I like Horgan as a writer, and while I would probably disagree with some of his assertions and positions, his criticism here of the self-deluding and smug stance of the more tribal elements of the skeptical/atheist/scientistic camp is fully justified and righteous, and proved completely correct by the obnoxious counter-attacks he documents.
Meh. After reading both the linked page and this link[1] that someone else posted in this thread, I definitely agree with this take from the latter:
> After reading his article, it is safe to say that Horgan does not have the first clue about scientific skepticism. The result was a parade of straw men supported by cherry picked and often misinterpreted examples.
I don't see obnoxious counter-attacks, I see people correctly pointing out that he's wrong.
I enjoyed this article a lot and I am saddened by some (not all) comments here.
I think many people who grow up as non-religious thinkers or choose by themselves to reject sprituality and/or religion, go through the same humility-inducing phases after growing up, so to speak.
I still don't believe in god but true nihilism is something to be afraid of.
As is science reduced to being a tool to increase profit.
Re: Dawkins
I understand the discussion here boils down to exactly the pointa that the article makes.
Re: Lorenz Krauss
I agree that calling someone a "hack physicist" is bad style and unneeded. However, reading the linked article behind these strong words was gratifying and interesting, I feel thankful that the author used this form of clickbait. I have no idea about Krauss and won't judge his scientific achievements as I am not a phywicist and probably will have forgotten his name in a couple of days.
I have however read endless trails of Quantum ane String theory pop-science woo that is not very good at making understable or falsifible Points.
Re: Mental illness
I wholheartedly agree. There are desparate people being told "SSRIs are like Insuline for you", right now, all over the world, because of flawed commercialized science. People are being harmed by this type of pseudo science, in very serious ways.
I am an atheist, but I thought Dawkin's book, the god delusion, came across frankly as ignorant.
There are whole canons of theological thought which counter many of his arguments, as theologians raised those concerns ages ago and have been thinking about them for literally thousands of years.
I think maybe he served a role though. An unreasonable voice can still be a valuable one, however much I might dislike that fact
Although I enjoyed reading the Blind Watchmaker, Dawkins clearly isn't a scholar seeking the truth; rather, he is an activist that is trying to spread/evangelize his personal atheist agenda. The one thing I don't understand his what caused him to behave that way - was he perhaps abused by a cleric?
Just read "The Dawkins Delusion" (2010) by his Oxford colleague Alister McGrath, which takes Dawkins apart and demonstrates the book's ignorance.
Remember that The God Delusion was published 20 years after The Blind Watchmaker. While certainly TBW made no bones about the author's atheism, it primarily focused on evolution, which was, in 1986, still considered rather subversive and doubtful to much of the public. Even more so when The Selfish Gene in 1976, only 4 years after the first gene was sequenced.
A lot of public opinion changed from 1986 to 2006, making evolutionary biology unlikely to be a radical, controversial or even interesting topic any more. Probably also changed was Dawkins' personal outlook on religion and atheism. Possibly this was affected by the reactions drawn by TSG and TBW, as two notable books that helped finally drew evolution into the mainstream and Dawkins himself being a self-made pro-evolution lightning rod.
I also don't happen to think it was a coincidence that the more philosophical angle of things like Unweaving the Rainbow gave way to more aggressive writing (uncharitably I might say "Reddit bait") just as the Internet really hit its stride. Alternatively, and rather more prosaically, some people seem to just get, well, angrier, in their mid-60s.
It's been a long time since I read The God Delusion, so my memory is hazy, but I read it after having read books like Nicholas Everitt's The Non-Existence of God and Michael Martin's Atheism: A Philosophical Justification, and I remember being disappointed with how comparatively weak Dawkins' treatment of the subject was. As LeroyRaz pointed out, these arguments are not new and a lot of back-and-forth has been (and is) happening, but from what I recall Dawkins only ever addressed weaker (layman's) versions of those arguments and it felt pretty obvious that he was writing about a subject far outside of his area of expertise
Because having been raised in churches and studying under university trained apologists I've only encountered weak arguments. All relying on appeals to authority or unfalsifiable claims. Even the premise of a god strikes me as impossible and/or irrelevant given it must also exist outside the bounds of our experience.
Mostly it's the same general arguments that Dawkins addresses, modified in various ways to address counter arguments, though I recall Plantinga in particular having some novel arguments that I believe were covered in Martin's book. Some of these were quite interesting, even if not convincing (to me). However, I couldn't give you the specifics as it has been a long time since I tried to engage with theistic apologetics. If you are interested then I'd suggest checking out the two books that I mentioned, as they cover the subject in depth.
They didn't explicitly say it but how that reveals the ignorance of dawkins here is that the attacks he chose were effectively fended off hundreds or in some cases thousands of years ago by theology and apologetics. It's not just that the refutations are old, it's that they're old and convincing.
Which is not to say that the conversation is over, or that the theologians are correct. But that an informed argument would be to address the (ancient) refutations to the naive attacks, rather than to simply restate the naive attacks as if they are insightful.
The points he raises in that book aren't going to be novel to pretty much anyone. Most believers will recognize them from their own minds. Probably no modern person is a "pure" believer: we are all exposed to and familiar with the mechanisms and logic of unbelief. Believers experience belief more as an inconsistent state, or an active effort or choice, than a simple delusion they are unable to perceive. There's a very interesting conversation there that dawkins wasn't willing or maybe able to have.
Charles Taylor's "a secular age" is one place where you could pick up the conversation our society has been having with itself for centuries about the mechanisms, role & effects of belief, delusion, religion & faith if you were interested in it as a practical or philosophical question and not as a battlefield for self aggrandizement as dawkins clearly was.
Old and convincing, to those who want to be persuaded by them.
I also disliked Dawkins’ book and found my path to atheism elsewhere.
However, the problem of evil has a persuasive answer only for those already within the system, to speak.
Christian apologetics is nearly exclusively a field of interest for those Christians who want to be more prepared to deal with conversations with non-believers.
The problem should be obvious already.
If you became a Christian before being exposed to the ‘rational’ arguments for being a Christian, then what exactly caused you to become a Christian?
Given the extraordinary amount of effort poured into the field of apologetics with very little outcome in terms of new converts, it seems to me that the primary purpose of Christian apologetics is to help those suffering a bout of cognitive dissonance to stuff it back down.
> the attacks he chose were effectively fended off hundreds or in some cases thousands of years ago by theology and apologetics. It's not just that the refutations are old, it's that they're old and convincing
I don't think theologians prove or debunk things, personally. I'm pointing out that the problems dawkins poses are ones theologians have answered. And then the answers have been questioned, and then the theologians have answered those, back and forth for a good long while now.
I'm pointing out that to bring these up as if religions have no answer to them is foolish or disingenuous. I'm not volunteering to cross-reference the book to 1700 years of christian thought for you though. Neither qualified nor motivated for that.
Sorry but you're dodging the question here. You said "the attacks he chose were effectively fended off hundreds or in some cases thousands of years ago by theology and apologetics". Which specific arguments are you referring to?
Ironically I personally disliked The God Delusion when I read it many years ago, and I have written professionally about two of the topics Horgan mentions as hard ones (biological determinism and psychiatric drugs). That said, I think many of the arguments in this thread are ludicrous and should not remain uncontested in a place like HN.
I would like you to eat with a spoon. Do you need help with that?
You have been pointed to references - genuine engagement in adult discourse may tend to require that you follow through with this prerequisite material to join the conversation.
I asked for a specific argument that the parent felt Dawkins made that was sufficiently rebutted by theologians. They replied with a generic list of Christian apologetics.
You're welcome to contribute to the debate if you have a specific example in mind to defend their argument.
Well, let me give you a specific example (just one of many): his dismissal of Thomas Aquinas' proofs for God's existence (at the start of chapter 3), isn't even good for an undergraduate; if he submitted that as an essay in a philosophy 101 course, I doubt he'd get good marks. He doesn't bother to understand what Aquinas meant by the terms he uses in his arguments; he shows zero awareness of the historical context, that Aquinas is relying on a specific set of philosophical theories (scholastic Aristotelianism), and it is impossible to properly understand his arguments without first understanding that theoretical background. It appears Dawkins has never read any of the secondary literature (not even a first year textbook!), he is just dismissing these arguments based on a plain English reading of their words. He identifies Aquinas' fifth proof with Paley's argument from design, completely ignoring the (rather standard) position that they are rather different arguments based on quite different assumptions (an Aristotelian theory of causation versus a mechanistic/Cartesian/Humean one)
Personally, I'm sceptical than any of Aquinas' arguments actually work. Maybe, if you accept his philosophical assumptions (about the nature of causation, etc), they succeed – but that leaves us with the equally difficult task of proving those assumptions. So, I think Dawkins may well be right in his conclusion, that Aquinas' arguments fail – but the reasoning he uses to reach that conclusion shows he has zero idea what he is talking about.
To make an analogy – imagine an anti-creationist book written by someone with a very poor knowledge of the science of evolution, and their understanding of it is riddled with errors and misunderstandings, and Dawkins was asked to review it – while he'd of course agree with the book's conclusion, he'd find its contents an embarrassment – much of The God Delusion is the same thing.
Compare Dawkins to someone like the Australian philosopher of religion Graham Oppy. Oppy is, like Dawkins, an atheist. Unlike Dawkins, when he criticises theists' arguments, he actually knows what he is talking about, and doesn't make the kind of juvenile mistakes that Dawkins makes. Unlike Dawkins, he's read all the secondary literature on the topic, and has made significant contributions to that literature. Due to this, many theist philosophers of religion actually have a lot of respect for Oppy, even though they (of course) disagree with his conclusions–among philosophers of religion (whether theist or atheist), Dawkins is mostly viewed as an example of what happens when an expert in one field decides to write a book in a completely unrelated one, and their valuable contributions to the former field are no guarantee their attempt to contribute to the later will be of any value at all.
Thank you for the detailed answer. I understood perfectly what you meant and I think you are correct in your criticism. This is a sign of poor scholarship from Dawkins, I'm better off knowing about it.
A small quibble, unrelated to your explanation, is that if this particular theological argument is not respected even among theologians, it does not constitute an example of arguments that "were effectively fended off hundreds or in some cases thousands of years ago by theology and apologetics".
> A small quibble, unrelated to your explanation, is that if this particular theological argument is not respected even among theologians, it does not constitute an example of arguments that "were effectively fended off hundreds or in some cases thousands of years ago by theology and apologetics".
