[Hat Tip: Pharyngula]
Sunday, September 19, 2010
Saturday, September 18, 2010
The Accommodationist Position
Some people are confused about the accommodationist position. Here's a good example from Janice Taylor published in The Times (London) and reproduced on RichardDawkins.net. The standard accommodationist rhetoric comes from atheists (secularists) who direct a great deal of anger toward the vocal atheists but go out of their way to excuse their religious friends.
I never thought I could utter this sentence, but I agree with the Pope. Like him I feel distaste for “aggressive forms of secularism”, although maybe I’d term it differently. I’d call it macho atheism as preached by unholy warlords.
...
Dawkins, Hawking, Hitchens: these male (always male) demagogues, bashing their anti-Bibles on to bestseller lists, smugly uncloaking the magician to show his act is mere incense smoke and mirrors. As if the rest of us require professors of theoretical physics or evolutionary biology in order to ponder the big questions of human existence, any more than we need a priest.
At least Christopher Hitchens, a US citizen, must maintain his thunderous volume to be heard above the American Tea Party movement’s Creationist tumult. (Although I thought it inconceivable that the mighty Hitch could ever be boring until I read his book, God is Not Great, a monotone, unreadable harangue.) But the other two are here in Britain. How are their crass insults to decent, thinking Catholics adding to a sane and necessary discussion about religion’s place in our public life?
...
Like the majority of British people, I have little religious faith, but the peace I feel in, say, a spartan Suffolk church connects me with my northern chapel-going ancestry. While I may not believe, the peace and quietude, the sense of something transcendent that makes my life on Earth seem at once precious and utterly insignificant, gives me sympathy towards those who do. My devout Catholic neighbour, who worked unpaid delivering babies in an African clinic, the born-again Christians who befriended my lonely aunt, even the Jamaican ladies in church hats who bring me tracts depicting in colourful line drawings the very moment the dead will rise again — they don’t make me long to assert my moral superiority or slap them round the head with Darwin.
And I’d guess the majority of my fellow heathens, those who don’t have iconoclastic non-fiction to flog, would agree. Secularism needs to stand behind the progressive movements within the Catholic Church, already challenging its policies on women, contraception, homophobia and child abuse, not run ahead of them screaming. It might concede that the Pope has a point that secular values have struggled in the past decade when morality was wholly defined by the free market.
Friday, September 17, 2010
Atheists Must Apologize for Hitler
The Catholic League has just posted this on their website [ATHEISTS MUST APOLOGIZE FOR HITLER].
Catholic League president Bill Donohue reacts to the way British atheists are handling Pope Benedict XVI's trip to their homeland:The accommodationists are going to be all over this one. They'll rip Bill Donohue to shreds, right?
The pope cited Hitler today, asking everyone to "reflect on the sobering lessons of atheist extremism of the 20th century." Immediately, the British Humanist Association got its back up, accusing the pope of "a terrible libel against those who do not believe in God."
The pope did not go far enough. Radical atheists like the British Humanist Association should apologize for Hitler. But they should not stop there. They also need to issue an apology for the 67 million innocent men, women and children murdered under Stalin, and the 77 million innocent Chinese killed by Mao. Hitler, Stalin and Mao were all driven by a radical atheism, a militant and fundamentally dogmatic brand of secular extremism. It was this anti-religious impulse that allowed them to become mass murderers. By contrast, a grand total of 1,394 were killed during the 250 years of the Inquisition, most all of whom were murdered by secular authorities.
Why should atheists today apologize for the crimes of others? At one level, it makes no sense: apologies should only be given by the guilty. But on the other hand, since the fanatically anti-Catholic secularists in Britain, and elsewhere, demand that the pope—who is entirely innocent of any misconduct—apologize for the sins of others, let the atheists take some of their own medicine and start apologizing for all the crimes committed in their name. It might prove alembic.
Waiting ....
