Spirit on the Brain

The slow, whiny death of British Christianity:

For centuries, religion was insulated from criticism in Britain. First its opponents were burned, then jailed, then shunned. But once there was a free marketplace of ideas, once people could finally hear both the religious arguments and the rationalist criticisms of them, the religious lost the British people. Their case was too weak, their opposition to divorce and abortion and gay people too cruel, their evidence for their claims non-existent. Once they had to rely on persuasion rather than intimidation, the story of British Christianity came to an end….

Now that only six percent of British people regularly attend a religious service, it’s only natural that we should dismantle the massive amounts of tax money and state power that are automatically given to the religious to wield over the rest of us. It’s a necessary process of building a secular state, where all citizens are free to make up their own minds….

After the race riots in Bradford, Oldham and Burnley in 2001, the official investigations found that faith schools were a major cause….

On average, [faith schools] get higher grades. But look again. A number of studies, including by the conservative think thank Civitas, have blown a hole in this claim. They have proven that faith schools systematically screen out children who will be harder to teach: children from poor families, and less bright children. Once you look at how much a school improves the pupils it actually admits, the only real measure of a school’s success, it turns out faith schools do less well than other schools—which isn’t surprising given they waste so much time teaching them crazy nonsense like Virgin births and Noah’s Ark.

Stephen Dutch, on “God’s Grandchildren: How Religions Fail and Why“:

As Alan Cromer noted in Uncommon Sense: The Heretical Nature Of Science (1993):

From the work of the Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget, we know that human beings have a fundamentally egocentric conception of the world. Growing up in modern society means learning to accept the existence of an external world separate from oneself. It is hard. Most of humankind, for most of its history, never learned to distinguish the internal world of thoughts and feelings with the external world of objects and events. … Cutting this connection, which is necessary before science can develop, goes against the grain of human nature.

Babies start out with a fundamentally magic view of the world: they cry, things happen. So it’s intuitively obvious that the universe should respond to our wishes….

The problem with the Middle East today is not Islam. The Koran has passages that urge forgiveness and mercy just as forcefully as the Bible. It also has passages that justify vengeance and cruelty as much as the Old Testament. There is a vigorous debate in some circles over whether Islam is really a “religion of peace.” Islam can be a religion of peace, but it arose in a region whose cultures are not cultures of peace. Islam took root in societies driven by a manic obsession with personal status, hypersensitivity to personal and group insults, inability to accept defeat, and paranoia – often bordering on clinical – regarding male sexual potency and female sexual infidelity. And despite its virtues, Islam failed to transform those societies. Instead, the surrounding cultures co-opted and contaminated Islam, selectively emphasized the doctrines that reinforced their cultural prejudices while neutering those that posed any radical challenge to the values of the society, and finally transformed Islam over large parts of its realm into a vehicle for justifying petty revenge and sexual paranoia.

Whenever I’m disposed to think unkindly about Islam, I remember two Muslims in particular. One, a Kuwaiti, narrowly avoided death at the hands of the Iraqis during the occupation of Kuwait. When he was threatened with execution, he asked for five minutes to pray first. The other, the imam of Kladanj in Bosnia, was a gentle, scholarly man who was delighted to show us his mosque and share memories of his pilgrimage to Mecca with a couple of respectful non-Muslims. If either of these people were Christians, they’d be held up as shining examples of what Christianity can do. Islam can produce people of peace.

Christianity can be a religion of peace, too, but in the Jim Crow South it was perverted into a vehicle for expressing resentment over defeat and exacting petty vengeance on blacks. “We took on an opponent three times our size, to protect something that didn’t deserve to be protected, and we lost, so we’ll take it out on Blacks.” In fact, the Christianity of the Ku Klux Klan (and extremists like Westboro Baptist Church) is a near perfect analogy for the radical Islam of jihadists….

The holy book of the religion can become the object of worship, so that radical Islamists can become rabid over insults to the Koran, yet simultaneously ignore its teachings (Sura 17.104 says “And We said to the Israelites after him: Dwell in the land ….,” a verse blithely ignored by the anti-Israel crowd), or radical Christians can display the same fury over any questioning of the authority of the Bible, yet display the grossest ignorance of what the Bible actually says.

