How not to examine the evolution of proteins

The Discovery Institute has me on a mailing list for their newsletter, Nota Bene. That’s probably unwise: usually I just glance at it, see another ignorant bit of fluff from Luskin or Nelson or one of the other usual suspects, and I snigger and hit ‘delete’, but sometimes they brag about how they’re really doing science, and I look a little closer. And then I might feel motivated to take a slap at them.

The latest issue contains an article by Ann Gauger, babbling about her recent publication disproving Darwinism, written with her colleague Douglas Axe, published in their tame ‘science’ journal, Bio-complexity, and edited by Michael Behe. It’s not work that could survive in a real journal, I’m afraid.

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Standing up to William Lane Craig

Lately, William Lane Craig has been demanding that Richard Dawkins debate him, and has gotten quite insistent lately as he tours England. I don’t see the point in anyone debating Craig: he’s a nobody who has contributed nothing to the intellectual world; he’s a professional debater and apologist, a rhetorical gunslinger for Christ, and there’s no purpose to enaging him (I know Hitchens took him on…but Hitchens has been our rhetorical gunslinger). Dawkins is a top-flight evolutionary biologist and a masterful craftsman of the English language. I don’t think there’s even anything interesting to discuss with Craig. So Richard Dawkins has taken the time to explain why he refuses to debate William Lane Craig. It’s a terrific put-down. I’m going to have to steal from it next time that importuning dweeb Vox Day starts pestering me to debate him.

I was pleased to see that one of Dawkins’ points was one that is not made often enough: William Lane Craig is a nasty, amoral excuse for a human being.

Why I am an atheist – Samyogita Hardikar

Up till I was 19 I had been dwelling into the murky waters of faith, mainly switching between a haphazard belief in some sort of higher power if not god per se and agnosticism of the ‘If there had been a god, then surely he wouldn’t have allowed all this cruelty and suffering?’ persuasion. Now I really don’t think there is a god. The reasons are many and most of them are obvious to and shared by most other atheists: no real evidence for the existence of god/ gods, a respect for and inclination towards a humanitarian and human-centric idea of morality, too many vulgar disputes amongst the believers themselves about who exactly this ‘one true god’ person that they all keep banging on about might be, to name a few of the top ones. But I vividly remember the moment I started thinking of myself as an out-and-out atheist and it wasn’t any kind of anger or frustration or hardcore empirical analysis that made it happen. It happened when I heard Douglas Adams speculating about the origin of god.

He says that the idea of god probably came into existence because after looking about and seeing what a well oiled machine this world was, we humans made the foolish mistake of asking the most ridiculous, naive and treacherous question: ‘So who made this then?’ ‘This’ being the world, of course. ‘Someone must’ve made it, you know? Like we make stuff?’
And from there we just went on improvising and thinking that since we’re the only ones who ever actually make anything, it must’ve been someone very like us, much more sizable and capable than us, and much more invisible, obviously.

I completely buy that theory and it may seem trivial but if we are to move on from all this violence and disharmony that happens in the name of god, we have to see the whole notion for the triviality that it is. Let’s not- for a moment- try to answer that absurd question with the first thing that comes to your mind and we’ll be fine.

To put forth a simple if slightly cheap analogy, the idea of god is a bit like non-degradable plastic. It’s man-made. It’s not found in nature. It was created by throwing a whole bunch of random stuff together. It’s a relatively recent invention considering how long we’ve been around and even if it may look like it at first glance, our lives do not depend on it. It’s a quick, immediate gratification based solution for an eternal problem which is why it’s dangerous. It seemed like a very good idea at the beginning and most people still think it’s pretty handy but now that we have it, we don’t seem to be able to get rid of it and it’s all beginning to get a bit out of hand. And lastly, living things are suffering and dying horrible deaths because of it. Atheism on the other hand is way more ego-friendly.

Samyogita Hardikar
India

Why I am an atheist – Lucretius of Mississippi

I had a happy childhood during which I was taken by my mother to the local Southern Baptist Church for Sunday School, Morning Church Service, Training Union (that’s extra night-time Sunday School for you non-Baptists out there) and Evening Church Service. As I got older, she added Youth Choir practice, Wednesday night prayer service, and Tuesday Visitation (during which we got addresses of folks who hadn’t been to church in a while, and also addresses of folks who had moved from another town and hadn’t come by to see us yet, and went out to see how they were doing.)

