Dawkins and objective morality

On this date exactly one year ago I posted an article called Stuck in the Matrix. Don’t worry, I don’t remember it either. Here’s my Wednesday Rewind reword for this year.

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Basil Fawlty (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

A blessing from Richard Dawkins:

Basil Fawlty, British television’s hotelier from hell created by the immortal John Cleese, was at the end of his tether when his car broke down and wouldn’t start. He gave it fair warning, counted to three, gave it one more chance, and then acted. “Right! I warned you. You’ve had this coming to you!” He got out of the car, seized a tree branch and set about thrashing the car within an inch of its life. Of course we laugh at his irrationality. Instead of beating the car, we would investigate the problem. Is the carburetor flooded? Are the sparking plugs or distributor points damp? Has it simply run out of gas? Why do we not react in the same way to a defective man: a murderer, say, or a rapist? Why don’t we laugh at a judge who punishes a criminal, just as heartily as we laugh at Basil Fawlty?… Isn’t the murderer or the rapist just a machine with a defective component?… [D]oesn’t a truly scientific, mechanistic view of the nervous system make nonsense of the very idea of responsibility…?

Why is it that we humans find it almost impossible to accept such conclusions?…  Presumably because mental constructs like blame and responsibility, indeed evil and good, are built into our brains by millennia of Darwinian evolution…. My dangerous idea is that we shall eventually grow out of all this and even learn to laugh at it, just as we laugh at Basil Fawlty when he beats his car. But I fear it is unlikely that I shall ever reach that level of enlightenment.

Yep, I know you know it’s ridiculous, but he is really claiming that rationally speaking, when it comes to belief in evolution, we should treat evil the same way we treat Basil’s response to his car breaking down; admit there’s a problem and try to fix it, but certainly not punish it! As Dawkins says elsewhere, people doing evil is just them ‘dancing to their DNA’; morality is a social construct, as if we’re actually living in the Matrix and simply don’t know that this whole idea of good and evil is all a lie.

According to Dawkins we should be laughing about 9/11 where terrorists attempt to punish America. We should laugh at how silly the concept of prison is. We should be laughing about Jimmy Savile. We should be laughing about the many people who go hungry every day. We should be laughing about the gang rape and murder in India.

I clearly disagree with him. I expect you do too. But…if humanity has come about as a result of evolution, then morality definitely is our own social construct. In fact, we should look forward to the day that we lose it through the process of evolution. Dawkins is being consistent, so should be applauded for it (although why he should be applauded is a problem because if there’s no evil to be punished, surely there’s no good to be applauded. Discuss).

But…

I can tell you with 100% certainty that I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that morality is true. And if that’s the case, then clearly Dawkins’ theory must be incorrect; in other words, logic dictates that we need God.

The irony of it all is that Dawkins doesn’t believe himself. Dawkins has a daughter and if she were raped I don’t think for a second that he would ever simply say: ‘Don’t worry, you have a defective component. Let’s get that looked at.’ I fully expect that he would want that rapist tortured for eternity for what he did.

Related articles

• Richard Dawkins (hownottobeachristian.wordpress.com)
• Infinite Regress: Dawkins on Theology (ofdustandkings.com)

An atheist: ‘Christianity is the answer to Africa’s problems’

Matthew Parris and Jonathan Dimbleby (Photo credit: Pickersgill Reef)

Matthew Parris is an atheist. He’s so much of an atheist that an article he’s written has been published on Richard Dawkins’ own website.

Now, Richard Dawkins, for those who might not know him, is the guy who hates belief in God so much that I once heard him in a debate against Tony Blair, of all people, arguing that the cause of all suffering in this world was a direct result of people’s religious beliefs.

Firstly, clearly that’s not true. But secondly, it’s therefore interesting that on his own website he’s published this article, entitled As an atheist, I truly believe Africa needs God. Here’s a great quote:

Now a confirmed atheist, I’ve become convinced of the enormous contribution that Christian evangelism makes in Africa: sharply distinct from the work of secular NGOs, government projects and international aid efforts. These alone will not do. Education and training alone will not do. In Africa Christianity changes people’s hearts. It brings a spiritual transformation. The rebirth is real. The change is good.

