phenomena are evidence that naturalism is insufficient to describe or explain the universe. So the evidence that both are false assumptions has some significance in the debate over whether or not we should believe that there are no gods.

I will utilize biologist Jerry Coyne's definition of free will: When faced with two or more alternatives, it's your ability to freely and consciously choose one, either on the spot or after some deliberation. A practical test of free will would be this: If you were put in the same position twice — if the tape of your life could be rewound to the exact moment when you made a decision, with every circumstance leading up to that moment the same and all the molecules in the universe aligned in the same way — you could have chosen differently.

If we had free will then we would be self-aware of the action we have selected before we have irreversibly committed to that action. If our choices are unconscious, having been determined well before the moment we think we've made them, then we don't have free will in any meaningful sense. Scans of brain activity favor the latter scenario. First we irreversibly commit to an action and we become aware of which action we are taking only after the decision was made. For example, brain scans show that when a subject "decides" to push a button on the left or right side of a computer, the choice can be predicted by brain activity before the subject is consciously aware of having made it. We then convince ourselves post-hoc that we decided on our action after conscious deliberation. Thus, our feeling that we consciously choose may be a deeply ingrained and automatic self-deception, a trick our mind plays on us.

In his new book "Who's in Charge: Free Will and the Science of the Brain", neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga explains how the right brain hemisphere is driven by the senses and acts on an immediate, subconscious level. The left brain hemisphere applies a conscious after-the-fact reasoning that attempts to make sense of the actions that the subconscious mind has already taken. The left-brain's "interpreter module" is always at work inventing theories to "explain" what the right half of the brain has already "decided" on the basis of reflexive subconscious instinct.

Our intuition that we have free will is very strong. The concept of free will is fundamental to the way people assign meaning to their lives and is perceived as continuously being in play except when we are sleeping. But from a biological perspective, conscious self-awareness of actions came later in the history of life. Life originally selected among alternative available actions without self-awareness. So it makes sense that animals which later acquired conscious self-awareness still tend to make decisions prior to being self-aware of those decisions.

The premise of the fine-tuned universe assertion is that a small change in several of the dimensionless fundamental physical constants would result in a universe that cannot support life. The current standard model of particle physics has 25 freely adjustable parameters. However, the standard model is not mathematically self-consistent under certain conditions, so most physicists believe that it is incomplete. In some candidate replacement theories, the actual number of independent physical constants may be as small as 1. But, for the sake of argument, let's accept that there are 25 and that a small change to any single one of these constants makes the universe radically different.

Fine tuning can be cited as evidence for an intelligently designed universe only if the probability that the universe would be able to support life is tiny over the entire spectrum of all possible combinations of all possible values of all the constants. Even if the fine-tuning premise were true, there is theoretical evidence for a multiverse which provides a naturalistic explanation for fine-tuning. But is the premise true? Varying the value of just one constant while leaving all of the other values at their actual values may result in no other universe that can support life. Yet varying the values of all 25 constants simultaneously may result in many universes that can support life. The former result can thus be misleading, because the latter result, if true, would outnumber, and thus defeat, the former result.

Simulating universes while simultaneously varying the values of all 25 constants may be computationally very difficult, but several attempts have been made with a subset. Victor Stenger has simulated different universes in which four fundamental parameters are varied. He found that long-lived stars could exist over a wide parameter range. Fred Adams has done a similar study to Stenger, investigating the structure of stars in universes with different values of the gravitational constant, the fine-structure constant, and a nuclear reaction rate parameter. His study suggests that roughly 25% of this parameter space allows stars to exist.

So the free-will and fine tuning arguments may both be wrong. Certainly, both arguments have been premature in the sense that neither phenomena has been established to be true by the evidence. It is only very recently that we have acquired the tools to start to tackle the question of whether these two premises are true. The early results suggest both premises are false.

