These things are almost getting trite

Hammond (where I work) has an impressive subscription list to magazines, for a small non-parochial Southern prep school. I have a mid-day break while AP Chemistry is taught by Mrs. Dunne, from about 11:15 - 1:30, and I spend most of it in the library, sifting through Discover, New Scientist, Popular Mechanics, Scientific American, The Economist, Atlantic Monthly, etc...

Thus, a few days ago, I read this article in New Scientist, "What Good is God?"; I must say I was a bit disappointed to be reading the same ideas rehashed. In every article of this sort I've read lately, the standard tripe is to interview a bunch of scientists and (for balance?) a few theologians. The verdict is always the same:

1. Religion enhances socialization, thus it was selected for during the nascence of civilization
2. Religion fulfills the role of general guilt-inspirer; when laws and order are necessary within group dynamics, religion is a useful tool to keep the group on the same page, afraid of the same things and inspired to act beneficially towards the group
3. Abstraction of the mind, with the concomitant ability to "see" intelligent agency behind certain things (recognize design), led to an overly sensitive detection system in which we attribute intelligence to patterns in nature that are...just natural.
4. We may have a language module, this irreducible center in our minds for grammar and syntax, and in the same way, a religion module, which enhances our sense of self and our role in the "grand scheme of things" and our feelings of awe and perception of transcendence
5. blah blah blah

These articles are good, I guess. But in a way they're getting overdone. The media loves to refer to "the new atheists" -- whatever in the hell that means. The essence they attempt to capture here is, in the words of The Nation article,

But over the past generation they have come to feel beleaguered and, except for rare individuals like comedian and talk-show host Bill Maher, voiceless in the public arena. The great success of the New Atheists is to have reached them, both speaking to and for them. These writers are devoted, with sledgehammer force and angry urgency, to "breaking the spell" cast by the religious ascendancy, to overcoming a situation in which every other area of life can be critically analyzed while admittedly irrational religious faith is made central to American life but exempted from serious discussion.

So the backdrop of "new" really only refers to the unique political situation in which we find ourselves today -- the crescendo of the culture wars where stinging critiques of religion are best-sellers but our own government can't pass a bill to support science research that may alleviate some of the worst diseases known to man for the clamor of religious zealots. And this is still newsworthy...why, again? You'd have to be blind and stupid not to know or notice the culture wars screaming around you.

I do appreciate the attempt to find some basic scientific grounds upon which to explain the origins of religion as a human construct. But I am reminded of Dennett's words (which have always meant more to me than those of Harris or Dawkins):

We sit in his study, in some creaky chairs, with the deep silence of an August morning around us, and Dennett tells me that he takes very seriously the risk of overreliance on thought. He doesn't want people to lose confidence in what he calls their "default settings," by which he means the conviction that their ethical intuitions are trustworthy. These default settings give us a feeling of security, a belief that our own sacrifices will be reciprocated. "If you shatter this confidence," he says, "then you get into a deep hole. Without trust, everything goes wrong."

It interests me that, though Dennett is an atheist, he does not see faith merely as a useless vestige of our primitive nature, something we can, with effort, intellectualize away. No rational creature, he says, would be able to do without unexamined, sacred things.

"Would intelligent robots be religious?" it occurs to me to ask.

"Perhaps they would," he answers thoughtfully. "Although, if they were intelligent enough to evaluate their own programming, they would eventually question their belief in God."

Dennett is an advocate of admitting that we simply don't have good reasons for some of the things we believe. Although we must guard our defaults, we still have to admit that they may be somewhat arbitrary. "How else do we protect ourselves?" he asks. "With absolutisms? This means telling lies, and when the lies are exposed, the crash is worse. It's not that science can discover when the body is ensouled. That's nonsense. We are not going to tolerate infanticide. But we're not going to put people in jail for onanism. Instead of protecting stability with a brittle set of myths, we can defend a deep resistance to mucking with the boundaries."

