He doesn’t get atheism either

Posted on October 13, 2010 by Michael

It’s annoying enough when Christopher Maloney wades in over his head and pretends to know something about medicine beyond what a pre-med student might know. But it’s even more annoying when he goes after atheists. (And, I mean, does he really want to go down that road, what with yet offering a viable defense for his quackery?)

I’m constantly amazed that the spokespeople for religious points of view aren’t better at getting their points across. The atheists are the one group who could have picked their spokespeople logically and by open election, but they let the most grumpy of their brethren carry the flag. Here’s a comparison of Dawkins vs. Gervais. If Gervais were the spokesperson for atheism, there would be a lot more converts. He makes his point, and you can’t help liking him for it. Dawkins makes a clever (rehearsed- he gives the same mocking answer to others as well) response without engaging the speaker.

Here’s Richard Dawkins not answering a question. Or answering it, if answering with the same question is an answer.

He then links to this video of Dawkins where an audience member asks what happens if he’s wrong about the Christian god. Dawkins replies by asking the audience member what if she’s wrong about all the other gods. To Maloney, this isn’t answering the question.

Is Dawkins’ point really that hard to get? He’s saying that the only reason that question seems reasonable to the audience member is that she has been brought up in a Christian culture. His question about what it means if she’s wrong about Zeus or Thor or whoever is to show that it doesn’t matter about what god we want to ask the question. It’s a trivial issue that assumes a lot of culture with it. So what if he’s wrong about the Christian god? Then he goes to hell, to the glee of a so-called benevolent creator. And if the audience member is wrong about Allah, she can kiss heaven goodbye. Who cares? The whole question is just a rudimentary way of posing Pascal’s Wager, that piece of philosophical trash.

Oh, and I love how Maloney links back to religion and atheism, as if we need his help in defining the terms. (Well, maybe he needs some help in defining “atheism”.) And linking to the IMDb page for Dawkins? Gold. I love when the elderly use the Internet.

Filed under: Atheism/Humanism | Tagged: , , , | 2 Comments »

Capturing the world

Posted on October 12, 2010 by Michael

As usual, the wonderful writing over at Shambling After deserves recognition.

I lived in a little bubble of ignorant bliss and although I convinced myself that I was concerned with the rest of the world, I couldn’t even begin to comprehend how much of the world there is to be concerned with.

This is about Cairo, but the same feeling found its way into me while I was in Africa. The constant dirt and abject poverty was something I expected, but it wasn’t something for which I was necessarily ready. I found myself often thinking, when people say they’re suffering, when they say they have it bad, it’s all relative. The tiny villages of Tanzania have suffering, they have it bad. That isn’t to say there is nothing but misery there – the number of smiling children I saw astounded me – but it isn’t ice cream and video games. When black Americans say they can relate to their ‘home land’, I now have nothing but contempt for such statements. Just as when a white person says he can at all relate to being black in America, the claim would be risible if it wasn’t such a lie. And I’m not saying I can relate merely because of what I saw while I sat in a Range Rover with my hundreds of dollars worth of hiking equipment and Slim Jims. But I do at least know I can’t relate.

To steal the Samuel Johnson quote used at Shambling After,

The use of traveling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are.

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PZ is full of good quotes

Posted on October 11, 2010 by Michael

Really, just go read his post:

I’ve been told to hush, there are good Christians who support science, and a vocal atheism will scare them away…and I have to ask, you question my support for science education, when you pander to people who you admit will put their superstitions above science if someone says a harsh word about Jesus?

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The sanity of secularism

Posted on October 11, 2010 by Michael

From PZ:

There is an answer, and it’s on display right here in this room. The solution, the only longterm solution, is the sanity of secularism. The lesser struggles to keep silly stickers off our textbooks or to keep pseudoscientific BS like intelligent design out of our classrooms are important, but they are endless chores — at some point we just have to stop pandering to the ideological noise that spawns these unending tasks and cut right to the source: religion.

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On fundamentalism

Posted on October 10, 2010 by Michael

Richard Dawkins on fundamentalism:

I’m not fundamentalist. A fundamentalist is someone who knows they’re right because they’ve read a holy book. Nothing is going to shift them from it, whereas a scientist is going to shift if the evidence changes. What a scientist does is say the evidence at present points me in one direction. If the evidence changes, I’ll change with great pleasure. That’s the opposite of a fundamentalist.

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How to write a news article

Posted on October 4, 2010 by Michael

It’s unfortunately common that journalists are always so eager to seek out all sides on an issue. It’s this sort of blind following of protocol that has resulted in the anti-vax crowd rising to the prominence it has, or the fact that creationists will often get to spout lies concerning recent scientific discoveries. And do the journalists ever challenge those lies? Not really. It’s apparently enough that we hear what two groups think, even if one of those groups is incompetent.

