Atheism 2.0 — fundamentally misconceived

Alain de Botton wants to take what he sees as the "good" things of religion and borrow them for atheism. He particularly likes religious buildings, which he seems to think provide examples of something that "atheism" — as some kind of movement — could usefully build. The problem with this approach is that it appears to accept the notion that atheism as a "thing" is in the same category as that other thing — religion.

It's not. According to Dictionary.com the definition of religion is this:

a set of beliefs concerning the cause, nature, and purpose of the universe, especially when considered as the creation of a superhuman agency or agencies, usually involving devotional and ritual observances, and often containing a moral code governing the conduct of human affairs.

Atheism on the other hand is not that. It's not a set of beliefs, it's the absence of belief in a god or gods. It involves no devotional or ritual observances, and says nothing at all about a moral code. Whatever religion is, atheism is not that.

Alain de Botton seems to regret that atheism is not that, and while he wouldn't accept the superhuman agency he seems to want to co-opt some of the "devotional and ritual observances".

On Justin Brierley's Unbelievable? radio programme today Alain de Botton stated that he doesn't really care for the nitty gritty details of science, and it seems that this barely concealed disdain for the hard facts of reality could be at the root of his less-than-rigorous approach to truth — an approach that sets him apart from other philosophers such as Daniel Dennett and A. C. Grayling. And of course Alain de Botton is far too nice to come out with full-blown condemnation of religious belief like Richard Dawkins and his ilk are wont to do. (His niceness was on full display in his conversation with James Orr today, but he was, almost literally, on his own ground.)

Alain de Botton already appears to be borrowing aspects of religion, such as the insistence that an absence of religion will inevitably leave a void requiring to be filled. This is not so, in the same way that removing a cancerous tumour from the body does not require something in its place.

His idea that there ought to be a community for atheists seems to me — someone who has not read his book — to be fundamentally misguided. There is already a community for atheists and people of a secular humanist turn of worldview; it's called humanity. We secular humanists (I count myself among them) can do what others do when when they don't go to church, such as attend or partake in sports, go down the pub, go to the movies, theatre, sightseeing, evening classes, quiz nights, museums, art galleries — or even skeptics conferences if we are so inclined.

All of these are communities of different kinds; pick one (or more) as you like. There's no need for something to serve as an ersatz church.

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Alain de Botton gave a TED talk recently on the theme of his book:

Grill the world's foremost Christian apologist — Unbelievable?

Last Saturday's Unbelievable? radio programme was a departure from its regular format — which usually aims to get "...Christians and non-believers talking to each other." In advance of William Lane Craig's visit to the UK in October Justin Brierley had him responding to questions sent in by listeners. Peter May, one of the organisers of the Reasonable Faith Tour, was also on the programme.

I wasn't expecting much from this, as the last time Craig was on Unbelievable? he took the opportunity to bad-mouth Richard Dawkins in an unforgivable manner.

But there were some good questions. I've only heard the show once, but here are some thoughts that occurred to me while listening:

When asked by Justin what he thought of Dawkins' refusal to debate him, Craig said Dawkins might be afraid of being humiliated — as he was in his debate with John Lennox. This seems to me a very odd interpretation of events. Dawkins gave up debating theists one-on-one after his encounter with Lennox because Lennox misrepresented the debate afterwards:

http://youtu.be/24vWUeMnXBg


Small wonder that Dawkins refuses to debate Craig, when Craig himself echoes Lennox in misrepresenting what actually happened. (The whole of Dawkins' talk is available here: http://youtu.be/xbza-UtseE0 — well worth watching.)

Concerning Polly Toynbee's withdrawal from debating with him, Craig suggested that atheists seem to have got together and agreed to boycott "this type of event". It seems more likely that they got together and agreed not to debate William Lane Craig, as they know he's not interested in dialogue, only point-scoring.

Then Craig answered some listener questions. After some preliminary exposition of the Kalām Cosmological Argument he attempted to rebut Justin Schieber's excellent point about temporal causality — that one can't really say anything about cause and effect when time doesn't exist — and in doing so produced a real howler. He resorted to "simultaneity", claiming that intentions can be simultaneous with actions and therefore not temporal. But "simultaneous" means "at the same time". In what way is simultaneity non-temporal?

Fine-tuning was next up, and as usual Craig, like other theists, simply takes fine-tuning as a given. But look at the size of the universe. No, really, look at its SIZE.

"Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is."¹

Intelligent life (that stuff the universe is supposedly fine-tuned to support) is as far as we know an infinitesimally insignificant part of the universe. One could characterise intelligent life as a "homeopathically tiny" concentration in the unfathomably vast cosmos. Statistically speaking, therefore, there is no intelligent life at all in the universe. How can the nominal non-existence of any such thing be described as the result of "fine tuning"?

A. C. Grayling's comment that he'd sooner debate the existence of leprechauns and fairies than the existence of God was described by Craig as "condescending". This is symptomatic of the false importance theists ascribe to their wacky beliefs. They complain they're not being taken seriously, yet cannot provide any reason why they should be. We have, of course, heard this before. During a debate in 2009 Richard Harries objected to Richard Dawkins' similar characterisation:

"You can't let Richard get away with that. That's a ridiculous remark. You cannot confuse the God of classical theism, which has animated the whole of western philosophy, with a leprechaun."²

But like Craig, Harries provided no sound reason not to.

Another question was about the moral argument for God, and as expected Craig trotted out his usual claim that it's logically impossible for God to be immoral because it's part of God's nature to be moral. But he merely asserts that this is so. The only justification for such an assertion is that God is defined to be moral. This isn't really a justification, it's nothing more than an arbitrary definition.

And this man is supposedly the world's foremost Christian apologist.

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1. Douglas Adams, The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy — the original radio scripts. London 1985, Pan Books.
2. Lord Richard Harries, during a debate at Wellington College, Crowthorne, on the motion "Atheism is the New Fundamentalism", November 2009.

The Rev. Canon Dr. Giles Fraser, Sniper-in-Chief

Giles Fraser

Is Giles Fraser attending the World Atheist Convention in Dublin this weekend? I don't know what he was expecting, but he seems to have been surprised by one of the speakers, Richard Green of Atheism UK (whom I was pleased to meet at the most recent Winchester Skeptics in the Pub). Anyway, Fraser has written up his reaction in the Guardian.

What is distinctive about Atheism UK, Green insists, is that it's an atheist organisation for all atheists, including those not committed to humanism. "We cater for atheists who are not humanists," he says.

A laudable goal, I would have thought. I'm all for inclusion. But Fraser manages to look down his nose at it.

These days, atheists who are not humanists are an unfamiliar breed. Most atheists, and in particular the new atheists, regard themselves as committed humanists. Indeed, they are new in name only for they appeal back to the atheistic humanism of the Enlightenment, with its optimism about human nature and strong belief in the power of human reason and the inevitability of progress.

It's no good castigating the "new" atheists for not being new — this soubriquet was coined not by the likes of Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens and Dennett, but by their detractors (such as, dare I suggest, the Rev. Canon Dr. Giles Fraser, Canon Chancellor of St. Paul's Cathedral).

The sunny optimism of the Enlightenment – not least its commitment to progress and a sense of the intrinsic goodness of human nature – was profoundly dented by the horrors of the first world war and the Nazi death camps.

Three paragraphs in, and we're on to the Nazis. Well done Giles!

The Enlightenment hadn't found another word for sin.

Why on earth would it need to?

And just as Nietzsche proclaimed the death of God, a developing anti-humanism started to announce what, in less gender-conscious times, Foucault was to call "the death of man". Indeed, Nietzsche himself insisted the belief in humanity was itself just a hangover from a belief in God and, once God was eradicated, the belief in human beings would follow the same way.

It may come as a surprise to Fraser, but Nietzsche is not the atheist God — because, well, you know, it's in the description: "atheist". Nor do atheists, or even humanists, need a belief in human beings. Speaking about belief in this way is simply a misuse of the term, much like bemoaning atheistic denial of "sin".

Richard Green's "atheists who are not humanists" could meet in a phone box. Indeed, the new atheists simply duck the challenge made by atheistic anti-humanism, believing their expensive scientific toys can outflank the alleged conceptual weakness of their humanism.

Aside from the pejorative sniping it doesn't surprise me that Fraser makes a specific quantitative claim without backing it up. And who says that "atheists who are not humanists" are in favour of anti-humanism (whatever that is)? As for expensive scientific toys outflanking the alleged conceptual weakness of their humanism — what does that even mean?

Thus they dismiss the significance of philosophy just as much as they have always done of theology – as if the two were fundamentally in cahoots.

