Threads from Henry's Web

Tag: Atheism

  • Expelled! and the Atheism-Evolution Connection

    There is something I want to clarify from my previous post on the topic. Nobody has mentioned this to me, but it is a common enough error that I think I need to say something explicit.

    I object both to the comparison of scientists supporting the theory of evolution to Nazis and the equation of acceptance of evolution with atheism, but I do so for rather different reasons.

    I regard Nazism as ethically repugnant and pretty much without redeeming value. It’s manifestation in Germany was particularly evil. The passage of years, however, has resulted in a variety of people comparing just about anyone they disagree with to the Nazis. If you get by with it, it guarantees a win. I regard the comparison of scientists denying tenure to a professor with Nazis as a slander. It also demonstrates a lack of ethical judgment, and specifically devalues the true evil of Nazism.

    I think it’s quite possible that for the producers of Expelled, the connection to atheists is more important. Atheism is more present and real to modern Americans, and it is the one thing they expect Christians of all denominations and believers from other faiths to be able to agree on–atheism is bad. So if you can hammer the concept into people that belief in evolution is the equivalent of atheism, they will viscerally reject evolution as they already do atheism.

    It’s a fairly standard propaganda ploy. Find something that is already in disrepute amongst your audience (and polls on the perception of atheists will show the basis for this), then all you have to do is completely (subconsciously if possible) relate the idea you dislike to the one people already dislike. Unfortunately, all that is necessary to accomplish this goal is to repeat it often enough and loudly enough.

    So my problem with “evolution is atheism” is quite different from my concern about Nazism. Nazism is nasty, and it is slander to connect it with evolutionary science. Atheists are generally good, moral, productive people, and there is nothing about their belief system that says they will be anything else. There’s a big difference between a group of people who believe as a tenet of their ideology that you ought to be killed, and a group that disagrees with you on certain philosophical points, even very basic ones.

    So I want to make myself clear. I do not object to the connection of atheism and evolution because atheism is nasty, and you shouldn’t smear evolution in that way. I object to this connection because it is incorrect. The theory of evolution describes the natural world, and is not incompatible with theism. It is also not incompatible with atheism. It is simply organized information about the natural world. Connecting it with a philosophy is completely unrelated to determining its truth value.

    Nazism is an ideology with an ethically repugnant set of actions inherent in it. It is slanderous to connect evolution with that ideology.

    It remains true, of course, that both connections are inappropriate propaganda ploys and the producers of Expelled! should be ashamed of themselves for both.

  • Responding to Richard Dawkins

    There’s still a good bit of discussion of Richard Dawkins around the blogosphere, focusing on <a href=”The God Delusion, though not exclusively. This morning I encountered a post by The Christian Cynic that gives an interesting response to one point, and also lets me know that the Christian Cynic is posting again.

    The point to which the Christian Cynic is responding is simple and annoying: What’s to keep Christian moderates from taking the next step and blowing things up? There are so many things wrong with the question. You can read Cynic’s good answer. I would answer with a counter-question: What’s to keep Dawkins from taking the next step after despising religious moderates, and start rounding them up and killing them (or advocating it)? If you’re an atheist and find that question offensive, then consider the offensiveness of Dawkins’ approach to religious moderates of all stripes.

    Cynic also linked to two other posts, these by macht of Prosthesis who is an occasional commenter here on Threads as well. The first is Self-Deception and Faith and the second is More on the reasonableness of belief systems and on comment on Sam Harris. Both are good. I personally have less concern with talking about leaps of faith, though I do not find theism unreasonable. I simply don’t believe there is sufficient evidence to force all reasonable people to agree–here is a leap at the end, because the evidence doesn’t carry one all the way.

    But this whole issue leads back to a sort of binary thinking. In discourse on theism vs [tag]atheism[/tag] much of the discourse is done in black and white, proven or not proven, rather than looking at shades and probabilities, even if they involve some guesswork. Science is suited to study the natural world and nothing more. But it is an assumption, and a leap whether of faith or not, to go beyond that and say that nothing exists other than the natural world as we perceive it.

