Good Reason

It's okay to be wrong. It's not okay to stay wrong.

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Debate: “Where Do I Come From?”

1 May 2012 / / 2 Comments

This is exciting for Perth people: I’ve been invited to be Teh Atheist in a debate entitled “Where Do I Come From?” Also appearing will be Christian pastor Rory Shiner, and Kanaga Dharmananda for the Hindu team.

It’s going to be at Wesley Uniting Church, on the corner of William and Hay St, this Thursday afternoon (3 May 2012) at 12:30. I have to say: some religious people aren’t too keen on atheists — these guys invite me to their church to speak. That says something, I think.

That Hindu cosmology — I bet you could make that stuff sound pretty close to the scientific view, even if it is a series of guesses. I wonder what the Christian guy will say to that.

It seems a number of Perth Atheists are coming. Come and join the atheist cheering section! (Are you allowed to cheer in church?)

Talk the Talk: Passive Voice Day

1 May 2012 / / Comments Off on Talk the Talk: Passive Voice Day

For this show, we had some fun with the passive voice. A lot of people have this idea that passive voice is being used every time there’s some kind of evasion or abdication of responsibility. It’s true that this is one thing passive voice does, but it’s not the only thing it does, and there are other ways to do it. So this podcast tells you how to spot it once and for all. Very educational.

And this show marks the return of Ben Ainslie! He’s been in earlier episodes, and I always enjoy a talk with him. We’re muy simpático. Maybe he’ll return.

I forgot to say: the date of Passive Voice Day was determined by shaunm on Shaun’s Blog. I left him out, which is actually kind of fitting since, hey, you can do that in passive voice.

One-off show: Here
Subscribe via iTunes: Here
Show notes: Here

Global Atheist Con, Day 2: A.C. Grayling

28 April 2012 / / 1 Comment

A.C. Grayling is a philosopher, and the author of “The Good Book”.

The title of his talk was “What Next for Atheism?” We’re seeing a swelling in our ranks, but how do we make sure this healthy atheist trend continues? Grayling suggests three ways:

  • Metaphysical debate, where we talk about rationality and evidence,
  • Secularism, where we discuss the role of the religious voice in public life
  • And most importantly, ethics, which involves how we live our lives and how we make decisions about our relationships.

Metaphysical Debate

Grayling suggested some ways that we can talk about religion to show how vacuous it is.
Instead of ‘God’, try substituting ‘Fred’.

Who made the universe? Fred. 

I have a deep personal relationship… with Fred.

Another suggestion (that I customarily use myself) is to refer to ‘gods and goddesses’.

I’m an atheist because I don’t believe in gods and goddesses. 

You can be moral without having to believe in gods. (And so on.)

This job involves getting people (especially children) to think critically. We can do this, says Grayling, by inviting people to think about the history of religions, and whether that justifies the case for them. Religions customarily obscure the facts about their past. Consider how the Church of England (and many others) have abandoned hell, and the Roman Catholic Church has abandoned limbo. I’ve seen this in the LDS Church as they’ve changed or abandoned doctrines with little fanfare and less detail, hoping no one would notice or remember. (It’s that memory hole again.) Grayling observes that this amnesia is very useful to them because it allows them to present themselves well. Religions, he says, are like the Greek god Proteus who could change his shape; Menelaus (or Aristaeus, or both) could only conquer Proteus by holding onto him tenaciously until, having gone through all his changes, he was exhausted. You just have to hang onto them until they get tired.

Yes, the religious will complain when we engage in metaphysical debate. But even this represents a positive change. A modern atheist could say, “When you guys were in power, you didn’t argue with us; you just burned us at the stake. Now when we present challenging arguments, you complain.”

Secularism

Religious people have the right to believe what they like, and to make their voices heard in the public square, says Grayling. But their influence is currently out of proportion to the number of actual believers. With bishops sitting in the House of Lords, and money going to ‘faith schools’, religion should see themselves as they are: “Lobby groups!” Like trade unions and other interest groups, we shouldn’t be paying for them — they should be supporting themselves. Grayling says this is a point we should be making constantly.

Grayling related how, in debates, there are frequently four clergymen on the panel, and then him, the lone atheist. There are four of them because they can’t agree with each other. And yet they’re willing to make common cause… because they want the public money.

Ethics

Grayling points out that religious people think they have a social area of morality and human experience cordoned off for themselves, and they claim that they own those things. We need to take back possesson of them.

