Sam Harris's New Year's Resolution for the Rich

Because I think Sam has crafted a thoughtful addition to the discussion of national responsiblity and its intersection with personal wealth (in the form of an article at the too often attrocious Huffington Post), and duty I am reposting it in its entirety here. Click on the title to see the article at Huffpo.

While the United States has suffered the worst recession in living memory, I find that I have very few financial concerns. Many of my friends are in the same position: Most of us attended private schools and good universities, and we will be able to provide these same opportunities to our own children. No one in my immediate circle has a family member serving in Afghanistan or Iraq. In fact, in the aftermath of September 11th, 2001, the only sacrifice we were asked to make for our beloved country was to go shopping. Nearly a decade has passed, with our nation's influence and infrastructure crumbling by the hour, and yet those of us who have been so fortunate as to actually live the American dream--rather than merely dream it--have been spared every inconvenience. Now we are told that we will soon receive a large tax cut for all our troubles. What is the word for the feeling this provokes in me? Imagine being safely seated in lifeboat, while countless others drown, only to learn that another lifeboat has been secured to take your luggage to shore...

Most Americans believe that a person should enjoy the full fruits of his or her labors, however abundant. In this light, taxation tends to be seen as an intrinsic evil. It is worth noting, however, that throughout the 1950's--a decade for which American conservatives pretend to feel a harrowing sense of nostalgia--the marginal tax rate for the wealthy was over 90 percent. In fact, prior to the 1980's it never dipped below 70 percent. Since 1982, however, it has come down by half. In the meantime, the average net worth of the richest 1 percent of Americans has doubled (to $18.5 million), while that of the poorest 40 percent has fallen by 63 percent (to $2,200). Thirty years ago, top U.S. executives made about 50 times the salary of their average employees. In 2007, the average worker would have had to toil for 1,100 years to earn what his CEO brought home between Christmas in Aspen and Christmas on St. Barthes.

We now live in a country in which the bottom 40 percent (120 million people) owns just 0.3 percent of the wealth. Data of this kind make one feel that one is participating in a vast psychological experiment: Just how much inequality can free people endure? Have you seen Ralph Lauren's car collection? Yes, it is beautiful. It also cost hundreds of millions of dollars. "So what?" many people will say. "It's his money. He earned it. He should be able to do whatever he wants with it." In conservative circles, expressing any doubt on this point has long been synonymous with Marxism.

And yet over one million American children are now homeless. People on Medicare are being denied life-saving organ transplants that were routinely covered before the recession. Over one quarter of our nation's bridges are structurally deficient. When might be a convenient time to ask the richest Americans to help solve problems of this kind? How about now?

It is easy to understand why even the most generous person might be averse to paying taxes: Our legislative process has been hostage to short-term political interests and other perverse incentives for as long as anyone can remember. Consequently, our government wastes an extraordinary amount of money. It also seems uncontroversial to say that whatever can be best accomplished in the private sector should be. Our tax code must also be reformed--and it might even be true that the income tax should be lowered on everyone, provided we find a better source of revenue to pay our bills. But I can't imagine that anyone seriously believes that the current level of wealth inequality in the United States is good and worth maintaining, or that our government's first priority should be to spare a privileged person like myself the slightest hardship as this once great nation falls into ruin.

And the ruination of the United States really does seem possible. It has been widely reported, for instance, that students in Shanghai far surpass our own in science, reading, and math. In fact, when compared to other countries, American students are now disconcertingly average (slightly below in math), where the average includes utopias like Kyrgyzstan, Azerbaijan, Albania, Kazakhstan, and Indonesia. President Obama was right to recognize this as a "Sputnik moment." But it is worse than that. This story was immediately followed by a report about giddy Creationists in the state of Kentucky being offered $40 million in tax subsidies to produce a full-scale model of Noah's ark. More horrible still, this ludicrous use of public money is probably a wise investment, given that such a monument to scientific ignorance will be guaranteed to attract an ovine influx of Christian tourists from neighboring states. Seeing facts of this kind, juxtaposed without irony or remedy at this dire moment in history, it is hard not to feel that one is witnessing America's irreversible decline. Needless to say, most Americans have no choice but to send their children to terrible schools--where they will learn the lesser part of nothing and emerge already beggared by a national debt now on course to reach $20 trillion. And yet Republicans in every state can successfully campaign on a promise to spend less on luxuries like education, while delivering tax cuts to people who, if asked to guess their own net worth, could not come within $10 million of the correct figure if their lives depended on it.

American opposition to the "redistribution of wealth" has achieved the luster of a religious creed. And, as with all religions, one finds the faithful witlessly espousing doctrines that harm almost everyone, including their own children. For instance, while most Americans have no chance of earning or inheriting significant wealth, 68 percent want the estate tax eliminated (and 31 percent consider it to be the "worst" and "least fair" tax levied by the federal government). Most believe that limiting this tax, which affects only 0.2 percent of the population, should be the top priority of the current Congress.

The truth, however, is that everyone must favor the "redistribution of wealth" at some point. This relates directly to the issue of education: as the necessity of doing boring and dangerous work disappears--whether because we have built better machines and infrastructure, or shipped our least desirable jobs overseas--people need to be better educated so that they can apply themselves to more interesting work. Who will pay for this? There is only one group of people who can pay for anything at this point: the wealthy.

To make matters more difficult, Americans have made a religious fetish of something called "self-reliance." Most seem to think that while a person may not be responsible for the opportunities he gets in life, each is entirely responsible for what he makes of these opportunities. This is, without question, a false view of the human condition. Consider the biography of any "self-made" American, from Benjamin Franklin on down, and you will find that his success was entirely dependent on background conditions that he did not make, and of which he was a mere beneficiary. There is not a person on earth who chose his genome, or the country of his birth, or the political and economic conditions that prevailed at moments crucial to his progress. Consequently, no one is responsible for his intelligence, range of talents, or ability to do productive work. If you have struggled to make the most of what Nature gave you, you must still admit that Nature also gave you the ability and inclination to struggle. How much credit do I deserve for not having Down syndrome or any other disorder that would make my current work impossible? None whatsoever. And yet devotees of self-reliance rail against those who would receive entitlements of various sorts--health care, education, etc.--while feeling unselfconsciously entitled to their relative good fortune. Yes, we must encourage people to work to the best of their abilities and discourage free riders wherever we can--but it seems only decent at this moment to admit how much luck is required to succeed at anything in this life. Those who have been especially lucky--the smart, well-connected, and rich--should count their blessings, and then share some of these blessings with the rest of society.