I used to avoid this truth by applauding – as you can – the practical work of mission churches in Africa. It’s a pity, I would say, that salvation is part of the package, but Christians black and white, working in Africa, do heal the sick, do teach people to read and write; and only the severest kind of secularist could see a mission hospital or school and say the world would be better without it. I would allow that if faith was needed to motivate missionaries to help, then, fine: but what counted was the help, not the faith.

But this doesn’t fit the facts. Faith does more than support the missionary; it is also transferred to his flock. This is the effect that matters so immensely, and which I cannot help observing.

Well, there you go. The article on Dawkins’ site is here, and the original’s here (although you need an account to view it). The place I found out about it all is here.

Related articles

• Breaking news: Richard Dawkins doesn’t like religion or ‘Islamic barbarians’. Well, he kept that one quiet (blogs.telegraph.co.uk)
• Book: The God Delusion (jameskennedybeijing.wordpress.com)
• -Richard Dawkins Loses Debate Against Former Archbishop Rowan Williams (answersforthefaith.com)
• Fancy going to the atheist church? (samisaacson.wordpress.com)

Scientology…ssshhhhh

Protest sign addressing issues of Homosexuality and Scientology (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The latest book shouting about how Scientology is some massive fiction story has been released…but not in the UK. UK libel laws run on the concept of ‘innocent until proven guilty’, which puts the burden of proof on the publisher of Going Clear, Transworld, for any claims it makes, and Transworld has said that the book’s content is ‘not robust enough’.

Hm. A bit disappointing. Probably mostly for the people who’ve already bought a copy and were hoping for something a bit more robust than ‘not enough’.

Of course, the literary human rights organisation English PEN thinks we should be able to write literally (!) anything in the name of free speech, and they perhaps have a point, but where would that leave us with Christianity? The God of the Bible, called by Richard Dawkins ‘the most unpleasant character in all of fiction’, is surely a target ripe for people to shoot at and rip apart until He collapses under all the claims that He’s been made up, isn’t He?

I suppose the only thing that could change that would be if He actually stepped into creation and left his mark on history, perhaps by having four independent biographers write about his incredible life, death and resurrection. Ha! Fat chance of that happening. That would be a miracle demanding life change wouldn’t it?!

Related articles

• Why can’t we read the Scientology book Going Clear in the UK? (guardian.co.uk)
• In new Scientology tell-all book, Tom Cruise explains his “special powers” (io9.com)
• Transworld cancels Lawrence Wright’s Scientology title (telegraph.co.uk)
• ‘Scientologists believe the Holocaust was planned and carried out by psychiatrists’ (sott.net)
• Losing faith? Belgium to charge Church of Scientology with fraud and extortion (richarddawkins.net)

Atheists: do you have the faith for evolution?

PhotonQ-Homer’ s Evolution Theory (Photo credit: PhOtOnQuAnTiQuE)

Probably one of the most often-used comment on this blog from atheists goes something like this:

You’re a Christian? Doesn’t that mean you don’t even believe in evolution? Ha ha ha, hey everyone! Look at this clown! Not only does he not believe in atheism, he doesn’t even believe in evolution, which everyone knows is a fact! What an idiot.

Well, atheist, just in case you still don’t realise that evolution is not, in fact, a fact, I think you may need to read a book written by an atheist. Here’s a little quote from it:

Even though writers like Michael Behe and Stephen Meyer are motivated at least in part by their religious beliefs, the empirical arguments they offer against the likelihood that the origin of life and its evolutionary history can be fully explained by physics and chemistry are of great interest in themselves. Another skeptic, David Berlinski, has brought out these problems vividly without reference to the design inference. Even if one is not drawn to the alternative of an explanation by the actions of a designer, the problems that these iconoclasts pose for the orthodox scientific consensus should be taken seriously. They do not deserve the scorn with which they are commonly met. It is manifestly unfair.

