I have to say, I wouldn’t normally link to the Telgraph, but this is just too good (and surprisingly on-the-ball for the Torygraph.) I mean, obviously, it doesn’t qualify as news per-se, but it’s good to see the concept is sinking in.

This is excellent news. I’ve always voted Liberal Democrat anyway (well except that time I helped vote Tony Blair into power¹,) but now there’s another reason to do so. Their new party leader, Nick Clegg, has come out in a radio interview and confirmed himself as an atheist. “Do you believe in God?” was the question, and “no” was the answer.

The show’s quick fire interview format forces short, unequivocal answers like that, so we shouldn’t read too much into the brevity of the answer, but it’s reassuring to note that he hasn’t gone back on the position when questioned about it afterwards. Unfortunately, he has said that he has enormous respect for religion (which must, surely, be a lie to soothe the religious voters – how can he respect such a vast, byzantine social construct, with all of it’s rules and regulations and restrictions of liberty and downright wackiness, when he doesn’t accept the one fundamental assertion they use to justify the whole sorry mess?) and, more worryingly, that since his wife is a Catholic, their children will be raised as Catholics. I don’t understand how anyone free from the mind-virus of religion could willingly allow their own children to be infected with it.

But never mind; I can draw some comfort from that fact that if my vote ever leads to a landslide victory again (which is, admittedly, a very long shot with the Lib Dems,) that I won’t be handing power to someone who’s so far from my mindset that he’s actually afraid the country at large will think him a nutter if he’s honest about his degree of religiosity.

[^1]: I was a student, and only just old enough to vote when the 1997 general election came around. I can vividly remember sitting around with all my friends as the results came in, all of us buzzing with excitement as the Labour landslide became apparent. We’d obviously all voted for them, because students tend to vote left and because after chafing under 18 years of Tory rule, we just knew that a Labour victory would change the country for the better. When we saw those results come in, we really felt that our generation had made the difference, that we’d done what our parents never could; we’d kicked out the corrupt, right-wing, authoritarian Tories and given power to a more honest, democratic alternative. We felt like we’d changed the world, and that it was a change for good. Ironic, really.

1. I was a student, and only just old enough to vote when the 1997 general election came around. I can vividly remember sitting around with all my friends as the results came in, all of us buzzing with excitement as the Labour landslide became apparent. We’d obviously all voted for them, because students tend to vote left and because after chafing under 18 years of Tory rule, we just knew that a Labour victory would change the country for the better. When we saw those results come in, we really felt that our generation had made the difference, that we’d done what our parents never could; we’d kicked out the corrupt, right-wing, authoritarian Tories and given power to a more honest, democratic alternative. We felt like we’d changed the world, and that it was a change for good. Ironic, really. [↩]

PZ has done a characteristically neat job of skewering the argument of some guy who thinks it’s naive to be an atheist, but in doing so he makes the statement (emphasis mine):

The brain, in other words, is a choice-making machine. It is also not deterministic. It takes in a multitude of inputs, including lots of noise, filters them on the basis of deep personal history, and generates interesting internal states and elaborate responses.

Now, I can see why he said that (I think;) it’s important to the point about free will that he’s making, but I think it’s worth pointing out that in a strict sense the brain is deterministic. Obviously you can’t write a computer program that will predict human behaviour or decision-making. You certainly can’t write one to predict whether or not two people will fall in love. But my point – and I think it’s an important one – is that theoretically, such a program could exist. Being made of physical matter means that the brain is theoretically predictable; that matter will always respond to the same situation in the same way, and it’s would be possible to predict, given full information about its current state and sensory input, what decisions it will make. The fact of the matter is that the brain is never in the same state twice, and the necessary calculations to make any prediction would take Vastly longer than just watching to see what someone does, so the question never arises.

What does this mean for free will, which is what the original article claimed a purely physical brain denied us? Well, I don’t know. Truthfully, I don’t even know what free will is supposed to be. It’s a term that religious people tend to throw around when they want to demonstrate that a purely physical reality would be undesirable, and is therefore impossible, but I don’t think I’ve ever heard a satisfactory definition of the term.

