A priest, a scientist, and a Communist discuss morality

We had a fun evening on Friday—a crowd of a few hundred people sat down to consider the problem of a morality at the University of Chicago. At the front of the room we had Bob Bossie (a very liberal Catholic), Sunsara Taylor (a very articulate Communist) and me to make a few opening remarks and open the floodgates of questions from the audience. It was interesting and thoughtful, and nothing at all like this incredible session on Fox News.

Let me emphasize that Bob was not that crazy priest in the video, declaring that godlessness meant the death of hope and the decline of your money making ability, that socialism and secularism were a failure, and capitalism was the only economic philosophy that could possibly lead to morality. That is, Bob was not freaking insane. He does believe in God, but his God seems to be a superfluous entity bobbing on top of a core of very humanist values, and when he talked about what he really cared about, it was communities of people.

Taylor’s position was very similar in a lot of ways — that we need to change the world through liberation of the oppressed, and the way to do that was through revolutionary Communism. In her case, though, the philosophical justification wasn’t at all superfluous — Communism was the best strategy for bringing about change. We had a little set of questions we’d worked out before the event, and she had the advantage of us all in providing the most coherent answers to them…I just don’t think she’s entirely right. I don’t like the idea of a revolution led by a vanguard, I’m more of an evolution driven by the education and inspiration of the masses kind of guy.

Here are the answers to our guiding questions that I gave (sort of) in my opening remarks.

1. Can science provide a morality to change the world?

NO.

Science merely describes what is, not what should be, and it also takes a rather universal view: science as science takes no sides on matters relevant to a particular species, and would not say that an ape is more important than a mouse is more important than a rock. Don’t ask science to tell you what to do when making some fine-grained moral decision, because that is not what science is good at.

What science is, is a policeman of the truth. What it’s very good at is telling you when a moral decision is being made badly, in opposition to the facts. If you try to claim that homosexuality is wrong because it is unnatural, science can provide you a long list of animals that practice homosexuality freely, naturally, and with no ill consequences. If you try to claim that abortion is bad because it has horrible physiological consequences to pregnant women, science will provide you with the evidence that it does no such thing, and also that childbirth is far more physiologically debilitating.

If you want to claim that homosexuals should be stoned to death because the Bible says so, science will tell you yep, that’s what it says, and further, we’ll point out that the Abrahamic religions seem to be part of a culturally successful and relatively stable matrix. “Science”, if we’re imagining it as some institutional entity in the world, really doesn’t care — there is no grand objective morality, no goal or purpose to life other than survival over multiple generations, and it could dispassionately conclude that many cultures with moral rules that we might personally consider abhorrent can be viable.

However, I would suggest that science would also concede that we as a species ought to support a particular moral philosophy, not because it is objectively superior, but because it is subjectively the proper emphasis of humanity…and that philosophy is humanism. In the same way, of course, we’d also suggest that cephalopods would ideally follow the precepts of cephalopodism.

So don’t look to science for a moral philosophy: look to humanism. Humanism says that we should strive to maximize the long-term welfare and happiness of humans; that we should look to ourselves, not to imaginary beings in the sky or to the imperatives written down in old books, to aspire to something better, something more coherent and successful at promoting our existence on the planet.

Science wouldn’t disagree. But it would be a kind of passive agreement that says, sure, nothing in that idea is in violation of reality, go for it. It would also be egging the cephalopods on, though.

2. Are science, religion, and communism complementary, conflictual or mutually exclusive of one another?

Science and religion are definitely in conflict. Again, science is only acting as a policeman, though: it’s firing up the sirens and flashing lights to pull over the priests and tell them that claiming authority on the basis of an imaginary man in the sky is fallacious and discredits your entire paradigm. Rethink the basis of your beliefs, and maybe we can get along.

I think science and communism are also in conflict, but perhaps less dramatically so. There, we have to point out an empirical problem, that communist societies haven’t fared so well. The concession I would have to make is that communism is a young philosophy, unlike religion, so it can be excused to some degree for being at the start of the learning curve. I find it a little hard to excuse some of the human costs of communism, but then science also has had human costs.