Well, to give a different example - in the midst of discussing Aquinas' proofs, he advances the claim that omniscience and omnipotence are logically incompatible. There is a long history in Jewish, Christian and Islamic philosophy of debating closely related questions. The 10th century Rabbi Saadia Gaon, the 12th century Islamic philosopher Ibn Rushd (Averroes), and Aquinas himself all discussed paradoxes of omnipotence (the classic "can God create a stone heavier than he can lift?") – the resolution of which generally turns on precisely how "omnipotence" is defined. There is similarly a long history in all three religions of intellectual debate over the relationship between divine omniscience, the nature of time and God's relationship to it, and human free will (if God perfectly knows the future, does that mean the future is predetermined? if the future is predetermined, how can humans have free will?) – topics discussed by ancient Christian philosophers and theologians such as Boethius (6th century) and Augustine (5th century), the Jewish philosopher Maimonides (aka Rambam, 12th/13th century), the 7th–10th century disputes in Islamic theology over predestination (qadr) versus free will.
Obviously this lengthy history of debate, stretching back many centuries, even 1500 years, has a lot of relevance to Dawkins' claim of a contradiction – and, as usual, Dawkins appears utterly ignorant of all of it. His argument seems to be basically that he knows what "omnipotent" and "omniscient" mean (he may have consulted a dictionary), and obviously by his definitions they contradict each other – zero interest in whether his definitions of them agree with those of philosophers and theologians who've examined these issues before – and then he cites a poem which expresses the same view. So I think that is a good example of what you are looking for in your quibble – although the plural in "thousands of years ago" is possibly somewhat of an exaggeration. I'm not sure if anyone ever answered Dawkins precise objection (although I wouldn't rule it out), but closely related objections have been discussed many times before.
I see. I think this is another great and very appropriate example, this time directly addressing the initial claim. I stand thoroughly corrected. Thanks for taking the time to explain it in a way that I and anybody else unfamiliar with this field could understand it.
No, because I'm not making one. I'm pointing out that the argument is in progress already, has been for centuries, and dawkins should catch up if he wants to be taken seriously as a participant.
This feels more like an attack on the crowd that posts on /r/atheism on reddit than the scientific community. But that sub attracts a lot of "edgy" teens who are just rejecting the way they were raised, they are indeed a "soft" target.
That is because scientific community and sceptics are two different groups. There is some overlap, but there is also huge overlap between scientists and christians. Many scientists are religious, actually.
Far fewer scientists are religious than the general population, which makes sense because the ability to think rationally affects both. Dawkins's problem is that religion is not the disease but the symptom of underlying irrationality. Solve for irrationality, and you solve for any problems religion creates.
Hitting religion head-on works poorly because of social pressures, but fixing science education to focus on the process for how we know things instead of what we know can fix society in a way that makes it easier for individuals to reject religious beliefs while also addressing the problems Horgan wants to fix.
It's a call to the people in the room at a Skeptics conference to be scientific and skeptical and not selectively so. I'm writing this comment based on my general experience in the community, which I was pretty into at that time.
Until around 2010, the Skeptics community, which kind of centered around several conferences and meetups with the same recurring "big names". It was getting a libertarian bent, with lots of the big names at these conferences being very scientific and thorough in debunking of things like homeopathy and religion, but dismissive of soft-science advances, and often dismissive of things like sexual harassment (even at community events) and mistreatment of minorities (often this would be chalked up to just being the fault of religion). You often couldn't always put your finger on it, but it seemed like the arguments for small government, private healthcare, no gun control didn't seem as.. scientific. And often there was a few people in the crowd who were experts in the topic of discussion looking around the room and wondering why seemingly everyone else was nodding in agreement. Those people slowly found each other and still attended meetups and enjoyed some speakers but were skeptical of others.
Around 2010 there was a noticeable divide in the group. Group A were people that wanted to apply skepticism broadly within the community and assert that more social topics ought not to be just status quo forever. A few were angry, but mostly it was people that didn't think the community was inwardly skeptical enough, or just got bored of making fun of chiropracters. Group B were people that looked up to the big names without much critical thought and were happy to be skeptical of religion and often had good discussion but just as often avoided good discussion if it was uncomfortable to the group or to the big names. Also people that didn't really engage and probably didn't notice anything change. The groups started to separate, in person and online, and group A generally gathered around known, but not "big name" bloggers, authors and youtubers. I remember being in that group and realizing things were worse than I thought, once you were in a room of like-minded people, there were a lot of open secrets shared about who was a creep and who was a creep apologist. Most of the stories were about patterns of behavior.
Then in 2011 elevatorgate and Richard Dawkins tonedeaf reply happened.[1] This was a big wedge and a small but still surprising number in group B became really nasty to the first group. Since then group A was not really a group loosely knit, with some focused on one issue or another, but deliberately not really having much leadership. Group B shed some people into A or away altogether as a minority of people in Group B doubled down on being assholes. But still group B had a lot of people who weren't engaged enough to see the drama or piece together that skepticism wasn't always evenly applied. This speech is for those people. Online it was shared heavily by people that had already left and felt resonance with it.
Funny enough, group B kind of imploded starting around 2016. A few big names were metoo'd, and it turns out some skeptics including big names were happy to be less than skeptical of alt-right adjacent views. I think Skepticism lost steam as people found more draw to align on and discuss political issues, especially in America. Covid happened and conferences and meetups stopped. Now the conferences and meetups are back and although a lot have moved on, it looks like those are mostly Group A people and let's say ex-group B people.
You're welcome, I was happy to find a reason to think back and reflect. There's not a great history of all this stuff because the sources of information are largely blogging networks that imploded, youtube videos, and a lot of private forums and events.
It's really interesting that the diatribe was from 2016 because within a few years a lot of the names he mentioned would have very few supporters at a similar event.
By the way, your comment was correct in that the room would have had a lot of r/atheists in it.
Just regarding the US healthcare stuff- life expectancy is determined by public health measures, medicine is just tinkering around the fringes of that. The US has lower life expectancy because of higher obesity rates, gun deaths, traffic deaths, and drug overdoses. Until resurrection is patented medicine obviously cannot bring back to life a patient who's just been shot or died in a car accident. So the 'the US spends a lot on healthcare but has low life expectancy' argument is a non-sequitur, public health is an entirely separate field. There's still a criticism of the US there, it's just subtly different from the one he's making.
I don't want to mention his other errors because they're culture-war bait, but I saw two not just enormous inaccuracies but famously partisan ones that are endlessly repeated despite being trivially easy to disprove. So, while I like his overall argument here, the glaring partisan inaccuracies doesn't exactly raise my opinion of Horgan as a thinker
Ok. Lets take maternal mortality rate. Yes there are a non-healthcare related risks to child births, e.g. your ambulance can be in a car accident, or there can be a mass shooting in your hospital, but these should be pretty rare, compared to other risks.
USA has 21 deaths per 100 000 live births. Canada has 11. Cuba has 39. Latvia has 18 (highest in continental Europe), EU as a whole is around 6. Among all of these USA is the only one that is on the rise (even Cuba is down from 46 in the year 2000, when USA had 12).
You’re not wrong. But if you look at the data, there are some strong indicators that the lack of public health care is a major contributor to the lower life expectancy in the USA.
Reducing maternal mortality would not materially help close the gap between the US and peer countries. Here is data and an argument that show this:
1. Total maternal deaths are 650 to 750 per year in the United States [1].
2. Accidental deaths by all causes total about 80,000 per year for ages 5-44 [2] (here I am eyeballing the Tableau chart by age group).
3. The risk of a 5-year-old dying in their 40s in the US is about 4x that in peer countries like the UK [3].
Putting #2 and #3 together, we would have to reduce yearly US accidental deaths for ages 44 and below by 4x to reach parity with peer countries. We'd have to go from 80,000 deaths per year to 20,000, meaning we'd need to save 60,000 lives per year from accidental death causes such as drug overdoses, vehicle accidents, and homicide.
Bringing the US maternal mortality rate down to the EU rate, while highly desirable, would only save a few hundred lives per year, a fraction of a percent needed to close the gap.
The numbers don't really work for that theory either.
Eyeballing this CDC death chart [1], non-accidental deaths from ages 5-44 add up to less than 30,000 per year. Most of those are cancer and heart disease deaths in the later ages. The US health system is not necessarily worse than peer health systems at dealing with such issues, and in any case, the health system can only do so much about them, because there are public health issues upstream like obesity.
But even if you magically completely wiped out those deaths only in the US and not in peer countries - which could never come even close to happening - it wouldn't do more than close half of the 60,000 gap I pointed out in my previous post. A gap caused mainly by accidental deaths (and suicide).
All this is just putting numbers to the basic, commonsense facts we know about mortality in the young: they don't die in the hospital, so making the hospital better doesn't do much to fix their mortality. And reducing the mortality of the young is the main thing needed to bridge the gap between US and peer countries, as I explained in a sibling comment.
So what you’re saying is that John Horgan made a rhetorical blunder by using life-expectancy as a case for how bad the health-care actually is? Perhaps it was, perhaps life-expectancy is just one indicator of many (as is maternal mortality). But as the parent of your sibling comment points out, John Horgan is not doing this to win a debate. Luckily Horgan cites a report[1] in his article which has spends an entire section on health care outcomes which includes life-expectancy (after age 60), maternal mortality, infant mortality, preventable mortality, treatable mortality, etc.
> The U.S. ranks last overall on the health care outcomes domain (Exhibit 1). On nine of the 10 component measures, U.S. performance is lowest among the countries (Appendix 8), including having the highest infant mortality rate (5.7 deaths per 1,000 live births) and lowest life expectancy at age 60 (23.1 years). The U.S. ranks last on the mortality measures included in this report, with the exception of 30-day in-hospital mortality following stroke. The U.S. rate of preventable mortality (177 deaths per 100,000 population) is more than double the best-performing country, Switzerland (83 deaths per 100,000).
Sure, any one of these might have alternative explanations, perhaps the abnormally high suicide rate has more to do lack of public transit, easy gun access, or something, than lack of psychological treatment, or the infant mortality is high because of endemic substance abuse (which is also a health care problem, but lets leave that for now). But taken together, the fact the USA consistently falls last in all but one of these metrics, must have a simpler explanation, and that explanation is that a large proportion of the USA population does not benefit from a good health care system.
None of this seems to engage much with the original commenter's point: America has uniquely bad public health problems which worsen both its direct outcomes (e.g. mortality) and the outcomes of the health care system, by putting more burden on that system. So it's not that easy to distinguish America's public health issues from its health care system issues.
Maybe deeper analysis is needed, not just the pet theories Horgan trots out on this and the other topics. He seems to be swinging about as wildly as those he's criticizing.