Is it the capacity to make choices free from outside interference? If it is, then I don’t see why the fact that thought processes are rooted in the physical, rather than some invisible thought-stuff should lessen our ability to claim that. The fact that my thoughts are, at the most vanishingly basic level, electro-chemical in nature makes them theoretically predictable, it’s true, but being predictable is not the same thing as being constrained. In fact, physical or not, I actually hope my decision making is predictable (to anyone with full knowledge of my decision making apparatus,) because if it isn’t then it’s, pretty much by definition, random – which is not how I like to think of my mighty intellect. In any case, if your thoughts being predicted negates free will, then the presence of an omnipotent, omniscient creator-being presents it with at least as large a problem as the materialist world-view, since it makes the universe just as deterministic, and more than that: planned.

So where does all that leave us? I still don’t know, but it’s a considered not-knowing, which is more than can be said for the vast flocks of believers who “know” they have free will, because someone told them they do, but don’t have any clear idea of what the term even means, much less of the problems inherant with the whole concept.

So, I’ll tell you what: You come up with a meaningful definition of free will that works in a dualistic universe, but not a materialistic one, and we’ll talk again. But until then; until such a time as you can define the terms you throw around so carelessly, don’t call me naive. OK?

I don’t often disagree with him, but I thought PZ overreacted a bit to this article at the Guardian. All it really seems to be saying is that Atheism is becoming a cultural phenomena in much the same way that some religions have in the last 20 years, which while so obvious as to not need saying, is actually true. As far as I can see there is no suggestion that atheism is a religion in any technical sense or that it has no more claim to rationality than one; the discussion is restricted to analysing it as sociological phenomena (or actually suggesting that such analysis should be done.) Of course atheists are a diverse, independent lot, and don’t like to be lumped together as a “movement” if they can help it (I certainly don’t consider myself to be part of one,) but it is undeniable that certain atheists (Dawkins included) are trying to get the “message” out, and in doing so, they’re bound to attract this kind of comparison with religious people doing the same thing, even though the “message” in question doesn’t bear comparison in the same way.

So while, I thought the article was fairly harmless, and even slightly interesting, the comments were a different matter. The very first one is… well, hard to describe; it’s like a brain dump of someone who’s desperate to believe in something, anything beyond the materialistic worldview, but doesn’t really understand the arguments, so he just spews out as many as he can fit in a single comment, in the hope that one of them is convincing. Needless to say, he doesn’t succeed. Normally, I try to avoid fisking because it makes me feel nit-picky; I’d rather address the substance of someone’s argument or position, than hope that knocking enough little holes in it will have the same effect. But, in this case, I honestly, don’t think there is any substance to the argument, so I’m going to just go ahead and deal with the points one by one as they were spewed out onto the page.

When you think of the great and varied minds possessed by the like of Plato, Augustine, Copernicus, Shakespeare, Newton, Picasso, Einstein, and then you compare them with the shrill and ‘aggressive’ voice of Richard Dawkins in his book The God Delusion you cant help thinking of a poor man’s Mr Spock: the cold absence of intuition; the dictatorship of a crude intellect over the greater arts of consciousness.

Ah - the old ad-hominem attack; “I don’t like his tone of voice, therefore he must be wrong. Or at least unenlightened. Or, well, somehow inferior to actual clever people.” And then a criticism of Dawkin’s use of reason to answer hard questions. What’s so wrong with the absence of intuition? Why on earth would we expect intuition to be of any use at all in determining the nature of the universe. People can’t even accurately predict the trajectory of projectiles with intuition alone, so let’s not pretend that it’s some sort of panacea to our understanding of the Universe. Oh, and “the greater arts of consciousness”? What the hell is that supposed to mean? Really? Because if you’re suggesting that there’s a better way to understand how the universe functions than rational thought and scientific exploration, then you’d better have more to back it up than some fancy, arm-wavy turn of phrase.

The intuitive genius contained in the like of the Inuit, Kalahari Bushmen, the Cogi of South America - the great Native American elder Fools Crow (now sadly deceased). If Richard Dawkins were to look with more scientific neutrality at this phenomena, and not approach received religion with his pre-judged half way house understanding of the greater phenomena behind it, he might settle for that less extreme position of agnosticism pending further exploration.

“Intuitive genius”? More ambiguous arm-waving. Yes, the cultures he lists have amazing survival skills in very challenging environments, but those skills are only “intuitive” in so far as they’re not scientific; they’re still learned skills. Baby Bushmen don’t spring from the womb miraculously able to track animals in ways that first-world minds find utterly incomprehensible, they learn to do it, because their entire culture is built around those skills. Now, tell me why we should assume that because someone has learned to be a phenomenal tracker, we should give extra weight to their views on the universe? Did they discover electricity? EM radiation? Get to the moon? Does their “intuitive genius” grant them the ability to treat tuberculosis? No. These people are undoubtedly very skilled, but those skills give them precisely no insight into the nature of the Universe.

