Beyond science versus religion

MAMMON, GOD OF THIS WORLD

2009-11-02T15:03:00.000-08:00

I remember vividly the day I discovered that the God of this world is not Jehovah, still less the Christian God of Love. It's Mammon.

It was over a quarter of a century ago, in downtown Sao Paolo. Not my most favorite city. Maybe a higher percentage of grey to green than in any other major metropolis. It's not usually cold there, but one month a few years later when it got quite chilly, the homeless were dying of hypothermia at around five a night. Not that anyone gave a shit. It's that kind of town.

Late one afternoon I had wandered into the heart of the business district. I was on a big avenue. I forget which. Maybe it was Avenida dos Bandeirantes. The Bandeirantes, literal meaning "banner followers", were gangs of Portuguese who went hunting for slaves. That would have been appropriate.

All along each side of the avenue were the Brazilian headquarters of all the great multinational corporations. Massive towers, forty, fifty, sixty floors. Out of curiosity, I went into one. Inside was a vast atrium, reaching up to a height of maybe eight or ten floors. At the back, a bank of bronze-doored elevators. In the middle, an immense statue, Atlas holding up the globe or something of the kind. And that was it. The rest was vacant space.

At first I was puzzled. Why such a waste of space? They could have put tiers of offices in there. They were businesses, weren't they? Business are supposed to be streamlined, functionally efficient. I mean it's a dog-eat-dog jungle out there. Isn't it? Where the weak and wasteful go to the wall. That's free-market capitalism--isn't it? They surely can't have been fooling us all this time. I mean, leave aside the cost of construction, just think how much it must cost to maintain them at an even temperature summer and winter.

I looked inside the next one. The same, or very similar. As were almost all of the towers along that avenue. Sometimes there was no statue. Sometimes there was a humongous chandelier. Sometimes the elevators were off to the side, or there was a big concierge desk. In some the atrium was higher than in others. But in almost all of them there was this same reckless use or abuse of space. Why?

Then I realized. These places were not offices--they were temples. They were using space just like cathedrals once did, to invoke awe, awe of a deity who could afford to be so wasteful, who could inspire his followers to undertake such massive, functionally useless undertakings. Well, we're not building cathedrals any more. Haven't been for quite a while. Except for poor old Gaudi's Sagrada Familia, still struggling to be born, 126 years and counting, the very last of these religious dinosaurs. That have been replaced, world-wide, by Temples of Mammon, god of lucre, greed and material things.

Our Four Horsemen, mounted on their rusty Rosinantes, are, just like the Knight of the Woeful Countenance himself, tilting at ghosts of their own imagination. There are no longer supernatural giants threatening the freedom of "free-thinkers"; there are only the material mills of commerce grinding people into profit. Of course, lip-service is still paid to the Old Gods. Large majorities in the U.S. (and somewhat smaller ones in the rest of the industrial west) still describe themselves as Christian, and doubtless believe, quite sincerely, that this still means something. Actually it means about as much as does modern China calling itself communist.

The parallel between China and America is indeed stunning. Here you used to have two countries with what were supposed to be diametrically opposed religions. We followed the religion of Jesus, China followed the religion of Marx (whose St. Paul was Mao-Zedong). Now we've both of us sold out to Mammon. But neither of us will admit it. Mammon is the God Whose Name May Not Be Spoken. It is too holy. He can only be worshipped under an alias. Doesn't matter what that alias is. Just as long as your heart is in the right place. That is, into material things.

Now we’ll go back and finish describing the bind into which the dramatic changes of the last two centuries threw the majority of human kind who didn’t benefit from those changes.

IN A MERE THREE LIFFETIMES

2009-10-18T16:07:00.000-07:00

Time to put things in context. What hardly anybody ever does.

Let's begin with a thought experiment. Imagine you are a citizen of Washington (or London, or Paris) in the year 1800. There are no trains, cars, planes--not even bicycles. There are no steamships or submarines. There are no cell-phones--no phones, period. There is no gas, no electricity, no running water. There are no dishwashers, washers-and-dryers, refrigerators, no computers, radios, TVs, movies. No high-rises, no freeways, hardly any roads worthy of the name.

Now imagine yourself suddenly transported back a couple of thousand years, to the Roman republic. How strange would you feel? Answer, not very, certainly no more than if you'd been moved, in your own time, to somewhere else on earth--Turkey, say, or China. Maybe even less so, for if you were well-educated you'd already speak the language, or some of it; the pronunciation would throw you at first, but you'd soon figure it out. You'd miss a few things: printing presses, firearms, clocks. But really not that much. Clothes would be different, but you'd expect that, and be more familiar, through historical paintings, with Roman wear than with the clothes of contemporary China or Turkey. Most everyday things would be the same: means of transport, weapons (firearms excepted), basic tools, household equipment, building materials. The way of life would not have been startlingly different; both cultures employed slavery, both had forms of republican government. Indeed, if our time traveler had been a politician, he would have felt perfectly at home in the Roman senate; for the Washingtonian at least, the republican sentiments would have mirrored those heard at home, often even in the same words; early C19 pols loved to quote Latin dicta, and indeed often saw themselves as spiritual heirs of what Rome was before it became corrupted.

Now suppose you were a Roman of the second century BC making the reverse journey. You might encounter slightly more strangeness, in that the languages would be new and unknown to you, and firearms would be as scary as they were to native Americans or Pacific islanders on first encounter. On the negative side you'd notice marked deterioration in road-building and plumbing. But again, the shocks would be no greater than you'd expect to receive from a barbarous culture of your own time. You'd adjust. Pretty soon you'd blend in.

Now imagine our C19 traveler suddenly projected into our own time. Brought forward, not two thousand years, but a mere tenth part of that. Given our biblical span of threescore years and ten, that's just three lifetimes. Given the pace of change that had always obtained, you'd expect only the most trivial of changes in so brief a spell.

Instead, you'd find a world totally unrecognizable, filled with artifacts and ideas and behaviors not just new, but utterly incomprehensible to you. Would you survive? If you did, would you keep your sanity? I very much doubt it. You and your Roman alter ego would be equally unable to cope with our world, where almost every step would leave you facing some horrendous new mystery.

The world changed more in those three lifetimes than during any other period in the history or prehistory of humankind.

Obviously, the changes themselves were due to changes in energy supply. Until the early C19, humans had depended on only four sources of energy: wind, water, animals and humans themselves. Wind could be used only for sailing ships and grinding grain, water only for grinding grain. Everything else--construction, transport, agriculture--depended on human or animal power.

Then, in quick succession, came coal and oil, unleashing a cascade of new technologies, mutating into electrical power (which, once harnessed, could exploit wind and water too). But of course you can't just change technology and not expect everything else to change with it.

There was a massive increase in material wealth. Along with this came equally massive shifts in the distribution of wealth, power and prestige, as well as in sheer numbers. At the time of the Roman republic, world population is estimated at 200 million. By 1800, it had more than tripled. But that was nothing. In the three lifetimes between then and now, it grew sevenfold, from 900 million to nearly 7.000 million. In 1800, 3% of the world's population lived in cities. Today, half the world's population lives in cities.

Don't forget, all of this in just three lifetimes. Well, maybe two lifetimes. Hiram Cronk, born in 1800, old enough to have fought in the War of 1812, died in 1905--a contemporary of Napoleon and Washington who lived long enough to have his funeral filmed. Emilio Navarro, a Puerto Rican baseball player, born in 1905 and thus a contemporary of the last Czar and Teddy Roosevelt, is still alive.

Now the first reaction of most people to all of these changes is, "Wow! PROGRESS!" They think of all the technological goodies that have indeed, in large part, "trickled down" to the working masses. They look at life expectancy: in 1800, that was anything from 25 to 45, depending on who you listen to, but now it's up in the seventies.

Well, that last statistic is a bit misleading. If you made it out of early childhood, and if you were reasonably well-to-do, your life expectancy was just as good in 1800 as it is today. Wikipedia lists the death dates of 60 people born in 1800. More than half--36--lived into their seventies. Of these, another half--18--lived into their eighties. Six of these made it to their nineties, and one (Hiram Cronk, who else?) made his century. What's more, only two of these 60 were women! Since women, on average, live several years longer than men, you can see that claims for the wonders of modern health care are, well, somewhat exaggerated.

And now for the down side.

For a relative few, there was no down side. If you were rich, or clever, or lucky, there was freedom like never before. And since the writing classes clung to or were enmeshed in the coat-tails of the soaring elite, good reports were (if you exclude a few radical soreheads, whiners and losers) just about all you read. I'm sure all four of our professional atheists go with this particular flow. But now they see all their gains threatened by fundamentalists within and without, and they react to that, it explains part of their anger. Because, don't you see, it's so irrational! I mean, to actually march backwards, back into superstitious darkness, just when the world is finally emerging into the clear light of reason!

Well...For the majority of people, any upside was overridden by the down. Whether or not they were better off materially, they were relatively worse off. The gap between rich and poor widened, then shrank as the working class unionized and reaped the accidental bonanza of WWII, then widened again and kept widening, though Democratic and Republican administrations alike. And technology made the gap more unbearable. When the rich man was in his castle, the poor man at his gate had only the vaguest idea what he was missing. Now the poor schmuck living in mortal terror of losing his minimum-wage McJob gets his nose rubbed in it every night--in living color, Life Styles of the Rich and Famous. All the pleasures he's been taught to believe are all he wants or should want are spread out before him, forever out of reach. Like Dives looking up from the fires of hell at Lazarus rollicking in the bosom of the Almighty. Only unlike Dives he's never been rich and unlike Lazarus--if you believe Dawkins et al.--he's got no second life to redress the balance of the first.

