Will The Real Fundamentalist Please Stand Up

This was posted on a forum I participate on. I think it sums up the current militant-atheist vs. religion debate quite well.

Evangelizing Religious Person: "You're damned for rejecting the WORD OF GOD"!!!!

Me: "You mean the Bible? I don't reject it, I just don't read it the same way you do. I read it to try and understand....".

ERP: "DAMNED!!!! DAMNED i SAY"!!!!!!

and then....

Evangelizing Anti-religious Person: "You're deluded for thinking the Bible is the infallable WORD OF GOD"!!!!

Me: "I don't think it's "the infallable word of God", I just read it to try and understand..."

EARP: "DELUDED!!!! DELUDED i SAY!!!!!!


No really,
I don't see any difference.

Live Intelligence Squared Debate

There is a live debate going on right now that will most likely be very interesting. You can view it at the following link.
http://www.intelligencesquared.com/live

"Atheism is the new fundamentalism"
In partnership with livestation.com, from 6.45pm (GMT) this evening, you will be able to watch online as Richard Dawkins, author of ‘The God Delusion’ and Professor A C Grayling, take on Richard Harries, the former bishop of Oxford, and Charles Moore, former editor of The Daily Telegraph, at this sold-out Wellington Squared event held at Wellington College, Berkshire. It will be chaired by the Headmaster of Wellington (and political historian) Anthony Seldon.

You can view the live comments from people watching the stream through twitter. The first speaker is from the Catholic Church which spawned the usual trite comments. Ill post my thoughts on the debate as it goes.

*facepalm* Hardly 20 minutes in and one of the atheist speakers, A C Grayling, has already brought up farries and pixies...

So far the two first speakers did not seem to address the topic of the debate.

Current speaker,  Moore, just got applause for a quip at Dawkins. Was not expecting that.

Moore is spending way too much time on Dawkins...
It is not like there is a lack of fundamentalist type thinking in other famous atheists.

Moore leaves the stage with both applause and boos.

Dawkins claims there is no equivalent of the Bible in atheism. While he may be technically correct, he underestimates the number of atheists who treat his book, The God Delusion, as holy scripture.

Dawkins just described religious people as inherently believing in "God of the gaps". Time for another facepalm.
And now he has pulled 911 into the debate as describing religious belief.

Well I tried to reopen the stream to see if it would reduce my CPU load as it was getting kind of high the page wont load again. It seems their server wont allow anyone to reconnect. Overall I thought the debate was fairly pointless. No one really addressed the actual topic. It largely gave me the impression of being a very verbose and erudite name calling contest.

Ray Comfort's Origin

As many have heard last week roughly 100,000 copies of Ray Comforts edition of the Origin of Species were handed out to college students across the nation. The difference with his version is a few of the chapters have been removed, apparently due to cost restrictions on length, and a special “introduction” was added by Comfort. The introduction is essentially a diatribe on evolution. Originally the books were planned to be distributed on the 19th but campuses were surprised when they were handed out a day early. A lot of critics cried foul saying that it was a detestable tactic, Comfort disagrees. While I agree with his critics that his attacks on evolution are baseless and, frankly, stupid, I have to side with Comfort on this one. He was met with threats of book burnings, people who were planning on ripping out the introduction, and others who were planning on taking as many copies as possible to prevent them from being handed out to anyone else. There is nothing wrong with counter protests, but physically preventing the books from being handed out goes a little too far. Besides that, it adds a little more drama to the situation, and drama makes for high volumes of blog posts. And it looks like there will be more drama. It seems Comfort is planning on having 1 million more copies handed out, as this article explains. A recent interview with Comfort was done over at Friendly Atheist and can be read here. It is pretty interesting as the questions asked were purposely not about creationism but more about things dealing with Comfort exclusively.

I do not know if the next round of distributions of his book will include Purdue again. This past time they handed out the copies on our campus on the originally planned date. When I heard they were hear I went to see if I could get a copy but by the time I was able to get there they had already ran out of copies and left. Luckily Mike, over at Politics and Pucks, had an extra copy and was willing to give it away. I have not been able to read it yet as I just finished Finding Darwin's God but from what I have seen the introduction, the part written by Comfort, is pretty sad.