The wealthiest Americans often live as though they and their children had nothing to gain from investments in education, infrastructure, clean-energy, and scientific research. For instance, the billionaire Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft, recently helped kill a proposition that would have created an income tax for the richest 1 percent in Washington (one of seven states that has no personal income tax). All of these funds would have gone to improve his state's failing schools. What kind of society does Ballmer want to live in--one that is teeming with poor, uneducated people? Who does he expect to buy his products? Where will he find his next batch of software engineers? Perhaps Ballmer is simply worried that the government will spend his money badly--after all, we currently spend more than almost every other country on education, with abysmal results. Well, then he should say so--and rather than devote hundreds of thousands of dollars to stoking anti-tax paranoia in his state, he should direct some of his vast wealth toward improving education, like his colleague Bill Gates has begun to do.

There are, in fact, some signs that a new age of heroic philanthropy might be dawning. For instance, the two wealthiest men in America, Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, recently invited their fellow billionaires to pledge the majority of their wealth to the public good. This is a wonderfully sane and long overdue initiative about which it is unforgivable to be even slightly cynical. But it is not sufficient. Most of this money will stay parked in trusts and endowments for decades, and much of it will go toward projects that are less than crucial to the future of our society. It seems to me, however, that Gates and Buffett could easily expand and target this effort: asking those who have pledged, along with the rest of the wealthiest Americans, to immediately donate a percentage of their net worth to a larger fund. This group of benefactors would include not only the super-rich, but people of far more modest means. I do not have 1/1000 the wealth of Steve Ballmer, but I certainly count myself among the people who should be asked to sacrifice for the future of this country. The combined wealth of the men and women on the Forbes 400 list is $1.37 trillion. By some estimates, there are at least another 1,500 billionaires in the United States. Something tells me that anyone with a billion dollars could safely part with 25 percent of his or her wealth--without being forced to sell any boats, planes, vacation homes, or art. As of 2009, there were 980,000 families with a net worth exceeding $5 million (not including their primary residence). Would a one-time donation of 5 percent really be too much to ask to rescue our society from the maw of history?

Some readers will point out that I am free to donate to the treasury even now. But such solitary sacrifice would be utterly ineffectual, and I am no more eager than anyone else is to fill the pork barrels of corrupt politicians. However, if Gates and Buffett created a mechanism that bypassed the current dysfunction of government, earmarking the money for unambiguously worthy projects, I suspect that there are millions of people like myself who would not hesitate to invest in the future of America.

Imagine that Gates and Buffett raised a trillion dollars this way: what should we spend it on? The first thing to acknowledge is that almost any use of this money would be better than just letting it sit. Mindlessly repairing every bridge, tunnel, runway, harbor, reservoir, and recreation area in the United States would be an improvement over what are currently doing. However, here are the two areas of investment that strike me as most promising:

Education: It is difficult to think of anything more important than providing the best education possible for our children. They will develop the next technologies, medical cures, and global industries, while mitigating their unintended effects, or they will fail to do these things and consign us all to oblivion. The future of this country will be entirely shaped by boys and girls who are just now learning to think. What are we teaching them? Are we equipping them to create a world worth living in? It doesn't seem so. Our public school system is an international disgrace. Even the most advantaged children in the United States do not learn as much as children in other countries do. Yes, the inefficiencies in our current system could be remedied, and must be, and these savings can then be put to good use--but there is no question that a true breakthrough in education will require an immense investment of further resources. Here's an expensive place to start: make college free for anyone who can't afford it.

Clean Energy: As Thomas Friedman and many others have pointed out, our dependence on nonrenewable sources of energy is not only bad for our economy and the environment, it is obliges us to subsidize both sides of the clash of civilizations. Much of the money we spend on oil is used to export the lunatic ideology of conservative Islam--building mosques and madrassas by the tens of thousands, recruiting jihadists, and funding terrorist atrocities. We should have devoted ourselves to a clean-energy Manhattan Project thirty years ago. Success on this front would still yield enormous wealth in this country, while simultaneously bankrupting the Middle Eastern states that only pretend to be our allies. Our failure to rise to this challenge already counts as one of the greatest instances of masochistic stupidity in human history. Why prolong it?

I am aware that a proposal of this kind is bound to seem quixotic. But what's to stop the wealthiest Americans from sponsoring a 21st Century Renaissance? What politician would object to our immediately spending a trillion dollars on improvements in education and energy security? Perhaps there are even better targets for this money. Let Gates and Buffett convene a team of brilliant people to lay out the priorities. But again, we should remember that they could scarcely fail to improve our situation. Simply repaving our roads, the dilapidation of which causes $54 billion in damage to our cars every year, would be better than doing nothing.

Does it make you feel more or less stress knowing how many otherwise sane people are looking forward to the end of the World.

People are insane, or at the very least mildly to majorly delusional. There is nothing really to say that isn't said more eloquently by the catastrophic level delusion on display in the following trailer. I do wish all the liberal theologians who complain about atheists mischaracterizing all the nuance, and metaphor found in these holy books would address the major source of our concern more directly.

Janet Parshall's America...I'm sure glad I don't live there (click here to see why).

Dear Janet Parshell,

I sometimes force myself to listen to your show and I must confess, it never ceases to disappoint me. Whether you are falsely claiming that you hope that President Obama does well(you don't hope this), or you are engaging in histrionics over climate change, evolutionary biology or complaining about healthcare your disinterest in honest engagement seems inconsistent with the values you claim to cherish. Honesty, and integrity seem decidedly lacking at just about every level of your being. Your ill facility with logic is also counter-productive. Those who disagree with you can never possibly be doing so simply because they see issues differently. They are always part of a larger conspiracy. I suppose if I thought that anyone who disagreed with me was a dupe for Satan (either willingly or not), it would be hard to take their opposing viewpoints very seriously too. Luckily I do not share in your delusional paranoid fantasy and can approach ideas and data as they are, and not through a warped ideological filter. I am forced to wonder if the growing pile of your inconsistencies ever alarms you, or if you even notice? Do you ever think, “I am sure to be caught today?,” or “I hope this bible quote will distract the audience from the fact I have no data, logic or even a good argument for what I am about to say?” I wonder this, because if I were you it would certainly be a matter of pressing worry. It’s a matter of credibility Janet.
You have none.