    As a side note with commercial overtones, this binary approach is constantly applied to scripture. Either the Bible is inerrant or it is useless. I take a different approach, one which I discuss in my book When People Speak for God. I’m unlikely to convince anyone that the Bible is inspired with that book, but I do present an alternative to the all or nothing approach that pervades the discourse. I related this to Dawkins in The God Delusion and the Bible. For a full list of my posts responding to The God Delusion, see my category Dawkins.

     

  • Dawkins and the Jewish Lobby

    Ah, that’s a provocative title, isn’t it?

    [tag]Richard Dawkins[/tag] is setting up an organization to help lobby for atheists. Despite my many serious disagreements with him, I don’t think that’s a bad idea, because atheists are viewed very negatively, and I think unfairly so. In fact, in many ways Dawkins himself is unfairly viewed in a negative light.

    But in this Guardian unlimited story, the following paragraph is not going to help, especially here in the United States:

    In an interview with the Guardian, he said: “When you think about how fantastically successful the Jewish lobby has been, though, in fact, they are less numerous I am told – religious Jews anyway – than atheists and [yet they] more or less monopolise American foreign policy as far as many people can see. So if atheists could achieve a small fraction of that influence, the world would be a better place.”

    Now I would put this in perspective simply because Israel is viewed very differently here in the United States than it is in Europe, and the conversation is very different. But to a whole bunch of people I know personally, and a whole bunch more I know of, them’s fightin’ words!

    As soon as you talk about “the Jewish lobby” and claim that they are monopolizing some aspect of American society you’ll be seeing the anti-Semitism charge come up pretty soon after. I’m moderately pro-Israel myself, and I think it’s extremely easy to overstate the influence of Jewish groups on the government. It’s also very easy to see “Jewish groups” where there are only groups with Jewish members.

    All of this combines with a very real anti-semitic movement, and a prejudice that lies just under the surface in many places. I’m assuming that Dawkins is merely taking a more European view and is not himself anti-Semitic. I know many people don’t believe that’s possible, but I have encountered that position and respect it while disagreeing. But such language is going to provide ammunition for his opponents.

    You think I’m overstating it? Joe Carter has already put it in his 33 things post today as “shades of anti-Semitism”. Oh well, I guess it’s fun harvesting questionable quotes from atheist speakers.

  • Is Liberal (or Moderate) Christianity Authentic

    Barry Jones of The Village Atheist has suggested a discussion with me on the issue of the whether my sort of Christianity is authentic. He doesn’t believe it is. After the exchange of a number of comments, we’re going to discuss this here on this blog. He’ll be putting his notes in the comments, but I will promote many of those comments to full posts so that his points get equal attention.

    If anyone spots items that have gotten lost in comments and that should be placed in a regular post, please let me know. Since Barry doesn’t have a blog I would like to make sure that all of the debate gets as close to equal billing as is possible.

    This won’t be a formalized debate. We’re just going to discuss publicly on this blog. Anyone is welcome to join in via the comments, or from your own blogs with trackbacks. I will promote any links to or trackbacks from relevant posts from the comments into a regular post so that you get your incoming links numbers up as well. Note that I will only promote relevant posts.

    I’m going to start by entering three comments from the previous post, the first from Barry, my response, and his response to that. Probably tomorrow, I will respond further to this exchange in a new post.

    First from Barry:

    I genuinely don’t understand why you are so annoyed at the actions of these “Minutemen” in their condemnation of the church’s accommodation of homosexuals. No-one can deny that the Bible, and by inference God himself, is violently opposed to (male) homosexuality (despite the fact that, by creating Man, he must also have created homosexuals.)
    Are not these Minutemen simply obeying God’s proclamations, and is it not hypocritical of you and other Christians to pick and choose which parts of the Bible you wish to observe and which you will sideline? Surely, God’s word is absolute, and if he wished his rules to be modified or muted for the modern world he would have let you know?
    Although I find the anti-gay sentiments of the Christian fundamentalists quite obscene, I have some grudging respect for their willingness to stick to their guns, where you and others like you try to weasle out of what your God actually said, and invent your own version of sanitised Christianity.

    My initial response (backquotes are in italics):

    I genuinely don’t understand why you are so annoyed at the actions of these “Minutemen” in their condemnation of the church’s accommodation of homosexuals.