How would you characterize the quality of a health care system than? Which measures should a poor performing health care system fail to deserve being called worse than others?
It seems to me as you are setting the conditions for measuring the quality of a health care systems as to make it impossible to value the quality of the American one compared to other nations.
It sounds like you think I am trying to win, or not lose, a debate by making it hard for you to succeed in your argument. I am not. I am not in the slightest personally invested in the question of whether the US health care system is better or worse than other countries'. I just don't think these statistics add up to a meaningful analysis of this complex problem, or a meaningful attribution to the health care system versus other causes. The world doesn't owe us a tidy statistic on which we can lay out all the nations and say whose health care system is good and whose is bad.
I would refer you to the original commenter's point, supported by my subsequent points. Public health issues seem to matter more than the health care system, and the US has uniquely bad public health issues, most of which the health care system by itself can't do much about. I don't think you've effectively disputed that point. "It's unfair that there's not a metric you'll accept showing how bad the US health care system is and how important that is" is just relying on the exact premise we're disputing.
I agree to make a valid comparison exclude gun and car deaths from healthcare statistics. Unfortunately, Horgan has citations, but you don't. So I can't really do much with your claim because without facts it is an opinion. If this were a debate that would score a point, but we're not competing with rhetoric: this should be a forum with facts. Because I *believe* you are correct, but I have no data so it remains a belief: facts would have helped!
Fortunately there was an article on this very recently [1]. Here's an archived link if needed [2].
> One statistic in particular stood out: one in 25 American five-year-olds today will not make it to their 40th birthday. No parent should ever have to bury their child, but in the US one set of parents from every kindergarten class most likely will.
> And this is a very American problem. These young deaths are caused overwhelmingly by external causes — overdoses, gun violence, dangerous driving and such — which are deeply embedded social problems involving groups with opposing interests. Far trickier to tackle than most health issues where everyone is pulling in one direction.
Honestly I didn't really believe you because I had looked similar numbers up a few years ago but then I found this pew research on the topic. Apparently youth gun deaths increased like a hockey stick graph %50 during the pandemic. I am surprised I have not heard more about this in the media. It will be interesting to see how much this returns to baseline. I wonder if this is just and effect of kids having %50 more opportunities for conflict out of school or if it was covid induced stress that everyone was feeling or what. It does make you wonder if shutting down all the schools really was the best thing to do for the kids. Although it's of course hard to balance that against the spreading of the disease to other familes members. And of course early on we did not know exactly how dangerous it would be for kids. It will be interesting to see how we respond during the next pandemic.
Horgan disagrees with adherents of scientism not on their epistemology but on some of their claims. That’s why, apart from a quick mention of falsifiability, he mostly simply negates what, e.g., Dawkins says—on cancer, or genetics, or multiverse theory.
Now I happen to think that he might be right, and that on most of these questions there is a fact of the matter amenable to investigation, but this is really quite a lazy approach; it’d be ambitious to properly address even one of these in a discussion of this length.
Any model of reality except reality itself is lossy. A model that can fit inside a human brain is extremely lossy. The only thing that differentiates between models is usefulness, but that is debatable too, if you consider short vs long term effects. Be careful what you wish and all that...
So we could all use a little modesty when it comes to the models that we build inside our heads. On the other hand, a model which you know is flawed will never drive you to act stongly. So a certain ammount of faith in what you believe is required for action and implied in that is the rejection of opposing beliefs.
I tried reading John Horgan's articles published in ScientificAmerican until I worked out what was annoying me about them other than they were generally poor – it's because they're basically about him. He's a self promoter and any truth in what he's saying is secondary to his ego.
Horgan isn't exactly wrong. Accepting "established science" is always anti-science. How will you know Einstein was correct if you don't endeavor to test his hypothesis?
Established science these days (since late 19th century) involves testable hypothesis, solid mechanical explanation and rigorous experiment when possible, reproducible too.
"Unestablished" "science" tends to skip one or more of these.
A lot of "soft" sciences also skip a lot of steps before publishing findings.
The most commonly skipped one is describing experiments in sufficient detail for them to be possible to reproduce. The other is making unwarranted conclusions from a special group or situation.
Ideally your culture has evolved a common set of norms that enable it to be high trust. Another word for this is “religion”. Additionally, having a more similar than not genetic makeup may be necessary (the diverse society experiment is still ongoing).
This has shades of the "I Can Tolerate Anything Except The Outgroup" essay[1], which I revisit periodically despite being someone in a different "Tribe" (to use that author's language), and find pretty helpful.
This article is a little painful to read, because it neglects discussing some core methodologies of scientific inquiry, which could improve its arguments. Probably the most important issue is the need for painstaking care when it comes to experimental design and observational data collection, the absolute necessity for independent replication, and recognition of the ease with which scientists can fool themselves (or others) either accidentally or deliberately.
In the modern world, the white robes of the religious authorities have been replaced in many areas by the white robes of the scientific authorities, and they can unfortunately be just as biased and unreliable as their previous cohort. Clearly there's a huge profit motive when it comes to scientific claims about drug efficacy; there's also bureaucratic motivations, i.e. retaining control of academic institutions and funding streams by whatever means necessary, and so on.
If you want to see how science can go wrong, there are many examples, but one of the best and most accessible is the story of Trofim Lysenko in the Soviet Union. Another, for ideological balance, is the rise of the Milton Friedman school of economic thought in the United States, whose practitioners were just as ideologically biased and free of careful analysis of data as the Lysenkoists were, while similarly proclaiming their field to be 'mathematically sound' and 'science-based'.
If we want to be even more controversial, Anthony Fauci's dieheard support for reckless gain-of-function research could be placed in a similar category (well, it does work, but creating hundreds of new infectious diseases is a bad idea), and Fauci's bureaucratic career has some interesting parallels to Lysenko's. Then we could open the box labelled "the safety and efficacy of antibiotics and vaccines in the context of failures of public health in the era of the return of infectious disease threats"... (Holding this opinion is still fairly risky and likely to be flagged in many discussions as out-of-bounds).
Science is really hard to do well, that's the bottom line - but it's still the only reliable method for resolving fundamental physical, chemical and biological issues. So don't let internal debates within the scientific community be used as fodder for anti-science lunatics, either.
>In the modern world, the white robes of the religious authorities have been replaced in many areas by the white robes of the scientific authorities,
Clearly humans do not change and will not change. There were always a small number of independent thinkers and their proportion will generally a constant, as long as humans do not change biologically.
> [Dawkins] hates religion so much that it impairs his scientific judgment.
We can all agree that no one is perfect. But let's also agree that impaired thinking is indeed the enemy. Every time there is impaired thinking, a hornswoggle of the innocent and the credulous is probably well underway.
And the crucial moment to challenge impaired thinking is when it presumes to dictate public policy.
How do you even challenge a theocracy, whose adherents believe they're right and can deploy any amount of violence or legal loopholes?
Nobody can fix "impaired thinking" of a person who firmly believes they're in the right, no matter the logic errors or negative consequences you bring.
Self-righteousness is much worse than faulty thinking.
Unfortunately for everyone involved morality is easily absolved, abdicated and deferred to authority, which requires no moral reasoning nor logic. Religions tend to enforce such authoritarian approach - be it a holy text, guru, ruler/head or even social convention. Questions are ultimately forbidden, branded as sin or heresy if they pass some arbitrary boundary.
> How do you even challenge a theocracy, whose adherents [... ] deploy any amount of violence
Living under any real dictatorship will eventually become intolerable, but a murderous kakistocracy leaves you only one sane choice: get yourself and your family out of there.
> In the last century, prominent scientists spoke out against U.S. militarism and called for the end of war. Scientists like Einstein, Linus Pauling, and the great skeptic Carl Sagan. Where are their successors? Noam Chomsky is still bashing U.S. imperialism, but he’s in his nineties. He needs help! Far from criticizing militarism, some scholars, like economist Tyler Cowen, claim war is beneficial, because it spurs innovation. That’s like arguing for the economic benefits of cancer or slavery.
The author brings up some good points, but the above attack on Tyler Cowen comes across as either bad-faith or a severe lack of critical thinking skills. You can read Cowen's article for yourself, it is linked below. Cowen never once recommended that any nation pursue war or militarism. He was merely pointing out a possible causal link between war and innovation. Which is exactly what every scientist should aim to do - find causal links, even if we wish those links didn't exist. As a reader of the article, I would hope we are wise enough to understand that even if a causal link exists, there are still many other important reasons to not pursue war.
I know this sounds nitpicky, but I only bring this up because I notice this becoming more and more frequent. People repeatedly attack and shame researchers who find facts and causal links that we wish didn't exist. This is classic shooting-the-messenger. Do we really want to live in a world where researchers are too afraid to publish any studies that yield inconvenient truths? Because we're halfway there already.
I wish there were more people genuinely motivated by searching for the truth (as opposed to just trying to be right). Probing our own views (being self-critical) and those from our own group (peer review) is indeed more important than going after "soft targets" outside, such as astrology.
The thing that turned me off against Dawkins' book, which I thought I would love, was that it just read as <em>mean</em> to me. It's been ages since I read it so I can't summon specific quotes, but here I was reading a book where I agreed with the premise but just found it to be mean-spirited.
I'm in the atheist camp, and I've certainly got my thoughts about religion dominating culture, but I agree with Horgan here: Dawkins isn't going to convince anybody (or at least not very many...) that don't already agree. That's not particularly useful.
In a recent interview he [edit to clarify: "he" here means Richard Dawkins] completely dismissed the fact that a lot of new atheists had religious fervour for their humanistic non-theist beliefs and that he had been on the wrong end of their fanaticism ("cancelled" many times by Universities on the grounds that his speech was contrary to diversity, inclusion and equity, and thus it was hate speech).
He was completely dismissive to the fact that religious people had perfectly predicted that in the absence of religion, people would have the same sort of fervour for superficially rationalistic, but otherwise deranged, views.
He just said that it might be true but it didn't seem interesting or relevant to him.
That's exactly what a fanatic would say. I didn't see it coming back in the early 2000s but his critics were a lot more correct that I could ever have predicted.
> He was completely dismissive to the fact that religious people had perfectly predicted that in the absence of religion, people would have the same sort of fervour for superficially rationalistic, but otherwise deranged, views.