I remember that the message to the young folk in my small-town church was very positive. God loves you, Jesus saves, bring your cares to Him, rejoice in God’s love and love your neighbor as yourself. As I got up to about seventh grade questions started to surface about how old the world was. The message we got was that we didn’t need to worry about this. Probably, we were told, God’s days must have been pretty long back during the making of the world. Everybody had to read the Bible on their own, and nobody, not even the minister, could tell you exactly what to believe.

But shortly after that my Dad had to move for his job, (in 1966) and we were in the great huge city of Memphis. I started to hear a very different message. You could read the Bible all you wanted, but if you thought anything much different from what the preacher said, you must be in rebellion against God. And that faith stuff we’ve been telling you about? It’s great that you have faith, but guess what, we have proof too! The Bible is the literally inerrant word of God, after all!

I was a fairly well-read young Southerner and I found this to be a bit hard to swallow. It all came to a head a couple of years later during a revival. (That’s where a visiting pastor comes and preaches every single night for a week or two.) The man stood up and said that archeologists had found the ruins of Jericho, and the collapsed walls exactly proved the Biblical account. And the very next night the same pastor told the old story about how NASA computers were missing a day in the history of the universe, but it was explained in the Bible. (Believe it or not, people are still spreading this story, see: http://www.presentruth.com/2009/03/nasa-finds-the-missing-day/ )

The second story had so many holes in it that it defied credibility altogether. Um, let me think, there is a story of an eclipse in Egyptian records about 1200 BC but how could you possibly date the historical account accurately to check against your orbital calculations for eclipses during that time? Back that far, I think you would be lucky to date any event within 10 years plus or minus in Gregorian calendar terms, right? And any further than that, well, there’s enough orbital chaos you probably couldn’t really say when eclipses occurred. And besides, why in the world would NASA be worried about exact orbits three thousand years ago?

So I did make it to the library, found that sure enough, the NASA story was bunkum, as was the Jericho thing. (Yeah, there were some archeologists, and there were some old walls of Jericho, but the collapse of the walls was dated to a fire so long ago it was impossible to correlate it with any plausible date for the Exodus.)

I could go on and give more examples of crazy pulpit-talk. And of course I owe a tip of the hat to some children’s and juvenile books by the esteemed Henrick Willem van Loon (Story of Mankind, Lives, Tolerance) that prepared me for this day. Suffice it to say that from this point on, I began to accept a purely historical, non-supernatural view of the Bible and of the Church. No there is no resurrection, how in the world would Jesus’ sacrifice atone for my sins, etc etc. OTOH I had a very hard evening sitting there one day reading a book called “The Uses of the Past” by Herbert Muller that helped bring it all into focus to me- albeit in a way that seemed very hard to take, it was as if I was watching my favorite football team lose to a hated rival, it was a feeling of deep disappointment and disillusionment. I suppose I was about 15 years old.

However, I hate to disappoint the hardcore outspoken atheists here, but the fact of the matter is that I live in a part of the world where “coming out” as an atheist seems to be more trouble than it is worth. One sees the coming of a post-Christian England, one supposes that natural trends are heading the same way here without any of my feeble assistance, why should I subject myself to the inconvenience of making myself publicly heard? So I never told my parents or indeed any other member of my family.

But when I went to college, and later when I got married and had kids, I found it necessary to have a “flag of convenience.” Well, there are in fact some wonderful churches that treat people very kindly, where the preachers do not shout and scream, and you might even have a string quartet to play along with the choir, where you might go and sing some Thomas Tallis or some William Byrd or some Johann Sebastian Bach, and they tend to have very nice pipe organs. Since this is actually the sort of music I really like, I hung out there for decades, at least until my children were grown and gone.

But I have to say, living in the part of the world where I live, I still dread the sort of backlash and harassment that I imagine would ensue were I to make myself publicly known, and though I may invite the ridicule of this forum, at my age I am content to continue as I am. If I may offer one small point of argumentation in favor of staying in the closet, perhaps I could say that I think there are more pressing things than evangelizing for the cause of not believing in God. For example, science education, evolution, and climate change are burning issues where I think we should stand up against the forces of ignorance. But where I live, being identified as an out-and-out atheist is actually going to eliminate any credibility I might have and reduce any chance I have for being taken seriously or effecting any change whatsoever.

Lucretius of Mississippi
United States

What #HumanistCommunity?

I wasted too much time in the #humanistcommunity debate on twitter, so I’ll briefly summarize: because I detest the church-like model of Epstein’s humanist chaplain concept, I must dislike organization, leadership, and community. It quickly became obvious that many people are incapable of recognizing anything other than chaplains and churches as a reasonable model for community.

