"God is Back"...NOT

The same two who predicted that 2006 and 2008 would mark the end for Democrats are now promising that religion is coming back in a big way.

They were wrong then. They're wrong now. Spectacularly wrong. It's almost comical.

That isn't to say, as I mentioned yesterday, that religion is dying or dead yet, because I think that's hasty. Even Denmark/Sweden are surprising in their identification with religion even without personal belief in it, so I think that at least a "husk" of religion will linger. However, their "evidence" of a resurgence of religion is completely vacuous.

Existential fallacies

The other night I was watching basketball and drinking beer with a smart theist friend of mine. He knows I'm an atheist and we enjoy banter on philosophy and religion. When the topic moved to existentialism, and we discussed the meaning and value of human life, I pointed out that what people believed about the value of their life became, it seemed, the actual value of their life. If theists believe that God has a plan for their life, it doesn't matter that they have no idea what it is, or whether or not God values them more highly than anyone around them, that is enough to suffice to convince them their lives are valuable. I also mentioned the postmodern view that man is free to create his own meaning and value in life.

His response was something along the lines of, "But this isn't ultimately meaningful." I asked him if his love for his wife was ultimately meaningful. He replied, "Perhaps not, but love itself is ultimate." The other night when I was discussing the problem of evil with a room full of Christians, another fellow made this same fact-value error (and, maybe, a fallacy of composition) in stating, "Your emotions are just atoms!" I pointed out to him that it would grieve him very much if I slung some atoms of lead into his body, although they were "just atoms"...

It seems that the terms "ultimate" and "absolute" are often misused in religious apologetics, in particular, as well as complaints that materialism logically necessitates a lack of value. The informal fallacy that is often committed is equivocating on the fact-value distinction between something being meaningful or valuable versus its being everlasting or infinite in terms of duration. Mysteriously, there is also some value assumed to be intrinsic to things that are immaterial, or at least are not composed only of material substances. I have two good quotes:

1) Chris Hallquist, reviewing Craig's Reasonable Faith, writes:

The first subheading reads "No Ultimate Meaning Without Immortality and God." The immortality part has something like an argument:

If each individual person passes out of existence when he dies, then what ultimate meaning can be given to his life? Does it really matter whether he existed at all? It might be said that his life was important because it influenced others or affected the course of history. But this only shows a relative significance to his life, not an ultimate significance. His life may be important relative to certain other events, but what is the ultimate significance of any of those events? If all the events are meaningless, then what can be the ultimate meaning of influencing any of them. Ultimately it makes no difference.[11]

Craig seems to be doing one of two possible things here. On the one hand, he seems to be equivocating between two different senses of the word "ultimate"--namely between "what eventually happens to a thing" and "what really matters." Alternatively, he seems to be making an argument containing the hidden premise that the value of a thing depends entirely upon what eventually happens to that thing. If the former, Craig is committing a classic informal fallacy; if the latter, he is making an unsupported and dubious assumption. The latter implies an infinite regress: If each moment is given meaning only by the next, then the next moment must be given meaning by the moment after it, and so on ad infinitum.

2) Gene Witmer, talking about presuppositionalism as an apologetic method, writes (p.10):

Note, incidentally, the constant use of "absolute." This is one of those terms philosophically naive people love to throw around. It's very, very unclear what it means. Sometimes it is used just for emphasis "Is this a table? Yes. Yes, absolutely!" Sometimes it is used to mean "unqualified", as in "absolutely no exceptions!" But neither of these fit the way it's used here, and I venture to say that it really doesn't mean anything clear at all. [more on PS here and here]

I recognize how long it has taken me to see the non sequitur between saying that something lasts forever versus saying that this property automatically renders a thing with value, or the lack of this property nullifies the value of a thing. As I read more about meaning and value in life I hope to see more things like this more clearly.

Neat article about the lack of religion in Denmark and Sweden

The NYT has an article about the lack of religion in Denmark and Sweden that may surprise and inform you. It is something to think about in considering the atheism/non-religion statistics of the US.

Problems with atheism

I mentioned this new blog I'd found the other day, and he has a post up that reminded me of my own complaints about atheism conceptualized as a movement and as a "way" of thinking about religion.

Will religion continue to maintain a social following, even if science progresses? Probably. I think atheists who predict the demise of religion are far too hasty, and things change in religion less than we think because of scientific progress. Here's more.

Blatant politics

Sometimes I see that liberals (like me) are still talking too much about the Bush-Cheney years, especially when Dick pops his head out of a hole to sling mud at Obama. But maybe we need to remember. This is an Olbermann video from January 2009 that summarizes the Bush failures: 8 years in 8 minutes. Also see this.

Parent perceptions and teenage drinking

I read about a project by one of the Intel Society for Science contest winners in the NYT and it reminded me of a conversation I had last year with a drugs and alcohol expert. Ms. Jurman's research pointed out that when teenagers learn that their parent(s) crossed certain boundaries, it emboldened them to cross the same boundaries. I remember having a conversation with Jeff Wolfsberg last year about the myth of European culture having a dampening effect on teen alcohol abuse. Jeff shot that idea down, saying that the permissivity of European and Latin American cultures towards alcohol actually seemed to create more young alcoholics than in America, although he admitted we have a wider-spread problem with binge-drinking during college.

Jeff does support teaching teens preparing to leave for college how to drink (and how not to) using tips like these:

1. Never drink just for the sake of drinking, as a game or contest, or with the aim of getting drunk or forgetting troubles.
2. Don't drink on an empty stomach. Eat both before and while drinking.
3. Pace yourself. Until you are familiar with your own reactions to alcohol, don't consume more than one drink per hour. One drink can be a 12-ounce can or bottle of beer, a 4-ounce glass of wine, or 1 ounce of liquor in a mixed drink.
4. Remember that carbonated drinks get alcohol into the bloodstream faster.
   