Finding Darwin’s God (Part 3)

The book discussion I have been attending here at Purdue finished last week. You can view my previous two posts over this here and here. We finished Kenneth Miller’s Finding Darwin’s God and had a final discussion over it. Here is a quick rundown. The beginning of the book Miller dedicates to discrediting various creationist arguments and gives a multitude of evidences and proofs for evolution. In fact, the entire first half of the book is dedicated to this. He then redirects his attention from attacks by religious believers, mainly creationists, to attacks originating from within the scientific community. He explains that scientists themselves are partly to blame for the reactions against science from the religious community. He again provides quite a long list of examples of well known scientists using evolution to try and exterminate religious belief.

I believe much of the problem lies with atheists in the scientific community who routinely enlist the material findings of evolutionary biology in support their own philosophical pronouncements.

He explains that these atheists are attempting to put forth at type of absolute materialism in place of religion. He continues this section by explaining that evolution does not necessitate disbelief in a creator God. He also gives examples of how the two are perfectly capable of living in harmony with each other. I also liked his explanations how how if evolution were truly false, and the creationists were correct, the resulting god would be a "charlatan" and a "magician".

One part that came up during our final discussion over the book is Miller’s use of quantum mechanics as a way to explain the method of which God could allow humans to be truly free of a predetermined existence. He only spends a brief amount of time on this subject but it comes off as a kind of God of the Gaps theory, albeit a much more supportable version. He uses the fact that science has shown that there is an absolute limit to our knowledge to support his point (Look up the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle if you are unfamiliar with this). His theory is in stark contrast to the general God of the Gaps theory which tries to use phenomena which science has yet to explain, but still may, to provide support. I think this is the weakest part of his book but it also happens to be the smallest, and in the end is not critical to his final argument.

Overall I thought it was a good book and worth reading. I would recommend it to both the religious and atheist alike.  Miller provides a good explanation of the current state of the Religion vs. Science controversy. And I think he, again, does a good job at explaining that the two fields are not inherently opposed to each other.

There is no religious reason, none at all, for drawing a line in the sand at the origin of life. The trend of science is to discover and to explain, and it would be foolish to pretend that religious faith must be predicated on the inability of science to cross such a line.

There will be another book discussion next semester. The actual book has yet to be decided upon as they are  taking suggestions. When one is decided I will post which book and what dates we will be meeting.

PZ Myers Comes to Purdue

The local Non-Theist Society had PZ Myers as a guest speaker today at CL 50. If you are not familiar with him he runs a very popular blog called Pharyngula and is a professor of biology. His talk was entitled A Few Things I’ve Learned from Creationists. Due to flight delays the talk started about 20 minutes late but no one seemed to mind. The basic structure of his talk was outlining several attributes he ascribes to Creationists, all of them highly negative, such as disingenuous. He would then go on to explain how creationists fit this description and how many of the ideas they try to push have been flat out proven wrong. While, on the surface this may look like a fairly arrogant way to prove a point, it actually was not that bad and fairly funny at many points. Initially I did not know what to expect as I am not familiar enough with his blog to know exactly what kind positions he holds. To my relief he did not do what I have seen many other atheists do, that is take all theists, mainly Christians, throw them all in a predefined box and proceed to rip it apart. His talk seemed to only focus on those Creationists who are attempting to make a mockery of science. He did not toss the rest of us in with them. I also enjoyed his sense of humor which was very light if a little blunt. Overall I thought it was a very interesting talk, his biology examples were really neat since I understand very little of that material being an engineer, and was well worth attending.

Atheism 3.0

Continuing with my previous post about the Rift Among Atheists is this opinion expressed by a poster on one of the religious discussion forums I participate on. From what I have been reading, both on that forum and in other places where the original npr article has come up, is that many atheists are dismissing these arguments on the basis that, they claim, the article is categorizing all atheists, as a single group, as splitting into two groups. That is to say, all atheists, or the majority, belong in either one group or the other. However, this was not how I interpreted the article, nor do I think it was meant to be interpreted as such. I took it to mean that with in atheism, you have two subgroups forming that are, or may end up, at odds with one another. There was another article on USA Today that was similar in nature that defines yet another group of atheists that the article dubs, for convenience, Atheism 3.0.

