Monthly Archives: September 2006

Atheism books pick up the gauntlet

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In my prior posting, I gave my initial reaction to the publication of several new books on atheism, especially A Letter to a Christian Nation (by Sam Harris) and The God Delusion (by Richard Dawkins).

Interested in the reactions of others to these books, I read numerous online reviews. I was pleased to see that most have been quite positive. Still, even in many otherwise glowing reviews, a few common criticisms emerged. And while I certainly admit that there is room for criticisms (I even have a few myself), there are three related points that kept getting raised that I believe are largely irrelevant. Here’s why:

The book is preaching to the converted. That is, any theist that might benefit from a thoughtful reading of the book will either never pick it up or dismiss it out of hand shortly after beginning it.

To this criticism, I bluntly say: So what?

First of all, I largely agree with this criticism. It is almost certainly true for Dawkins’ book. Dawkins writes “If this book works as I intend, religious readers who open it will be atheists when they put it down.” I have a similar hope for his superb book, as the arguments in it are so compelling as to seem nearly impossible to refute. But still, I can hardly imagine Dawkins’ wish getting granted. Dawkins does not help this cause by his consistently disparaging tone towards believers and their religious beliefs (such as his comment about the debate between monotheism and polytheism: “Life is too short to bother with the distinction between one figment of the imagination and many”).

However, this criticism implies that there is some hypothetical book that could have been written that would somehow surmount this difficulty and convince a large segment of theists to change their world view. I seriously doubt that. Arguments against a belief in God have been out there for hundreds of years with little effect overall. As I pointed out in my previous posting, religious belief systems are designed specifically to prevent their rejection by believers. Some people may manage to overcome this, but it won’t be easy.

If there is any hope for a shift here, it will be a generational one, heralded by a change in how our children are taught. Now that I think of it, perhaps that is why fundamentalists are so strongly against the teaching of evolution in our schools. And this is almost certainly the basis for what is depicted in the new film Jesus Camp. But I digress.

Making matters worse, this hardly seems like the right moment in history to expect any sort of major change to occur in the country’s attitude towards atheism. Here in the U.S., we live in a time when religion, especially fundamentalist religion, has greater influence on our political landscape that ever before.

As an analogy, I think back to the months before we invaded Iraq. I was among the very tiny minority that was speaking out against the idea of a “preemptive war,” attending rallies and writing letters to the editor protesting the impending war. However, I believe that there was nothing that I nor anyone else could have written at the time that would have had a significant effect. The aftermath of 9/11 was still too close, the Bush administration was too willing to present faulty intelligence as fact and to raise of the specter of nightmare nuclear scenarios, and the press was too busy searching for its missing spine.

Still, you have to start somewhere. Even if you know your voice will hardly be heard at first, you have to hope that if you speak the truth long enough, hard enough, and convincingly enough that eventually, the tenure of the times will change, and your voice will fall on more receptive ears. That has finally happened with the war in Iraq. Hopefully, it will someday lead to widespread support for atheism.

Finally, even if a book could be written that would satisfy the cited criticism, it doesn’t mean that Dawkins should have written it. That would be like saying that Michael Moore should make movies that get his point across but in a way that doesn’t annoy conservatives. Yes, it would be great if someone made such a movie. But there is room for and value in Michael Moore’s approach as well as others.

The book is a polemic. It is critical to the point of being nasty and insulting. This is not the way to win converts. You don’t change the mind of someone who disagrees with you by insulting them.

This is almost a corollary of the first criticism. So perhaps all I need say here is re-read what I just wrote. But let me go a bit further.

There is certainly substance to this criticism. Even a title such as “The God Delusion” starts off on a combative note. But, as Dawkins and Harris both point out, religion has gotten off too easy here for far too long. The level of “respect” expected when discussing religious beliefs, no matter how bizarre they may be, far exceeds what would be expected in any other area of discourse. Perhaps it is time to loosen this restraint.

If nothing else, the result of the approach of these books is to bring attention to themselves and the questions they raise. I doubt whether this would have happened with a more “polite” book.

The book isn’t really saying anything new or original.

