Oh, no…I have to defend Sam Harris a little bit even while disagreeing with him! There was a strange flare-up, a revival of an old interview with Harris from 6 years ago, in which he said something controversial:

If I could wave a magic wand and get rid of either rape or religion, I would not hesitate to get rid of religion.

This is one of those fraught philosophical scenarios loaded with emotional biases against an unrealistic, overly simplified moral dilemma that can never occur in the real world, and all I can say is…I hate those things. And there it was, all over twitter, and people were emailing me about it, and I just wanted the stupid story to go away, but now David Futrelle has highlighted it and John Wilkins has storified it.

[Read more…]

I’m an atheist. I know where we’ll all end up: death, extinction, oblivion. So I’m sure as hell going to emphasize how I live my life, how I make my conclusions, and how I regard my place in the universe as far more important than my final fate. I’m not interested in authoritarian short-cuts that substitute wish-fulfillment fantasies for truth, and one thing I definitely do not want to do is lie to myself.

Those are the thoughts I was thinking on reading this review of Stedman’s book, Faitheist, and while watching this lecture by Sir Ghillean Prance, a British ecologist. They’re very different discussions about very different phenomena, but I agree with the general message of both the book and the lecture while utterly detesting how they get there. They are wasting my time and they are misleading people — they are failing to provide the tools that will help people guide themselves to a rational conclusion and a correct answer.

We all know of Stedman here. He’s an atheist, and his book is all about social justice and working with religious people to achieve the goal of helping the poor, the needy, the disadvantaged. I can agree entirely with that goal; I think atheists ought to recognize the reality that they share the world with 7 billion people, each of whom has just as much right to be here as they do, and that a just solution to the world’s problems does not deny the needs of a majority, or even a significant minority, of the people who live there.

While Stedman has part of the answer right — we need to work with everyone to achieve that goal — his path to it is a combination of contradiction and emotion. Everyone, sure, except those meanie-head atheists who he will undercut at every opportunity, because that’s his scheme for notoriety, to be the good atheist, the one who loves Christians and despises atheists. He’s the left-wing version of S.E. Cupp. And how will he persuade people to his vision? By being the gosh-darned nicest, sweetest, gentlest person he can be, and by sucking up to faith (oh, excuse me: “interfaith”) leaders, who will never ever get the kind of criticism he delivers to atheists.

We will never get the critical thinking I consider the ideal of rationalism from a Stedman — even when he’s fighting for a cause I consider eminently defensible by rational means. While an atheist by definition, Stedman is not an atheist by principle. He’s an atheist by feeling (which, admittedly, is true of a great many atheists — just not as often by atheists who try to justify their position with a book).

Meanwhile, Ghillean Prance is an excellent biologist, with data and real concerns about the state of the planet. He discusses the evidence for climate change, its effect on natural populations, the consequences of environmental degradation and habitat destruction, and also deplores the selfishness of our current economic inequities — inequities that are widening rather than be corrected.

I cannot emphasize strongly enough how much I agree with his conclusion. But what ruins it for me is how he gets there.

“We should be taking care of the earth and not destroying it,” says Sir Ghillean. “The Lord God took man and put him in the Garden of Eden to cultivate it and keep it – not to destroy it.”

In this guest lecture, Sir Ghillean discusses the positive role faith leaders are playing in the environmental movement – from the leadership of the Ecumenical Patriarch of the Eastern Orthodox Church (dubbed ‘the Green Patriarch’ by Al Gore), who has brought together faith leaders from around the world to discuss environmental issues, to His Holiness the Dalai Lama who speaks of an ethical approach to environmental protection.

Environmental ethics are, Sir Ghillean says, a part of Christianity and Judaism. He points to Job 12:7-8 as an example:

But ask the animals, and they will teach you, or the birds in the sky, and they will tell you; or speak to the earth, and it will teach you, or let the fish in the sea inform you.” (Job, 12:7-8 NIV)

He asserts that his Christianity is compatible with his scientific/ecological views, and of course it is. But it’s because the religious justifications are endlessly malleable, and you can wrap it around any conclusion you want. There are industrialists bulldozing the rain forests right now who will tell you that their holy book tells them that it is their right to do so; there are people murdering other people because their holy book says to kill the infidel; there are people treating their own children as subhuman because their dogma does not allow them to tolerate people with different sexual desires. To tell people that they should accept scientific observations because their magic book and their sacred leaders say so is a betrayal of scientific thought.

And, man, this guy loves to quote the Bible.

It is through the combination of his faith and career that Sir Ghillean sees the case for environmental sustainability as a moral one. He quotes Isaiah 24:5 to make his case, but points out that there are similar messages and beliefs across the major world religions.

“The earth is defiled by its people; they have disobeyed the laws, violated the statutes and broken the everlasting covenant.” (Isaiah 24:5 NIV)

Whilst Isaiah was talking about moral defilement rather than ecological damage, Sir Ghillean believes that the message here and the impacts of climate change cover the intersection of ethics and ecology.

“It’s the poor who suffer the most from this climate change,” he says. “In some places the rich are getting even richer and the poor poorer. When there’s 1.4 per cent of the world’s wealth with 20 per cent of the population, it is something we should truly be ashamed about.”

If Christianity (and religiosity in general) is so good at convincing people of the importance of charity and fairness, explain the Republican party.

Isn’t it obvious that religion is not a tool for spreading goodness and kindness? That some individuals do so is not argument that their little granfalloon is responsible. That’s true of religion, but it’s also true of science and atheism, as we know all too well.