The old atheists said there was no God. The so-called "New Atheists" said there was no God, and they were vocally vicious about it. Now, the new "New Atheists" — call it Atheism 3.0 — say there's still no God, but maybe religion isn't all that bad.

One of the atheists they quote in the article is the author of the book I am currently reading, An Atheist Defends Religion (although I have currently put the book on hold while I work on Finding Darwin's God for a discussion group I am participating in). Again, many atheists dismissed this article as categorizing atheists as a whole. The following post, I think, is worth reading and helps sum up the situation fairly nicely.

The suggestion that modern American atheists are not united is, in my opinion, a serious misunderstanding of that community and its underlying philosophical principles. It's not atheism itself that unifies the atheist community. Rather, it is the epistemological principle underlying their atheism that is uniting them. That epistemological principle is science. Atheists don't seem to realize it yet, but they are fairly strongly united by their belief in science. It might even be said that American atheists are behaving as if science were a religion.

In spite of that, I don't believe we're seeing a schism in the atheist community. Atheists are united, in the sense that they have strong epistemological agreement, but they have little organization. A couple of sensationalist authors calling themselves "New" isn't much leadership. There are starting to be more real life meetings, and more and more writing about atheism, but there isn't any robust social infrastructure like there is in any other religious community. "Schism" implies that one order is leaving another order. But there isn't much order among American atheists. Instead of a schism, I'm sure that what we're seeing the start of is the emergence of a new order.

The idea of "Atheist 3.0" seems fairly correct, assuming that the so-called "New" atheists are 2.0. The "New" atheists are only different from the old atheists in that they are getting a lot of media coverage and expressing their atheism quite publicly. However, Atheist 3.0 can be described as a group of atheists who are searching for more order in the community, and are making the effort to create order. I know this because I am one of them.

I've been a strong atheist for well over a decade. About two years ago, bashing Christians online started to get boring. Especially when the smarter Christians started posting thoughtful arguments for their positions. Now, I don't support mythology or Christianity, but I've been able to put aside my hate and bias towards Christians and start looking at them objectively. What I discovered is that, regardless of all the atheist smears of Christians, they have a robust social infrastructure. That is the kind of order that American atheists need. After that, I started treating Christians as individuals, and it became obvious that there are a ton of good Christian people in America, people that, despite my philosophical disagreements with, I know I can trust.

I'm now at the point where I am looking at Christian communities as models for "atheist" communities. But of course, the idea of a strictly "atheist" community doesn't make much sense. The American Secular Humanist movement has already resolved this problem by adapting the Christian Humanist tradition to an atheist society. Secular Humanists are taking what is good from the Christian tradition, and adapting it to fit the modern, rational age. I know Secular Humanism has been around for the last few decades, but I predict that its numbers are going to start swelling as American atheists start looking for more than another online forum to bash Christians on.

By the way, this post might seem a bit random, but the fact is I just got banned from an atheist forum for expressing ideas like these. I was accused by several people of being a Christian in disguise, trying to troll their forums. So I definitely agree that there is starting to be a "bitter rift" dividing atheists.

Original Post

The Idea that Religion Rules Out Rationality

Over at Friendly Atheist Jesse Galef wrote a post where a variant of the question “Could you date someone religious” is posed. This variant is “Could you date someone who could date someone who is religious?”, keep in mind this is from an atheist point of view. At first I thought this was a weird question. For when I pose the same question to myself from a theist point of view “Could I date someone who could date someone who is atheist” I consider the question to have a “no duh!” response of “yes”. Then I read the posters response to their question,

I don’t think that I would immediately reject such a girl, but I don’t know if the relationship would last in my case. I consider certain traits central to my identity – my skepticism, my rationality, my willingness to accept what I think is true rather than what I wish were true. If a girl has no problem dating a religious person, how much could she value those traits in me?

When I read this I immediately got the impression that at least a little bit of bias and ignorance, if not a lot, was coming to the surface. I am referring to how the poster implies that if someone is willing to date a religious person, then they automatically do not value certain traits such as skepticism and rationality. This further implies that being religious means one is incapable of skepticism or rationality. This is simply, and utterly, false.