Hm. So why is he not happy to force every piece of evidence into the evolutionary theory? In his own words:

My skepticism is not based on religious belief or on a belief in any definite alternative. It is just a belief that the available scientific evidence, in spite of the consensus of scientific opinion, does not in this matter rationally require us to subordinate the incredulity of common sense.

[D]oubts about the reductionist account of life go against the dominant scientific consensus, but that consensus faces problems of probability that I believe are not taken seriously enough, both with respect to the evolution of life forms through accidental mutation and natural selection and with respect to the formation from dead matter of physical systems capable of such evolution.

So there you go. It’s called Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False, and of course it’s on Amazon and elsewhere.

Scientific proof that Dawkins is a sitcom character?

Richard Dawkins in this episode. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Richard Dawkins. The very name strikes fear into every Christian, or so he’d have us believe. A man who has made a living out of being angry at people who go to church, and who takes himself more seriously than anyone else on the planet. Any attempt to describe him makes him sound like a character off a sitcom; Ned Flanders is one neighbour, and Richard Dawkins is the other, whose life work is to get angry and tell everyone how stupid Flanders is, while good ol’ Ned just keeps on being happy and nice.

So I was watching some cooking programme on Channel 4 on Sunday evening when Dawkins’ voice greeted me, advertising his new TV show. I don’t want to spoil the surprise here, but I have a sneaky suspicion it’s something about how God doesn’t exist and that Dawkins hates Him anyway. But the trailer started with Dawkins saying something along the lines of:

Now that more people than ever are leaving religion behind, something something something.

I’d be genuinely interested to know what evidence Dawkins has seen that ‘more people than ever are leaving religion behind’, or whatever it was he actually said. Because last I heard people still have their faith. Certainly both Islam and Christianity are growing so I reckon Dawkins is wrong.

If anything, I reckon he’s looking at some census or something which would only capture whether people say they have faith or not, and that’s definitely not the same thing. A couple of generations ago most people in the UK would probably have said they were Christians despite the fact they didn’t actually believe it…so maybe Dawkins should change that advert to ‘now people have admitted they don’t believe in this stuff…’

Well, through his work I hope Dawkins becomes a Christian and gets happy about something. At least he’s not a hypocrite, he certainly acts as if there’s no God, so let’s give him that.

The meaning of an atheist’s life

The single biggest problem atheists are presented with is that they have faith in something that they know isn’t true. Here’s how it looked in a recent conversation I had:

Atheist: You believe in an invisible god, that’s just the same as believing in an invisible unicorn – you can’t disprove its existence, therefore it must exist.

Me: No, I’ve met God, therefore I know He exists.

Atheist: That’s silly.

True story. But the analysis isn’t so easy. If I have met God Christianity is definitely true and atheism is definitely false (and so is belief in the invisible unicorn). If I haven’t met God, both Christianity and atheism may be true, because not having met someone doesn’t make them cease to exist.

So the question for atheists is really: without evidence of a supreme supernatural Being(s), is the logical conclusion to attempt to meet the Being(s), or to believe that there is none?

Atheists like Richard Dawkins violently believe that there is none, but they’ve encountered a pr0blem: what about morality? If we are nothing more than mutated animals who have an ability to communicate about imaginary things then morality is not objective; it is no more ‘right’ to stay faithful to one partner than it is ‘right’ to tell the truth or to laugh at someone’s misfortune.

Without objective morality it’s impossible to discern whether the Holocaust was good or bad. That’s a problem, because people just know that the Holocaust was bad.

Don’t worry, though. Some atheists have settled down to work to figure out how we can have objective morality and a meaning to life without the existence of God, and they’ve come up with an answer. Ready? To get meaning from your life, pick from one or more of the following:

• take drugs to improve your mood
• get lots of money
• buy lots of stuff
• watch lots of telly

Having done at least one of the above I think it’s fair to say that they all suck, so giving Christianity a go is easily the best idea an atheist will have all day.

