Don't get me started...

[johnridley]

This is a rather long response to a thread on the GT list that I was responding to. I decided that I'd wandered too far off-topic to post to the list, but at the same time was pretty happy with what I'd written and didn't want to just throw the text away. I think I could keep going on this all day but I need to stop at some point...

(the previous statement in the thread was asserting the existence of complete lack of faith, stating that this was atheism)

I certainly agree with you regarding the existence of a state of complete lack of faith. My only argument on this point is that, in the sense I understand it, the word atheist is not completely defined as non-faith. I'd describe agnostic as non-faith. Atheist seems to be used mainly to refer to anti-faith, not non-faith, and the two are not the same.

Note that agnostic implies leaving the door open for gods; if proof of a transcendent being[1] was presented to an agnostic, they'd take it into consideration, and perhaps come to believe (though at that point, I guess it wouldn't be faith either; but belief can stem from either proof or faith). By contrast, [my perception is that] atheists have closed the door and are not willing to view evidence.

Note that I'm not even saying that there IS evidence. I haven't seen any. I've heard people say there's evidence, but the people saying it have a vastly different definition of "evidence" than I do. Testimony is not evidence, people are easily fooled, screwed-up brain chemistry can cause people to feel they're experiencing a transcendent experience, and lots of people hear voices in their heads.

If it's too hard to try to wrap your brain around and deal with the fact that the universe is just a random occurrence, the anthropic principle is a perfectly valid assumption[2], and this life is all we get (if you're miserable, you lose, end of story), then religion is an easy way to hand-wave your way out of all that uncomfortable reality. It's no wonder people don't mind being convinced of a greater existence than what they're experiencing.

Since the threat of divine retribution is a damned powerful tool for controlling the masses that I don't believe would go unwielded by the unscrupulous (a group of whom there is no lack), I think the development of religion is inevitable whether or not there actually is a transcendent being behind it, so the simple existence of religion proves nothing either.

At the same time, I see no point in closing the door on the presentation of evidence. That's just hard-headedness. But I don't really expect to see any evidence, either. Given all that, the "default position" seems to me to be the old joke about the militant agnostic: "I don't know, and you don't, either!!" In other words, I don't really believe that anyone has any real evidence. I'm willing to look, but I set the burden of proof for this really quite high.

As I've been saying, my understanding of "atheist" is certainly skewed; I get my opinion of atheists by looking at who's standing on a soapbox screaming "I'm an atheist" - just as many people's views of christians or moslems or whatever are defined by the stereotype of who's on late-night TV asking for money, or who's blowing up who and releasing videotapes from caves.

If I cared much about this, I guess I'd study it, but honestly, I don't. The semantics seem more interesting to me than the beliefs. I don't really care to make a study of atheism any more than any other set of beliefs or non-beliefs. All I really ask of a religion is that they do more good than harm. Even in the present day that sometimes seems to be asking a lot. I tend to gravitate towards religion as a fairly efficient delivery system for humanitarian efforts, as long as their views and actions aren't too onerous.


[1] Whatever that "proof" might be, since the very existence of such proof seems to me to deny the concept of transcendence. Therefore it may be that there can never really be "proof" of such a being.

[2] I think that denying the validity of the anthropic principle happens because people are unwilling to give up the notion that they hold a priviledged vantage point in the universe. This notion has always proved to be false, usually hides the truth, and must be avoided.

Comments

[backrubbear.livejournal.com]

The generally understood meaning of agnostic is "I don't know if there's a god or not." Since it's from "without knowledge", that's understandable.

Atheist is "without God". Most would hold this view from their current view of the "facts", for some definition of facts.

In practice in the U.S. most agnostics tend to have moral views that heavily overlap with Christian core moral views without the justification of Christian religious texts. Atheists range from "I don't believe in a God, end of conversation" to "you're absolutely crazy to believe in a God and I'm going to treat you as a psychopath for doing so". It's funny when you get atheists as rabid as most of the rabid religious people.

[tceisele.livejournal.com]

Be careful about strawmen here, though. I hear about the existence of "rabid atheists", but I'm not sure I know of anybody that I could point to that meets the description. Probably the most prominent "atheist" these days is Richard Dawkins, but if you read his books, he pretty clearly falls into the category that is being called "agnostic" here. Same with other prominent "atheists" who have recently published books (Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens) or who talk about it on their blogs (P.Z. Meyers' "Pharyngula"). I'm sure that there are rabid atheists who insist that there cannot possibly be a god, but they mostly aren't the ones who are talking at the moment.

[backrubbear.livejournal.com]

The only exposure I've had to the recent debates on the topic have been courtesy of reading Wired. I haven't read any Dawkins, but my brief exposure to him courtesy of a number of quotes is that he's less an atheist than he is an asshole.

I certainly don't blame him for lashing out. The basis of the Wired article was that people who would otherwise keep quiet about their beliefs for one reason or another are having to speak out, sometimes quite loudly, to be heard. In essence, they're tired of being in the closet.