Being religious does not automatically make a person incapable of skepticism and rational thinking. In fact, many people arrive at their particular religious beliefs through the acts of first being skeptical about a belief, thinking critically about that belief, and finally coming to what they consider a rational decision about whether or not to believe it. In other words, they exercise these exact traits. I have noticed that the idea that the religious are incapable of exercising certain traits, such as skepticism and rationality, is a trend that is becoming more common among, mainly younger, atheists.Skepticism and rational thinking do not, by default, lead to atheism.

The second thing I noticed in the post is the comment “my willingness to accept what I think is true rather than what I wish were true”. I realize that atheists consider religious beliefs to be false or non-existent. However, this comment goes a little farther and describes religion as “wishful thinking”. There are ways to express your opinion respectfully about something you disagree with, and there are ways to express your opinion that comes out as ridicule, whether intentionally or not. Implying religion is wishful thinking is the latter. My post Criticism vs. Ridicule touches on this issue.

I am not implying that the poster was intentionally trying to imply these things or even that they were aware of it. I also realize that this issue is one that stretches across both atheists and theists. It is something that I think everyone needs to work on when talking about points of view that they disagree with. If you express an opinion about something you do not believe in, read it over a couple times. Try taking your opinion and pointing it back on yourself. For example, if it is directed towards atheism, try replacing “atheist” with “theist”. Then ask yourself the question if you still would consider it respectful. Generally doing so will help you avoid instances where your own bias may be playing too large a role in your thinking and help you express yourself in a more rational manner so that others may take what you say more seriously.

Who Killed Jesus?

On my way to my Intro to Religion class today I came across a group standing on the Memorial Mall with a large sign that read "Who Killed Jesus". One of the people stopped me and asked if I would fill out a survey. I had heard about this group yesterday but was unaware they were continuing through today and tomorrow. I decided to stop and talk with one of them. Turns out they are a local Christan student group called Purdue Bible Fellowship. The guy I was talking to introduced himself and asked me what my name was and major. He asked me if I was religious, I said I was and that I was LDS. As I expected he did not know what LDS meant so I explained it was the same thing as Mormon. It did not really surprise me as many people only know us by "Mormon" and not "Latter-day Saints". He then asked me the question that was the theme of their event "Who killed Jesus". I hesitated a little and responded that the answer can vary according to what view you take towards the crucifixion and what religion, if any, you believe in. He agreed with me and said his answer was that he, meaning people in general, killed Jesus. I understood what he meant in referring to Christ's need to die for everyone's sins. The conversation then switched a little to our respective religions and the comparison between the two, Mormonism and mainstream-Christianity.

He was interested in the differences in mainstream-Christianity and Mormonism which is what we ended up discussing up until I had to leave. I told him one of the main differences being the Trinity, we do not adhere to it. I also talked to him about baptism and the works for the dead. We continued with works and faith and the slightly different view we each had on the issue. I thought that their event seemed to be very respectful and useful. It would be nice to see more religious groups holding such events on campus. From what I understand they will be continuing with their booth tomorrow. I may stop by again for another discussion.

On a side note it was also interesting to notice standing next to me was the president of the local Non-Theists Society. She was talking with another one of the members hosting the event. However, I did not get a chance to hear what they were discussing before I had to leave.

Image from: Politics and Pucks

Finding Darwin’s God (Part 2)

Today I attended the first in a series of book discussions on Kenneth Miller’s Finding Darwin’s God. It is being held by the Religious Studies program and the Purdue Religion and Science Group. You can read more about the specifics from a post I wrote previously about the event. We met in the round discussion room on the top floor of Beering overlooking campus which was very nice. That was the first time I had ever been in that room. There were roughly sixteen people who attended this first discussion although it sounds like there are around twenty who are participating as some were unable to be there today. Apparently, we also caused nearly every book store in the city to sell out of the Finding Darwin’s God as they ran out of copies to give out to those participating. The discussion was started by going around the table and having everyone introduce themselves. The group was largely made up of faculty and staff with some graduate students largely from the Religion and Philosophy departments. There were a couple people from the Biology department and even one professor from Civil Engineering. What I found interesting is, as far as I could tell, the only two undergraduate students were engineers, a girl from Civil Engineering and then myself. I would have expected at least one or two undergrads from the Liberal Arts department or possibly even the Biology department. During the course of the discussion a couple people came out and stated their religious position including one atheist who, if I understood him correctly, believed that evolution does not, in and of itself, lead to a belief in God but supports a naturalistic view of life. We also had another person identify herself as a Christian Biologist who saw no problems with the compatibility between religion and biology.