Perhaps we should dig just deep enough to find out what helps us and makes us happier. When we start to descend into Dennett's abyss, maybe we ought to pull back a little on the self-analysis. I bet the robot, once he knew his own programming language, and understood that his code could've been written in any of several languages, could even get a little depressed.

Cameron and Comfort Hit New Low with Rank Dishonesty

I was reading Comfort/Cameron's reaction to the ass-whipping they took on the upcoming ABC special for their "proof" of God's existence, and happened to notice the mention of a website in the press release:

http://www.intelligentdesignversusevolution.com/

Curious, I looked it up...Jesus Christ on a pony, are these kooks not only pathetic, but lying for Jesus!

On their front page, they feature a video of a creationist interviewing Dawkins, and I know that video. And that's why I call them dishonest/liars.

They dug up the canard about Dawkins' inability to answer a question about genomic information increases via evolution -- a subject they've been thoroughly responded to on, but stammer on mindlessly about. What's sad in this case is the deception that was involved in both shooting the interview and in the selective editing used to piece it together. Basically, it's a creationist hit job on Dawkins.

Usually, people like Comfort/Cameron are just stupid, (i.e. argumentum ad bananum) but here they're playing to rank dishonesty and exposing their complete lack of integrity.

I have compiled a very useful list of papers (continually revised), covering abiogenesis, the evolution of genetic information, the origin of the genetic code, and human evolution. I will list some of those papers below.

For more on the evolution of information in the genome:

1. Natural selection as the process of accumulating genetic information in adaptive evolution, M. Kimura (1961)
2. Rate of Information Acquisition by a Species subjected to Natural Selection, D.J.C. MacKay
3. Evolution of biological information, T.D. Schneider
4. The fitness value of information, C.T. Bergstrom and M. Lachmann
5. Review of W. Dembski’s No Free Lunch, J. Shallit
6. The Evolution and Understanding of Hierarchical Complexity in Biology from an Algebraic Perspective, C.L. Nehaniv and J.L. Rhodes
7. On the Increase in Complexity in Evolution, P.T. Saunders and M.W. Ho (1976)
8. On the Increase in Complexity in Evolution II: The Relativity of Complexity and the Principle of Minimum Increase, P.T. Saunders and M.W. Ho (1981)

In addition to these papers, I wanted to highlight six other recent reviews that give a great overview of the present scientific thinking towards the origin of the genetic code:

1. "Selection, history and chemistry: the three faces of the genetic code.", Trends in Biochemical Sciences, Volume 24, Issue 6, 1 June 1999, Pages 241-247 (full-text .pdf)
   
2. "Genetic code: Lucky chance or fundamental law of nature?", Physics of Life Reviews, Volume 1, Issue 3, Dec 2004, Pages 202-229 (full-text .pdf) [low-quality pub, but expansive overview of the subject]
   
3. "Stepwise Evolution of Nonliving to Living Chemical Systems.", Origins of Life and Evolution of the Biosphere, Volume 34, Issue 4, Aug 2004, Pages 371–389 (full-text .pdf)
4. "The Origin of Cellular Life.", Bioessays, Volume 22, Issue 12, Dec 2004, Pages 1160-1170 (full-text .pdf)
5. "The Origin of the Genetic Code: Theories and Their Relationships, A Review.", Biosystems, Volume 80, Issue 2, May 2005, Pages 175-184 (full-text .pdf)
6. "The Origin and Evolution of the Genetic Code: Statistical and Experimental Investigations.", Robin D. Knight, Ph.D. Dissertation, June 2001.
   

And three more about evolution and complexity:

1. Understanding the recent evolution of the human genome: insights from human-chimpanzee genome comparisons, Human Mutation, 28(2):99-130, Oct 2006, Download PDF
2. The origin of new genes: Glimpses from the young and old, Nature Reviews Genetics, 4(11): 865-875 Nov 2003, Download PDF
3. Evolution of biological complexity, PNAS, 97(9):4463-4468, April 2000, Download PDF

There are answers. Do the creationists know that they exist? Mostly not. Would they understand them if they did? Mostly not. How much knowledge is required before creationists admit that we have sound scientific answers to all of their objections? There will never be enough. Ever.