Jung and Nietzsche both had this idea ~100 years ago. When Nietzsche claimed God was dead, it was a lamentation, not an enthusiastic assertion, it was the modern world that had killed God. Jung claimed that people that left religions still tied their ideas to something, New Age Religions, Spiritualism, politics, something. In the French Revolution the Cult of Rationality set up by Robespierre had just as many trapping of religion and blood thirsty fanatics as any religion. The cultural revolution in China has many "atheists" gladly pointing people out for "heresy" to the "inquisition".
These is a lot of evidence that religion is not the only source of fanatics out there.
Robespierre's cult wasn't based on "reason" but rather was just a normal religion based on a central God and the belief in an immortal soul. It wasn't really all that different from many forms of Protestantism -- he simply wanted to control the religion himself rather than having the Pope do it.
I believe he was always aware of this, but thought it was different this time because of wide access to information and technology, etc. Reading that, it does sound like a sort of religious belief, but that's how he (Dawkins) had posed it in the past since the 90s or so when questioned about it.
What you're seeing may just be a first-generation atheist effect.
Most atheists in the US are still first-generation and rejected their parents views within the last couple decades.
They also tend to trend younger, and it isn't too surprising that their beliefs are "sophomoric" (in the sense of being like a college sophomore who has just figured out everything about life with their wealth of experience).
As a 51 year old that was raised without religion, I'll agree they are in fact really tiresome.
[also see this good comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35513850 -- I've lived in Seattle for the past 30+ years so just never come face-to-face with religiosity in ages. If an Atheist is surrounded by Christian assholes they tend to turn into an asshole right back. That is just normal behavior of humans (or abused animals as well really). ]
I don't know if it's only first-generation, the jury will be out on that one for a long time, perhaps many generations
there is a clear pattern, which Dawkins seems to embody, that new atheists are MORE religious than their parents, but they are pious of their non-deistic beliefs and they very strongly preserve the religious-based culture they stem from in terms of moral values and societal norms
the danger in this, which we are observing now, is that their ability to predict the dynamics of society is worse not better than that of plain old religious types - because their own piousness is invisible to them and they engage in deranged stuff like assuming people will just default to their hierarchies of values and morality, once the religious rooting and background of their moral beliefs is removed
the obvious thing to assume would be the opposite, that humans would resort to their historically documented patterns of behaviour and repeat the intense conflict of the past to adjudicate moral disagreements, which the previous state of stand-off had already paid its dues to - and those conflicts were violent and bloody, which should bring us pause in our desire to go back to a state of "new religion" even if this one is based on the state-of-the-art science of the day and might be not deistic in the common sense of the word
TLDR; in the sense of moral belief, it's not clear whether it would be better to have a non-religious society (non-coherent in moral values and collective moral rules) or even if such a thing is possible, or could be stable over time. My gut instinct is that (moral) atheism and collectivism are a bomb of a combination that is unlikely to end in anything other than disaster, and my egoistic belief is that I'm much happier if people believe in exotic supernatural stuff but it's neatly compartmentalised into the private sphere and controlled public spheres, than if they start a crusade to uproot the collective's beliefs, which will likely affect my livelihood - I see the New Atheists movement as an effort to destroy a very desirable state of affairs, not a grand goal of ushering in a rationalist Utopia
I mean, he's right, no? The fact that religiousness is sometime replaced by other beliefs (that, I will note, tends to be less physically violent) is orthogonal to the fact that gods do not exist.
Now, maybe the 1000s of gods humans ever prayed to actually exist, but I refuse to believe only a fraction on them do, as the arguments for all their existence is the same.
this is a question that came up often when he was asked on his motivation to dedicate so much time on debunking religion and religious practice
it wasn't a question about God or some God, it was a question on the supposed rational golden era that, according to Richard Dawkins, God and religion were stopping
his view that religion would be replaced by a judicious form of rationalism has been thoroughly discredited IMO, so no, he was not right about that
Dawkins' fear of the religious person looks to me exactly like the fear of the unknown that serves as the basis for many religious beliefs, and his belief that humanism would save the world completely analogous to Anglicanism, Catholicism or Orthodox Christianity, all of which have a scientific/gnostic eagerness[*], and a goal to unify the nations of the world
listening to Solzhenitsyn describing the humanists of the post-war, Dawkins completely resembles the figure of the zealot of a non-Deistic religion - "Humanism" - so blindingly fanatic of his beliefs that he cannot fathom that, once people are presented with them, some people might just not accept them or agree to them
* those religions actually try to track scientific truths, adapt to them and teach them
> * those religions actually try to track scientific truths, adapt to them and teach them
They do to a minimal extent. They still profess belief in revelation and miracles, to name just two things that are completely orthogonal to the scientific method. I also find it self-evidently false that their goal is to "unify the nations of the world", when you talk about three competing branches of a religion that has a ton of blood on its hands.
I don't think Dawkins is afraid of religious people, but the opposite is quite likely.
they carry post-Galilean duality of the spiritual and the natural, and they literally aim to be the world's single religion
there is no contradiction between aiming to be unifying, and believing this greater goal justifies bloodshed - in fact it's at the core of it, and it shares the problem with humanism and other forms of moral atheism
Ok, so they want to unify the world by killing everyone who disagrees. And you seem to believe that "humanists" (meaning atheists I presume) believe the same thing.
I hope I didn't get your argument right. In case I did, the first assertion is laughable, and the second one is false.
I also found Dawkins while I was losing my faith, but all I can attribute to him is an edgy phase of that process where I thought it was cool to pick fights with religious people to poke holes in their arguments. I regret that now, but thankfully it was only a phase that I grew out of a year or two later (before I managed to burn too many bridges with very nice and reasonable people who happen to be religious.)
Had Dawkins not existed, the ultimate outcome would have been the same. I think once you go down the path of doubting, the obvious contradictions in religion stack up fast and drive you further along in that process, regardless the influence of Dawkins. Reading the bible had a lot more to do with my atheism than Dawkins. It was impossible to reconcile the contents of that book with the christian god as had been taught to me as a child, so the whole thing unraveled.
> Had Dawkins not existed, the ultimate outcome would have been the same.
Even without Dawkin's book, you could very likely have still gone through the "edgy" phase. The overly enthusiastic "baby atheist" phase is very human, and very common, as is the eventual rise out of it.
"The God Delusion" for me, who was already long converted before I read it, was mostly a quick read and forget. His earlier books on evolutionary biology, though, are brilliant. I honestly can't specifically remember any of his God Delusion arguments any longer, but the things I learned from him on evolution stick with me to this day.
> The overly enthusiastic "baby atheist" phase is very human, and very common
Indeed, it's true for any new belief really: people who go the opposite direction and become religious show similarly ardent and sometimes abrasive behavior. Or people who convert between major religions. The same for political ideologies.
I think it's just part of the process of switching your thought patterns, at least for the majority of people. A new paradigm, your mind spends a lot of energy on processing it. So it becomes a large part of your external aspect as well.
Isn't that all the more reason to dislike his reading on the topic? Exacerbating an unconstructive attitude that people will naturally grow out of on their own only postpones that maturation.
> Even without Dawkin's book, you could very likely have still gone through the "edgy" phase.
You're probably right, since r/atheism also exists; Dawkins is by no means the only fount of edge. But I don't agree that such a phase is inevitable, independent of social influences which encourage it. Edgy atheism is a 'scene', a self-perpetuating subculture. It has no leaders or formal structure, yet it actively seeks out and recruits people who are in a compatible headspace.
It's like being goth. People who are goth didn't all independently discover and adopt the fashion of black lipstick, black dyed hair and pseudo-Edwardian dress. They adopt these fashion choices because other people did so before them, and crowds naturally draw more people in. When you're adrift looking for a personality, it's easier to fall in with a scene that already exists than it is to find your own truly unique way. Scenes generally speaking are inevitable, an artifact of basic human psychology I'm sure, but I don't think any specific scene has ever been an inevitability. Goths specifically were not destined to exist as an inevitable consequence of human psychology, nor do I think the edgy reddit/Dawkins style of not believing in gods was inevitable.
I can perhaps see an argument that edgy atheism is an inevitability given the social context of an oppressive christian society that gives people an axe to grind, but I'm far from convinced. Such a context might instead give rise to violent subculture that encourages terrorism against the oppressors. (We're fortunate that it didn't, but in other times and places such violence scenes have emerged in response to oppressive circumstances.) And as it is true that a more violent reaction to the circumstance was possible, I think it is conceivable that a less antagonistic response was also a conceivable possibility. It is conceivable to me that a subculture for "baby atheists" might instead have formed around the premise of demonstrating superior compassion, rather than antagonistic debate.
Or to put this another way.. For any violent revolution in history, there may instead have been a relatively peaceful bloodless revolution. And for any relatively peaceful bloodless revolution, there may instead have been a violent one. The Romanian Revolution in 1989 had maybe about twelve hundred people die. Was that specific degree of bloodshed inevitable, given the oppressive circumstance? I think it might instead have been fifty thousand killed, or even fifty. In reality it played out the way it did, but I see no reason to believe it had to be this way specifically.
Here's a word you should know (if you're not familiar with it already): contingent. The more commonly used definition is "dependent on", as in "my grade is contingent on good study habits", but it can also mean "subject to chance", as in "the number of deaths in the Romanian Revolution was contingent."
Yeah, I get that. I think I'm more bothered by the gross sweeping generalization that not a single individual would be convinced by him. I'm guessing you probably found a bit of an aversion to those kind of simplifications in your faith-shedding process too.
Tbqh I probably get a bit prickly when the subject of Dawkins comes up for a few reasons. In part because of what I already mentioned, about Dawkins being an edgy influence on me for a time, but also because religious people I meet now seem to often assume I'm presently a Dawkins fanboy, as though atheism and Dawkins are a package deal like christianity and Jesus.
So, while I agree that some people may find Dawkin's arguments persuasive, I bristle at the suggestion that he's an important driving force behind modern atheism in the west. I view him mostly as a grifter who's found a way to monetize a social trend, not as an important leader of that trend.
One way to read excessive snakiness and meanness is as insecurity in the validity of your ideas. I can definitely see someone having this reading of Dawkins and some of the other voices in "New Atheism".
One other problem I've seen with some of the most outspoken atheists is that they fundamentally seem to misunderstand the role that religion plays in many people's lives. Biblical literalists like Answers in Genesis are really a side show - they're easy to mock, but don't represent what religion is to most adherents. Most people don't look to religion for scientific answers but for community, a scaffolding to build their lives around, and for relief from existential dread. "New Atheism" often had no alternative answer to these functions.
> Most people don't look to religion for scientific answers but for community, a scaffolding to build their lives around, and for relief from existential dread.