Or has he? You see where this is heading. And all we've considered so far is the material side of things. We haven't even considered something that can't be weighed or measured, something that is accordingly discountable by science and reason--means that you can use only on what can be weighed and measured. That thing is, dignity.

Dignity depends, in large measure, on autonomy. Humans cannot have a sense of their own dignity unless they can--insofar as this is feasible--control their own movements. Prior to 1800, and in times and places where there was neither slavery nor serfdom, most people were autonomous agents. If they were not self-employed as farmers, tradesmen, storekeepers, they were apprentices who had every expectation that they would become self-employed. No matter that they might be shoeless, half-starved, that they might have to work all the hours God sends to make ends meet, there was no-one to tell them "Do this" or "Do that", to regulate their time of coming or going, to stand over them with a stop-watch, to reluctantly dole out, at week's end, what was deemed to be "their share" of the profit from their labors. Or to impose on them the (to rational folk penning atheist screeds in comfy studies) wholly unimaginable tedium of the assembly line.

The new work-routines that had been conjured out of thin air by the new technologies reduced their bodies to robots but, cruelly perhaps, did nothing to their lively, questioning, protesting human minds. That's why communism. The founders of the movement dreamed, and the wage-slaves hoped, that communism would restore their lost autonomy. Of course it didn't. It couldn't have, even with goodwill (and you couldn't even expect that, any revolution will ultimately breed monsters). The evils of technology do not stem from selfish, greedy or evil minds, although such minds will naturally come along for the ride. Those evils stem from the nature of the beast. If you are mass-producing for ever-swelling masses, work has to be systematized, regulated, robotized. And the fact that the masses are swelling, that every year there are millions more mouths to feed and bodies to clothe, only compounds the problem. The more there is of anything, the less it is valued. The more people on earth, the less the assumed value of each individual. Not, of course, that anyone would cop to this. But would you expect them to? No, they all say, of course individual life is valuable. But why? Well, it just is.

They have to say thing like this because one of the main reasons why individual life was valued has largely disappeared and is under threat wherever it still exists.

Individual life was valued because every individual, good, bad or ugly, was assumed to have an immortal soul. The whole vast, creaky apparatus of the Church existed for the avowed purpose of saving souls, and the Church was an immense and palpable presence in people's lives. Not so much because it was more powerful than it is now, but because there was no vast machine, no Empire of Mammon, pulling the other way. So you had the paradoxical situation that human life was cheap, cheaper by far than it is today, yet at the same time the individual, the soul-bearer, with that drop of immortality in his or her chest, was more highly valued, mattered more. If you think this was a strange and irrational state of affairs, remember that you comfortably inhabit a paradox equally bizarre, in which a far higher value is placed on human life, but the human individual is reduced to a meaningless cipher.

Though I have a visceral loathing for aristocrats, drawn from generations of peasant ancestors, I have to admit that they served at least one useful purpose. With their contempt for material values and their sense of superiority over sordid money-grubbers, they represented a countervailing force to the Forces of Mammon. Allied with the Church, they oppressed the lower orders (bad), but their mere existence prevented the worshippers of Mammon from coming to power (good). But in just three lifetimes, all of that went by the board.

I remember the exact moment when I realized that Mammon, not Jehovah or Christ's God of Love, was the true God of this world. Next time I'll tell you about it.

FOUR GUYS AGAINST GOD: 8, DANIEL DENNETT (CON'T.)

2009-10-11T18:37:00.000-07:00

There's been something of a hiatus here. I thought I was going to have lots of fun dealing with Dennett's commercial take on religion. Then I reread it and realized it was too easy a target. I can do it in a couple of paragraphs.

The chapter headings and section titles say it all: "Cui bono?", "The growth market in religion", "Towards a buyer's guide to religion", "What can your religion do for you?". To Dennett, religion is for what you get out of it, and the most effective religions are those that, while demanding more of their followers, offer them more (or at least claim to). This gives Dennett, like Dawkins, sneering rights at more rarified brands of religion, those whose God does not listen to human prayers and is inaccessible to human knowledge. Such a God (if not a pure invention by self-interested exploiters) is at best an impotent ghost undeserving of human worship, for "Who can be loyal to a God who cannot be asked for anything?" (p. 193).

Well, Dennett would be surprised. Any mystic worth his salt, and many less-radical believers whose main driving force is the need to worship something greater than themselves, who do not expect anything in return, and who have the good sense to realize that "greater than themselves" better not refer to any kind of human--these don't ask for anything back. Dennett has obviously never felt this need, and if forced to confront it would probably pour scorn on it, mistaking it for some servile act unworthy of a Bold Man Standing Alone in an Indifferent Universe, so I'm wasting my time if I go further with this. I would simply point out that if you're ignorant of this side of human experience, and proud of that ignorance, it's no different from saying you're proud of being deaf, or blind, or impervious to human suffering.

Instead I'm going to catch Dennett out in a self-contradiction. That's much more fun. With anyone as logically akamai as Dennett, you don't get to do that every day, or year, for that matter. Here goes.

In his section entitled "The domestication of religion" (pp. 167-74), Dennett shows himself perfectly aware that religion can be, and repeatedly is, hijacked and exploited by those, both clerical and secular, who seek power over others. "Curious practitioners" (or kleptocrats, as he calls them a few lines later) "will also have uncovered whatever Good Tricks are in the nearest neighborhoods in the Design Space of possible religions" (p. 171). In other words, religious beliefs are consciously and purposely manipulated by the powerful for the powerful.

That was in Chapter 7. By Chapter 10 he's forgotten all about that. (All these nouveau-atheist books have an air of being hastily thrown together for a quick buck.) Now, "Those who feel guilty contemplating 'betraying' the tradition they love by acknowledging their disapproval of elements within it"--those , for example, who feel uneasy over the darker aspects of Christianity--"should reflect on the fact that the very tradition to which they are so loyal...is in fact the evolved product of many adjustments firmly but delicately made by earlier lovers of the same tradition" (p. 292, my italics).

No it's not, Dan. You yourself just said it's not. The Kurious Kleptocrats did it. Or at least a lot of it.

You can't have it both ways. Beliefs were produced either by "lovers of the same tradition"--true believers--or by power-greedy kleptocrats manipulating the faithful. Dennett can't wriggle out of this by saying, of course some were produced by one lot and some by the other. True, he hasn't claimed ALL religious beliefs are just "Good Tricks" pulled by the unscrupulous, but he HAS claimed that whole religious tradition s accumulate from the words and works of true believers.

Why? Because atheists want to have it both ways They want to ridicule religion by every available means, so its deliberate manipulation as a means of social control has to be brought in somewhere. At the same time, given the scorched-earth, take-no-prisoners strategy they've chosen (and I'll tell you why they chose it in a later post), they want to show there's no real difference between liberals and fundamentalists--liberals are vainly hoping to dodge the Just Wrath of the Atheist by disavowing the less defensible aspects of their faith, and no atheist worth his byline in the MSM is going to let a little thing like logic save them from their just deserts.

As I'll later show, what's wrong with Christianity--which, in point of fact, is not really Christianity at all, but the sinister hybrid Judeo-Christianity--was not, for the most part, the work of "earlier lovers of the tradition", but stems, in large part, from political manipulation from both inside and outside the Church. But thoughts like this are impossible for "free-thinkers". For them, there can't be "something that has gone wrong" with any religion, for at least two reasons.

One, religions are bad throughout, so atheists lose face if they admit that any religion ever was, or ever could be, anything but bad through and through. Two, by defining personal religion out of the equation, and focusing solely on religion as a form of social organization, Dennett automatically rules out any scenario involving conflict between individual and social (the blind sheep are supposed to swallow the kelptocrats' Good Tricks, hook, line and sinker). After all, those tricks are memes, and memes are sinister viruses that, willy-nilly, infest and infect our species, no less irresistibly than, in days of yore, Dawkins' Selfish Genes manipulated those lumbering robots who naively thought they were human individuals with free will.

And that's another piece I'd thought of doing, on Dennett's meme-infatuation. But I'm going to reserve that for a post still a half-dozen stops down the line, called "The Credulity of the Skeptic". This will deal with all the remarkable things that our pious unbelievers actually do believe in, from WMDs in Iraq and jihadi serial virgin-deflowerers to the official 9/11 story and the meme.

Don't believe in God but believe in memes? I mean, come on!

For next time, I promise you Something Completely Different. I'm going to do what both sides have very significantly failed to do, so far. That is, place the debate firmly in the context of human history.

ORCASTRATION

2009-10-02T21:52:00.000-07:00

I couldn't resist this one. I had to share it with you. It comes from a Christian website, http://weatherstone61.wordpress.com/2009/10/01/lets-all-calm-down/,
and I solemnly swear I didn't touch the spelling:

Jim Mariner (15:10:58) :

I agree with you to a point. I believe that where we are heading has been carefully orcastrated for a number of years.

Aren't you glad it wasn't done carelessly?

Now we know why the birthrate is declining.

FOUR GUYS AGAINST GOD: 7, DANIEL DENNETT

2009-09-30T14:33:00.000-07:00

According to a Newsweek reviewer cited on the back cover of Breaking the Spell, Dennett and Sam Harris are both writing "bone-rattling attacks on what they regard as pernicious and outdated superstitions". Bone-rattling? Surely Dennett blushed. Maybe he had no control over blurbs; or maybe he just went along because nowadays, strident sells. But in fact Dennett is quite different from the other Three Guys. All three are doing a full-court press on the opposition. They flat-out deny God and denounce religion. Dennett takes a different tack. He will examine religion scientifically.