Know when to say "when." Monitor your own feelings. Be wary of any changes in mood or perceptions.

I think it's difficult for reality-bound parents to ignore the fact that their children will learn how to use alcohol from them first, and then from culture if their parents don't teach them by example. I fully intend to drink responsibly around my child(ren) and show them by example how to ask others to drive and plan ahead and know your own limits. I think this is a far more effective teaching tool than scaring or controlling them into total abstinence (even if you could) during high school, after which, in college, they may find themselves passed out in a ditch in the first week. I guess one option is to ship your kids off to some "camp" to try to scare/train them off experiencing things.

I know I could've benefitted more from positive role models involving alcohol use, and I blame this absence partly for how I got so wild in high school. (Partly.) I ended up being told by AA people that I was an alcoholic (complete BS). By the way, AA sucks as a form of "treatment" and doctors are now realizing that there is no such thing as a binary solution for all people who abuse alcohol.

So while Ms. Jurman's findings indicate more teens will try alcohol if their parents did, it doesn't talk much about whether or not these teens use alcohol more responsibly than their peers if taught by example.

Deep thoughts

I have a few days off and found myself immersed in deep thoughts. I think I'll join a gym. It would be healthier for me. Three heavy things have happened today.

First, I'm reading about existentialism (two books). My brain and soul started hurting after about 30 minutes of the first book, especially the excerpts from Tolstoy's Confession. Then I read Chris Hallquist's explication on why W.L. Craig is wrong about atheism entailing a life of absurdity. I can see now I need to go deeper with all this. It's what I need now.

Second, a friend of mine wrote a post on atheistic metaethics that is delicious. He even linked to a wonderful paper that completely destroys the theistic "response" to the Euthyphro Dilemma that claims God's nature "grounds" morality.

Third, I found a new site by an atheist who reminds me a lot of myself, (he even uses the Stephen Roberts quote in his header image!) and has published an e-book on Alonzo Fyfe's desire utilitarianism.

My head hurts but it's satisfying to think deeply. And freely.

Starting with skepticism

An old friend of mine makes an argument for taking a critical approach to religious claims from the start which he calls the outsider test for faith (OTF):

The outsider test is simply a challenge to test one’s own religious faith with the presumption of skepticism, as an outsider. It calls upon believers to "Test or examine your religious beliefs as if you were outsiders with the same presumption of skepticism you use to test or examine other religious beliefs." Its presumption is that when examining any set of religious beliefs skepticism is warranted, since the odds are good that the particular set of religious beliefs you have adopted is wrong.

This is restating, in formal language and with much support, a web meme that began with a quote by Steven F. Roberts:

"I contend we are both atheists, I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours." -- Stephen F. Roberts

Sometimes something is said like this by Dawkins or Hitchens or Harris: "We're both atheists about Zeus and Thor and almost all of the other gods who have ever existed. I just go one god further than you do."

I also like this math-based permutation of the same idea:

True by sheer force of numbers: the number of gods I reject is approximately equal to the number of gods you don't believe in. Here's the mathematics for the hard-of-thinking: x ≅ x+1, for sufficiently large x. Here x is the number of gods you don't believe in, which has been measured and found to be precisely a metric shitload. I just reject one more.

Of course, there are some criticisms of these sentiments, and I don't mind to address their major complaints.

First, I agree that by saying, "Because you reject a great many claims in religions other than yours, you must reject the claims in yours, or all claims in all religions," is a non sequitur. But I don't even think that's the point. I think the point is that in order to reject claims in other religions, you adopt a certain level of scrutiny and critical thinking towards those claims. You rely solely on the evidence and the logic. The atheist is saying to you, "I think you have a double standard, in that you aren't as critical of the claims in your own religion as you are towards other religions (and even towards atheism)."

Second, I agree that to call someone an "atheist towards god X but not god Y" may be semantically wrong, although I think the point is trivial. Perhaps it is like saying, "You are a vegetarian towards beef but not towards chicken." Either you're a vegetarian or not, right? And so the semantic argument is that you can't call Christians "atheists" towards other gods because the word atheist means, literally, "without [a] god" and not "without this one particular god"...

So what atheists should instead say, apparently, is something like, "If you are as skeptical towards religious claims in your own religion as you are towards others, you'd probably find they don't merit your belief and you'd abandon your own religion entirely in the same way you reject other religions."

The other night I went out and drank with, literally, a room full of Christians and talked about the problem of evil. I was the only non-theist in a room of about 20 theists. It went well, I think...for me. After all, I did have on my side basically the most powerful and irrefutable argument against the existence of an all-good and all-powerful being ever. Anyway, near the end of the night a guy basically told me to "roll the dice" on a god. I asked him why he thought I hadn't already tried that, then told him, briefly, why I thought Pascal's Wager sucked.

Pascal's Wager intersects with the "OTF" concept for the reason that you can't place a "safe bet" when it comes to religion. It's always possible, if you don't use the route of skepticism, for a given religion to be correct about some claim about what's required for salvation or to avoid damnation. But if you do use the route of skepticism, then you will end up withholding belief in all religions because of the paucity of the evidence to substantiate such extraordinary claims.

Another problem is that you can't simultaneously believe in/follow/meet the requirements of all the religions simultaneously. Also, you can't believe in something just because you think of it as a cost-benefit ratio. Your belief won't be authentic. I've trod this ground before. There are other flaws with Pascal's Wager, of course, and other responses to it.

Long story short, skepticism towards religion makes sense.

Comment on changes in American religious landscape

From Andrew Sullivan writing in the UK TimesOnline:

American Christianity may be stronger in some pockets, but it is dumber too. In the end, in the free market-place of ideas and beliefs, that will count.

It already has.

Statistical feelings about Bible

The new GSS data (H/T: 538) for 2008 is released on a preliminary basis, and since I organized some "no religion" statistics a little while back I thought I'd throw this one in: about 1 in 5 of us don't take the Bible seriously as God's book.