    The question is, “Which church’s condemnation of homosexuality?” They have a church that does, but the two churches they are protesting disagree.

    No-one can deny that the Bible, and by inference God himself, is violently opposed to (male) homosexuality (despite the fact that, by creating Man, he must also have created homosexuals.)

    No one can deny? That’s interesting, because it appears that there are at least two churches in Columbus, OH, who apparently do deny it. There are several disconnects. First, that the Bible teaches that homosexuality is wrong. There are certainly people who deny this. Second, that by inference, if something is stated in the Bible, it must also be what God thinks. There are those who believe that and those who don’t.

    One of the differences between streams in Christianity is whether theology is founded solely on scripture. The larger portion of the Christian faith does not hold to a purely scriptural foundation.

    Are not these Minutemen simply obeying God’s proclamations, and is it not hypocritical of you and other Christians to pick and choose which parts of the Bible you wish to observe and which you will sideline?

    There is nobody, and I repeat, nobody who actually obeys all the commands of scripture. It would be hypocritical of me to claim that I kept all the commands of scripture and then not to do so. It would be hypocritical of me to accuse someone else of failing to obey scripture, while failing to obey it myself, but since I have done none of those things.

    The charge of hypocrisy must be based on my claimed beliefs. That I fail to live up to someone else’s standards is not a basis for a charge of hypocrisy.

    Surely, God’s word is absolute, and if he wished his rules to be modified or muted for the modern world he would have let you know?

    And why is it that God’s word, in this case as reflected (if they are) in the Bible, must be absolute? Further, why should my understanding of them be absolute?


    Although I find the anti-gay sentiments of the Christian fundamentalists quite obscene, I have some grudging respect for their willingness to stick to their guns, where you and others like you try to weasle out of what your God actually said, and invent your own version of sanitised Christianity.

    It’s quite silly of you, who are not a Christian, to decide what should be my authentic faith. Apparently you have decided that only Biblical literalists who teach “sola scriptura” are to be regarded as authentic Christians. I will assure you that is not so. But more importantly, I follow my faith as I understand it, not as the fundamentalists understand it, nor as you understand it.

    And, if it matters to you, the issue I raised was one of courtesy. Even believing that homosexuality is evil does not give people the right to invade other people’s worship service and disrupt it.

    And finally Barry’s response to that:

    You ask “Which church’s condemnation…”

    I mean, the Church that bases its teachings on the Bible, which I take as the basic definition of “Christian”.

    Yes, you are correct, I do take the view that “only Biblical literalists who teach “sola scriptura” are to be regarded as authentic Christians.” How else can one make a definition of “Christian”, considering that the very name derives from a character in the book? Consider this – what would be the tenets of your faith if there were no Bible? You may well believe in some kind of creator God, who listens to prayers, performs miracles and grants an afterlife to those she deems worthy. But you would have no knowledge of Jesus Christ, or his resurrection, or the Ten Commandments or any of the other Bible stories that sustain your faith. No different, really, to the thousands of other religions around the world, past and present, who believe(d) in similar gods. What distinguishes the Christian faith from all others is its unique holy book, the Bible. This book is where the Christian faith originates; this book defines Christianity.

    For centuries, up to and including this day, the Bible has been promoted by the religious establishment as being the “inerrant word of God” (or some similar phrase), meaning that the Bible – ALL the Bible – is sanctioned by God. Those who wish to dispute this, and argue that certain passages are untrue or irrelevant, should, in my opinion, find a new name for their belief set, and then explain the origins of this “new” religion.

    You say there are questions over whether theology is founded solely on scripture, and that the larger portion of the Christian faith does not hold to a purely scriptural foundation. I dispute this, unless you are talking purely of the Christian “intelligentsia” (who number probably less than 1% of the total). I submit that the average Christian believer, sitting in a pew in Biloxi, or Rio, or Rome , or Seoul, believes 100% that Christianity is founded solely on scripture. However, it as a very restricted subset of scripture that they are exposed to, and a very pervasive and oppressive system that has drummed it into them probably from childhood, carefully skirting over any parts that might give rise to doubts.