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Theists' defense against atheism and human invention fails

Sean McDowell and Jonathan Marrow wrote a book "Is God Just a Human Invention? And Seventeen Other Questions Raised by the New Atheists", published in August 2010, that claims to defeat the arguments for atheism and show that Christian theism is true. I have not read the book, instead I recently read a book review. Sometimes, reading a favorable book review is enough to conclude that the book fails to achieve its claimed objective. Why and how does this book fail to make a convincing argument against atheism, contrary to the enthusiastic book reviewer's assertions that the book succeeds? Let's take a look at some of the arguments from the book as cited by the book reviewer.

All people, including atheists, have faith in some things, therefore atheist attacks against religious faith are said to be mistaken. One trusts the unfamiliar pilot of a plane one boards; one has faith that the electrician properly wires your house; one trusts the cook at the restaurant where one eats, etc. The problem with this argument is that it is confusing our day to day faith in the behavior, skills, and good will of other people with faith in factual claims made by religions. It doesn't follow that because we trust pilots to not try to kill their passengers that we are justified in trusting that the angel Moroni communicated the wisdom of God to Joseph Smith as asserted by the book of Mormon.

Atheists are then accused of having blind faith in the ideas that the universe came into existence from nothing, that life emerged from non-life, and the human mind arose from mere matter. None of this is true. Atheists follow the opinions of the experts in cosmology, biology, and neurology: Cosmologists, Biologists, and Neuroscientists. These are the people who have devoted their time and efforts to studying and pursuing the evidence about our universe, life, and brains, including their origins. The evidence suggests that our universe contains a near balance of negative and positive energy consistent with its emerging from an unstable, initial "nothing". Nothing is in quotes here because the evidence suggests that absolute nothingness could be impossible, it exists in the minds of theologians but has no evidenced reality. The evidence suggests that the brain is a completely materialistic entity that is the sole source, together with its supporting body, of our minds. The evidence suggests that life emerged from chemistry and is entirely a chemical and physical process. These are, in fact, the conclusions favored by the available evidence. I, and most other atheists, are absolutely convinced that these are the conclusions that are the best fit with the evidence.

The authors of the book are then quoted as asserting "there is no inherent conflict between Christianity and science”. As evidence for this it is noted that most of the early pioneering scientists were theists. However, time passes and more evidence is accumulated. Today, more scientists are atheists than a hundred years ago. People hold inconsistent beliefs, so the fact that there are many people who hold two beliefs is not sufficient to establish that both beliefs are not in conflict.

The authors claim naturalism “ultimately undermines any basis for confidence” in nature’s order and the powers of reason. It is claimed that under a naturalistic worldview, there’s no reason to trust our reason or our senses; they were merely the result of blind Darwinian accidents. Again, this is false. Our reason and senses are effective precisely because they competitively evolved. To the extent animal reasoning and senses were less trustworthy they were out competed by animals whose reasoning and senses were more trustworthy. The process of evolution is thus not only accidental, it is also directional, it necessarily follows a path that "puts us in touch with reality", because the outcome is shaped by competition for survival. A tendency to walk over cliffs is not an outcome favored by evolution.

The authors defend the concept of miracles, “if a transcendent God exists, then it seems eminently possible that He has acted in the universe”. This if x then y is possible logic is sensible here. But we could just as logically say if not x then not y. While the authors seem to be impressed by the standard philosophical arguments for God, those arguments fail by the only criteria that counts, they don't reach conclusions by following the overall weight of the overall evidence. So the authors are mistaken to consider those various traditional arguments for god to be convincing. Arguing from one possibility to another possibility only makes sense when the evidence favors the first possibility.

The authors claim that Hume mistakenly presumes to know the uniformity of human experience prior to considering the evidence. Indeed, we should always start with the evidences. So do the available evidences favor the conclusion that the universe consistently follows a set of laws? Yes, very much so. Pieces of icebergs break off and fall down into the ocean, but equivalent amounts of ice don't jump up and attach itself to the side of the iceberg. Hume was correct regarding this "presumption" of his. Time has a clear direction from past to future because our universe unfolds uniformly according to fixed laws.