16.2% outright call it a book of "fables, legends, history, and moral precepts written by men" while 1.2% say "other" and 1.6% "don't know". It's a good sign, and let's keep hoping that number increases with time.

Speaking of stasis

The statistics for adults who are scientifically illiterate haven't changed much since I commented on them in 2007:

* Only 53% of adults know how long it takes for the Earth to revolve around the Sun.
* Only 59% of adults know that the earliest humans and dinosaurs did not live at the same time.
* Only 47% of adults can roughly approximate the percent of the Earth's surface that is covered with water.*
* Only 21% of adults answered all three questions correctly.

Compare that to the numbers from 2006, reported as the % answered correctly (2006 SE, Table 7-10):

1. The center of the Earth is very hot. (True) 78
2. All radioactivity is man-made. (False) 73
3. It is the father’s gene that decides whether the baby is a boy or a girl. (True) 62
4. Lasers work by focusing sound waves. (False) 42
5. Electrons are smaller than atoms. (True) 45
6. Antibiotics kill viruses as well as bacteria. (False) 54
7. The universe began with a huge explosion. (True) 35
8. The continents have been moving their location for millions of years and will continue to move. (True) 77
9. Human beings are developed from earlier species of animals. (True) 44
10. Does the Earth go around the Sun, or does the Sun go around the Earth? (Earth around the Sun) 71

This isn't high-minded snobbery. This is basic shit about the world around you. This is also why the US is beginning to suffer greatly as the scientific prowess of foreign nations increases and our native scientists, though superior at what they do, dwindle in number with each passing year.

...the more things stay the same

Although things change, many of the dialogs I've had with theists via email, facebook, blogging, etc., all still sound a lot like a dialog between Spinoza (a sort of pantheist/deist) and Burgh (a fervent young Catholic) from over 330 years ago!

Check it out, thanks to Babinski: here.

The nerve!

How dare scientists present...science!

"There's nothing balanced here. It's completely, 100 percent evolution-based," said DeWitt, a professor of biology.

That's damn straight! Imagine, at the Museum of Natural History, all you find is...naturalism! No supernatural explanations at all!

And at this university at which this "professor" does his "teaching," I bet you won't find balance about the possibility that Christianity is a fraud either!

"We come every year, because I don't hold anything back from the students."

Except facts.

Near the end of the "Evolution Trail," the class showed no signs of being swayed by the polished, enthusiastic presentation of Darwin's theory. They were surprised, though, by the bronze statue of man's earliest mammalian ancestor.

"A rat?" exclaimed Amanda Runions, a 21-year-old biochemistry major, when she saw the model of a morganucodon, a rodent-like ancient mammal that curators have dubbed Grandma Morgie. "All this hype for a rat? You're expecting, like, at least an ape."

Yeah, cause, like, you'd think that apes aren't even related to rats by evolution, like, at Liberty U.

Food for thought

Stanley Fish, NYT, 3/8:

Whereas in other theories, the achieving of a better life for all requires a measure of state intervention, in the polemics of neoliberalism (elaborated by Milton Friedman and Friedrich von Hayek and put into practice by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher), state interventions — governmental policies of social engineering — are “presented as the problem rather than the solution” (Chris Harman, “Theorising Neoliberalism,” International Socialism Journal, December 2007).

The solution is the privatization of everything (hence the slogan “let’s get governments off our backs”), which would include social security, health care, K-12 education, the ownership and maintenance of toll–roads, railways, airlines, energy production, communication systems and the flow of money. (This list, far from exhaustive, should alert us to the extent to which the neoliberal agenda has already succeeded.)

The assumption is that if free enterprise is allowed to make its way into every corner of human existence, the results will be better overall for everyone, even for those who are temporarily disadvantaged, let’s say by being deprived of their fish.

The objection (which I am reporting, not making) is that in the passage from a state in which actions are guided by an overarching notion of the public good to a state in which individual entrepreneurs “freely” pursue their private goods, values like morality, justice, fairness, empathy, nobility and love are either abandoned or redefined in market terms.

Short-term transactions-for-profit replace long-term planning designed to produce a more just and equitable society. Everyone is always running around doing and acquiring things, but the things done and acquired provide only momentary and empty pleasures (shopping, trophy houses, designer clothing and jewelry), which in the end amount to nothing. Neoliberalism, David Harvey explains, delivers a “world of pseudo-satisfactions that is superficially exciting but hollow at its core.” (”A Brief History of Neoliberalism.”)

Harvey and the other critics of neoliberalism explain that once neoliberal goals and priorities become embedded in a culture’s way of thinking, institutions that don’t regard themselves as neoliberal will nevertheless engage in practices that mime and extend neoliberal principles — privatization, untrammeled competition, the retreat from social engineering, the proliferation of markets. These are exactly the principles and practices these critics find in the 21st century university, where (according to Henry Giroux) the “historical legacy” of the university conceived “as a crucial public sphere” has given way to a university “that now narrates itself in terms that are more instrumental, commercial and practical.” (“Academic Unfreedom in America,” in Works and Days.)

The thrust of his column is in examining the effects of privatization of our university system. However, I found this analysis of neoliberalism, and especially its logical flaws, very helpful.

Atheism statistics

This post will serve solely as a reference. For more analysis/opinion see all posts tagged "social analysis".