Most of my reading on atheism comes from colonial discussions on deism/englightenment era reading that I did a number of years ago. The distinction very much an ideological one - "There is no supporting evidence, therefore there isn't a god" vs. "There is no supporting evidence and there may be a god". Much of the thought at the time turned to the idea of the watchmaker god.

Then again, there's the militant agnostic: I don't know and you don't either.

[johnridley.livejournal.com]

One of the things that bothers me the most about some religious types is that they assume that they have a monopoly on morality. They seem to think that without the threat of divine retribution, people will abandon all morality and civilization will collapse.

I think this says more about THEM that it does about me. If that's what they think, then I assume that they are, at the core, morally bankrupt and need to be threatened in order to do the right thing.

As for me, I think that simple empathy leads to core morality. Expanded (racial) self-interest leads to some more of what may be termed morality. Anything beyond that is probably dogmatic and is possibly counterproductive.

I'm not sure which christian core moral beliefs you refer to. Certainly there are a whole lot of what many christians themselves feel are core morals that I feel are actually immoral. Anything that denies a person the right to live their life as they wish if they're not bothering anyone is in that group. The problem is that lots of religious types take a very expansive view of "bothering anyone" - they seem to think that the very existence of something outside their "approval" is bothering them, whether they have to actually look at it or not.

[backrubbear.livejournal.com]

Most of my issues are with groups that have beliefs about a One True Way mixed with If You're Not With Us, You're Against Us. As I'm getting older, I'm starting to believe more and more than strongly religious people are most safely treated as being insane. I avoid "triggers" that bring out crazy behaviors. Most of the time, it means that the people I'm worried about start getting treated less as people and more as inmates of an asylum.

As for core moral beliefs, I'm mostly referring to the Do Unto Others rules.

[rmeidaking.livejournal.com]

We're getting a lot more Evangelical Atheists (for lack of a better term) because it's becoming clear that the public schools have a lot more religion bleeding through the edges than some parents want.

That is, they're getting peeved that teachers are telling their kids about their Invisible Powerful Friend, and in some cases, negatively impacting those kids who don't toe the line. As a result, the parents are having to fight back on their kids' behalf.

I would like to live in a world of, "Believe whatever you want; keep it to yourself." That's not going to happen when ten of my 150 channels are overtly religiously connected, and I suspect that the History Channel is a cover for religious education as well. It's most annoying when folks start saying, "Hey, they found the archaeological evidence for the Battle of Jericho. God *did* throw down the walls! It must have happened just like in the Bible!" I want to respond with, "Yeah, they found the site of Troy, too. It happened pretty much like Homer said, which means that the Gods of the Greeks really existed!" ("The Bible is the Inspired Work of God, while The Iliad is Historical Fiction." Huh?)

Meditation is physiologically indistinguishable from prayer. The only difference is focus: Internal or external? Personally I think that meditation is more honest; no one is pretending that any other being exists. OTOH, pretend all you want; just be honest in your pretending.

And I say this while knowing that my personal pretending has paid off. I have gotten hints and urges while meditating that solved genealogy puzzles and personal crises. Did God intervene? I don't know. I might be willing to make a case for Interested Ancestors, though!

Meanwhile, I really do want there to be less Evangelism in the world. Your belief system is working for you? Cool. Keep it to yourself, and don't teach my kids about it unless they ask. Don't ask them to ask!!

[johnridley.livejournal.com]

Right. I solve most difficult programming projects by reviewing the problem set and then letting it cook in the basement; eventually it comes back up and all my conscious mind has to do is to type in the ready-to-roll solution. I'm not really pretending anything, I don't think God is doing my programming for me. I just have a piece of my brain that sits around making connections between data when I'm not consciously thinking about it. There's nothing any more mysterious about it than any of the rest of the brain (which is plenty mysterious enough).

[johnridley.livejournal.com]

You're absolutely right about the schools becoming a flashpoint for this. Frankly, seeing religion seeping through the cracks into public schools scares the daylights out of me. More to the point, seeing selective religion doing so. If they gave fair and balanced (heh) coverage, talking as much about muslims as christians as anything else, and religion was studied simply as a major force in the world, I'd be fine with that. In fact I think it'd be great. But I am seriously worried about allowing religion to dictate or censor what is taught.

[backrubbear.livejournal.com]

I wish this conversation would have come up two years ago when my reading on topic was still fresh.

The struggle we're in is a backlash to the Enlightenment. Science and reason are as much of a "cult" to some people as a particular sect's version of canon is to others. It's only been in the last several hundred years in western civilization where people stopped caring what religion thought of a given topic that we've been able to advance certain topics. Reason started winning over religion.

And now religion is fighting back.

[island01.livejournal.com]

Hi, I'm an agnostic atheist, but I am also a big supporter of strong interpretations of the anthropic principle, so I have to correct some of your illogic here:

[2] I think that denying the validity of the anthropic principle happens because people are unwilling to give up the notion that they hold a priviledged vantage point in the universe.