If not necessarily objectively. He makes no bones about where his principles (and his presuppositions) come from (well, I guess that's better than pretending to be unbiased when you're not). Early in the book he self-identifies as a "bright". Even Christopher Hitchens, to his credit, had his yuck-factor triggered by what he described as the "cringe-making proposal that atheists should conceitedly" (his terms) call themselves "brights". I couldn't agree more. Once again, there's this social tone-deafness that's so common among atheists (I wonder how many are Asperger's cases). Plus the smugness that sent P.Z. Myers and the rest of the Pharyngula bunch ape-shit when some Christian blogger called them on it (it was laughable to see how many of them totally misunderstood what the "smugness" accusation was about).

But that's by the way. More importantly, Dennett has practically defined his quest out of relevance by pages 10-11. There, he takes issue with William James, whose Varieties of Religious Experience focused on the dealings of individuals with whatever they "consider(ed) the divine". Dennett, on the other hand, defines religion as "a larger social system or community". And he decides to go with that because "there are reasons for trading in James's psychological microscope for a wide-angle biological and social telescope" (ibid.) He neglects to tell us what those reasons are.

He would have been wiser to survey things from James's perspective as well as from his own. Both are valid; either one without the other does not begin to embrace the whole phenomenon of religion. Using either one on its own ignores one of the most basic characteristics of religion: its Janus-facedness. Individual religion can be (isn't always!) something pure and noble; social religion can be (and often is) repressive, destructive, even actively evil. It is precisely this tension between the Jamesian side and the Dennettian side that has to be investigated if we are ever to understand religion, and I hope to go into this a lot more deeply in future posts.

For now I'll just note the absence, not just from Dennett's work but from that of all four Guys, of virtually any reference to the Via Negativa, mystics, or mysticism. One would have thought that the mere term "mysticism" would have raised atheist hackles, with its false connotations of "mystification" and consequent identification as that hobgoblin of "freethinkers" since the Enlightenment: "Superstition!" One would have thought they'd mistake it for an easy target. Were they really smart enough to see it isn't? Or were they just so ignorant of what they were writing about that they had never heard of these things, or didn't understand them?

I say "virtually" because there is one reference in BtS to the "apophatic" (p. 232). Kudos (NOT, please, in the plural!) to Dennett for dredging up this rare word. It's one of those "blind-'em-with-science" terms of art that theologians use to make their work look more heavy-duty intellectual than it really is. But all Dennett does with it is have fun with some wannabe-postmodern claims by a straw-man "Professor Faith".

I'm sorry. Unless you know what mystics are, what they do, and why they do it, you are ignoring what for many is the very core of religion. But enough of that for now. Let's see how well Dennett does with those mainly public aspects of religion that he does investigate.

Well, again the issues are narrowed and prejudged, and this in a way that I've had occasion to complain about in my day job. I'm talking about the singular-plural distinction. Professionally, I encounter this in dealing with people who play fast and loose with the distinction, using "language" and "languages" alternately and indiscriminately, saying things like "language is still evolving" when it's clear they mean "languages are constantly changing."

Dennett performs this trick with religion/religions: "But it is obviously false that RELIGION is natural in this sense [i.e. not a product of culture, DB] . RELIGIONS are transmitted culturally, through language and symbolism, not through the genes" (p. 24, my emphasis).

It may be worthwhile to compare religion/religions with language/languages. Languages are particular instantiations of a general faculty, language. Likewise, religions are particular instantiations of religion. Religions and languages are culturally transmitted, but language is deeply rooted in human biology. Is religion too, maybe?

Dennett, under the influence of a heavy dose of evo-psych, has to hedge his bets here. Religions may be cultural, but whatever's cultural must be reclaimed for science somehow, so in his chapter entitled "The Roots of Religion" he opts for the source of religion(s) in the abuse of perfectly natural evolutionary mechanisms. We meet, for the zillionth time, "the intentional stance" , followed by HADD, the Hyperactive Agent Detection Device (previously detected only in a five-page article in a cognitive science journal) and guess what, language, so we can spin endless webs of words around our HADDS and our intentional stances, convincing ourselves of all manner of nonsense. And of course in addition to that...

What? You surely can't mean THAT'S ALL THERE IS?

Sorry, folks, that's all he wrote. To get a "folk religion" going--and you can learn, of course, from any nineteenth-century musings on "savage tribes" that when you've met one folk religion, you've met 'em all--it seems you don't need much. All you need is a need to identify other organisms that might have intentions different from yours, a preference for false positives over false negatives (if you mistake a boulder for a leopard, nothing really bad happens; vice versa, you could be supper), and the gift of the gab to make up explanations for anything you can't immediately explain.

This image of the poor pre-human schmuck, cowering at the trembling of a leaf, wondering if the devil's in it, and inventing a whole slew of supernatural entities to explain things is so insufferably patronizing (not to mention old-fashioned) that you feel like dumping Dennett in the bush (that's "the jungle" to you tenderfeet) and seeing how long he'd survive. Seriously, any preliterate tribesperson has a more sophisticated understanding of the natural world than your C21urbanite, and if that's the case now, why should our ancestors, who had an even tougher life, have been any dumber? Just as patronizing is the evo-psych obsession with the hangovers from our ape days that lurk unchanged in the depths of our psyche and, hidden from all but the likes of Dennett, determine all we do. Or, as he himself puts it in one of those Dennett-for-Dummies summaries that end each chapter, "The false alarms generated by our overactive disposition to look for agents...are the irritant around which the pearls of religion grow" (pp. 114-5).

Nice image, but like the HADD itself, right off the top of Dennett's head, with no empirical foundation whatsoever. Unless--could it be?--he actually wants to give us an example of the kind of magical thinking he's describing?

Dan has an earned reputation as a jokester, which of course is what makes him more fun to read than most philosophers. But the Dennett of BtS is far from the relentless trawler along the cutting edges of computing and cognitive science, dragging up pearls (if I may borrow his metaphor) with which to revive shopworn philosophical controversies, that we used to know and love. This is Dennett in full armchair mode, a very different kettle of fish.

So, having exposed religion's sorry roots, he's onto what keeps the bush so vigorously growing. And it's...(roll of drums while Dan opens the blue envelope)...guess what? Cui bono!

Yes. To Dennett, the ultimate mantra is: ASK NOT WHAT I CAN DO FOR MY FAITH; ASK WHAT MY FAITH CAN DO FOR ME.

But that deserves another post.

INTERLUDE: SEXY ATHEISM v. CHRISTIAN BORES

2009-09-26T00:31:00.000-07:00

I just came across this, so I'm posting it, partly because it seems to me to nicely encapsulate what a lot of fundamentally decent people feel (although I don't wholly share those feelings) and partly because it makes a couple of good points that are very relevant to this whole debate:

In your book, you write about your faith. How do you feel about religion, and particularly Christianity, being attacked by militant atheists?

It does make you think you ought to stand up and be counted, but I'm not remotely evangelical. It has been a great comfort to me and is a strong part of my life, but it's rather like trying to explain to somebody who doesn't speak Italian how wonderful that language is. It's up to them to find out, and if it doesn't suit them that's fine. But I feel saddened that faith is so often assumed to be coupled with a lack of intellect. It's sexy to be an atheist; it's not hugely sexy to have a faith, certainly the Christian faith.

Are you wary of being labelled a "Christian"?

Yes. Because I suppose I don't want to be one of those earnest, rather boring people who say, "I'm a Christian!" It's a complex issue really, but I do believe quite deeply, quite profoundly.

Alan Titchmarsh, interviewed by The Guardian, 09/24/09

Take #1. "It's sexy to be an atheist; it's not hugely sexy to have a faith, certainly the Christian faith."

This opens up a whole can of worms about why people have the ideas they have. Do they have them because they really believe in them, or because they think those ideas enhance their image? Well, I guess a few cynical people do consciously and deliberately choose ideas for the second reason. But for every one that does, there are dozens, hundreds, who do it quite unconsciously. If they knew what they were doing, the probably wouldn't. It's often regarded as dirty pool, looking at why people think what they think rather than sticking to what they think and debating that on an intellectual level. But let's do it anyway--let's expose them.

Why is it sexy to be an atheist? Well, it's still a bit daring, like the first time you used the f-word in front of your parents. Just like teen rebellion, it makes you feel decisive and important and more interesting than all the old fuddy-duds. After all, it's only recently that the faith that dare not speak its name became the faith that won't shut up. Once you've got past that, you can strike heroic poses with it. Try JUST ME ALONE BEFORE A HOSTILE UNIVERSE (we have the Subnietzschean model for a cool $29.95). Or what about THE PENETRATING MIND THAT SEES THROUGH ALL THAT OLD CRAP? Both in their different ways guaranteed to make you feel good the way a good faith should. And after all, if there's no God then we're the tops, the cream of creation, the highest form of being in the universe. Like most revolutionaries (there are honorable exceptions), atheists want to become what they seek to overthrow.

And on the other side, there's the unsexiness of believing a bunch of stuff that's been around a couple of thousand years. No, there's no contest on the sexiness front.

Or #2. "One of those earnest, rather boring people who say, 'I'm a Christian!'"