• Feb 2009 CUNY ARIS, 12.3% atheist + agnostic
• Apr 2008 Harris, 28% "not religious", 14% "not at all religious" [table 6]
• Nov. 2007 Harris, 18% atheists + agnostics (82% believe in God)
  
• Nov 2007 various by Zuckerman and Paul, "America's disbelievers...number 30 million, ...far outnumber American Jews, Muslims and Mormons combined."
• Aug 2007 Pew, nonreligious: 16.1%, with 4% atheist + agnostic and 12.1% generally unaffiliated
• Mar 2007 Newsweek, 10% "no religion", 6% atheist + agnostic
• 1972-2006 GSS Data, 14.4% "not religious" [here], 6.1% atheist [here]
  
• Dec 2006 Harris, 14% agnostic, 4% atheist, 6% "would prefer not to say"
• Sept 2006 Baylor U., 10.8% "religious nones," 5.2% atheists
• 2005 Adherents.com global data, 16% of people globally are atheist, agnostic, or related
• May 2004 Pew, 16% "unaffiliated", 7.5% "secular" and 3.2% "atheist, agnostic"
• Dec 2001 CUNY ARIS, "no religion" 8% in 1990, 14% in 2001. 14.3 million in 1990, 29.4 million in 2001 (more here)

I'll update as I find more.

Presuppositionalism summarized

I said a long time ago, in a debate with a presuppositionalist (PS) named CalvinDude, that the PS request for an atheist to give an "account" of logic (in the sense of justifying the use of, or explaining the metaphysical concept of, with the possibility that it was unjustified) was retarded, for the very reason that in doing so, one must assume that logic was valid. See here for a more articulate dismissal of PS based on that issue. And see here for the point that there is a fundamental misunderstanding on the part of PS proponents in trying to ask us to "justify" logic at all.

I also said a long time ago that the entire apologetic method of PS was simply not an argument at all, but a ridiculous burden that naive people place on other naive people. See here for that issue revisited. What people "arguing" for PS are actually doing is asking you to write a textbook on metaphysics and epistemology in order to thoroughly explain logic. But if you fail to do this, how does this prove anything about their positive claim for God's existence? It doesn't. Not even in the slightest.

Instead, all it does is give them the opportunity to try to find some mistake in your textbook(s), which is usually not hard to do, unless you're a genius philosopher, and thus you spend hours and hours carefully constructing arguments for no reason at all except to prove that logic is valid.

Wow.

On the other hand, they just sit back and basically do nothing to advance the idea that logic presupposes God's existence. Instead, all they have "on their side" is that a crude material reductionism, if attempted by an atheist, will fail to properly explain abstracta like concepts and mathematical entities and logical relations and properties. So basically just don't try to reduce those things to matter, and the PS literally has nothing to argue about!

Presuppositionalism

Taking on presuppositionalism (PS) gained Gene Witmer fame and fortune! Well, at least the former, but the latter is surely on the way.

BTW, I'm the guy at the PhilSoc meeting who brought up the question that led him to write the paper and do the talk. He also did a radio spot as a result of those.

If you aren't familiar with PS, see this comparative anatomy of apologetic methods by a PS proponent.

Job and the Problem of Evil

It is often to the book of Job that Christians refer in answering questions about why we suffer.

About the problem generally, for the theist, there are only a few possible responses:

1. We suffer because we deserve it (the attitude of Job's friends)
2. We suffer because we are righteous (hinted at by Jesus in the NT) while the world around us is wicked -- it's God's way of bettering us -- but it will be righted in the end (the Apocalyptic view)
   
3. We suffer because the world is wicked and we deserve it, as we are all wicked (we are to blame for both) and we may not blame God for it at all (Rom 9)
   

Job's god never really answered this question. But I did like the way a recent Yale course in religion analyzed the issue (H/T: Wes):

God has heard enough, it's his turn to ask questions, the answers to which are clearly implied; these are rhetorical questions.

[Job 38 ff]

Where were you when I laid the earth's foundations?
Speak if you have understanding.
Do you know who fixed its dimensions
Or who measured it with a line?"
You did, God.
…Have you ever commanded the day to break,
Assigned the dawn its place,
…Have you penetrated to the sources of the sea,
Or walked in the recesses of the deep?

No, no human has. And God continues with these rhetorical questions, questions regarding the animals, their various powers and attributes, but one wonders what the purpose of all these questions is.

One senses that they are irrelevant. Job has posed some very specific challenges to God. Why am I suffering? Is there a pattern to existence? Is God's refusal to answer these challenges a way of saying there is no answer? Or is it God's way of saying that justice is beyond human understanding? Or is this theophany of God in nature and the focus on creation, an implicit assault on the fundamental tenant of Israelite religion that God is known and made manifest through his interactions with humans, his rewards and punishments in historical time.

You'll recall that the monotheistic revolution is generally understood to have effected a break from mythological conceptions of the gods as indistinguishable from various natural forces, limited by meta-divine powers and forces of the cosmos.

The biblical God wasn't another Ancient Near Eastern or Canaanite nature God ultimately, but a wholly transcendent power--He was figured this way in many parts of the Bible--known not through the involuntary and recurring cycles of nature but through His freely willed and non-repeating actions in historical time. Such a view of God underwrites the whole system of divine retributive justice.

Only an essentially good God who transcends and is unconstrained by mechanistic natural forces can establish and administer a system of retributive justice, dealing out punishment and reward in response to the actions of humans in time.

Is the author of Job suggesting that history and the events that befall the just and the unjust are not the medium of revelation? Is God a god of nature after all, encountered in the repeating cycles of the natural world and not in the unpredictable and incoherent arena of human history and action? If so, then this is a third fundamental biblical assumption that has been radically subverted.

So we'll turn now to God's direct speech to Job in 40:8, 40, verse 8, excuse me. "Would you impugn my justice? / Would you condemn Me that you be right?" God, I think, is now getting at the heart of the matter: your friends Job were wrong, they condemned you. They attributed sin to you, so that they might be right. But you, too, have been wrong condemning Me, attributing wickedness to Me so that you might be right.