If you’re trying to persuade people to do the right thing because they’re Christians, or atheists, or ecologists, you’re making a fallacious argument: you’re trying to rope them into a cause by invoking the tribe or authority. Those things are not an appeal to reason! It’s easily subverted: the whole tribe can go marching off to war with another tribe, or the authority can be wrong and send everyone chasing the wrong answer, and the only check we can possibly have on that is if everyone is taught to think for themselves. A quote from the Bible or Darwin can be pretty words to illustrate an argument, but they are not necessarily arguments in themselves.

I entirely endorse the concerns and scientific solutions Ghillean Prance advocates, but not because he’s a Christian. It’s because the data that we’re changing the world for the worse is strong, and because I can respect the beauty and richness of the natural world — not because the Bible tells me I should, but because I know enough about how that world works to see the relationships of all those elements to each other and to me. If I want to see further and do better, I won’t achieve that by burying my nose in a holy book, and advocating greater absorption in magical thinking is going to actively interfere with our appreciation of reality.

I similarly endorse greater involvement in social justice and equality. It’s not because Jesus was a politically progressive social worker or because atheism says I must: it’s because of empathy and the ability to identify with other human beings, and recognizing that all 7 billion of us are on this planet together and that I cannot demand of others what they cannot also demand of me. Philosophy and ethics should shape how we behave not a deified science or imaginary magical being.

Another faulty argument that is fundamental to religion is the idea that you should follow the precepts of your faith because you will be rewarded after you die — an evil argument right at the heart of Christianity. No, you won’t; you’ll be dead, as will we all be, whether we’re paragons of virtue or monsters of vice. The only good arguments are ones that explain the consequences on living human beings — that the paths we take have to be their own rewards.

Although, to be fair, I think we’re mostly in agreement but talking past one another because of our prioritizing of certain premises.

Michael Shermer thinks that “the most any natural science could ever discover in the way of a deity would be a natural intelligence sufficiently advanced to be god-like but still within the realm of the natural world.”; Jerry Coyne claims that there could be, in principle, evidence for a supernatural god — there just isn’t.

My position is that we cannot find evidence for a god, that the God Hypothesis is invalid and unacceptable, because “god” is an incoherent concept that has not been defined. I could claim that a spumboodle exists, for instance, and we could go around and around with you presenting hypothetical examples and listing potential entities or forces that are spumboodles, but we’ll get nowhere if I never tell you what the heck a spumboodle is or what it does or even how I recognize a spumboodle. Without that, the whole concept is untestable and unverifiable. It really doesn’t count if I insist that something undefined exists, and then keep jiggling between vague realities (it exists in our dimension! It has a color!) and contradictory guesswork (it’s transdimensional! And completely invisible!) designed to keep moving the spumboodle away from any possibility of honest evaluation.

Coyne accepts the wobble. On the one hand, he is insisting on general principle in the possibility of existence of a divine being (I think a clear and unambiguous definition of “divine” is a prerequisite for that), but on the other he’s willing to substitute a mundane creature with only unexplainable abilities for “divine”.

Well, yes, we wouldn’t know whether a divine being was absolutely omniscient and omnipotent, or relatively more omniscient or omnipotent than us. But if the degree of, say, omnipotence and omniscience is sufficiently large (i.e, any miracle can be worked, all things can be foretold), then I think we can say provisionally that there is a God. I’ve previously described the kind of evidence that I’d provisionally accept for a divine being, including messages written in our DNA or in a pattern of stars, the reappearance of Jesus on earth in a way that is well documented and convincing to scientists, along with the ability of this returned Jesus to do things like heal amputees. Alternatively, maybe only the prayers of Catholics get answered, and the prayers of Muslims, Jews, and other Christians, don’t.

Yes, maybe aliens could do that, and maybe it would be an alien trick to imitate Jesus (combined with an advanced technology that could regrow limbs), but so what? I see no problem with provisionally calling such a being “God”—particularly if it comports with traditional religious belief—until proven otherwise. What I can say is “this looks like God, but we should try to find out more. In the meantime, I’ll provisionally accept it.” That, of course, depends on there being a plethora of evidence. As we all know, there isn’t.

And that’s where he loses me. What does it mean to be relatively omniscient or omnipotent? If our criterion is that the being has to be a certain amount more powerful than us to be defined as a god, what is that amount? The sun is much larger than us, and has far more power than we do…is it a god? Or will that suggestion be met by the sudden appearance of additional criteria to constantly exclude all entities from consideration that don’t also meet certain unstated requirements?

What I want is something like the Higgs boson: a description of a set of properties, inferred and observed, that can be used as a reasonable boundary for identifying the phenomenon. If you’re going to dignify it with the term “hypothesis”, there ought to be some little bit of substance there, even if it’s speculative. The god proponents can’t even do that. God beliefs are remarkably specific — belief in Jesus as an admission ticket to paradise, for instance — but somehow, when it gets down to saying who, what, where, when, and why, they all fly to pieces, and when it comes to saying how they know of its existence, all goes silent, or subsides into ritualistic repetitious chanting of words from a holy book.

The only way to win this game is to not play. Don’t concede the possibility that X might exist unless you’ve got clear criteria for defining the bounds of X’s existence, and it’s up to the advocates for X to provide that basic foundation. If they can’t do that, reject the whole mess before you brain gets sucked into a twisty morass of convoluted theological BS.

(By the way, I do agree with Coyne on one thing: I also reject Shermer’s a priori commitment to methodological naturalism. If a source outside the bounds of what modern science considers the limits of natural phenomena is having an observable effect, we should take its existence into account. If Catholic prayers actually affected medical outcomes, we shouldn’t reject it out of hand because of the possibility of a supernatural source. But it’s still not evidence for a god, unless you’re going to commit to defining god as a force that responds to remote invocation via standard Catholic ritual chants by increasing healing…in which case god becomes something we can disprove, and also faces the prospect of consolidation with other phenomena. Maybe god becomes the placebo response, for instance, in which case he’s been reduced to something feeble.)