Again, it's worth noting that this kind of Christian is just like our New Atheists. Both are socially tone-deaf. Both suffer severely from LJHS*. The source of this is ego. These people love themselves more than others, they haven't any real feeling for how other people feel but that doesn't matter because they are right and other people are wrong. This of course is why you can't simply write off Christianity (for all its faults and weaknesses) because true Christianity (as compared with the shoddy imitations that nowadays mostly pass for it) must include sensitivity towards others and would never seek to proselytize unless sure that this would be welcomed by their hearers.

In passing, but not without some relevance to the above:

Christian jokes are lame

NPR jokes are lame

I've never heard an atheist joke

*Remember Little Jack Horner? Well, his Syndrome is neatly encapsulated in the nursery rhyme: "He stuck in his thumb /and pulled out a plum / and said 'What a good boy am I!" (Atheist version of the LJHS" "What a clever boy am I!")

FOUR GUYS AGAINST GOD: 6, DAWKINS v.GOD 2.0

2009-09-18T20:42:00.000-07:00

On p. 142, Dawkins quotes co-conspirator Dennett as pointing out that "evolution counters one of the oldest ideas we have: 'the idea that it takes a big fancy smart thing to make a lesser thing.'"

When I read this, I couldn't believe my eyes. Hadn't Dawkins, just a moment before, said the very reverse of this? I looked back, and there it was, on p. 136: "A designer God cannot be used to explain organized complexity, because any God capable of designing anything would have to be complex enough to demand the same kind of explanation in his own right."

What gives here? I thought for a moment, well, Dawkins is talking about a designer God, and God 2.0 is not a designer. Then I thought, well, isn't He? What's design anyway? To design something doesn't necessarily mean that you have to sit down at a drawing-board and draw diagrams, then go to Home Depot, buy the parts and put them together. All you have to do is whatever it takes to get the thing into existence. How do believers in Genesis 1 think God created Adam? With his thumb? Or did He just say to the handful of dust, "Be a man"? Ridiculous questions that serve merely to highlight the fact that, if God does exist and creates things, we don't have a clue as to how He might go about it. So Dawkins' designation of "designer" should fit just about anything that satisfies his description of a God.

But if that's so--and Dawkins is surely too smart to get caught in this kind of trap, so I still have a niggling feeling I must have missed something, somewhere--then Dawkins has contradicted himself. If God simply set things up so that evolution took place, how does that make Him necessarily complex? Evolution did the complex stuff for him--like making us--and evolution is, as Dawkins points out, a "stunningly simple" thing. Living organisms multiply, they vary in their capacities, some individual organisms have capacities that better suit (or exploit) the current environment, those organisms tend to have more offspring than others, so the useful capacities spread through the population, and bingo! You've got evolution. Can't get much simpler than that.

Dawkins ought to have argued that God had to be complex to start evolution. I've no idea how he'd have done that. Part of the problem is that, although Dawkins is, or should be, a materialistic monist, he won't cop to it, or at least hasn't--so far.

Because, as I pointed out in the previous post, claims about complexity can only relate to entities whose degree of complexity can be observed and measured. And those entities are material entities. If there are entities that have no material existence, we have no way of knowing whether they are simple or complex, or indeed whether simple or complex would have any meaning, with reference to them.

And of course there are entities that have no material existence. Dawkins uses them every day, every hour, possibly every waking minute of his life.

Many years ago, I received in the mail the inaugural lecture of a professor who had just been appointed to some distinguished chair (of inorganic chemistry, or whatever, I can't remember except that his field was about as remote as it could be from mine). I've no idea why it was sent to me, surely by some bizarre mistake. But I couldn't fail to notice that he cited approvingly Lucretius's dictum: "Nothing exists but atoms and the void."

I wrote back thanking the professor, but asked him what he thought the words "atoms and the void" consisted of. Unsurprisingly, he never answered.

Well, what do they consist of? Take any word, the first word that occurs to you--just now, with me, it happened to be "badger". The word refers to a rather charming animal, nocturnal and striped, but it certainly isn't the animal. In fact, even its meaning is highly flexible. "To badger someone" can mean to pester them with repeated questioning or unwanted advice. "The badger game" is a criminal strategy whereby the victim is enticed into having sex with a woman, and during the act a man claiming to be her husband bursts in on them and demands money. So does the word "badger" perhaps consist of marks on a printed page? Or the oscillations of the air caused when "badger" is uttered? Or is it perhaps the neuron, or more probably cohort of neurons, that represents the word in the speaker's brain? Or is it all of the above, in which case how can the same thing be in three places at the same time?

Obviously it can't, and equally obviously, I would have thought, it's none of the above. "Badger" is not necessarily immortal--if all the brains that had retained it were dust, if all the pages on which it was written had crumbled away, if all perturbations of the air caused by its utterance had long been stilled, it would no longer exist (as, for all we know, God might not survive the death of His universe). But there's no question that as long as any of those external manifestations exists, the word "badger" will continue to exist, and it will not in any sense be a material thing.

Same goes, of course, for all the concepts that underlie words, and all the idea that ever existed, whether or not they were expressed. We are the creators of non-material entities. And what's more, those entities aren't just passive phantoms. They are causative agents in the real world. They build philosophies, religions, science itself. They are, directly or indirectly, responsible for practically everything we do.

Are there any non-material entities that we haven't created? We don't know, but why shouldn't there be? Supposing there were, would they be simple or complex? We couldn't tell. Are words simple or complex? Their meanings may be complex, or their structures may be complex, but these manifestations of words have no necessary interconnection--words with a simple structure may have a complex meaning, or vice versa. And they are, in any case, manifestations--not the word itself. At the very least we can say that however we choose to judge immaterial things with regard to complexity, that judgment cannot be the simple process it is for material things. And if every aspect of our lives is governed by immaterial entities, why should the universe itself not be governed by just such an entity? "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was God, and the Word was with God." I've no idea what this means (in common with all the biblical commentators who are, however, less honest about it) but, as they used to say in the old country, it makes you think.

Please note, I am not using this argument as an argument for God's existence. My aim is much more modest. I want to show that Dawkins' arguments for God's non-existence don't go through, consequently the possible existence of God must remain a hypothesis alongside His possible non-existence. Can probabilities be assigned to either? That's another question, one I'd rather not deal with right now.

FOUR GUYS AGAINST GOD: 5, RICHARD DAWKINS (CONT.)

2009-09-13T18:04:00.001-07:00

Harris and Hitchens never stopped long enough to define just what they meant by God. You had to guess; most of the time it looked like Yahweh (red in tooth and claw) was meant. Dawkins is more careful--"I am talking only about supernatural gods" (p. 41), although in the next breath he claims that "the most familiar to the majority of my readers will be Yahweh, the God of the Old Testament." Really? Not the Christian God of love and redemption? And the vast majority of his readers, he admits, will be Christians. Why would they be more familiar with the God of the Judaic scriptures than the God of the New Testament?

(Here's a can of worms indeed, the varied contents of which we'll come back to again and again, DV, in these pages.)

Could Dawkins' choice have anything to do with the fact that Yahweh is a more vulnerable target? Let that pass for now. In the next chapter he clarifies what he means by a supernatural god: "a superhuman, supernatural intelligence who deliberately designed and created the universe and everything in it, including us" (p. 52). He doesn't define supernatural. You're supposed to know what it means. For most people, the following equations hold:

natural = what I can understand

supernatural = what I can't understand

Naturally (pun unintended), the advance of science has tended to move one thing after another out of the second category and into the first. Is that process one of infinite reach, so that eventually the second will be totally empty? Dawkins, along with many other scientists, would like to think so. We'll see.

Indeed Dawkins (in contrast to many others of no mean weight yet very different approaches, T.H. Huxley and the anonymous author of the Cloud of Unknowing for two) explicitly states that the existence of God is ultimately provable or disprovable by the exercise of human reason. In fact, he believes (p. 73) that we can already weigh the probability of God (and find it close to zero). He distinguishes seven points on a spectrum of probability, from the 100% of the "strong theist" to the 0% of the "strong atheist" (p. 74). However, there's a problem here if we think back to the definition of "God" on p. 52.

Dawkins is well aware of the difference between theism and deism. But his definition fails to distinguish between the kind of hands-on God who follows us as individuals, rewards believers with eternal life, answers (or at least hears) prayers, works miracles, and all that kind of stuff, and the hidden, mysterious God who created a universe that would eventually spawn intelligent life, for whatever reasons He may have in mind. Clearly the balance of probabilities is very different, depending on whether you are talking about the first kind of God or the second. Dawkins seems to be running probabilities on the first, so what he might take them to be for God 2.0 remains a mystery.

One thing he is adamant on, though, and it's this: people can't hide in the kind of wishy-washy agnosticism that says that since we can't calculate a firm probability either way, we should say the chances of God/no-God are fifty-fifty. Not so, says Dawkins, because if you propose the existence of anything that cannot be empirically proven, the burden of proof is not on skeptics to disprove it, but on you to prove it.

And, on and off through the rest of the book, he repeatedly lines God up with other things that have been (or might be) proposed on the basis of no empirical evidence: Bertrand Russell's earth-orbiting teapot, the tooth fairy, the Flying Spaghetti Monster, and more.

This is bizarre, understandable only in light of one gambit of the New Atheists--to weaken religion by trivializing it, in the same way that picadors weaken the bull so it's less able to avoid the matador's killing stroke. One potent way of trivializing is the same as one way of imputing guilt--by association. Associate God and religion with things like fairies and imaginary tea-pots and you're already half-way to slaying the beasts; at worst you've cut them down to size in people's mind. But such associations, just like "guilt by association", are ridiculous. Nothing turns on the truly imaginary things that Dawkins adduces. Whether or not there are tooth fairies, whether or not there is an imaginary teapot between here and Venus makes not a smidgen of difference to the world or how we think about the world. But whether or not there is a God makes an enormous difference.