The sad thing is that they think that their non-answers and ignorance (not knowing how things happen) equals evidence that scientists/science cannot provide answers or knowledge. IOW, they use the classic argument from incredulity/ignorance. If they don't know or understand something, then it means god did it. Longest-running theme in creationism.
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Technorati tags: God, Religion, Atheism, Intelligent Design, Evolution, Creationism

Paula Zahn with Richard Dawkins on Darwin Day (2/12/07)

After the first (arguably horrific) segment done on the PZ hour regarding atheists and discrimination, the producers decided to take a stab at it again; this time, they actually include atheists on their panel, and feature Richard Dawkins in an interview with Paula.

**update**
Youtube 1 -- interview with Dawkins
Youtube 2 -- panel conversation
**

digg story

Should Science Tell Us the Greatest Story Ever Told?

True or False:

...in a world dangerously charged with ideology, science needs to take on an evangelical role, vying with religion as teller of the greatest story ever told...(link)

Well, you already know what I think -- tell the story that's true, ergo, not religious ones.

November 21, 2006
New York Times
A Free-for-All on Science and Religion
By GEORGE JOHNSON

Maybe the pivotal moment came when Steven Weinberg, a Nobel laureate in physics, warned that “the world needs to wake up from its long nightmare of religious belief,” or when a Nobelist in chemistry, Sir Harold Kroto, called for the John Templeton Foundation to give its next $1.5 million prize for “progress in spiritual discoveries” to an atheist — Richard Dawkins, the Oxford evolutionary biologist whose book The God Delusion is a national best-seller.

Or perhaps the turning point occurred at a more solemn moment, when Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York City and an adviser to the Bush administration on space exploration, hushed the audience with heartbreaking photographs of newborns misshapen by birth defects — testimony, he suggested, that blind nature, not an intelligent overseer, is in control.

Somewhere along the way, a forum this month at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, Calif., which might have been one more polite dialogue between science and religion, began to resemble the founding convention for a political party built on a single plank: in a world dangerously charged with ideology, science needs to take on an evangelical role, vying with religion as teller of the greatest story ever told.

Carolyn Porco, a senior research scientist at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo., called, half in jest, for the establishment of an alternative church, with Dr. Tyson, whose powerful celebration of scientific discovery had the force and cadence of a good sermon, as its first minister.

She was not entirely kidding. “We should let the success of the religious formula guide us,” Dr. Porco said. “Let’s teach our children from a very young age about the story of the universe and its incredible richness and beauty. It is already so much more glorious and awesome — and even comforting — than anything offered by any scripture or God concept I know.”

She displayed a picture taken by the Cassini spacecraft of Saturn and its glowing rings eclipsing the Sun, revealing in the shadow a barely noticeable speck called Earth.

There has been no shortage of conferences in recent years, commonly organized by the Templeton Foundation, seeking to smooth over the differences between science and religion and ending in a metaphysical draw. Sponsored instead by the Science Network, an educational organization based in California, and underwritten by a San Diego investor, Robert Zeps (who acknowledged his role as a kind of “anti-Templeton”), the La Jolla meeting, “Beyond Belief: Science, Religion, Reason and Survival,” rapidly escalated into an invigorating intellectual free-for-all. (Unedited video of the proceedings will be posted on the Web at tsntv.org.)

A presentation by Joan Roughgarden, a Stanford University biologist, on using biblical metaphor to ease her fellow Christians into accepting evolution (a mutation is “a mustard seed of DNA”) was dismissed by Dr. Dawkins as “bad poetry,” while his own take-no-prisoners approach (religious education is “brainwashing” and “child abuse”) was condemned by the anthropologist Melvin J. Konner, who said he had “not a flicker” of religious faith, as simplistic and uninformed.

After enduring two days of talks in which the Templeton Foundation came under the gun as smudging the line between science and faith, Charles L. Harper Jr., its senior vice president, lashed back, denouncing what he called “pop conflict books” like Dr. Dawkins’s “God Delusion,” as “commercialized ideological scientism” — promoting for profit the philosophy that science has a monopoly on truth.