Let me make an example out of just one issue close to your heart of late, climate change. Your new fodder for denial is the recently hacked emails. But let’s leave that aside for a moment. As early as two weeks ago your gripe was about consensus among scientists. Namely you thought that the consensus wasn’t high enough to make it a national policy matter. That is since it was just a majority of climatologists who think that climate change is actually occurring and not an overwhelming majority of scientists (let’s say 90% or greater) our government should be, at the very least, reticent to act in a major way on the phenomenon. If scientific consensus, and independent corroboration were really important to you, there would be no problem (though I would be curious what said majority would have to look like before you supported any regulatory action on climate change, or even said you had to accept the current expert opinion). However you are clearly not concerned with scientific consensus and the manner in which you wield the notion is a smokescreen to cover over what is an ideological opposition which is religious, political and economic at its roots. Despite your alleged Christian commitment to honesty, you seem decidedly uncomfortable with the concept. But lying for Jesus is an old story.

Clearly though you don’t care a whit about scientific consensus. If you did you would not oppose the teaching of evolutionary biology in schools. Next to quantum mechanics, and relativity you would be hard pressed to find a more accepted, or more successful theory in all the sciences. If you actually valued scientific consensus you would not clamor for the teaching of creation “science” or its euphemistic code intelligent design alongside the teaching of evolutionary biology. You would not advocate, "teaching the controversy." No you don’t care about evidence Janet, you care about furthering your religious and political ends. There really is no controversy over evolution among working biologists (a huge overwelming majority consensus) Janet, but you don’t care. You prefer the views of William Dembski, and a minority (infinitismal)of other voices to the rest of the scientific enterprise. Clearly consensus isn’t as big on your list of concerns as you make it out to be.

If scientific consensus were as important a criterion in your mind as you make it out to be, you would not oppose ABC sex education, that is to say comprehensive education. A is for abstinence, B is for be monogamous and C is for condoms. You would not in a million years support and certainly you wouldn’t prefer Abstinence-only education because research has consistently shown abstinence only education doesn’t work. In fact it doesn’t work so well that kids who go through abstinence only programs are more not less likely to engage in sexually risky behaviors without protection. If scientific research was your guide, and the consensus of scientists a benchmark, you would certainly never support only funding AIDs/HIV programs on the continent of Africa that pledged to use only the worthless Abstinence-only approach to sex education. That would only increase the numbers of AIDS/HIV cases. But I think we see again you really don’t put much stock in scientific consensus.

Whether you are engaging in willful mendacity or you are simply so blinkered by the limits of your religious faith, and your political ideology that you are incapable of seeing a bigger more complex picture is not entirely clear. Though your histrionics about the popularity of vampires in fiction (you call them, with breathless credulity, “’undead’ instruments of the Devil) make me suspect that your religious derangement is very real. But even real religious derangement doesn’t preclude shameless dishonesty so I suppose that leaves us with an untidy open question. Whatever the case Janet, it is absolutely clear that you do a huge disservice to your listener’s comprehension of complex issues. You and your guests are simply echo chambers for one another. But beyond the disservice you do for your listeners, you do a disservice to public discourse on complex issues that cannot hope but to become political footballs. It is sad that you do not use your position in the media to elevate the debate.

Good Day,
Max Driffill II

A wonderful debate: Stephen Fry/Christopher Hitchens vs Archbishop John Onaiyekan/Ann Widdecombe MP

An amazing debate. And mostly just because Stephen Fry is so wonderfully eloquent and humane, and because Chistopher Hitchens, is so eloquent, serious and angry. It is the oratory equivalent of a one-two punch.










There is little by way of editorial comment that I could add to this.

Dan Dennett, provocative as usual.

Pascal's Wager: An argument that should never have been convincing.

As an atheist (a six on the Dawkins scale) I get to hear about Pascal's wager more often than anyone really needs to hear about it. If you find yourself in the unbelieving crowd, no doubt you hear it too often as well. This post isn't for you (well it is for you too, but I am really interested in exposing the flaws of Pascal here). This post is for those, often well meaning folks, who continue to tirelessly wheel out Pascal's rotting corpse in an effort to affect a religious conversion. I don't honestly think they've given Pascal's Wager the review it deserves. This may not be so. However, the abruptness with which the wager falls apart makes me think those who fancy it haven't thought too deeply about it. Either that or they think I'm none to bright. No doubt a few have thought the latter.

Before pressing on, let me spell out Pascal's Wager. Blaise Pascal, was a brilliant mathematician, philosopher and theologian of the 17th century. He was an innovator in mathematics and physics. He was also, perhaps not surprisingly, sick much of his life. And I don't mean mildly sick either. Much of Pascal's life seemed to involve some kind of pain. Whether this unduly influeced his theology, is not, for our purposes, germane to the argument contained in his infamous wager. It was a decidedly Christian wager, by the way, but probably has applicablity for all the Abrahamic traditions. Pascal thought all people should wager thusly: While no evidence for God exists, and proving his existance through reason was impossible (a part modern users of this argument like to leave out) one should wager as if God did exist because the costs for being wrong so outweighed the costs of being correct. That is to say, winning the wager (by believing in God) gets you heaven and whatever other poorly described rewards heave has to offer while you also avoid the eternal torments of hell (failing to believe in God if said being exists). There are no real rewards for winning the bet the other way. If the unbeliever is correct both believer and non-believer get the same reward. Nothing.

Wikipedia has a nice framing, "even though the existence of God cannot be determined through reason, a person should wager as though God exists, because so living has everything to gain, and nothing to lose." So if you believe, and are correct you win the lottery, and if you are wrong you have, so Pascal claims, lost nothing.

For some reason this seems like a very brilliant gambit for many believers, but they really ought to note its many pitfalls. Lets look at what I think are three of the most obvious.