    Returning to the central point of the original post, the two churches in Ohio that you mention do not “deny” that the Bible and God are opposed to homosexuality – they can’t, because it’s there in black and white for anyone to read (”If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them.” Lev 20:13). They simply try to ignore it, and try to deflect criticism by emphasising other Bible passages that promote love for all. But the elephant in the room will not go away.

    In closing, I would say that I would not presume to decide for you what should be your faith – that is a personal matter for you. And I do agree that rudeness is never to be condoned, no matter what one’s beliefs.

    . . . and . . .

    One more point I forgot to make:

    You ask: “Which church’s condemnation of homosexuality?”

    You mean there’s more than one Church?? Why?

    I will begin my response from this point in a post, hopefully tomorrow.

  • More on Atheism and Autism

    Bruce Alderman has written some very cogent comments on the earlier post by Joe Carter on this topic and my response. Bruce looks at this from a somewhat different angle. Carter has also written an additional post which Bruce calls a strategic retreat.

    Bruce’s posts are:

    Carter’s follow-up post is Atheism, Autism, and Other Minds (A Clarification) [Note that McAfee Site Advisor continues to report problems with this site, though I continue to use it.].

    I have asked a friend of mine who is a psychologist and an atheist to write a response. Assuming he gets to it (it’s the beginning of the year and he’s a college teacher), I’ll post it here. In his initial comments to me he also focused on what he called serious misunderstanding of autism, rather than misunderstandings of atheism.

  • Are Atheists Autistic?

    Joe Carter has a post at the evangelical outpost [Note: Evangelical Outpost is showing a warning about browser exploit from McAfee Site Advisor. As I was admonished in the comments, I need to give warning. I’ve used the site for years, but that doesn’t mean I’m safe in doing so. Use the link at your own risk.] in which he proposes, with some caveats, that atheists may tend to be less socially aware, particularly aware of other minds, and may tend more toward Aspberger’s Syndrome. He invited readers of his blog to take a test here, which I did, scoring a 30. Since I’m a theist, that puts me close to a counter-example for his thesis.

    I commented there that I thought this approach is more polarizing than helpful, though I would admit is is no more polarizing than the suggestion some atheists have made to me that I hallucinate any experience of God. I don’t mind them doing that.

    In a reply to my own comment there, Joe states [see warning above]:

    About 95% of the atheists I have met seem to be “quarrelsome, socially challenged men.”

    His experience is different from mine. I’ve found Christian apologists to be much like this. I have also found atheist apologists to be like this. In fact, apologists in general tend to be in your face and somewhat quarrelsome. I think that goes with the territory, though I do know some counter-examples in each and every group. Personally, while Dawkins gets on my nerves, I don’t think it’s because he’s socially challenged. I’ve only read his work, and seen him on TV, but he seems reasonably personable for an advocate of a controversial position.

    If there is a correlation, and the problem is a type of “mind-blindness” then it should not be surprising to find that reason-based arguments are ineffective when trying to change their opinion of God. We Christians tend to treat atheism as if it was some form of Enlightenment-era rationalism and provide arguments that appeal to their reason.

    I’m afraid I have seen atheists as much more interested in discussing the arguments for the existence of God than most Christians. I would suggest that, rather than the intellectual arguments being ineffective because of a psychological failing on the part of atheists, they are ineffective because, as proofs of God’s existence, they are, in fact, flawed.

    In my experience, practically all of the arguments for God’s existence make more sense from the position of faith, i.e., I believe I can learn something about God through them, but they are not water-tight. Belief in God involves faith, which does not mean it is totally immune from intellectual examination, but I believe it does mean it’s not totally subject to it.

    I’ve always thought atheism was mostly psychological rather than epistemological. This potential correlation only strengthens that opinion, which is why I think it is worth exploring.

    Again, I would have to disagree. On a purely intellectual level, atheists do quite well. There’s no need to seek psychological reasons. They simply don’t find the arguments convincing. I wonder why that’s so hard to accept?

    For me, while there are pieces of the puzzle provided by arguments for God’s existence, at the core there is a serious leap of faith. That leap was not easy to take, and so I’m not at all surprised that some don’t take it, and some others don’t even believe there is a leap to take, and that I imagined both chasm and leap. Those are all things on which different people can have different views.