Religions teach that all the good things come from gods, and all the bad things come from us. In fact, all the things come from us, and there’s no need for mumbo-jumbo.

So in closing, Grayling outlined the way forward for atheism:

  • Challenge the claims of religion, challenge their history, pin them down about what they think
  • Demand that voices in the square are proportionate to their actual participation, and
  • Take back human experience.

Talk the Talk: Dying Words (featuring Nick Evans)

27 April 2012 / / Comments Off on Talk the Talk: Dying Words (featuring Nick Evans)

Last week, Professor Nick Evans came to visit UWA to talk about his work with languages in Papua New Guinea. So I abstracted him for a while to talk about endangered languages (and his book Dying Words: Endangered Languages and What They Have to Tell Us) for an episode of Talk the Talk.

The audio isn’t great, I’m afraid. I have a lot to learn about this ‘microphone’ thing. But actually it’s very fitting, because that’s just the kind of audio you’d get when doing field research. Right?

One-off show: Here
Subscribe via iTunes: Here
Show notes: Here

The Three Horsemen: Act 1

27 April 2012 / / Comments Off on The Three Horsemen: Act 1

Setting: Book-signing queue

Dramatis personae:
Daniel Dennett (DD): A philosopher
Daniel Midgley (DM): A Daniel Midgley

DM: (hands over books) Great talk. I’m a linguist, so I’m interested in Quine’s induction problem.
DD: (autographing) Yes, it’s interesting.
DM: You mention Quine a lot.
DD: Yes, he was my first teacher.
DM: Oh, cool. (Takes books.) Thanks!

End of Act I

Science vs ‘continuing revelation’

24 April 2012 / / 12 Comments

In a recent thread, I was wondering how people can have confidence in a religious leader who gets it obviously wrong. In a comment, brettandkatie asks (ask?) a really good question that I’ve been thinking about:

So, how does this differ from “further light and knowledge”? The apostle know what they are given now, just like I know what I am given now. Further revelation may change this. I don’t think that God and science should be separated, for they work together.
I don’t discredit science, it has given us so so much. However, we are getting the best of what they “know” may change. How can you use the word “know” if it is a hypotheses? I’m just saying that having full confidence in everything current science is saying can be hard because, while much of it is fact, much is also an educated guess that will change in the future. So how is this different from what you claim the LDS church does?

In other words, scientists learn more, and their knowledge changes. Religious leaders learn more, and their knowledge changes. So how is science different from ‘continuing revelation’? Don’t they work the same? Am I being unfair to expect religion to work differently?

It’s a tempting comparison, but not all systems that advance incrementally are the same. Consider the cheating spouse who tells a little of the truth, and then comes out with more and more of it when confronted with more and more of their lies. Or what about L. Ron Hubbard, who made up more and more of his phony-baloney science fiction religion bit by bit? That’s incremental, but most people are able to see how that isn’t quite on a par with science.

Before getting to the meat of it, a couple of caveats. First up, I’m addressing this from a Mormon perspective, since I’m most familiar with it and because it’s in response to a Mormon commenting on a post about a Mormon apostle. I think this relates to other religions too, but if this criticism doesn’t seem apt, be grateful that your church doesn’t do this. (Or it does, and you just don’t realise.) Also, I don’t think I’m comparing ‘ideal science’ to ‘the worst of religion’; I think I’m comparing how they work most of the time. Again, take it for what it’s worth.

SCIENCE
RELIGION
With science, you start with the facts and move to conclusions. With religion, you start with the conclusion and see what facts will get you there.

Still love this cartoon:

SCIENCE
RELIGION
In science, you start with the null hypothesis (assuming the hypothesis is not true), and you use evidence to build up a picture. An idea must be within a certain degree of confidence before you settle on it. Religious people require that an idea be argued down to null before they’ll abandon or (more often) modify it. As long as there’s a sliver of hope, they’ll cling to it.
The evidence for a scientific idea must be publicly verifiable, and replicable. Scientists submit their evidence and conclusions for peer review. So-called ‘spiritual evidence’ comes from emotions, experiences, and unusual-seeming happenstances, which cannot be examined directly by others, or replicated under controlled conditions.
The evidence for scientific ideas comes from the natural world. The evidence for religious ideas comes from interpretations of holy books and authority figures.
Scientists change their views when the evidence requires. Religions change their views when they become unpalatable.
Scientific hypotheses make testable predictions. If those predictions don’t come true, the hypothesis is rejected. Religious leaders sometimes make a prophecy. If it doesn’t come true when expected, the prophecy is either kicked down the road for “sometime in the future”, or reinterpreted to apply on a “spiritual level”. They are not typically abandoned.
In science, you publish your results when they change. With religion (particularly the Mormon sort), you quietly drop doctrines and hope no one will notice after 40 years. (The most recent exception I can think of happened in 1978.)