Steven Dutch, on 21st Century Magic:

For all the harm it has sometimes caused, it seems clear that the Western world’s bias in favor of black and white, right and wrong, was indispensable to the development of science. A culture that views things in terms of black and white can learn to see shades of gray; it is not at all clear that a culture that sees only shades of gray can learn to see black and white. A culture committed to right and wrong answers will eventually see that over-zealous application of that concept sometimes fails to agree with reality; it yields wrong results. But in a culture where differences are routinely explained away as a matter of individual perspective or thoughts influencing reality, how could anyone deduce the existence of invariable laws?….

Paranormalists actually assert that magical phenomena have a basis in reality, and that there is a mechanism for magical processes. The best known varieties include:

• Clairvoyance: foreseeing the future
• Telekinesis: exerting forces with the mind
• Telepathy: communication with other minds without physical means
• Extrasensory Perception (ESP): sensing actions without actual physical communication

There’s nothing inherently irrational about testing these ideas; the problem is that the tests routinely fail. Rather than accept the implications of the tests (the phenomena didn’t show up, or after enough failures, that they don’t exist), paranormalists resort to evasions: the phenomena are real but not susceptible to conventional experiments, excessive controls to guard against fraud dampen the phenomena, skepticism dampens the phenomena (only people who believe in them can test for them), rare spectacular hits mean something but long runs of random results don’t, and so on.

More than any other city, Las Vegas is built on the laws of probability and thronged with people trying to beat them. If paranormal phenomena exist, the casinos would spot it.

It’s significant that the list of paranormal phenomena above includes most of the supernatural special effects of more conventional religion: prophecy (clairvoyance), miracles (telekinesis), and visions (telepathy and ESP). the only thing lacking is a moral code. All the miraculous fringe benefits of a religion with none of the muss and fuss of not stealing, not committing adultery, and so on.

That’s actually not quite right, as there’s a big overlap between the above (New Age) beliefs and the acceptance of the idea of karma/reincarnation, which implies the Golden Rule just as surely as anything in scripture does. With karma and reincarnation, if you steal or commit adultery in this life, you’ll be on the receiving end of the same behaviors in a future life. That’s plenty of “muss and fuss,” where the expected punishment exactly fits the crime.

[T]here’s precious little atheism that doesn’t resort to some kind of consolatory religion, minus God. If there is absolutely no afterlife, then a second after you die, it won’t matter to you whether you lived in luxury or grinding poverty, freedom or a concentration camp. When the last person who knew you dies and the last record of your existence disappears, it won’t matter at all what your life was like. Most atheists, pressed on this point, will say that it “still matters,” as if there’s some kind of Cosmic Consciousness out there that keeps score even if you’re not there to remember it. If there’s no judgment or arbiter of values, then every value statement is, at bottom, merely an opinion. Ultimately, Elvis on black velvet is as valid a work of art as anything by Picasso or Rembrandt. It is perfectly possible to live a long and full life exploiting others and die happy. Few atheists have the courage to face this issue squarely; most fall back on the ethics of Voltaire or Bertrand Russell (in other words, arguments from authority), the common consensus of society, the greatest good for the greatest number, and so on. But really, why should I care about the greatest good for others if I can increase my own good at the expense of others? In fact the most coldly rational strategy is to encourage everyone else to act ethically while I ally myself with like-minded people to exploit them.

Indeed, a lot of the good behaviors we see from atheists today are, I think, the product of them being raised with religious values, and then thinking themselves out of those cults, but still retaining “what their mothers raised them to be.” (I’m speaking for myself there, too, as someone who grew up with a mother who was a missionary in early-’60s Europe; who later spent a decade believing that the Cosmic Consciousness of God and guru were aware of his every thought and action; and who, by now, has no pangs of conscience whatsoever when downloading copyrighted digital content, which I wouldn’t have considered doing even if it had been available, growing up.)

PZ Myers just posted a disparaging blog on the “New Agnostics,” which inadvertently covers a lot of what I dislike about the shallow New Atheist position:

One other specific issue I have to take with Rosenbaum is that he’s lazy. He’s got one question that he’s absolutely sure will stump the atheists, and justify his rejection of them. It’s an old and distinguished philosophical question, but hardly relevant.