Again, rather than debate whether this criticism is true or not, I once again reply: Even if it is true, so what?

It’s not as if every one in the country has been repeatedly exposed to these arguments. It’s not as if these ideas have been thoroughly debunked and proven to be false. Quite the contrary.

So, if someone can take worthwhile concepts, even if the someone is not the originator of the concepts, and present them in a new and thought-provoking way, in a way that can be more easily understood by a general audience, in a format that is more easily accessible than obscure journal articles, in a manner that garners national attention, starts a discussion as to the merits of these ideas, and perhaps ever so slowly changes the opinions of at least a few people, then I say: “Fantastic.”

To take another example, how many years after the Civil War was it necessary to argue that African Americans were not getting the civil rights they deserved? How many times was it important to say the same things over and over again? What would have happened to the civil rights movement if, back in the 1950’s, the country said, “We’ve heard all this before” and protesters replied, “Oh, okay, sorry about that” and went away? For one thing, I doubt we would have seen the successes that occurred in the 1960’s.

The modern defense of atheism is only in its earliest stages. If it takes repetition to make a dent in the public’s awareness, then so be it. If it will still take many years before the repetition has an effect, so be it. We are in this for the long haul. As the saying goes, all journeys begin with the first step.

Coming out of the atheism closet

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A few weeks ago, Newsweek ran an article titled The New Naysayers. It was about a trio of newly-published books on atheism. The books are Breaking the Spell (by Daniel Dennett), A Letter to a Christian Nation (by Sam Harris) and The God Delusion (by Richard Dawkins). What these books, especially the latter two, have in common is aptly summarized in this quote from the article:

“Dawkins and Harris are not writing polite demurrals to the time-honored beliefs of billions; they are not issuing pleas for tolerance or moderation, but bone-rattling attacks on what they regard as a pernicious and outdated superstition…These authors have no geopolitical strategy to advance; they’re interested in the metaphysics of belief, not the politics of the First Amendment. It’s the idea of putting trust in God they object to, not the motto on the nickel.”

This is a much more aggressive and offensive (in both senses of the word) posture than atheists have taken in the past. And, overall, for this I am glad.

Atheists have for too long been far too polite in their criticism of theistic positions. I suppose it comes from being such a small minority, or at least feeling like one. It can be difficult to be assertive when you know that the result will be the virtual casting of stones upon you by almost everyone else in the community. But if ever there was a time for atheists to be willing to take this risk, the time is now, where we have a war being waged by religious fanatics in our own country against religious fanatics in other countries, with ordinary people on both sides caught in the crosshairs.

Happily, the number of atheists may be larger than is generally assumed, even here in the U.S. As Dawkins notes in the Preface to his book: “The reason so many people don’t notice atheists is that many of us are reluctant to come out. Exactly as in the case of the gay movement, the more people come out, the easier it will be for others to join them.”

Okay, Richard. You’ve convinced me (which was not that hard to do!). I am coming out. Let me start here with two personal thoughts on the subject:

The black box. One of the most insidious aspects of religion is how it manages to defend itself against attack. I don’t mean attacks from non-believers against religious individuals. I mean intellectual attacks that might otherwise get a thoughtful religious person to question their own beliefs. In this way, religious beliefs have something in common with a successful virus.

As others have also noted, religious beliefs carry their own immunity protection, making it difficult for a successful attack to be mounted against them. How else to explain the fact that Hurricane Katrina could kill thousands of people, yet a survivor may still thank God for sparing his or her life? Logically, for survivors to believe that God directly intervened to save their lives, they must also believe that God could have intervened to save everyone who died but chose not to do so. In other words, those who died were not equally deserving of God’s mercy. Even worse, there is an implication that God, being omnipotent, caused the hurricane in the first place — or at least permitted its destruction.

Every time there is a disaster, I have trouble wrapping my mind around this. A raging fire burns an entire neighborhood of houses to the ground, killing several people. Yet, interviewed on television, there will always be a surviving resident thanking God for allowing them to get out of their house alive. Why is it not equally valid to curse God for allowing the fire in the first place? Or at least for the people who died?