I see little evidence of atheists or humanists dismissing the whole of philosophy (A. C. Grayling,  Daniel C. Dennett, Stephen Law — to mention just three atheist philosophers off the top of my head). As for theology, Giles you can keep it. I've no use for your kind of theology, especially as you seem to believe it doesn't even have to be true.

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Eric MacDonald has read Fraser's peanut and dismembers it with a sledgehammer.

Could I believe in a supernatural God?

Something that came up in the latest Skepticule Extra discussion (podcast due out imminently — watch this space) prompts me to clarify a change of position. Back in January of 2010 I blogged about what I thought it would take for me to become a believer in God. That post appears somewhat inconclusive now, as I seem to have moved to a more hard-line stance.

Listening to a recent exchange between Richard Dawkins and A. C. Grayling, and reading Grayling's subsequent email to-and-fro with Jerry Coyne, I've realised that there's probably nothing that would convince me of the existence of God.

This of course stems from my naturalistic worldview, in which supernatural entities or events are precluded by definition. However:

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

William Shakespeare: Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 5

The Bard may have been suggesting that there are things we know nothing of, but the more we find out, the more we realise that the universe is strange. And though strange, it has never, not even once, been found to be supernatural. Every time a "mystery" has been explained by science, that explanation has been a natural one. Not once has science come up with an explanation involving supernatural forces. Some might object that the remit of science prevents this, but what else are we to go on? Divine revelation?

Before I'm accused of being closed-minded on this issue, I should first point out that I consider the problem to be essentially one of definition. If you ask me what it would take for me to be convinced of the existence of God, I will necessarily want a clear definition of that God. You tell me precisely and coherently what you mean by God — with no obfuscation or appeals to mystery or ineffability — and I will tell you precisely and coherently what it would take for me to believe in that God.

A Secular Bible — and barely disguised disdain

The Today Programme this morning featured a discussion between "famous atheist" A. C. Grayling and Thought for the Day regular the Rev Canon Dr Giles Fraser. Grayling was on to plug his latest book, The Good Book: A Secular Bible — characterized as an atheist version of the Christian Bible. He's an accomplished philosopher with a knack for plain speaking without rancour, and so this is one I'll be checking out.

Giles Fraser — he of woolly theology — was apparently on as "balance". Despite his remarkable claim that very few Christians hold to the idea that belief in God is a necessary precondition for morality¹, he could not restrain the typical disdain theists reserve for anyone of a godless persuasion who dares to imagine that a fully engaged life can be lived in the absence of a god. It was all jolly banter in the studio, but with a noticeably condescending subtext.

I doubt, however, that any of this will have put off Grayling from his book-promotion — nor should it. Compared to him, Fraser comes across as an intellectual midget whose jovial ripostes may make for a mildly entertaining end to the BBC's flagship morning news radio programme, but beyond that they are of little consequence.

Incidentally the Guardian has an extensive interview with A. C. Grayling that may serve as an antidote to the foregoing Fraser-frustration:
AC Grayling: 'How can you be a militant atheist? It's like sleeping furiously' | Books | The Guardian

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1. So few Christians hold to this belief, and yet atheists debating theists encounter it all the time.

The theodicy of Haiti doesn't bear thinking about (so let's not)

I get my first news of the day from BBC Radio 4, specifically the Today Programme. Yesterday regular host John Humphrys asked¹ the Archbishop of York, John Sentamu, why God allowed such terrible suffering to be inflicted on the innocent people of Haiti. The Archbishop didn't have a coherent answer, though he did at least condemn Pat Robertson's ugly accusation (that the Haitians had it coming because their ancestors made a pact with the devil):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f5TE99sAbwM



The Today Programme  audio stream for Thursday, January 14th is available here (scroll down to 0831):
http://news.bbc.co.uk//today/hi/today/newsid_8458000/8458361.stm

Or download an mp3 of the relevant clip from RapidShare here:
http://rapidshare.com/files/335314721/Today_JohnSentamu_Haiti_BBCR4i-20100114.mp3

"Stories of survival are emerging from the rubble in Haiti. Troy Livesay, of the Christian charity World Wide Village, lives with his family in Port au Prince and has written a moving account in the Guardian about his family's survival. He begs people to prey for Haitians. Archbishop of York, John Sentamu, comments on how people turn to God during times of disaster."