Faced with the fundamental question: “Why is there something rather than nothing?” atheists have faith that science will tell us eventually. Most seem never to consider that it may well be a philosophic, logical impossibility for something to create itself from nothing. But the question presents a fundamental mystery that has bedeviled (so to speak) philosophers and theologians from Aristotle to Aquinas. Recently scientists have tried to answer it with theories of “multiverses” and “vacuums filled with quantum potentialities,” none of which strikes me as persuasive….

Although, actually, some of us do have pretty good answers to the question, and it’s apparent that Rosenbaum hasn’t even tried to look them up before posing with [sic] his challenge. He could have looked up Sean Carroll, who gives a characteristically thoughtful and rather philosophical answer.

Ultimately, the problem is that the question—”Why is there something rather than nothing?”—doesn’t make any sense. What kind of answer could possibly count as satisfying? What could a claim like “The most natural universe is one that doesn’t exist” possibly mean? As often happens, we are led astray by imagining that we can apply the kinds of language we use in talking about contingent pieces of the world around us to the universe as a whole. It makes sense to ask why this blog exists, rather than some other blog; but there is no external vantage point from which we can compare the relatively likelihood of different modes of existence for the universe.

Well, except in the “many universes” perspective which Rosenbaum sort of mentions (and which I have no use for, but which is probably the dominant way to get around the philosophical problems with the collapse of the quantum wavefunction, etc.).

Not to mention that the idea that a question “doesn’t make sense” in part because it has no satisfying answer is a pretty mind-bogglingly stupid notion. But this is what happens when scientists try to do philosophy. Seriously. (I had read Carroll’s piece before, and been completely unimpressed by it.)

Or perhaps he could have looked up Victor Stenger, who is a bit more blunt.

What this example illustrates is that many simple systems are unstable, that is, have limited lifetimes as they undergo spontaneous phase transitions to more complex structures of lower energy. Since “nothing” is as simple as it gets, we would not expect it to be completely stable. In some models of the origin of the universe, the vacuum undergoes a spontaneous phase transition to something more complicated, like a universe containing matter. The transition nothing-to-something is a natural one, not requiring any external agent.

As Nobel Laureate physicist Frank Wilczek has put it, “The answer to the ancient question ‘Why is there something rather than nothing?’ would then be that ‘nothing’ is unstable.”

Of course, those guys are mere physicists. Nothing they could say would be at all persuasive.

Awfully close there to an ironic/sarcastic argument from authority, there; but leaving that aside, you know how regularly scientists will bring up the idea that you’re not allowed to ask “What were things like before the Big Bang?” because “time only began with the Big Bang itself, so it’s meaningless to ask what existed ‘before’ it”?

Stenger and Wilczek are quite happy, when it suits them, to conjecture about what happened/existed before the Big Bang (and to have eternal laws of physics existing in that Nothing/vacuum state; and how did those laws get there? they don’t say; perhaps being lawless is an “unstable” state?). And Myers swallows and regurgitates it whole, because it suits him, too.

Also, the question of Something vs. Nothing which Stenger and Wilczek are trying to answer (and which Myers seems to think they’ve given a sensible/convincing/blunt/“pretty good” answer to) is precisely the same question which Carroll has just tried to prove “doesn’t make sense”!

So which is it? Does the question not make sense and therefore have no answer, or has it already been answered (and therefore implicitly does make sense)? Doesn’t appear that the none-too-philosophical Myers has noticed that inconsistency, either! Yet he’s considering the “New Agnostics” author to be “a chipper flibbertigibbet who is proudly agnostic (no problem with that) and as dumb as they come”! A little reflection would serve “Darwin’s tick” better.

“Are you agnostic about fairies?” is a good question, because it highlights what people actually think. John [Wilkins] gives the right answer; he doesn’t believe in fairies. Most people say the same thing. The point is that it is not only possible, it is reasonable to reject major categories of belief. John also gives the right answer about the Catholic god, which is just as phantasmal as fairies, and he also gives the very same answer about deist or pantheist gods that all the New Atheists give. Neither I nor Dawkins nor Larry Moran nor any atheist I’ve ever talked to will say that we have evidence that the remote and abstract God of Leibniz does not exist.