But science isn’t a moral philosophy. I’ve proposed humanism as our tool; are communism and religion in conflict with that? And that’s where the answer gets murkier, because more progressive versions of those philosophies all seem to converge on humanism, anyway. The quest for social justice is a humanist ideal, and it’s also front and center in communism and liberal religion; you can be either of those and also be a humanist. I wouldn’t exactly call them complementary, but I would call them compatible.

3. How will we motivate people, and with what moral paradigm to change the world?

As I’ve said repeatedly, science doesn’t provide a morality. What it does provide, and what I optimistically and subjectively think will motivate people, is that it provides rigor and a path to the truth of the world. I know, I could be cynical and suggest that what people really want is delusions, distractions, and reassurances to help them hide away from reality — but what I’ve noticed is that people who accept reality seem to be better able to deal with it, and are often happier and more content. And further, they are better prepared to change the actual world, rather than burying themselves deeper in their fantasies.

All three of us disagreed on many things…but trust me, this wasn’t Fox News. It wasn’t a coterie of flaming idiots, for one thing.

Metal Darwin

There may be a few metal fans here and there…and this song is for you. If you don’t enjoy music with lots of hoarse shouting and banging instruments into rocks, DO NOT PLAY THIS VIDEO. You will cry. I’ve got two sons, so I’ve been inured to this stuff — and at least this band, The Ocean, has intelligent lyrics.

Oh, you say, you couldn’t hear the lyrics? Neither could I, because my ears were bleeding (but that’s one of the desired effects of this genre, don’t let it bother you). I had to look them up on the internet.

The Origin of Species

Yes, it’s quite hard to believe
That we all come from the same seed:
The scrub, the cockroach and the human being
It’s hard to see how the perfection of complex organs was achieved without an engineer

But all you see is the human eye
On top of the mountain peak, so high
A steep wall of rock
Impossible to climb
Our imagination is left behind

But there is a gentle slope on the backside
And even worms have simple eyes
That help them distinguish darkness from light

Our brains are accustomed to the scope of a lifetime
We will never be able to see how the sluggish vessel of evolution
Is slowly creeping up the hill
Uphill

There’s no other solution
There’s no other solution
There’s no alternative to the theory of evolution

Now excuse me, I need to get a bag of ice for my head and to load a few of this band’s songs into my iPod.

You can’t trust a Murdoch paper

I was a bit suspicious of this story that Dawkins and Hitchens were going to “ambush” and “arrest” the Pope when he showed up in England. It was just a little too sensationalistic, too out of character. I was right.

Needless to say, I did NOT say “I will arrest Pope Benedict XVI” or anything so personally grandiloquent. You have to remember that The Sunday Times is a Murdoch newspaper, and that all newspapers follow the odd custom of entrusting headlines to a sub-editor, not the author of the article itself.

What I DID say to Marc Horne when he telephoned me out of the blue, and I repeat it here, is that I am whole-heartedly behind the initiative by Geoffrey Robertson and Mark Stephens to mount a legal challenge to the Pope’s proposed visit to Britain. Beyond that, I declined to comment to Marc Horme, other than to refer him to my ‘Ratzinger is the Perfect Pope’ article here: http://richarddawkins.net/articles/5341

Here is what really happened. Christopher Hitchens first proposed the legal challenge idea to me on March 14th. I responded enthusiastically, and suggested the name of a high profile human rights lawyer whom I know. I had lost her address, however, and set about tracking her down. Meanwhile, Christopher made the brilliant suggestion of Geoffrey Robertson. He approached him, and Mr Robertson’s subsequent ‘Put the Pope in the Dock’ article in The Guardian shows him to be ideal:
http://richarddawkins.net/articles/5366
The case is obviously in good hands, with him and Mark Stephens. I am especially intrigued by the proposed challenge to the legality of the Vatican as a sovereign state whose head can claim diplomatic immunity.

Even if the Pope doesn’t end up in the dock, and even if the Vatican doesn’t cancel the visit, I am optimistic that we shall raise public consciousness to the point where the British government will find it very awkward indeed to go ahead with the Pope’s visit, let alone pay for it.