I am sure that most people don’t give this any thought at all — in the same way they don’t think about why the sky is blue or how their brain works. It’s just accepted. If some thought is given, it will likely lead to a reply such as “God works in mysterious ways and we cannot always understand his purpose.” But that just doesn’t cut it. By explaining everything, such statements explain nothing.

To put the matter in metaphorical terms: Suppose I had a black box and I told you that inside it was a genie who could grant your every wish. However, to get a wish granted you had to talk to the Genie directly. And to talk to the Genie, you first had to open the box. The problem is that no one has ever been able to open the box. Further, according to a scroll that is attached to the box, if someone ever does find a way to open the box, the Genie will instantly fly away, before you can even see him and certainly before you can ask him anything.

If you were to accept all this as true, based on faith, it becomes an elegant self-sustaining impenetrable belief. There is no way that anyone could ever prove you wrong. Whether or not the box is ever opened, the predicted result is the same: you never get to see the Genie and you never get to ask your wish. So the faith that the Genie exists safely survives.

If this black box faith appears to work in the same way as many religious beliefs, if it appears to mimic how a person’s belief in God is not shaken by events no matter how good nor how bad they may be, no matter what evidence and logic might otherwise dictate, this is not a coincidence.

The need for proof. When I say I do not believe in God, some people of faith ask how I can be sure that God does not exist? And why is my certain lack of belief any more defensible than their certainty that God does exist?

First of all, while I consider myself to be an atheist rather than an agnostic, I admit that I cannot prove that God does not exist. So I am not certain that God does not exist. As any scientist worth his salt knows, you can never prove the negative. I cannot prove God does not exist any more than I can prove that flying saucers from Mars are not circling the Earth at this very moment, using cloaking devices to keep us from detecting them.

But this is exactly why the burden of proof is on those who make extraordinary claims. No one (well almost no one) truly believes there are flying saucers in earth’s orbit right now. This is because there is no evidence to support such a belief. When we ask why we can find no evidence, the most reasonable explanation is that there are no flying saucers.

Just because some explanation has some very remote possibility of being true doesn’t mean that it deserves equal consideration to other explanations that are far more likely to be true. This is so whether talking about flying saucers or a God that answers our prayers.

It is especially so when you consider all the different religious belief systems in the world. Almost by definition, all but one of them must be wrong. Yet most people cling to the correctness of just one of these systems, simply based on the happenstance of what they were taught as a child. This is not the best way to evaluate truth vs. falsehood.

I often hear that religious beliefs are a matter of faith, as if this somehow absolves people from having to have defend the reasonableness of their beliefs, whether to atheists, to those of different faiths, or even to themselves. I don’t see why religion should get this free pass. It is just another way that religion works to prevent a believer from ever having to consider that they might be wrong.

Note: I wrote the above posting after finishing Harris’s book but only reading as far as Chapter 1 in Dawkins’ book. After completing the remainder of the book, I discovered that a good part of what I wrote echoes points made by Dawkins. See especially the discussion of Betrand Russell’s celestial teapot, on pages 52-54. I was not surprised. It would have been presumptuous of me to assume that I was the first person to think of these arguments. At first, this made me hesitate about publishing this item. Should I post something that is so obviously “unoriginal”? Obviously, I ultimately decided that I should. For a subject where most people have not heard these arguments even once, it can only help to have them repeated. This is a subject I will explore in more detail in my next posting.

Afterthought on HIV’s “intelligence”

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In my previous posting, I wrote about the “intelligence” of HIV virus. This has led me to the following afterthought:

The HIV virus is a great example of the explanatory power of evolution. Here is an organism that, on any measure of complexity, is at the opposite end of the spectrum from humans. Yet, it is still incredibly well-adapted to its environment. So much so that, at least for awhile, scientists feared that HIV could eradicate the entire human race. There is still some concern that this could happen, if HIV mutates into some more virulent form. Evolution, which does not posit that increased complexity equals superiority or that humans have any special status that should make them immune from extinction threats, has no trouble with explaining the success of HIV.