That brought an angry rejoinder from Richard P. Sloan, a professor of behavioral medicine at Columbia University Medical Center, who said his own book, Blind Faith: The Unholy Alliance of Religion and Medicine, was written to counter “garbage research” financed by Templeton on, for example, the healing effects of prayer.

With atheists and agnostics outnumbering the faithful (a few believing scientists, like Francis S. Collins, author of “The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief,” were invited but could not attend), one speaker after another called on their colleagues to be less timid in challenging teachings about nature based only on scripture and belief. “The core of science is not a mathematical model; it is intellectual honesty,” said Sam Harris, a doctoral student in neuroscience and the author of “The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason” and “Letter to a Christian Nation.”

“Every religion is making claims about the way the world is,” he said. “These are claims about the divine origin of certain books, about the virgin birth of certain people, about the survival of the human personality after death. These claims purport to be about reality.”

By shying away from questioning people’s deeply felt beliefs, even the skeptics, Mr. Harris said, are providing safe harbor for ideas that are at best mistaken and at worst dangerous. “I don’t know how many more engineers and architects need to fly planes into our buildings before we realize that this is not merely a matter of lack of education or economic despair,” he said.

Dr. Weinberg, who famously wrote toward the end of his 1977 book on cosmology, “The First Three Minutes,” that “the more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless,” went a step further: “Anything that we scientists can do to weaken the hold of religion should be done and may in the end be our greatest contribution to civilization.”

With a rough consensus that the grand stories of evolution by natural selection and the blossoming of the universe from the Big Bang are losing out in the intellectual marketplace, most of the discussion came down to strategy. How can science fight back without appearing to be just one more ideology?

“There are six billion people in the world,” said Francisco J. Ayala, an evolutionary biologist at the University of California, Irvine, and a former Roman Catholic priest. “If we think that we are going to persuade them to live a rational life based on scientific knowledge, we are not only dreaming — it is like believing in the fairy godmother.”

“People need to find meaning and purpose in life,” he said. “I don’t think we want to take that away from them.”

Lawrence M. Krauss, a physicist at Case Western Reserve University known for his staunch opposition to teaching creationism, found himself in the unfamiliar role of playing the moderate. “I think we need to respect people’s philosophical notions unless those notions are wrong,” he said.

“The Earth isn’t 6,000 years old,” he said. “The Kennewick man was not a Umatilla Indian.” But whether there really is some kind of supernatural being — Dr. Krauss said he was a nonbeliever — is a question unanswerable by theology, philosophy or even science. “Science does not make it impossible to believe in God,” Dr. Krauss insisted. “We should recognize that fact and live with it and stop being so pompous about it.”

That was just the kind of accommodating attitude that drove Dr. Dawkins up the wall. “I am utterly fed up with the respect that we — all of us, including the secular among us — are brainwashed into bestowing on religion,” he said. “Children are systematically taught that there is a higher kind of knowledge which comes from faith, which comes from revelation, which comes from scripture, which comes from tradition, and that it is the equal if not the superior of knowledge that comes from real evidence.”

By the third day, the arguments had become so heated that Dr. Konner was reminded of “a den of vipers.”

“With a few notable exceptions,” he said, “the viewpoints have run the gamut from A to B. Should we bash religion with a crowbar or only with a baseball bat?”

His response to Mr. Harris and Dr. Dawkins was scathing. “I think that you and Richard are remarkably apt mirror images of the extremists on the other side,” he said, “and that you generate more fear and hatred of science.”

Dr. Tyson put it more gently. “Persuasion isn’t always ‘Here are the facts — you’re an idiot or you are not,’ ” he said. “I worry that your methods” — he turned toward Dr. Dawkins — “how articulately barbed you can be, end up simply being ineffective, when you have much more power of influence.”

Chastened for a millisecond, Dr. Dawkins replied, “I gratefully accept the rebuke.”