Job's friends erred because they assumed that there's a system of retributive justice at work in the world and that assumption led them to infer that all who suffer are sinful, and that's a blatant falsehood. But Job also errs; if he assumes that although there isn't a system of retributive justice, there really ought to be one. It's that assumption that leads him to infer that suffering is a sign of an indifferent or wicked God, and that is equally a falsehood. Job needs to move beyond the anthropocentrism that characterizes the rest of Scripture and the Genesis 1 account of creation, according to which humankind is the goal of the entire process of creation.

God's creation, the Book of Job seems to suggest, defies such teleological and rational categories. In a nutshell, God refuses to be seen as a moral accountant. The idea of God as a moral accountant is responsible for two major errors: the interpretation of suffering as an indicator of sin, or the ascription of injustice to God. In his final speech, Job confesses to a new firsthand knowledge of God that he lacked before, and as a result of this knowledge Job repents, "Therefore, I recant and relent, / Being but dust and ashes," 42:6.

Here we see the other meaning of Job's name, "one who repents," suddenly leap to the fore. What is he repenting of? Certainly not of sin; God has not upheld the accusations against Job. Indeed he states explicitly in a moment that the friends were wrong to say he had sinned. But he has indicated that guilt and innocence, reward and punishment are not what the game is all about, and while Job had long been disabused of the notion that the wicked and the righteous actually get what they deserve, he nevertheless had clung to the idea that ideally they should. And it's that mistaken idea--the idea that led him to ascribe wickedness to God--that Job now recants. With this new understanding of God, Job is liberated from what he would now see as a false expectation raised by the Deuteronomistic notion of a covenant relationship between God and humankind, enforced by a system of divine justice.

At the end of the story Job is fully restored to his fortunes. God asserts he did no evil and the conventional, impeccably Deuteronomistic view of the three friends is clearly denounced by God. He says of them, "They have not spoken of Me what is right as my servant Job has," 42:7. For some, the happy ending seems anticlimactic, a capitulation to the demand for a happy ending of just desserts that runs counter to the whole thrust of the book, and yet in a way I think the ending is superbly fitting. It's the last in a series of reversals that subverts our expectations. Suffering comes inexplicably, so does restoration; blessed be the name of the Lord.

God doesn't attempt to justify or explain Job's suffering and yet somehow by the end of the book, our grumbling, embittered, raging Job is satisfied. Perhaps he's realized that an automatic principle of reward and punishment would make it impossible for humans to do the good for purely disinterested motives. It's precisely when righteousness is seen to be absurd and meaningless that the choice to be righteous paradoxically becomes meaningful. God and Job, however we are to interpret their speeches, are reconciled.

The suffering and injustice that characterize the world have baffled humankind for millennia. And the Book of Job provides no answer in the sense of an explanation or a justification of suffering and injustice, but what it does offer is a stern warning to avoid the Scylla of blaspheming against the victims by assuming their wickedness, and the Charybdis of blaspheming against God by assuming his. Nor is moral nihilism an option, as our hero, yearning for, but ultimately renouncing divine order and justice, clings to his integrity and chooses virtue for nothing.

So the only "answer" Job may provide is that the laws of nature themselves are not used as tools of god's justice, but instead callous impersonal forces of the world. Job's "error" is in assuming that the world ought to be just if there was a god behind it who was just. And so this just brings in Occam's Razor to cut away whether a god is behind it all regardless...

Remember Ehrman's explication of the Apocalyptic view of evil in the world, which is somewhat more satisfying than this one, but lacks in logic still.

A picture of a godless universe

A few months ago, in a post talking about a GC member being on TV, I wrote,

The idea that God is listening to your requests and will fix that prostate, or give you that new job, or raise, or protect you from danger, is hilarious. While you're sitting there asking that, mothers are raising their dead children to the sky, after pleading with God to spare them. People are rotting from leprosy and mentally rotting from Alzheimer's. To think that God is letting all the billions of people on earth suffer and plead with no reprieve, but that he cares what job you have or mate you pick, is the height of hubris. The problem of evil has destroyed the faith of giants like Charles Templeton and unknowns like me.

If you want to distill atheism down into a picture, here it is:

That picture is probably a lot like the one that Charles Templeton saw in Life magazine during a famine in Africa in the 1960s that he claimed shook him free of his last remnants of god-belief. It was taken by Kevin Carter, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1994 for it. He took his life three months later.

I've read plenty (including Bart Ehrman's talk on how the Bible portrays suffering) of attempted justifications of how a god could exist and still allow human suffering on this scale. None of it convinces me.

What economic calamity looks like

If you're still confused about what's actually in the stimulus bill, here's a good summary of the positives. If you're still convinced we didn't need a stimulus plan, here are two graphs showing job losses make the gravity of our economic malaise sink in...

1) NYT:


2) Speaker Pelosi's chart:

Atheism and The Watchmen

I just got back from seeing The Watchmen, so I thought I'd weigh in on Anthony Stevens-Arroyo making an idiot of himself:

The antithesis of such movements is Atheism. Often presented in its Enlightenment phase as the culmination of human freedom, the premise that Atheism is our human future is simply wrong. People today are moving away from Atheism, not towards it. Moreover, when screening out secularists (= tolerance for all) and agnostics (= doubt about God), Atheism is revealed to be a movement with a tiny number of members. Atheism began sometime in the 17th century and is now flickering out. When looked at through the prism of human experience that begins 40,000 years ago, Atheism is a blip on the radar screen of humanity.

Of course, Atheists will stay with us, and they are welcomed by me as long as they don't try to impose on the rest of us their belief that God doesn't exist. I know that religion, including Catholicism, has had to learn that rule of live-and-let-live to overcome past offenses, but that is not an excuse for Atheists to continually whine about past injustices or to deny the real world of today in which the world's majority believes in God. Besides, the Constitution honors separation of Church and State, not separation of Faith and State. If the majority vote to proclaim "In God We Trust," democracy tells us the elite minority has no right to dictate what others may or may not express about faith (NB: -- without any particular religion attached).

