Atheism is a religion mainly for people who are really pretentious and condescending. Basically it is when you without a doubt believe there is no God, supreme force, connective tissue, or anything in the universe other than what you see because you're soooooo great and know everything congratulations. I guess being an atheist is fine whenever you come to that conclusion through science and reason, but one thing I hate is when people become atheists because they had a shitty week or something. "My car got stolen and my great aunt Petunia died, therefore I now know there is no God." Like what, he's your personal servant or something? Your sandwich sucks and it's God's fault? If you get into a philosophical argument with an atheist then it's probably going to be just as frustrating as getting into a philosophical argument with a Christian, so it's probably better to just talk about the Mets/Jets/Rockets/Blue Jackets instead.RATING: I Don't Believe In Ratings%
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When I was about 14 I got sick of staying up all night worrying that 90% of the people I knew were going to go to hell, and became an atheist until I turned 23 and figured out that God is a kind of system, game, or self-organizing principle of matter and information an evolutionary complexification, an increasing vector of non-zero-sumness, as Robert Wright puts it in his great book Nonzero. In these terms, the Bible is a profoundly evolutionary document--a fact that seems to escape atheist and creationist mouthbreathers alike. I guess there are plenty of stubborn morons on both sides of the fence. Still, I'd rather read Dawkins' The Selfish Gene than fucking Left Behind.
I don't know a not-pretentious-and-condescending way of saying this, but the first four words of this entry are a problem.
Yeah I'm going to have to throw out a big ole f-you to the G man on this one. And Sean has a good damn point. And where's my $50?!
And by "G man" I meant Glenn, not God. Don't be bitter because you can't commit to a belief.
Go Blue Jackets!!
See? The atheists are so furious! Don't worry, Laurie, I'll send your money before the dollar is worthless.
I agree wholeheartedly with the first four words of this entry. Atheism more than meets the minimum qualifications for a religion: What's Good About Atheism.
John: I'm not an expert on Wright's work specifically, but he seems to belong to Steven Jay Gould's school of thought, which I've always found to have the feel of reverse engineering. Your description of god as a wandering vector sounds like it could be described as passive intelligent design.
The alternative is that god(s?) are in the fundamental mathematics and science of the universe, e.g., pi has the value it does because god made it that way. This is an interesting idea, but not very convincing to me. As science describes more of the world around us, the concept of god seems to retreat that much further. If we can describe and predict what this vector will do, god will be somewhere else.
The most recent link you posted is a compendium of bad theistic arguments. Atheism isn't anything specific; it's definition by negation. Surely as a Canadian you recognize that that doesn't endow any characteristics. I'm not a Knicks fan. That doesn't mean I'm a Celtics fan. Or a Lakers fan. Maybe I just don't like basketball. So my favourite team is Un-Basketball?
Getting back to hockey, I could entertain the possibility of dropping the Oilers for the Hamilton-Kitchener-Waterloo Thrashers if it were to happen.
And by "Thrashers" I meant "Predators", of course. I'm proving my fandom already.
Sean: Wright and Gould have criticized each other's work bitterly, but that may be the narcissism of small differences. I think they mostly disagree over how to handle teleology.
I'm afraid I disagree so far with your characterization of Fred's article--I don't think the arguments are bad at all, nor are they exclusively theistic, and I'm curious about why you think so. An offhand dismissal is not a refutation.
Likewise with "passive intelligent design"--what does that even mean?
Maybe I was wrong about Wright and Gould. Here's an article by Wright on why Gould is "bad for evolution."
Can I just say it is about damn time we are talking about something other than comic books? Huzzah. Now go leave comments on my Tofurkey post. Bitches.
Don't be down on comics. :(
The article you linked to consists of mainly predictable commentary (which I will address) but the seemingly relevant point is in paragraphs 4 & 5. The argument is that "rationality cannot prove itself" and that axioms must be asserted without total, absolute and complete certainty. This seems to argue for the lack of absolute truth. What that has to do with atheism being a religion is unclear. It seems that the idea is that atheists accept the structure of logic "on faith" in the same way a religious person accepts the presence of the supernatural on faith. In this way, logic is equated with religion. This is not what I (or, colloquially, most people) mean when they say religion. Belief alone is not enough. The concepts of belief here are related only by the limits of the English language.