I don't think this is true at all, particularly when you consider the world at large and not just the West. Also, you can find these functions elsewhere. You don't need to believe in God or in miracles to have any of that. Also, biblical literalists are the reason many rights are eroding in the West. Confronting them is a necessity, even if you're a religious person.
> Weird how me and hundreds of millions of people can do without it then.
Weird how you can't realize that the actual truth value of that perception is a function of the truth value of the accusation itself.
> I have no idea what you meant about clairvoyance.
The truth value of "You don't need to believe in God or in miracles to have any of that" (or, "me and hundreds of millions of people can do without it") is a function of the experiences of the individual human beings in the referenced set. You do not actually have access to that, so your mind whipped up a virtual proxy of reality to stand in for reality itself. In your culture, this supernatural practice is considered normal, so no one even bats an eye at it. In my experience, most people consider it ~crazy to not do this.
>One other problem I've seen with some of the most outspoken atheists is that they fundamentally seem to misunderstand the role that religion plays in many people's lives.
One interpretation of this apparent misunderstanding, is that it is simply easier and more profitable to create humorous or rage-baiting content around obviously absurd claims that cater to a pre-existing views, than it is to watch an extensive lecture going over particular arguments.
>Because you found him to be off-putting? Or you found his arguments to be weak?
It was the juxtaposition of the hubiris against the weakness of the arguments. I'm generally put off by people who think they're much smarter or stronger than they really are, and who use it to bully others.
>What about your religious views would you say are "radical"?
To give one example, I now believe non-Abrahamic religions (or a lack thereof) should be entirely illegal.
I did not hold any beliefs even remotely as fringe back before discovering Mr. Repzion, Richard Dawkins, Jackyln Glenn and The Amazing Atheist, Onision as a kid back in ~2011.
After that my impression of atheists gradually soured and I began to observe that in some sense, their attitude was not restricted merely to speech despite what they might dishonestly claim, and that their positions and the demand for that content reflected society's general attitude towards religious people.
I began to understand that this is natural for all groups, tribes etc, so it would be naive for me to allow myself to be on the backfoot.
I have so many questions. How would one determine whether I were a non-believer? What is an appropriate punishment? Why are Abrahamic religions whe ones which are allowable but all others are not? What benefit would this provide? Do the benefits outweigh the harm?
Is it ok to be a non-practicing Jew, or is it required to be orthodox? Are Mormons acceptable? 7th Day Adventists? Jehovah Witnesses? Why or why not?
How does one believe something when they simply and sincerely do not? Is it possible to force someone to believe something?
Can you cite examples of blasphemy laws which have proven to be a net positive in society? How do we deal with people having similar beliefs but exercising them wildly differently? Is that ok? Why or why not
I'm all for thought experiments and playing what-if, but if you're going to make the statement that my sheer existence should be illegal, I need quite a bit of clarity!
I do want to hear what they have to say. It sounds like they have some pretty out-of-the-box ideas about how society should function. Admittedly, it seems as though I would oppose those positions, but rather than dismiss them as the muses of a sociopath I prefer to get to specifics and address the idea in its entirety.
The notion of forced religion certain could lead to the worst versions of theocracy imaginable, but surely someone would think things to their logical conclusion before professing something so heinous. Right?
They are wanting to think that they are taking the "long view" of things, are being totally logical,and that calling it "heinous" is simply the view of people on the wrong side of history.
>How would one determine whether I were a non-believer?
It would be according to what is apparent from your statements, observances and symbolisms. If you wear a cross or a sockcloth for example, you are counted among the Christians until otherwise proven, a similar principle is applied to wearing a yarmulke, tefflin, kufi or hijab. These are of course not perfect metrics, but this was the standard used in the middle ages in Arabia, and it generally sufficed for demonstrating group identity in practice.
>Do the benefits outweigh the harm?
I think that it is important for humans to have some shared basis for a worldview, and the abrahamic religions encompass a significant enough portion of the world without so much variation as to be as problematic as other belief systems.
>Is it ok to be a non-practicing Jew, or is it required to be orthodox? Are Mormons acceptable? 7th Day Adventists? Jehovah Witnesses? Why or why not?
This is a question I have been exploring, and that I need to do more rigorous thinking on. I cannot provide a satisfactory answer at the moment, other than that people who take wholly symbolic positions on religions would definitely be excluded from those definitions (e.g: jungians, nontheist quakers). Other groups are a greyer area to me.
>How does one believe something when they simply and sincerely do not? Is it possible to force someone to believe something?
It's not necessary for us to go exploring your thoughts, that would be impractical and invasive. We need only concern ourselves with what's external and the impact it has on society.
Although it's not possible to force someone to believe something, practising a belief may eventually lead to you feeling an affinity towards it if you're on the fence.
>Can you cite examples of blasphemy laws which have proven to be a net positive in society?
This question actually does very well in demonstrate the conflict in worldview that becomes apparent in the assumptions we use. What is 'positive'? As far as many religious people are concerned, a lack of blasphemy and irreligiosity is itself beneficial.
>How do we deal with people having similar beliefs but exercising them wildly differently? Is that ok? Why or why not
Any given belief system necessarily has a certain tolerance for variation in beliefs, and usually a distinction is drawn between creedal differences and practical differences, with the former being a greater concern than the latter.
>In what way is atheism a danger or harm to society except that it violates your proposed monoculture?
Violating said monoculture is a problem in itself because it leads to a population that cannot collaborate or agree even broadly on morals that concern day to day life. We're seeing this right now in America, where each side of the aisle (which broadly speaking is cut across religious lines) is becoming progressively angrier as they realise the others beliefs necessarily requires capitulation from their side on some issues, in ways that cannot be accepted, such as abortion or the integration of homosexuals and transgenders. This is gradually destabilizing the country.
Religion is in no way a force for bringing people together. Anti-Semitism is rampant among many Christians. Catholics and Protestants have quite a history of not seeing eye-to-eye. Shia and Sunni Muslims are pretty notorious at this point for their battles.
Your examples are counter to your own point. Jews don't seem to have the same views on abortion that the evangelicals appear to have. The United Methodist church is splitting because of differing views on homosexuality and other LGBTQ+ issues.
Having common values is very important, but predicating it on all the doctrine of a set of religions or a single religion seems shaky at best.
I also noticed you still haven't given a good reason. Your opening line is circular - violating the monoculture is bad because it disrupts the monoculture. Instead of proposing a broad set of morals outside of religion, you intend to (by force?) push a set of morals that YOU dictate based off ancient texts of dubious origin.
>Religion is in no way a force for bringing people together. Anti-Semitism is rampant among many Christians. Catholics and Protestants have quite a history of not seeing eye-to-eye. Shia and Sunni Muslims are pretty notorious at this point for their battles.
People will not cease to differ, yet despite all of that they agree that atheism is disastrous.
>Your examples are counter to your own point. Jews don't seem to have the same views on abortion that the evangelicals appear to have. The United Methodist church is splitting because of differing views on homosexuality and other LGBTQ+ issues.
This is a very shallow understanding of religion. There will always be fringe groups who differ. The fact is religious texts have a meaning, that someone wants to negate that meaning makes no difference. If text did not have meaning you would not be able to understand what I am saying.
Jews, Muslims and Christians all have slightly different beliefs on abortion between them for example, but they all agree the unborn have certain rights. The differences are minor such as when the unborn is a person, if the unborn can be mourned, what constitutes necessity that could justify an abortion etc. None of these groups permit elective abortion.
>Instead of proposing a broad set of morals outside of religion
It is not possible to believe that religion dictates morals, while also believing in morals external to your religion, because it entails contradiction.
>you intend to (by force?) push a set of morals that YOU dictate based off ancient texts of dubious origin
If my morals were based on conjecture, they would be just as baseless as your moral conjecture, regardless what the conjecture was.
You have no moral basis from which to criticize me, you only have personal preferences, and there is no god of liberal humanism that will punish me in a way that I cannot escape if I fail to comply.
It's clear you've not researched ethics thoroughly. I guess all those philosophers just needed to agree to use the same exact interpretation of the same holy books and there would be no need for discussion, right?
The Methodists are hardly a fringe group.
Atheism is "disastrous" only in that it is based on non-belief, not that Atheists themselves are detrimental to society.
The hundreds/thousands of protestant sects counter your statement that "religious texts have a meaning." They are long, often self-contradictory, and open to many interpretations. Not "a" meaning, but many "meanings." Again, the things you are claiming to be strength do not bear out in reality.
I think you to be better than the sociopath you claim to be. Do you only abstain from murder and rape and lying and cheating to avoid punishment in the afterlife? Because while I may have "baseless" moral conjectures, a simply moral code of "do unto others as you would have them do unto you" is superior in a myriad of ways.
You admit yourself, morals are based off standards. We can agree to those which bear out healthy, happy, productive societies or ones which do not. It's funny how most people consider theocracies to have a negative connotation.
Still waiting to hear what punishment is befitting a person of non-belief.
>It's clear you've not researched ethics thoroughly.
Au contraire, subscribing to hard DCT is an active choice I made.
>I guess all those philosophers just needed to agree to use the same exact interpretation of the same holy books and there would be no need for discussion, right?
Wholly negating meaning on the basis of usually minor differences is sophistry.
>Do you only abstain from murder and rape and lying and cheating to avoid punishment in the afterlife?
Yes. Reading Stirner helped me to realise that there was very little difference between disliking heights and disliking murder aside from God telling me that avoiding the latter leads to unimaginable reward. Absent that I could simply decide to start liking things if it so pleased me, just as I did with heights.
>We can agree to those which bear out healthy, happy, productive societies or ones which do not.
Except that all of these terms are based in belief systems, of which mine and yours are wholly different.
> Au contraire, subscribing to hard DCT is an active choice I made.
Catholic teaching (both traditional and contemporary) is that objective morality is inherent in the very nature of created things, and hence knowable in principle by anyone who knows those created things–even a convinced atheist. If by "hard DCT", you mean that good and evil are (in the general case) contained in the contingencies of God's free will as opposed to the necessity of God's own nature (theological voluntarism) – such that God could have chosen to command murder instead of prohibiting it, in which case it would be good rather than evil; and that right and wrong are unknowable except through special divine revelation (e.g. the Bible) – then Catholicism condemns that as heresy
Since you advocate taking away the religious freedom of atheists and non-Abrahamists (Hindus/Buddhists/Sikhs/Jains/Taoists/Shintoists/etc) – would you be okay if a Catholic theocracy persecuted you for your own belief in "hard DCT", given that according to Catholicism it is heretical?