The message of "Watchmen" concerns humanity's need for meaning. False and merely human solutions, no matter how heroic or inevitable they seem, are inadequate substitutions for the transcendent bonds of being on a planet populated by others. We need to watch the self-appointed watchmen who would destroy those bonds. Human heroes in spandex do not replace God.

First, I think that the line about atheists not imposing their beliefs on others has to be one of the richest ironies I've read in a while, coming from a Catholic. I mean Jesus FUC*ING Christ! These people still try to restrict women's rights, access to contraception, scientific research on stem cells, teaching sound science, censorship of "religiously-offensive" art, et cetera ad nauseum. And what, he's claiming that Catholics don't send out missionaries and try to convert others? Is that a godda&ned joke????

As for the substance of his article, let's take this apart a little at a time:

(Regarding The Watchmen, a disclaimer: I have never read the books and this was my first viewing of the movie, so for a deeper discussion of the background/plot/characters of The Watchmen see elsewhere.)

While the character of Dr. Manhattan is indeed deified in the movie, it isn't only his power that reminds me of traditional notions of a god. His detachment from humanity's suffering was the real key trait that made him like a god -- even as the world faced imminent destruction, he removed himself to a new planet and did not stop the devastation. It's difficult to argue straight-faced that there is a real effort to propel Dr. Manhattan to YHWH-status -- he isn't omniscient, and is, in fact, tricked by a human, albeit "the smartest man in the world," Ozymandias.

As for the question of whether people are "moving away" from atheism may be objectively answered: not true. If you place all organized religion on one end of a spectrum and atheism on the other, people are clearly and unequivocally moving away from organized religion and towards atheism. Now, they may not be making it all the way to the atheism end, but they are moving in that direction. At best (for religionists), people are moving towards an impersonal God or agnosticism.

Now I've cautioned against the historically-inaccurate "prophecies" that science would necessarily eradicate faith and that atheism would become the dominant outlook of all people, but the fact is, there has been a shift in that direction (see below for polls). It is reasonable to say that between 5 - 15% of Americans reject the idea of a god as prescribed by any religion, and thus would qualify as either an agnostic or atheist. However, there is still a large gap in all polls between the number of people who say that they believe in a god (between 85-95%) and the number who self-identify as an atheist. Many polls show this gap.

Yes, people are moving away from identifying themselves as atheists, per se, as there is a huge gap between people who say they don't believe in a god, or have no religion, and those who self-identify as atheists. I think the "A"-word has a bad rap, and that's clear from many recent polls. People who don't believe in a god still shun that label. There's a lot of atheophobia out there, which leads to fear of discrimination amongst atheists, so they tend to stick with neutral labels like, "non-religious"...

But this is no consolation to religious people. Some bullet-point facts:

• In the largest religious self-identification survey ever done (CUNY ARIS), statistics show that the greatest growth in a religious demographic group from 1990 - 2001 occurred in "no religion": from 8% in 1990 to 14% in 2001. Quote, "the greatest increase in absolute as well as in percentage terms has been among those adults who do not subscribe to any religious identification; their number has more than doubled from 14.3 million in 1990 to 29.4 million in 2001" (more here)
• Pew's new surveys peg the number of nonreligious slightly higher: 16.1%, with 4% atheist + agnostic and 12.1% generally unaffiliated
  
• From the same CUNY ARIS survey, the growth in the raw number of "no religion" folks swamps the Evangelicals by about 30-fold and non-denoms by about 14-fold. In numerical form, the "no religion" switch from some prior religion increased by approx. 6.6 million persons, and those "switching out" of non-religion (i.e., converting to a religion from none beforehand) were approx. 1.1 million persons = approx. 5.5 million net deconverts. Do the math on this, and you'll see that no other category even comes close. Not one. The next highest number of net converts is 1.4 million for "Christian" (fourfold less) and then 600,000 for "Pentecostal". So I don't see how the data could encourage people to say that people are "moving away from atheism." (more here)
• Also from Pew: "People moving into the unaffiliated category outnumber those moving out of the unaffiliated group by more than a three-to-one margin. At the same time, however, a substantial number of people (nearly 4% of the overall adult population) say that as children they were unaffiliated with any particular religion but have since come to identify with a religious group. This means that more than half of people who were unaffiliated with any particular religion as a child now say that they are associated with a religious group. In short, the Landscape Survey shows that the unaffiliated population has grown despite having one of the lowest retention rates of all "religious" groups."
• In a 2004 Pew Poll, "The study found the highest share of people yet, 16 percent, who said they had no religious affiliation. Some of those were actually nonspecific spiritual seekers or people between denominations, but almost 11 percent of the respondents said they were atheist or secular."
• In a 2006 Harris Interactive Poll, "A Financial Times (FT)/Harris Poll conducted among adults in the United States and in five European countries (France, Italy, Germany, Great Britain and Spain) shows that Americans are more likely than Europeans to believe in any form of God or Supreme Being (73%). Of the European adults surveyed, Italians are the most likely to express this belief (62%) and, in contrast, the French are the least likely (27%)." 14% of respondents in the US self-identified as agnostic and 4% as atheist. Six percent chose, "Would prefer not to say." If you (safely) assume that all of these three categories are probably not religious, that's one in four Americans who either: i) disbelieve in God's existence, ii) doubt the existence of God, or iii) don't really have an opinion either way.
  
• In a Baylor U. poll in Sept. 2006, "In 2004, the General Social Survey reported that 14.3 percent of the population had no religion, but by using a more detailed measure in the Baylor survey, researchers determined that only 10.8 percent of the population or approximately 10 million Americans are unaffiliated." Although 10.8% of persons are "religious nones", only 5.2% were willing to self-identify as atheists. Others aren't sure.
  