The main idea here is not just that science and religion are different in lots of ways, though they are — they actually function as opposite and incompatible methods. Science expands when it can; religion contracts when it must.

And finally, an observation: Science is a system created by humans.
Religions claim to get their answers from an all-knowing, all-powerful being.
Yet science has been much more successful at gaining knowledge, promoting longevity, and finding out about our universe. That ought to give believers some pause.

Let’s just say that brettandkatie is (are?) right, and science and religion are comparable systems. Why would a god even need to spread his knowledge by using the same system that humans invented? Wouldn’t we expect him to do better? An organisation led by a god would surely have more knowledge and would show more moral progress than a purely human one. Yet religions display less knowledge and poorer moral judgment than humans generally. So what are they for?

Some believers acknowledge this, but then say that god is ‘teaching his people line upon line’ or that ‘god chooses to work through fallible people’. Well, God would be awfully hamstrung if he could only teach to the level of his most advanced followers. Why would a god limit himself in this way, and not take the lead? We are meant to believe that this all-powerful being is stymied by human cognitive limitations and human intransigence. This makes no sense.

(p.s. You can tell I’m pretty gung-ho on science, but please don’t have full confidence in everything current science is saying. It’s going to change. That’s why it’s good.)

Gaslighting

23 April 2012 / / Comments Off on Gaslighting

I haven’t seen this usage before:

Huntsman gaslights GOP, compares the party to communist China

Via Zeke Miller, Jon Huntsman poured gasoline onto the national Republican Party tonight, then struck a match.

The author means something like ‘immolates’, but that’s not how most people use it. The reference comes from the movie ‘Gaslight‘, in which a husband tries to make his wife question her judgment by (among other things) lowering the lights while insisting that she’s imagining it. In modern usage, it means ‘to make someone think they’re crazy’.

This is the usage I’m familiar with.

Attempt to Gaslight Women Will Blow Up Republicans

Global Atheist Con, Day 2: Daniel Dennett

23 April 2012 / / Comments Off on Global Atheist Con, Day 2: Daniel Dennett

Daniel Dennett is a philosopher, and author of “Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon”.

His talk was “How to Tell If You’re an Atheist“.

Dennett started out with a discussion of anasognosia, also known as Anton’s Syndrome, or ‘blindness denial’. Sometimes people are struck blind, and they don’t know it. They know something’s wrong; they just don’t know what it is. In the same way, some people might be going through ‘atheism denial’ — being an atheist and not knowing it. I’m not sure it’s helpful to compare atheism and blindness, but it’s Dan Dennett here! so we’re going to cut him some slack.

Dennett is working on the Clergy Project, kind of a research project and support network for pastors who no longer believe. Even though they’ve relinquished their faith, some of these trained ministers may be reluctant to identify as atheists, either because atheism gets a bad rap, or because they’ve invested so much in their religion. It’s their career — and who’s going to hire a 55-year-old theologian? Dennett says these ex-believers are having a hard time finding each other for support, like gay people in the 50s without the gaydar. Dennett gives a clue to spot them, though. The ones who are active in their works are probably the non-believers; they’re trying to atone for their hypocrisy. The ones playing golf still believe.

Dennett explains some of the appeal of atheism: We’re a happy lot, in part because we don’t suffer under a burden of artificial guilt. We feel bad for our misdeeds, but we don’t call them sins. So you might be an atheist if you’re curious about atheists, and yet you’re a little worried about what you might find out about yourself.

Lots of Christians don’t believe that Jesus is the son of a god. In a recent UK poll (commissioned by the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science), the percentage of people describing themselves as Christian has dropped from 72 to 54%. Of those 54% percent, half hadn’t attended a church service in the previous year, 16 percent hadn’t attended in the past ten years, and a further 12 percent had never done so. And only 44% of that “54-percenter” group believed that Jesus is the son of a god. Asks Dennett: Do you believe that Jesus is the literal son of god? If not, you might be an atheist.