Joe McLaughlin will be an excellent journalist

I’ve spent far too much time in airports lately, and I think I might be going mad. I’m sitting, trying to type while waiting, and it’s just noise, noise, noise, noise — there’s the horrible repetition of “You are approaching the end of the moving walkway&hellip:You are approaching the end of the moving walkway&hellip:You are approaching the end of the moving walkway&hellip:You are approaching the end of…”, the frequent intercom warnings that “The TSA has determined that the current threat level is orange…”, which means nothing at all, and worst of all are the televisions located everywhere, blaring out the “news”. I’ve been thoroughly packed full of all the most important news, thanks to CNN.

And there’s the problem.

I was involuntarily subjected to full-on CNN at sampling intervals of approximately an hour and a half, with over an hour of their news coverage at a sitting. There was only one story, one all-important story that soaked up all the air time all day long.

Tiger Woods is whacking a little ball with a stick again, and he’s doing a good job.

His score at some tournament was reported repeatedly, and then some self-important sports pundit would come on and seriously tell us what this meant to Woods’ self-esteem, and to the psychological state of millions of little-ball-whackers all around the world. I kept hoping at least one of these guys would stop, look incredulously at his fellow panelists, and point out that this soul-crushing inanity is not news, and definitely not worth hours of masturbatory reflection. Jeez, CNN programmers should just look at the front page of the BBC and plan on spending 50 minutes of every hour covering the important stuff. I’ll allow that they can spend 10 minutes of every hour covering pop culture trivia — golf scores, Lindsey Lohan vulva sightings, the Kardashians, celebrity face lifts, that sort of thing.

Because right now I’m just going to have to assume the media is packed full of mindless morons.

Speaking of mindless morons, my talk at RIT was ‘reviewed’ by a student named Joe McLaughlin. I see a bright future for him in American media.

I remember him well. I gave a talk on the conflict between science and religion, and afterwards, he came down and asked me some questions. Well, first he declared firmly that he was a Catholic…which told me right away he wasn’t going to have much intelligent to say. I could give a rat’s pungent patootie for his Catholicism — if he wants to ask a question, nothing is gained by declaiming his ideological position at the outset, and my answer wouldn’t change whether he’s Catholic or Cathar. But yes, I had to get his testimonial first.

Then he asked about the infamous cracker incident: Why did I offend Catholics? Didn’t I know the host was sacred? Why did I pick on Catholics and not other believers? It was the usual drivel. I answered him seriously, told him the multiple reasons I had carried out my protest, and asked him if he had read what I had written…he hadn’t. He’d looked me up on Wikipedia, and hadn’t followed a single link to the source.

Let me mention…not once in my talk had I even mentioned desecrating crackers.

If you read his article, you’ll discover that it begins with McLaughlin announcing his Catholic credentials, talks only about the desecration of communion wafers, and despite the fact that I took the time to explain to him personally at some length about the actual motivations for the event, he declares “He just did it to offend Catholics.”

He affirms my opinion of most journalists so well. He ought to think about pursuing the profession. Either that, or he can practice moving walkway announcements.

I am getting a bit exasperated at the obtuse cracker questions I still get. They’re all asking precisely the wrong questions. Here are two hypothetical newspaper headlines; which of them is trivial, and which is High Crazy, needing more explanation?

Headline A:

MAN THROWS BREAD IN TRASH
It’s just a cracker, he says

Or Headline B?

MAN BELIEVES BREAD IS GOD
It’s the most precious object in the world, milllions say

Most people are getting worked up about Headline A, which is ridiculously trivial (and that was the point of the exercise), but everyone who interviews me seems to sail obliviously past the weird world of Headline B.

Please, please, please don’t ask me about how I dared to abuse a cracker, or about Tiger Woods, for that matter. Neither are important. I’d like to consider the insanity of a world obsessed with trivia and delusions, instead.

We have seen evil, and it is us

Here is why we need Wikileaks — because when our soldiers carry out Collateral Murder, we should know about it. Good journalism should be exposing this stuff for us.

This is a video shot from an American helicopter gunship in Iraq. It shows real human beings being shot to death. I wish I could unwatch seeing it now, so be advised before you click on that play button…it is horrific.

A couple of Iraqi journalists working for Reuters are slaughtered in the above clip, gunned down from a distance by American troops who claim their cameras are weapons, that they’re walking around with AK-47s and RPGs…which I simply don’t see anywhere in the clip. I see a small group of civilians casually walking down a city street.