In the end it was Dr. Tyson’s celebration of discovery that stole the show. Scientists may scoff at people who fall back on explanations involving an intelligent designer, he said, but history shows that “the most brilliant people who ever walked this earth were doing the same thing.” When Isaac Newton’s “Principia Mathematica” failed to account for the stability of the solar system — why the planets tugging at one another’s orbits have not collapsed into the Sun — Newton proposed that propping up the mathematical mobile was “an intelligent and powerful being.”

It was left to Pierre Simon Laplace, a century later, to take the next step. Hautily telling Napoleon that he had no need for the God hypothesis, Laplace extended Newton’s mathematics and opened the way to a purely physical theory.

“What concerns me now is that even if you’re as brilliant as Newton, you reach a point where you start basking in the majesty of God and then your discovery stops — it just stops,” Dr. Tyson said. “You’re no good anymore for advancing that frontier, waiting for somebody else to come behind you who doesn’t have God on the brain and who says: ‘That’s a really cool problem. I want to solve it.’ ”

“Science is a philosophy of discovery; intelligent design is a philosophy of ignorance,” he said. “Something fundamental is going on in people’s minds when they confront things they don’t understand.”

He told of a time, more than a millennium ago, when Baghdad reigned as the intellectual center of the world, a history fossilized in the night sky. The names of the constellations are Greek and Roman, Dr. Tyson said, but two-thirds of the stars have Arabic names. The words “algebra” and “algorithm” are Arabic.

But sometime around 1100, a dark age descended. Mathematics became seen as the work of the devil, as Dr. Tyson put it. “Revelation replaced investigation,” he said, and the intellectual foundation collapsed.

He did not have to say so, but the implication was that maybe a century, maybe a millennium from now, the names of new planets, stars and galaxies might be Chinese. Or there may be no one to name them at all.

Before he left to fly back home to Austin, Dr. Weinberg seemed to soften for a moment, describing religion a bit fondly as a crazy old aunt.

“She tells lies, and she stirs up all sorts of mischief and she’s getting on, and she may not have that much life left in her, but she was beautiful once,” he lamented. “When she’s gone, we may miss her.”

Dr. Dawkins wasn’t buying it. “I won't miss her at all,” he said. “Not a scrap. Not a smidgen.”

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It's a difficult thing, in my view, to say what the role of science is, insofar as "encouraging itself". Science is a method to knowledge, and it is also embodied in who scientists are, to some degree. Religion is not a method to knowledge, it's circumvention of justified knowledge via belief.

If people want justified knowledge, then encouragement is not necessary. Some people don't seem to want it at all, preferring their cherished hopes and dreams over the sometimes cold facts of the natural universe.

I don't know if the inherent nature of science is evangelical, or if it should be. Perhaps if we lived in a better world, the people whose ignorance and fear keeps them from accepting the reality of scientific knowledge and progress would not have to be "converted", because their fear and ignorance wouldn't exist in the first place.

But we don't live in the best of possible worlds, do we?

I am already an athevangelical, I suppose I can become a scientangelical as well ;-)
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Technorati tags: Science, Religion

Dawkins Needs to Shut Up Sometimes

Recently criticizing the shallow critiques allotted to religion in the works of Harris and Dawkins, I felt a bit of catharsis. I aired my major grievance against Dawkins. I have always respected his philosophy towards science, and the care with which he probes evolution. I own many of the man's books. But now, he has said something just plain stupid and awful to Emily Hourican in The Dubliner:

The Catholic Church also has an extraordinarily retrogressive stance on everything to do with reproduction. Any sort of new technology which makes life easier for women without causing any suffering is likely to be opposed by the Catholic Church. Regarding the accusations of sexual abuse of children by Catholic priests, deplorable and disgusting as those abuses are, they are not so harmful to the children as the grievous mental harm in bringing up the child Catholic in the first place. I had a letter from a woman in America in her forties, who said that when she was a child of about seven, brought up a Catholic, two things happened to her: one was that she was sexually abused by her parish priest. The second thing was that a great friend of hers at school died, and she had nightmares because she thought her friend was going to hell because she wasn't Catholic. For her there was no question that the greatest child abuse of those two was the abuse of being taught about hell. Being fondled by the priest was negligible in comparison. And I think that's a fairly common experience. I can't speak about the really grave sexual abuse that obviously happens sometimes, which actually causes violent physical pain to the altar boy or whoever it is, but I suspect that most of the sexual abuse priests are accused of is comparatively mild - a little bit of fondling perhaps, and a young child might scarcely notice that. The damage, if there is damage, is going to be mental damage anyway, not physical damage. Being taught about hell - being taught that if you sin you will go to everlasting damnation, and really believing that - is going to be a harder piece of child abuse than the comparatively mild sexual abuse. [emphasis mine]

Wrong, Richard. So wrong. So stupid. Just keep your mouth shut sometimes, when you feel it meandering towards an area so outside your experience and expertise.

You're no longer making an intelligent critique of religion. You're ranting. You're preaching. You're baldly asserting things without any scientific backing whatsoever. You're acting like something I detest -- someone who rails against an ideology (usually atheism), without evidential support, by drawing huge non sequiturs. [HT: Hallq]
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Technorati tags: God, Religion

Delusions of Delusion

I am no friend of religion. That should come as no surprise to anyone with even a passing familiarity with me or my writing. That said, I feel no regret or compunction in admitting that Taner Edis is saying something I've felt about Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins for a while now (and expressed in my restraint to endorse the latter's new book):

If you want to understand something about real varieties of Islam, not the phantom "Islam" that comes out of a contextless reading of the Quran, there's no alternative to doing some serious studying. I don't mean spending half a lifetime on it—there are a good number of scholars whose job it is to study Islam. They're not all apologists, and they generally have interesting things to say. Read a book or two, and I don't just mean Islam-bashing books. It is, after all, possible to be a critic of Islam without frothing at the mouth in the process.

Indeed, that's part of what's disappointing about garbage like what Sam Harris puts out. He writes as if there is no scholarly work being done on the Quran or Islam at all. He doesn't have to agree with it, but even if he thinks current scholarship about Islam is too apologetic in nature, he has the burden of arguing against academic views. There is no excuse for ignoring it and charging in with quotations from the Quran. As a result, Harris looks like a fool to anyone who has a serious, scholarly interest in Islam. And to the extent that skeptics of religion endorse such rants against an "Islam" very few Muslims would recognize as their religion, we collectively look like morons with an axe to grind.

Although Taner is specifically incensed against Harris' shallow treatment of Islam, I feel the same way about a lot of things I see coming out against Christianity. Honestly, I see in retrospect that a some of my earliest examinations of Christian beliefs were more superficial as these new ones by Harris and Dawkins. An extremely long review by Steve Hays of the Triablogue does root out some of the shallowness with which Dawkins dismisses Christian apologia.

Understand that I actually have the desire to know what is true, to the best of my own abilities. I do not want to prop up shallow scarecrow/strawman claims of Christianity (or any other religion) in order to display my prowess at knocking them down. That's part of why I linked to James Lazarus' post earlier: I agree with him that some of those arguments deserve a deeper look, and a second consideration.

However, C1; the claim that "religious language is meaningless," (I would prefer incoherent/unintelligible/non-veridical), I think remains as a solid argument. I also think that this claim ties in more directly to Dawkins' arguments, and would have buttressed them to make them more solid.

One of Dawkins' major arguments in the book is that it is more rational to believe that complex things come from stepwise, gradual change over time, guided by nautral laws, than to believe that the most complex thing we know of (God) just plain old exists and always has. Now, the reason I say that James' C1 analysis would be of much help here is that the standard definition of God, and the questions of ontology and existence, require a serious look.