1. Pascal's Wager assumes we can choose which beliefs we adopt
I can only speak for myself here, but it seems like there are very few of our beliefs we can control. If we believe something, it is likely because we think the reasons for holding that a position is consistent with reality are strong. Not because it makes us feel good. No doubt some beliefs are better at making people feel happy than others, but that says nothing about how true they may be. For instance children believe in Santa Clause for very rational reasons. Authorities, whom they trust tell them Santa is real. For a child of a suitably young age, this kind of trust makes complete sense and constitutes reasonable evidence. But no matter where you find yourself in the belief or unbelief question you look for evidence of the veracity of position. It isn't apparent that one can choose to believe anything. They have to be compelled by evidence to adopt a position. That doesn't mean of course they will arrive at the correct position, just that some body of evidence (experience, research, etc) will have been enough to convince them that an idea (God, Aliens, Bigfoot) is consistent with reality. Whether people notice it or not they speak in terms of evidence no matter how much they use the word faith. At most all an unbeliever could do was act as if they believed if evidence didn't compel belief. Lets leave that aside for the moment.

2. Pascals Wager assumes that adopting religious belief carries no costs.
In every framing of this argument that I've heard, and indeed the way it was phrased by Pascal himself, it is assumed that faith is a cheap investment for the believer, as cheap as unbelief (hence the extreme difference in payoffs at the end of earthly life). One wonders how that part of the argument can be made with a straight face. Religious belief has obvious costs (these can vary of course, but they exist in every sect of the Abrahamic traditions). Religious faith makes its cost felt in obvious places like one's bank account (tithing, other religious donations), but also in terms of family relationships, and mental health, and simple time. The costs of religion can be felt in all these areas. Why Pascal didn't count these things as costs I don't know. Perhaps he was simply trying to bolster his case that the investment of both unbeliever and believer was equal in an effort to underscore the difference in payoffs. But think about all the time believers spend doing things for their faiths, the money spent, the relationships avoided, or broken off, and it becomes apparent that belief has costs, and sometimes they are quite serious. From here we see that these costs amount to serious, indeed utterly substantial investment. This seems like a profoundly obvious thing to have missed. Set against eternity in heaven I suppose a life time of this isn't much of an investment, but if it is the only life you get it, the wastefulness of it becomes apparent. Think about someone you know (it might be you reading this) who spends time, and considerable amounts of money on their faith, maybe they have also shunned a child for some religious infraction, or have all their life avoided same sex encounters that they deeply desire. What if that believer is wrong? Such a scenario certainly ruins Pascal's hypothesis that cost was a non-issue for the believer, but even mild costs would work to ruin the notion.

3.Pascal's Wager assumes that God will accept a lie.
I cannot make myself believe something that I think is patently false. All I can do is act like I believe something that I already believe is patently false. Sure I can fake it. And this is essentially what Pascal asks people to do with his wager. Dishonestly act as if you believe to gain a set of rewards for little cost in a future life. Firstly does this sound like the kind of action that the god of Abraham would tolerate? Secondly, is such subterfuge commensurate with moral action? It seems to me the answer to both questions is no. Pascal, and those who continue to use this argument act as if the answer is yes.

Paul Kurtz: Stick. In. The. Mud.

Of all the personalities at CFI, I've always been the least impressed with Paul Kurtz. At the CFI World Conference in Bethesda, he did little to change my opinion of him. His latest contribution to rationalism (which can be found, undissected, by clicking on the title of this blog) has actually earned him negative points.

The celebrating of "Blasphemy Day" by the Center for Inquiry by sponsoring a contest encouraging new forms of blasphemy, I believe is most unwise. It betrays the civic virtues of democracy. I support the premise that religion should be open to the critical examination of its claims, like all other institutions in society. I do have serious reservations about the forms that these criticisms take. For example, cartoons have been recently circulated ridiculing key figures in Christianity, such as a cartoon depicting a feminine Jesus painting his "nails" with red nail polish, or the drawing of the Pope with a long nose like Pinocchio.

This could be translated, faithfully as, You know I'm all for free speech when I am arguing against religious claims, or challenging religious authority, but when the speech violates my rather prudish sensiblities I'm going to have, ahem, serious reservations.

Clearly a humourless guy, Kurtz has no need of things like satire and ridicule to punch through the thin facade of power and authority the holds many hostage in religious communities, or even those living outside religious observance. Sometimes the comics, satire and ridicule that so offends Kurtz's refined sensiblities, are exactly the prescription for cutting through the anesthetic of religious influence. Holy crap that cartoon, just said what I have been thinking for years! Out loud! Think of the importance of such experiences in some people's lives. Do you not see the power of a single satirical image? Are you so dense that you fail to see the usefulness of such images?

When we defended the right of a Danish newspaper to publish cartoons deploring the violence of Muslim suicide bombers, we were supporting freedom of the press. The right to publish dissenting critiques of religion should be accepted as basic to freedom of expression.

It was also assumed by many, the contributors to CFI, and its readers, that you were also defending the freedom of expression of the artists themselves. The cartoons, while certainly conveying the messages, were doing nothing terribly different than the pope-pinnochio-nose image you deplore. You cannot have one freedom without the other. Either you really are for freedom of the press and freedom of expression or you are simply for that which you agree with, and is framed in the way least likely to cause offense taking by some person, somewhere.

But for CFI itself to sponsor the lampooning of Christianity by encouraging anti-Catholic, anti-Protestant, or any other anti-religious cartoons goes beyond the bounds of civilized discourse in pluralistic society. It is not dissimilar to the anti-semitic cartoons of the Nazi era.

Here you make your most ridiculous blunder. It is completely dissimilar my orthodox PC friend. You will note that in both of the cartoons you mention (recent submissions I presume) it is not Catholics, or Christians generally who are being lampooned, or charcteritured, but leaders or icons of a particular faith tradition. These are attacks on ideologies and leaders in said traditions. Anti-semitism is racism, not criticism. Anti-semitism is less about Jewish ideology and much more about hating a racial identity.

Yet there are some fundamentalist atheists who have resorted to such vulgar antics to gain press attention. In doing so they have dishonored the basic ethical principles of what the Center for Inquiry has resolutely stood for until now: the toleration of opposing viewpoints.

Now you are just being silly Paul. Fundamentalist atheists? Fuck you. How is that for tolerating an opposing viewpoint? Vulgarity? Grow the fuck up. No one has dishonored, and certainly never violated (until now no less) your basic tolerance principle. The CFI, indeed all skeptical endeavors, in both small and large ways are always engaged in acts of intolerance of ideas. It is why we criticise a thing.

Now skeptics and freethinkers tend to be happy letting people believe what they want, which is certainly tolerance in the most important sense of the concept. However, it doesn't follow though that we should suddenly not be heavy handed with ideas, or utilize scorn, ridicule, satire or some other form of harsh critique. And we certainly shouldn't not do it because you are going whine about it when we do. You may want to go scowl somewhere else Paul. Sometimes bold statements are vastly more useful than the long, academic critique.

