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are not issuing pleas for tolerance or moderation, but bone-rattling attacks on what they regard as a pernicious and outdated superstition…These authors have no geopolitical strategy to advance; they’re interested in the metaphysics of belief, not the politics of the First Amendment.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.

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.

So…as quoted in an article from the Detroit Free Press, “Republican gubernatorial candidate Dick DeVos says he thinks Michigan’s science curriculum should include a discussion about intelligent design.”

Oh, please.

If I believed there might be a hell in an afterlife, I am sure this would be a small taste of what it is like.

DeVos, and other proponents of Intelligent Design (ID), do not debate the topic in any rational way. Instead, the are like an old vinyl LP, stuck on a scratch and playing the same sound bite over and over again…and with the same level of conscious thought.

Never mind the overwhelming evidence and thousands of articles and books that make the case for evolution, never mind the virtual complete lack of any pro-ID articles in any refereed journals, never mind that there is no reason that the scientific community would oppose ID if there was any evidence to support it, never mind that 99+% of all scientists oppose the very idea of treating ID as science (much the same way they would oppose teaching that the world was created by invisible insects from Neptune), never mind that even if there was significant evidence opposing a theory of evolution that is not the same as support for ID, never mind all of that. They could all be the subject of another and much longer posting (not to mention that it has all been covered extensively and repeatedly by others).

Let’s just focus on the judge’s ruling in Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District. If you read the full text, you’ll find an rock-solid well-reasoned set of arguments for why ID is nothing but religion in sheep’s clothing and should not be taught in science classes.

Ideally, in any reasonable debate, after each side states its arguments, you continue by rebutting your opponent. But not ID proponents. Did DeVos say, “I support the teaching of ID in schools, despite the ruling by Judge Jones, and here is why I believe he is wrong?” Or anything resembling that? No. He simply ignores the case made by the opposing side and repeats the exact same thing that he would have said if the judge’s ruling had never been issued.

It’s as if someone said: “It’s not raining where I am standing now.” And I replied: “But look at yourself, you are getting covered in water from the sky, your jacket is soaked, and there is no water source in sight that could account for this other than rain.” And that someone replied: “It’s not raining where I am standing now.”

Frustrating? Infuriating? You bet. Like a broken record? Yes again. But that’s what it’s like dealing with ID proponents. And amazingly, it is at least moderately successful. Otherwise, we would not still be here debating this. I see it all the time, such as in Ann Coulter’s latest book. She has a chapter on evolution in which she trots out virtually every anti-evolution argument ever made, despite the fact that they have been successfully rebutted over and over. There are no counter-rebuttals to the rebuttals. That would be expecting too much. No, it’s just the same “It’s not raining…” repeated again and again.

Finally, I can’t end this without commenting on the gutless nature of the cited Free Press article. In its misguided attempt to appear “unbiased and balanced,” it loses the very credibility it seeks.

Here is a key excerpt:

“Intelligent design’s proponents hold that living organisms are so complex they must have been created by a higher force rather than evolving from more primitive forms. Some want science teachers to teach that Darwin’s theory of evolution is not a fact and has gaps.

However, a federal judge in December barred the school system in Dover, Pa., from teaching intelligent design alongside evolution in high school biology classes. The judge said intelligent design is religion masquerading as science and that teaching it alongside evolution violates the separation of church and state.”

First off, it makes it sound as if the debate is between intelligent design’s proponents and a single federal judge. What about all the evolution proponents? Don’t they get a say?

Second, and much more importantly, it takes no position. It is simply a “he said, she said” piece with no attempt to evaluate anything. Now, I understand that the article is not an editorial. I am not saying this should be an opinion piece. But an article need not drift into opinion to take a fact-based position. Not every argument has two sides that are of equal merit. There is nothing wrong with pointing that out.

For example, imagine reading the following:

“A recent offshoot of intelligent design holds that living organisms consist entirely of tiny integrated circuits, as were first created by a group of immortal elves that lived in Antarctica but today reside on a space station that orbits the moon, where they continue to research new designs and send them to Earth.

However, one federal judge in California has barred teaching this offshoot theory in science classes, stating that it is a religious theory masquerading as science.”

Wouldn’t you expect to see a bit more? Wouldn’t you expect the article, at the very least, to point out that there is virtually no known evidence to support this wild assertion? That would be a factual truth, not an opinion. But no, that might offend someone. Somebody might claim that the paper was being anti-religion. So instead we get the sort of vacant drivel that passes as reporting in the current climate.

If only one could end all this as easily as you can remove the needle from a broken record. Sadly, this record is likely to keep spinning for a long long time.