Indeed, from a traditional Catholic perspective, hard DCT is a socially harmful heresy – by reducing right and wrong to God's whims, it encourages aberrant sects which justify all manner of evils as God's prophetic command; by falsely claiming that non-believers are incapable of knowing objective morality, it discourages them from seeking to know and understand and obey that morality, and gives them an excuse with which to evade their own moral responsibility. If any heresy is sufficiently socially harmful to justify its persecution, your own "hard DCT" is arguably among them.
I get the impression you are Muslim, or at least leaning in that direction. "Hard DCT" is the Asharite position, so you might call it the mainstream traditional Sunni view. Catholicism's view on this topic has been influenced by Islam, since Ibn Rushd (Averroes) was a big influence on mediaeval Latin Catholic philosophy (including Aquinas), and through that on Catholic theology too. Something close to the Asharite position occurred among Catholics as well - William of Ockham and the nominalists, most notably – but Catholicism ended up decisively rejecting that approach. It still has some advocates among Protestant philosophers (most notably nowadays, Robert Merrihew Adams)–but the Catholicism of recent centuries has rather decisively ruled it out.
By contrast, in Islam, Ibn Rushd's viewpoint was adopted by the Mu'tazilites, but opposed by the Asharites, and the later generally won out over the former; unlike Ibn Rushd, al-Ash'ari and his followers were ignored by Latin Catholic Europe. The Mu'tazilites largely died out, and their theology was not accepted as orthodox in Sunni Islam. However, Māturīdism, which can be viewed as somewhat of a compromise position between the Mu'tazilites and the Asharite views, is generally accepted as an orthodox Sunni theological school–and it agrees with Ibn Rushd, the Mu'tazilites, and Catholicism, in rejecting hard DCT.
My impression is that Asharite theology is more popular than Maturidite theology in contemporary Sunni Islam; while there is no necessary correspondence between schools of Islamic law (madhhabs) and schools of Islamic theology (aqidah), in practice Hanafis tend to be Maturidite while the followers of the other schools of fiqh tend to be Asharite or Atharite instead, and Hanafis are only about a third of contemporary Sunni Islam. Twelver Shi'a theology also rejects the "hard DCT" viewpoint of the Asharites; a basic principle of Twelver Shi'a theology is that right and wrong are an inseparable part of the divine essence, not just what God happened to choose to make right and wrong. I'm not entirely sure what the Atharite position is, if they have one; but if we take Ibn Taymiyyah as representative of Athari theology, he condemned the Asharite position that God could have chosen to make evil deeds good – which suggests that "hard DCT" is contrary to the Atharite position.
>would you be okay if a Catholic theocracy persecuted you for your own belief in "hard DCT", given that according to Catholicism it is heretical?
I would not, but I'm not sure what that has to do with my broader argument, since it doesn't hinge on Abrahamic religions seeing eye to eye on all topics. For example, you wouldn't find Ahmed bin Hanbal saying that he would prefer no caliphate to one that believed in the createdness of the Qur'an, despite being persecuted for that belief himself.
>"Hard DCT" is the Asharite position
Yes, but it's also not exclusive to them. For example Ibn Hazm was a prominent theologian who subscribed to it, despite his vehement opposition to asharism.
>I'm not sure what the Atharite position on this question is, if they have one
My understanding is that Ibn Taymiyyah takes the view that goodness is based on the nature of God, rather than command or foreknowledge exclusively, and that individual commands may take either side of euthyphro's dilemma, rather than being confined to one or the other.
> I would not, but I'm not sure what that has to do with my broader argument, since it doesn't hinge on Abrahamic religions seeing eye to eye on all topics.
Well, your whole idea of persecuting non-Abrahamists is a good example of something Abrahamists don't see eye-to-eye on. Certainly a lot of Christians are opposed to it – as I pointed out before, it violates the official teaching of the Catholic Church at the Second Vatican Council – but I don't believe all Muslims have ever agreed on it either. When Muslim rulers first conquered parts of India, and ended up ruling over Hindus and Buddhists, most of those rulers decided against extermination – and there were plenty of ulama willing to provide them with a fiqh justification for that decision.
> For example Ibn Hazm was a prominent theologian who subscribed to it.
Ibn Hazm lived before Sunni theology had settled-down into three established schools, and as such can't really be said to belong to any of them. Who follows Ibn Hazm's aqidah today? I'm guessing, if anyone does, it would be Zahiris? (who are sometimes considered a "minor Sunni maddhab", in addition to the four major ones)
> My understanding is that Ibn Taymiyyah takes the view that goodness is based on the nature of God, rather than command or foreknowledge exclusively, and that individual commands may take either side of euthyphro's dilemma, rather than being confined to one or the other.
Okay, but all Jews, Christians and Muslims agree that some divine commands are "positive" – only binding because God willed them, not because the object of the command is inherently good (for an obligation) or evil (for a prohibition). So in saying "individual commands may take either side of euthyphro's dilemma", Ibn Taymiyyah is not saying anything different from what Māturīdīs or Twelver Shi'a or Roman Catholics would say. "Hard DCT" always takes "one side" of Euthyphro's dilemma; everyone else takes "both sides" depending on the specific rule, just as Ibn Taymiyyah does. I don't actually see any difference between Ibn Taymiyyah (or Athnaris more broadly) and the Māturīdīs on this particular issue, while he clearly disagrees with the Asharites and Ibn Hazm
>and there were plenty of ulama willing to provide them with a fiqh justification for that decision.
Yes, that's the position of the Hanafi and Maliki schools. The Shafi'is, Hanbalis and Zahiris however opt for extermination.
>Ibn Hazm lived before Sunni theology had settled-down into three established schools, and as such can't really be said to belong to any of them.
For Ibn Hazm, all three schools had been established by then. The 'schools' are broad categories, not everyone falls into them, he wouldn't be the last to express views outside of them (even today you have the New Kalam movement continuing these discussions).
>Who follows Ibn Hazm's aqidah today? I'm guessing, if anyone does, it would be Zahiris? (who are sometimes considered a "minor Sunni maddhab", in addition to the four major ones)
Outside of the three schools nobody really takes aqaid wholesale. There are matters people agree with him on and other matters they disagree on. His most controversial position was on resigning the meaning of God's names.
>I don't actually see any difference between Ibn Taymiyyah
> Yes, that's the position of the Hanafi and Maliki schools. The Shafi'is, Hanbalis and Zahiris however opt for extermination.
So basically you are saying you want everyone to commit genocide against Hindus and Buddhists, because a minority of Sunni ulama believe such a genocide to be obligatory (at least in theory)? Sources disagree on whether Malikis or Shafi'is are larger in number; if you accept the larger estimates for the number of Malikis, the Hanafis and Malikis together would be the numerical majority of contemporary Sunni Islam, which means the majority of Sunni Islam rejects your pro-genocide position.
I don't think you are going to convince many people to accept your pro-genocide viewpoint – which is a very very good thing. In fact, while unlike you I'm no great fan of making beliefs illegal, if we are going to do it, I think your own pro-genocide beliefs should be near the top of the list
"You have no moral basis from which to criticize me, you only have personal preferences, and there is no god of liberal humanism that will punish me in a way that I cannot escape if I fail to comply. "
I do not believe there is morality without God. The difference would only be in what I consider to lead to the greatest pleasure and the least pain for myself, after all "what I seem to owe you I owe at most to myself"
> To give one example, I now believe non-Abrahamic religions (or a lack thereof) should be entirely illegal.
If you actually believe something is true, trying to compel people to believe it is a very counter-productive measure, because it doesn't convince people to believe it – they may outwardly pretend to believe, but inwardly they'll rebel against the compulsion; compelling people to believe something is sending the message "my arguments are no good which is why I have to resort to force". I remember my mother trying to force me to go to Mass as a young teenager – it did nothing to endear the Catholic Church to me, and to the extent I have any sympathy for it nowadays, that's in spite of her influence not because of it
You see this in Iran – the government makes it a crime to leave Islam, with the result that only around 40% of the population really believe in Islam any more; most of the remaining 60% will pretend to believe (to escape persecution) but in private they don't. [0] (Tolerated religious minorities–Christians, Jews and Zoroastrians-are less than 1% of the population.) While I have no doubt some of the decline of Islam in Iran would have happened anyway, for similar reasons to secularisation in the West, I think the Iranian government's attempts to force Islam on people (and a very authoritarian interpretation of it at that) have likely accelerated the decline of Iranian Islam, and it would probably be in a healthier state today if the 1979 Revolution had failed
>If you actually believe something is true, trying to compel people to believe it is a very counter-productive measure, because it doesn't convince people to believe it – they may outwardly pretend to believe, but inwardly they'll rebel against the compulsion
This isn't the case at scale, people are more likely to believe something if it is normalized for them.
> This isn't the case at scale, people are more likely to believe something if it is normalized for them.
How then do you explain the case of Iran I cited? Islam enforced as the state religion, leaving it is punishable with death (at least in theory), and yet there has been a huge decline in Islamic belief over the last few decades. That's evidence against your position.
In those experiments, only a minority of test subjects adjusted their expressed belief in response to social pressure; and only a minority of that minority appeared inwardly convinced in doing so. So this experiment doesn't support your position – putting aside the question of whether a highly contrived experiment is actually generalisable to ordinary human social behaviour.
>How then do you explain the case of Iran I cited? Islam enforced as the state religion, leaving it is punishable with death (at least in theory), and yet there has been a huge decline in Islamic belief over the last few decades. That's evidence against your position.
'more likely' isn't the same as 'nobody leaves'. If you compare similar statistics between secular countries and conservative ones, it's quite clear that more people remain religious in the conservative countries.
>In those experiments, only a minority of test subjects adjusted their expressed belief in response to social pressure
Because of the prisoner's dilemma. It is more often than not beneficial to a given belief system, for that belief system to suppress alternative beliefs. Various expressions of atheism are subject to this too.
We see this more explicitly in China and France, but we are also beginning to see it in other areas of the western world primarily using soft power, such as by funding subversive institutions and figures.
As with the prisoner's dilemma, there is no good reason for religious people to play the game with their hands tied behind their backs.
I don't really see this as a "game". As an atheist I'm perfectly fine with people having beliefs.
What I do have a problem with, is them imposing their values and morals on me, or judging me by them. They should keep that within their own communities. Also note that many religions disagree on many things, and they all believe they are the one true right one, yet this is literally impossible.
But I would not wish to suppress other beliefs as long as they don't impose their values upon atheists or followers of other belief systems. And if they do try to do so my problem is with that imposition alone.