HT

Nice atheists are silly

Dawkins: Debates Make us Look Bad (Photo credit: Templestream)

I think I must be the biggest fan in the world of Richard Dawkins’ logic. I say this based on the fact that although I disagree with him on almost everything, I’m using my own definition of the word ‘logic’, and using a sample size of only one: me.

Think that sounds silly? Good. Me too.

So, to add to the silliness, have a look at an article written by Dawkins himself in which he shows that atheists are more generous than Christians.

Here’s a couple of key facts he uses to convince us:

• giving to churches or faith-based charities doesn’t count as generosity
• giving to atheist charities (such as the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science) does count as generosity

Oh right. There we go then. I don’t think I need to say anything to that, do I?

But that’s not my biggest gripe with his article, or with his general logic expressed here. What does Dawkins actually mean when he talks about being ‘good’? I think you’ll find that under the atheist worldview (particularly Dawkins’ extreme version of it) we’re all results of chance and random mutation, so ‘good’ is simply something our DNA has created from itself, and therefore is changeable at will.

So, if you’re an atheist, why not keep your money and spend it on yourself? Stop being nice and charitable because you only live once, and any emotions you feel for other people are only biological results of your heritage and nothing to be considered.

Thankfully Christianity knows what goodness looks like, and his name is Jesus.

If you’re logical, you should be a Christian

English: Photo of Bart D. Ehrman taken following the Greer-Heard Point-Counterpoint Forum at the New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

If Wikipedia is to be believed, Bart Ehrman is a New Testament scholar who became a Christian as a teenager before ultimately changing his views and becoming agnostic (read: atheist) due to the problems of evil and suffering. He’s now pretty well-known among apologists as a more reasonable version of Richard Dawkins.

It’s no surprise, therefore, to see him in a debate about the existence of Jesus, who he states was a real human being, but is not God. Andrew Wilson over at WYTM has handily picked out the most useful quotes, so I’m not just going to copy-paste them here, but here’s the summary for you time-starved individuals who can’t be bothered to even read a summary:

• Where multiple unconnected individuals recall the same version of events, the likelihood of it being true increases exponentially; they couldn’t have all made it up.
• The bias of these accounts has no bearing on the situation (in any case, all accounts of the truth are biased to a certain extent).
• Therefore, Jesus Christ, attested to in multiple sources both in and not in the Bible, both Christian and non-Christian, must have existed.

The problem for Bart Ehrman, it would seem, comes up when you use his own logic on Jesus’ miracles. Here are Andrew Wilson’s words:

The fact that [these multiple sources] provided independent, multiple attestation of all sorts of events (healings, multiplication of loaves, casting out demons, the empty tomb and the resurrection appearances) would clearly indicate that the writers of those sources had not invented them. Interesting.

Presumably, the fact that these events both involved “miracles” and supported Christian belief might bother Bart Ehrman, and lots of other New Testament scholars, on the basis of their materialist presuppositions. But that would not stop them from having happened. As historians, the variety of independent sources available should lead them, and us, to conclude that these things were not invented. That this might be inconvenient for the secularist’s worldview is irrelevant, historiographically.

So there you have it. Bart Ehrman, like most secular moderns, does not believe Jesus rose from the dead. But, on the basis of his own argument, he probably should.

Indeed.

You can’t give it away

The translators of the King James Version of the Holy Bible intentionally preserved, in Early Modern English, archaic pronouns and verb endings that had already begun to fall out of spoken use. This enabled the English translators to convey the distinction between the 1st, 2nd and 3rd person singular and plural verb forms of the original Hebrew and Greek sources. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

This one might be a touch weird, but bear with me. Here are the facts:

• Every school’s getting a copy of the King James Bible if Michael Gove’s plan goes ahead.
• Some people were cross that the cost of this (£370,000) was going to be paid for by taxpayers.
• So some Tory donors are paying for it.