  • Embarrassed Again

    I knew when the news of the tragedy at Virginia Tech came out that there would be religious responses that would be obnoxious, and even some that would be downright despicable. It seems that with every tragedy there are uninvolved people available to place blame and to pontificate. I personally have no words that are worth saying to those who have lost a loved one in this tragedy, or for that matter to the Virginia Tech community. They’re going through something I have never experienced.

    I have, however, experienced tragedy, and I know how people use it for their own agendas. When our son died of cancer at age 17, and throughout the five year battle that preceded that event there were people who needed to question us. We were either grieving too much, in which case our faith was weak, or we weren’t grieving enough, and were thus in denial. We weren’t using the right treatment plan, out of the many dozens of non-traditional treatments suggested. Some thought that he would be healed if we just took him to the right church and had the right group pray for him. They couldn’t understand why we didn’t jump up and go where they suggested immediately.

    Then there were those who just looked at us pityingly. My wife and I have taught–and still teach–weekend seminars on prayer. How could we be teaching about prayer, and yet our own son was not healed. For some reason these folks didn’t check what we actually teach, or they would have found that we do not and have never made the claim that prayer should replace medical care, or that there is some certainty of healing through prayer. In fact, we behaved precisely as we teach. We sought the best medical care available, and we maintained a strong prayer life.

    Now the vast majority of our friends and neighbors were wonderful. I’m talking about a tiny minority who were nonetheless quite vocal. I learned how to ignore people. The point here is not what we or anyone else believe. The point is that everyone thinks they have the right to stick their philosophy and opinions into someone else’s decisions and grieving.

    With that in mind, I’m going to comment on a couple of “Christian” responses to the Virginia Tech tragedy. Now if the bereaved want to sound off in any way they wish, I’m not going to jump in, but these are responses from people outside. They make me embarrassed to be a Christian. I’m never embarrassed to be a follower of Jesus; just sometimes the name “Christian” gets so horribly besmirched by this type of comment.

    The first is a comment by Dinesh D’Souza:

    To no one’s surprise, Dawkins has not been invited to speak to the grieving Virginia Tech community. What this tells me is that if it’s difficult to know where God is when bad things happen, it is even more difficult for atheism to deal with the problem of evil. The reason is that in a purely materialist universe, immaterial things like good and evil and souls simply do not exist. For scientific atheists like Dawkins, Cho’s shooting of all those people can be understood in this way–molecules acting upon molecules.

    Now that paragraph is wrong in so many ways. I’ve recently responded to Dawkins’ book The God Delusion (see category “The God Delusion” on the sidebar), and while I have many disagreements with Dawkins, something that should surprise no one, I don’t see D’souza’s characterization as at all accurate. On the surface, yes. Dawkins is a materialist. But simply explaining everything as molecules acting on molecules, well, not so much. In addition, however much some Christians might like it to be so, Dawkins is not the sole atheist on the planet. Atheists work and hope, live and learn, love their families, make moral decisions, in short, they do the things that everyone else does. And there’s no evidence to suggest that they make worse neighbors.

    But it’s not the wrongness of all this that embarrasses me. It’s the insertion of this religious (or philosophical) goal. I haven’t read any such, but if an atheist writer used the tragedy to announce gleefully that this proved there is no God, I would find that offensive as well. Let the tragedy be what it is. Especially let’s not use it to demonize any group of people. I’d also like to call attention to this very moving response (HT: Dispatches from the Culture Wars).

    Then there’s Dr. Grady McMurtry, president of Creation Worldview Ministries, who believes that teaching evolution was the cause:

    . . . people should not be surprised when mass shootings occur, such as the one on the Blacksburg university campus on Monday. “And at Virginia Tech, what do we have?” he asks rhetorically. “We have a person who, unfortunately, thought that humans had no more value than cats and dogs — and unfortunately, I think, probably felt the same way about themselves.” (source HT: Pandagon)

    Probably felt that way about themselves? Does he think it’s appropriate to be gratuitously insulting at this point? I’ve discussed this issue before and am not going to revisit it now. All I’m interested in at the moment is the way the tragedy is being used to push agendas, and not in a kind way.