It is one thing to examine the claims of religion in a responsible way by calling attention to Biblical, Koranic or scientific criticisms, it is quite another to violate the key humanistic principle of tolerance.

Again critique is a form of intolerance. Mild to be sure, but come on. Just say what you mean here Paul. You don't want people offending the liberal believers who contribute to and support CFI. That is what all this whinging is really about isn't it?

One may disagree with contending religious beliefs, but to denigrate them by rude caricatures borders on hate speech. What would humanists and skeptics say if religious believers insulted them in the same way? We would protest the lack of respect for alternative views in a democratic society. I apologize to my fellow citizens who have suffered these barbs of indignity.

Paul anyone nattering about hate speech simply does not really support free speech and expression, nor a free press, nor liberty in general. When I see some insulting image of atheists or free thinkers (and there are certainly no shortage of these), of some bit of parody or satire I simply try to address the arguments contained therein. I do not complain overmuch about the intolerance of the other side, I begin constucting arguments against their position to lay it bare. "These barbs of indignity" that so vex you, don't matter. What matters is that I can argue against them, and am permitted the freedoms necessary to do so.

ZOMGitsChriss is my new hero: She kicks Ray Comfort and Kirk Cameron in the nuts.

Solid as they say.

BLOG BIT: Defending Simon Singh or...:Screw the BCA

Click on the title of this blog bit for link to Olivia Judson's nice defense of Simon Singh (you should also get to visiting his site and signing his petition). Singh co-authored a book that seriously reviewed the claims of the Chiropractic practicianers, as well as other alt medicine therapies, and wrote a piece in the Guardian about chiropractic. This led to a stupid, stupid libel suit by the British Chiropractic Association (BCA). The BCA could not rebut Singh's scientific arguments (the Guardian did invite the BCA to defend, and produce science that supported their claims), so they resorted to this, potentially financially crippling, law suit. Thanks crappy English Libel laws that stifle scientific debate, and investigative journalism!

Karen Armstrong, and Theology?

I occassionally read an essay by Karen Armstrong, just to see if she has stopped writing badly, or at least stopped to think a bit before she starts pushing her boulder up hill. I am consistently dissappointed in her efforts to defend something she calls faith, but that nearly all the world's faithful would fail to recognize. Her latest contribution to the dialogue is equally innane, and wooly headed. But I thought I might take a moment to dissect it.

"Richard Dawkins has been right all along, of course—at least in one important respect. Evolution has indeed dealt a blow to the idea of a benign creator, literally conceived. It tells us that there is no Intelligence controlling the cosmos, and that life itself is the result of a blind process of natural selection, in which innumerable species failed to survive. The fossil record reveals a natural history of pain, death and racial extinction, so if there was a divine plan, it was cruel, callously prodigal and wasteful. Human beings were not the pinnacle of a purposeful creation; like everything else, they evolved by trial and error and God had no direct hand in their making. No wonder so many fundamentalist Christians find their faith shaken to the core."

This to me seems a stunning consession on her part. If this is so, and I'm certainly in agreement with her that it is, hasn't she just removed not only the dominant interpretation of God, one who omniscient and omnibenevolent, but also the dominant practice of religious faith, especially among the Abrahamic traditions? Most religious believers do hold that purpose is built into the design of the Cosmos. Even the most progressive among the Abrahamic traditions who can accept the fact of evolution, one can hardly miss the way many smuggle purpose back into the discussion, with some form of directed evolution. The following paraphrase could essentially come from Francis Collins, Kenneth Miller, or the Pope: "Oh yes, the evidence clearly shows evolution to be a completely natural process. I feel that god certainly intervened with humans, ensouled us and and enmoralled us."
Yes I know enmoralled isn't a word. The first paragraph of this essay, it seems to me, completely removes the need to take God, or religion seriously at all, and what is funny is that Karen Armstrong perforates her arguments with such statements all the time.

"But Darwin may have done religion—and God—a favor by revealing a flaw in modern Western faith. Despite our scientific and technological brilliance, our understanding of God is often remarkably undeveloped—even primitive."

I actually laughed out loud at this line. I suppose Ms. Armstrong is incapable of noticing that it is hard to understand the capacities of an unproved entity, one that provides no positive evidence for its existance. God, bigfoot and the Lochness monster share this attribute. But perhaps parody is a better way to illustrate the problem: Despite our scientific understanding and technological brilliance our understanding of Zeus is remarkably undeveloped-even primitive.

In the past, many of the most influential Jewish, Christian and Muslim thinkers understood that what we call "God" is merely a symbol that points beyond itself to an indescribable transcendence, whose existence cannot be proved but is only intuited by means of spiritual exercises and a compassionate lifestyle that enable us to cultivate new capacities of mind and heart."

Apart from exageratting the number of non-literalists in the Abrahamic traditions, I think she is on liberal theologian autopilot here. She isn't really interested in arguing her case and simply content to intellectually felate the readers who already agree with her. She assumes that the interpretation she favors is the one all should understand, without justifying why we should be in agreement with her. Why should more literal readings, shades of which have by far been dominant to "God is mearly a symbol that points beyond itself to an indescribable trancendence" crowd, be rejected? Here Armstrong has no credible answers.

"But by the end of the 17th century, instead of looking through the symbol to "the God beyond God," Christians were transforming it into hard fact. Sir Isaac Newton had claimed that his cosmic system proved beyond doubt the existence of an intelligent, omniscient and omnipotent creator, who was obviously "very well skilled in Mechanicks and Geometry." Enthralled by the prospect of such cast-iron certainty, churchmen started to develop a scientifically-based theology that eventually made Newton's Mechanick and, later, William Paley's Intelligent Designer essential to Western Christianity."

Can Armstrong really be saying that prior to the 17th century Christians were looking at the symbol, to the "God beyond god?" It is safe to say that the inquisitors would disagree. Christians had and always have, by and large, been in the business of transforming God into hard fact. Does that mean that there have not been enlightened people and sects who realize that literalism doesn't work because the facts don't allow it? Of course it doesn't. But they lose out to the literalists for a simple reason I think. The stories don't really allow for comfortable non-literal interpretation, especially taken as a whole (as in the bible for instance). We can take some of the stories individually and say, if we work at it, well this could be interpreted as an allegory, or metaphor. But its when you view the stories in context of the larger narrative that such non-literal interpretations break down. In any event, this statement is stunning in its odd disconnect from the religious history that preceded the 17th century.