What about believing in something divine, like a benign force? Dennett was once asked by a radio host if, despite being an atheist, he didn’t believe in some kind of force that protects us. “Well, yes,” Dennett replied. “Gravity!” If you believe that God is a “concept” that enriches our spirits and enlightens them, then you’re definitely an atheist! Dennett remarked that even he believed that the “concept” of god exists… as a concept. He believes that thousands of concepts of gods exist — but that doesn’t make him a polytheist.

Science is disciplined. It relies on double-blind studies, accurate measurements, and peer review. There’s nothing like this in religion. In fact it’s just the opposite. Dennett cited the phrase “Fake it ’til you make it!” as typical of religion, and mentioned the case of Mother Teresa, who wrote of feeling like god wasn’t there. The fuzziness of religion enables its impenetrable creeds, and in fact relies on them for its survival; creeds that are simple don’t last long. Religion doesn’t survive too much probing, which is why believers think that talking about religion critically is rude — sort of like, “Don’t ask, don’t tell”. Dennett’s response: Don’t ask — Tell!

Technological advances will break down religions. Many of us owe our deconversion in some sense to the Internet, either by exposure to more information, or to the creation of new non-churchy social support networks. The elders of churches will either have to anticipate unwelcome questions from young people, or try and lock the kids away from the technology — and they probably won’t. Eventually, this may lead to religion becoming a semi-transparent myth in our culture, like Santa Claus. Asks Dennett: Wouldn’t it be great if the god myth were semi-transparent like this?

Global Atheist Con, Day 2: Dan Barker

19 April 2012 / / Comments Off on Global Atheist Con, Day 2: Dan Barker

Dan Barker is co-president of the Freedom From Religion Foundation.

His talk was entitled Life-Driven Purpose, which is of course, a take-off on Rick Warren’s book. As a pastor, Rick Warren’s purpose is “to glorify God”, which is to say, to bow down to a master. What’s that like? Barker invited us to consider the posture of prayer: Prostrate on the floor, on our knees, hands clasped (shackled?) in supplication, not a threat. A slave. Masters are afraid of slave revolts, which is what atheists are doing. But many people still want to bow down before a king, even those whose ancestors kicked kings out of their country.

You can watch the next bit of Barker’s talk yourself (or something like it).

Barker points out that religion does not enhance your moral judgment. It compromises it. Two stories to illustrate.

Story one: Suppose I were to break into some Christians’ home. I torture them, shoot the dog, and burn the house down. When people ask why I did it, I say, “No reason; the devil made me do it!“

Would you consider that person to be moral? Probs not, I’m guessing.

Story two: The story of Job. His whole family is killed by a collapsing house, and Job is tormented with sore boils.

Why did God allow this?

Job 2:3 And the LORD said unto Satan, Hast thou considered my servant Job, that there is none like him in the earth, a perfect and an upright man, one that feareth God, and escheweth evil? and still he holdeth fast his integrity, although thou movedst me against him, to destroy him without cause.

In other words: No reason; the Devil made him do it. This is not a moral being.

The good news we offer to the world is that “There IS no purpose of life. And that’s good!”

People often act like there’s some kind of purpose to life, and if only we could find out what that was, we could do it and be happy. But if that were true, we would be secondary. We would be subservient, looking for marching orders, looking outside ourselves to find some purpose. But it’s wonderful that life is its own reward. We want to make the world better, reproduce, have jollity, and so on. But those things aren’t the purpose OF life. There’s a purpose IN life.

As long as there are problems to solve, knowledge to be gained, beauty to create, we have a purpose IN life. Life with purpose, life with meaning. A life-driven purpose.

Talk the Talk: Logos

19 April 2012 / / Comments Off on Talk the Talk: Logos

Poor Big Tobacco. That nasty old government is trying to control their trademarks in an effort to stop them from killing more and more of us, and making billions in the process. How do they stand it? With a lawsuit, that’s how. Like I couldn’t hate tobacco companies more.

There’s currently no word on how the lawsuit went, but in the meantime, you can listen to this episode of Talk the Talk, in which I talk to Joe Cassidy about logos, logo evolution, and the ownership of symbols.

And this is the last episode with Joe! He’s moving out of Perth to work on editing a regional weekly newspaper. We on the Talk wish him all the best, and we fear for the future. Of course, we’re in good hands with Stacey Gougoulis for the next few weeks, and he’s always a lot of fun.

One-off show: Here
Subscribe via iTunes: Here
Show notes: Here

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