( Troy Livesay's Guardian account is here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jan/13/survivors-tale-haiti-blog-extract )

When disaster strikes the innocent, theodicy is revealed as the empty wailing of those who know they have no excuses for their supposedly omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent God, but this morning on Thought for the Day theodicy's guilty vacuity was brought to a new low by Giles Fraser:

"...at a moment like this, I prefer to leave the arguments to others. For me this is a time quietly to light a candle for the people of Haiti, and to offer them up to God in my prayers. May the souls of the departed rest in peace."

Well thanks a bunch Giles! I'm sure your candle and prayers will be so effective in helping the Haitians in their dire plight, and might even convince them that — despite appearances — God loves them after all! (I'm sorry, but when I heard this execrable peroration this morning I uttered an extremely audible profanity.) This isn't the first time the Rev. Dr. Giles Fraser has used Thought for the Day to hide behind verbal obfuscation, and it illustrates precisely why the slot should be opened up to secular humanist viewpoints.

RealMedia audio stream:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/religion/realmedia/thought/t20100115.ram

Podcast audio:
http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/radio4/thought/thought_20100115-1008a.mp3

Download mp3 from RapidShare:
http://rapidshare.com/files/335825978/Thought__15_JAN_10.mp3

The script for Giles Fraser's thought should be is now available soon; meanwhile you can read an alternative interpretation at Platitude of the Day.

UPDATE 2010-01-19: On Saturday's Today Programme, atheist philosopher A. C. Grayling was asked to respond to both John Sentamu and Giles Fraser. He was calmly rational (as always), but scheduled at the very end of the programme he had insufficient time to deal in full with the idiocy that is theodicy. The vacuous blatherings of Messrs Sentamu and Fraser last week have been rightly castigated across the blogosphere — Manic Street Preacher's recent post contrasts similarly reprehensible, knee-jerk statements in response to tragedy with those displaying a more compassionate outlook.

The audio stream of A. C. Grayling's valiant but time-constrained effort is available here (scroll down to 0854):
http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_8462000/8462906.stm

Or you can download the clip from RapidShare as an mp3:
http://rapidshare.com/files/337961781/Today_ACGrayling_Haiti_BBCR4i-20100116.mp3

¹UPDATE 2010-01-22: A transcript of John Humphrys' conversation with Archbishop John Sentamu is available at the JREF Swift blog.

Richard Dawkins at Conway Hall (June 2009)

My own effort at recording a snippet of Richard Dawkins' opening talk at the BHA Darwin, Humanism and Science one-day conference at Conway Hall last June was less than successful, so I'm glad to see this at last posted on YouTube. (I imagine the delay might have been something to do with the book tour for The Greatest Show On Earth. Dawkins gave a similar talk at the AAI 2009 convention, but I'm embedding this one, which I actually attended.)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h_f3B45E4dw


(The day was opened by Richard Dawkins and closed by A. C. Grayling, and I'll be hearing them both in person again at the Wellington Squared debate in Crowthorne on Sunday.)

The Atheist and the Bishop - BBC Radio 4

The atheist is A. C. Grayling; the bishop is Richard Harries. This is the second of three 45-minute radio programmes "in which an atheist and a bishop come together to apply their own philosophies to the experiences of people they meet, with Jane Little chairing the discussion."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00m1nm2

The highlight is a visit to a London Academy faith school to talk with three of the students - a Muslim, an atheist and a Roman Catholic - and A. C. Grayling asks the Muslim what will happen to the atheist when she dies. They also speak to Samantha Stein, director of Camp Quest UK.

For UK listeners the audio can be streamed for a few days from the BBC iPlayer:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/console/b00m6ggf

For those beyond the reach of iPlayer (or after the stream expires) a 40 Mb mp3 of the programme is available from RapidShare:
http://rapidshare.com/files/272317918/The_Atheist_and_the_Bishop_-_Episode_2.mp3

The Camp Quest segment is also featured at their website:
http://www.camp-quest.org.uk/news/cq-atheist-and-the-bishop/

UPDATE: As is my wont with such stuff, a couple of days before posting I emailed this to RD.net, and it's now in their newsfeed:
http://richarddawkins.net/article,4237,n,n

Arguments for Fred* #1: Why is there something rather than nothing?