Meanwhile, let's follow the logic. Atheists are people who don't believe in god. According to people like Bill Donohue, if you've failed to be convinced by any of the arguments in favor of superstition then you have to take the blame for the actions of everyone else who hasn't fallen for the common delusions of religion. (Including imaginary non-believers like Hitler.1)
Okay. Where does this sort of logic take us? Bill Donohue and the Pope don't believe in the tooth fairy. Neither did any of the people who flew airplanes into buildings on September 11, 2001. .... Do you see where this is headed?
Donohue's "logic"—using the word in its loosest sense—is based on a false premise. He assumes that atheists (those who haven't accepted religion) share a common moral and ethical position that makes them collectively responsible for the actions of every atheist. In other words, he thinks that atheism is a religion like Roman Catholicism or Voodoo. That's just plain nonsense.
Why is it so hard for believers to understand the absence of belief? After all, every single one of them doesn't believe in hundreds of Gods. The Pope doesn't believe in Thor or The Flying Spaghetti Monster. Neither did Hitler, Stalin, or Mao. When can we expect an apology from the Pope?
[Hat Tip: Why Evolution Is True]
1. PZ Myers has just posted a list of Hitler quotations proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that Hitler was a firm believer in God. Very likely the same God that the Pope and Bill Donohue believe in.
Tom Chivers' Top Five Books on Evolution
Tom Chivers has posted a list of his top five books on evolutionary biology [Best evolutionary biology books, from Stephen Jay Gould to Richard Dawkins]. Here they are ...
- Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History (1989)
Stephen Jay Gould - The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Life (2004)
Richard Dawkins - Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters (1999)
Matt Ridley - Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life (1995)
Daniel Dennett - The Blind Watchmaker (1986) Richard Dawkins
Here's my list of the top five trade books ...
- Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History (1989) Stephen Jay Gould
- The Blind Watchmaker (1991 edition) Richard Dawkins
- Why Evolution Is True (2009) Jerry Coyne
- Reinventing Darwin: The Great Debate at the High Table of Evolutionary Theory (1995) Niles Eldredge
- Extinction: Bad Genes or Bad Luck? (1991) David M. Raup
Thursday, September 16, 2010
Get the Popcorn!
According to Wikipedia, Karl Giberson (right), "... holds two Bachelor's degrees from the Eastern Nazarene College, and both a Master's degree and PhD from Rice University." He teaches courses on religion and science at Eastern Nazarene College.He also writes articles defending religion. His latest appears on the BioLogos website [Doing Battle with Jerry Coyne’s Army of Straw Men]. The purpose of that posting is to take on Jerry Coyne of Why Evolution Is True. Jerry Coyne, as most of you know, is one of those atheists who dares to challenge theists, even moderate ones. Coyne is definitely not an accommodationist.
Apparently Coyne and the other vocal atheists (I am one) are insufficiently versed in the subtleties of religion and science and Karl Giberson is going to set us straight in a series of upcoming postings. (You'll need several bags of popcorn to watch this.) Like many before him, Giberson is going to try and prove that the vocal atheists are attacking strawman versions of religion and not the really good stuff that intelligent people believe in. Have we heard this before? [The Emperor's New Clothes and the Courtier's Reply] [On the Existence of God and the Coutier's Reply]
Here's what Giberson finds most objectionable.
Some of the arguments I want to examine include:Speaking of strawmen, has anyone ever met a New Atheist like this? All the New Atheists with a science background (e.g., Jerry Coyne) are vigorous opponents of bad science. Some of us have reserved our harshest criticism for those who don't understand science, especially those theists who claim that religion doesn't conflict with science.
1. The tendency of the New Atheists to lambast laypeople who acquired some wrong ideas in Sunday School studying religion, but to let them off the hook for the wrong ideas about science they acquired in the public schools. Most Americans spend way more time studying science in school than they do studying religion in church. So why is “religion” to blame for bad religious ideas but science gets off the hook for dumb science ideas?