Does your version of religion not have any accounting for an element of the supernatural? Something infinite? If inherent uncertainty is necessarily religion, then there is no way to seperate religion from anything. Talking about your favourite colour? That's now a theological discussion.
Now for the rest of the article:
Paragraph 1: (hint of ad hominem)
Paragraph 2: strawman, ad hominem
Paragraph 3: strawman (also old and busted)
Paragraph 4 & 5: dealt with
Paragraph 6: disingenuous, but inevitable, invocation of quantum mechanics
Paragraph 7:appeal to majority & tradition ("Almost the whole of the human race for all of its history has had some kind of religion or other"), begging the question, correlation is not causation
Paragraph 8 (including the quotation and the text block immediately following is assumed to be part of Paragraph 8): appeal to majority
Paragraph 10: more physics-as-suits-me via cosmology (really, discussing cosmology and/or quantum mechanics at any meaningful level requires knowledge well beyond the scope of most (but not all e.g. Paul Davies) religious apologists)
Thus, my argument is reliant on faith, but I'm sure Russell's Teapot has my back.
It looks like I should so some more reading on Robert Wright...I knew only the superficial difference between he and Pinker.
That's more like it! I don't have time to go point by point tonight, as I'm up to my balls in course reading for the guy whose article you just critiqued, but I guess the ball's in my court.
As Arnold said, "I'll be back."
You guys pay by the word around here, right?
holy fucking fuck i leave for one day and comments all over the place like tribbles and shit
also, tldr like crazy in here
I think what Fred is criticizing when he invokes Godel's incompleteness theorum is the atheist tendency to dichotomize reason and faith, with atheism on the side of reason and religion on the side of faith. Dawkins does this in The God Delusion. Of course that doesn't mean all atheists do it, but I think a lot of them do it a lot of the time.
I also don't think his appeal to quantum mechanics is as disingenuous as you think. He's not just a "religious apologist" invoking science when it's convenient, he's a distinguished university professor who's written some 40 books, about 20 of which are on science and the arts, and he's been studying this stuff, especially the science of time, since the 60's. I'll admit that I don't understand quantum mechanics well enough to defend Fred's appeal to the many-worlds hypothesis against a technical expert, and an argument based on ethos isn't an argument at all, but do you know quantum physics well enough to critique it, or are you simply condemning him out of hand because he's religious? What invocation of cosmology would you find more satisfactory?
I see what you mean about the straw man arguments, but I've seen Dawkins, for example, make arguments like these. One man's generic summary is another man's straw man, and I don't think you've really addressed the content of the arguments themselves--you've merely applied rhetorical labels. This is a wham-bam article for TCS, not a philosophical treatise. (Of course, if you're interested, he wrote a book called Natural Religion that asks the question, "What would the universe have to be like in order for all religions to be right?" It's heavy on the cosmology.)
Correlation isn't causation, but it's not often one can isolate a determinate causal order in the social sciences. Most studies of this type uncover correlation rather than cause. Religious inclination has been linked to reciprocal altruism and "prosociality" in empirical and experimental studies (e.g. Norenzayan and Shariff, "The Origin and Evolution of Religious Prosociality" Science 3 October 2008), but it hasn't been proven conclusively that it's the religion proper or the secondary reputational concerns that bring about an increase in altruistic behaviour and a reduction in rates of cheating.
I still don't know about "passive intelligent design," but from what I do know about intelligent design, the closer it gets to plausibility, the less distinguishable it is from evolution by natural selection. Even Francis Crick is on paper speculating about a "panspermia" scenario. Insofar as "intelligent design" is used by creationists as some sort of bullshit critique of Darwin's ideas, I think it's grossly and demonstrably false.
All in all, a good chat. I just wish I could get my reading done and write quarrelsome comments simultaneously.
Shitballs, that's a lot of text. It looked pretty reasonable in the little box.
Man I'm glad I was in class getting my plastic cup of professor-provided Shiraz filled up twice before logging on here.
Sean: Sorry, in all that logorrhea I managed to lose the original point entirely, which was that I said that atheism meets the minimum qualifications for a religion.
Of course, it depends on how you define religion. But confucianism doesn't worship a deity or invoke supernatural explanation, and it's generally regarded as a religion. There are other points of view, F.T.'s included, that take a sort of "science fiction" approach to religion. These are still vulnerable to unsympathetic criticism, but they don't invoke supernatural or "magical thinking" as such.
