Dear Paul, Darwinism is cultural poison.

I spent some time today clearing my email inbox, and came across this heartening missive:

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Dear Paul:

A new survey of more than 3,000 Americans powerfully confirms that Darwinism is cultural poison.

The wide-ranging survey found that evolutionary theory really does undermine many people's belief in God and absolute morality. 

Behind the statistics are real people. We've all heard the stories. Every year teens head off to college full of hope and promise. Many have been raised in solid homes of faith and were educated in private religious schools. But so many lose their way after getting brainwashed into believing life is just a meaningless evolutionary accident. 

It doesn't have to be this way. Your gift today can help fight this poison. 

The survey was made possible by you, our financial supporters, and it's a game changer. 

No one with an open mind will be able to read the survey results without realizing how corrosive Darwinism is. The results can persuade more people to stand up against this powerful ideology. 

But for that to happen, your financial support is need to publicize the results to more than 100,000 pastors, faith community leaders, and laypeople. 

With your support, we'll do targeted social media campaigns, licensed email blasts, media interviews, infographics, short videos, and more. If we can raise the funds. 

Please send a donation today of $75, $150, $500, or more, for this important campaign. 

This is a unique opportunity for your donation to work as a force multiplier. How? As a way of saying thanks for giving, we will send you a digital copy of the report when it becomes available later this fall. I hope you will send a gift today and that you will share your copy with someone who needs to hear.

Together we can grow the ranks of the intelligent design movement and turn to flight those who would use Darwinism to drain meaning, purpose, and morality from the world.

Sincerely,

Kelley Unger
Director, Development Operations
Center for Science and Culture
Discovery Institute

P.S. There's also good news in the survey. Many theists and even some agnostics reported that the evidence for intelligent design strengthens their belief in God.

Help us spread the word, and the evidence.

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So yes, the Discovery Institute is once again asking me for money, but I shan't be sending them anything, not least because the trends they are lamenting, and to which they are opposed, are actually good trends that reason and logic should lead us to applaud:

The wide-ranging survey found that evolutionary theory really does undermine many people's belief in God and absolute morality. 

I see that as a positive trend. (I also note that there are three links to their donation page, but no link to the survey report, which will only be available after donation.)

Behind the statistics are real people. We've all heard the stories. Every year teens head off to college full of hope and promise. Many have been raised in solid homes of faith and were educated in private religious schools. But so many lose their way after getting brainwashed into believing life is just a meaningless evolutionary accident.  

Generally speaking it's a good thing to have your brain cleared of erroneous, unevidenced beliefs. Life is, in fact, empty and meaningless. And it's empty and meaningless that it's empty and meaningless. So don't sweat it, just get on with your life, a life that will have as much meaning as you care to put into it.

Absolutely misguided: theism's mental block

That Facebook thread mentioned in my previous post has been growing, but it's become clear to me that the author of the Original Post has some serious misunderstandings about atheism, materialism and naturalism. In this she's far from unique, and since the mental block she's exhibiting is one that other theists apparently share I thought I'd jot down some explanatory notes about such notions that I can refer to if (when!) such brain-jams come up in future.

The first, exemplified in the OP referred to above, is the notion that without God everything is pointless. The theist is saying that if God does not exist there's no point to anything at all — that if human beings are "merely" matter, then they don't … matter.

This misconception is tied up with the theistic idea of absolutes and ultimates (as are most theistic misconceptions, I might add). In this case the theist maintains that there must be God-given purpose for human life to have any meaning. This idea is so ingrained into religious thinking that many theists (the OP author cited above included) cannot see beyond it. To them, the idea of a world without God is simply too alien to be entertained. Some even suggest that if God didn't exist, they would resort to crime, and care nothing for their fellows.

This scary prospect is evidence of the second, related, theistic preoccupation with absolutes — that of objective morality. Many theists claim that morality is impossible without a transcendent moral law-giver. They claim their own morals come from scripture, and that even an unbeliever's morals are based (or borrowed) from the same scripture. Faced with an atheistic insistence that morality can be derived from circumstances and consequences, theists will often ask, "But why should you care what is good or bad? What makes one action 'better' than another, if there's no ultimate objective morality?" So, absolutes again. But what makes scriptural morality — rules written in a book — any better than moral guidelines derived from careful consideration of the likely outcomes of moral decisions? The answer of course is that it isn't better, it's actually worse. Personally I'd rather be subject to a moral code derived from analyses of circumstances and consequences, than to the arbitrary moral edicts of a Christian with a crib-sheet.

It seems to me that moral philosophy, neuroscience, cosmology and indeed physics in general are moving steadily in the direction of materialism and determinism and away from outdated concepts of dualism, the soul, free will and absolutes. Yet theists cling desperately to these notions because without them their faith makes no sense at all.

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This week's Jesus and Mo is apposite:
http://www.jesusandmo.net/2013/08/21/soul/