One of the things I never really grasp is how much hate is coming from religious groups regarding what people do in the bedroom. Something that does not affect or hurt them at all. I never understand the reason for this.
>As an atheist I'm perfectly fine with people having beliefs.
This rings hollow, because as soon as we want to police our own communities according to our laws suddenly it becomes 'you are sexist, you are homophobic, you are anti-democratic, now hand over your children, your wealth and your guns'.
>What I do have a problem with, is them imposing their values and morals on me, or judging me by them. They should keep that within their own communities.
So that we can instead have your morals and values imposed on us?
>But I would not wish to suppress other beliefs as long as they don't impose their values upon atheists or followers of other belief systems. And if they do try to do so my problem is with that imposition alone.
So you would have no problem with Christians fining other Christians for premarital sex, or imprisoning women for having abortions, or Muslims flogging other Muslims for engaging in sodomy? Hell, what if we just don't want to bake a cake for a gay couple?
>Something that does not affect or hurt them at all. I never understand the reason for this.
Our morals are based on our religious texts. It has nothing to do with whether we feel 'affected' in the short term.
For example, Catholicism: Vatican II's declaration on religious freedom (Dignitatis humanae) says that "a wrong is done when government imposes upon its people, by force or fear or other means, the profession or repudiation of any religion, or when it hinders men from joining or leaving a religious community". Of course, some Trad Catholics reject Vatican II, and for many of them their biggest disagreement with it, is not anything to do with liturgy (as one might expect), it's this teaching on religious freedom. But, unlike many Trads, most Catholics don't reject that – not just moderate or liberal Catholics, even many very conservative ones. A devout Opus Dei member who prays to Pope Saint John Paul II every day can't reject Vatican II, because JP2 taught very explicitly that it was binding, and because Opus Dei was always a big supporter of it (and still is–which is a big part of why many Trads, SSPX in particular, dislike them so much).
I highly doubt you understand the situation as well as you'd like to think.
You're calling for a theocracy, and I assume forced re-education and/or mass murder of non-religious people.
This, in your mind, is the best way to have a stable society? And you came to this conclusion because of the influence of some shitty, middle-brow Youtubers and their click-bait?
It's not as bizarre as perhaps you might hope, you would be surprised at the number of people coming to similar conclusions and who trod a similar path to get there. People like Daniel Haqiqatjou and Nick Fuentes didn't pop up out of nowhere, and they're just the tip of the iceberg.
As per the title, it explains his belief, as a radical Muslim, that slavery and underage marriage ought to be defended
If this is where you are getting your ideas from–I don't really know what to say in response. A lot of people who ended up joining Islamic State and blowing themselves up on some battlefield in Syria, they started out by listening to people who say the sort of things that he does
Ahh, Fuentes and Haqiqatjou. Are you an incel? And yes it is still bizarre, reactionary, self-indulgent silliness. No different than if I was to start saying we need to kill all the god-believers because of the times they told me I was going to hell. Kill them all, because they clearly don't respect me and are in my way, who knows what theyll do next. They'll do anything if its in that book of theirs!!
"the only really straight heterosexual position is to be an asexual incel." -Nick Fuentes
Thankfully God blessed me with charisma, good looks and a positive outlook.
>No different than if I was to start saying we need to kill all the god-believers because of the times they told me I was going to hell. Kill them all, because they clearly don't respect me and are in my way, who knows what theyll do next. They'll do anything if its in that book of theirs!!
Many atheists already hold this view either explicitly or in effect, and it's a more logically consistent one than yours. There's nothing stopping you from staying silent in the prisoner's dilemma, but confession is the most strategic choice.
>"the only really straight heterosexual position is to be an asexual incel." -Nick Fuentes
Just to be clear, I'm not arguing that Dawkins bad = religion true. I'm only giving an indication as to the emotional reaction that prompted me to start pondering certain things.
That still makes no sense to me. You had an emotional response about an asshole scientist and that prompted you to believe in something which is completely unjustifiable as a response? I get examining your beliefs, I don't get having an irrational belief.
For this comment, let's assume there is no God and Dawkins is correct. A few people can be persuaded by his slap in the face tactics and insults. For the rest he really should be asking why people hold on to a belief, because whatever benefit they get from it he is not offering an alternative - which is worse. So yeah, I think he an inconsiderate jerk.
>> This presumes people hold on to a belief because it is valuable to them. I'm not so sure of that.
Some people hold a belief simply because they were raised with it. If it does nothing for them, they are IMHO more likely to be convinced by a mild face-slap argument and some evidence of a contrary belief. The people who have a belief tied to their identity, or the the people who say "this changed my life" are not going to convert with Dawkins approach because he's trying to take something from them, or even attack their identity (quite rudely).
It's true in some cases, not in others. I have family members who are religious and it (as far as I can tell) does provide value for them, in a positive way. My MIL, for example, is religious and it seems really positive for her.
She approaches her belief in a very loving, positive way and sees her job in the world to be loving and kind and to do service for others, etc. While I don't share her beliefs her values are pretty awesome.
It seems to me that she derives value from them and I certainly find her to be inspiring and positive. She spends pretty much zero of her time talking about sin or Hell, but espouses joy and love and gives thanks for her family and so forth. I don't need any particular set of beliefs for that to be inspiring for me and to want to emulate it.
Others may cling to belief out of fear, inertia, tribalism, or who knows what else. If it works for people and doesn't lead to harm for others (or themselves) then I'm all for it. I sometimes envy people who do have religious beliefs because maybe life makes more sense to them.
Let's assume there's no God, and Dawkins is merely pointing out that fact without offering an alternative. Then he's speaking the truth, and to me that's more important than any religion. Let's not even get into the fact that most religions are covered in blood throughout history. I'll take an inconsiderate jerk any day over genocidal liars.
> Let's assume there's no God, and Dawkins is merely pointing out that fact without offering an alternative. Then he's speaking the truth, and to me that's more important than any religion.
If his views are true – then he's doing the truth a disservice by arguing for it in such a sloppy manner.
A lot of well-educated theists read Dawkins, and come away more convinced of theism – they see how incompetent Dawkins' arguments are, and they (wrongly) conclude Dawkins is the best atheism has to offer.
Atheism would be better off without his book–and the truth would be too.
> Let's not even get into the fact that most religions are covered in blood throughout history.
It's interesting how commonly non-theist's facts are expressed in conveniently ambiguous figures of speech when it is convenient, but when something similar is done in religious scripture it is considered a big no no.
Regarding "most religions are covered in blood".....what does this mean?
Does it mean that all religious scriptures have blood on their pages?
Does it mean that every single "member" (according to some unstated categorization algorithm) of every single religion across time was "covered in blood" (a phrase for which we we lack a definition)? Or, maybe only some members (which would then require a universally agreed upon cutoff point)?
Or, something else entirely?
And then if we were being thorough, we may find it interesting to compare the frequency of this phenomenon in other, non-religious forms of human collectives, lest our comments are misinformative (a big no non these days, at least sometimes)....but then, would that be in violation of the "Whataboutism" rule, the origin and validity of which seems rather unclear?
Yep same story for me. Dawkins’ voice is a huge turnoff. After trying and failing to make it through “surely you must be joking mister Dawkins” I imagine he must be insufferable to be around in person.
Are you confusing him with Richard Feynman? I'm really surprised you find Richard Feynman to be a huge turnoff, if so. He seems like a genuinely awesome, non-abrasive guy all around, unless I've missed something.
Agreed. I'm an atheist and a science enthusiast. Also, technically, a Philosopher since I have a degree in Philosophy. I find Dawkins' writing sloppy, lazy, arrogant and ignorant. He's a poor advertisement for the world of science.
Heh. Fair point. It would, indeed, be an uphill climb.
I sometimes wonder, though, if a masterful person could author a book that the intended audience would read and sow seeds of doubt that would lead to questioning belief. (Or perhaps such a book exists and I don't know about it.)
But, yeah, if you want to sell books then I suppose that's the better approach.
In retrospect, the Selfish Gene turned out to be simply wrong about its main thesis, that non-fuctional useless junk DNA was a major portion of the human genome (and of other multicellular organisms). Even worse, Dawkings tried to use that claim as some kind of 'there is no intelligent designer because an intelligent designer wouldn't have put all that junk DNA in the genome', and then when it turned out that non-gene-coding DNA had all these structural-functional roles, it turned into a creationist-vs-atheist debate.
Psychologically, I think Dawkins and his cohort are refugees from strict religious fundamentalist backgrounds who have retained many aspects of fundamentalist thinking while rejecting the religious part. They seem to think they've got it all figured out, but in many respects, their views are 100 years out of date, more in line with 19th century highly deterministic thinking about science and nature.
That wasn't it's main thesis at all. I don't remember his discussion on "junk DNA" specifically (perhaps I should reread as it has been many years), but the main thesis (to put it in my own words) is that a mental model of evolution as acting upon genes leads to more accurate predictions and better understanding than a mental model where evolution acts upon whole organisms. (There's also the discussion of memes and their roles in comparison/contrast to genes). When he talks about science and not rah-rah atheism I never found Dawkins to be fundamentalist in thinking, and I recall he would generally qualify when his thoughts were more speculative. (The author of TFA on the other hand, does give me that impression particularly with sentences like "Psychiatric drugs help some people in the short term, but over time, in the aggregate, they make people sicker")
There are a ton of errors and misconceptions in that view as well. Dawkins claimed genes were discrete entities only concerned with their own replication and kept on with that view despite the discovery of introns, gene shuffling, and about a dozen other major discoveries in the field, like epigenetic modification and others. This criticism of the hyper-reductionist approach of Dawkins is nothing new, either. See this from 1995:
> "The intervening two decades between that volume and this have seen a major technological revolution in the science of genetics. Just how do these breakthroughs affect Dawkins's ideas about the origin of diversity? The answer, apparently, is not at all. Dawkins's descriptions of genetic processes are facile and outdated. According to him, the power of natural selection is still "almost limitless" genes are still discrete entities with "a flintlike integrity" that remains unaffected by their environment from generation to generation."
Similarly, the relationship between Charles Darwin and modern evolutionary theory is about as distant as that between Isaac Newton and modern physics, which is another concept that the Dawkins crowd (in which I'd include Charles Murray, Sam Harris, etc.) seems uncomfortable with.
Sorry but you're just grasping at straws here. There are valid criticisms of the gene-centric perspective but things like introns and epigenetics have nothing to do with it.
A few hours ago you were saying something completely wrong about the book and now you incorrectly act as an expert critic. I recommend you give it a reread (or a read) instead.