"But the Great Mechanick was little more than an idol, the kind of human projection that theology, at its best, was supposed to avoid. God had been essential to Newtonian physics but it was not long before other scientists were able to dispense with the God-hypothesis and, finally, Darwin showed that there could be no proof for God's existence. This would not have been a disaster had not Christians become so dependent upon their scientific religion that they had lost the older habits of thought and were left without other resource."

Here Karen get its all, unmistakeably wrong. Did Darwin show there could be no proof for God's existence? No, not at all. There are numerous ways God could proven it is just that there is a dearth, to say the least, of such evidence on offer. What Darwin did was render the design inference null. An intervening God has become completely unnecessary as an explaination for life because of evolutionary theory. The evidence does not support the God inference, that is something religious believers impose on the facts. But rendering proof of God impossible? God could show up on the White House lawn, convene a pressconference and say, "For you guys, I'm going to turn Venus, and Mars into new Earth like planets complete with shopping malls, and roller coasters, and national parks, and adjust for various gravitational influences so as not to upset the orbit of or life on this Earth." And while it wouldn't establish that it was definately the Abrahamic God, it would be consistent with the kinds of powers often attributed to him. Such a thing would certainly be hard to explain scientifically. In any event, all Darwin, and later researchers have done is establish that God is certainly an unnecessary part of the explanation.

"Symbolism was essential to premodern religion, because it was only possible to speak about the ultimate reality—God, Tao, Brahman or Nirvana—analogically, since it lay beyond the reach of words. Jews and Christians both developed audaciously innovative and figurative methods of reading the Bible, and every statement of the Quran is called an ayah ("parable"). St Augustine (354-430), a major authority for both Catholics and Protestants, insisted that if a biblical text contradicted reputable science, it must be interpreted allegorically. This remained standard practice in the West until the 17th century, when in an effort to emulate the exact scientific method, Christians began to read scripture with a literalness that is without parallel in religious history."

Again with this pre-17th century nonsense. Simply because a minority of religious thinkers in any time period adopt audacious, innovative and figurative contortions to preserve their religious conclusions doesn't mean such contortions are terribly intutitive to most religious minds, or even implied by the texts, often odious, that inspire them. Nor does it mean that such contortions were implied by the authors of said texts or that such an approach to religious scholarship is the correct approach. Does the historic persecution of Jews, homosexuals, heretics or the preoccupation with witches and the occult of the times pre-17th century smack of literal, or figurative mindedness dominating the intellecual landscape of that era?

"Most cultures believed that there were two recognized ways of arriving at truth. The Greeks called them mythos and logos. Both were essential and neither was superior to the other; they were not in conflict but complementary, each with its own sphere of competence. Logos ("reason") was the pragmatic mode of thought that enabled us to function effectively in the world and had, therefore, to correspond accurately to external reality. But it could not assuage human grief or find ultimate meaning in life's struggle. For that people turned to mythos, stories that made no pretensions to historical accuracy but should rather be seen as an early form of psychology; if translated into ritual or ethical action, a good myth showed you how to cope with mortality, discover an inner source of strength, and endure pain and sorrow with serenity."

Bald and somewhat bold assertion here, and it results from her tendency toward confirmaiton bias. She sees a scholar or two that agree with her sybolism only approach and then inflating the frequency of such scholars in history.

In the ancient world, a cosmology was not regarded as factual but was primarily therapeutic; it was recited when people needed an infusion of that mysterious power that had—somehow—brought something out of primal nothingness: at a sickbed, a coronation or during a political crisis. Some cosmologies taught people how to unlock their own creativity, others made them aware of the struggle required to maintain social and political order. The Genesis creation hymn, written during the Israelites' exile in Babylonia in the 6th century BC, was a gentle polemic against Babylonian religion. Its vision of an ordered universe where everything had its place was probably consoling to a displaced people, though—as we can see in the Bible—some of the exiles preferred a more aggressive cosmology."

So it was all just therapuetic? No one believed a word of it? This is a fascinating story Karen, but it fails to explain the rather real history of sectarian conflict in any substative way. She should have prefaced this paragraph with the phrase, "I think, maybe, based on my gut instinct." It would have been a more honest bit of scholarship on her part.

"There can never be a definitive version of a myth, because it refers to the more imponderable aspects of life. To remain effective, it must respond to contemporary circumstance. In the 16th century, when Jews were being expelled from one region of Europe after another, the mystic Isaac Luria constructed an entirely new creation myth that bore no resemblance to the Genesis story. But instead of being reviled for contradicting the Bible, it inspired a mass-movement among Jews, because it was such a telling description of the arbitrary world they now lived in; backed up with special rituals, it also helped them face up to their pain and discover a source of strength."

Perhaps, but we only really have her word to go on here that this was religion as therapy. It may be the case, or it could be the case that the mass movement was another example of rather literal-minded religion. Simply because Isaac Luria created another creation story isn't proof that he, or the followers of the movement didn't treat it as literal truth. Numerous religious figures from then to now create rather literal minded movements. Scientology is a prime example of this.

"Religion was not supposed to provide explanations that lay within the competence of reason but to help us live creatively with realities for which there are no easy solutions and find an interior haven of peace; today, however, many have opted for unsustainable certainty instead. But can we respond religiously to evolutionary theory? Can we use it to recover a more authentic notion of God?"

Says Karen Armstrong. I think her interpretation is actually the one that is unsustainable, and why it is always a minority view among religious people. In any event, both approaches opt for certainty in advance of evidence. In either approach does anyone see trepidation, an "I could be wrong about this" in the expressed sentiments. Armstrong is certainly not in doubt about God. In this she and the fundamentalist are the same. She just dresses her God in smoke and provides mirrors.

"Darwin made it clear once again that—as Maimonides, Avicenna, Aquinas and Eckhart had already pointed out—we cannot regard God simply as a divine personality, who single-handedly created the world. This could direct our attention away from the idols of certainty and back to the "God beyond God." The best theology is a spiritual exercise, akin to poetry. Religion is not an exact science but a kind of art form that, like music or painting, introduces us to a mode of knowledge that is different from the purely rational and which cannot easily be put into words. At its best, it holds us in an attitude of wonder, which is, perhaps, not unlike the awe that Mr. Dawkins experiences—and has helped me to appreciate —when he contemplates the marvels of natural selection."