Perhaps the killers were merely mistaken, as happens in war. Perhaps they had better views of weaponry than can be seen in this video. But that doesn’t explain what happened next, when a van pulls up to help a wounded man and they open fire again, fully aware of what was going on below them, and fire several bursts into the people and into the van.

Maybe they could see weapons more clearly than I can. But then how did they fail to notice two small faces peering out of the passenger side window of the van? They shot journalists and children, all the while laughing and congratulating themselves on the ‘nice’ pile of bodies they had produced. And when they see soldiers on the ground rushing injured children to aid, they say, “Well, it’s their fault for bringing their kids into a battle.”

I am ashamed. We are the storm troopers, the murderous invaders, the butchers of children, the laughing barbarians. We aren’t in Iraq to help those people, our troops are there to oppress them…when we aren’t gunning them down outright.

Oh, and go ahead, turn on your TV news. The top stories on CNN are the iPad, Jessica Alba planning to adopt a baby, and Tiger Woods. Doesn’t that fill you with confidence?

(via John Cole)

Bad, bad media

The media are lashing back. The post-convention media (with the exception of one article in the Australian) has been abysmally bad, relying on tried-and-true excuse-making from religious apologists. It would be nice if they actually had conversations with atheists rather than immediately running to the nearest cathedral for consolation, but I guess that’s what they have to do now. After all, the convention was an unqualified success, a real triumph for the atheist movement, and they just can’t have that.

Barney Zwartz is a concern troll. He’s a believer; he presumably thinks religion and god and all that crap have some value; so why is he trying to give us advice on how to make atheism more effective?

Here’s my advice. If atheists can reduce their contempt for believers and work harder for their positive goal — reducing the footprint of religion in society — they may begin to exert more of the influence they feel they deserve.

OK, Barney. Here’s my advice for you: put away the writing career, join a monastery, and pray, pray, pray. It will advance your cause!

Of course, why should a believer trust my advice on this issue? I want you to go away. It’s the same with Zwartz. Complain away, at least that’s being honest about your own opinions; but playing the game of offering grandfatherly advice to a movement you detest is insincere and obnoxious.

Oh, and what you consider unworthy doesn’t interest me much. Explain why.

Also unworthy were ABC science presenter Robyn Williams offering “a devastating argument against religion in two words: Senator Fielding”; former Hillsong member Tanya Levin: “I’m finally getting to hang out with the adults”; and Rationalist Society president Ian Robinson, asking whether there were any believers in the audience. “OK, I’ll speak really slowly.” (Wild applause after each.)

What was missing was any sign of self-deprecation. Atheism will be a mature movement in Australia when atheists can laugh not just at the religious, but at themselves.

For instance, you could try to defend Fielding — that would be interesting. Fielding is the fellow who believes the earth is 6000 years old, after all, because his religion tells him so. The religious should be embarrassed by him.

As for laughing at ourselves…we did. There was quite a bit of humor aimed at our own little group. It’s just that the wacky, goofy religious nuts are so much funnier. Religion will be a mature movement when it can stop providing so much juicy material for comedians, although, given that you’ve been struggling with that problem for a few millennia, I don’t offer much hope.

Speaking of jokes, here’s a punchline for you: Melanie Phillips. She’s the deranged religious nut who rants and raves about atheists being totalitarian fundamentalists, and who is now making a career out of her hatred of Richard Dawkins.

Just why is he so angry and why does he hate religion so much? After all, as many religious scientists can attest, science and religion are — contrary to his claim — not incompatible at all.

A clue lies in his insistence that a principal reason for believing that there could be no intelligence behind the origin of life is that the alternative — God — is unthinkable.

Melanie Phillips was not actually at the Global Atheist Convention. I specifically addressed her argument about compatibility from propinquity — it just doesn’t work, because it means that everything must be compatible with everything else in the most trivial way. I also have not heard Dawkins ever claim that God is unthinkable, or that there is no possibility of intelligence responsible for the origin of life — quite the contrary, these are possible alternatives which we simply reject because there is no evidence for them.

It’s always a bad sign when the only way you can make a point is by lying about what the other person said.

Phillips is always a source of amusement, though.

Through such hubristic overreach, Dawkins has opened himself up to attack from quarters that, unlike the theologians he routinely knocks around the park, he cannot so easily disdain.