The central thesis of the Selfish Gene has nothing to do with "junk DNA", and when the book does talk about the subject it doesn't assume that it has no purpose.
(What it does say is "Biologists are racking their brains trying to think what useful task this apparently surplus DNA is doing" and "The simplest way to explain the surplus DNA is to suppose that it is a parasite, or at best a harmless but useless passenger".)
Yes, it turned out to be wrong, but not for the reason you cite. Dawkins completeliy dismisses the critical role of mutational fixation of epigenetic gene expression. He admits it exists, but dismisses its relevance in speciation.
More recent discoveries point to the genome's 3D architecture as being critical to its function, and large chunks of non-coding DNA appear to play key roles in keeping it stable.
The point, however, is that Dawkins is not a scientist, he's just a rather fundamentalist-minded ideologue, and that's true for the whole "New Atheist" cohort.
I think Dawkins, like atheism itself, makes sense in a certain context.
I haven't called myself an atheist in many, many years. It's unnecessary now. I live in a place and a social context where it doesn't matter. But I grew up in a place where everybody took a shared belief in God for granted. God, if you believe in God the way most Christians do, is a concept that touches everything. Everything you do, all the choices you make, derive ultimately from your conception of yourself as a child of a benevolent God, living in a universe that He created for us, for purposes that we can't fully understand, but in which we are provided with a certain amount of guidance about his wishes for how we should behave towards each other and towards Him. Naturally this comes up in conversation sometimes. It's just too big and too all-encompassing not to. Any conversation about how people should and shouldn't behave -- which is a huge percentage of human conversation, since it include politics, gossip, and personal dilemmas -- God is right there under the surface, and can come up explicitly at any time.
When God comes up, you have a couple of choices:
1. Use the same language as everybody else, internally translating what other people say into concepts that you find meaningful and compelling, and translating what you want to say into Christian language, even when such translations are inaccurate. Or,
2. Channel your inner Christian, and play a Christian role in the conversation. (Definitely an option for folks like me who were Christian when they were younger.) Or,
3. Speak the way you think, and be prepared to be misunderstood, met with horror, judged, and/or forced to explain yourself.
Choosing option 3 becomes exhausting over time, and calling yourself an "atheist" is one way to make it a little bit less exhausting.
People wonder why "atheists" are constantly refuting all of the naive, amateur-hour proofs of the existence of God and not grappling with more philosophically sophisticated ways of conceiving of God. Why so much straw-manning, why so much punching down? In my opinion, it boils down to this: if you are talking to someone who believes in a philosophically sophisticated concept of God, then you probably aren't being forced to play the role of "atheist" because you aren't being faced with active astonishment, perplexity, and/or hostility about your lack of belief. I have virtually never needed to be an "atheist" in the last fifteen years, because I live in a nice blue urban bubble where everybody understands that their concept of God is not a universal that they can assume as common ground with everyone they meet. When someone wants to talk to you about what they believe, they aren't filled with disbelief, disgust, or fear, and they aren't looking to come to a successful resolution of your spiritual sickness by the end of the conversation.
Because my need (and, I suspect, many other people's need) for atheism was driven by the context of being surrounded by people who shared a religious belief and found it baffling, horrifying, and/or disgusting that I didn't share it as well, I never needed atheism to be sophisticated or subtle. I never needed it to be convincing for educated people. I only needed it to give me a voice and a label for myself in those situations. I found it useful then, and even though I've been able to put myself in a better situation where I can leave it behind me, I understand why other people still need it.
The people you were with probably were unused to outsiders and insecure how to deal with your "alien" (to them) views.
They should have behaved welcoming and inclusive. But as we all know, there's a lot between "should" and "is" in this world...
Because there are atheists, agnostics, Christians, Muslims and those of other religions, we need to find a way to be nice to each other, and perhaps a smallest common denominator of moral values (a sort of "moral POSIX standard").
Your three options are interesting. There was a linguistic study among Algerian immigrants to France, provided in Arabic and in French (same questions), so study the influence of language/culture on the answers. The same people were asked about love, for example, and as you would expect those answering in French would "channel" (to use your word) idioms and responses associated with love in a French context (language of love, Paris as the city of love, romantic love etc.). In contrast, responses in Arabic channeled concepts of moral chastity. Need to find that study (I believe it was a chapter in a book).
I was not an outsider. I was born and raised there. You're right that anything they weren't comfortable with was thought of as outside pollution, though.
Sorry, I meant "outlier" with respect to your views rather than "outsider".
There are many "insiders" that intellectually belong "outside" but that shy away from the consequences of expressing one's views, and what would happen after such a disclosure.
Even well-meaning groups like religious sects that want to "save" can have devastating effects on individuals. Recently, a shooter killed several members of
the Jehovah's witnesses at a meeting, probably because he was an ex-member,
and they are known to cut all social/communications ties with leavers.
Needless to say, if people are not mentally stable, being isolated by force can lead to disaster.
But usually, the most strongly worded views come from insecure people who are not that knowledgeable, whereas people who have deeply studied and compared are more gracious and see connections where others would like to create more divisions.
Skepticism means doubting, not bashing. Doubting is a negative, it undoes. It doesn’t create an alternative— but it helps to create a space for alternatives.
There’s a certain strain of progressive thought, going back over 150 years, that connects these seemingly unrelated ideas:
- Blank slate: human genetics are trumped by environment
- Born Good: humans are good in their natural state and socialized to be violent
- Equitable: humans naturally want to be equal
These positions have varying degrees of scientific support but all of them are highly contested and at least partially wrong. Horgan in his article is interesting in that all of his attacks support progressive opinions and none of them go after that group’s sacred. This indicates he is a member of a tribe he is not aware he is in.
This talk is... not great. Being a controversial contrarian isn't too helpful when you're mostly just wrong and misinformed. I commend him for at least linking to the responses of his critics, though I'm not sure he's ever addressed them.
I'd suggest reading Steven Novella's response at least:
The entire thing read as a bit of an ad hominem. Skeptics can be tribal like anybody else, and they can get things wrong or not investigate things that should be. Ok, that's all true but not particularly insightful. Picking one thing that the Skeptical community seems to accept and then focusing on it with good arguments and evidence instead of attacking "Skeptics" would have been more useful and likely better received.
There is a type of criticism where the author seems to expect respect for their outsider status and anti-tribal attitude, which they see as increasing their objectivity, and this seems to liberate them to criticize viewpoints labeled "tribal" without sufficient substance.
It's the substance of a criticism that validates it, not a self-assessed position as an objective outsider.
Never heard of him before but his whole life is apparently science focused:
> In 2011, Krauss defended his association with Epstein, saying "As a scientist I always judge things on empirical evidence and he always has women ages 19 to 23 around him, but I've never seen anything else, so as a scientist, my presumption is that whatever the problems were I would believe him over other people
That's a pretty typical attitude in the community at that time ("allegations aren't evidence"). Krauss' behavior was an open secret in the skeptic community for a long time and it was no surprise when he got metoo'd.[1]
His very first example of a "hard target", string theory, has been criticized repeatedly by Neil deGrasse Tyson (and many others), one of the people he explicitly accuses of being "in tribe". The rest of the article is downhill from there; I see numerous other errors/inaccuracies just from a skim. Seems like these are just a bunch of substance-free attacks from a contrarian. Sure you can find some individual people saying some questionable and unsubstantiated things, but his broader claim of groupthink doesn't hold water.
I think you're conflating multiple groups. Think of each thing as their own group. "String theory" people are a group, "simulation" people are another group. While some of the string theory group may also be simulation people, it's not a guarantee.
And I think that's the problem overall with his essay. There is no big group here. There are lots of groups and people are members of some and are against others.
It's also disingenuous to call someone not skeptical of an issue just because they disagree with you. It's quite possible that Neil deGrasse Tyson has considered the simulation question critically and skeptically, and still come to the conclusion he has.
The other major issue is that it's all very surface level. I don't know how much time he was given, so he may have picked topics he disagrees with and presented people that agreed with them to demonstrate that there can be opposing views even among notable people in the field.
The core idea is one that is just kind of not needed to be said anyway. Everyone, when presented with the idea, "We should be skeptical of even scientific claims", will probably say "Well, no shit, that's how science works". So it's an idea people already think they do. And it really just gives them ammunition to claim other people aren't doing it enough.
> Everyone, when presented with the idea, "We should be skeptical of even scientific claims", will probably say "Well, no shit, that's how science works".
Considering what we went through for the last couple years with Trust The Science (which is very well documented on the internet), it is impressive that so many people still believe this to be true. Psychologically, it seems quite similar to how people often hold allegiance to any ideological organization despite its obvious issues.
> It's quite possible that Neil deGrasse Tyson has considered the simulation question critically and skeptically, and still come to the conclusion he has.
That's possible but I wouldn't bet on it. He's not a philosopher, he's a science entertainer who runs a movie theater. The meat of his career is commentary on popular sciency subjects, most of them very far his actual academic expertise (astrophysics.) I figured this out after watching his twitter account for a while. Wall-to-wall poorly conceived hot takes on popular subjects that he obviously didn't put much thought into. If he thinks he can get hired for interviews/talks/books talking about simulation theory, I believe he'd do it even if he personally considered it to be unscientific nonsense.
Either way is likely, but I don't think the position of "they have a different position from me, therefore they are not thinking critically" is a good one in general.
Now, I'll probably never get to actually talk to Tyson on simulation theory, so I'll never be able to ply him with any question I have about his position. Or to ask if he considered certain other points of view. Or to question certain gaps that need to be covered in order to make a simulation, etc.
But I'll not assume that he hasn't critically considered the information presented to him. I'll also not accuse him of not approaching it critically, because whether or not he has, he probably believes he has. So it's a non-starter of a conversation.
If you would call out the inaccuracies and cite why you think they are, that would be far more useful and helpful to the discussion than just complaining and waving vaguely ... "over there" as where the errors lay.
I think "scientists" need to stick with the program and stop calling stuff like the multiverse a theory at all. The correct scientific term is hypothesis, which is quite literally a hypothetical, carrying much less weight than a theory.
Colloquially they're used interchangeably but the dictionary definitions (and therefore usage in maths and the sciences) are different:
Theory: A set of statements or principles devised to explain a group of facts or phenomena, especially one that has been repeatedly tested or is widely accepted and can be used to make predictions about natural phenomena.
Hypothesis: A tentative explanation for an observation, phenomenon, or scientific problem that can be tested by further investigation.
Examples: the Special Theory of Relativity (very well tested, and used for real world applications), and the Riemann Hypothesis (a result in mathematics that appears to be correct but so far has not been proven).