Of course, orbiting teapots, fairies with or without teeth, and Spaghetti Monsters flying or otherwise, are all things the probability of which is so low that nobody in his right mind would bother to assess them. However, there is one thing they have in common that they don't share with God. If they existed at all, they would be physical entities in the real world. But God, if he exists, is not. God, as the anonymous president of a New Jersey historical society (quoted in my last post) along with every sensible Christian for centuries, has said: God is a spirit. (In the fourth and fifth centuries there actually were people called Anthropomorphites who not only believed that God was a bearded old man in the sky but were ready to kill those who rejected the notion, but the Church eventually squelched that one.)

Does this make any difference? Yes, as we shall see, it makes quite a lot of difference. Let's start with the question already touched on--whether it is possible, in any meaningful sense, to assess the probability or otherwise of God's existence.

Dawkins thinks it is. Quite apart from the probability scale already mentioned, he considers that with respect to intelligent life on other planets, one can "make a sober assessment of what we would need to know in order to estimate the probability" (p. 95). He adduces the Drake Equation

created in 1960 by astronomer Frank Drake, where N is the number of civilizations in our galaxy in which communication might be possible and R^* is the average rate of star formation per year in our galaxy, f_p is the fraction of those stars that have planets, n_e is the average number of planets that can potentially support life per star that has planets, and so on. Dawkins points out that though the numbers to be assigned to each term in the equation are still subject to vast margins of error, some of them have narrowed in the last half-century. For instance, in 1960, the notion that any other star might have planets was pure conjecture, but now we have spectrographic evidence for the existence of several hundred planets, while more (and smaller, potentially more life-friendly ones) continue to be discovered. This, Dawkins claims, should slightly reduce our skepticism about the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence. In the same way, "science can make at least probabilistic inroads into the territory of agnosticism" (p. 96--don't forget that agnostics just as much as fundamentalists are in Dawkins' crosshairs--"He who is not for me is against me" is, as we have seen, a canon in the atheist creed.)

But if N were God, what would the terms of the equation be? Dawkins pours scorn on Stephen Unwin (pp. 132-6) whose book The Probability of God uses Bayesian analysis (a formula slightly different from the Drake Equation, but broadly similar in its aims and results). The scorn is not wholly unmerited. Unwin feeds in figures that are purely subjective guesses for such parameters as the existence of evil or the validity of miracles and even then only comes up with a 67% likelihood for God's existence (which, according to Dawkins, he then ups to 95% by adding his equivalent of the "cosmological constant" Einstein used to make his equation come out right--"faith"!) Obviously, Dawkins and Unwin would assign very different values to the presumed validity of miracles; Bayes' Theorem works when the input consists of objectively valid information, otherwise it's a mental placebo for the distressing fact that there are many things we don't know, and some we can't.

In the final analysis, Dawkins takes neither Drake's nor Bayes's route. He bases his judgment on a single improbability: "A designer God cannot be used to explain organized complexity [the complexity of, say, humans, DB] because any God capable of designing anything would have to be complex enough to demand the same kind of explanation in his own right" (p. 136). Well, how did humans get to be so complex? By natural selection, of course; according to Dawkins, or me if it comes to that, evolution by natural selection is the only way you can progress from simple to complex physical organisms. Dawkins is ready to accept the possibility of godlike aliens who evolved on some other planet (p. 99). They too would be physical organisms. But suppose God is NOT a physical organism? I mean, no sensible person I know of ever suggested He would be. Is there natural selection for spirits? If so, what environments select for different kinds of spirit? (Without variation there's nothing for natural selection to work on.)

Such questions are absurd, of course. Dawkins could easily circumvent them by simply saying, the universe consists entirely of physical organisms and material objects. After all, philosophical dualism is rejected by most scientists, even, nowadays, by most philosophers. So Dawkins could simply win his case by adopting materialistic monism, a healthy tradition from Democritus on. Why doesn't he?

I don't know. But in any case, he's wise not to, as I'll show in my next post. For now, just let's say that Dawkin's killer argument would kill God only if God were a physical organism produced by natural selection, which no-one has ever suggested He was. If He is indeed a spirit, then we have no way of knowing how simple or how complex He would have to be to do whatever it may turn out He does. If He's there.

It is however possible to estimate roughly how complex God would have to be if we consider different possible versions of God. If God indeed produced humans, down to their brain-wiring and internal plumbing, from a handful of dust--like a watchmaker makes a watch--then yes, I guess He'd have to be pretty complex. If on the other hand He simply set the parameters of the Universe so that eventually, something like us--something capable of comprehending the idea of God--would be bound to turn up somewhere, then there's just no way of computing how simple or how complex He would have to be. And if God worked through evolution, as many pretty-orthodox Christians believe, He would not have to be complex at all, on Dawkins' very own assumptions.

Which assumptions a? I'll tell you next time. Nothing like a cliff-hanger to get folks' attention.

FOUR GUYS AGAINST GOD: 4, RICHARD DAWKINS

2009-09-10T17:25:00.001-07:00

It's obvious from the start that we're in a different league now. Gone are the hoppings of Hitchens, the touching faith in C17 Prod propagandists of Harris. the uncritical belief in popular myths both authors share. Instead, we get measured prose, well-structured, coherent arguments, things you can get your teeth into. Funny so few reviewers could spot the difference.

But we're still in the world of anger. All of the four guys except Dennett are angry, and in a subsequent post ("The Anger of the Atheist") I shall go in some depth into the reasons for this, because it's far from obvious why it should be so. Actually when it comes to anger there are two issues bundled into one. Not just, why are atheists so angry, but why is anger so popular nowadays? For popular it undoubtedly is. If you can go by Amazon rankings and review numbers, Dennett's sales are much lower than the others, and while other factors are probably involved, I'm sure his relative lack of anger is an important one. I'll examine some reasons for the popularity of anger when I try to put this whole science/religion debate into its sociohistorical context.

However, for the moment we're stuck with Dawkins' anger. Unlike the other two Angry Guys, he's a little uncomfortable with it. He starts The God Delusion with a rather labored explanation of how he isn't really angry at all. What ignorant folk saw as anger was actually just... good humor! The opening to Chapter 2, most often cited as evidence, is "guaranteed to get a good-natured laugh", and he "invariably use(s) it as the warm-up act to break the ice with a new audience." (This, btw, is the passage in which he describes the God of the Old Testament as "petty", "unjust", "vindictive", "bloodthirsty", "racist", and "a bully", among many similar things--I'd give anything to see him "breaking the ice" at, say, a Southern Baptist convention.) So, far from the ogre he's been depicted as, he's just your friendly neighborhood atheist, always good for a quip and a smile.

And then, just 21 pages later, he blows it.

He says (all this is on p. 38) "The president of a historical society in New Jersey wrote a letter that so damningly exposes the weakness of the religious mind, it is worth reading twice."

Here it is, in its entirety. "We respect your learning, Dr. Einstein, but there is one thing you do not seem to have learned: that God is a spirit and cannot be found through the telescope, no more than human thought or emotion can be found by analyzing the brain. As everyone knows, religion is based on Faith, not knowledge. Every thinking person, perhaps, is assailed at times with religious doubt. My own faith has wavered many a time. But I never told anyone of my spiritual aberrations for two reasons: (1) I feared that I might, by mere suggestion, disturb and damage the life and hopes of some fellow being; (2) because I agree with the writer who said, 'There is a mean streak in anyone who will destroy another's faith'...I hope, Dr. Einstein, that you were misquoted and that you will yet say something more pleasing to the vast number of the American people who delight to do you honor."

Okay. Have you read that twice? I've read it three or four times. Can you please tell me exactly how and where it "exposes the weakness of the religious mind", damningly or even mildly?

To the contrary, it seems to me a perfectly reasonable (and far from weak-minded) letter, not one I would write myself, perhaps, but unexceptionable as far as it goes. In addition, it touches on a couple of deep truths about the whole issue, truths we'll explore in depth at a later date. and also show a genuine warmth and solicitude for others. The politeness to Einstein is a bit oleaginous for my taste, but my taste tends to prefer the sour to the sweet, anyway, and that's the only fault I can find in it. The writer comes off as a thoroughly decent guy, one who knows that charity doesn't just mean tax-deductible donations.

But now listen to what Dawkins has to say about it (and only bold italics will do justice to his response):

"What a devastatingly revealing letter! Every sentence drips with intellectual and moral cowardice."

Okay, readers. Go through the letter a third time. See if you can catch any of the drips of intellectual or moral cowardice. Expose the devastating revelations!

I mean, really, come on! Only someone blinded by his own anger (and totally lacking in (a) sensitivity and (b) fellow-feeling for other human beings) could write such wildly inaccurate, over-the-top trash. It shows, too, the kind of Taliban-ready intolerance that he, and especially Harris and Hitchens, are so quick to spot among the religious (and from which the moderate/liberal Christians who get so much flak from him are singularly free). Truly I say unto you, we have met the enemy and he is us.

I hadn't meant to spend so much time on this aspect of Dawkins' work, but I'm not sorry I did. Some very big questions here--questions that lie beneath those that people on all sides of the debate ask and answer--involve the extent of human reason, the extent to which it can be relied upon, and whether there is in fact far more to life than the exercise of reason. What may seem to be a trivial tizzy of Dawkins over some letter some unnamed president of some unnamed New Jersey historical society allegedly wrote in fact opens up vast vistas on the human condition.