What Darwin made clear was that nature is sufficient to explain the origin of biodiversity, adaptation and behavior. Extra, supernatural variables were unnecessary after Darwin. I will have to disagree with her assessment that her religious ideas, or any ideas infuse the bearers of said ideas with anything like wonder, or awe at the mysterious. Whether Karen can find the words for it or not, her certainity about "God beyond God" is in no way diminished by her inability to articulate the concept clearly.

"But what of the pain and waste that Darwin unveiled? All the major traditions insist that the faithful meditate on the ubiquitous suffering that is an inescapable part of life; because, if we do not acknowledge this uncomfortable fact, the compassion that lies at the heart of faith is impossible. The almost unbearable spectacle of the myriad species passing painfully into oblivion is not unlike some classic Buddhist meditations on the First Noble Truth ("Existence is suffering"), the indispensable prerequisite for the transcendent enlightenment that some call Nirvana—and others call God."

Do all the major traditions really insist on meditating on pain and misery? Do they do this in the warm fuzzy way Armstrong implies? What conclusions are reached from these meditations? The compassion that lies at the heart of faith? She says these things as if they have a single particular meaning. What uninsightful, and painfully trite, nonsense.

Are the Boy Scouts a good thing? And should you support them with your tax dollars.

(Clicking on the title of this entry will take you directly to the BSA's official website. Who said I wasn't fair and balanced?)

While watching Penn And Teller on the wonderful internet device that is Netflix, I saw some thing about that discriminatory organization known as the Boy Scouts. For a while now I've been on board with them being able to discriminate against gays and atheists because they had snowed me into believing their bullshit about being a private organization. If you are a private organization, however reprehensible I may find your message, I will support your right to do what you will so long as you aren't hurting anyone. What I didn't realize is that your tax dollars and mine, fund alot of Boy Scout's discriminatory nonsense. Go here to see how they accomplish that little trick.

Considering that the Boy Scouts likes to ban atheists, gays, bisexuals, transgendered, and of course chics, is it right for our tax dollars to support such a blatantly discriminatory set of policies? Would it be right to use tax dollars to support eh Ku Klux Klan? I know of at least one alternative to the scouts that you might consider. That is to Camp Quest, which functions as as a residential summer camp. It is a bit pricey though. There are probably others to consider as well. I wonder if existing scout troops led by by more inclusive scout leaders might just ignore the scout leadership hand book on these discriminatory points and help change the orginization from the inside? I have my doubts about this approach because BSA management has been pretty consistent when it comes to kicking such enlightened folks out on their sensible asses. Poor schleps.

Unless you are a part of such a troop may I suggest that you ignore the Boy Scouts of America at really any opportunity. Feel free to let them know you will ignore them until such time as they are willing to change their policies. In the mean time, do feel free to contact your local, state and federal representatives (click here for your state congressmen, and here for your senators by state) and let them know what an un-American organization the BSA really is, and that as such, it should recieve, indeed is prohibited from recieving, and tax dollars.

So....think twice before buying candy bars or other sundries from these guys. I know they say its for a nice camping trip, or canoe rentals, but don't donate till they drop their discriminatory practices. Besides Girl Scout cookies are infinitely better anyway.

Chaser's War on Everything.

Enjoy.

Francis Collins and the The Biologos Foundation: Trying to justify religious tradition with science. Part 1.

In the past few days I've posted several links to critiques of Francis Collins. Here I offer my thoughts on Collins. In later parts, I will review Collins The Language of God and his wooly-headed, woo laden Biologos Foundation.

Here are some statements, highlighted in other articles I've linked you to in the past, given by Francis Collins, current nominee to head the National Institutes of Health.
Do they seem like the statements of a person who is mixing his religion with science? Are these the forumulations of a person whose religion interferes with more evidence based scientific reasoning? It seems that way to me. And that I think is a reason to worry. (These quotes are from talk he gave for the Veritas Forum.)
(Note the extreme sloppyness of his thinking. In comic book writing we call this ret-conning. That is old material is brought into current continuity by some poorly thought out contrivance. In this way people can feel as if the time invested in old stories was worth while, while justifying-maybe- the new direction/developments in the story telling. Only very rarely do fans find this sort of thing enjoyable. It is deemed credible by fans even less often than that.)

Here is Collins on the origin of the Universe,
“Almighty God, who is not limited in space or time, created a universe 13.7 billion years ago with its parameters precisely tuned to allow the development of complexity over long periods of time.”

Collins is clearly out of his depth relying more on the conclusions of fellow Templeton prize winners than the physics community at large. He is in fact just making it up to suit the conclusions his faith demands. He is too knowledgable and intelligent to adopt the simple creationist model (the one that demands instant creation and a six thousand year old earth) so he has come up with a version for the educated masses that still hanker after some religious "truth." If you like the idea of a sky daddy, but cannot really get on board with the obvious nonsense that a literal reading of desert based tribal mythology is, the warm, soft language of a Collins may be just what the doctor ordered.

While the scientific evidence certainly suggests that the universe is indeed 13.7 billion years old, it is incredibly hard to use science to justify anything else said by Collins in this quote. On the evidence there is no need to assume (and the assumption is completely unjustified by the evidence) an Almight God. That is getting way ahead of the facts. And saying that the universe is fine tuned for life is a somewhat risible argument. Whatever you want to call it it isn't rigorous reasoning. People who say the universe is fine tuned for life are not really thinking it through. Fine tuned compared to what?

Taking the long view, the universe is anything but fine tuned for life. Life so far as we know is actually quite rare, and my not often get the time necessary to flourish beyond the very simple. Astroids, comets, black holes, novae all pose very real threats to the stablity of solar systems and the individual planets of which they are comprised.

Looking more locally at the history of two other planets in our own solar system we see again that the universe is not terribly conducive to life. Mars once had many of the atmospheric constituents we currently think important for the origin of life. Certainly it had flowing water. What happened? Perhaps life did arise there (an may in microscopic form continue to go about its business) but its small size insured that those same atmospheric constituents bled off over course of eons. With the thinner atmosphere no substantial greenhouse effect to raise temperatures. The planet cooled and complex multicellular life never had a chance. Looking to the inner solar system we find Venus, in size very similar to Earth. It had and has no problem holding atmospheric gases, but a runaway greenhouse effect has created surface temperatures hot enought to melt lead. There is little chance we will find life there, though perhaps Venutian thermophiles await us on our sister planet? I won't hold my breath though.