James first delves into an analysis of C1 from the perspective of positivism -- the position that dismisses all claims of knowledge which have no basis in either: i) an analytical approach, or ii) observation/empiricism. James immediately deals with the most important rejoinder to positivism, its apparent intrinsic self-refutation -- how can we know the statement, "All reliable knowledge comes via empiricism, observation, or analysis"? Does that, itself, meet its own standard? Of more importance to C1 -- is it not at least theoretically possible for religious claims to be observed and verified? James' conclusion here is, "yes". I agree. Certainly if God wanted to prove itself to us, and decided to spend a few years down here on earth performing obvious miracles, confirming Its own power and goodness, and defying the laws of nature, then the proposition, "God exists," would principally be confirmed according to the demands of positivism.

James next examines the prong of the argument which, I will attempt to show, is not so easy to dismiss:

Smith argues, as Augustinian theologians have in the past, that we cannot describe God in positive language. We can only say what God is not, rather than what God is. However, at the same time, we could only say what God is not if we first had some sort of notion from the beginning about what God actually is. So the attempt to describe God and his characteristics in purely negative terms would collapse into the project of describing God and his characteristics in positive terms, which, according to Smith, is not something that we can do. The conclusion that would purportedly follow from this is that we cannot meaningfully refer to a “God” in our language at all.

James next presents an alternative to the claims of Smith -- some positive definitions of God, as well as some limits to God:

[Smith] could have just as easily described omnipotence as “being able to do whatever it is that is logically possible to do”, which is clearly a positive description. Furthermore, the positive description that I’ve just given is much more in accord with what believers typically believe about the nature of God, in comparison with the definition that Smith gives us. So, from this end, Smith's argument has problems...

The classical view of God as literally infinite in character is no longer accepted by almost all theologians (was it ever predominant, really?), and furthermore the Bible itself describes limits to God's character. For instance, according to the Bible, God cannot lie (Titus 1:2, Hebrews 6:18). Now, Smith might argue that this is simply incoherent. However, it would only be incoherent if we already accepted Smith’s rather shallow analysis of the way in which believers speak and conceive of God. Since they clearly do not speak and conceive of God in the way that Smith lays out, all of his arguments, including this one, fail.

Now we're getting somewhere. What James has done here is attempt to show that the formulations of C1 which depend upon Smith, or at least the way that James has described Smith (I must admit that although I possess the text in question, I have not yet been able to read it), are not wholly sound. I will actually grant him the benefit of the doubt (wrt presenting Smith and analyzing Smith accurately). Given that, I have to agree with him.

However, I do think that a strong case can be made that many aspects of the Christian religion are the equivalent of "square circles", rendering belief in these attributes of God illogical. When theists try to squeeze in some sort of notion that God exists "outside of time and space", for example, but is somehow able to manipulate/create them, we start to get to the crux of where my argument begins, and where it bifurcates from that of Smith. I will get into this more deeply in a future post.

Christianity has gone through numerous revisions and evolution over the past 2000 years, and some very great minds have tackled age-old objections to, and problems with, the faith. When we approach some of the most sacred and orthodox of Christian beliefs, such as prayer, the goodness of God, etc., with the care they require, we are not deluding ourselves into thinking that we've dealt with the best version of their arguments. Believers and unbelievers alike deserve the respect of giving our best shot at evaluating arguments for and against faith in God.

Now, what we ought to separate are serious philosophical investigations from cultural pleas. I think that Dawkins' latest work falls into the latter category, as do the works of Harris. I think there is a place for this sort of thing, and a need for it, and when attempting to influence culture (these men obviously have, for better or worse, as their works skyrocket up the bestseller list), we all recognize the painful truth that works on these subjects must be "dumbed down" to be read widely. In that sense, I understand why Dawkins and Harris write as they do -- they want to influence the masses, and recognize the folly of using a book with extensive footnotes and philosophical verbiage.

But mere cultural competition is something I hope that all persons, of faith or without it, come to detest. I hope that human culture evolves to a level of complexity that books on the subject of religion do their subject justice, and that they can be well and widely-received.

And that's why I said I wasn't going to buy Dawkins' book a while back, not that I don't appreciate the effort.
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Technorati tags: Religion