The anthropic principle says that we DO hold a priviledged vantage point.

Anthropic selection effects, (weak interpretations), say that we do not, but you have to prove that more than one universal configuration is even possible, before you can use it to supercede the observed "specialness". Speculative and unproven or non-evidenced *plausibilites* are valid counter-arguments to equally non-evidenced causes, like, "god" or ID, but they cannot be used as "proof" of anything.

This notion has always proved to be false

No, your statement is what is false.

Where is this "list" that you mention?

[johnridley.livejournal.com]

Yes, you're right, I did not think that footnote through properly.

I'm not clear on exactly what my thoughts were when typing that. I'll elaborate and perhaps one of us will see what I was getting at.

My comment on us holding a priviledged vantage point stems mainly from cosmology; geocentricity was "obvious" until it fell to heliocentricity, ditto to galaxy-centric, etc. At this point cosmology and experiment indicates a flat universe and any notion of the "center" of the universe is simply illusion; we seem to be at the center because light has been coming at us from all directions for 13.7 billion years, so the "edge" looks that far away in all directions. But it's an illusion. We're not in a special place, and thinking that we are simply obscures clear thought on the subject.

Thinking that we were in a special place has always held back cosmology. Only when we let go of the idea that we were living in a priviledged location were we able to see the truth.

As applied to basic physical laws, like what the electron charge is, the ratio of the nuclear forces, etc, then certainly we do hold a priviledged and very specific vantage point. Ditto with what rock we happened to evolve on.

I'd guess that I mixed situations that the anthropic principle DOES apply to (evolution of life, the kind of world we live on, basic physical laws) with ones that they apply much less to (where the "center of the universe" is, etc). I probably just typed that as a general thought on the principle, even though it doesn't apply to the topic under discussion. Sorry for that.

I guess you're talking about the GT "list". It's a private mailing list.

[johnridley.livejournal.com]

I think perhaps my thought was that people are unwilling to believe that we could come to a priviledged vantage point through pure chance; they believe that we must have been put there. This denies the very nature of the anthropic principle; it doesn't matter how unlikely it is; there are a hell of a lot of worlds, and the numbers dictate that it is very likely to happen somewhere, and hey, here we are, so it did happen somewhere. QED.

Most of the arguments against this sort of thing seems to stem from peoples inability to handle really big numbers. People think that "1 in a million" things just don't happen without stopping to think that those things happen thousands of times a day in a population of billions, and even "1 in a million trillion" things probably happen daily in the universe at large.

People just can't (or don't want to) believe that they're the result of a really unlikely set of chance events; they seem to think that reduces the meaning of their lives or something, so they feel they must ascribe some purpose to their existence.

[island01.livejournal.com]

Thinking that we were in a special place has always held back cosmology

I disagree, rather, I think that Brandon Carter hit the nail dead on the head when he said that "there has been a strong (not always subconscious) tendency to extend this to a most questionable dogma to the effect that our situation cannot be privileged in any sense. This dogma (which in its most extreme form led to the “perfect cosmological principle” on which the steady state theory was based) is clearly untenable, as was pointed out by Dicke (Nature 192, 440, 1961).

At this point cosmology and experiment indicates a flat universe and any notion of the "center" of the universe is simply illusion

No that's false too, and that isn't what is meant by "flat". Actually, the observational evidence most apparently *does* say that we are at the center of the universe:

But when you look at CMB map, you also see that the structure that is observed, is in fact, in a weird way, correlated with the plane of the earth around the sun. Is this Copernicus coming back to haunt us? That's crazy. We're looking out at the whole universe. There's no way there should be a correlation of structure with our motion of the earth around the sun — the plane of the earth around the sun — the ecliptic. That would say we are truly the center of the universe.
-Lawrence Krauss

Now, if I were to press Larry on this, then he would likely say that we have had *some* success at "explaining away" the evidence, but if I were to ask how much progress had been made into the most apparent implication, (which surely must have generated an equal amount of interest, *yeah, right*), then he would say something like... "What investigations... why should we give equal time to the most apparent implications of the evidence?"

Uh huh... that's purely unjustified and irrational "dogma", alright.

And it runs rampant among neodarwinians too...

EEk! It's all my fault...

[madtechie2718.livejournal.com]

You know, I'm kind of sorry I started that Scientology thread on the GT list....

Re: EEk! It's all my fault...

[johnridley.livejournal.com]

I thought the discussion went pretty well considering. I've seen more useless and violent threads on what you would think were much less contentious issues.
Besides, I've been meaning to write this for a while, so once I got started it just came out. I've got more to write about other stuff but it'll pick its own time to come.

It was not a bad thread, as threads go.

[techgrrl.livejournal.com]

But we'll blame you anyway.

Seriously though, I think the bulk of it is just
sorting out what the words mean. We all seem to
use them in such different ways that we cannot
pick nits until we get a common lexicon.