And here are my reactions:

• The Bible’s terrific, and everyone should have access to it.
• The KJV isn’t my favourite translation, but it’s alright.
• £370,000 really isn’t very much in the grand scheme of things (around 6p per taxpayer).
• A lot of schools already have copies of the Bible so won’t need another one.
• This particular Bible has a gold ‘presented by’ message right on the spine, which reminds me of King Herod’s Temple in Jerusalem (Jesus didn’t really like that).

Others have reacted to it, but let me point you towards a couple. David Mitchell has his own unique take on this which made me chuckle. Richard Dawkinshas a different take on it (as you’d expect), which I find a bit silly really. I’ll explain why.

 For a start, it’s in the Science section of the newspaper. I don’t get that at all.

Secondly, Dawkins’ issue seems not to be with ‘Giving a Bible’ vs. ‘Not giving a Bible’, but instead ‘The KJV’ vs. ‘Everything else in the world’.

Thirdly, Dawkins’ funny little story about self-professing Christians not being able to identify the first book of the Bible is misleading; (1) I wasn’t asked so they clearly missed some in their poll, (2) a lot of people who say they’re Christians may well not be, and (3) when Dawkins was asked to give the title of Charles Darwin’s evolution book on live radio he couldn’t get past the first couple of words. Whoopsie.

Fourthly, Dawkins’ assumption that Christians think the Bible’s a moral guidebook is simply wrong – it’s the story of God’s redemptive work for humanity. It’s all about grace!

Fifthly, the following [annotated] quote is actually quite good:

In the words of Paul, the inventor of Christianity (or whoever really wrote the Epistle to the Hebrews [very unlikely to have been Paul so I’m not sure where he’s got that from]), “without shedding of blood, there is no remission”. And the scapegoat couldn’t be just anybody. The sin was so great that only his son (or God himself, depending on your Trinitarian theology [the Christian theology would say Jesus is both]) would do. It was necessary for God to come “down” personally to Earth and have himself tortured and executed, after being “betrayed” (though why it was a betrayal since getting himself executed was the main purpose of the visit, is never explained, nor is the millennia-long vendetta against Jews as “Christ-killers” [the Bible’s pretty clear that things can be against God’s moral will yet still aligned to God’s sovereign will; Dawkins needs to do his homework]).

Whatever else the Bible might be – and it really is a great work of literature – it is not a moral book and young people need to learn that important fact because they are very frequently told the opposite. The examples I have quoted are the tip of a very large and very nasty iceberg. Not a bad way to find out what’s in a book is to read it, so I say go to it. But does anybody, even Gove, seriously think they will?

Good challenge, Richy Rich, let’s read the Bible!

The greatest show on earth #thehump

 

Eurovision song contest (Photo credit: kjelljoran)

Yes, I know, Richard Dawkins would have us believe that godless creation is The Greatest Show on Earth, but the truth is that Eurovision is.

Eurovision: the most watched non-sporting competition in the world. And it’s on tomorrow evening.

It’s at times an unbelievable showcase of Europe’s varied music scene; I can’t remember the last time Germany didn’t put in a heavy metal or dark hip-hop band, and Eastern Europe’s addiction to club music is contagious.

It’s also the most unexpected version of political you can imagine; countries that in any other situation hate one another’s guts vote for one another every single year, and Azerbaijan (this year’s hosts) went to extreme lengths to simply black out the screen during Armenia’s performance, and arrested people who voted for them. Epic.

And the UK has this magic way of simultaneously finding Eurovision a living joke while really wanting to win, and puts in some of the most odd performers our country can muster: Andrew Lloyd-Webber, Blue (remember how Eurovision was meant to be their springboard back to fame? Ha!) and of course #thehump Engelbert Humperdink, a man I genuinely thought was a fictional character until two weeks ago. Thanks Princess Bride.

Anyway, if you’re not busy enough cheering on England against Norway tomorrow evening, or just want something to switch over to beforehand, during halftime, and afterwards, why not have a little look at the second largest flagpole in the world?!

Come on Russia!

And, while we’re at it, who can believe that Jedward are back again?!