    The agenda we should be pushing–and yes, I have an agenda as does everyone–is simple love and respect. I’m a long ways away and there’s remarkably little I can do, but I can speak with respect of the people involved, no matter what their religion or lack thereof. I can see them as human beings seeking a way to deal with the tragedy that has struck their lives. I can refrain from pretending I possess a one stop answer to their problems.

    I think that’s what Jesus would do in these circumstances.

  • God Delusion and The Bible

    The major complaint that I have about the treatment of the Bible in The God Delusion is that it is somewhat superficial. Particularly in the section on the Old Testament, Dawkins merely points out problems that we should recognize as real with scriptures. (For another approach see Who’s Afraid of the Old Testament God?.) I would say that someone who can read Judges 17-21 or Numbers 31 without serious concern has a problem with their moral compass.

    Passages such as those are a key reason why I do not look at the Bible using the “boy scout manual” metaphor. The Bible is almost completely unlike a boy scout manual or the instruction book for your car or an appliance. It is, instead the story of people experiencing God. (See my essay Inspiration, Inerrancy, and Authority.)

    I do not believe the inspiration of the Bible can be successfully argued outside the concept of the community. That doesn’t mean that there is nothing that can be said for or against. It simply means that acceptance of the Bible as a source of authority, and appropriate use of it must occur in a community of faith.

    One might expect that this would be an area in which I would spend the greatest portion of my time, since it is my specialty, but it would be hard for me to emphasize enough how un-earthshaking Dawkins’ arguments about the Bible actually are to me. They do bring up a serious point in terms of Christian education, however. There are many, many Christians who don’t know about these things and have never taken them into consideration in their own understanding of the Bible. They loudly proclaim that they keep every command in the Bible and do everything the Bible says, but very fortunately they don’t actually do that.

    Preachers and teachers who don’t want to deal with the difficult questions have a tendency to read only those portions of scripture that are easy to understand and will comfort the congregation. Some versions of the lectionary, for example, leave off the last two verses of Psalm 137 in reading because they will obviously disturb some members of the congregation, or don’t appear to fit with the rest of the reading. But one needs to face the fact that the did fit to the original author.

    I have blogged on this topic before: Slavery and the Bible, Biblical Decision Making, Slavery and the Bible Condensed, and The Danger of Unchanging Truth.

    One last thing, and this is addressed more to my fellow Christians, especially moderates and liberals, than to Dawkins or other atheists. It is not sufficient to tell someone that they should not take the Bible literally. There are many varieties of not taking the Bible literally. Take Numbers 31, for example. If you say not to take it literally, you might be suggesting that the story never happened, or that it did happen, but that Moses imagined God’s commands, or that the entire story was intended as an allegory (meaning what?), or perhaps that it’s historical but not normative. Again, I’ve blogged on this before here and here.

  • The Complexity of the Creator

    The attack on moderation, or excluding the middle (broadly conceived) and the assumption that this is all there is are the two key points of disagreement, from which most everything else follows.

    The assumption that this physical universe is all that exists is illustrated in the discussion of the multiverse theory (pp. 145-147). Now do not take this too far. I’m actually attracted by the multiverse theory as he expresses it. It’s obviously speculation, but it’s enjoyable speculation at least, and may even point in the right direction in years to come. My knowledge of physics is too small to go any further than that.

    But for me the question still remains–who is the creator? At some point you do have to get to the question of why there is something rather than nothing. The environment in which the universes of the multiverse exist, such as to be subjected to natural selection must exist, and thus you only push the question back another step. Now, instead of asking where the universe comes from, you must ask where the multiverse comes from. The universe is clearly not nearly so universal as we thought (if these speculations are true). It is naturally caused by the multiverse.

    This should be familiar to those who have studied arguments for the existence of God. The question frequently comes back to where God comes from. But that is the point of that particular category of argument. Because nothing else is self-existent, we look for a self-existent source for other things, because it seems pretty clear that something must be self-existent. (Of course it may indeed be “turtles all the way down!”)

    At the same time if we admit that something is self-existent we have already taken a step beyond anything we understand within the physical world. We’re imagining something that’s so far out of the box that it’s, well, out of the universe, or perhaps even out of the multiverse. At this point, I think I’m making one of the best arguments for agnosticism. Whatever is the ultimate cause or “ground of all being” (Tillich), is not something we can measure according to the standards we know.