Books taking his arguments apart on his own purported ground of scientific reason have been published by a growing number of eminent scientists and philosophers, including mathematicians David Berlinski and John Lennox, biochemist Alister McGrath, geneticist Francis Collins, and philosopher and recanting atheist Anthony Flew.

Uh, yes. We can easily disdain them. Berlinski, Lennox, and McGrath are not serious contributors to the debate; Berlinski is a popinjay and Lennox and McGrath are wacky theologians. Collins’ arguments for religion are fallacious and trivial, and Flew is in a sad state of senility.

Here’s the worst. ABC news spent half their brief coverage with shots of a communion ritual at a church, and got some smug idiot in a dog collar named Philip Freier to give his opinion of atheism, and got it all wrong.

Here’s the priest’s brainfart:

It will be interesting to me to see how something that is framed around a largely negative concept, atheism <self-satisfied smile>, is capable of developing a coherent position.

Wrong, wrong, wrong. The central concept of modern atheism is the importance of evidence. We have seen the remarkable success of evidence-based reasoning, and have noticed that religion doesn’t seem to use it…that the only negative concept here is the fundamental premise of religion, faith. Evidence and reason are not negative concepts, except perhaps in the minds of faith-heads who have replaced them with a vacuum and gullibility.

We’ve also been waiting a long, long time for religion to develop a coherent position. Their failure so far suggests that they are incapable of doing so.

The problem with science journalism…

…is that too often newspapers think you don’t need a science journalist to write it. Any ol’ hack will do. Take this article on evolution in the Vancouver Sun, which distills modern evolutionary biology into 12 theories, which happens to include Madame Blavatsky’s Theosophy as well as Intelligent Design creationism — which, at least, is pairing intellectual equals. The author, Douglas Todd, is speaking High Crackbrain and making stuff up. It’s all garbage from a buffoon who knows nothing about the field. What, you have to wonder, qualifies him to be writing on science?

Jerry Coyne has the answer.

He has twice taken first place in the Templeton Religion Reporter of the Year Award, which goes to the top religion reporter in the secular media in North America. Todd is the only Canadian to have received the Templeton.

Hey, the Templeton Foundation puts it right at the top of their web page: they are SUPPORTING SCIENCE. They are all about sponsoring the reconciliation of science and religion (although, perhaps, that should be written as “science and RELIGION“, since we all know where the emphasis lies). It’s just too bad that the results so often belie their claims.

Kim Stanley Robinson at Duke

I haven’t had a chance yet to listen to the whole of Kim Stanley Robinson’s talk at Duke, but what I’ve seen so far is very good. I’m more posting this here so I have a reminder to watch the rest once I get home, but nothing is stopping you all from enjoying it now.

science is a Utopian project; it began as a Utopian project and it has remained so ever since, an attempt to make a better world. And this is not always the view taken of science because its origins and its life have been so completely wrapped up with capitalism itself. They began together. You could consider them to be some kind of conjoined twins, Siamese twins that hate each other, Hindu gods that are permanently at odds, or even just a DNA strand wrapped around each other forever: some kind of completely imbricated and implicated co-leadership of the world, cultural dominance–so that science is not capitalism’s research and development division, or enabler, but a counterforce within it. And so despite the fact that as Galileo says that science was born with a gun to its head, and has always been under orders to facilitate the rise and expansion of capital, the two of them in their increasing power together are what you might call semi-autonomous, and science has been the Utopian thrust to alleviate suffering and make a better world.

There is a bit farther in where I have to disagree — he equates science with a new kind of religion. I understand why he’s making that argument, but I consider it lazy thinking; it’s like saying a car is a horse, because they share some basic function, but at some point in the transformation of a concept, you have to stop and say, “Wait a minute…this is something new.” Both a car and a horse may be useful for transportation, but a car is not a horse: we have a very different relationship to the two, their prevalence bends culture in very different way, their differences are far, far greater than their similarities. In the same way, Robinson can say “It’s a religion in the sense of religio, it’s what binds us together. It’s a form of devotion: the scientific study of the world is simply a kind of worship of it, a very detailed, painstaking, and often tedious daily worship, like Zen,” but that glosses over the fundamental differences. Science changes the world and our understanding of it in ways that religion cannot.