This is annoying because we have quite a few models for godless organizations that avoid that pitfall. CFI. American Atheists. SSA. They don’t have “chaplains”! I wonder how they manage without collapsing?

This is particularly galling because what Epstein claims to be doing is gathering empirical data on how best to run a secular movement. As I pointed out, we’re doing this already by having diverse secular groups springing up all over the place, not by having Greg Epstein defining what a secular meeting is supposed to be. He managed to diss one such incredibly successful group in his interview:

That’s not to say there aren’t homes for atheists on campus. Jesse Galef, communications director for the Secular Student Alliance, said his organization now has 306 chapters nationwide, up from 195 two years ago.

But those groups are loose-knit. They have no official format for meetings; some do service projects while others are as likely to hold an “atheist prom.” Most are led by students, not chaplains, and they have no institutional memory, since their membership turns over every four years.

Epstein wants to create something more permanent with a carefully thought out infrastructure.

Here’s one of the fastest growing secular organizations in the country…so what’s wrong with being “loose-knit”? It seems to work. What’s wrong with an “atheist prom”, or whatever idea provokes and entices the group? Maybe a “carefully thought out infrastructure” would be exactly the thing to crush the spirit of the movement.

Anyway, the argument will never end. Some people will follow this strangely pseudo-religious pattern, some of us will be more anarchic and let the organization bubble up from the bottom. But if we’re looking for empirical examples that work, it seems to me that the secular organizations that are succeeding all seem to have a shortage of chaplains.

Just call me a Quaker, I guess

My post yesterday declining to support churchiness for atheists seems to have irritated a few people, including Greg Epstein himself, and there was a bit of to-and-fro on twitter trying to convince me of the folly of my rejection. It didn’t take.

(There is apparently going to be more twitter chatter about it today, at 5pm (time zone unspecified), under the tag #humanistcommunity. I can’t join in — I’m doing an interview with Michael Slate around that time. I think.)

Now Hemant has joined in with a deeply flawed argument. He criticizes my complaint with a little sarcasm:

Right… who wants to bond with other people, perform community service, have fruitful discussions, find a secular way to celebrate rites of passage, and have someone they can talk to when they’re going through rough times who isn’t going to spit religion in their face?

Who’s disagreeing with any of that? Regular meetings, bonding, service, etc., all sans religion is great! Nowhere in any of my criticisms have I objected to any of those goals.

I also had people claiming my objection was to having weekly meetings. Again, I have no idea where that came from. Minnesota Atheists has weekly meetings, too, and I’d be going to them regularly if I didn’t live a three hour drive away.

Secular parenting, service, discussion, etc fine but if done weekly they’re a cheat & a waste?

So that’s just bizarre. I don’t have a clue what’s running through Epstein’s head. Have weekly meetings; have bi-weekly meetings. Have ’em every day. Organize for community service, have discussions about science and religion, socialize, all that good stuff. Have secular celebrants come in to celebrate milestones in people’s lives. That’s all good.

Just don’t turn it into church. Don’t develop a structure. Don’t have it led by chaplains. I’ve heard Epstein speak; a lot of what he talks about seems to be fond recollections of the way familiar old churches and synagogues were run, and I’m seeing that echoing in the way he’s setting up this “chaplain” nonsense. It’s un-egalitarian, it’s non-secular, it implies a special knowledge possessed by a Head Bozo. Epstein is a product of a theology program and a divinity school, and he’s still trapped in archaic patterns of thought, just trying to stuff atheism into a familiar model. We have lots of atheist groups out there that function perfectly well with things like elections and committees without granting special privilege to people who go through Epstein’s Magic Course. I stated my opinion of chaplains:

And chaplains? I suppose their entrails are just as good for strangling kings as a priest’s, but that’s their only use.

I also asked why the heck we needed them, what they were good for, etc. This is Epstein’s reply.

Humanist chaplains are trained in freethought history & philosophy, ceremony & meeting facilitation, counseling, etc.

People who do counseling and get specific training in it are called “counselors” or “psychiatrists” or “therapists”. They have specific and valuable roles in any community, and it’s not as a generic leader of a group. I’m suspicious of any organization that churns out “chaplains” and calls them “counselors”. The other examples of knowledge…why do I need to be a chaplain to practice them? How do all those other atheist groups out there survive without chaplains?