• In a March 2007 Newsweek poll, "Nine in 10 (91 percent) of American adults say they believe in God and almost as many (87 percent) say they identify with a specific religion. ... Although one in ten (10 percent) of Americans identify themselves as having "no religion," only six percent said they don’t believe in a God at all. Just 3 percent of the public self-identifies as atheist, suggesting that the term may carry some stigma."
• In a Nov. 2007 Harris poll, "The poll of 2,455 U.S. adults from Nov 7 to 13 found that 82 percent of those surveyed believed in God, a figure unchanged since the question was asked in 2005." If 82% actively believe in God, that's 18%, again, who are atheists + agnostics (just like the 2006 poll where it was 4% atheist, 14% agnostic).
• The 2005 global data from Adherents.com suggests that 16% of people globally are atheist, agnostic, or closely related to one of the two.
• Data analyzed by Zuckerman and Paul led them to conclude, "in 1900 expected the massive defections from Christianity that subsequently took place in Western Europe due to secularism…. and in the Americas due to materialism…. The number of nonreligionists…. throughout the 20th century has skyrocketed from 3.2 million in 1900, to 697 million in 1970, and on to 918 million in AD 2000…. Equally startling has been the meteoritic growth of secularism…. Two immense quasi-religious systems have emerged at the expense of the world's religions: agnosticism…. and atheism…. From a miniscule presence in 1900, a mere 0.2% of the globe, these systems…. are today expanding at the extraordinary rate of 8.5 million new converts each year, and are likely to reach one billion adherents soon. A large percentage of their members are the children, grandchildren or the great-great-grandchildren of persons who in their lifetimes were practicing Christians...
  
  In the 1940s and 50s 1-2% usually responded no asked if they believe in God, up to 98% said yes. A Harris study specifically designed to arrive at the best current figure found that 9% do not believe in a creator, and 12% are not sure. The over tenfold expansion of Amerorationalism easily outpaces the Mormon and Pentecostal growth rates over the same half century...
  
  America's disbelievers atheists now number 30 million, most well educated and higher income, and they far outnumber American Jews, Muslims and Mormons combined. There are many more disbelievers than Southern Baptists, and the god skeptics are getting more recruits than the evangelicals."

Let that sink in for a moment. There is a huge shift away from religion, which I would claim is at least towards atheism, but at best (for religionists) is towards unorganized/individual belief in a god. People like Stevens-Arroyo get paid to write drivel that is completely at odds with these facts. Since the early part of the 20th century, belief in God has shrunk dramatically. When you drill down into the numbers, things only get bleaker for religion's future:

• there is a large age gap in those who are not religious: 35% of 18-29 year olds reported "no religion" in the CUNY ARIS survey while only 8% of those 65+ did
• this is also true of Pew Polling, which found, "The survey finds that the number of people who say they are unaffiliated with any particular faith today (16.1%) is more than double the number who say they were not affiliated with any particular religion as children. Among Americans ages 18-29, one-in-four say they are not currently affiliated with any particular religion."
• this is also true internationally, with a third of the 18-29 year-olds in Spain being nonbelievers and half of Australian youths.
  

So the movement away from religion is massive among young people, which means the shift towards atheism (away from religion) will only accelerate in the future.

• Now, if you want to present a depressing case for Evangelical Christianity's growth, Christine Wicker, author of The Fall of the Evangelical Church (hyperbolic and premature in its proclamation), has some neat stats on her website, culled from various source.
• I've put much the same sort of thing together before a few times.
• I've also said I think there are problems with atheism and dealing with existential issues is difficult.
  

Stevens-Arroyo sounds like Steve Prothero:

[Regarding Prothero's newest book, Religious Literacy] The book is repetitive in spots and, perhaps as an indication of how fast the religion conversation in America is moving, can feel outdated. "The hard-core atheist," Prothero writes, "once a stock figure in American life, has gone the way of the freak show." Well, except for Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett, whose books on atheism have topped the best-seller lists for two years.

Yeah, right...keep on dreaming. Science won't ever kill off religion, but money may:

But before you point out the considerable effect religion has on U.S. society and politics, let's change the lens to account for a basic insight multicountry surveys offer: a population's religiosity level is strongly related to its average standard of living. Gallup's World Poll, for example, indicates that 8 of the 11 countries in which almost all residents (at least 98%) say religion is important in their daily lives are poorer nations in sub-Saharan Africa and Asia.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, the 10 least religious countries studied include several with the world's highest living standards, including Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Hong Kong, and Japan. (Several other countries on this list are former Soviet republics, places where the state suppressed religious expression for decades.)

Also see this on the same issue.

Here are a couple of pictures:
1) From Paul and Zuckerman - growth of atheism in the 20th C
2) From Paul and Zuckerman - rates of atheism by country
3) Wikimedia assorted maps

Kirk Cameron and Ray Comfort won't just die

Well, so much for being an atheist. Living Waters crew Kirk Cameron and Ray Comfort, masters of logic and famous for their "atheist's worst nightmare" argument that nearly destroyed my lack of faith, have now gone and done it: they've "Pulled the Plug on Atheism".

Just to pick one of the articles at random from their site pulling down the intellectual pillars of non-faith:

Let's see, who do I think is more reliable...

Kirk Cameron and his explanation of how "The Law of Thermodynamics" (he means the second law) invalidates a cyclic universe...

...or physicist Paul Steinhardt, Albert Einstein Professor of Physics at Princeton, and his explanation of a cyclic model of cosmology that doesn't violate the second law...
(also see here and here)

it's a real difficult decision.

Ma' don't know Chuck

My mother recently forwarded me a link to Charles Krauthammer's wikipedia page with the note:

I thought you might enjoy sharing this. He is one of my favorite columnists and I don’t agree with everything he says, naturally but I find him brilliant for the most part. Love, Mom

Yes, dear old ma' is one of those Faux News sycophants.  She watches the talking heads and finds them brilliant.  Poor woman.  At least one of her children turned out all right.