The authors then attack Hume’s argument that one should be skeptical about the improbable. “But surely it is perfectly reasonable to believe that an improbable event can occasionally occur”. No, that is not a reasonable conclusion for any particular imaginable event. Again, this depends on the evidence. We know that Royal Flushes in poker are both improbable and an occasional occurrence, while a human language talking donkey is not only improbable, but physically impossible and thus a never occurred fiction. Believing in any such tall tale events that violate the evidences regarding what is possible, a.k.a. a miracle, is, by definition, unreasonable.

The authors claim that there is not good evidence for macroevolution (changes from one species into another different species), only good evidence for microevolution (small changes within a kind). This is false. The evidence for evolution transcends this micro/macro distinction and is strong for both. Macroevolution is also an unavoidable logical consequence of microevolution.

The authors claim that a purely material reality cannot produce consciousness. Again, this is contrary to the evidence. The evidence that we have favors the conclusion that consciousness is an emergent property of purely material brains. Near death experiences are like dreams, we have lots of evidence that they are fictions, they reflect activity internal to the brain, not what it is true beyond the confines of the person. Intention and free will are not sufficient evidence for consciousness being immaterial. We literally don't have evidence that free will is anything more than an illusion, or that if it is in any sense real, that it is in that sense also non-material.

The authors note that atheism lacks an objective and perfect ground to issue objective moral commandments as well as the means to hold all moral lawbreakers to an account. But neither does theism. The authors claim that “In the theistic view, objective moral laws are grounded in the reality of a Moral Lawgiver." That is a circular argument, it fails to establish what are objective moral laws, or how that is determined. Citing the Christian (or Hebrew or Islamic, etc.) bible as the guide for "Morality" is untenable. Those documents are more distant from being a decent, let alone perfect, guide to moral behavior, or laws, than most atheists could write themselves. Furthermore, it is rather obvious that the content of these documents reflect the state of knowledge and attitudes of the people of the place and time where they originated. Again, the evidence strongly favors the conclusion that the only Lawgivers behind these documents are people.

The book reviewer concludes "They offer several of the leading arguments for Christian theism while toppling some of the most belligerent of the objections promoted by the New Atheists. They have written, with abundant care, to attain a thoroughness that is not often established in popular books. The wisdom and excellence with which each chapter is written makes this a crucial volume for the budding apologist’s library."

The arguments for Christian theism, and more generally for religious theisms, in this book, and in the many similar arguments found in other such books, are often seriously flawed, in conflict with the available evidence, and very weak overall. That books like these are popular is an indication that more debate regarding religious beliefs is needed. There is nothing belligerent, or impolite, or counter-productive, in arguing that everyone should believe in macroevolution, in abiogenesis, in global warming, in atheism, and generally in that set of conclusions which are best supported by the available evidence.

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Enlighten the Vote PAC

Secularists have several civil rights groups with lawyers such as the Freedom from Religion Foundation and American Atheists. Secularists have a lobbying group, the Secular Coalition for America. Yet there is still only one elected official in the Congress who self-identifies as a non-theist. We need something more, but this something more that we need is not an atheist political party. We need a well funded PAC similar to EMILY's List.

There is such a PAC, it is called Enlighten the Vote, but unfortunately it appears that is not well funded. If the Enlighten the Vote PAC were better funded, secularists could pursue a three-pronged strategy to elect atheists: recruiting and funding viable atheist candidates; helping them build and run effective campaign organizations; and mobilizing secular voters to help elect progressive candidates across the nation. We could work within the context of existing progressive political parties, including the Democratic party, for the targeted and limited goal of secularist government, much like the Secular Coalition for America already does, but without the 501(c)4 restrictions on partisan political activities.

As a group, atheists don't have a common, broad, governing agenda needed for a political party. For example, I disagree with the National Atheist Party's support for import tariffs. My understanding is that most economists disfavor import tariffs because the available empirical evidence (and also economic theory) is that by restricting trade such tariffs result in a net loss in most contexts. I don't think atheists should be taking a position on import tariffs under the banner of atheism because economic policy is too far removed from the issues related to the existence of gods.