I’m not going to go into that “less extreme position of agnosticism pending further exploration” argument again. Look through the last couple of week’s archives. Suffice it to say, there’s no reason to believe in God, so I don’t believe in God, so I’m an atheist. Show me evidence, and I might change my mind.

60% of cutting edge scientists persist in failing to categorise themselves as atheist at all. Where 40% might choose to follow his lead, another 40% confess to a faith not at all at odds with the finding of physics, bio-chemistry or cosmology. This ratio remains largely unchallenged over the past 100 years. The conclusion from science is clear; in no way can it be said it debunks the ‘spiritual’ mind.

“Lots of clever people believe it, so it must be true.” You really call that an argument?

In fact there are significant problems with any such claim, and they spring first and foremost from cosmology: take the small but unavoidable matter of the cosmic constant and the uncannily prescient anthropic principles.

Backwards thinking. Of course we’re a “good fit” to the Universe, we arose and evolved within it. To argue that the Universe must have been designed to give rise to us, presupposes that we were the desired result, to then argue that we must have been the desired result because the Universe is designed for us is circular reasoning.

And not least from bio-chemistry - we have yet to successfully computer model the emergence of life on Earth from their initial building blocks without some form of ‘informative inflation’ hypothesis.

God of the Gaps. Do you promise that when we do successfully computer model the emergence of life on Earth from their initial building blocks, you’ll shut up? Or do you plan on finding something else we can’t yet explain scientifically?

This posits an equally mysterious ‘self organisation’ as the only means for matter to overcome the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics in order to kick start evolution. Indeed this is not unlike Plato’s ideal ‘desiring’ some kind of ‘replication’ of potential form.

It’s been said before; if you think abiogenesis violates the 2nd law of thermodynamics, then you don’t understand the 2nd law of thermodynamics. The 2nd law of thermodynamics says that heat will not flow from colder body to a hotter one. How does that have anything to do with the origin of life?

So in a sense when Richard Dawkins strays from his personal remit of minimalist ‘science populariser’ onto the time honoured territory of metaphysics it is faintly reminiscent of that Edward Woodward character in 70’s horror classic The Wicker Man. Like Sergeant Neil Howie, Richard Dawkins fairly blunders around the realm of intuition totally oblivious to what is taking place around him. While there may be no unsavoury resolution implied there is perhaps a strong implication of Bob Dylan’s Ballad of a Thin Man, to paraphrase: ‘something is happening there, but you don’t know what it is, do you, Mr Spock.’

Or, to paraphrase in a slightly different way; “There’s more to life than you know, and you look foolish for not seeing it, but I’m not going to give you any specifics, because if you can’t already see it, you’re too foolish to understand anyway.” Or, to put it another way; “The Emperors new clothes sure do look nice.”

PS: For anyone who has read Dawkin’s The God Delusion, in the spirit of fair play, might do well to also read Alistaire McGrath’s more measured reply The Dawkin’s Delusion.

Read it. Thought it was a load of unconvincing drivel, that amounted to nothing more than “You’re not a unicornologist, so you can’t tell me there’s no such thing as unicorns, and anyway, you can’t prove there’s no such thing as unicorns, so stop not believing in them.”

Actually, having just been through that again, I notice a lot of use of the word “intuition.” That smacks of post-modernism and their ridiculous “other ways of knowing”. I guess I should never have expected anything sensible.

In case I haven’t banged on about this enough over the past couple of weeks, here’s another great article explaining why atheism is the rational result of the scientific world-view. This time with pictures! I especially like this diagram; it does a great job of illustrating the scientific attitude to knowledge. Go and read the whole article, it’s all just as good.

Last week, there was a brief but verbose exchange in the comments here about what atheism is, and whether it’s a rational position, or one of faith. It turns out that Scott Adams has been blogging about something similar recently.

His central argument is basically Pascal’s Wager, which he accepts and defends (badly) in a later post. I’m not really interested in going over the arguments for and against Pascal’s wager here - if you’re interested, Google the term - but I do want to take issue with this ridiculous and pervasive idea that somehow atheism requires an impossible degree of certainty.