She bristled when I forwarded her an article from McClatchy pointing out that the Faux News crew's analysis on Fannie and Freddie being to blame for the financial crisis was just plain wrong.

But I bet she doesn't really know Chuck and the way he's drifted right over the years.

Babies make us moral

Okay, not exactly, but the argument is that the nature of human child-rearing developed our senses of empathy and sympathy, which in turn make us more moral creatures.

Also see this article by Steven Pinker in the NYT Magazine, and some other recent articles along the same vein.  If you prefer a podcast, Marc Hauser was on POI about this very topic on 4/4/08 (.mp3).

Conservatives heart porn

A new interesting study done on the correlation between political conservatism and porn:

• Benjamin Edelman --Red Light States: Who Buys Online Adult Entertainment?. Journal of Economic Perspectives 23, no. 1 (winter 2009): 209-220.
• New Scientist summary
• Charles Blow NYT blog summary
  

Eight of the top ten per capita porn consuming states gave their votes to John McCain.

The reason this is funny (to me) is the fact that conservatives and their puritanical style of government are so ironic and hypocritical. When the Religious Right and Rush Limbaugh run your party, you know you have some issues. If the Democrats headlined a former gay porn star at their far-left conference, it wouldn't be nearly as funny as when Republicans do it at their CPAC conference, because of the RR influence.

When the RR has a conference, they choose only "non-porn offering hotels..." at first this sounds like a moral choice (to support businesses who are "more pure") but then you realize it's just so they can't control their urges to watch big manly bear porn. They also can't deal with the raw fact that gay sex is observed in the animal kingdom all the time, so they probably prefer hotels without the Discovery Channel too. Religion is like porn in many ways.

While many religious people will say that things like porn consumption make people "fall away" from the faith, it turns out that porn and faith seem to have no real impact on one another: Edelman found that a 1% increase in churchgoing in a postal zip code was correlated with a 0.1% drop in porn subscription purchases on Sunday...but that purchases through the rest of the week brought up those zip codes to the average (or above).

It turns out that abstinence until late adulthood contributes to sexual dysfunction. Perhaps it's because they spend too much time watching porn to practice the real thing and their expectations are all out of whack with reality ;)

Save the earth

It's the heart's cry of every tree-hugger. But how many would be willing to use cloth toilet wipes instead of paper?

Perhaps saving the earth doesn't have to be this hard; it could be amazingly simple: get rid of junk mail, buy more recycled stuff, recycle more of your own stuff.

When it comes to the consumption of trees, toilet paper is a huge waste of live trees. So buy recycled TP (and other paper products). It isn't very difficult, or expensive.

George Carlin: "Religion is Bullshit"

Check out a classic from Carlin:


Transcript here.

Abstinence-only bullshit

It seems that faith-based bullshit reigns supreme in Texas:

STATE-MANDATED IGNORANCE.... McClatchy ran a disturbing piece the other day, noting the results of a new study examining Texas' public schools and lessons on sexual health. It wasn't at all encouraging: "The overwhelming majority of Texas schools use scare tactics and spread myths in place of teaching basic sex and health information that students can use to protect themselves and others."

The report, Just Say Don't Know: Sexuality Education in Public Schools, published by the Texas Freedom Network, studied materials from 990 Texas school districts and found that 94% of the districts use "abstinence-only programs that usually pass moral judgments while either downplaying or ignoring contraception and health screenings." An additional 2% ignore sexual health altogether. "What is left is a miniscule 4 percent of Texas school districts that teach any information about responsible pregnancy and STD prevention, including various contraceptive methods," the TFN noted.

Let's not forget that state-mandated ignorance on this scale comes with considerable costs. Texas, thanks to its taxpayer-financed confusion, has one of the highest teen-pregnancy rates in the nation, costing the state "approximately $1 billion annually for the costs of teen childbearing."

Data from the CDC further showed that "young Texans overall rate well above national averages on virtually every published statistic involving sexual risk-taking behaviors," making this "one of the most pressing public health issues facing" Texas.

I've heard before that "nothing fails like prayer"...maybe that should be amended. Faith-based sex education fails miserably.

The market in shambles

Back in September, I used a bit of hyper-partisan hyperbole to score a few political points on the cheap by putting up an image of the one-day 504-point decline in the DJIA in mid-September. The DJIA stood well above 10,000 at the time.

How nice it would be if it had stopped there.


As of this morning it is touching on 12-year lows under 7,000.

Jesus' Money 101

Stanley Fish is a great read in the NYT. Today's piece is an example: he examines the allegorical and literal role that money plays in the Christian faith and doctrines.

One thing I've always found hilarious is the idea that Jesus paid for all men's sins on the cross (c.f., Matt 18:14, 1 John 2:2, &c.) yet that one must "accept" such a work in order to realize it. Now I know this doesn't apply to Calvinists, but instead to Arminian non-universalists. The logic of the claim is horrible to say that your "free will" is needed in "accepting" a work done on your behalf if you don't have the authority to order the work done in the first place.

True, if I say I will build a deck onto your back porch, I need your permission to do this work for you, because you are legally in charge of the property and must approve of the work to be done.

But in the case of "paying off your (sin) debts" wouldn't God be the legal authority and thus be the sole arbitrer of approval for the work to be done? In fact the Bible plainly claims that God foreordained the act of Redemption (c.f. Rev. 13:8, &c.), and so it's solely up to God as to whether or not a particular work (the payment of all men's sins) would/could be done.

It's sort of like me saying that I'm going down to the bank to pay off your mortgage, but you say, "What if I don't accept your payment?" The point is, the one who holds the debt is the banker, and he will accept my payment. The act of clearing your debt is collaborative only between the banker and the one paying the debt. Your cooperation is unnecessary, should the banker have authority over how the debt is discharged.

Does God not have authority over the payment of sin?

I suppose that's why a lot of Christians accept universal salvation.