2. In our debate on USA Today, Jerry Coyne contrasted the complicated theological doctrine of the incarnation—the most mysterious idea in all of theology—to the function of penicillin—one of the best-understood ideas in biology. This is not an appropriate juxtaposition at all.Shame on you Jerry Coyne! That's not an appropriate comparison at all. The appropriate response to a theist who raises "the complicated theological doctrine of incarnation" is, "Who the
3. The phrase “philosophical consistency” is tossed around like it represents some simple set of rules that allow us to see how religion is cheating. If only it were that simple. Science all by itself has issues with philosophical consistency that Coyne apparently doesn’t see because, if I may hazard a guess, he hasn’t spent a lot of time wrestling with the deeper issues of science.Oh Boy! This is going to be fun. Apparently science is just as philosophically inconsistent as religion! Can't wait to find out about that.
Stay tuned folks.
What the Pope Said
The current edition of the leader of the Roman Catholic Church is visiting Britain. It's a state visit, for reasons that aren't clear. The Pope delivered a speech when he arrived [Pope's Holyroodhouse Speech Transcript]. Here's part of what he said ...
Even in our own lifetime, we can recall how Britain and her leaders stood against a Nazi tyranny that wished to eradicate God from society and denied our common humanity to many, especially the Jews, who were thought unfit to live. I also recall the regime’s attitude to Christian pastors and religious who spoke the truth in love, opposed the Nazis and paid for that opposition with their lives. As we reflect on the sobering lessons of the atheist extremism of the twentieth century, let us never forget how the exclusion of God, religion and virtue from public life leads ultimately to a truncated vision of man and of society and thus to a "reductive vision of the person and his destiny" (Caritas in Veritate, 29).Accommodationists take note. The Pope has just told us that "extreme atheism" and Nazis can be lumped together in the same paragraph. He has just announced that "aggressive forms of secularism" don't respect or tolerate the cultural values of most Britons.
...
Today, the United Kingdom strives to be a modern and multicultural society. In this challenging enterprise, may it always maintain its respect for those traditional values and cultural expressions that more aggressive forms of secularism no longer value or even tolerate. Let it not obscure the Christian foundation that underpins its freedoms; and may that patrimony, which has always served the nation well, constantly inform the example your Government and people set before the two billion members of the Commonwealth and the great family of English-speaking nations throughout the world.
I expect the same criticism of the Pope that I see from accommodationists when they think "New Atheists" have stepped over the line.
Waiting ......
Meanwhile, the British Humanist Society responds [BHA Reacts to Pope's first remarks on state visit].
The notion that it was the atheism of Nazis that led to their extremist and hateful views or that somehow fuels intolerance in Britain today is a terrible libel against those who do not believe in god. The notion that it is non-religious people in the UK today who want to force their views on others, coming from a man whose organisation exerts itself internationally to impose its narrow and exclusive form of morality and undermine the human rights of women, children, gay people and many others, is surreal.
Wednesday, September 15, 2010
I Can't Believe He Actually Said That!
GilDodgen is an Intelligent Design Creationist who sometimes posts at Uncommon Descent. Here are links to some examples of his "work."Why Do We Call Them IDiots?
IDiot Logic on Display at Uncommon Descent
Resistance to Science
A State of Extreme Cognitive Dissonance
IDiot "Irony"
Poor IDiots, Wrong Again
Last week he posted an article that I ignored—as did everyone else with anything better to do (like watching reruns of Hogan's Heros) [see, Why Secular and Theistic Darwinists Fear ID]. That article generated a lot of comments on Uncommon Descent and this made GilDodgen very excited. It prompted him to post again today [My Proclivity for Inspiring Long UD Threads] in order to offer this explanation.
My thesis is that people like me, a former materialist atheist, who have been influenced by logic, reason, and evidence (i.e., the ID movement) represent the greatest threat to the reigning nihilistic and anti-intellectual Darwinian orthodoxy.Yep, I'm sure that's the answer.
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