Kicking off a new series of posts today, inspired by recent discussions at Skeptico, I bring you the first of several ramblings on the arguments I've come across for the existence of God. This one is more of an oblique question than a direct argument: why is there something rather than nothing? The implication is that for there to be something (that is, for the universe to exist, rather than not to exist) there needs to be a prime mover - a cause. And that cause has to be God.

Just Googling the question will reap a rich harvest of links to extensive discussions on the subject, but the main thrust of most of the refutations of this argument appears to be that the state of "there being something" is more stable than the state of "there being nothing". In other words, there has to be something. But I'd like to offer a simpler, more direct refutation. Instead of asking the question, "why is there something rather than nothing?" perform this little experiment:

Flip a coin. It comes up heads (or tails). Why did it come up heads (or tails) rather than tails (or heads)?

The answer to the question posed by the above experiment is also the answer to why there is something rather than nothing.

*Fred is A. C. Grayling's term for "any suppositious supernatural agency defined ad hoc for some purpose religionists have in mind."

UPDATE 2009-08-21: Click here for AfF #2

A secular Thought for the Day? - I'll believe it when I see it

The BBC Trust is apparently considering calls for Thought for the Day to include non-religious speakers, and this morning the call was discussed on Today, the programme on which TftD airs:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_8151000/8151168.stm

"Christina Rees, a member of the Church of England's General Synod, and AC Grayling, a philosopher and atheist, discuss the future of Thought."

Christina Rees perpetuates the misunderstanding that godless people have nothing to offer in commentary on the ethical aspects of current affairs. She also seems to think that the call for TftD to be opened up to secular speakers is a call for theists to be excluded from the slot. What we are complaining about is that TftD is monopolised by theists, when there are equally valid non-theist viewpoints that are entirely appropriate for this brief segment of the Today Programme. It's called "Thought for the Day", not "Religious Thought for the Day", so I think our protests are valid.

The argument isn't new - it comes up every six months or so, is chucked around a bit, and then forgotten until the next time. I'll be very surprised if the BBC does an about face on this.

If the flash player doesn't work for you, download the mp3 from RapidShare:
http://rapidshare.com/files/341825485/Today_ACGrayling_ChristinaRees_TftD_BBCR4i-20090715.mp3
(2.6 Mb, 5'34")

Later:

Perhaps there's hope after all. Check out this post by the National Secular Society:
New hope for an end to religious monopoly on Thought for the Day | National Secular Society

A. C. Grayling at Conway Hall - Darwin, Humanism & Science

While I get around to posting my thoughts on the Darwin, Humanism & Science event held at Conway Hall two weeks ago, the BHA has posted this recording of A. C. Grayling's talk with which he wound up the day:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HbeY9_NErCs


I'm not sure why the first thing they've posted is the last thing on the schedule (unless it's the only thing they're going to post), but be that as it may, Grayling's talk was relaxed and informal, without slides, focussing on C. P. Snow's idea of "The Two Cultures".

Darwin, Humanism and Science

On June 6th the British Humanist Association is hosting a one-day conference at Conway Hall in London on evolution - its teaching in schools, and the conflict between evolution and creationism. Until recently I would have been surprised to see a whole day devoted to this topic, as I wasn't aware that in Britain we had much of a problem with creationism. Then I discovered a creation museum within ten miles of where I live.

When I realised I could attend this event without taking time off work I decided that in view of my recent visit to said creation museum I really ought to go. It's now sold out, but fortunately I was in time to get a ticket. I hope to be reporting on the event here.

The programme, in brief, is as follows.

Welcome from Polly Toynbee, president of the BHA

‘Charles Darwin and the theory of evolution’
Professor Richard Dawkins

Teaching of evolution in European schools
Professor Charles Susanne, Free University of Brussels, Belgium

Insidious Creationism: the intellectual abuse of children through creationist books, comics and literature
James Williams, University of Sussex, England

Lost in education: on the cognitive biases that impede our acceptance of evolutionary theory
Johan De Smedt, University of Ghent, Belgium

“Evolutionary Humanism”: How to cope with the ‘moral’ arguments against evolution
Dr Michael Schmidt-Salomon, Giordano-Bruno Foundation, Germany

Hinduism and the Myth of Evolution
Babu Gogineni, International Humanist and Ethical Union, India

‘Humanism and Science’
Professor A C Grayling, Birkbeck College, London, England

This should be a comprehensive overview. The detailed schedule on the BHA website indicates there will be opportunities for questions.