Yes, the Catholic god doesn’t exist, Zeus doesn’t exist, blah, blah, blah, etc. But is your self-awareness the product of Spirit looking through you, or is it just an emergent property of your neural network (and thus potentially of silicon neural networks, too)? The answer is that there is no answer, i.e., we will never know. (Even if you replaced a person’s brain, neuron-by-neuron, with silicon functional equivalents, and found that your self-awareness was unaltered through all that, it still wouldn’t tell you whether that self-awareness was itself Spirit.) But it’s a question which one can very reasonably be agnostic about, in the “religious sense” of agnostic—because if that Spirit exists, It is (impersonal, transcendent/immanent) God.

And, the answer to that question is directly relevant to the question of how Something has emanated from Nothing, i.e., of whether the God of the Yogis exists.

Myers continues, on why the New Atheism isn’t a religion:

Whenever we take a position on anything, it immediately opens up the possibility of opposition and segregation into multiple camps. We don’t like brussels sprouts; They love the slimy little things. Tribes are what people do, naturally and spontaneously. The question is always about how they deal with other tribes—shall we execute Brussels Sprouts Eaters, or is it sufficient to merely deport them, or shall we just have an information campaign and make fun of the crazy people who eat the awful green balls?

But, all religions began as cults; and cults are not defined simply by how they treat people outside of the group, but much more on how they bind people into the in-group. (Making fun of people outside the group of course accomplishes both functions, for those already inside.) Myers and his ilk are being disingenuous in pretending that what they are doing is simply mounting an “information campaign,” while not executing or even excommunicating non-atheists: If the people outside your group who are asking quite reasonable questions are denigrated as being “as dumb as they come,” it would be best to not ask too many questions, eh? And when the group’s leaders give blatantly nonsensical responses to those same questions (as Myers has done), and when pointing that out results in one experiencing the rancor of the group in defense of their “wise leader” and ideals (just as any defense of PETA on the same board will result in one being called a “troll”)….

Plus, if you think about it, any “lapsed atheist” would indeed no longer be fit to join in the “atheist games,” by definition. So they do in fact get de facto excommunicated.

Any strongly-defined in-group, regardless of how “rational” the tenets it accepts as conditions of membership, will demonstrate cultist tendencies; it’s just human nature. Groups of atheists and scientists included (e.g., in Oppenheimer saying that “if we cannot prove Bohm wrong, we must agree to ignore him”). To see Myers arguing that “atheism isn’t a religion” (which it isn’t) misses that point so completely, it’s almost funny. Seeing him call people outside of his (Brussels sprout-eating) in-group “crazy” is just as “amusing”: Scientology has used the same tactic for decades, now.

“New Atheism” is not a religion, certainly. (Nor is self-correcting science, obviously.) But is it a cult? Arguably, yes. At least, it’s rapidly getting there.

(I have observed before that if either PZ or Ophelia Benson had ever gotten themselves into full-blown [psychological or political, etc.] cults, they would never have been able to “think themselves out” of those groups. You can see that very clearly again, here.)

Half a decade ago, I spent a few hours reading the postings on an atheism list-serv. One of the threads ended with a poster claiming that agnostics were taking a “cowardly” position, in not being able to admit that God doesn’t exist, and that therefore the atheist position is the only rational one. (No doubt PZ would agree.)

I’ve said it before, I will say it again: These people confidently stop asking questions at precisely the point that any reasonably intelligent spiritual (not religious) teenage seeker starts asking them. (Sam Harris is a rare exception among the New Atheists, there, in spite of—nay, because of [or at least consistent with]—his dalliances with the New Age fraud Ken Wilber.) It’s not that such seekers ever actually find answers that stand up to thorough questioning and evidence. But at least they don’t try to blithely brush the questions under the rug, and then turn around and rend the people asking them. Further, you can only actually understand the full, convincing range of reasons for how spiritual claims don’t stand up to questioning by … well, by writing (or at least reading) a book such as this (blog’s) one, which traces the evolution of religion/spirituality from our hunter-gatherer days.

In general, I’m proud to consider myself a “militant atheist.” But unthinking crap like the “Waterboy to the Four Horsemen” has posted there, makes me cringe.