That’s why I really like this article by Ashley Yeager of Duke. Without simply presenting us her point of view, something for which we have plenty of bloggers and the like, she informs the reader of what happened at a particular event – and she doesn’t ask for the needless opinions of dissenters.

People filed into Page Auditorium on Oct. 3 carrying The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution tucked under their arm. The scene was typical of a lecture given on a college campus, except the instructor was the controversial and outspoken British biology writer Richard Dawkins.

…

Dawkins’ lecture used no props or PowerPoint slides. For 45 minutes, he simply talked his listeners through his latest book, mixing scientific discussion with scathing jabs. He cited evidence for his argument that “we stop calling evolution a theory and call it a fact.”

…

He spoke about the family trees that linked all animals and how some would argue that “God deliberately deceived us.” Maybe God did, Dawkins conceded. But if so, “I’m not sure if that is the kind of God you want to worship,” he said.

…

“You have all the arguments on your side. (Students) may say well my parents, say or my preachers say this. Well, damn your preacher, these are the facts.”

You know when you watch a DVD of a TV show and it has that weird cut where you feel like you’re about to watch a commercial? Well, this is the point in this article where most other journalists would go to some priest or well-known creationist for a dissenting view. I can just feel it. But Yeager doesn’t do that. Here is the next paragraph.

One audience member asked Dawkins if he and religious groups that advocate for many of the same causes as his foundation — natural disaster relief, education reform, among others — could ever work together. No, Dawkins said. At a fundamental level, the two groups’ views would have them debating much more than aiding others, he said.

She just continues on with her account of the event. I love it. This is a good example of how journalism should be done.

Just because there is another side doesn’t mean it’s a side worth hearing.

Filed under: Atheism/Humanism, Evolution, News | Tagged: , , , , | 7 Comments »

Atheists score higher than religious on religious survey

Posted on September 29, 2010 by Michael

Pew has a new and unsurprising poll about what Americans know about religion.

On average, people who took the survey answered half the questions incorrectly, and many flubbed even questions about their own faith.

Those who scored the highest were atheists and agnostics, as well as two religious minorities: Jews and Mormons. The results were the same even after the researchers controlled for factors like age and racial differences.

“Even after all these other factors, including education, are taken into account, atheists and agnostics, Jews and Mormons still outperform all the other religious groups in our survey,” said Greg Smith, a senior researcher at Pew.

One head of an atheist organization has an idea why we’re seeing these results.

That finding might surprise some, but not Dave Silverman, president of American Atheists, an advocacy group for nonbelievers that was founded by Madalyn Murray O’Hair.

“I have heard many times that atheists know more about religion than religious people,” Mr. Silverman said. “Atheism is an effect of that knowledge, not a lack of knowledge. I gave a Bible to my daughter. That’s how you make atheists.”

And for some, I suspect, the deep conflict between science and religion helps to inform people about the religions of the world. People see the truth of what science has to tell us, then they hear the lies of religion (miracles, for example), and they look into both more deeply. I lend much more weight to Silverman’s more straight-forward explanation, but I think there’s something to be said of my suggestion; people want to know what’s true and religion hasn’t a single answer.

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Hitchens on Christianity

Posted on September 24, 2010 by Michael

This is utterly excellent.

Filed under: Atheism/Humanism, Religions | Tagged: | 1 Comment »

Dawkins’ speech at Pope protest

Posted on September 20, 2010 by Michael

Filed under: Atheism/Humanism, Politics and Social | Tagged: , | 1 Comment »

‘The Grand Design’

Posted on September 17, 2010 by Michael

I just got my copy of Stephen Hawking’s “The Grand Design”. I’ve only looked at it briefly, so a full report is not possible at this time. However, I think it’s worth quoting a section he has on miracles.

It is Laplace who is usually credited with first clearly postulating scientific determinism: Given the state of the universe at one time, a complete set of laws fully determines both the future and the past. This would exclude the possibility or miracles or an active role for God. The scientific determinism that Laplace formulated is the modern scientists’s answer to question two (‘Are there any exceptions to the laws, i.e., miracles?’). It is, in fact, the basis of all modern science, and a principle that is important throughout this book. A scientific law is not a scientific law if it holds only when some supernatural being decides not to intervene. (Page 30)

Emphasis mine.

This is a concise account of why the belief in miracles is so anti-science: science tells us ‘These are laws which are true at all points and all times within the observable Universe’ whereas a believer in miracles inherently says, ‘No, no. These aren’t laws at all. They can be made untrue at any point and any time, and in fact some of them have not been valid in certain places and at certain times.’ Of course, the believer doesn’t actually say that. But his belief in miracles means that.

Filed under: Astronomy/Cosmology/Physics, Atheism/Humanism, Science | Tagged: , , | 2 Comments »

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