One of the topics that was brought up by one of the coordinators of the discussion was how, or if, science and engineering courses teach about the classics of their fields, such as Darwin’s On the Origin of Species and Newton’s Opticks. She mainly asked this of the engineers in the room as the majority of the people there were from liberal arts backgrounds and did not know how we, engineers, were introduced to this material. We basically had to tell her that we do not go over any kind of classic engineering or science material. That those works have become almost exclusively relegated to classes on literature or the history of science and technology.

The topic of evolution in High School came eventually came up as well. Professor Ryba, one of the coordinators of the discussion, brought up a point from Miller’s book were Miller said he never had any introduction to evolution through his High School classes. Many of the people there were roughly the same age as Miller and thought that kind of strange as they had evolution in High School. A possible reason that was brought up for this is the differences in location. Different areas of the country, and world, have brought evolution into the classroom at different points in time.

A good point was made by the person who stated they see evolution as supporting a naturalistic view brought up a point about one of Miller’s statements in the first chapter. In it Miller makes the statement,

And does [evolution] rigorously exclude belief in God?

He made the contention with Miller’s choice of the word “rigorous”. He argued that science rarely ever can be said to be rigorous in its definitions or predictions, possibly making the point of the book kind of specious.  Another point was brought up dealing, again, with Miller’s choice of words. This time it was with his choice of using the term “traditional” in reference to religion. It was brought up that the definition of “traditional” can by very vague and spread across a fairly large spectrum of beliefs. It will be interesting to see how Miller defines it further.

The next meeting is in two weeks for which we were asked to read up to chapter six and to come with questions and pages highlighted.

A Rift Among Atheists

Over at the Thomas Society a link to an online article from npr was posted that I think very accurately describes a current transition within the atheist movement. The article is titled A Bitter Rift Divides Atheists. It describes a current rift among New and Old Atheists. The New Atheists being the ones who actively rely on ridicule to get their points across. This is something I have been witnessing both on my local campus and online. It is a movement that I believe will only do more harm than good, as the article points out. You can read the full article from the link above as it does a much better job of explaining the current situation. Here are a few excerpts I found interesting.

During the previous Blasphemy Day an art exhibit was held, in D.C., displaying art works that many Christians would find highly insulting. It was hosted by The Center for Inquiry.

Another, Jesus Paints His Nails, shows an effeminate Jesus after the crucifixion, applying polish to the nails that attach his hands to the cross.
"I wouldn't want this on my wall," says Stuart Jordan, an atheist who advises the evidence-based group Center for Inquiry on policy issues.

Naturally, this kind of stuff created a fairly big controversy. The article explains that it is a controversy that is not simply limited to Blasphemy Day, but has a much larger scope.

"It's really a national debate among people with a secular orientation about how far do we want to go in promoting a secular society through emphasizing the 'new atheism,' " Jordan says.

"What we wanted were thoughtful, incisive and concise critiques of religion," he says. "We were not trying to insult believers."

They may not have been trying to insult believers, but many others are perfectly happy doing so.

For example, Hitchens, a columnist for Vanity Fair and author of the book God Is Not Great, told a capacity crowd at the University of Toronto, "I think religion should be treated with ridicule, hatred and contempt, and I claim that right." His words were greeted with hoots of approval.

The article ends with a quote from the founder of the Center for Inquiry that I very much agree with.

"I consider them atheist fundamentalists," he says. "They're anti-religious, and they're mean-spirited, unfortunately. Now, they're very good atheists and very dedicated people who do not believe in God. But you have this aggressive and militant phase of atheism, and that does more damage than good."