The rest of the planets also offer incredible hurdles to the evolution and origin of life (Earth it must be said has been no different in this regard). Ours only seems to exist in a goldilocks zone because our of our vantage point in history. But numerous times life on our planet has nearly been wiped out, by extra-terrestrial impact (comets or meteors) or by volcanic eruptions that have cause large scale climatic change. The persistance of an evolutionaryly successful species (and by this I simply mean a long existing species) is about a million years. Some last incredibly longer, some not nearly so long. It remains to be seen where our own species will fall out on the curve. The persistance of life seems more to do with luck than anything else. Certainly we could not with a straight face say that the history of life indicates any thing like a supernatural caretaker or a divine plan lurking in the chaos of history natural or otherwise.

More from Collins:
Slide 2: “God’s plan included the mechanism of evolution to create the marvelous diversity of living things on our planet. Most especially, that creative plan included human beings.”

How can anyone make this statement in so authoritative a manner? Here the unproven, unsupported, even unhinted God is stated as bold fact, followed by the bald assertion of the existance of God's plan. How can Collins know any of this? How can he claim that God used evolutionary selective pressures to do any specific creating? How does it make any sense to suggest that humans were a part of this creative plan?

First one has to establish that there actually is a god of any kind before one can make any statement about said being's intentions, plans and mechanisms by which the aforementioned are carried out. Once establishing a deity you would have to go through a lot of work to see precisely which deity it was. A difficult research programme to say the least.

Looking at the history of life on Earth, one has got note that the presense of humans was never ever guaranteed. Stephen J. Gould had gotten at least that much right. The history of life is replete with contingency. Wipe most of life off the face of the planet and it is unlikely that the selective environment that led to Homo sapiens would ever repeat itself, just as after the Cretacious/Tertiary extinction event, the enviroment never again produced the suite of selective pressures, or starting conditions that gave rise to the dinosaurs a hundred and fifty million years earlier. Collins and his directed evo ilk seem blissfully ignorant of the fossil record and its implications for life. They have no sense of contingency, indeed the seem to have no sense of the fossil record at all.

This argument about humans being the sole purpose could be made equally of any modern organism. I could use the same logic just as defensibly in the following way: God's plan included the mechanism of evolution to create the marvelous diversity of life on our planet. Most especially that creative plan included Coleopterans (beetles). Of course no one would take this terribly seriously even though the it seems in sync, however slightly, with the facts. There are vastly more species of beetles than there are any other animals after all. Perhaps the universe was fine tuned for the arrival of beetles?

Have I mentioned that Francis Collins really just likes to make stuff up?
Slide 3: “After evolution had prepared a sufficiently advanced ‘house’ (the human brain), God gifted humanity with the knowledge of good and evil (the moral law), with free will, and with an immortal soul.”

Does Collins not realize that he has just set the whole of Christian thought on the rails? Science is not settling for this "answer" and is in fact already in the process of elucidating the evolutionary processes, and precursors that lead to human moral reasoning. Neuroscience, evolutioanry psychology, and evolutionary biology in general, are demonstrating that our morality has arisen largely from precursors found in nature. There was no moment of ensoulment and knowledge of good and evil per se, (there is at least no evidence of such a thing) but a graduated series of changes over time.

In any event science is elucidating many of the hows and whys of both our good behaviors and our bad, which appear to have roots in our shared evolutionary biology, and the cognitive apparatus selective pressures have created. Not only that but neuroscience will likely continue to erode clasical notions of free will but how that all falls out is far from clear. Why does Collins assume he has a firm grasp on these future developments? How exactly does he justify the authority with which he invests his baseless wooly-headedness?

I really cannot believe he said the following:
Slide 4: “We humans used our free will to break the moral law, leading to our estrangement from God. For Christians, Jesus is the solution to that estrangement"

I for one would really love to hear Collins unpack this. When were we observing the moral law? At what point in the course of our history would it make sense to begin looking for our fall from grace in the annals of our natural history? He seems to think there is such a place. What evidence does he have for the assertion?

Was it perhaps when our ancestors were helping to drive the pleistocene megafauna into extinciton? Or perhaps after the near extinction of our species around 70,000 years ago when a supervolcano is thought to have reduced human populations to around 15,000 individuals? What about Neanderthals? They seem to have had a sufficiently "advanced house," their brains were quite a bit larger than our own. Did they have this knowledge of good and evil? What about Homo erectus? How far do Collins and his friends at Biologos want to take this kind of reasoning? Since their thinking isn't limited by facts, logic or evidence I suppose the folks at Biologos could go on making it up to their hearts content. Which they will no doubt continue to do to the delight of millions.

But why Jesus as the salvation? I mean all we see when we look back at the history of our species is natural events, one after another. Why would our fall from grace look so natural, in fact be so easily disguised by natural events, extinctions, super volcanoes, climate changes, our less than stellar treatment of other species etc and the solution be so obviously super natural? Why is the Garden of Eden a metaphor and Jesus not? I'd love to hear the explanation for this but I don't expect anything cogent to be offered.

And here is Collins trotting out the utterly sophmoric:
Slide 5: “If the moral law is just a side effect of evolution, then there is no such thing as good or evil. It’s all an illusion. We’ve been hoodwinked. Are any of us, especially the strong atheists, really prepared to live our lives within that worldview?”

This is a fine example of a classic logical fallacy, the argument from adverse consequenses. It goes something like this. If something bad would happen because proposition x were true then x obviously cannot be true. If this kind of "logic" actually worked there would be no bad things at all. Think about disease diagnosis and you will see how silly Collins is being here. My doctor just told me I have cancer, but if I did that would be bad therefore; I cannot possibly have cancer. That statement makes precisely as much sense as Collins statement above.

Say it were proven though that human moral and ethical intuitions were in someway the products of evolutionary processes. So what. Would the fact that such phenomena were products of material processes make them somehow less real, less worthy of our attention. Does that mean that our sensiblities are really an illusion? No. It would simply mean that our faculties have arisen by natural means.

If we've been hoodwinked it has been by the shamans of the gods talking ahead of the evidence and speaking with an authority they have not earned.