    Thus I find it totally irrelevant, though interesting, for Dawkins to claim that God must be “very very complex and presumably irreducibly so!” Well, yes. And if theists in general were asserting that God had first evolved into what he is and then created the universe, that would be relevant. But this is a clear example of Dawkins assumption that even God must be natural. He first defines God into the natural universe and then argues against him, but that is simply a complex way of assuming one’s conclusions. As it is, it kind of misses the point.

    What theists are saying is that there simply is no natural force that can produce the creator, period, so the creator is something that is outside of our physical universe, who operates according to very different laws.

    For a contrary view more conservative than mine, see Christianity and Secularism by Elgin Hushbeck, Jr. (My company publishes that book.)

  • Points of Agreement

    [Continuing my series responding to The God Delusion. The starting entry is From the Land of the Deluded.]

    It may surprise many readers to know that I have a number of points of agreement with Dawkins. Since I have blogged about many of these things before, I’m only going to give a basic list with an occasional link to other writing I have done on the subject.

    First, I accept the theory of evolution, and I even appreciate the description Dawkins gives about it. For an understanding of atheistic evolution (and I believe the adjective is not unfair in his case), I recommend The Blind Watchmaker (link to my brief review). But I also recommend it to anyone who simply wants to understand the simple power of variation plus natural selection to produce amazing things. It’s wonderfully well written and I thoroughly enjoyed reading it. I even understood Gould’s punctuated equilibria much better after I read it! (Gould is one of my favorite science authors of all time, but he tends to be more wordy and is easier to misunderstand than Dawkins.)

    Second, while I know that many Christians have been offended by the title and the tone of the book, I’m afraid I don’t see the point. I titled my opening entry From the Land of the Deluded. Why? Is it because I believe I am, in fact, deluded? No. I just find it amusing. What is puzzling to me is that Christians are concerned that an atheist calls them deluded. If he is, in fact, an atheist, as what else could he regard them? If he is an atheist he doesn’t share many basic assumptions with them. What possible offense can his judgment have on them? I’m a believer in dialog, and I think dialog needs to be courteous. But dialog also needs to be clear. We need to know what each party to the discussion actually believes, otherwise we cannot possibly hope to come to a real understanding.

    Third, I deplore the negative stereotyping of atheists in American or any other culture. I do not believe that atheists are by nature immoral any more than anyone else. I would have no problem voting for an atheist for public office.

    Fourth, I do not believe in indoctrination. I do believe in religious education. I advocate this distinction in churches. A child should know about more than his birth faith and should have the right to make an informed choice. This means hearing about other faiths and about the option of no faith, and I would provide this training in Sunday School. Note that I don’t mean teaching from one of the little “Different Religions and How to Convert Them” kind of books, but from materials that positively present the views of the particular group. I blogged about this previously here.

    Fifth, I’m pretty happy both with the Zeitgeist commandments enumerated on page 263 and 264, and with Dawkins’s amendments to the same. It’s perhaps odd that coming from such different positions, we look for such similar things in society, but I think it is a good indication that moderation is a possible option.

    Sixth, I do believe that religious beliefs should be subject to challenge, and I agree pretty much down the line with his comments on the Danish cartoons story (p. 24ff). I blogged about it previously here.

    Sixth, last but not least, I must call attention to the footnote on page 321, quoting Ann Coulter: “I defy any of my co-religionists to tell me they do not laugh at the idea of Dawkins burning in hell.” Well, I have not read Ann’s book, so assuming Dawkins has quoted her correctly, I will say simply that I do not laugh at any such thing, nor do I regard it as a Christian attitude for anyone to laugh at the prospect of anyone else burning in hell. (Hell itself is another worthwhile topic, but I’m not going there right now.)

    When there is conflict on issues such as this, I am in favor of religious freedom. I wish I had come away from The God Delusion with the feeling that Dawkins also favors freedom, but I’m not certain. He seems to have a certain tendency to assume that he is right (not necessarily a bad thing), and to assume that he can also make a better choice for everyone else, which I think is a bad thing.