It’s true that we can never be 100% certain about anything, but why should that be any more relevant when you say “I don’t believe in God” than when you say “I believe the sun will rise tomorrow morning,” or “I do believe in God”? Scott sarcastically asks if there are any atheists out there, but he might as well ask if there are any Christians, or any fans of Star Wars (I mean, I _think_ I like it, but I can’t be sure, right?) Hell, he might as well ask if there’s anyone out there who knows their own name. Am I 100% certain that there’s no God? No, of course I’m not, but I’m as close to certain of that as I am of anything. I’m not 100% certain that I’m not going to float off my chair and hit my head on the ceiling in the next half an hour either, but no-one calls my belief in gravity irrational or a “faith-position”.

So yes, if you define “agnostic” as “having any uncertainty on the subject of supernatural causes” or something similar, then Scott’s dead right, it’s the only intellectually defensible position, but it’s also tautological and therefore meaningless, since by Scott’s own argument, it’s not just the only intellectually defensible position; it’s the only position. That makes it a fundamentally useless definition; it’s like insisting that people answer every question by saying “I don’t know,” and prefix every statement with “it might be possible that…” Technically it’s true, but it doesn’t help anyone in practice, and in fact it just muddies the waters because it makes it impossible to tell where in that range of certainties someone is. Do they really not know, or are they making allowance for that 0.000001% margin of human error? The same is true of the word agnostic; if we extend it’s definition, as Scott apparently wants to, to include everyone who might be wrong in their beliefs on supernatural causes, then we include everyone, and the word loses all meaning - what good is an adjective that applies to everyone? Similarly, defining atheism so narrowly as to exclude everyone is of no value at all; there are certainly people who don’t believe in the supernatural, even while acknowledging that they might be wrong, and even if you insist that technically they’re agnostic, you’re going to need some way of referring to them that differentiates them from the agnostics who believe Christ died on a cross for their sins, and the ones that believe Zeus rules Earth from atop Olympus. Why not take their belief at face value and use the word atheist to refer to them? I think you’ll find that’s how we refer to ourselves.

Oh, and what’s the difference between a weak atheist and an agnostic? That’s easy; a weak-atheist doesn’t believe in supernatural causes, because the evidence does not support such a belief, while acknowledging some uncertainty insofar as more and contradictory evidence may come to light. An agnostic, on the other hand, holds uncertainty as regards supernatural causes to be key to his beliefs, either because he believes there are fundamental limits to our ability to know of such things, or because he believes the evidence is currently inconclusive.

When I first read about the Out Campaign, I thought it was a great idea. I’m all for atheists being open about their lack of belief, and I like the logo, so I figured a t-shirt was probably in my future. Unfortunately, when I got to the online store, what did I see? a sodding great “richarddawkins.net” url across the front of them. That’s not a statement, it’s an advertisement, and I’m no-one’s walking billboard. Not even Richard Dawkins’.

This is really valuable. I get sick of people throwing the word “Fundamentalist” around whenever someone is confident and uncompromising in their beliefs. Fundamentalism is a specific, term, with a specific meaning, and that meaning is not “people who say things loudly, that I disagree with.” An atheist, no matter how vocal, how uncompromising, and how assertive they may be, can never be accurately described as a fundamentalist.

And so, the Blakes Law (reproduced in case you’re too lazy to follow the link):

1. In any discussion of atheism (skepticism, etc.), the probability that someone will compare a vocal atheist to religious fundamentalists increases to one.
2. The person who makes this comparison will be considered to have lost the argument.

PZ has put up a fantastic post about what it means to be an atheist. It expresses pretty much everything I’ve ever tried to say about how not believing in God doesn’t, in the least, reduce ones ability to find meaning or beauty in our lives.

The whole thing is well worth the time it takes to read, but if you really don’t have the time I’m pulling out my two favourite sections here (emphasis in the original).

What we atheists are saying is that we need to turn away from those powerless rationalizations, no matter how poetic they might be, and recognize that their power and their appeal flows from their humanity, not their religiosity. Forget god, that empty hulk, that great vacuum that humanity has stocked with its fears and dreams, and look at what we have created and felt instead. When someone weeps over a dead child or creates a great poem, it should matter not at all what some priest imagines his pantheon is doing. Take your eyes off your hallucination of heaven—what’s real are that woman’s tears, that child’s triumph, that grain of sand, that bird on wing. The meaning is derived from the reality of what we see and feel, not some convoluted vapor and self-serving puffery about an abstract concept like “god”.

and

None of those [atheist] writers want the Bible burned or denied to readers. What we want is for people to think of it as a great hodge-podge of human expression which doesn’t so much vindicate a nonsensical image of a divine being as it does the complex, earthy, sometimes soaring and sometimes hateful picture of us.