For religious (“design”) explanations for how the world works, HIV is likely to be a major problem. What kind of God would create an organism that kills millions and threatens to kill billions more. Yes, some say that this is God’s punishment to those that are drug addicts or homosexuals. But even if you accept such an idea (which many religious people do not), it doesn’t work: AIDs infects far more than those populations, including children infected even before they are born.

I know I am not the first to raise the larger issue here. How, if there is a benevolent omnipotent God, he could permit “bad things to happen to good people” has been a long-standing debate. But there is still not a convincing answer to this question.

The issue also serves as a convenient segue to my next two postings.

Drawing the line on the emotions of animals and plants

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The other night I attended a talk by Jeffrey Mason, author of When Elephants Weep among several other books. I was not familiar with his work prior to this talk. While the talk skipped around a number of topics, its main focus was on Mr. Mason’s assertions that animals have emotions akin to humans and therefore deserve a similar level of treatment and respect. This is now largely accepted as true, at least more true than had been commonly accepted years ago. I certainly concur. Additionally, I consider myself a supporter of animal rights, at least of the sort promoted by Jane Goodall if not PETA.

Still, Mr. Mason tended to make broad generalizations that went beyond what could be supported by evidence — such as when he claimed there was “nothing” you could learn about animals from studying them in a lab or that dogs should never be kept as pets because you are denying them their “ideal” existence (check out the negative reviews of his books on Amazon for less polite criticisms of his work and views). But what prompted me to write this posting was not Mr. Mason himself who, regardless of any difference in our views, I found to be a smart, witty and engaging speaker.

Rather, it was the more bizarre and extreme views expressed by members of the audience. Several people suggested that plants (trees in particular!) are as capable of emotional responses (such as fear) as animals and thus deserve similar deference. Going off in a different direction, one person noted that “it goes without saying” that dogs have telepathic capabilities and use them to communicate with humans. Given that there is no evidence of telepathic powers even in humans, it’s hard to imagine how this works. But I suppose that’s another story.

At least one audience member raised a telling point: “Where do we draw the line?” That is, where is the line that says organisms on this side have emotions and therefore need to be protected from human mistreatment while organisms on the other side do not merit this protection.

In trying to answer this question for myself, I gave some thought to the impressive HIV virus.

Here is an organism that measures less than 1/10,000 meters in diameter. It is nothing more than a couple of strands of genetic material, a few proteins and a shell to contain them. Yet, it displays what, from a human perspective, appears to be an incredible level of intelligence. Indeed, the best and brightest minds in the world have yet to find a way to defeat it, despite decades of trying. It manages to invade our immune cells and take them over, with the result that when these cells divide they produce more HIV, which in turn spreads to still more immune cells, eventually destroying enough immune cells that the body loses its ability to fight off infections. As stated on the How Stuff Works Web site : “HIV corrupts and disables the system that should be guarding against HIV.”

So where does that leave us? Should we conclude from the apparent intelligence of HIV that we need to be respectful in how we treat it? In particular, should we oppose attempts to kill the virus, in the same way that we might oppose those who attempt to kill dogs for sport or mistreat chimpanzees?

I am concerned that at least a few attendees in Mason’s audience would answer yes. But this is certainly not a conclusion I would reach. Instead, we should bear in mind that, just because an organism may behave in way that resembles an aspect of human behavior, doesn’t mean the behaviors are equivalent in any significant way. Ignoring this fact is the dark side of anthropomorphism. For another example, just because a plant emits an odor designed to attract insects (even if that odor resembles dead flesh, as in the case of stinking flowers), doesn’t mean that flowers have any conscious understanding of what they are doing or why. And it would be ludicrous to suggest that these flowers be accorded any “rights” based on their insect attractiveness.

As in any controversy, there may be fuzziness at the border line. It can sometimes be hard to draw a narrow and clear divide. In this case, individuals may not be able to agree on exactly what species fall on one side of the line and which ones go to the other. But that doesn’t mean that a line does not exist. And, even with a fuzzy line, distinctions can be quite clear once you move some distance away from the line itself.

In other words, it is not inconsistent to support the humane treatment of many animal species without having to support similar rights for trees and viruses. I’d like to think there is not much of a debate here. But after attending this talk, I am not sure. Anyway, it seems worth a mention.