My objection is simple. No priests. I don’t care what label you call them, creating a hierarchy of privilege is not acceptable to me. As I’ve also said, though, the Epstein approach will definitely appeal to people who are looking for a church substitute — you just won’t find me among them. I don’t want another church, I want them all gone.

I’m living in a small town with 15 petty little sects, each with their building, from humble to historically impressive, and I can encourage nothing that might add yet another sinkhole to the mess we’ve already got. In my perfect atheist future, each of them would shut down, one after the other, and be replaced by secular institutions that actually contributed to the community economically and socially. Replacing them with little Epsteins leading their flock through ceremonies and doing such productive work as lighting candles and playing group therapist and singing godless hymns…<shudder>…no, I wouldn’t be going. I’d be saying nothing has changed but the names.

I will be disappointed that humanity just can’t seem to break free of bad ideas.

Why I am an atheist – James Grimes

It’s not all of the terrible things that happen on Earth that make me think god isn’t real. We’ve all heard the argument that god wouldn’t help quarterbacks win football games while letting children in Africa starve to death, but this doesn’t make me think he’s not real; it just makes me think he’s an asshole. It’s not that bad things happen to good people or good things happen to bad people, it’s that anything happens to anybody. The cause of my atheism isn’t tragedy, but the arbitrary nature of human existence.

Perhaps I expect too much from god, but if he is real, why isn’t everything beautiful? Why isn’t everything perfect? People mention sunsets and that special feeling you get when you are with someone you love as evidence of god’s existence. Even things like death and heartbreak stir up emotions just as profound, if not as pleasant. But they seem to forget that god created everything, that everything is a part of his plan. Love is all well and good, but I can’t believe that a perfect being thought it would be best to include shitting as an unavoidable biological function of human beings.

I can’t believe that a perfect being would create anything less than perfect. Call me crazy, but it seems like a contradiction. Forget the elephant man; pimply faced teens are enough to convince me that god doesn’t exist. If god is real, why isn’t every man an Adonis and every woman his Aphrodite? Why do people have unibrows? Why is my moustache thicker on one side than it is on the other? These may seem like petty questions, but when it comes to the existence of god I truly think they are just as important as questions like why do people feel pain or why is there so much suffering in the world. I can believe that god makes hurricanes; maybe he really is trying to punish those queers. But what intelligent reason could there be for creating say, asparagus?

I must conclude that there is no god, no plan for existence. There is too much imperfection, too much asymmetry in the world we live in. This is of course not to mention the fact that the bible is completely full of shit. On the principles of solipsism and critical thinking I must admit that it is possible that god exists. But if he does, mankind’s reverence for him is matched only by his indifference toward us.


James Grimes
Kansas, United States

Suffer, Earthlings!

Creationists have this idea that history can be nothing but an unremitting decline — their version of the second law of thermodynamics is a weird thing that has everything ratcheting down into chaos equally, with no possibility of local decreases in entropy at the expense of an overall greater increase. They have almost convinced me. I once would have said no one could be dumber than Kent Hovind, but I have seen the works of his son Eric, and it’s a forthright demonstration of creationist thermodynamics.

Eric Hovind has disproven the K-T meteor theory of dinosaur extinction.

It’s impossible for a couple of reasons for an asteroid to kill them [dinosaurs], because the asteroid, they say, was millions of years ago. The earth isn’t millions of years old. And second, they’ve lived with man, as is very very evident.

I’m so sorry. I’m looking at that quote, and realizing that as soon as I press the “publish” button, it will sweep out in a wave of electrons all around the world, and trillions and trillions of innocent neurons will die in agony as they try to parse it. And I think, I have the power to do that, but do I have the right? Is it ethical to inflict such cognitive pain on so many people?

Eh. Atheist, scientist, slightly mad.

I press the button. Bwahahaha!

(Also on Sb)

Anderson Cooper posts a stupid poll

Why Anderson Cooper gave any airtime to that fraud John Edward is a mystery (oh, wait: gullibility sells!), but the poll is even further insult. Send him a message.

Do You Believe in Mediums?

Anderson, unlike his mother Gloria Vanderbilt, admits that he is a “skeptic” of John Edward’s abilities as a medium.

Our cameraman, George, admits that he, too, was a skeptic of channeling spirits. John Edward changed his mind, however, after a spontaneous — and surprisingly accurate — reading during a taping.

How about you? Do you believe mediums have the power to channel those who have passed?

No 72.9%

Yes 27.1%