The word "religion" is cognate with "ligament," and the "lig" refers to that which binds, which holds people together. I think religion is basically an economics of reciprocal altruism (even if it's as simple as "shouts out" between like minded authors) that invokes a common cosmology and ritual symbol system, and that also often involves a sort of self-sacrifice. In the case of atheism, I think the cosmology and ritual symbols are usually the trappings of science and experimentation, and the sacrifice involves giving up the consolation of an afterlife and all the comforts and hopes of superstitious thinking. Dawkins himself admits feeling a deep, existential (religious?) awe when contemplating nature's infinite variety. I think Fred's point, which I agree with, is that just because some atheists have managed to substitute science for religion in a zero sum exercise doesn't mean that they have a monopoly on science itself, nor does it mean that religious believers are all superstitious fools (which you never said, but Dawkins has).
Blah blah blah. I do run on.
I'm going to comment on this entry. Soon.
PS - John, thanks for the DFW link (re: earlier, drunken post under 'Mead')
Jesus, I was going to review some other religions, but the comments here are almost to LXG extremes. It amazes me that John and Sean can have such stamina for intellectual argument. I run out of steam about half a sentence in.
Holy fuck! ZING!
"Stamina for intellectual argument." That's a flattering way to put it.
it depends on how you define religion.
That about sums things up.
In your definition you assert that there are common tenets required for a religion, and that atheists "usually" throw in with science and experimentation. The use of usually there is precisely the point. There is no rulebook to atheism, other than not being a theist. The necessity of commonality is not there, and thus your definition of a religion breaks down.
Further, your definition of religion relies on further definitions of "common cosmology". There is no necessity in your definition of religion for the supernatural. Is that intentional? I don't see how your definition is different from what is generally called a worldview or philosophy.
Yes, I've left your other extended comment unacknowledged. There's obviously a lot there (I had five paragraphs written in response to the first few statements) but I think everyone's heard quite enough from me on the topic.
I've enjoyed the dialogue, although these conversations always seem to come down to semantics.
Or maybe conversations with me just seem to come down to semantics.
i win. i win the argumen
Rather than make long posting, let me direct yu to some of my ideas on religion and evolution here and on information and God here. In this review I talk about holiness. In my dissertation, I also talk about the connection between narrative and religion here and here.
Mother of God and All Her Wacky Nephews! Glenn really touched a nerve on this one.
(Troy is a friend who is also interested in a lot of the stuff we've been talking about, and I solicited his opinion on our debate since he's a Christian who has studied literature and recombinant gene technology.)
I've found this conversation really interesting--I'm the kind of person who learns what I think by explicitly formulating my opinions. So I'm not trying to drag out an argument or get in the "last word," so to speak, but to engage the ideas just a little more (and get the comment count up nice and high).
Of course, no one need read on who doesn't want to.
I think part of the problem is that language is always ambiguous, and airtight definitions of whole classes of people at the level of the social sciences and humanities are very hard to come by.
Atheism is, by definition, a negative identification. You can't argue with that--it's like trying to box with a ghost, especially since the massive recursive processing power of the human brain most likely evolved to thwart other competing human beings' predictions of it, or its predictions of their predictions of it, etc. I can say, "Atheists use this argument," and an atheist can say, "Well I don't." I can say, "Many atheists do this," and an atheist can say, "Many doesn't mean every." Does this mean generalization about humans is useless or impossible? Not necessarily, but it does require a certain amount of equivocation, and it's rightly vulnerable to criticism on those grounds.
I also believe that it is perfectly possible to be religious without evoking a supernatural explanation of cosmology, causation, etc. Religion isn't synonymous with "superstition," just like atheism isn't synonymous with "19th century classical determinism" or "nihilistic cynicism."
I think these sorts of dialogues, in which stereotypes are made explicit and then challenged, are great to have, even if none of us are likely to completely change our minds based on what we've written here.
Re-reading my last comment shows how I write without proofreading at 7 o'clock in the morning. Yuck.
Anyhow, it was interesting, John. There are lots of places to discuss ontological (and other existence) arguments online with people more adept and concise than I.
I will do my best to read the literature linked-to in this thread.
i lerned everything i know about christ's mercy from this NSFW website enj9y yall
o and if you got throug that one you mite wanna check this out also nsfw talks about the chrstian lifestyle
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