Among other things, I shall inquire into the privileging of reason--the way in which reason is treated by atheists as the supreme form of human activity. It turns out that belief in reason has extremely flimsy rational foundations, a fact that believers in reason avoid at least as strenuously as the religious avoid things that might threaten their faith.

But next time I'll be dealing with the substance of some of Dawkins' arguments.

FOUR GUYS AGAINST GOD: 3, CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS

2009-09-08T14:36:00.000-07:00

It's hard to know where to start, with Hitchens. His book God, sorry, god is not Great, is all over the map.

Maybe start with the title. The de-uppercasing of the deity struck me as childish. After all, it's just the personal, individual name for the Christian deity, who is not Allah, or Yahweh, or any other god (one can speak of gods, but not Gods). And what does he do if God happens to be the first word in a sentence? I think he carefully avoids putting it there--a cursory scan reveals no cases.

On top of that, it's illogical. He uses upper case for the Koran (sic), Allah (scared of a fatwa?), the Crucifixion, Jesus Christ, Christian, Catholic, Hindu, Buddhist and any other word connected with religion. Only God, like Rodney Dangerfield, gets no respect. This, constantly repeated, becomes an irritating tic, another reminder of a fault he shares with all the Horsemen--he's tone-deaf, he just doesn't realize how he comes off

Then the subtitle. "Religion poisons everything." Everything? Like, say, a Bach cantata? (Would Hitchens enjoy one more if it had been dedicated, not to religious ends, but to the old warmonger Frederick II of Prussia before whom Bach performed in 1747?) Or a sunset? Or a child's infectious laughter? The statement is not just ridiculous, it's petulant--the kind of thing some spoiled (Jewish or Gentile) princess might exclaim if her current suitor broke her favorite tea-cup ("Horace, you spoil everything!").

After that beginning, it's an olla podrida, if you'll pardon my Spanish. Starting with a slab of memoir, it moves to the use of religion for lethal purposes, interrupts with a four-and-a-half-page interjection on eating the meat of the pig (and even within this brief span Hitchens hops around like a flea on a blanket, from mad cow disease to Islamic prohibition of pork to pig-farming to George Orwell to our evolutionary closeness to pigs to heart transplants to New Guinea cannibalism to trichinosis to King Lear to the use of pork by the Inquisition for smoking out crypto-Jews to Winnie-the-Pooh to P.G. Wodehouse to the evils of factory farming to Lord of the Flies), then segues into things allegedly religious people have said or done that were bad for one's health. Later follow individual chapters on Intelligent Design, the Old and New Testaments, the Koran, miracles, the origins of the Mormon faith, a seventeenth-century Jewish cult no-one has ever heard of, the influence of religion on human behavior, Eastern religions, religions as inherently sinful, the evils of raising children to be religious, and three chapters pushing various aspects of a "secular" alternative to religion.

(A minor mystery here. The chapter on miracles is entitled "The Tawdriness of the Miraculous and the Decline of Hell". In fact, there's not a word about the decline of hell, or about hell for that matter, in this chapter or anywhere else in the book. Hitchens either forgot all about it or deliberately left it out after he'd handed in the chapter headings. Just a symptom of the reckless haste, or perhaps something worse than that, which characterizes this whole book. Let's see which it really is.)

As all this flea-hopping suggests, if you come to Hitchens expecting some brilliant, complex, sustained and coherent argument against either God or religion, you're going to be disappointed. God isn't so much denied as belittled (as the title suggests) and religion is dealt with by picking out all the silly and cruel things that have been done by persons or institutions claiming to be religious--things that any honest religious person deplores just as much as Hitchens does--and concentrating on these to the exclusion of all else. He doesn't ever get into any of the deeper issues involved. Nor will we, at least not for now. This is just a preliminary skirmish, dealing with the deficiencies of our Four Guys that are peculiar to each of them. Those that they share will follow. Worry not, the serious stuff is coming.

Hitchens is like Harris in more than one respect. One of those respects is his willingness to accept popular mythology without checking on it.

Start with the least consequential: The "Governor of Texas" who allegedly said, "If English was good enough for Jesus, it's good enough for me" (p. 110). If he'd taken the trouble to look that remark up, he'd have found that, in addition to at least two Texas governors, it's been attributed to a dozen or more other politicians spread over the last half of the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth centuries. Scholarly opinion is, if a saying gets multiple attributions, it's probably a phony. But hey, anything's okay if it gives east-coast eggheads a laugh at red-state rubes.

But that's only one of a number of places where Hitchens is guilty of misinforming us

"Fish do not have fins because they need them for the water" (p. 78) Oh no? Hitchens needs to bring himself up to speed on the most recent developments in evolutionary theory, with special attention to niche-construction, evo-devo and convergent evolution. Why did ichthyosaurs and dolphins, both of whose ancestors were landlubbers, develop fins like a shark's? For the same reason the shark developed them. Because a fin is a whole lot better for maneuvering under water than a leg, duh. Hitchens is presumably still stuck in the paradigm of his co-religionary (if that's the word) Dawkins, where a gene is a gene is a gene, condemned to do the same old shtick for eternity. He needs to learn that genes are very flexible, can express themselves in different ways in different environments, and that, by and large, the same genes that made legs for the dolphin's pig-like ancestor now make the dolphin's fins, and the bird's or bat's wings if it comes to that.

More serious is the "mad and cruel" idea of the "limbo" to which Catholic doctrine consigns infants who die unbaptized (p. 64). What happened to them, or whether there even was a limbo, has never been an article of Catholic dogma ("dogma", remember, is not just what you happen to believe, but what you must believe). Consequently there have been several notions as to what limbo might be. One, perhaps the commonest--certainly the kindest--is that "these souls enjoy and will eternally enjoy a state of perfect natural happiness; and this is what Catholics usually mean when they speak of the limbus infantium, the 'children's limbo'" (http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/09256a.htm). In other words, all they miss is the special contact with the Almighty that's the reward of the properly baptized. "Mad and cruel"? Sure beats the oblivion Hitchens presumably expects.

Either Hitchens doesn't know this, in which case he's ignorant, or he does know it, but hides it from the reader, in which case he's dishonest.

But wait. There's worse.

"...the time when theologians would dispute over futile propositions with fanatical intensity, measuring the length of angel's wings. for example, or debating how many such mythical creatures could dance on the head of a pin" (p. 68). Of course, everyone has heard the story about angels dancing on the head of a pin, or on the point of a needle in most accounts, but you have to go no further than Wikipedia or The Straight Dope (hardly esoteric scholarship) to find it's a myth, with no mention prior to the seventeenth century (and then only in the Protestant propaganda Harris so loves) and subsequent references limited to the works of secular mockers like Hitchens. To the best of anyone's knowledge, no mediaeval scholar ever debated the issue, let alone with the "fanatical intensity" that Hichens claims. As for the "length of angels' wings", the earliest reference I have found was...wait for it...

2007!

Can you believe it? There's no reference anywhere to any such discussion except in Hitchen's book, in a couple of post-2007 blog posts and a couple of critiques of Hitchen's book. In other words, Hitchens flat-out made it up! You might doubt dishonesty in the limbo case. But not here.

More would be superfluous, but I can't resist noting his problems with geography. For instance, the Muslim advance in its early years "petered out at the fringes of the Balkans and the Mediterranean" (p. 129) The whole western, southern and eastern coast of the Mediterranean, from the south of France to eastern Turkey, is one of its fringes?! Or "the secular left...believed that there was a worker's paradise beyond the Ural Mountains." Beyond? Beyond the Urals were Stalin's prison camps, the Gulag Archipelago--the "worker's paradise" lay THIS side of the Urals!

Or his problems with number: none of the Gospel authors "published anything until many decades after the Crucifixion." (p. 111). Jesus was crucified around CE 30; the latest possible date anyone gives for the Gospel of Mark is CE 73, and many scholars think it was written earlier than that, maybe even in the fifties. So is "two to four" Hitchens's definition of "many"? Well, his number sense surely is elastic. "Benito Mussolini had barely seized power in Italy before the Vatican made an official pact with him, known as the Lateran Pact of 1929" (p. 235). Barely? Mussolini seized power in 1922 and was overthrown in 1943, so his reign lasted 21 years. From 1922 to 1929 is seven years--a full one-third of that period. So he'd barely seized power in 1929? Hitchens obviously subscribes to the Humpty Dumpty school of semantics: "When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean--neither more nor less."

Finally, a touch of smut. In the chapter entitled "The Evil of the 'New' Testament Exceeds the Evil of the 'Old' One" (Wow! Bet you never realized that!) we find our way back to the Inquisition (founded over a millennium after the NT was written) and Hitchens' speculation that if Barbelo, an imaginary paradise found in some Gnostic texts, had happened to be included in the Bible, "skilled torturers would have worked for days on those who doubted the truth of Barbelo; beginning with the fingernails and working their way ingeniously towards the testicles, the vagina, the eyes and the viscera" (p.114). Well, anyone who wants to know what Inquisitors really did should refer to my post on Harris and torture. What Hitchens writes here is sheer, unadulterated crap, and prurient, pornographic crap at that. Christians have been responsible for some pretty vile things in their time, but this is not one of them. We saw exactly the same stuff in Harris. Can't atheists make their case without this kind of lascivious pandering? And if not, why not?