More generally, I think everyone should, insofar as it is currently possible, strive to anchor their policy positions in the available empirical evidence. One of the biggest problems I have with the Republican party is that their supporters tend to favor policies that directly contradict lots of available, strong evidence on issues such as global warming, evolution and sex and history education, and the like. Republicans like to say that the Obama Administration's stimulus program "failed" despite the fact that the empirical evidence, when evaluated by the experts, appears to better fit the conclusion that the stimulus program reduced the strength of the recession. It is difficult to trust any political party or movement that prides itself in exhibiting a selective and shameless unwillingness to follow or respect or understand the overall weight of the evidence. Ideology overtaking reason isn't a recipe for good governing or national achievement and success.

What many secularists as a group have in common is an ethical civil rights agenda for secular government that opposes government favoring religious ideologies over more generally applicable principles and opposes government privileging religious institutions over non-religious institutions. Accordingly, the Enlighten the Vote PAC that seeks to elect self-identified atheists who favor ethical secular governing with equality before the law for all, and that could supplement the work of the non-partisan Congressional lobbying group Secular Coalition for America, appears to me to be worthy of our support (despite their odd practice of capitalizing the word atheist as if it were a proper noun).

The specifics of the agenda varies over time. Examples of current policy issues which the Secular Coalition for America lobbies Congress include discrimination against atheists in the military, laws allowing pharmacists to deny emergency contraception access, exemptions for so-called faith-healing from medical neglect liability, safety exemptions for religious child care centers, theological restrictions imposed on civil marriage, government support of organizations that deny membership to non-theists such as Boy Scouts, broad exemptions for religious groups from local zoning restrictions (RLUIPA), religious control over sex education, "Under God" in the Pledge, government funding of religious schools, taxpayer subsidized housing for clergy, and state school curricula that mislead children for religious reasons.

There are naysayers who advocate for fear on behalf of silence. They say that the religious right is big, and strong, and mean. The religious right wants us to challenge them so that they can target us for defeat. Therefore, anyone who publicly takes any unpopular position in opposition to the religious right is playing into the religious right's hands by provoking them. The best strategy is to be intimidated into silence.

It is logical, and therefore probably true, that some people want their political opponents to be afraid of them with the goal of intimidating their opponents into silence. Insofar as we appease a strategy of promoting intolerance and bigotry against atheists by agreeing to be intimidated into silence by our political opponents we are arguably guilty of encouraging such a strategy on their part. But this is not primarily about what our opponents want or about their tactics, this is not primarily about what is currently popular and unpopular, this is first and foremost about the merit of alternative government policies and trying to realize the better policies on the basis of merit. We identify and speak out on behalf of some policies and against other policies because those policies are better or worse than the alternatives, not because those policies are currently more popular or unpopular. We are all better off if our conversations on policies are open and held on the basis of the policy merit, not on the basis of insisting on a-priori self-censorship that is rationalized by someone's measure of relative size of, and reasons to fear, the opposition. Silence because of fear of the opposition isn't a policy argument with any substance, its a recipe for rewarding the promotion of intolerance as a political tactic. My advice to everyone is to avoid being self-deceived by anyone claiming it is a sophisticated and wise strategy to refuse to advocate for good policies merely because those policies currently face a misdirected, strong opposition.

I anticipate that some people may object to the focus on electing atheists. Why not focus on electing secularists more generally? Why not use the more inclusive term "non-theist"? We, all of us secularists, not just atheists, need to challenge the anti-atheist prejudice directly and head on because it is in the self-interest of secularism to defeat the fear of atheism. The fear of atheism and prejudice against atheists is one of the major obstacles to the popularity of secularism more generally. We can't defeat that association by trying to divorce secularism from atheism even though they are not the same because secularism necessarily tolerates atheism and therefore, for that reason alone, anti-atheist bigots will not accept secularism. EMILY's list is more effective, not less effective, by focusing on electing women rather than focusing on electing people of any gender who support abortion, because they recognize that opposition to legal abortions and under-representation of women as policymakers in government are mutually re-enforcing problems.

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