All of this in a book hailed as "the best [of "atheist screeds", DB] since Bertrand Russell's Why I am not a Christian" (Associated Press), "recommended without reservation" (Library Journal), "the best of the recent rash of atheist manifestos" (Publisher's Weekly), "excellent...splendid... runs the gamut of superb arguments" (Providence Journal--that's Providence, Rhode Island, not the divine kind). Can't these guys read, or are they even more ignorant than Hitchens?

I thought I was going to have to write at least two posts on Hitchens, but now I'm not. I'm not wasting my, or your, time on that. God (or the Devil, some say) is in the details. I don't know which, but I do know that everything is built out of details. If a writer shows rank carelessness, sheer recklessness, and blatant falsification, of a kind any editor worth his salt should have seen and stopped in press, why should you listen to him? Why would anyone even imagine that a writer who cared so little for truth in smaller things could be trusted to tell the truth in big things, least of all the biggest things of all?

FOUR GUYS AGAINST GOD: 2, HARRIS, TORTURE AND TRUST.

2009-09-06T17:29:00.000-07:00

"Congratulations to Sam Harris on a characteristically brilliant broadside. His book, The End of Faith is one of those books that deserves to replace the Gideon Bible in every hotel room in the land."

Thus Richard Dawkins (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/richard-dawkins/coming-out-against-religi_b_5137.html).

So let's see just what kind of reading our sojourner in Motel Six will enjoy if Dawkins has his way.

One of the most striking and shocking passages in the book deals with the religion-driven horrors of the Inquisition, where "thumbscrews may be applied, or toe-screws, or a pear-shaped vise may be inserted into your mouth, vagina, or anus." Alternatively, "You may be bound to a bench, with a cauldron filled with mice placed upside down on your abdomen. With the requisite application of heat to the iron, the mice will begin to burrow into your belly."

Harris's source for this is a 1930s book by one John Swain, otherwise unknown to history, called The Pleasures of the Torture Chamber. Its title alone should indicate the kind of titillating, salacious potpourri that this is. And ITS sources? Religious propaganda!

The sources it cites are people like John Marchant, an industrious Protestant pamphleteer who churned out broadsheet after broadsheet in the first half of the eighteenth century, or Anthony Gavin, a renegade Catholic priest (or so he claimed) from Spain who made his living in England by tell-all confessions about atrocious Catholic practices. These in turn follow a rich vein of anti-"Popery" dating at least from Foxe's Book of Martyrs in the 1550s, long-lasting fruit of the two centuries of struggle between Catholics and Protestants that killed more Christians than Christians ever killed infidels. Some of this propaganda is based on fact but most of it is sheer fancy, designed to inflame the indignation of fellow-Protestants while tickling their prurient imagination with borderline porno about vaginas and anuses.

Now, just the facts, Sam.

Thumbscrews were never used by the Inquisition. They were an invention of Dawkins's fellow-countrymen, first used by William Cecil in the reign of Queen Elizabeth to extract confessions from...guess who? Catholics! Toe-screws I've never heard of; why couldn't you just use thumbscrews on the toes? The "pear-shaped vise" may have existed and may on occasion have been used by the secular power, but again, there is no evidence that the Inquisition ever used it. The inquisitors were neither naive nor (as a general rule) sadistic. They were certainly well aware of the spiritual dangers of sexual torture for excitement's sake; for this reason, instructions to inquisitors included adjurations to leave the sex organs alone (they made their victims put on white drawers after they'd humiliated them by stripping them naked), and indeed to do nothing that would mutilate people or imperil their lives (that was reserved for the secular powers, to whom prisoners judged guilty were always handed over for physical punishment or execution--hypocrisy, if you like, but historical fact). As for the cauldron of mice, this is the kind of masturbatory fantasy dreamed up by sadists too timid to follow in de Sade's footsteps. In fact, the three methods favored by the Inquisition--and used to the exclusion of almost all others--were: the rack; suspension; and...wait for it...

Water-boarding!

Right. Dick Cheney's favorite torture, naturally under the title of tortura del agua, was also a favorite of the Spanish Inquisition. The method was identical: victim bound and laid on his or her back, linen cloth inserted in throat, water poured onto cloth until choking began, then cloth removed, process repeated as often as necessary.

It would take too long to document all the other travesties in Harris's account. He totally confuses the treatments of heretics, witches and Jews, compounding what were quite different procedures into a monolithic chamber of horrors. The kinds of tortures used by the Inquisition were relatively mild compared with the tortures used on a regular basis by the civil powers in any "civilized" country, and--especially if you were accused of witchcraft--you were probably better off with the Inquisition than in a civil court: a lot of Catholic clergy were quite skeptical about the diabolical power of witches, Protestant clergy and laity were much more enthusiastic witch-hunters. What the Inquisition did was quite atrocious enough, especially coming from people who were supposed to love their neighbors, but that doesn't justify replacing genuine history with the fevered imaginings of people who were themselves religious zealots.

Anyone who wants the true history of the Inquisition can read Henry Charles Lea's monumental History of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages and History of the Inquisition of Spain, the full text of both of which is readily available on Google Books--a bit on the dry side, and lacking the salacious details Harris craves for, but reliable and comprehensive. For that matter, an acclaimed BBC documentary on Myths of the Inquisition, aired ten years before Harris published, explodes all the hoary garbage he peddled, so it's hardly esoteric knowledge that we're talking about here. End of Faith is, despite its 62 pages of notes and overstuffed bibliography, as research-free as LCN. At least Harris had the honesty to bring out LCN with a bare three-and-a-bit pages of notes, a 10-item list of "books I recommend", and no index.

But what's really shocking about all this is that--to the best of my knowledge--no-one has ever called Harris on his distortions of history. Not in any of the reviews I've seen, certainly. Not even people like Dawkins or Natalie Angier (who should surely know better). Horrible suspicion: they may indeed know better, but keep their mouths shut because, even if Harris is an asshole, he's OUR asshole, and you don't rock your own boat.

And then, a hundred pages down the road, this stunning discovery: Harris thinks torture is okay! Granted he pussyfoots around it, but after endorsing the unspeakable Dershowitz's adolescent ticking-bomb scenario, he holds his nose and dives in. Yes, torture is fine and dandy, if...If it's useful in the so-called War on Terror. If the information it yields saves lives. Not that he or anyone else has yet come up with a credible case of a single life saved by it. And never mind that the FBI, who should know more about interrogation than most people, think it's useless as a way of obtaining valid information. Nor that the only two viable functions of torture are (a) frightening and cowing groups regarded as subversive and (b) securing confessions that are politically or ideologically convenient. "You want witches? Pass the thumbscrews and I'll give you more witches than you can shake a broomstick at...Sorry, what was that? Wrong century? Oh, it's terrorists you want now! What for? Ratchet up the threat level and keep the military-industrial complex in business? Gotcha. Pass the water-jug."

Speaking of that, did you notice that Harris never mentions water-boarding? Not in his account of Inquisition tortures, even though it was one of the Inquisition's top three. Not in his discussion of whether it's okay to torture terrorists, even though it tops the CIA's list. Not one solitary word. Why do you think that is? Like a guess? Mine is, he'd do anything to keep you from realizing that he supports the very same kind of torture the Inquisition practiced. That wouldn't look so good for his Religion's-horrible, Atheists-are-lovely argument, now would it?

Indeed, bullshit makes strange bedfellows How about Sam Harris and General William Boykin? Yeah, the guy who said "We're a Christian nation. because our foundation and our roots are Judeo-Christian. Did I say Judeo-Christian? Yes. Judeo-Christian. The enemy that has come against our nation is a spiritual enemy. His name is Satan. And if you do not believe that Satan is real, you are ignoring the same Bible that tells you about God" ( http://www.irregulartimes. com/tortureboykin.html). But both Boykin the armed fundamentalist and Harris the committed infidel are on board in the war on Iraq, sorry, IN Iraq, and Afghanistan--in the crusade against Terror, the anti-jihad jihad against the Muslims, most of whom "are utterly deranged by their religious faith" (LCN p. 85). If it comes to that, Hitchens is on board too . Two out of the Four Horsemen on the side of the angels. And, incidentally, on a side that most atheists and humanists wouldn't touch with a bargepole. Life's sure way more complex than you'd like to think it is.

But for me, the most disturbing thing about Harris is not his racism, nor his acceptance of torture, nor his siding with Christian warriors, nor his cavalier way with historical facts. It's his credulity.

Later on there'll be a chapter on this blog entitled "The Credulity of the Skeptic". For now, just note this. On p. 49 of LCN, Harris says that the Bible is "brimming with lies". Harris doesn't believe the Bible, but he does believe the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth-century equivalents of today's Christian fundamentalists--believes in their phoniest propaganda, as long as it makes some other Christians, Catholics in this case, look bad. In other words, he'll grab onto anything that supports his case, regardless of trivial details like whether it's true or not.

I think that fact alone pretty well takes Harris out of play in this science v. religion business, don't you? Time to move on to Hitchens--at worst, in contrast with the dour Harris, he's good for a laugh or two.

FOUR GUYS AGAINST GOD: 1, SAM HARRIS

2009-09-04T19:39:00.000-07:00

One thing you can say for Harris--he believes, with all the fervor of a true believer, in the profound principle first and most clearly enunciated more than a century ago by the comic-opera-writing duo, Gilbert and Sullivan:

Every little boy or gal who's born into this world alive
Is either a little liberal, or else a little conservative.

In other words, as is nowadays almost universally accepted, there can be only two opinions about anything.

It follows from this, by unimpeachable logic, that you are either a Christian fundamentalist or an atheist. (There is, naturally, only one "basic doctrine" of Christianity. This may come as a surprise to a lot of theologians--what have they been talking and writing about all their lives?) If you pretend to be anything else, you're a hypocrite, in fact worse than a hypocrite, you're an enabler who gives cover to those who burn clinic and shoot abortionists. And make no mistake, we're at war here. "One side is really going to win this argument, and the other side is really going to lose" (p.5--unless otherwise indicated, all page references in this post refer to Letter to a Christian Nation, henceforth LCN).

Moreover, anyone who doesn't support his side (meaning all the "moderate" or "liberal" Christians who "cherry-pick the Bible", pp. 18 & 105) must be on the other side. Or as Jesus put it more pithily, "He who is not for me is against me" (Matthew 12.30--you jes' cain't get away from that ole Bible!)

Well, in fact everybody cherry-picks the Bible. Paul Jeter accuses Christian fundamentalists of cherry-picking (http://dissidentvoice.org/Dec2004/Jeter1224.htm) One named "Clayvessel" accuses Oprah Winfrey of cherry-picking (http://www.oprah.com/community/thread/102396). Those are just a couple of the 444,000 hits I got when I googled "cherry-picking the Bible" (exact wording). Cherry-picking's an equal-opportunity thing. Why? Because you can't NOT cherry-pick the Bible. If the Bible contradicts itself, you have no option, you have to pick. Were animals created first, then Adam? Or Adam first, then animals? (Genesis 1 or Genesis 2--take your pick.) Were Christ's last words "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" (Matthew and Mark) or "Father, into Thy hands I commend my spirit" (Luke), or "I thirst...It is finished" (John)? If your neighbor worships a graven image, should you forgive him or kill him? You just have to pick, unless, like the Red Queen in Alice, you can believe "six impossible things before breakfast".

And of course the most diligent cherry-pickers are atheists like Harris, who rake through the Old Testament for the most damning bits just as diligently as we, when kids, would rake through it for the naughty bits (I spent years wondering just what "emerods in his privy parts" could mean).

Anyway, after assuring us over and over again what nice people atheists are (because "our own search for happiness provides a rationale for self-sacrifice and self-denial", p. 24--we'll see when we get to more general discussion just how much substance there is in that claim), Harris finally lets the horns peep out from under his cloak with the following three consecutive sentences:

"Insofar as there is a crime problem in Western Europe, it is largely the product of immigration" (p. 43-4).

(Haven't I heard something like that before, somewhere? From Rush Limbaugh, maybe?)

"Seventy percent of the inmates of France's jails are Muslims"

(I wonder which part of the words "racial profiling" Harris doesn't understand. My guess is, the "racial" part.)

"The Muslims of Western Europe are generally not atheists".

Note in this passage the shift from "immigrants" to "Muslims". Not a word about "Arabs"--that would be racism, wouldn't it, and your friendly neighborhood atheist would never be guilty of that, would he?. But it's obvious that in the first sentence he must mean "Arab immigrants" and in the second, "Arabs". Because, unless you interpret the third sentence as "The Arab immigrants of Western Europe are generally not atheists", it's both tautological and nonsensical. Of course Muslims aren't atheists--duh! Or they wouldn't be Muslims, would they?

"Brave", "intelligent", "clear-sighted", "bracing", "a marvelous little book"--these are just a few of the encomia that Harris's book gleaned. Yet it bears all the marks of something written in haste and anger, so much so as to blind its author to patent absurdities. He complains bitterly that there should be a special term for "atheist" when there are no special terms for "non-astrologer" or "non-alchemist" (p. 51). Well, obviously, because there's no single thing, like "astrologer" or "alchemist" to contrast with it. There are at least four alternatives--instead of being an atheist, you might choose to be a deist, a theist, a polytheist, or an agnostic.

Oops! Sorry, clean forgot. There's only two possible opinions about anything!

Let's face it--"research-free" would have been a more accurate epithet than any of those cited above. Take this, for example: "It seems all but certain that the dogma of the Virgin Birth, and much of the Christian world's resulting anxiety about sex, was a product of a mistranslation from the Hebrew" (p. 58). Indeed, the Hebrew word in Isaiah--'alma--could mean "young maiden" as well as "virgin". So the take-home message here is, "Christians are such total idiots that they'd let a simple mistranslation screw up both their deepest beliefs and their sex-lives".

In fact belief in the Virgin Birth hasn't anything to do with any mistranslation. Given Christian premises, it represented, like most theology, a perfectly logical and indeed unavoidable deduction (the validity of the premises is, of course, another matter). The logic of it is typically expressed in this early twentieth century commentary by Professor Charles A. Briggs of the Union Theological Seminary (Briggs, please note, was regarded as a "radical" in his day, and his defense of the doctrine of Virgin Birth came as something of a surprise):

"If Jesus Christ is the incarnation of a pre-existing deity, then some mode of birth was necessary. There seems to be no alternative between the Virgin Birth and birth in the ordinary way of human generation."

And of course, that way would have meant jizzum from Joseph, ruling out God as the Father. Couldn't be. So had to be VB. The prophecy from Isaiah, readings of which could simply choose a common alternative meaning for 'alma, was just icing on the cake, seeming as it did to prophesy and confirm what must (according to Christians) have happened.

As for the VB screwing up Christians' sex-lives, that's a non-sequitur if ever I saw one. The virginity or otherwise of Christ's mum has absolutely nothing to do with the alleged anti-sexual bias of Christians (more honored in the breach than the observance--check out the list of "sexually-active Popes" on Wikipedia), which had far more to do with previous ascetic traditions by the Essenes and others or St. Paul's gynophobia. In fact the Albigenses, a sect whose elite really did practice absolute abstention from sex, got barbecued to extinction by Christians.

But Harris's gross misunderstandings of religion aren't limited to Christianity. He repeats the hoary but popular myth that Muslims blow themselves and others up so that they can enjoy "seventy-two virgins in Paradise"--if you don't believe that, it's because you "simply don't know what it is like to really believe in God" (p. 83).

As his statements about the VB (and many more scattered throughout LCN) abundantly show, it's Harris, the committed atheist, who (naturally enough) doesn't know what it's like to really believe in God. The most thorough and objective study of suicide bombing to date, Robert Pape's Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism, examined every instance of suicide bombing from 1980 to 2004, and concluded that the main motive was not religious fervor but the desire to end foreign occupation of what the terrorists regarded as their homeland. Repeated reports of 9/11 terrorists hanging out in nightclubs, drinking alcohol and soliciting prostitutes immediately before the hijackings (see for example http://www.historycommons. org/context.jsp?item=a091101beforepinkpony) are absurd on Harris's view, but make sense, given Pape's.

(Note, btw, that Harris also lists the Tamil-Sinhalese conflict in Sri Lanka as yet another conflict driven by religion. Yet again, duh! True, Tamils are mostly Hindu and Sinhalese mostly Buddhist, but the conflict had zero to do with their respective religions. In fact the conflict was a purely secular one--the Tamils wanted their own nation and the Sinhalese didn't want them to have it.)

I suppose we should be thankful that LCN doesn't repeat the ludicrous account of Inquisition torture that disfigured Harris's previous book The End of Faith. With weird but typical Harrisian logic, his own approval and advocacy of torture follow it. Wow! There's material there for a whole nother post.

MISSION STATEMENT

2009-09-02T14:34:00.000-07:00

Welcome to BEYOND SCIENCE VERSUS RELIGION--the site that transcends and transforms the currently escalating struggle between science and religion.

You might think that, with so much being written about it, that struggle has been studied to saturation point.. You would be SO-O-O-O wrong. Many aspects of it have been ignored or hardly touched on. Why is conflict intensifying now, rather than at some other time? What are the social and historical forces that drive it? What aspects of religion are atheists wholly unaware of? How much is atheism due to the fact that, early in its history, Christianity went terribly wrong? Why won't Christians admit that their current practices travesty Christ's teachings? What is the hidden paradox in the atheist position that makes its denial of God scientifically untenable? Can atheism and religion turn out to be, at bottom, the same thing--acts of faith?

Hardly anyone has discussed these aspects so far, for a simple reason. Most who have taken part in the debate have been committed to one side or the other, ignoring weaknesses on their own side, knowing (or caring) too little about the other to understand its real flaws. The rest have made wishy-washy attempts to patch up a truce by papering over the cracks--equally, if for different reasons, failing to face unpalatable truths. What is most lacking and most needed is rigorous analysis, uncommitted to either side, dealing with both sides equally and equally objectively. Placing the struggle firmly in both its historical and cosmic contexts, this site will provides just such an analysis.

With my unwavering commitment to seek out bullshit and destroy it in all of its varying forms and disguises, I promise to do that, right here. Here's how we'll proceed. The atheists will get their turn first, for the simple reason that I'm getting really pissed off with their SMUG SELF-SATISFACTION. You'd think this kind of self-righteousness would be the sole prerogative of the religious, bur believe me, buddy, it ain't. So I start with the grandly-self-titled Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, or, to cut them down to size, Four Guys against God--Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett. I take each of them in turn and examine them minutely, then--if I haven't been sidetracked into trying to answer the brilliant, witty, devastating arguments that you, my readers, will produce, if indeed you exist (yet another act of faith, I suppose)--I'll look at some failings they all, to some degree, share. And then, if I live so long, if we ever get there, it will be the turn of the religious.

Sam Harris--as the most insubstantial, 120 pages on the most generous of counts--you're up first!